I study computer science and any time I sit down to code, I just browse or watch Youtube. Anything but do the work. Days and even months have gone by like this where I haven't done even an hour of learning. Its tough because in order to code I need to be in front of a screen but my brain refuses to study and just looks for that dopamine hit. My grades have suffered and I feel like a constant failure.
To clarify this is not an effect of the pandemic but has been happening for the past few years.
Does ADHD randomly pop up in life or is it a chronic condition? For me, this has been a relatively new thing in my academic life. I’ve only noticed it happening since my senior year of high school(I’m in senior year of college rn). Before that, I could focus for hours on end without a hitch. Would you say these are grounds enough to go to a doctor?
It's probably worth it, yeah. And "not being able to focus on stuff" isn't really the crux of adhd either, it's more like "I can't make myself want to focus on this particular assignment, but there's another one for another class that sounded fun so I can focus on that." Like one of my coping strategies forever was "make sure there's something you want to do less than all the other things you need to do, so you can procrastinate on that bad thing by doing the less-bad ones". Having a really hard time keeping track of time, deadlines, etc is also a big one - I have a lot of high school memories of doing all my homework the period before it was due, I could absolutely focus on it then (especially with a deadline looming) but I'd never be able to do it any earlier than that.
For me it definitely got much worse in college, especially as I started having to balance way more adult-responsibility type tasks with school ones.
Woah, I think you just described my school years. Even when I was performing "well" academically , I did have moments where I procrastinated a lot in school like submitting hw/reports/projects close to the deadline or sometimes even after, not being able to study for exams in subjects I found “boring”.
This hit the nail on the head. And it got so much worse in college as I got bogged down in other life stuff. Thus an entire semester would go by before I opened the textbook for any subject and that too just to pass the exams.