Today’s guest article comes from Levi Knighten who shares the joys and difficulties of building LEGO with ADHD.

Building LEGO Isn’t Fun All the Time

Building LEGO sets is not a fun endeavor for me. This must sound incredibly blasphemous, seeing as I’ve not only built several sets but also have designed over 50 MOCs. It’s often tedious and greatly frustrating, causing me to avoid it as much as possible.

Luckily for me, I have a partner who truly enjoys building, much to my everlasting confusion. I often hang out in the same room while he builds, mostly so he listens to good music once in a while, and so I can occasionally wander over to watch. I always offer to help because I feel bad for making him build things that I asked for or even designed, but the idea of building something like a modular set on my own is daunting. I’ve built a modular before 10243 Parisian Restaurant, but even with the luster of being a new LEGO fan, it was not as fun as I thought it would be.

For years afterward, I wondered why I was unable to enjoy building LEGO like everyone else. Surely, I just needed the right set to really engage with, or maybe I need to get better at designing MOCs so I can have as much fun building them as I do looking at them. This was clearly my fault somehow, I just couldn’t figure out why.

Then I was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) at the age of 28.

AFOL and ADHD

Contrary to popular belief, ADHD isn’t simply a lack of attention span. It’s more like emotional dysregulation, short term memory and recall issues, rejection sensitivity disorder, low tolerance for frustration, coordination issues, and so much more that if I continued listing them out, we’d be here for at least another full page. The main idea is that the attention span issues are more of a lack of dopamine from certain tasks that aren’t promised to provide the immediate satisfaction that something more engaging would.

Meanwhile, for something that is more engaging for the individual can lead to hyperfocus, which can be good for getting things done but often lead to forgetting to eat, drink water, or other tasks that need doing.

Finally, I had an answer to questions I’ve had for years as well as to questions I didn’t even know to ask. The attention span means I put my phone somewhere unexpected and short-term memory issues mean I can’t remember where it ended up. And I don’t enjoy building LEGO sets because it frequently runs into many areas where I have more disruptive issues. From start to finish, the whole process often feels as though it was designed to make me feel incompetent.

For starters, putting LEGO pieces together is not always easy, especially with adult hands. When it comes to connecting 1x1 tiles to a larger plate or making a larger assembly that remains flimsy for another three steps, you’re asking for trouble. I often drop pieces, have trouble lining them up properly, or worst, breaking the same assembly multiple times.

I vividly remember making 31122 Fish Tank and thoroughly despising the entire frame build for the aquarium itself. You have to make two assemblies and loosely connect them before they get reinforced about two pages later. In the time it took for me to get to that step, I broke either one or both at least three times. I very nearly set it aside for my partner to do when he came home but persevered, primarily out of spite and pride. At least now I know that it’s not just that I’m clumsy but instead, it is more of an ever-present issue with coordination that often crops up in people with ADHD.

I turned this into a turtle tank and no longer despise this set.

That same pride doesn’t help when I get frustrated. As stated, 31122 Fish Tank nearly drove me to rage. Only a slight exaggeration, if I’m being honest. It was filled with fiddly bits, infuriating instructions and, I had unknowingly skipped a page right at the very end. So, while there was some modicum of pride when my partner (a prolific builder and notably, someone who doesn’t have ADHD) came home and saw I completed a set by myself, it was thoroughly overwritten by the frustration that lingered from the whole process.

Emotional dysregulation – the inability to self-regulate well – means that when the feeling of frustration starts to set in, not only am I unable to mitigate it, it overwhelms me thoroughly and swiftly. I have strategies in place to help, of course—you don’t get to my age being undiagnosed without developing some workarounds. But at the same time, I sometimes just have to walk away from the build. This, unfortunately, means leaving it unfinished until I have more motivation, or more likely until my partner comes around to do it for me.

Look at all that beautiful Dark Turquoise!

Let’s Go Skipping

As far as reading those LEGO instructions? Horrid. I’ve mostly used the included books in sets, but I’ve also built using both official and unofficial PDFs… and the same thing happens in both mediums. I skip pages.

I once did a live stream building a few small sets like 40469 Tuktuk, 60249 Street Sweeper, and 40448 Vintage Car. I was having a lot of fun with 40448 Vintage Car until I struggled to figure out where an assembly was supposed to attach, only for my partner to come and realize that I had skipped two whole pages about five minutes back. For a smaller build that’s more intensive on plate usage, that’s a significant chunk of information to have missed.

This same thing happens even when I’m using physical instruction books. Every time I’ve built something at home with instructions, I’ve skipped a page. The main difference now is that I know I’m likely to skip a page and have enough familiarity with the medium to figure out quickly if I skipped something. This is definitely a perk of being reasonably knowledgeable about LEGO and how builds might connect, but that comes after years of building official sets and designing MOCs—which isn’t where a lot of my friends with similar, as I like to call it, brain worms, are coming from.

What Did You Say?

One last issue I want to discuss is actually two that can tie together frequently: poor interoception and short-term memory issues. In short, interoception is your ability to tell when your body is hungry, thirsty, hot, etc. It’s a problem for me normally but if I’m hyperfocusing on a project, any hope of noticing anything else goes out the window. A common scenario often starts with me working on something somewhat involved; a project that starts with a simple goal but has multiple subsequent steps.

If I start wanting to build something, I have to pull my collection out. But, I left the pieces from my last trip to my local Bricks and Minifigs unsorted, so I started sorting those on the table. They get moved into the collection now and I can finally start pulling pieces for whatever I was trying to build. In between the lead-up and the actual build process, I can easily pass over an hour without realizing that I’ve been hungry and sweating due to overheating in the summer heat.

So I get up to fix a snack, maybe take a quick shower, and on the way back, and then I notice something in the house that needs addressing. That usually is just playing with my cats for a few minutes, but I’m thoroughly sidetracked. Like any human-controlled RPG protagonist, I’ve found myself doing every side quest available before remembering that there is, in fact, a world that needs saving. Or in this case, a LEGO MOC that needs to be finished so said cats don’t get the idea to try and “help” sort the loose pieces surrounding it.

She’s really good at “helping”, I promise.

Creativity At A Cost

It’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to my interaction with LEGO as a medium, despite what the preceding paragraphs might lead one to believe. One of my greatest strengths in life is my creativity and the seemingly endless stream of ideas I have.

The LUG I’m a part of once held a monthly build challenge to make a 4x4x4 build after one of the members saw one online. If you haven’t seen one before, it’s a challenge to build something with a maximum size of 4 studs in all dimensions. We typically have the full month between meetings to complete a build challenge… but with something that fits perfectly in my wheelhouse of building microscale? I may have gone a bit overboard. And by overboard, I mean I was having dinner in Davy Jones’ locker with my 27 builds that I made in the course of that month.

Walking into the LUG meeting with all of these was deeply satisfying.

It was an incredibly fun month for me; work was extremely slow, so I had my parts collection on a nearby table and wandered over throughout the day to test out ideas regularly. I have a whole microscale city that I’ve been expanding for years as I think of new buildings to add. Even discounting the creative endeavors that aren’t LEGO, I’m hardly ever bereft of things to work on.

Making The Most Of It

If I really want to build an official set for some reason, I can build with my partner who doesn’t mind reading out instructions for me so I don’t skip steps (assuming I can actually process what he says). I prefer designing MOCs for a few reasons as a general rule, but I do feel like I’m missing out sometimes. I know there are plenty of people who enjoy the building process, and I just never have, which sucks for a hobby that revolves around building!

Luckily, there are still plenty of ways for someone like me to enjoy LEGO. I greatly enjoy participating in monthly challenge builds, designing things on paper or in Studio as well as sorting through LEGO. One of my favorite things of all is taking sets or MOCs apart; it’s a great way to fulfill the need for multitasking when I have something I can do with my hands while catching up on my favorite shows.

This isn’t exactly a call to action or a wish for LEGO sets to be more accessible for me. Think of this more as “This could be why your friend/family member doesn’t enjoy building sets, even if they like LEGO.” There’s no wrong way to enjoy this hobby, whether you only enjoy collecting certain printed bricks, sorting by color, or building in Studio like I do. LEGO can be anything you want it to be: a toy, a medium for art, a learning tool, and so much more.

Despite my dislike of building sets, I am grateful for my experiences with these colorful plastic pieces. I’ve made new friends, gotten to display my creations at shows, and have yet another hobby to share with my partner. It’s truly exhilarating to see how much has changed since I started being more active in the community. I can’t wait to create the next thing, even if building for me just means listening to music while it gets made for me.

One of my newer builds for my microscale city - an aquarium that might be my favorite building so far!

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published August 11, 2023.

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