I’m  a punk rock kid at heart. I noticed a specific lyric from Social Distortion’s latest album. Seems relevant to the clutter prone… I’ll tell you something, baby, that’s a factNever see a hearse with a luggage rackAll your money, your hard earned payIt don’t mean shit, babe, at the end of the dayCan’t take it with you, can’t take it with youCan’t take it with you, can’t take it with you

As I am finishing up one of my most productive days in a while, it occurred to me that I’m probably going to end up with only slightly fewer things on my List Of Things To Do than when I started the day. There was a time when I would have been stressed out by that. Today I was finally able to articulate why it doesn’t stress me out anymore.  I recognize that it is the cycle of life As I plowed through the things that had become slightly more urgent, other things came up. So, even if I replaced all the things on my list for all new things, that is still progress. The newer things don’t have the same sense of urgency. I still got to cross off the old stuff and feel great about that. And, by reloading my list, I have a clear idea of where to go from here.  If you are busy, it doesn’t matter how productive you are. There will always be stuff on your list. That’s okay. As long as the list helps you get it done, you are in good shape.

Here’s the rest of the garden!

The fixing of the soil ended up being a total demo and recreation of the yard. That was a huge EF project of it’s own. I’ll do another post on that some time. The garden part was again about planning. I decided to make raised beds to grow my veggies and fruits. That seems to be the best option based on my research. But that just added another project and more stuff to learn about… and more money to spend. Ultimately I ended up deciding to focus on the landscaping project during the spring/summer of 2013. I figured that the soil safety was the most important. Plus, once I saw what the new yard was like, I could better plan the beds. Of course that meant a whole ‘nother year of being patient… and it nearly killed me. But I used that year well. I did research on raised beds, reread my gardening books, took a wood working class, watched videos on making raised beds on YouTube, learned about garden covers, irrigation, rain barrels, compost and measured my new front yard about 30 times. Then when the spring of 2014 was on the horizon… we had our second child due on April 10th. It didn’t seem possible to build a garden from scratch with a newborn at home. I certainly didn’t have the time or energy to start seeds inside in April. To be honest, I was already a bit overwhelmed with all that I wanted to do but had no experience doing. Add in a baby, and it seemed impossible. I was super bummed out to have to wait a whole year more. And, that is when I realized that I was at that moment of having planned as much as I could and that I was defeating myself.…

So, I’m stuck with dangerously bad soil, it’s too late to plant anyway, and I don’t know where I get good sun. When confronted with this sort of situation, most ADHDers (my past self included,) would have done one of two things. Felt overwhelmed by what needed to be done and given up on the garden all together or ignored these pesky details and charged right ahead with a garden anyway. Believe me, both options crossed my mind. Here’s what I did instead. I set to work figuring out what I needed to do to fix the soil, did research on when to plant in New England for the following year, and started a self-designed “sun study.” The sun study was the easiest, so I’ll start with that. I am up early with my son on Saturdays anyway, so I set an alarm to go outside once an hour and took pictures around the house to see where I was getting sun. I did this two or three times about a month apart until I got a sense of where and when the sun was shining.  The what and when to plant was a little tougher. The books I read suggested that I started most of what I wanted to plant inside weeks before I could bring them out. That seemed like a lot of pressure to then get everything in the ground at the right time, to harden them off appropriately, etc. I made a decision that the book probably represented the absolutely perfect way to grow stuff. I was willing to compromise and see what happened.  I feel like this is a really important side point. As ADHDers who try to plan, we can very often get overwhelmed by try to plan to perfection. And as many of…

When we bought our house just over a year ago all I wanted to do was start a garden. Having been a chef for over a decade, I love food and have always wanted to grow my own. Of course being the pain in the a$$ that I am, I wanted to grow all sorts of specific varieties. I had big ideas.  But, as ADHDers we often have big ideas that either don’t get launched or turn into serious boondoggles without the proper planning. I like to think I’m a pretty together cat at this point in my life. So I set to my garden dreams by planning, planning, and planning some more. I got two books on gardening, one specific to the North East. (We live just outside Boston in Milton.) The other was about vertical gardening which maximizes the yield per square foot of garden space. I read most of these books pretty thoroughly and realized that just plopping a garden down when we moved in would be a classic “rush into the doing stage” ADHD mistake. I learned three things that June. One, I needed to check my soil to see if it was right for what I wanted to grow. Two, I needed to understand where I could get full sun (at least 6 hours a day during the growing season.) And, three, it was too late to plant in June anyway. Maybe that last fact was a blessing? It forced me to delay my gratification until the next year at the earliest, and that gave me plenty of time to plan anyway. So, step one was a soil sample. I followed the instructions on the UMass Agriculture site and sent it off. It only took about a week to get the horrible news. Our soil…

I came across a very interesting tidbit at my monthly CHADD meeting early in June. One of the parents had noticed over the months that her 9-year-old son was seemingly under-medicated. Her suspicion was that the change had happened when he switched to longer acting formulation of Methylphenidate (Ritalin.) She wasn’t sure if it was that the dosing didn’t translate or if he just wasn’t responding as well.  Despite the doctor’s reluctance, she pushed to have her son put back on three times daily of short acting Methylphenidate. To the great surprise of many, this was much, much more effective. He seems like he is a whole new kid. (Of course the parents are doing a ton of behavioral stuff with him. But now that he’s appropriately medicated, they are really seeing results.) Pharmacologically, there is no difference in the active ingredient in Ritalin, Methylphenidate (generic name and the actual ingredient,) Metadate, Ritalin LR, SR, ER, Concerta, Daytrana, and even Focalin. But most patients will tell you that they respond better to one or more than others. The conventional wisdom is that the longer lasting more sophisticated delivery systems are more beneficial. Clearly, as in this boy’s case, that is not always true. I think the take away here is that it is important to think outside the box and not assume anything when it comes to trying stimulants. It really is trial and error. But, when we get it right, it can be life changing. More on meds coming up.

When we get overwhelmed our functioning becomes radically diminished. I would imagine that is the same for most people. Maybe it is just that as ADHD’rs we are more prone to overwhelm? When I was going through coaching school I developed a coaching model about the many different causes of overwhelm. I think there were 12 or 13. However, my experience working with clients since then has taught me that there are three main causes. The first main cause is our lack of effective executive function as it relates to decision making. But that is a whole other post. More on that later. The second is anxiety which is usually rooted in negative thought patterns, projecting negative outcomes. I think I’ll tackle that in another post too. The third, which I want to write about today it the idea of missing information. This is also a way in which our negative thought patterns can effect us. Often we become overwhelmed when we are missing a key piece of information that then doesn’t allow us to proceed. Add in the fact that our tendency is to project the worst possible outcome when mentally filling in the blank, and we can become paralyzed and not even seek an answer to our question. For example, I have a client who is working toward getting in to a very specific grad school program for a specific career. She became overwhelmed by the process of getting accommodation for taking the GRE’s. She expressed anxiety about getting a formal diagnosis, what would be accepted, how to find this out, does she even need to take the GRE’s to get in to this specific program, will she be qualified to get into this program anyway…  I think you get the picture. She had lots of blanks to…

I think that it’s important to know that as ADHD’rs we need to live in what I call the “Sweet Spot” between being understimulated and overwhelmed. If we are bored or understimulated our brain doesn’t produce the dopamine necessary to pay attention and we effectively shut down. If we are overwhelmed our brain becomes overstimulated, goes into panic mode… and we shut down in a different way. More on being overwhelmed in the next post.

I had a question from a client today. She wanted to know what to tell her nine year old daughter about why she was going to neuropsych testing. My response was atypically brief, so I thought I would just post it too. I would point out that you know she is struggling with lots of stuff. The testing is to see if you she has ADHD just like mom and aunt –––. If she does, that’s actually a good thing, because it can be dealt with and her life can get easier and less stressful.

I talk a lot about not doing a daily list. But a daily schedule is a great tool. I’ll post again soon with more detail on the difference between the two and the rationale. For now, here’s a list I did a few weeks ago. Client names have been redacted. The idea is to illustrate how tasks are put in to time. You’ll notice that there are two things that I didn’t get to. And that constitutes a really good day. Other things came up, and I’m okay with that. I put those things on my schedule for the following day and got them done. Set the bar at a reasonable level, but high enough that you have to push a little and don’t let yourself fall in to the abyss of (perceived) “free” time.

Many of the mundane tasks of life bore us ADHDers to the point that we avoid them, rush through them, or hate them in a way that is totally out of proportion to how much of a bummer they should actually be.   Listening to the radio is one thing that I have found really helps me get though those daily and weekly tasks. I guess it began in high school. I got one of those shower radios and listened to music mostly while I was getting ready in the morning. I found it easier to get out of bed and get in to the bathroom and get on with my day. I started doing it again at some point in my adult life. I listen to the radio, mostly sports now or NPR when I’m in the bathroom in the morning, or when I’m in the kitchen.  Podcasts are also a great thing to take advantage of. I might not survive my hour or two in the kitchen every weekend without NPR podcasts, the Moth, and Risk. They are entertaining enough that I can get anything done without it seeming like a total chore.