I’m going to give you one specific example, call it a case study of what I talked about last week in terms of easy often being really hard for us. It involves an anonymized former client. He was, in fact, one of my earliest clients when I was first doing professional organizing, before I even started coaching.  Awesome guy. Very nice. And very smart. Had a big job in the banking industry. Travel the country. Did lobbying work. Was paid handsomely. Excelled in his job in every way. Though I will note, I virtually guarantee you that was supported by a personal secretary who did all of the tedious day-to-day stuff. I’m so confident in that guarantee because of what he hired me for. It may best be described as a modern day archaeological dig. He hired me to go through his mail. As brilliant and talented as this man was, the tedium of opening his mail and dealing with its contents was completely overwhelming to him. That simple task, which most people look at as so easy they don’t even really have to think about it, was Kryptonite to him. The reason it felt archaeological, or maybe I should say anthropological, was that it was like going back through time because I needed to go through the seven years of unopened mail dating back to his divorce. This is the man who would be having dinner with us senator in Washington on Thursday only to come home to his beautiful house on Friday and find out that his cable had been turned off because he hadn’t paid the bill in two months. Not surprisingly if you did not know about ADHD and how it worked, you would have a hard time making sense of that guy. Of course, if…

I think I touched on this a little bit a few weeks ago. But I partially can’t remember and I’m sure it can use repetition and more flushing out anyway. And it’s a direct continuation from last week. We have established that boredom is our kryptonite. Let’s expand that definition to include boredom, tedium, repetition, lack of variety, or really anything that falls under the heading of what we call a non-preferred task. This often manifests in even the brightest and most capable ADHD people as a the mind-bending paradox of “easy” being really “hard.” But let’s back up for a second. What do I mean by hard? I know, not a word you really need to think of a definition for. What if we changed it so difficult? How about challenging? How about attentionally challenging? Are you following me? Language is important. I have always said there’s a word missing in English between want and be able to. When we don’t do something that we know is important, most people framed that as, “I didn’t want to.” Of course they wanted to do it. Why the hell else would we be talking about it and Coaching?  OK. I recognize that’s a slight oversimplification. And I think I’ll do a post about the difference between wanting the result of something and wanting to engage in the process of doing it sometime soon, if I haven’t recently already. But my point is we always default to the word want, which really is like saying we have a character flaw and is undermining in the long term, because we don’t know how to conceptualize not being able to do a thing that we are aware we are capable of doing. Don’t think about that sentence for too long. It’ll make your head…

Scientists refer to planets where water is liquid and life could potentially be sustained as being in the Goldilocks zone. As people with ADHD, we have our own Goldilocks zone. As I am pretty sure I mentioned in last weeks post, boredom is our kryptonite. It’s difficult to even explain to neurotypical people how we experience boredom. On a neurochemical level our brain shuts off. Behaviorally that may make it look like we’re not trying, we gave up, we refused to persevere, we’re not interested in achieving our potential, we’re lazy, or generally have some sort of inherent character flaw. Our brains clearly do not respond to a cold lumpy bullet porridge. On the other hand, how many of us are prone to being overwhelmed, overstimulated, and get freaked out in someway when everything just seems like too much. Much like boredom, this is part of the human condition. I know ADHD people experience boredom on a whole other level. Honestly I’m not sure if our tendency to get overwhelmed and the severity of it is worse than it is with your average human. The reason it’s hard to tell is that getting overwhelmed is the perfect intersection of ADHD and anxiety. So it’s hard to isolate the overwhelm factor as it relates to ADHD as a standalone. Not to mention there are sensory processing issues and executive dysfunction to throw into this delicious stew. Regardless of whether it’s just ADD or a delightful gumbo of convergent neurodiversities, it’s clear that the ADHD is a major contributing factor. But, again this aspect of how we respond to the world can be tremendously counterintuitive to the untrained eye. Because our brains are particularly wired to activate when we are interested, passionate, or particularly in our element and area of expertise, we…

I don’t I think we have an understanding of what ADHD is as a culture. It is the rare disorder that is named by its symptoms. I believe this falsely leads people to believe that its name encompasses all of its symptoms. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Or, perhaps, we just need to have a broader sense of what attention is. I find that most people think of attention as sitting still and paying attention to a lecture in school or getting through a meeting at work. But it is so much more complex than that. If you take into account the neurobiological underpinnings of ADHD, we could redefine it as a disorder of under stimulation. We are constantly at war with our intentions. We often lack the ability to execute on those intentions because of our lack of ability to focus on what we call non-preferred tasks. In other words, being bored is our kryptonite. it is hard to even explain to neurotypical people what boredom is like for the ADHD brain. Frankly, it is not unlike trying to explain what it is like to be chronically inattentive. Both of these facets of ADHD are also parts of the human condition. But there is a clinical and practical difference between how we as ADHD people experience them and what they’re like for the general population. Literally, when we are not stimulated, our brains shut off in certain meaningful ways. it can be a Herculean effort to simply do the normal everyday things that we find boring but neurotypical people take for granted. And that can significantly deplete our resources for the rest of life. so, as ADHD people, and for ADHD clinicians, I would suggest that a good metric for the severity of a person’s ADHD as…

This is going to be a weird post, so buckle up. On the upside, I’m not sure anybody reads this after I switch platforms. So perhaps I’m just yelling into the void. I had a very interesting session with a younger client today. She’s a rising senior at a very prestigious university. One that I did not get into, I might add. She’s at somewhat of a crossroads in terms of trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. In order to protect your privacy I won’t go into details. But I’ll say that she was planning to go into a certain profession. And I’m recently sure she’d be good at that profession. But I’m not sure she could survive all of the school necessary to get to the end result of being in that profession. the reason I bring this up is that it touched on a nerve for me. I don’t want to sound self-important or egotistical. But I have several rounds of neuropsych testing to prove how smart I am. And I’m considerably smarter than the average bear. But what does smart mean, if school is really hard? What does it mean if sitting still is not what you’re good at? What does it mean to understand things at a high level if you can’t produce the amount of work that’s expected of intellectually advanced students? What good is it to get a political science degree if you don’t want to sit behind a desk? Coincidentally, that last question is part of why I freaked out when I was at UMass many moons ago. And that’s also why I ended up pursuing culinary arts. Not that there’s anything wrong with pursuing that. And one could argue it was right for me at the…