My Blog: ADHD Since 1978-

“in medicine we don’t only treat the worst cases.”

I think that understanding this concept when dealing with ADHD is important and under recognized. And more than just ADHD, I think all psychiatric disorders can suffer from a reticence to be dealt with unless they’re extremely severe. As far as I’m concerned that is in regards to the spectrum of psychiatric disorders overall as well as within individual disorders. I think most of us would agree that treating a paranoid schizophrenic it’s probably a good idea. I think we’d all agree that treating someone with severe melancholic depression who has talked about, threatened, or attempted suicide is a good idea. but wisdom that my pharmacologist departed to me once was that, “the medicine we don’t only treat the worst cases.” We treat a hairline fracture as much as we treat a compound fracture. We even treat a sprain, which isn’t even a break. Yet when it comes to mental health many people feel like they need to hit some undefined but specific level of suffering or dysfunction in order to seek help. And shamefully, many physicians don’t take patients seriously enough until they get to a catastrophic point where treatment is infinitely harder. this came up in my life when I was getting my oldest diagnosed with ADHD. As an ADHD person myself and an ADHD coach professionally, I knew he had adhd. But he didn’t necessarily present in a typical way. He was doing really well at school because he enjoyed it. But he was really struggling and the rest of life in ways that I won’t get into, but that made it very obvious that he was on his own planet. He wasn’t the traditional hyperactive ADHD boy. So even though I see one of the best ADHD doctors in the world, I still felt like I…

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The scales of motivation

Imagine the statue of the Scales of Justice. Now just imagine her scale. Or if you’ve ever used a really old school baking scale, imagine that. Let’s call that the scale of motivation. Everything we do or don’t do has motivating and demotivating factors. Something as simple as getting up to pee when you’re reading an amazing book or can’t take your eyes off Stranger Things. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I hold it for quite a while if I’m doing something interesting. In fact, this can often make it harder to potty train ADHD kids. They tend to have accidents when they’re doing things that they don’t want to stop doing because they hold it for too long. But let’s get back to the scale analogy. On one side, I have to pee. On the other side, I want to keep watching stranger things. When my sense of having to go to the bathroom begins, it’s not pushing hard enough down on its side of the scale to make me stop doing my “preferred activity.” But, eventually, as the pressure builds, having to pee will be more unpleasant than it is pleasant to continue watching. Add in the factors of how good is the episode, how close I am to the end of it, how far away the bathroom is, how tired I am… And even deciding when to get up and pee is a reasonably complex equation. And that’s about as easy as it gets. Of course, this is a basic human situation. But it is dramatically magnified by how our brains are wired. Our threshold for boredom is lower. And we are constantly fighting the battle to do the “non-preferred activity” that we need to do in the face of other “preferred activities” that we…

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Do ADHDers get a bad rap for having bad memories?

Most people will tell you that those of us with ADHD don’t have a good memories. I thoroughly dispute this. I think there are two issues at work that make it look like we don’t have good memories. The first is our lack of attention. If we’re not deeply attending when something comes into our sensory universe, we don’t lock it in to our memory. So it’s not that our memory is faulty. It’s that we’re not paying attention in the first place. The other issue we have is that we do not have good situational memory. Part of the stems from our lack of time sense. We’re kind of like giant toddlers. Everything is either yesterday, right now, or later. And we don’t experience time as a constant because time moves much faster when we’re engaged and torturously slowly when we’re bored. The result is that we’re just not good at remembering whatever the thing is when we need to remember it. We might remember before and after we need to remember, but just not at the right moment. All the more reason we need to have external structures to manage our time and remember our tasks. Standard disclaimer: I promised myself when I started this blog that I would post regularly, hopefully weekly. In order to achieve this goal, I have to fight against my own perfectionists. That means I edit very little if at all. I’m focusing on content not on detail. So please forgive any mypellings grammatical / punctuation mishaps, and anything Strange like weird capitalizations due to my using voice recognition.

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when to not be flexible with your ADHD kids?

so, I recently wrote a post about flexibility in the morning with my youngest in terms of him brushing his teeth after breakfast. You can refer to that if you’d like. But, there is another side. Not everything can be flexed to make it optimal for him. I use it glib and hyperbolic term to refer to the stuff we really need to focus on as “the hill we die on.” so the morning routine, in large part, doesn’t have to go in a certain order. As I discussed, there is a logical order. There is an order that makes at least likely that we will forget stuff. But ultimately, when you go to the bathroom, when you brush your teeth, when you eat breakfast, as long as all those things happen, doesn’t really matter. of course, my 8-year-old wanted to change the one thing that is sequentially important. He wanted to start taking his pills after breakfast. That’s a no-go, for several reasons. One, we want those pills in him as quickly as possible so that he’s medicated for camp / summer school, and maybe even getting out of the house if he takes them early enough. Two, if he takes them too late it may mean more overlap in the midday with his afternoon pills. Actually, that’s not the end of the world. You take such a small dose that it doesn’t really affect his appetite. If anything he eats better cuz you can focus. But I’d still like to avoid that overlap if it all possible. Third, unlike brushing teeth, taking the pills is 100% essential. If he doesn’t brush his teeth, no small children will die and to no empires will fall. Not taking his pills would not be great. He could survive a morning without…

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What is your time worth as an ADHD adult?

Decision making can often be a difficult thing for those of us with adhd. And sometimes that means that we keep doing the thing that we’re doing because it’s the thing we’ve always done. Of course, I think that’s a human being thing too. But it’s important for us to reassess our methods, are values, and our priorities somewhat regularly. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before. But I’m also sure it’s been quite a while. When we decide how to spend our time, there are many competing forces. There is how much time we have. There is how much attention we have consistently were able to utilize it priority is important. Often money is part of the equation. And I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting. The point is that how we choose to spend our time is a relatively complicated system. I am suggesting that examining that system and possibly making changes could improve your quality of life. Specifically, I like to discuss outsourcing today. Deciding what to outsource is a financial decision. But, it is also a personal decision. People often talk about what they would do for an extra hour in the day or something in that vein. Well, it’s possible. Everything that you outsource will buy you time. You just have to decide whether it’s worth it. Here’s the example that came up for me in the last few weeks that engaged me in this topic enough to write a post. I used to go through my filing cabinet and filing system every year in January to finish up the year, get ready for taxes, and generally clean out the junk. Well, as less and less of my life is involved paperwork, and more and more of my life is involved parenting, I haven’t…

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structure and flexibility in parenting

this is my first attempt to post a new blog entry on my new and improved website 3.0. still dictating into my phone. Apparently the combination of the two doesn’t like to capitalize at the beginning of sentences… Sometimes. Anyway… so I wanted to share a situation it’s been happening with my youngest. He struggles with certain activities of daily life due to his emotional dysregulation. One of those things is brushing his teeth. I generally come from a place where I want to set up my routine to have fewer weak points as possible even if that means some compromises. So, I brush my teeth when I’m doing the rest of my stuff in the bathroom in the morning before I come downstairs. Even though that means I brush my teeth before I eat, which is less than ideal. the idea being that, once I eat, I don’t have that gross taste in my mouth anymore and I’m on to the next thing and it’s easy to forget to brush my teeth. Also the toothbrush is in the bathroom upstairs so that creates a linked behavior of brushing my teeth and doing the rest of my morning routine. Plus, I have ADHD so I’m lazy. And I am likely to avoid going back upstairs if I can help it. so how does this relate to my 8-year-old? Well, for some reason, inside his dysregulated and still developing brain, he does not like brushing his teeth before breakfast. It is completely inefficient. It drives me crazy. And on the rare mornings that I’m in charge of taking him to school or camp, it is an opportunity for us to forget to brush his teeth all together. I think I would have resisted this change. As a matter of fact, I…

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Is it a relief to get a diagnosis?

So I noticed, now that I’m dictating my entries, they seem much longer. I would appreciate some feedback from my fuel oil readers as to whether or not these entries are too long. If they are, I can break them into pieces or make an effort to be more concise. I will say, generally their topics that I feel need a little time and energy. But I want to make sure that I’m satisfying the needs of those who actually read. So let me know if you feel like it, what your jam is. I tend to try to balance some short and some long. And I’m also going to try to get a video blog / YouTube channel off the ground this summer as I finally finished the redesign and relocation of my website. Anyway, now that I’ve made this a gigantic paragraph longer than it needs to be, here we go. I honestly can’t remember if I’ve written about this yet. I know I say that a lot. But I’ve been writing this blog for about 8 years maybe 10. Almost every week. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of what I’ve said here and what I’ve just been telling clients and friends. But this is come up recently, as a friend of mine has had her oldest diagnosed with a slew of conditions that are quite reminiscent of the package of situations that my youngest deals with. I was texting with her the other day, as we haven’t had a chance to really connect in person yet, about how she felt finally getting these diagnosis. I won’t share her thoughts. Those are hers. But it reminded me very much of when my youngest was diagnosed with pediatric bipolar the age of four. My dad’s not a guy…

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Do we really need more hours in the day?

So, dictating these entries into my phone seems to be going well. And it’s definitely faster than typing. I don’t know why the voice recognition works better on my phone than it does in Google docs. I have an android. You would think it’s the same stuff running behind the scenes. Anyway, it appears that my typo rate is about the same so I’m going to stop apologizing for any potential voice recognition snafus. And I will just get on with it. I think I have not met an ADHDer who didn’t want more hours in the day. But I think it’s really important to recognize that time is not the only resource that we lack. In fact, we often mistake our lack of focus, bandwidth, emotional energy, or whatever you want to call it for a lack of time. Yes, it would be helpful to have an extra hour in the day. But, would that actually lead to more productivity? If you spent that hour screwing around on Instagram or wasting time hyper focus on something else unimportant, what would that extra hour do for you? I think it’s important to realize that we do have a limitation in terms of how many hours there are in the day. However, I find as a person with ADHD, that the more important limiting factor is my number of attention hours in the day. I kind of think of myself, or my brain at least, as a analog to a cell phone battery. It doesn’t drain at a constant rate. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re streaming Netflix or gaming it’s going to burn faster than if you’re just talking or texting or the phone is mostly on standby. I think our brains are much the same way. The…

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Success Journal: Consolidating successes & building real confidence

I’m pretty sure this is a human thing. But it is also a decidedly ADHD thing. The thing being, not being so good at remembering when we did well, overcame obstacles, tackled our anxiety, and generally succeded in an unexpected (to ourselves) way. Again, having only been an ADHD person and having mostly coached and studied ADHD people for the last decade plus, I come from the ADHD perspective. If my thoughts are more broadly applicable, great. Over the years I’ve done a lot of thinking about why ADHDers are not so good at consolidating positive experiences and using them as templates for future challenges. I have some thoughts on that. I’m not sure that the post mortem on the “why” is the most important part of this. So, if you aren’t interested in the “inside baseball” analysis of this, feel free to skip ahead to possible strategies while I nerd out on the causes. There are well known studies that show ADHD kids get something like 20:1 negative:positive feedback. Yet we are often pretty darn smart. My client base certainly is. But we tend to learn at an early age that what we are bad at is valued by society AND generally considered easy by our neurotypical peers. All that EF stuff like planning, being on time, handing things in, paperwork, showing our work, etc. Simultaneously, the things that we are good at tend to come so easily that we almost take them for granted. And, sometimes they aren’t things that are valued, at least tangibly, by our society. For example, people skills are something that can be a great predictor of success in many career paths. But they are a thing that is almost never emphasized or rewarded at any level of schooling. So, what often happens is…

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Slowing down in the moment

This is my second attempt to post a blog entry only using voice recognition on my phone. Hopefully it will also be successful. Last time seemed to go well. I will ask you to bear with me if there are any weird typos related to autofill. There are so many moments in our day when something small and useful, perhaps even vital, definitely efficient, seems like a big deal. Ultimately, we don’t have an accurate understanding of what attention is. The ability to do the unpreferred thing that feels tedious boring or overwhelming. That is attention. Just as much as sitting down and paying attention to a lecture in college is attention. But those little things happen all day everyday. When you get change at the convenience store do you take time to put it in your wallet or just jam it into your purse for the pocket of whatever jacket you’re wearing? When you bring the mail in, do weed out the junk mail and put it right in the recycling? Do you have a convenient place near the door to put the mail? Or do you just throw it on the dining room table with all the other mail until it becomes a pile that’s so overwhelming you don’t want to deal with it? After you make dinner, if you don’t feel like doing the dishes, do you leave the leftovers so that they’re gross and unusable the next morning when you get around to the dishes? Or do you take 2 minutes to put them in a tupperware so you can have them for lunch the next day? I’m not looking to shame anyone here if you’re doing the non-optimal behavior. And you’ll note that I’m not even framing it as a choice. We have years of…

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Why I don’t believe in procrastination

First of all, I’m using voice recognition on my phone to write this sitting in a parking lot while my youngest is in OT. I hope it works. And I hope it comes out legible and linear. Hooray technology! Hooray multitasking! So I don’t believe in procrastination. I believe it is a label we put on a behavior that we don’t understand. Nobody gets up in the morning and says to themselves, I’ve got something really important to do and it’s going to negatively affect me if I don’t do it but, damn it, I’m just not going to do it anyway. It might look like that from the outside. But nobody makes that conscious choice to fail. Many wise people have said to me, people succeed when they can. I’ve been talking about this not believing in procrastination with my clients for years. I do that because almost everyone I work with lists procrastination is one of the top three things they want to fix in coaching. But that’s like saying I want to fix my grades. Are you going to break into this school computer and fix your grades? Because grades are not a thing that exists in and of themselves in a vacuum. They’re the result of weeks and months worth of accumulated behaviors. Coaching, at its core, is behavioral intervention. So it’s my job to figure out what’s the underlying situation when a client tells me they have a problem with procrastination. The reason I am writing this particular entry now after talking about procrastination for so many years with so many clients is that I think I finally have a good way to articulate what’s going on underneath the surface. Imagine an old school balance scale like the one that the statue of Justice holds.…

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