- By moving your thoughts to something concrete, you have helped your brain “let go” of the swirling, flooding and ruminating;
- You can review your thoughts in a concrete manner and see what’s what, without letting other ideas seep in;
- You also have a reference of thoughts/experiences that you can review if they should come up again.
AD/HD Treatment Solutions
Perspectives, comments and ideas to help you create the life you want to live.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Adult ADD/ADHD: Managing Emotional Control.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Adult ADD/ADHD: Firing (Up) Your Board of Directors
- Emotional Control: responding to a situation with the appropriate level of emotion; controlling your anger, frustration, and tears so you don’t appear to be out of control or childlike;
- Planning: looking ahead and anticipating what’s to come and when to do it;
- Organization: also thinking about the future, where should I put the things I’ll need later
- Working Memory: recognizing the cause and effect of actions for the future, filing away ideas, comments, conversations to be retrieved later;
- Shifting: ability to unhook from current thought, activity, plan to move forward on a likely basis;
- Initiating Effort: getting started with a task that you need to get done (no matter if you want to or not);
- Task Monitoring: you have got the task in motion, take care to finish it properly and on time;
- Self Monitoring: recognizing and self-correcting when you are off-task, interrupting, arguing, operating outside social norms.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Adult ADD/ADHD andThe 40 year old Meltdown.
When your spouse has ADD or ADHD, it’s a “not-uncommon, but, still a disturbing sight.” So says Kristen about her last grocery store excursion with her husband, Jason. It was over ice cream. The flavor. Having purchased an apple pie for a family gathering, Kristen was thinking vanilla would be appropriate. But when she asked her husband if he was OK with getting something everyone liked, he blew up.
Looking back, Kristen realizes that the phrase “everyone liked” was the trigger to what came next. Jason received the message that Kristen said that nobody liked his previous choice of Chunky Monkey. Jason whirled around, stamped his foot and sputtered out loudly “Everybody liked my ice cream, everybody ate it and loved it. I don’t know why you think my choices are bad.” After that tirade, he stomped down the aisle.
In May, his daughter graduated from college. Carl had thought a lot about how the weekend would go, with dinners with his girl, hanging out, talking and setting up an apartment for her. Lots of good times with Dad.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Are You Really Losing Your Mind?
Thursday, February 13, 2014
So Much to Do. So Little Time.
"I'm working so hard to get through the day, but I don't seem to get anything done. Furthermore, no one seems to appreciate how busy I am."
"I get a lot of reminders from my boss about deadlines and unfinished projects. When I get home, my wife starts in about stuff that I've promised to do and haven't even started (like paying the bills this month, BEFORE they turn off the cable, again)."
"There just doesn't seem to be enough time."
The idea of being busy, and the evidence of getting timely results are often at odds when ADHD is in the mix. It can be a frustrating mystery to all involved as to why so much time can fly by with so little to show for it.
Here are some clues:
- Clue #1. With ADHD, preparing to start the task is part of the actual execution. There's the talking about doing the task, the thinking time...thinking about starting the task, then the gathering of materials (sharpened pencils, paper, bills, checkbook, stamps, phone numbers, etc.), the coffee, water, snacks, the right lighting, chair, music, checking email, facebook, and... you get the idea. Whew! Exhaustion, boredom or distraction sets in before the actual task is begun.
- Clue #2. Having moved through the first phase of the task, it's time to actually initiate. Whoa, not so fast. There are plenty of reasons why pulling the trigger on the actual writing of the memo, proposal, presentation, research paper, bill payment, returning calls/emails, laundry, vacuuming, etc. fails to occur. Perfectionism (finding the right words to write), fear of the unknown (something scary might be in those billing envelopes), procrastination (it's not that important that I can't postpone it, or this is so important that I better wait until I can do it right and without interruptions), overwhelm (there's so much to do, I don't know where to start), and/or exhaustion, boredom or distraction. Hmmm. There's a pattern here.
- Clue #3. The chickens come home to roost, aka motivation. At some point in the process, there's an outside motivator that kicks things into action. Notice I said outside motivator. With ADHD the internal motivation driver can be inconsistent or non-existent except in unique circumstances. Someone/something has provoked action, usually in the form of a threat (spouse yelling, guests coming, job deadline, utilities turned off). The task gets done, but not without a lot of churning, stress and energy.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Organize and Declutter Your Home for the Holidays
- You are not Martha Stewart! None of us is.
- You are not your mother! A generation or more ago, many women stayed home full-time and didn’t have to carpool their children from one activity to another. Suffice it to say, that era is over.
The Black Bag De-Cluttering Trick
- In November — and perhaps again in December — set a goal to de-clutter your house in an hour. Supply everyone in the family, including the kids, with black garbage bags and grocery boxes, and have them deposit unwanted or unneeded things into them.
- Use separate bags and/or boxes for each room — label them with masking tape and black marker, so that you know which room the items came from.
- Use boxes to manage paperwork or anything fragile that might be damaged if tossed around in a garbage bag.
- Place the labeled bags in your basement storage area or garage to be retrieved once the holidays are over.
- Make it your New Year’s resolution to organize, give away, or throw away each one of the bagged items.
Step-by-Step Tips: One Week Countdown
- 7 Days Out: Gather and wash holiday serving plates, bowls, platters, and serving utensils for the big feast.
- 6 Days Out: Make room in the fridge for holiday dishes.
- 5 Days Out: Wash sheets, towels, and face cloths that guests will need. Stack them in the bedroom where they’ll be used.
- 4 Days Out: Vacuum and dust upstairs (the upstairs carpets won’t have time to get dirty again); dust main level.
- 3 Days Out: Clean all bathrooms. Start with the one that guests will use (do the master bathroom last).
- 2 Days Out: Vacuum and dust downstairs; clean kitchen (you’ll do a last-minute cleanup on the holiday).
- 1 Day Out: Empty trash baskets. Do a last-minute de-cluttering trip through the house with a black garbage bag.
Holiday Time Savers
- Don’t waste precious time ironing a wrinkled tablecloth—throw it in the dryer, then shake out the wrinkles and put it on the table.
- To provide instant ambiance, buy several pots of poinsettias and place them in the entry hall, living and dining rooms, and the guest bathroom. Arrange plain white pillar candles (they’re less likely to drip or tip over than tapers in candlesticks) on clear or holiday-colored plastic dessert plates. Don’t forget to arrange them around the fireplace, in the hall, and in the powder room.
- Instead of wiping down a dirty oven, just clean the door with oven cleaner (after all, that’s what most people will see). Then line the bottom with fresh aluminum foil.
- When company arrives unannounced, create a festive atmosphere by sticking one of those fragrant plug-ins into an outlet, lighting candles, and putting on a favorite CD of holiday tunes.
Friday, December 2, 2011
The four big sleep issues with AD/HD
This article comes from the February/March 2004 issue of ADDitude.
No scientific literature on insomnia lists ADHD as a prominent cause of sleep disturbances. Most articles focus on sleep disturbance due to stimulant-class medications, rather than looking at ADHD as the cause. Yet adults with ADHD know that the connection between their condition and sleep problems is real. Sufferers often call it "perverse sleep"—when they want to be asleep, they are awake; when they want to be awake, they are asleep.
The four most common sleep disturbances associated with ADHD are:
1. Initiation Insomnia
About three-fourths of all adults with ADHD report inability to "shut off my mind so I can fall asleep at night." Many describe themselves as "night owls" who get a burst of energy when the sun goes down. Others report that they feel tired throughout the day, but as soon as the head hits the pillow, the mind clicks on. Their thoughts jump or bounce from one worry to another. Unfortunately, many of these adults describe their thoughts as "racing," prompting a misdiagnosis of bipolar mood disorder, when this is nothing more than the mental restlessness of ADHD.
Prior to puberty, 10 to 15 percent of children with ADHD have trouble getting to sleep. This is twice the rate found in children and adolescents who do not have ADHD. This number dramatically increases with age: 50 percent of children with ADHD have difficulty falling asleep almost every night by age 12 ½ by age 30, more than 70 percent of adults with ADHD report that they spend more than one hour trying to fall asleep at night.
2. Restless Sleep
When individuals with ADHD finally fall asleep, their sleep is restless. They toss and turn. They awaken at any noise in the house. They are so fitful that bed partners often choose to sleep in another bed. They often awake to find the bed torn apart and covers kicked onto the floor. Sleep is not refreshing and they awaken as tired as when they went to bed.
3. Difficulty Waking
More than 80 percent of adults with ADHD in my practice report multiple awakenings until about 4 a.m. Then they fall into "the sleep of the dead," from which they have extreme difficulty rousing themselves.
They sleep through two or three alarms, as well as the attempts of family members to get them out of bed. ADHD sleepers are commonly irritable, even combative, when roused before they are ready. Many of them say they are not fully alert until noon.
4. Intrusive Sleep
Paul Wender, M.D., a 30-year veteran ADHD researcher, relates ADHD to interest-based performance. As long as persons with ADHD were interested in or challenged by what they were doing, they did not demonstrate symptoms of the disorder. (This phenomenon is called hyperfocus by some, and is often considered to be an ADHD pattern.) If, on the other hand, an individual with ADHD loses interest in an activity, his nervous system disengages, in search of something more interesting. Sometimes this disengagement is so abrupt as to induce sudden extreme drowsiness, even to the point of falling asleep.
Marian Sigurdson, Ph.D., an expert on electroencephalography (EEG) findings in ADHD, reports that brain wave tracings at this time show a sudden intrusion of theta waves into the alpha and beta rhythms of alertness. We all have seen "theta wave intrusion," in the student in the back of the classroom who suddenly crashes to the floor, having "fallen asleep." This was probably someone with ADHD who was losing consciousness due to boredom rather than falling asleep. This syndrome is life-threatening if it occurs while driving, and it is often induced by long-distance driving on straight, monotonous roads. Often this condition is misdiagnosed as "EEG negative narcolepsy." The extent of incidence of intrusive "sleep" is not known, because it occurs only under certain conditions that are hard to reproduce in a laboratory.