Well, Where To Begin?
First there is considerable research on the topic and anyone who has delved into said research may be wondering if the term ADHD is a catch all term used for a whole spectrum of closely related conditions and the brain imaging studies have found some interesting things. For the sake of discussion let us assume that ADHD is a somewhat understood thing that is still under study, which is all fine and dandy but how does that help us in the here and now?
Two Major Issues of ADHD
Now I’m going to be talking from the perspective of someone with ADHD (currently unmedicated, you are welcome and I’m sorry) and the first major problem with ADHD is first the person who has it is not the real sufferer of the condition. (Ask Coyote in Zebra Clothing about that sometime)
We will take today for instance, I decided to take the car real quick to get rent money. While I’m proud of myself for staying on task for an event that took more than two physical steps of my feet…I neglected to recall that I have almost no perception of time and ended up making my brother late because it didn’t dawn on me that things like morning rush hour might produce things such as traffic jams and police stops that ended up leaving me stuck in my parking space for many more minutes than planned because some random person decided to park and block me in while getting their ticket, or that the clerk checking me out because I decided to get a sandwich and coffee might have decided to see how big of a line they could make before someone came to help them. So…. I’m making spaghetti to say sorry, **apology gestures are a thing, Do The Thing**.
The second major problem is it is doing life on a cognitive expert mode. Imagine playing a game where you decide to use only the sub-optimal strategies where you took points out of things such as judgement, impulse and emotional control, long term and working memory…and decided to add them to the “hold my beer” skill. While that sounds like a fun Mod of the Sims to play and an interesting person to have at a party, I’m not sure I would want to be that person…..oh wait….I am that person. Introspective self deprecating gallows humor is good at articulating your issues, **self deprecating humor is a thing,Do The Thing**.
Acknowledging Focus & Distractions Hurdles
Now to get on topic, As I’ve just demonstrated the mind of those poor people with ADHD is filled to the brim with distractions. It is not to say that we can’t focus, I give everything I see 1000% focus…until there is something else to see. And even if I manage to find a place where there are no other physical distractions it is entirely possible that some mental distraction will come along and I might just sit there for three hours while I work on a story for some random subreddit to post or brainstorm some random social experiment. But this is where the making the most out of sub-optimal strategies part comes in.
Thankfully for me I learned early on that this way the way I was. I think that was the 2nd grade while I was standing in the corner with my arms spread and my fingers on each of the discipline marks on the wall. I’m not sure what the full list of things I did to get me there was, but failure to do school work and some highly unfiltered words from my mouth may have had something to do with it. It dawned to me that maybe there was a mechanic I could use to mitigate the attention drift problems I have and I began to read ahead. Now I’m not going to say there was not challenges, but I discovered that I could ‘write’ papers in my head in those moments of drift and occasionally I could recycle that material that mattered. This was a huge successes for me or for most people it would be just a success but work with what you got!
Productive First Steps
I learned that the key to getting things done was inner and external environmental control, this way even if I got distracted I still did something that needed done….a very useful thing. Now as a child my focus room was the little bathroom at 2 am when everyone was asleep and while this was by far a less than ideal strategy, it still got things done for me. There was no TV sounds, no distractions from parents or siblings and a deadline.
Next was mastering preemptive damage control. Keep in mind the tune of the day is making the most out of the sub-optimal strategy available to me. Each assignment I would plan out the moment I got it. If I could give it a credible attempt at finishing it in 5 minutes, than it was done in the next class in the first few minutes. Classes that generated assignments that could take an hour or more were broken down into chunks and I would squeeze them in (when I remembered) a few at a time in lunch, on the bus, in the start or stops of other classes, anywhere but home.
Putting It All Together
So, thus far this seems fairly simple. Find your quiet time to do your thing, keep your potential distractions to be something synergistic to some main project or whatever. Now it is time to discuss an external means of distraction that can be problematic.
While people with ADHD are horrible at remembering things or even staying on task long enough to pick up all the ingredients for a birthday cake, we are very prone to say “ok” if someone asks us for help. Which itself is not a bad thing but…umm…we are kinda time blind and consequences blind and most of our friends know that they could ask us for help driving a few states away to help a friend move and we would say yes before we thought about things like an upcoming paper we need to work on or who is paying for all of this.
That aspect came up in a Learning Disabled program and while it was a good way to be introduced to quite the spectrum of personality enhancements, I think the two major things I learned from it was to pick yourself up off of the ground when you fail, and fails are going to happen. Anyone with ADHD is going to have those moments, it is just like a diet, yeah you are going to have your lapses, just don’t define your life with them.
And the second thing is to own it. Traffic did not make me late, I was late the moment I went out the door. Yes I get distracted but the moment I blame it on the outside world is the moment I am at the mercy of the outside world. So if the choice is to be the world’s pawn or be my own faulty self well…I’ll take the latter. With accountability comes power.
