thinkythink

6 Ways to Deal With a Slow Mind

Crap! My ADHD just hit me like a brick.

I've been relatively lucky so far during this pregnancy- my ADHD symptoms have been limited. (This is something a lot of women with ADHD seem to report, that their ADHD  isn't as bad when they are pregnant.) But today I am experiencing what I remember from pre-pregnancy days. My "planning brain" is slow or non-existent. I'm kind of sluggish in the thinking and the mood.  Maybe it's a good time to revisit some of the things that help on slow-brained days:

1. Notice your mental state.
2. Plan to suit #1. (I'm slow so I can't expect my mind to jump from project to project fluidly).
3. Use rituals (like a cup of tea) to set the stage for planning.
4. Lower your expectations. (Plan only a few things.)
5. Write a few things down that you want to do today (Even if it's hard to get up and a get a pen, or even open the self-addressed email.)
6. Check your list and see if it's realistic. You can't do the same things when your planning brain is on vacation, so pick the right tasks.

I'm off to make a cup of tea.

I'll take it.

Yesterday my husband was getting ready for a work trip. It's rare that he is home with me while our son is elsewhere, but it was a work day for me so the tot was at daycare, hence a rare opportunity for a few quality alone-time moments. Alas, my husband was a bit hyped up, following up on quote requests before leaving the office behind; packing; looking up baggage fees for the airline; finishing some work on a fence he's building; and so on. So when he couldn't sit with me and chat for a few minutes we had this conversation:
Him: I'm sorry. It's just that my mind is racing in a thousand directions right now.
Me:  Oh. Yeah. I kinda feel like that on a daily basis.
Him: I know.

So I realize, he may not get all kinds of girl stuff, like needing to be "understood" or "heard" or  wanting to be hugged RIGHT NOW. But apparently, he gets a fundamental chunk of what it's like to be me. I'll take it.

6 Ways to Quiet Your Hyper Mind

A lot of people talk to me about how their minds are flooded with fast thinking, and then want to know how to make it all just chill out up there. It's just tiring and there's too much going on. Here are some ideas:

1. Occupy your mind intensely.

2. Change your physical state.

3. Check in on your physical, mental, emotional states, and take care of them.

4. Drown out some of it.

5. Identify what's going on: your mind is a speeding flood of thoughts.

6. Watch the flood of thoughts like it is a river you're standing next to.

I'll elaborate in future posts. In the meantime, try these out. But don't worry or judge if they don't work; different things work at different times for different people.

CNN.com article: "Why Can't I Concentrate?"

I love that this article about women and adhd made it into the  mainstream (cnn) press. It has some good things to offer, and a few things lacking that I'd like to point out.

Good:
"When adult ADD (or ADHD: the H is for hyperactivity) goes untreated for years, women may end up plagued by anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem."

I'd add:
A lot of women seem to end up being treated for anxiety and/or depression when their ADHD goes undiagnosed. (I used the terms ADD and ADHD interchangeably.)

Good:

"Because women are less likely than men to be classically hyperactive, their symptoms can be more subtle and easily missed. For instance, a woman with ADD may come off as chatty, peppy, or extroverted, or even as a dreamy, artistic soul."

I'd add:

Many women with ADHD lack the symptoms of hyperactivity and/or impulsivity. (There are different types of ADHD- predominantly hyperactive, combined, and predominantly inattentive.) So these womens' symptoms aren't always apparent to others at all because they aren't disruptive.

Good:

"Hormonal changes can exacerbate the effects of ADD, too. When a woman enters perimenopause, she may be even more likely to forget names or key bits of information."

I'd add:

Hormonal changes within the menstrual cycle can exacerbate effects of ADD. You don't have to wait until (peri)menopause to have hormones affect ADHD. In fact, it seems that many girls symptoms really start to show up along with hormonal changes at puberty. Many women have symptoms fluctuate at certain points during each menstrual cycle.

In summary:

Decent, basic article. Glad to see this information out there. Inattentive folks, you're vaguely represented here. Women with PMS and ADHD are a bit neglected here. It's a good start. The stories towards the end are worth reading. It's great that people are talking about women with ADHD.

"High IQ Is No Help for Those With ADHD...

..."researchers find." Link is here, and really the biggest thing I want to say about this, is thank goodness. Thank goodness that researchers are bothering to find out this fact, which may seem obvious to some of us. The fact they are finding is not so much that high IQ doesn't "help" but that high IQ doesn't mean someone doesn't have ADHD.

I sometimes find it surprising that we have to be told this. Maybe that's because in my training as an ADHD coach, at some point I learned that one characteristic of ADHD can be a mismatch between achievement and potential for achievement, where IQ might be one measure of such potential.

I have been personally fortunate never to have anyone tell me that I couldn't possibly have ADHD because I was too smart, or had gotten through too much school, despite having made it through a Master's degree, and through some doctoral research, before even knowing what ADHD is. But I have gotten to know people who have, including some of my clients. This has included the particularly nasty cases where a previous diagnosis was dismissed simply because of some success in academics.

I think this notion that IQ or book smarts or whatnot could exclude ADHD is particularly insidious for people who also don't have the obvious target written all over their faces of obvious hyperactivity. The same holds for other with very quiet disabilities (such as learning disabilities). If you are one of these people, take heart that not everyone writes off your struggle. Luckily, there are people, including doctors, who get it, or who even have ADHD themselves and are open about it. And three cheers for folks like those at Yale who use their credentials to make things easier for us.

When My Brain Won't Choose

Today is one of those days when I can't choose which step to take next. This morning I was trying to figure out whether to go to my local coffee shop before or after a midday appointment. (I concentrate really well on some kinds of work in a coffee shop instead of my home office.) The issue, really, is that "figuring out" doesn't always work. I didn't need to figure anything out. I knew the reasons one way and the other, and I also didn't care all that much about it. My head was kind of spinning in tiny circles, thinking through the options. I wasn't worried. I wasn't ruminating. I just couldn't flip that switch. And that unflippable switch is exactly what ADHD is about.

How did I solve it today? I noticed it was happening. I noticed what my mind was doing. I checked in with myself and noticed I was pretty darned tired, physically, and hungry. So I made something to eat, a cup of tea, and put my feet up, and rested for a while.  It's been hard to learn to trust my need to do that- because it means letting go of the decision attempts, the plans for that moment or day, and putting something else (myself) first. But here I am, a few hours later, rested and more able to concentrate, writing at the coffee shop. 

Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is a topic that's been coming up a lot lately, for example, over here and here, both over on addforums.com. It's a disorder that is diagnosed independently, or as comorbid with ADHD. But I've also noticed that there is some social anxiety that is, for me anyway, built in to my experience of inattentive ADHD. I love working with people and talking to people. But I sometimes feel very shy. People who know me pretty well think I'm nuts when I tell them this because I can be so outgoing! And talking to people is what I do for a living. But I get shy or even anxious when:

• I have to take a phone call and I don't know who it's from
• I have a social event and I don't really know what to talk to people there about (like when people there have a connection to my husband but I don't feel like I know them enough to start chatting)
• I need to talk to someone I have hired, like a housecleaner, babysitter/daycare, or contractor, and be assertive about what I need from them
• I need to ask something of a neighbor

I've noticed that these things can definitely relate to my ADHD. Because of my ADHD, I

• Can't always think clearly about what I want to say when I'm on the spot
• Don't always feel comfortable consciously integrating social niceties into what I'm saying
• Sometimes experience mental shutdown- that deer-in-the-headlights feeling- in the face of certain conversations.

I also can get completely overwhelmed by to much input- like too much cross-talk with too much of the wrong kind of noise in the background. I used to get a little queasy from this, and people would notice me get a little pale. (I really noticed this when speaking a foreign language with a large group at a restaurant with noisy acoustics!)

It's helped me a lot to know all of this about myself. Now, I can

• Plan conversations that might be hard (even though they seem like silly little things)
• Screen phone calls when I'm not ready to jump into a conversation with someone I don't know (or even someone I do).
• Choose a quieter spot in a restauran.
• Change my expectations. If it's a noisy party, I might sit on a chair in a quiet corner and not talk so much.
• Change my beliefs. If I don't talk so much at a party, it doesn't mean I'm antisocial, or have some social phobia. It means it's hard on my little mind to be social in that context.
• Take care of myself. If it's all too much, I can take off, claim I'm feeling unwell or tired, and just call it a day, without coming to any grand conclusions about myself.

Of course, it'd be great to be at ease in all social situations, but not being that way doesn't make me all that different from anyone else! I realize a lot of people have it harder. As I wrote about earlier in this blog, I do know that now that I know about my ADHD I like people a lot more often.

Daycare for Mama

Today is my son's first day at daycare. Up until now, we've had a babysitter who has come to our house while I am working. I am following a friend's wise advice not to expect myself to be all too productive for the first couple of weeks that he's there, because it is apparently usually a bigger adjustment (emotionally) for mama than it is for the peanut. Beyond that, though, one of my concerns is that I won't be as focused or efficient as I was with the sitter and the tot in the house with me.

This thought surprised me. In fact, it surprised our dear former sitter, who said, "what do you mean you won't be able to get as much done even though I won't be chattering away at you and distracting you every time you come upstairs?" Yes, I'd get slightly too caught up in conversations with her when I came up from the basement office to grab a snack or say hi to the little one. And more significantly, if he was crying and I wasn't on a client call I would tend to come up and check on him. I did a middling job of learning to limit the time I took away from my work for a break.

Which I guess we all have to do regardless of what the distraction might be- baby or sitter, co-workers, chores, tetris... or ourselves. That last one is what I am wondering about. Before babe was born, I worked in a quiet house most of the time. There were some things I know I was much more efficient at when I was not alone in the house. I could clean up my office better when my husband was doing the same (or when my assistant was keeping me on task when I had one) for example. I think I've now gone for one of the longest stretches in my career that I have NOT been alone at the house working. But working with a baby and sitter upstairs is different from having a body-double or assistant or just someone working at the same sort of task or in the same room.

Yet having those people in my house helped anchor my attention. That's the ADHD trick. They kept me outside my own internal whirling thoughts, and so, while distracting me, they also rescued me from distraction. INTERNAL, INATTENTIVE-TYPE distraction. So I'm giving myself a couple of weeks, and then I might have to add in some new accommodations for this little mind. We shall see.

Disaster Preparedness

In an earlier post I said that when other people told me I worried too much I used to think they were right, and get, well, worried. And that now I get annoyed instead, which is an improvement. Nowadays I think about it in terms of how I work. As I said in that post, I know I do best when I have a conceptual framework. That means that I have a kind of mental scaffolding for understanding a situation; I know where to put my thoughts if that makes any sense. So when I think about "worry" and "overthinking," nowadays I think of it more in terms of disaster preparedness.

A couple of years ago, when avian flu was bigtime in the news, I had a bunch of conversations with people about preparing for epidemics / pandemics. Would I have the supplies to hunker down and stay safe? What does that involve? Same with Katrina, got us all thinking about what you would do if you had to evacuate suddenly. These are scary things to think about. I noticed that some people (like the one I live with) thinks that it's kind of overkill to be concerned, or to go through a checklist and buy supplies for these kinds of situations. It can be seen as just overactive worrying if you don't live in active earthquake/flood/fire area, for example. But for others of us, getting prepared is something productive and constructive to do with our concerns. It is a way of taking care of ourselves, not by letting anxiety rule us, but by getting our houses in order.

And once that's done, worry is free to subside. In fact for me, I don't even have to carry out a full preparedness plan; merely understanding what it involves and having a tangible sense of those steps allows me to feel more in charge. You could say that the preparedness information is my conceptual framework. If the proverbial -or actual- dam breaks, I'll be mentally ready; so in the meantime I don't have to be concerned, whether or not I'm thinking about it.

A Slowed-down Day

I talk about this more often. On a less spacey day, I'll go back and check what I've said before. It's a spacey day today, and lately my ADHD has been hitting a bit harder than it had been- I think it's a hormone thing, or the stage that my toddler is in at the moment, I'm not sure. Point is, it's not always predictable. My brain's status is not always what I think it would be. Ok, I've grown to NOT rely on it being the same all the time, which is always a big help. That is, assuming some days or moments will be somewhat sucky, makes it easier when that happens.
Ah, but my point?
it's the old flexible structure thing. I'm pretty lucky right now; my son directs my attention a lot of the time, so that I don't need to choose what to focus on, and his needs are fairly immediate and tangible, which is a good ADHD thing. My work time is more limited, so I have to choose pretty quickly what to do- again, this can actually be ADHD-friendly, as long as you let go of all the stuff you think you ought to be doing and keep only a couple things in mind (even if long-term it means we need some desk-cleaning strategies). But I also need some grace. I think grace is how I think of this kind of flexibility.
Lately, on Thursday afternoons, I work on some projects. My client appointments tend to be lumped on other days recently. So I can do follow-up emails and write a blog post, for example. But I may not be able to do as much as I think I can. I may not get down to my office as quickly after the sitter arrives as I would like, even if I've got everything lined up. As long as I've got the grace to just let that be the way it is, that's ok.

As long as I can accept that I DON'T always move in straight lines to get to my desk (or to a task) then I keep myself more at ease, more focused- and I keep the flow of laundry-to-babysitter going (she folds it for us, so she acts as a structure for me to get it in the wash), so I can be less distracted by household stuff (I've done what I'm supposed to right then). And I do get to my work. And the thing is, on a day like today, on a spacey day like today, when I need someone else to tell me whether to eat the eggs or the ham and cheese lest I stand in front of the counter for an hour spacing out and being ambivalent, less work is what was going to happen anyway. But less work is some work, and it's pretty darned good.

Can you relate?