ADHD Traits

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6
Dec 11

ADD Blogging Writing with ADHD

I sat down nearly two hours ago to write a post for this oft neglected ADD blog. What happened? Well, not to put too fine a point on it: ADD.

Let me start by saying that I don’t “blame” my ADHD for things. That is neither productive, nor completely accurate. However, it is often the case that I look back and smile when I can see the ADD traits unfolding as I recall recent events.

Let’s start by clarifying what I mean by sitting down to write a post.

English: Symptoms of ADHD described by the lit... What I really mean is that I was looking at the analytics for my personal finance blog at FinanceGourmet when I noticed that the traffic had blipped back up here at Addessories. Curious, I got distracted (Hey, look! Something shiny) and started looking at what posts here were getting increased traffic. Eventually, I hit the big Addessories text at the top of the screen to get back to the home page where I noticed that is has been a very long time since I last wrote here. Doh!

Thus, I decided to write an ADD tips post for this ADHD blog.

To write the post, I entered the WordPress dashboard. So far, so good.

I noticed that a few of the plugins needed to be updated (Uh, oh.)

Of course, I don’t want out of date plugins, so I checked them all and clicked update. When they were finished updating, I should have gone right back to writing, but it seemed like one of my usual plugins was missing. Unable to determine which one, I went and logged into my freelance writing blog in order to look at what plugins where installed there.

If you don’t know how this ends, you must be new here.

Anyway, long story, short, I ended up installing a new plugin, writing a blog post about it (Zemanta WordPress Plugin for Online Writers) at the writing blog and then found about a dozen other things to do including checking Facebook, looking to see when the Broncos play this weekend and checking my Google AdSense earnings.

If it makes anyone feel better, that graphic came from the Zemanta plugin, so it was worth installing

At this point in time, it is well after 10:00 p.m. and I have numerous things I must do before going to bed, some of which have been urgent for an hour or more, including getting a drink, and ironically, going to the bathroom.

What is the point of all this?

Nothing, other than further proof that I am definitely one of us. Oh, and, now I don’t feel so bad about not actually writing that update even though this one isn’t really too much of an update.

Don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow (or the next day). Procrastination is the enemy of all, but especially those of us with the inattentive form of ADD.

See you later.

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2
Mar 11

Adult ADD Symptom Criteria

An interesting ADD research review from November 2010 ask whether the proper criteria are being used to diagnose adult ADD. Attention deficit disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as it is officially called, has three clinically defined types. Each type of ADHD has its own symptoms and potential treatments. However, the criteria necessary for a diagnosis of adult ADHD is laid out in a manual known as DSM-IV. One group of researchers reviewed clinical interviews to see how the ADD symptoms criteria should be re-examined for the upcoming publication of DSM-V.

Diagnosis of Adult ADD

One interesting result of the research was that almost half of the people who had ADHD as a child still meet the DSM-IV criteria to be diagnosed with adult ADHD. Of those, almost all of them still report a current attention deficit disorder (94.9%) while just over a third still report a hyperactivity issue (34.6%).

In other words, the persistence of ADD into adulthood is correlated much more with attention deficit rather than with hyperactivity.

To put it another way, you are much more likely to outgrow being hyperactive than you are to outgrow an attention deficit.

The main issue raised by the researchers is that many consider ADD to have three factors. Two of the factors are recognized by the DSM-IV as requirements for a diagnosis of adult ADD, while the third is not.

According to the researchers, the three factors of adult ADD are:

Inattention / Hyperactivity
Impulsivity
Impaired Executive Function

Executive function is not a recognized criteria for adult ADD, however, as the review shows, it is the least likely of the three to be outgrown. In other words, it is the key component of an adult ADD diagnosis and it is not currently used as a criteria.

Whether anything will come of this research remains to be seen, however, it does provide some useful information for us adults with ADHD. Just because you are not hyperactive, doesn’t mean you don’t still have the core issue that comes with ADD. Furthermore, perhaps as you age and choose your ADD treatments based on solid scientific data and medical research, you may want to prioritize those that focus on executive function.

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1
Feb 11

Distraction versus Do It Now

One of the trickiest things about dealing with ADD is that it happens inside of your own brain, which makes it incredibly difficult to be truly objective. In turn, that lack of objectivity can lead to making bad decisions.

The most important symptom of ADD is being chronically distracted in a manner above and beyond the norm. This condition is often referred to as distractibility. Once you have been diagnosed with ADD, you spend a fair amount of time searching for that distraction occurring within your own mind. This in itself can become a distraction, but we’ll leave that aside for today.

How To Tell If It’s ADD Distraction

Today I was working at my desk. I am a freelance writer who works from home. I have created a small office in a closet in my basement as a way to both block out the distractions of working at home — TV, Internet, kids playing — and a way to focus on my work. My desk fits against a wall. On either side are shelves with office supplies, books and printers. All in all, as distraction free of an environment as you can get without resorting to blank walls, empty desks, and soundproofing. Still, as an adult with ADD, distractions pop into my brain all of the time without any additional stimulus.

On this particular morning, the thought that showed up uninvited in my mind was that I needed to make a phone call that I had been putting off for a few days. Like many people with ADHD, I would think of making the call, decide to do it "in a minute" and then forget all about it. So, when it came up during a time when I was both willing and able to make the call, I grabbed the opportunity.

When I returned to my desk, I started beating myself up about getting distracted while I was supposed to be working. Then, it hit me.

Was I really distracted, or did I finally take care of something that needed to be done by doing it right away.

This is, of course, a trick question.

Doing something that needs to be done right away is a good thing.
Stopping what you are supposed to be doing in order to do something else is a bad thing.

The trick is that it was not a "bad" thing to take care of something that needed to be taken care of. What was a "bad" thing was not doing it before during all of the other windows that were available so that I didn’t have to interrupt what I needed to be doing to finally take care of it.

As ADDers, we beat ourselves up too much anyway. Be sure that you are at least trying to correct the right thing.

In this case, I should have been proud of myself for returning immediately to work after making the call and glad that the task had been completed. The correction that I need to make is getting to these things before I should be focusing on something else.

Oh, and the other thing I need to work on a bit is not writing blog posts whenever I have a thought about ADD instead of getting back to work on the paying freelance writing gig that is due this week

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19
Jan 11

Progressive Procrastination and ADD

ADD and procrastination go hand in hand. It isn’t hard to see why. Procrastination is the art of putting something off, often because there are more interesting things to do, or because the required task seems boring, long, or unwieldy. All of this plays right into the sweet spot of ADHD. How easy is it find something better to be doing when virtually everything is a stimulus to an alternate train of thought? And, before a long, boring, task even begins, the ADD mind is looking for something that will provide more promising stimulus.

procrastination Everyone gets distracted, but what makes ADD different than normal distraction is both the level and the frequency of the distraction. A person without ADD may clean out the basement without ever even noticing what is on the boxes he is using for organizing a pile of clutter. A person with ADD might not only notice, but be reminded not only of whence the box came, and perhaps, other “important” tasks or thoughts that are related, however tangentially, to what is on that box. If you’ve ever picked up an empty storage box, seen the old writing from your time in the college dorms on the side, remembered that the alumni association was having some sort of event that you were meaning to go to because an old classmate said they would be there the last time you talked on the phone, and then left before filling a single box because you remembered that your cell phone needed charging, and never came back because while you were upstairs, you noticed that crack in the wall you’d been meaning to fix, you know what I’m talking about.

Procrastination Getting Worse

The catch to procrastination is that it often grows upon itself. I call this progressive procrastination, although there may already be a scientific term for it that I am unaware of.

Progressive procrastination happens in two ways. First, with each task that is procrastinated, the list of projects that require attention grows. Life never stops and just because you didn’t finish cleaning out the basement doesn’t mean that your small business taxes won’t come due until you are done. Rather, your taxes and basement are now both on the list and procrastinating on either one simply moves it further down (or up, depending on how you think about things) an ever growing list.

At a certain point, the list becomes unmanageable. Shortly thereafter, it becomes a fantasy. A list with thirty long-term, do them now, tasks is simply not reasonable. At this point, the average ADDer takes one of three roads:

Keep adding to the list. — All of the tasks are real and need to be done, so there is no need to remove them from the list.
Start over — If a list isn’t realistic, then it makes sense to make one that is.
Try to “do better” — The list is a personal failure that can be fixed by self-improvement or improving how things are done. At this point, yours truly invents a new organizational system, or better yet, spends hours online researching all possible organizational methods including trying to find special ADD calendars, ADHD organizers, or other ADD management systems.

The problem with all three of these methods is that they set up the ADDer for more failure in the future.

Method one ensures that the list will never be done and that one will never feel the satisfaction of completing the list. Without the reward feedback of the feeling of accomplishment on a job well done, the mind not only fails to construct motivational pathways that may lead to success in the future, it lets those that sit unused wither away.

Method two may lead to the completion of the list, but it might be nothing more than a hollow victory. Most people with ADD are introspective from years of asking questions about why things seem to work differently in themselves than in others. They are not easily fooled into taking pride in accomplishing a “dumbed down” list of tasks. Furthermore, the tasks that were dropped from the list are further embedded in the psyche as “unimportant” or “delay-able”. After all, if they were dropped from the list in the first place, how important can they really be?

Method three is, of course, simply more procrastination. No organizational system in the world makes a list of necessary functions smaller. In fact, the time spent creating, developing, or finding the perfect ADD organizer may add to the growing list of procrastinated tasks because that time is not being used to complete other items before they fall onto the “to-do list”. In other words, if your list is long because you forgot you needed to do those things, then by all means, find a better organizational system to suit your ADD. On the other hand, if you can recite that list backwards and forwards because certain things have been on it for so long, you don’t need a new system, you need to do some of the things on the list.

I wish I had a great solution, but I suffer from progressive procrastination myself.

I’ll offer two tidbits in hopes that they may bring enough boost that we can make progress.

You always overestimate your willingness to do something later. — This is that “I don’t really feel up to it, so I’ll do it when I feel better about it,” excuse. It is a lie. If you have a killer headache and don’t want to do something noisy, that makes sense. To see if you are fooling yourself however, go do one of the quiet things on your list. If you won’t do that either, then the problem isn’t your headache. What can be helpful here is knowing, in advance, that you are lying to yourself. That way when you hear it in your head, you know it is a lie. Don’t let that pass. Be offended, just like you would be if someone else lied to you. That indignation may be just enough to keep yourself from believing that you will feel like doing it later, because you and I and your brain know that you won’t.
Procrastination is a pretty girl (or boy) lying because they can get away with it. — Have you ever noticed how sweet the little voice in your head is when it wants to procrastinate? “Oh, don’t worry. You work fast. You can get it done later. You always do.” Now see that pretty little voice batting its eyes at you with its bald faced flattery. Picture that smug little smile that says, “it worked before and it will work again. You are nothing but putty in my hands.” Procrastination always gets its way by being sweet and manipulative. “I know you have that big project due, but it won’t take long to help me with this video game. Come on. You know you want to.” — Trust me. If you picture that pretty girl or pretty boy who always got away with everything just because they were pretty and always sweetly lying their way into getting what they wanted, you’ll despise that little procrastination voice in your head and do the opposite just to spite it. The trick is making yourself see it, because when you don’t want to, the voice will sound a lot more like the truth. Good flattery always does.

What are your tricks for avoiding progressive procrastination? How long do they usually work for you before you have to regroup?

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28
Dec 10

When You Just Can't

Procrastination versus Motivation

Sometimes, you just can’t.

Period.

That’s it.

I mean it.

As adults with ADD, we tend to be an introspective lot. It starts with questions like, “What’s wrong with me,” or “Why can’t I just get it together,” and moves forward (hopefully) through a vast journey of other questions until someone, somewhere, blurts out (grin) the words, “Maybe it’s ADD.”

Along the way, a lot of other considerations get made and a lot of other theories are formed. Some of the ideas suggested are pleasant fictions, some are unpleasant realities, and there are many others in between. The thing is, that by the time you actually get diagnosed with ADHD you already have a barrel full of other things that could, should, or would be issues that you do or do not have to deal with. This vat of knowledge can overwhelm other factors that might be at play.

When you CAN’T get going on something, I mean really cannot get going, there are a lot of things to choose from.

Off the bat, you could go with depression and its coincident apathy.

You could go with procrastination.

You could also go with the old standby and blame distraction.

That’s Not It

However, with all of that ammo born of introspection, it is important to fully understand the situation before picking your metaphorical bullet and loading it up into your mental firing chamber.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it isn’t ANYTHING.

Depression is not a one day thing, nor is one day worth of hard core apathy a symptom of depression.

Procrastination is defined by the putting off of a task in order to do something else marginally more enjoyable. Not doing anything isn’t procrastination per se.

And distraction requires that something else be occupying your focus. Just staring at the computer screen and rolling your eyes at the thought of doing ANYTHING at all isn’t ADD. It isn’t depression. It isn’t distraction. It’s nothing. Nothing at all. And, it sucks.

When that happens there really isn’t anything you can do about it other than unlearn everything that you have learned since being diagnosed with ADD and go back to what you used to try and do before you knew you had ADHD. Just put your head down and try and plow ahead until that lack of motivation goes away.

As an adult who has grown more savvy in the ways of managing ADD, this can be trying. For years, just putting your head down and trying harder was a one-way ticket to Failsville. It accomplished nothing more than draining your brain of willpower and happiness. That makes trying it again in these situations tough to take. But, there it is.

A quick reality check that you already knew courtesy of my own Day of Blah. I’m a writer and I didn’t feel like writing. I just couldn’t make myself write a very easy, very due, assignment, so I wrote this. I don’t feel any better about it, but I’ve already been writing now, my fingers are already moving, and I’m already forming the intro paragraph in my mind. In other words, I didn’t exactly put my head down and write on the assingment, but I put my head down and wrote.

And it worked.

If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.

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29
Oct 10

Dealing With ADD Procrastination in ADHD Adults

When it comes to ADD, there are plenty of co-morbid indicators. That’s a fancy, psychological jargon way of saying that ADD occurs in conjunction with other psychological and mental issues. For example, people with ADHD are more likely to also be diagnosed with depression. Whether depression is caused by ADD, or ADHD is caused by depression, or whether there is no casual relationship at all, is unknown. But, a person with ADD and depression has depression as a co-morbid indicator of ADD — or vice versa.

Another very common condition that often occurs in people with ADD is procrastination.

While everyone procrastinates sometimes, there are people, both with and without ADHD, for which procrastination is a very big problem that constantly threatens their lifestyle, rather than an annoyance. Unfortunately, adults with ADD are more likely to fall into the former category.

In fact, many undiagnosed adults with Attention Deficit Disorder never consider undergoing an evaluation for ADD because they believe that their "problem" is actually just with procrastination as opposed to a potential case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Among those diagnosed with ADD there is an ongoing difficulty in reliably distinguishing between issues that may be symptoms of ADD and those that may be more closely related to chronic procrastination. What makes determining where the obstruction to success lies so difficult is that most adults with ADHD developed procrastination habits and coping mechanisms simultaneously over the course of their life making the symptoms of ADHD indistinguishable from plain procrastination.

Books To Help With Procrastination

Books about procrastination and dealing with procrastination litter the shelves of the bookstore. Some books are better than others, but I’ve always found one very frustrating detail about procrastination help books is that they all seem hell-bent on tying procrastination to perfectionism, and therefore procrastination is caused by fear that what you do won’t be perfect.

This rings about as hollow to me as possible, and yet, it seems like many books about procrastination spend more pages on trying to "prove" that procrastination is caused by fear of failure. If you think that you do not have a fear of failure, then you just don’t understand that you are a perfectionist, and that not living up to being perfect is your problem. Therefore, procrastination is caused by perfectionism (which is just a form of fear of failure) and by the time they are ready to move on, I really don’t care what that book has to say because it no longer has any credibility in my mind. At the very least, whatever kind of procrastination that author is talking about, is not related to the procrastination from ADD that I might have.

I recently picked up a book about procrastination on a visit to the Tattered Cover bookstore. I do this all the time when I go into bookstores. I find a topic that might interest me and then I read a page or two from the book to see if it sounds like something that I might give enough weight to to actually read the book instead of dismissing it as some self-help guru’s attempt to make money off of some newspaper column or TV show appearance that they have. Most of the time, I just put the books back on the shelf. Something makes me roll my eyes, or think that it won’t resonate with me.

This time, however, I grabbed a copy of The Procrastinator’s Guide to Getting Things Done. I don’t really care about the title, but I happened to read a page near the beginning of the book where the author states that your inner procrastinator’s voice is very seductive, saying things like, "Oh, you can get that done later. You have plenty of time. You work better under pressure anyways." All of this sounds very familiar. But, what pushed it over the edge for me was the next paragraph which basically said, "You’re smarter than that. Don’t play the fool to that voice."

Now, THAT definitely resonated. In face, as I stood there with the book in my hand I actually felt like a fool who had been played for years by my inner procrastination voice. I’ have never really thought of it in those terms, but it has definitely given me a tiny handhold in my daily battle against procrastination, which is more than I can say for any other book about procrastinating, or focusing, or buckling down, or building new habits, that I have read in a very long time.

I haven’t read much of the book yet, so a whole-hearted endorsement of The Procrastinator’s Guide to Getting Things Done is a ways off, but I did manage to get to Chapter 3, which is titled, "What Are You Afraid Of?" — Check out the ADD tools and ADHD tips for those.

Uh, oh. Another book ruined by a tunnel-vision author who cannot let go of their "shocking, earth-shattering, enlightenment" that all procrastination is really just fear of not being perfect. But, then, just as the storm clouds gathered, something happened.

The author has a checklist that is designed to help determine if fear (of perfectionism or of failure) is your problem. That’s fair. It’s not like it is not one possible cause of procrastination, it’s just that it is not the ONLY possible explanation for why people procrastinate.

The book’s author, Monica Ramirez Basco, has a six point checklist to help determine if fear of failure / perfectionism is the issue causing your procrastination. The very next thing, is a different checklist. This procrastination checklist determines if fear of failure is NOT your problem.

That’s better than I have gotten out of any procrastination self-help book I’ve found in recent memory, so I’ll keep reading. In fact, I was so excited, I came right to Addessories to share my find with others who have ADHD and procrastination issues and might like to have a possible ADD and procrastination resource.

Ironically, it’s near the end of the month and I have tons of writing projects due, so technically, this who post is procrastination. But, at least I’m writing

Is Fear Causing My Procrastination Checklist

Fear is not your problem if:

You are feeling lazy
You are tired
You are discouraged
You just can’t concentrate
You would rather be doing something else

Hello, #4 and #5! Come to Pappa!

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27
Aug 10

Toughest Thing About ADD

The hardest part about ADHD in adults and ADD in kids is that no matter whether you take standard prescription drugs from a doctor, or work out your own drug-free alternative ADD treatment, nothing helps you focus on the RIGHT things.

That is, while Adderall may help you focus, there is nothing in it or Ritalin or Vyvanse that will make you focus on schoolwork or on that critical project due for work. They can help keep you focused and help you get distracted less often, but in the end, you have to make yourself focus on the right thing FIRST, and THEN the meds will help keep your focus in place. But, if you don’t get your focus on the subject you need to focus on, then all they do is help stop you from being distracted from something you shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

Who wants to guess what my top ADD issue is this morning?

Hope your day is more focused and productive than mine has been so far.

– ADDer

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1
Jul 10

What Is Attention Deficit Disorder Like

Understanding attention deficit disorder, or ADD, requires getting past the pop culture version of ADHD, also called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and looking at what attention deficit disorder is really like.

First off, you need a basic understanding of the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. Once you have a basic grasp on the generalized symptoms of ADHD, you need to be aware that there are actually three forms of ADD all of which can be present in both adults and in children. After that, you will want to understand both the conventional ADD treatments of therapy, coaching, and prescription medications, as well as the bombardment of new, maybe works, kind of sort-of backed up by scientific data, alternative treatments for ADHD.

Of course, all of that only gives you a basic concept of what the condition is like in some prototype population like attention deficit disorder child or adult adhd labeled groups. None of that gives anyone a real grasp of what it is actually like to have ADD as an adult or as a teen or child. That is why from time to time I like to profile here on Addessories real life events or stories of an adult with ADHD. (It’s me.)

Deadline Today’s life with ADD episode comes courtesy of my small home office where I conduct my freelance writing business as a work from home dad. For the past three or four hours there has been a small empty plate on my desk. It comes and goes from my consciousness as I fling my fingers across the keyboard generating text that will hopefully pay the mortgage and more this month. When it arrives in my consciousness, or what I like to call “my front brain,” it annoys me a little bit because I can’t remember how it got there or what was on it. Also, I have had a terrible headache for the past 90 minutes because I’ve been thinking, “I need to go get something to drink,” for somewhere around 70 minutes, but I keep remembering in the middle of writing something and I know that if I stop, it might take me a while to get started again, or more likely, I might not be able to quite remember where I was going with my thoughts and I’ll have to start over altogether.

In a lot of ways this is nothing more than so much whining, except that none of this is uncommon.

When someone calls on the phone or a family member pops by my home office, they almost always have to wait for me to go to the restroom before they can talk to me. You see, while I am working my brain does scatter about distractedly from here to there, but one of the “theres” never seems to be my bodily functions. Rather, my mind wonders if I finished that article I started this morning, if there are better keywords than the ones I am using, and it can’t help but wonder what the plate is doing on my desk.

As it turns out, my wife brought me a sandwich and strawberries for lunch on that plate. Ah, that’s what it was.

Which brings us to today’s lesson in ADHD. People with ADHD are not forgetful, per se. While I struggled to come up with an idea of what the plate was doing on my desk that was less a function of being unable to remember and more a function of being unable to command some of the sections of my brain to stop doing whatever it was they are already doing and focus on the issue of the plate. Once the image of the strawberries popped back into my front brain (one of those brain centers apparently got around to processing some of the things in its queue, like what about the plate) I could remember everything about it.

I remember her appearing at my side with the plate. I remember that she had one too. I remember how good the strawberries were and what kind of sandwich it was. I also remember why I put the plate on my desk. (I wanted to remember to take it upstairs and not leave it on a shelf in my office.)

The point of all this noise is that the symptoms of ADD are not necessarily comical stereotypes of forgetful space cadets, but rather the manifestation of what happens when, in some cases (not all the time), one cannot calm the brain down enough to get it to do the front brain’s bidding and instead, the rest of the brain (the back brain, if you will) continues on with what it already had determined — often at the front brain’s command — what was currently important and that new requests would simply have to wait.

In other words, this isn’t the absent minded professor. ADHD is the command center switchboard with too many urgent requests coming in from the field. The good news is that if you can wait around a minute, your call will be answered in the order it was received.

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8
Jun 10

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – Distracted By Boring Stuff

boring-wall When I first envisioned what the addessories.com website would be like, I pictured a site where both adults with ADHD and teens with ADD and even children with ADHD could get ADHD tools, products, tips and yes, accessories for ADD lifestyles. The idea was that of the many books, magazines, websites and organizations for ADHD out there, there was, and still is, a lack of actual useable tools and products for helping with ADHD symptoms and making time management and organization easier for people with ADD.

(What is with switching between ADD and ADHD all the time? – What is the difference between ADD and ADHD?)

For example, every book about ADHD or ADD article you read is going to tell you to do things like make lists, use reminders, and of course get a calendar or organizer to help you get more organized. Of course, unless you are incredibly un-self-aware (Whew, too many hyphens!) chances are that you already have tried tons of planners and calendars and lists and various organizational systems. If you were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, chances are that you have desperately tried buying calendars and Palm Pilots and BlackBerries and the like hundreds of times in an effort to work better, organize better, and be a better husband, father, dad, wife, mother, or mom. After all, one of the symptoms of ADHD is not liking to be disorganized.

That is why I have started work (again) on the ADHD Planner which will be a calendar and organizational system specifically designed for people with ADD to use. Since no two cases of ADD are exactly alike, the ADD planner will be customizable based upon your particular case of attention deficit disorder.

What Is It Like Having ADHD or What Is ADD Really Like

Along the way, to creating my utopia of the best ADHD gadgets and top ADD tips and tricks, I’ve gotten side tracked.

Now, I know what you are thinking, and yes, I get distracted just like everyone else, both with and without ADHD. However, in this particular case, the distraction has been a bit of a good news / bad news sort of thing. The delay it has caused in making this ADHD website what I want it to be is the bad news. The good news is that much of the distraction has come in the form of increased work for my freelance writing business, which until I get all of these products created, manufactures, and sold, pays the bills.

However, there has been an unexpected distraction in the form of visitors to this website. They come here for many reasons. Almost everyone who ever lays eyes on this website for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder comes here via results for queries made on search engines. When that happens, there is a log of information that basically says what the keywords were that were used to search for ADHD or ADD. This is, of course, why I constantly shift between using ADD/ADHD and why I also try and spell out both acronyms at least once per post.

The really odd thing is that a lot of the traffic to Addessories comes from searches for things like:

What is ADHD really like?
What does ADHD feel like?
Is ADHD a real things?
How Do I Know If I Have ADHD?
and so on…

The weird part is that this is isn’t really a broadly covered topic. Read any of the major ADHD books out there and you will get a clinical description of ADHD as well as a handful of what I have come to call either "Me too stories," or "Sob stories," depending on my mood. These are the "examples" or "cases" that the PhDs that crank out these books write about where a patient or client of theirs relates how ADHD has affected their life in some way.

What is almost always missing from these writings is an indication of what ADHD actually feels like, or what it is like inside the ADHD brain. I don’t know if this is due to the difficulty in describing it, or if it not scientific enough to relate in formal writings, or (if I’m feeling jaded) if the authors of these books really don’t know because they don’t really have ADHD or it is something very minor to their overall life.

Whatever the reason, people keep coming for answers about what ADHD is like in the real world, outside of the clinics and counseling sessions. Therefore, I will endeavor to keep exploring this avenue in detail and welcome your help in doing so. After all, I can only tell you what it is like inside of my brain.

With all of that being said, I think I may have finally gotten into words a key concept about what ADHD is like and how ADHD is different from everyone getting distracted sometimes.

As I have said in the past, and most ADHD authorities point out, ADD involves an unusually high level of distractibility on a chronic (on-going) basis, not just getting distracted sometimes by distracting things. Which brings me to my pseudo-epiphany which we will cover in more depth in the next post.

The difference between ADHD and regular distraction is that people with ADHD get distracted all of the time by things that are NOT distracting.

Put another way, ADDers get distracted by boring stuff just as often as they do by exciting stuff.

If you have ever brought home a brand-new DVD release that you have been dying to watch and ended up cleaning the dust bunnies you noticed under your TV stand instead, you know what I’m talking about. I needed to be reminded a half-dozen times not to use up all of the already minimal time we had for "date night" because I was trying to get a laptop to play the DVD onto the TV so that I could show her some of the new features in Windows Media Center. Instead of eating popcorn, laying on the couch, and watching the movie I desperately wanted to see (and which she has no interest in, but agreed to watch for me) I was trying to find the online manual for my laptop. Instead of fun, I was troubleshooting keys, software, and S-video cables.

In other words, I got distracted by something boring. That, my friends, is what it is like to have ADD.

ADHD Traits — No Comments
8
Jun 09

How Do I Tell If I Have ADHD or ADD?

adhd-questions How to tell if you have ADHD is second only to what is it like to have ADHD among the questions that rattle around the brain of those with ADHD. Unfortunately, the most common answers are either to check with a doctor or mental health professional because only they can make an actual diagnosis of ADHD, or to take a simplified, overly general, test. The test questions are often so broad and inane that they simply perpetuate the myth that the symptoms of ADHD are the same as things that happen to everyone. Ironically, both answers show a fundamental misunderstanding of the ADD/ADHD mentality.

Do I Have ADD or ADHD? Just Answer the Question!

People with ADHD, particularly adults with ADHD, are not prone to react well to either of the common answers to the query of whether or not they have ADD. Typically, a person with ADHD does not reach the conclusion that they do potentially have ADD after sitting in quiet reflection about their daily life. Rather, they are likely to have the thought pop into their head in the middle of doing something else.

One of the most common times to wonder if you have ADHD/ADD is when beating yourself up for a recent failure or shortcoming. “Maybe I have ADD,” is the kind of thought that many ADDers have right after thinking something like, “Why can’t you just get it together long enough to…” or maybe, “Why can’t you stay organized?”

For most adults with ADHD, the next stop is Google and a search for ADD. Ironically, such a search will likely be futile since ADD and the word ‘add’ are the same thing when typed into a search box. A search for ‘attention deficit disorder’ likely follows, and then perhaps after noticing another acronym, a search for ADHD which will yield better results.

Regardless, while the ADDer will read a dozen sites in a row – and indeed may enjoy doing so – to get the answer to their questions, they are not likely to stop and take a boring test, and are even less likely to call and schedule an appointment with a doctor or therapist. Thus, the most helpful scenario for someone with ADHD is to provide a real answer, and not a bunch of legally approved boilerplate language about getting an answer from someone else.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell if you have ADD/ADHD since I am sitting behind a keyboard, and quite possibly am nowhere near it while you are reading this, not that it matters because even if I were sitting at my computer, it’s not like I can see you through the Internet or anything.

If that sentence sounds like something you say, or something you write, or have to stop yourself from writing, then signs point to yes. If you read that sentence and started considering the possibility of video phones or video conferencing or some sort of online video conference, like Skype, then signs point even more so to yes. If you didn’t get to this paragraph despite it being in italics before opening a new window or tab in your browser to lookup something about video conferencing or other tool or method, then the signs really point to yes.

Test To Find Out If You Have ADHD / ADD

The official tests used to determine if you have ADD or ADHD aren’t much better than the ones that you find online. For the most part, they ask you to rank from 1 to 5 (Never through Always) if certain things happen to you.

As you take the test you’ll find yourself saying, “maybe” or “sort of” a lot. In those cases, I would encourage you to choose 4 or 5.

That aside, I’ve developed some of my own ADHD quizzes to help determine if someone has ADHD. These ADHD tests are not generic, are not boring, and are not official. They won’t give you anything more than a real answer to your question. THEN you can schedule an appointment with a professional or family doctor.

And that, is how the ADHD mind works.

Next Step —> ADHD Tests (In my next post coming as soon as I get it formatted.)

ADD ADHD AddessoriesADDessories, accessories for ADD ADHD