adhd

A wandering mind. You’ll get frequent comments from teachers, or, in an adult, supervisors or spouse, that the individual’s mind wanders, that he or she has trouble focusing and staying on task, that performance is inconsistent, good days and bad days, good moments and terrible ones, all of which usually lead the teacher, supervisor, or spouse to c

As for brooding, this is the special blessing and the bitter curse of ADHD. You have a vision. Maybe you’ve come up with a novel technology for making an unbeatable knife sharpener. Or maybe you think you have the plot to the perfect novel. Whatever your vision, you go at it like you never have before.

But then, what you’ve created…disappoints. It’s

ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with i

Those who suffer from concentration difficulties such as ADHD or ADD often have a dopamine deficiency. In these cases, more stimulation is required to get enough dopamine to work on a task with focus. In addition, there are more potential distractions when the brain is faced with more impressions than can be processed. Attention is constantly shift

Strong will, stubbornness, refusal of help. It can seem stunningly stupid, but many people with ADHD, especially men, state outright, “I’d rather fail doing it my way than succeed with help.”

Once you have all the data pertinent to your problem in pieces—on paper, using objects, or graphically represented in some other way—you can move all that physically represented stuff around with your hands, your eyes, your ears, even your whole body to see if a solution reveals itself. If it’s a verbal problem, use paper, 3˝ × 5˝ file cards, or ev

The problems that ADHD creates are not so much with knowledge, or the back part of our brain, but with performance, or the front part of our brain. That is where we use that knowledge in daily life for greater effectiveness. Thus, the problems for you have more to do with not using what you know at critical points of performance in your life than w

The massive behavioral conditioning we’ve all been undergoing since the advent of ubiquitous electronic communications technology has changed us radically. But this dramatic, if not epochal, change is underappreciated. It’s underappreciated because we’re living in it as it happens, like frogs in cold water that slowly gets heated up without the fro

ADHD can make the future seem hopelessly distant. A goal that requires a significant investment of time, incorporates waiting periods, or has to be done in a sequence of steps can prove so elusive that you feel overwhelmed. When that happens, many adults with ADHD yield to the temptation to find an escape route.