Treating ADHD Blog

Spinning My Wheels ADD Blog: Treating Adult ADHD With Humor - and Meds

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The ADHD Office

I've started to organize my office. Anyone got a recommendation for the best brand of extra-large garbage bags?

At this point, I'm willing to bet that if I had the money to hire an all-star team of the best ergonomics expert, the best interior decorator, the best office designer and the best feng sui practitioner, and commissioned them to create the perfect home office for me, I'd be tearing it apart and moving things around within a month. There would be holes in the walls where I'd hung shelves, only to decide a week later that they could be a leeeeeetle bit lower, and bulletin boards, that, it occured to me, would function better in a landscape alignment than a portrait orientation.

I'd have monkeyed around with the respective heights of my chair and my desks. Spent hours, if not days, trying to decide about buying a white noise generator or an air purifier. Done extensive (and inconclusive, unsystematic, misunderstood and only faintly recalled) research on the proper light level. Which, of course, would have necessitated making: A CHART! Which, of course, would have necessitated spending hours at Gizmo's Tech Support Alert, one of the great time-wasting sites of all time (because you get lots of choices based upon parameters which make no sense at all to you), looking for the best freeware chart-building, data-sorting program available (because my chart will be so complex that I'd never be able to do it on… Excel or…Google Docs).

This would, necessarily, be followed by some time browsing the Staples catalog.

I'm so tired of this garbage. One of these days I'm going to start throwing everything out. Leave myself with a dozen #2 Staedtler Mars Lumographs and two legal pads.

Now, if I can figure out what kind of garbage bag to use…

The ADHD Motto

If at first you don't succeed . . . try something else that's more in line with your abilities and interests and is less costly and easier to get to.

You know my motto, the lodestone by which I steer, the proceleusmatic words that keep me moving forward through this life of hardship and sorrow, my very own nil desperandum. Don't you? Didn't you get the memo?

OK, you slackers, here it is: "If at first you don't succeed . . . try something else that's more in line with your abilities and interests and is less costly and easier to get to."

Early on, I was eulogizing Eternal Spring, a variation of nei kung developed for "mature" beginners in the field of tai chi. I still believe in it. I know it works. However, I can't seem to make myself do it for more than a couple of weeks at a time. The classes aren't exactly cheap (which is not to say that they're in any way exorbitant, please understand) and the location and hours don't fit particularly well with my schedule. And as much as I'd love to think of myself as an autodidact, I'm not.

So, I was goofing around, doing important stuff like organizing the hundreds of bookmarks ("favorites" to you poor, benighted IE users; when are you going to start using a good browser?) when I happened upon a link to the International Taoist Tai Chi Society. This non-profit, international organization teaches, among other things, a variant form of tai chi, developed by Master Moy Lin-shin.

Taoist tai chi—as opposed, I guess, to High Episcopal, or Hasidic, or Pentecostal tai chi—downplays, almost eliminates, the martial impulse in the art. Its focus is entirely upon improving physical health and spiritual well-being, although they do teach a sword and saber form(?). I went to one of their classes years ago, but I was more attracted to the Yang style as taught by Master Chu.

Anyway, I clicked over to the ITTCS website, and realized that the New York location is on the route I take home from work, and the rate for UNLIMITED monthly classes for seniors is only thirty bucks. And one more thing. I figured out, whiz kid that I am, that If I'm a Senior, I Probably shouldn't worry too much about learning enough Tai Chi to be a Lethal Freakin' Weapon. Let's face it: ten years from now, I want to defend myself against some mook, I should raise my ebony-headed walking stick, the bottom of which I'd drilled out and filled with two ounces of lead, and crack his dome.

Classes start right after Labor Day. I'll be reporting on my progress.

PS: Those of you awaiting similar progress reports on my reading of Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot--You three guys just hang in there. Soon. Honest.

ADHD Prioritizing Gone Haywire

I decided to follow my own advice and treat my own ADHD with a little creativity.

One day, during a lull at work the phrase, "Bespoke vituperation" pops into my mind. I'd been thinking about doing a frivolous business card for myself, as opposed to one that I'd give to a prospective client, and that phrase looked like it would fit in admirably.

I've had occasion to make up several business cards for my various failed businesses, and have the procedure down pretty well. This time I decided to avoid some of the traps that amateurs in typography and design (I'm not excluding myself from this group) step into. No fancy stuff, no watermarks, no borders, only two colors, for starters.

This was . . . about six months ago. I can't imagine how many times I picked the project up. Probably every time I had something else to do that I wanted to avoid.

So here you go, after a few dozen wasted hours, another example of prioritizing gone haywire:

The Eye of the Beholder

I bring you another source for treating ADHD-induced depression with beauty.

Hard on the heels of Stair Porn, I bring you another source for reassurance that beautiful doesn't have to be artsy. Eye of the beholder, m'boy, eye of the beholder.

I've came across these pictures by Branislav Kropilak for years. Naturally, I can't recall where I first saw them, but I urge you to take a look. He works in a medium known as a "Giclee print on aluminium" which means nothing to me, but which seems to provide a hard-edged, glowing result. I find the pics of parking garages especially attractive, and used one as my desktop photo for a year. The point is that you don't need to be Ansel Adams out shooting Yellowstone, or Atget memorializing the exotic gardens of France. It's the process that counts. You can take beautiful—that's actually a lousy word, one that puts up more obstacles—let's say you can put up visually stimulating photos of anything. The physical realities exist, apart from you. The value of the photographs is in your investigation/analysis/presentation of the subject.

Leave the bee-yoo-tee-full stuff to your Uncle Mike, who loves to shoot sunsets and hydrangeas and little puppies. Find something to look at, and think about it. Never mind anything else. Just think about it and shoot it. The subject doesn't need to be "aesthetic" or "photogenic." It just needs to be considered, carefully and honestly, and photographed, as well as you can. And it doesn't have to be a "Giclee print." Just a JPEG--one that you can look at a year from now and regain the state of mind you had when you shot it.

One more obstacle to progress savagely eradicated.

Battling ADHD With Creativity

One way to deal with ADHD and depression is to surround yourself with creativity.

Among the many nasty aspects of having ADHD—I mean, a specific aspect, not just the fact that it sucks—is that The Deficit provides an entry point for depression (so-named after the famously unsuccessful French general, Jacques de Pression, whose inability to win even the smallest battle made everyone in France so sad) and depression loves to put its dirty hobnailed boot on the neck of creativity.

One way to deal with this is to surround oneself with visual reminders that creativity can survive, given half a chance. There's a nifty blog called Stair Porn that features photos of …yes! you guessed it! Stairs.

Now, stairs might not seem very sexy to you. But head over there and look at the pretty photos. And take heart: you can do this, or something like it. Design your own stairs. Or start your own blog.

But do something, for Pete's sake.

Goal Setting for ADHD Adults

The first challenge of reaching a goal is learning to set realistic objectives.

Finding that someone has written just what you've been trying to write, only much better, can be aggravating. Nonetheless, good guy that I am, I will refer you to a posting by "Dustin" on the Writer's Technology Companion. Dustin has written a perceptive piece about setting goals. The short story is that he believes in setting goals that are relevant, achievable and concrete.

I've posted about this several times in different guises, only not so specifically. This is about writing, but there's no reason it couldn't be adapted to one's efforts at learning Sanskrit, or Ruby on Rails or how to get out of a greenside bunker. Set goals that you can achieve, that mean something to you, and that you can quantify. Not "Learn more Sanskrit today." And for heaven's sake not "Learn 500 new Sanskrit verbs and their conjugations today before lunch." Maybe "Review the Second Conjugation in Sanskrit today."

Look over your "Notes to Self" and stickies and calendars and to-do lists. If you find anything saying "Learn to sail a 45' ketch this weekend," smack yourself. Take a good course in coastal navigation first. (It's fun, and will trump almost anyone else line of baloney at a cocktail party, since it's full of words that we've all heard and can't define.)

ADHD Reading Tips

Skimming ain't reading. Let me repeat that: skimming ain't reading.

Skimming ain't reading. Let me repeat that: skimming ain't reading.

I read for a living. Proofreading and copyediting bring home the bacon. OK, I don't eat much bacon any more, if only to avoid having to shell out for the Lipitor, but you get the idea. Everything I do should be perfect, but there's some stuff that's more critical than other stuff. If I miss a comma in a novel, it's not great, but the world will keep on spinning (remind me to see if there's a connection between the moon's phases and my use of threadbare metaphors). When I'm reading legal or financial documents, a missing period can be a disaster. So I've taught myself to read carefully, word by word, character by character if necessary. There's a difference between reading for comprehension and reading for typos. It's just hard to turn the different modes on and off.

This doesn't apply when I'm not getting paid for reading. Twice already today, I've allowed my eyes to wander over a page, only to realize that I had almost no idea what I'd read. The first document was from my health insurance company, so I had an excuse; even after I'd read it carefully, underlining as I went, I was lost. Am I being overly cynical, or is it intentional? You know how card sharks and magicians "force" a card on you, getting you to pick the card they want you to pick out of the deck? I wouldn't be surprised to find that some arm-gartered, eye-shaded parasite at a long-defunct insurance company figured out that if he made the text unreadable, you'd sign your name on the first available dotted line, just so you could stop reading.

The second item, however, was an interesting article about how to sell on eBay. After two pages, I realized that what my brain had snagged from these pages consisted of the words "eBay," "profits," "shipping," "Sevres" and "garage sale." The connections among these terms were nil. I went back and re-read the piece, carefully, and found out exactly what I wanted to learn.

Check yourself when you're reading. Do a little self-testing. If you can't tell yourself, in one simple sentence, what the author wished to convey on that page, you ain't reading. You're skimming.

Knock it off.

The Fate of ADHD Projects

We ADD adults love projects because they're big, they make us feel like we're establishing a real beachhead in the war against confusion; but then everything goes off the rails.

If there's one thing we of the Deficit (ADD) love, it's projects.

(So ask, already, would you?)

Glad you asked. We love projects because they're big, they make us feel like we're establishing a real beachhead in the war against confusion, and because starting a New Project doesn't require any actual work. Or thought. And if we're lucky, it will give us a reason, however specious, for buying a new toy.

Just after reaching the point at which we've defined the nature of The New Project is the site where we tend to go off the rails. Turning the project into an actual step forward, creating a useful structure for improving our lives, that's not so much fun. It's work. It requires regular, concentrated effort. It poses the risk of failure. We'll hate the sight of the new notebook, underwater-writing pen, ergonomic paperclips, daylight-spectrum desk lamp or — dare I say it — USB flash drive that we just had to have to make the project work.

You need an overview, to be sure. But let's remember what we talked about last month: base your actions on recognizing, defining, starting and completing small, discrete tasks. At the end of a month, the little tasks, completed, will add up to a lot more than a grandiose Leviathan of a project.

And you won't have to explain to your wife what happened to that lovely desk lamp she bought you last year.

My ADHD Shopping Process

Once again I'm plagued by that old bugaboo, indecision, and his partner in crime, bad time management.

The urge to buy a USB flash drive has been overwhelming. They're just so incredibly cool, and now they're available with 32 gigs of memory. Of course, the entire hard drive of my desktop contains less than a gig of content, so unless I decide I absolutely must carry around the complete audio text of Swann's Way and the collected works of J.S. Bach (they run neck-and-neck in the "Never-Going-to-be-Listened-to, Not even Ten Minutes' Worth" Derby), a one- or two-gig model would suffice.

So what's the problem? For once, it's not even a financial issue; the little gadget I want (in case you're interested, it's the SanDisk 2GB Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive ) only costs about $25.

It's that old bugaboo, indecision. And his partner in crime, bad time management.

A logical approach to making this purchase would involve doing some research on flash drives, learning what, for example, "U3 technology" means and would I ever need it, trying to find objective reviews and gaining some sense of what features—other than the neat-o titanium case, crush-proof up to a ton—and determining the store with the best price.

Once I got past the neat-o, crush-proof case with the laser-etched graphics and the distinctive blue LED, I was dead in the water. Every day for a week I'd look at the websites of the two stores with the best prices. Check out the SanDisk website.

Think about whether I really wanted to add another gizmo to my key chain, which led to a three-day internal dialogue about the advisability of getting one of those carabiners that hooks onto my belt loop, enabling me to carry my keys, my house keys, my cigar cutter, a pocket knife, my lucky ring and a micro-mini-Maglite along with my Cruzer. Decided that it was either too nerdy or too right-wing, either one a deal-breaker.

In the end, I was forced to ask myself the single most-relevant question: what the hell did I need it for? I only use two computers, and I store anything I'm working on up at Google Docs (which I'm much less likely to lose than the little flash drive). So what actually happened was that (a) I didn't define the issue properly in the first place, (b) I didn't do the research that would have enabled me to make an intelligent choice if question "a" showed a need for it and (c) wasted a lot of time instead of doing something useful, like, f'rinstance, writing more of these articles.

Music, Lyrics and ADHD

My ADHD memory prohibits me from remembering song lyrics--if you'd ever heard me "sing" you'd probably be grateful.

Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I was driving home from the beach last night, listening to a radio station that played lots of oldies. It's only fair to say that I've never been any good at linking up musicians and the titles of their works and the works themselves. Stones, Beatles, CCR, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, Who, Zep, Hendrix…I can recognize their music pretty easily, although I probably don't know the titles of the works.

Then there's everyone else. No matter how much I try, I can never distinguish between Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. Stop sneering. I know one has a flautist, but can never remember which one. Maybe because I'm not a fan of either. And there's a flotilla of groups out there in the "Unlabeled" category, outfits like Journey, Boston, Foreigner, Styx and REO Speedwagon. I'm not even considering the metalhead groups, because even if I could distinguish among Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Megadeath, Slayer…why would I want to?

So I was driving home and I heard and recognized this song. No idea of the group or the title. So I "memorized" the chorus, figuring that I could Google it at home. Unfortunately, the next song (which turned out to be by ELO) distracted me, and the one after that muddied the waters (nice music metaphor, no?) beyond redemption.

I'll never learn this stuff. I don't know why my head refuses to cooperate. Looks as though I'll have to keep humming along, since I don't know the lyrics. Or the title. Or the artists.

Then again, if you'd ever heard me "sing" you'd probably be grateful. The humming can be ignored. The squawking is a real tooth-grinder.