Treating ADHD Blog

Archives: November 2008

Avoiding ADHD Depression - I Hope

During the holidays especially, unrealistic expectations and ridiculous goals can backfire on ADHDers and send us spiraling into depression. So don't let yourselves up to fail, folks!

Harvey Penick was a great golf coach, probably on a par (get it?) with coaching legends like John Wooden and Dean Smith. He wrote a small book which had a red cover, entitled The Red Book, widely considered the best "how-to" book ever written about how to play this impossibly frustrating game.

The tie-in here is my belief that we need to set realistic goals, so that we don't wind up beating ourselves about the head and body for not achieving something that we should never have aimed for in the first place. This, my dears, is known as Setting Yourself Up To Fail, and it's a bitch.

So ol' Harve tells a great story about a successful pro named Tommy Armour. Seems that some duffer met Armour at a pro-am, or in a gin mill or something, and kept pestering him about how he could learn to put backspin on his approach shots. Finally, Armour had listened to enough nonsense. He asked Duffer if most of his approach shots wound up past the pin or fell short.

Duffer thought for a moment, and allowed that almost always he was short.

Armour asked the key question: "If you're always short, why the hell are you worrying about putting backspin on the ball to draw it back to the pin?"

Let's start thinking things through a little better, amigos. Unrealistic goals and poorly conceived strategies can only lead us to failure and, thence, to depression.

ADHD vs. Self-Esteem

The ADHD question for the day: Is there a causal relationship between ADHD and poor self-esteem?

So, folks, it's quiz time again. Unfortunately, I don't have one of those widgets that you see on the sports blogs, which enable you to vote on critical issues ("Who was the greater athlete: Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky, The Great Lebowski, Tonya Harding, Willie Mosconi or Secretariat?") and see what your fellow Nobel laureates think, so you'll have to post comments. Or else.

The question for the day: Is there a causal relationship between ADHD and poor self-esteem?

Or, to put it on a more personal level, "Have you ever known—or been—a person afflicted with ADHD who has a good self-image?

My vote is, "No, are you kidding?"

The subterranean, amorphous, malignant information that we—We—carry around with us, the knowledge that we're almost certainly "different" from "them," certainly doesn't do much for our self-confidence. I think we can stipulate that some kind of link exists between the two conditions. What we need to figure out is whether the ADHD is the proximate cause of the feeble self-image, or if the lack of self-esteem contributes to the inability to function.

Intuitively, I'd have to believe that the ADHD is more of a hard-wired situation. Whatever environmental factors may enter into its etiology, my personal experience is that the problem is largely congenital. You got dealt a bad hand, Jack, and you just have to deal with it.

The lack of self-esteem seems, equally intuitively, to be something more readily attributable to external factors. It would be a remarkable child who, lacking parental support and affection, grows to be a self-confident, focused adult.

Somewhere, hand and hand with these two issues, of course, runs our old friend Depression. But for the purposes of accurate polling, we'll leave him on the bench for this discussion.

So, gentle readers, care to offer any thoughts on this chicken/egg quandry?

And, speaking of poultry, Happy Thanksgiving to all.

The ADHD Swing Thing

If you want to accomplish something, the more impediments you can remove, by constant intelligently planned practice, the quicker you'll achieve proficiency.

I mentioned the other day that my tai chi teacher keeps exhorting us to be patient, and not to think about what we're doing in class so much as to free the mind to let the body learn. I'd like to offer some support for this position.

1. Anyone who can touch-type should be able to relate to this. Once you've achieved a reasonable degree of mastery of the QWERTY keyboard, you'll notice that you can type away, concentrating on what you want to say rather than how to type it. The instant your brain switches back to doing "Umm, lemme see here, the ampersand is shift-7" or "Hit the hyphen with the ring finger of the right hand, not the pinky" you're almost certainly going to have to pause and rearrange those synapses.

2. Same deal for musical instruments. If your head is wondering where C sharp is, or how to finger it, you know damn well that the other part of the brain, the one that wants to improvise on the melody of "Take the 'A' Train," may as well take a short snooze.

3. A classic: watch someone who's learning to play golf. The golf swing is a very complicated sequence of movements involving pretty much every muscle of the body from neck to feet. If someone tells a beginner, "If you do nothing else, keep that right elbow tucked in," and if the duffer takes that advice, it's dollars to doughnuts that he's going to screw up his swing for a while.

You need to work on one thing at a time, but when you get around to taking a full swing, you shouldn't be thinking about much more, in my humble, 24-handicap opinion, than keeping your eye on the ball.

4. An area in which I've had some success: languages. The tipping point, to use a currently voguish phrase, in speaking/reading/writing a foreign language occurs when you stop translating in your head, and think/read/speak directly in the secondary language. Your brain can speak French but if it's going to think in English and translate, not only will your French be halting, it will probably be bad French.

The connection here with ADHD is, in case I've been unclear, that if you want to accomplish something, the more impediments you can remove by constant, intelligently planned practice, the quicker you'll achieve proficiency.

In other words, are you interested in developing a picture-perfect golf swing, or playing golf well? Not at all the same thing, and the first doesn't necessarily lead to the second.

Mixing my examples, allow me to quote the epitome of stylishness, Duke Ellington: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." In golf or jazz or anything else. Don't get bogged down in the small stuff. Keep your eyes on, and devote your practice to, the final result.

Hay-foot, Straw-foot

I don't have dyslexia, nor do I have left-right confusion, but you'd never know it if you watched me practice Tai Chi.

I hadn't heard or thought of the expression, "Hay-foot, Straw-foot" for years, but it floated to the surface as I was trying to learn the 108 moves that constitute the Taoist Tai Chi. From what I've read, contemporary tai chi is more frequently taught using the 24-move or 48-move forms developed in China in the several decades ago.

I've been told, although I can't cite a source, that ADHD is in some ways related to other learning disabilities, the best-known probably being dyslexia. I don't have dyslexia, nor do I have left-right confusion, but you'd never know it if you watched me doing White Stork Spreads Wings or Push Needle to Sea Bottom or Strum the Pi-Pa. Left-foot forward, right foot raised? Shift weight from left foot to right foot (at least this is an absolute; in Eternal Spring classes, Master Chu, a retired physics professor, would say "OK, 30–70, weight on left foot, now move right arm, weight 65–35 on right foot, now raise left foot" at which point I'd usually fall, gracelessly, to the floor).

So, disregarding any possible as-yet-undiagnosed LD that I may have, I can tell you that this is tricky. My teachers at Taoist Tai Chi are as patient as the monks who developed the original system, and keep telling us not to think so much, but rather to let the body learn the moves. The body, not the mind. I've been at it for a couple of weeks now, and slowly it's sinking in. As for the young sylph who started at the same time I did, and now glides through the form effortlessly and confidently, all I can tell you is that she let it slip that she'd been a dancer for most of her life. Her body is not only strong and flexible, but used to taking orders from her brain. I may have to put some WD-40 on the soles of her sneakers.

This is a rambly post, even for me, so let me get to the point before you're all snoring. Here you go, in two parts. Everyone has problems learning stuff; some just have more than others. And, although you must imagine that the rest of the class is watching you and snickering, you insufferable narcissist you, they're probably much more concerned with not falling on their own faces. So relax, empty your mind, let the eyes teach the body. You can do it, you know. It just takes time.

What? Oh, right. During the Civil War, many of the recruits on both sides were farmboys. Although they might have been brave men and keen shots, education wasn't a strong point, to the extent that they didn't have a good grasp of left and right, and therefore couldn't march in an orderly manner. So in desperation, their sergeants tied little wisps of hay to their left boots and straw to their right boots, and off they went, left/right/left/right.

Quinoa and the ADHD Diet

If you are looking to eliminate prepared foods from you ADHD kid's diet, I suggest trying quinoa. It's a healthier alternative to dinner in a box.

I've noticed a lot of discussions on these pages about the influence of diet on ADHD, particularly with regard to kids, and I thought that since I spent most of my adult life cooking for a living, I'd throw in some suggestions as they occured to me.

One of the big problems appears to be that having a child with ADHD makes so many demands on a mother's time and energy that doing a lot of cooking isn't part of the game plan. If you incorporate a desire to eliminate many prepared foods, which may contain chemicals that adversely affect an ADHD sufferer, the time demands grow, perhaps exponentially. That box of mac 'n' cheese, the stuff that you can make in five minutes and that has that nice yellow-orange, never-seen-in-nature glow, looks mighty tempting. After all, you reason, as the kids methodically dismantle their room, they've gotta eat something, and the whole world eats mac 'n'cheese.

Here's a suggestion that probably won't work, but I'm going to put it out there anyway: make quinoa.

Quinoa is a "super cereal" originally grown in the Andes. It's advertised as a perfect food, largely due to the composition of its amino acid structure. And guess what. It is. Unimpeachable sources like the Departments of Horticulture at Purdue and New Mexico State can explain this in as much detail as you'd care to know.

Back to our hypothetical situation. Quinoa is eeeeeasy to cook. Takes about 15 minutes, start to finish. It keeps, in my refrigerator, for a week, and you can reheat it in seconds in a microwave. If you're worried about additives, there's a lot of certified organic quinoa available.

The problem is getting the kids to like it, convincing them that it's not "yucky." If it's not contrary to your particular dietary concerns, you can mix in some cheese (I like pecorino, but that's probably a bit much for most American kids, so try parmesan), add some tomato sauce or salsa, or hit it with some sesame oil or hoisin. Any leftovers that have met with your kids' approval can also be chopped up and mixed with the quinoa before you reheat it.

I suppose you could even put a big slab of Velveeta on it, but that might be defeating the purpose.

Tools for the ADHD Google User

I can easily get so lost in Google Land, that I forget the six or seven things I just had to get done.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what's screwing up my thought processes. Is it the ADHD or is it just that at heart I'm still about nine years old? Honestly. Ever watch a baseball game and realize that you're easily old enough to have been Derek Jeter's mother or father? But before that realization you're seeing him as a "grown man" as opposed to your image of yourself as being, maybe, prepubescent? That's me all over.

And as a result, I'm majorly susceptible to gadgets of any kind. It's not just that I think they may have a beneficial impact on my daily life, like deodorant or Concerta or Cheerios. It's the glitter that gets me. Like a baby in a cradle, lying happily on his back watching some dumb mobile twirling around over his face (and let me say now that anyone who exposes his baby to large visual doses of Shrek is out of his mind. Images, images, images, folks.)

Anyway, one of the big purveyors of this mind-candy is, of course, the hand-rubbing, snickering, engineers out in Mountain View, CA, home of Google. I can easily get so lost in thinking about how to configure my iGoogle home page, which widgets and gadgets and doodads and trinkets to embed that I forget the six or seven things I just had to get done.

The latest gizmos come from—allow me to quote—"the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams." One looks inutile for my purposes, one I still don't entirely understand, and one looks like the answer to a prayer. Given all of the problematic aspects of my headworkings mentioned above, I'm always looking to consolidate. iGoogle helps. But let me pose this question: which page, apart from that one that you won't let anyone else see you looking at—c'mon, you know—do you go to the most often? Right. Your email.

If you don't use gmail, you can stop here. Actually, you can stop here and sit down and figure out why you're not. Do you really like the ad-riddled interface of Hotmail? Sheeeesh.

Hang on, I'm almost done (and gimme a break. I haven't done any postings here in ages, and the editorial function is the last one to kick back in [see, Moran and Sebastian, Editorial Implementation in Pathological Bloggers, Edin. Univ. J. of Cognitive Studies, 3.14]).

This latest thing allows you to insert, in your left sidebar, an agenda. A listing of all the events in your Google Calendar. Staring you right in your grill. You can have it display only those calendars (you don't know about this either?) that you wish, as well as a mini-calendar. There it is, folks. Enable this device and your "to-do" list will wash over your retina several, or several dozen, times a day.

Now if they'll come up with a tiny little widget that will give real-time Yankee scores, we'll be all set.

Talking to Myself

I talk to myself all the time, but I rarely get a helpful response.

If my old man saw me talking to myself and asked who I was talking to, and I said, "No one, just myself," he'd invariably ask, "Getting any good answers?" The answer to his question was, equally invariably, "No." But I'm still talking to myself, and now I'm not so sure that my answer was correct.

The fact is that I talk to myself all the time. Constantly. No sound issues from my mouth, and it's possible that my lips aren't even moving (although my hands frequently are, making little gestures expressive of curiosity, emphasis, sometimes congeniality…probably my ego, id and superego dealing pinochle).

To the extent I'm aware of it, some of my conversations with myself are either rehearsals, in which I'm getting ready to say something to someone, which is usually ridiculous since I'll never remember the script, or variations on the "What I should have said to that jerk is…" theme. I'd like to think that it's qualitatively different from what the poor schizoid who stands in front of the supermarket, even in the rain and snow, is doing, with his lips flapping over his toothless gums and his soggy cigarette flipping up and down.

I'd really like to believe that.

Most frequently, I'm talking to myself to keep from forgetting something that I'd read, or that someone had told me, something to which I'd only been able to stay tuned for a few minutes, or else I'm telling myself what I have to do next, so that I don't forget something important, like moving the car across the street to avoid getting any more parking tickets.

Kind of sad, no? Sad, discouraging and, in the long run, debilitating.

You Say You Want a Resolution?

I'm going to post progress on my New Year's resolutions on my ADHD blog so you can help me keep track of them.

I'm getting clever in my old age.

You know the usual bell curve for resolutions? Start at zero on the y-axis, somewhere in the second week of December. Start making, and trashing, lists of New Year's resolutions. Around Christmas, you've got the perfect list, carved in granite, or, at the least, in Corian, a manageable, realistic list of things you're absolutely positoootly going to do in the upcoming year, things that will change your life. The curve peaks on New Year's Eve Day, when you can't wait to start doing all these neat things that will turn you into the Terminator of Shilly-shally.

There's a hiccup on New Year's Day, when, between the hangover, the Bloody Marys at brunch and the eleven corporately-sponsored bowl games, you totally forget the list, and another one the next day when you get to work and discover the large gaps in your "Done" list following the mandatory stupidity at the end of December.

From then on, it's all down hill, a ride greased by heavy application of the usual ointments: don't have the time, don't have the right equipment, don't have the cool outfits, my wife makes fun of me, my back hurts, the new season of CSI: Bala Cynwyd is airing, the flu, yadda, yadda, yadda (thanks, cousin).

So here's the new drill. I've already made and acted on my resolutions for the coming year. YES!

Want to lend a hand? I'm going to post them, HERE. On THIS BLOG. So you can help me keep track of them. Feel free to jeer or throw laurel wreaths, as the Holiday Spirit moves you.

Here's a list, still subject to some revision:
1. Walk to and from work every day (total of four miles, burning about 500 calories) [In progress]
2. Join and go to Taoist Tai Chi [In progress. Plan is to attend classes Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday]
3. Resume Eternal Spring practice, since it turns out that, no surprise, Master Chu is right. Most older folks don't have the leg strength or balance to do tai chi chuan properly, and nei kung develops these two qualities effectively.
4. Latin
5. French
6. Learn to play the drums. A real long-shot.
7. Write more, and sell more of my writing. The most important.

This should be enough. Keep watching for new developments.