Adhd 2.0 Quotes

A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It’s the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one’s brakes is the name of the game.

it helps to think of 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 inventive, out-of-the-blue problem solving; interpersonal cluelessness combined with uncanny intuition and empathy; the list goes on.

Another, less polite way of saying it: People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors. We hate hypocrisy maybe more than any other human failing, and we can spot it a mile away.

We often explain ADHD to children using a very simple analogy that certainly resonates with adults, too: A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It’s the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one’s brakes is the name of the game.

No brain is the same. No brain is the best. Each brain finds its own special way. —From a poem written by Edward Hallowell to his five-year-old daughter

We’ve got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.

helps to think of 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 inventive, out-of-the-blue problem solving; interpersonal cluelessness combined with uncanny intuition and empathy; the list goes on.

People with ADHD—at any age—often possess intellectual effervescence. Unfortunately, this natural sparkle can be snuffed out by years of criticism, reprimands, redirection, lack of appreciation, and repeated disappointments, frustrations, and outright failures.

Most people with ADHD or VAST have low scores in Fact Finder (which does not mean bad; there are no bad scores on a Kolbe test) because their natural talent lies in their ability to cut to the chase and summarize information instead of digging into details.

ADHD” is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages it.

Insufficient sleep is associated with increased risk of obesity, depression, high blood pressure, depressed immune function (which can lead to cancer), and anxiety disorders.

If we weren’t so dreamy and curious we could stay on track and never get distracted.

It’s a funny thing about those of us who have ADHD. We want what others avoid. We like problems. We need the difficult. That’s because easy is boring. We need the stimulation of intense challenge. But as we’ve said, a challenge undertaken just for the sake of a challenge can be counterproductive at best, self-defeating at worst.

It’s worth noting that changing behavior through ABA is often more than enough. But sometimes you want to go deeper, to help a child—or anyone else—understand cognitively and emotionally where they are and who they are in social situations, recognize their options, and decide for themselves what they want to do. Once they learn how to decide for themselves what they want to do, rather than put on reflexive behaviors they’ve been conditioned to show, real growth ensues. ABA is surface; social learning is deep. ABA is more or less robotic; social learning helps you understand social situations and respond according to your own desires and values. ABA is more mechanical; social learning is more supple and human. By coaching children in how to understand social situations and how to develop different ways of handling them, you can teach them not only how to do it but also enjoy doing so that the interaction is not just a matter of going through the motions.

A simple way to start is to sit down with your child, or, if you’re an adult, sit down with your spouse or some other adult (it’s best to do this with another person, as the interaction makes for more creative, spontaneous, playful, and thorough answers), and respond to the following questions. Have the person asking the questions write down your answers, because this is an important document to save: What three or four things are you best at doing? What three or four things do you like doing the most? What three or four activities or achievements have brought you the most praise in your life? What are your three or four most cherished goals? What three or four things would you most like to get better at? What do others praise you for but you take for granted? What, if anything, is easy for you but hard for others? What do you spend a lot of time doing that you are really bad at? What could your teacher or supervisor do so that your time could be spent more productively? If you weren’t afraid of getting in trouble, what would you tell your teacher or supervisor that he or she doesn’t understand about you?

They think along unusual lines and feel a persistent drive to build, develop, or create something, anything, from a business to a boat to a book to a balustrade. It’s like an omnipresent itch to make something. If that itch goes unscratched, we tend to feel listless or depressed, unmotivated and at sea. If we pour our energies into something that is beneath our creative abilities, we tend to lose interest. Remember, boredom = kryptonite. If we find ourselves in a job that doesn’t draw on that creative strength but instead demands a skill set we just don’t have, we will falter—and we’ll feel the crush of that defeat harder than others do.

Compared to other killers from a public health standpoint, ADHD is bad. Smoking, for example, reduces life expectancy by 2.4 years, and if you smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day you’re down about 6.5 years. For diabetes and obesity it’s a couple of years. For elevated blood cholesterol, it’s 9 months. ADHD is worse than the top 5 killers in the U.S. combined. Having ADHD costs a person nearly thirteen years of life, on average. Barkley adds, And that’s on top of all the findings of a greater risk for accidental injury and suicide….About two-thirds of people with ADHD have a life expectancy reduced by up to 21 years.

Still others—even less charitably—think ADHD is a fancy term for laziness and that people who “have it” need some good old-fashioned discipline! In fact, “laziness” is a word about as far from accurate as it could be. The mind of someone with ADHD is in fact constantly at work. Our productivity may not always show it, but this is not because of a lack of intent or energy!

Being a 3, he is technically “resistant” in Follow Thru, which is typical of people with ADHD or VAST. In other words, they take shortcuts and let solutions evolve as they work on problems instead of planning an approach in advance. Dr.

This relates to how he approaches risk and uncertainty. With a 9 in Quick Start, he is “insistent” in this way, and that makes him like most people with ADHD or VAST. They jump right in without testing the waters first. Remember: fire, ready, aim.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

Try to fall for a stable person who is also stimulating. They really do exist.

Creativity,” as we use the term in connection with ADHD, designates an innate ability, desire, and irrepressible urge to plunge one’s imagination regularly and deeply into life—into a project, an idea, a piece of music, a sandcastle.

rejection-sensitive dysphoria,” or RSD, which describes a tendency on the part of people who have ADHD to overreact precipitously and disastrously to even the slightest perceived put-down, dis, or vaguely negative remark. They can spiral down to the depths in the blink of an eye and become inconsolable.

People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors.

there is another now proven way to motivate yourself to stick with your exercise: Imagine or recall how good it feels after you’re finished.

Here’s a pro tip: Take a run around the block, go up and down the stairs in your house, just do something to get yourself moving. You’ll definitely notice the difference in your ability to focus and settle into the needed zone. Better yet, make it a regular habit and consider it a necessary dose of medicine to keep you functioning as your best self.

For getting and staying on track, exercise is one of the most powerful non-medical tools we have and an important first line of defense.

one of the most fascinating and beneficial effects of exercise is that it prepares the brain to expand, learn, and change better than any other human activity.

one of the most fascinating and beneficial effects of exercise is that it prepares the brain to expand, learn, and change better than any other human activity. It improves mood and motivation, reduces anxiety, regulates emotions, and maintains focus.

From depression to anxiety as well as for ADHD and VAST symptoms, exercise is just what the doctor should order.

But taken to the extreme, this is counterproductive. Rejecting help can sabotage a person’s education, career, health, and relationships. As we’ve stated earlier, it’s not uncommon for a young person or adult to say, “I’d rather fail doing it my way than succeed with help.

How much sleep is enough? The amount of sleep it takes for you to wake up without an alarm clock. That’s your physiological requirement for sleep. Try to get that much and your brain will repay you; your body will as well.

Long-term studies found that those with ADHD who are successfully treated with stimulants become addicted to substances far less than the general population, and certainly less than the population who have ADHD and do not take stimulant medication.

Spoiler alert! Taking a stimulant or stimulant-like drug early in life helps prevent, not promote, addiction later on.

Am I doing everything I can in terms of non-medical treatments (e.g., connecting, building structure into my day, getting exercise and quality sleep, eating well, meditating, and other beneficial habits)?

Was Steven at risk of developing a self-image as a failure? Had he already done so?

Okay, buddy, you say to yourself, do it again. How those words taunt through eternity. Do it again. To do it again, consistently, that’s the dream we all share but few of us achieve.

Failing to master the adaptive pursuit of dopamine leads to addictions of all kinds, but mastering it leads to success and joy.

Another stimulant-like drug, modafinil (brand name Provigil), works by stimulating both the histamine network and dopamine, which makes us awake and attentive. Originally designed for narcolepsy, and popular with shift workers like night nurses and pilots, it also has benefits for some with ADHD. The

digging a hole and filling it up is a challenge—but to find the right challenge. We call that the right difficult. One

One proactive way to pinpoint your right difficult is to develop a practical inventory of your strengths—what you are good at.

you ought to spend the majority of your working hours at the intersection of three circles: the circle of all the things you really like to do, the circle of all the things you’re really good at doing, and the circle of things that someone will pay you to do.

But as we’ve said, a challenge undertaken just for the sake of a challenge can be counterproductive at best, self-defeating at worst.

Don’t feed the Demon. Shut off its oxygen by denying it your attention. Do something else that engages your mind. Stay in action!

strength-based model. Lily explained to Samuel that he had a race car for a brain, but with bicycle brakes. I told her it was key for him to understand that his race car brain was a great asset of which he should feel proud. He just needed to work on his brakes, so that then he could win races and become a champion. Human connection

Shame is the most disabling learning disability.

You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry

You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry at him.

In fact, we do not suffer from a deficit of attention. Just the opposite. We’ve got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.

In a neurotypical brain, when the TPN is turned on and you’re on task, the DMN is turned off. But in the ADHD brain, the fMRI shows that when the TPN is turned on, the DMN is turned on as well, trying to muscle its way in and pull you into its grasp, thereby distracting you. In ADHD, therefore, the DMN competes with the TPN, which in most people it does not do.

In other words, just as the cerebellum had long been known to act as a kind of gyroscope or balancer of gait and movement, he explained, “so does it regulate the speed, capacity, consistency, and appropriateness of cognition and emotional processes.

As mentioned earlier, one way to think about the central challenge in ADHD is gaining better braking control over the metaphorical Ferrari brain, both in terms of the speed at which it operates and the level of emotion it can emit.

Still unproven,

The great mathematician Alan Turing summed us up when he said, “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” That sums us up perfectly.

This is truly a malfunction of the imagination, and it explains the confluence of the creative and depressive we so often see within the same person, even within the same hour.

It turned out that many women dropped out of Dr. Felitti’s weight loss program because losing weight made them feel unbearably anxious and vulnerable. Their girth helped them to feel safe, beyond a man’s desire to assault them. So, even though they knew that their obesity put them at risk for disease, they did not want to give up the protection they felt it afforded them.

If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.

Because it’s just not in the makeup of people with ADHD or VAST to give up. Sticking to something is a terrific quality if the something is productive and makes you happy or your life better. But sticking to something just for the sake of sticking to it is a Sisyphean undertaking—pushing that old boulder up the hill day after day only to have it roll back down the next.

Many people with ADHD or VAST are at the other end of this scale. They need to move and create movement as they work. They need to create physical, hand-built solutions to problems.

Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you once started with enthusiasm, make careless mistakes, or, worse, fall into a state of misery and despair, for no good reason whatsoever. All

In other words: Spend more time in the TPN focusing on a single task. We know what you might be thinking: The whole point is that I can’t focus on a single task! But you can—you are already a master of distraction, so now distract yourself. Productivity isn’t the point here. Moving the toggle switch is.

Creativity is impulsivity gone right.

Forgiveness does not mean that you condone the deed, just that you renounce the hold that anger has over you.

Kindness makes kids grow, and adults as well.

All children do better when they know who is in charge. Knowing that they are not gives them a sense of security and order. The same goes for adults, to a certain extent—having a clear chain of command at work, for instance, is both orienting and especially helpful to the employee with ADHD.

The single most important factor in predicting health, longevity, occupational success, income, leadership ability, and general happiness comes down to one four-letter word. “It’s love,” Vaillant famously stated. “Full stop.

loneliness—the number one medical problem

But such is the ignorance that still surrounds ADHD that people continue to cite lack of effort as the cause of the disorganization and poor attention. The biological fact is that, in the absence of stimulation, they can’t. Not won’t. Can’t.

daily structure, nutrition, sleep, populate your world with positivity, and accept and find the right help.

We also know that ADHD can crop up for the first time in adulthood. This often happens when the demands of life exceed the person’s ability to deal with them. Classic examples are when a woman has her first baby or when a student starts medical school.

Creating comfortable, positively connected environments is the most important step in helping people of all ages get the most out of life in general; the lack of connection particularly hurts people who have ADHD.

We shoot ourselves in the foot, only, on the spot, to devise a painless method to remove the bullet. The great mathematician Alan Turing summed us up when he said, “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” That sums us up perfectly.

ADHD” is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages

Focus on anything external to yourself. Activating the TPN will shut down the DMN.

Those of us with ADHD are usually pretty sensitive, so we begin to put up defenses, and before you know it we’re loners, being teased, put off, or, if we’re adults, not climbing the ladder, and people are wondering why, and not in a helpful way.

we take a strength-based approach to treating people in our practices. As we like to say, we do not treat disabilities, we help people unwrap their gifts. More exuberantly: We help identify superpowers!

people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world.

The connectome that lights up when you’re engaged in a task is called the task-positive network, or TPN. Aptly named, the TPN gets you down to work. You’re deliberately doing something and you are intent on it, unaware of much beyond the bounds of what you’re doing. In this state, you don’t consciously know whether you’re happy or not, which is just as good as being happy, if not better, because you’re not wasting any energy in self-assessment. You may become frustrated with what you’re doing and have moments of anger or dismay, but if you stay in the task, in the TPN, those moments will pass, and the TPN, buoyant connectome that it is, will carry you along. When you’re thinking with the TPN, you’re in the Angel mindset. But you can also get trapped in the TPN, doing a task from which you cannot disengage. This is the hyperfocused state that people with ADHD can fall into. Far from being helpful, it can keep you stuck in one task, unable to shut down the screen, turn off the TV, or move from one paragraph to the next. This is the often unrecognized downside of focus.

We also know that ADHD can crop up for the first time in adulthood. This often happens when the demands of life exceed the person’s ability to deal with them. Classic examples are when a woman has her first baby or when a student starts medical school. In both instances the organizational demands of daily life skyrocket and the person shows the symptoms of ADHD that he or she had been able to compensate for in the past. It is then that ADHD can and should be diagnosed. Indeed, adult-onset ADHD is a recognized condition in the big book of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5).

Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you once started with enthusiasm, make careless mistakes, or, worse, fall into a state of misery and despair, for no good reason whatsoever.

perfectly describe how many children with ADHD feel in classrooms and adults with ADHD feel in the adult world. Misunderstood, alienated, left out, on the outside looking in.

Having ADHD costs a person nearly thirteen years of life, on average.

People with ADHD are lovers in the sense that they tend to have unbridled optimism.

Defying the laws of physics, we change the nature of time in our minds.

The paper is due in five days” becomes “It’s not due now,” and the five days might as well be five months.

Uncannily accurate intuition, coupled with a tendency to overlook the obvious and ignore major data.

The mind of someone with ADHD is in fact constantly at work. Our productivity may not always show it, but this is not because of a lack of intent or energy!

You’d find ideas firing around like kernels in a popcorn machine:

Ideas coming in spontaneous, erratic bursts.

Some people call this being a nonconformist, but that term misses the point. We don’t choose not to conform. We don’t even notice what the standard we’re not conforming to is!

people with ADHD feel an abiding need—an omnipresent itch—to create something.

Even awake we’re dreaming, always creating, always searching for some mud pie to turn into pumpkin apple chiffon.

we are often unable to stop the idea generation at night;

It is the same with tasks placed into the daily planner—it is useful to know when they begin and when they will conclude to modify expectations and encourage follow-through.

This coping approach is another step in "breaking down chores" to make them more manageable. Rather than increasing your desire for the activity, try "lowering the bar" and setting a more fair expectation.

The overarching mistake too many people make about ADHD is to think of this mountain of a condition as a molehill of a problem for a rare few. Big mistake.

ADHD is the most treatable disorder in psychiatry, bar none. We have more medications with… larger effect sizes, greater response rates, and more delivery systems that change people’s lives more than any other disorder. They’re some of the safest medications in psychiatry.

Connection, positive connection, which at its most distilled is called love, has incredible healing power.

A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes.