Adhd Awareness Quotes

My room is the safest place my body has. My mind doesn’t really have a safe place.

we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications. A major public health awareness campaign by governments—perhaps without influence from pharmaceutical lobbying groups—is needed on this issue.

Each one of us is different, but one thing that is true; Each one of us is wonderfully made, and so, my dear, are you!

Self-awareness ✓ Inhibition ✓ Nonverbal working memory ✓ Verbal working memory ✓ Emotion regulation ✓ Self-motivation

I’ve got too much history of thinking about how you present yourself. I think that I get known for being a motormouth, but when introspection is provoked, I can’t help but make it a bit of therapy.

If you are being parented, it means that ADHD symptoms are getting in the way of your relationship, whether you are aware of it or not. To get out of parent–child dynamics, consider these suggestions: Talk with your doctor about improving treatment

days of “talks” about his “problem”? People with ADHD are all too aware that others think they are “broken,” and the resulting low self-esteem and resentment sometimes color their ability to enter into a relationship in the first place. Take this professionally successful woman with ADHD:

Caffeine has a calming effect on the ADHD brain. The theory is that the brain of people who suffer from the disorder has an overabundance of dopamine transporters, or re-uptake inhibitors. They carry away dopamine too fast, creating a shortage of it. In turn, that affects serotonin and norepinephrine. The combined effect is a reduced ability to focus, especially on tasks that the person doesn’t enjoy, a lesser ability to control impulsivity, and it even messes with the awareness of time. Caffeine stimulates dopamine production in the brain, temporarily filling up the gap created by the rapid

You may feel desperately unhappy and lonely, and your partner isn’t even aware of it—even if you’ve tried to talk about it. You fight and nag much more than you expected, and life often seems depressingly up and down and out of control.

An adulthood diagnosis of ADHD can be, among other things, physically dizzying, and that I once feared 'never beginning to live’ now feels completely legitimate. However, I am learning that my fear was borne of the assumption that ‘truly living’ is something ‘other’ than what I experience, and it isn’t.’ - Katy Fraser, Talking in Diamonds

Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can’t sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She’d like you to take him to be evaluated. And so you do. It’s a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what’s wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be. But obtaining a diagnosis for your kid is not a neutral act. It’s not nothing for a kid to grow up believing there’s something wrong with his brain. Even mental health professionals are more likely to interpret ordinary patient behavior as pathological if they are briefed on the patient’s diagnosis.[15] “A diagnosis is saying that a person does not only have a problem, but is sick,” Dr. Linden said. “One of the side effects that we see is that people learn how difficult their situation is. They didn’t think that before. It’s demoralization.” Nor does our noble societal quest to destigmatize mental illness inoculate an adolescent against the determinism that befalls him—the awareness of a limitation—once the diagnosis is made. Even if Mom has dressed it in happy talk, he gets the gist. He’s been pronounced learning disabled by an occupational therapist and neurodivergent by a neuropsychologist. He no longer has the option to stop being lazy. His sense of efficacy, diminished. A doctor’s official pronouncement means he cannot improve his circumstances on his own. Only science can fix him.[16] Identifying a significant problem is often the right thing to do. Friends who suffered with dyslexia for years have told me that discovering the name for their problem (and the corollary: that no, they weren’t stupid) delivered cascading relief. But I’ve also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping—in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn’t listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was “within normal range.” But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child’s recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself. Bad

increased awareness of ADHD among teachers and school personnel have increased reporting of children with ADHD and, consequently, more accommodations. This has led to more teachers being willing to receive training and work with these students. It has also helped teachers understand how to cater their teaching styles to these children’s needs. Additionally, the number of individuals diagnosed with ADHD has increased due to the increased availability of diagnostic tools and resources for children and adults. There has also been a growing awareness of the disorder itself, which has led to people taking a more proactive approach to dealing with it.

When Hinshaw and Scheffler make the provocative statement that the primary trigger of ADHD is compulsory education, they are fully aware of the heritability of the underlying symptoms and problems. Their direct implication is that ADHD reveals itself through the ever-increasing push for academic and job performance in an increasingly competitive world economy.

De Mello, the Buddhist Jesuit, says that most of us are sleepwalking most of the time; we’re not paying attention to what is really going on, we are not aware.

I couldn’t look away from Ares for fear he’d slice me in half, but out of the corner of my eye I saw red lights flashing on the shoreline boulevard. Car doors were slamming. “There, officer!” somebody yelled. “See?” A gruff cop voice: “Looks like that kid on TV…what the heck…” “That guy’s armed,” another cop said. “Call for backup.” I rolled to one side as Ares’s blade slashed the sand. I ran for my sword, scooped it up, and launched a swipe at Ares’s face, only to find my blade deflected again. Ares seemed to know exactly what I was going to do the moment before I did it. I stepped back toward the surf, forcing him to follow. “Admit it, kid,” Ares said. “You got no hope. I’m just toying with you.” My senses were working overtime. I now understood what Annabeth had said about ADHD keeping you alive in battle. I was wide awake, noticing every little detail. I could see where Ares was tensing. I could tell which way he would strike. At the same time, I was aware of Annabeth and Grover, thirty feet to my left. I saw a second cop car pulling up, siren wailing. Spectators, people who had been wandering the streets because of the earthquake, were starting

The first step in dealing with negative automatic thoughts about a task or plan is to catch them by asking, “What am I thinking right now?” These thoughts often do not occur in the form of grammatically correct sentences, but may be expressed in brief phrases (e.g., “Oh no,” “I hate this stuff,” a string of expletives, etc.). In fact, sometimes procrastination starts with an accurate statement (e.g., “The gym is crowded after work.”), but that can kick off a string of assumptions that result in procrastination (e.g., “I won’t be able to find any open machines. It will either take me 3 hours to finish my workout or I won’t be able to do my full workout. I’m tired and I’m not up to dealing with crowds tonight. There is no use in going to the gym.”). The subsequent evening spent watching lousy television shows while eating way too many cheese puffs leads to self-critical thoughts and frustration with the missed workout (e.g., “I could have gone to the gym. I would have been done by now. Now I have to find time to make up this workout.”). At the outset, it is vital to be aware of how your thoughts make you prone to procrastinate. Automatic thoughts are often distorted and impact your feelings about tasks. Hence, you start to psych yourself out of doing something without having a chance to get started on it, which increases the likelihood of resorting to avoiding the task through an escape behavior. In Chapter 7, we will discuss in greater detail some of the distorted thoughts and strategies for modifying them, particularly with regard to the emotions they trigger, including pure and simple discomfort about a task (i.e., “Ugh”). When dealing with procrastination, however, the most common distortion we encounter is magnification/minimization. That is, you pull out and embellish all the negative elements about performing a task and you overlook or play down the positive elements and your ability to handle the task in question.

Being aware of now and not now (or time tunnel vision, if you prefer that) can work in your favor. For example, you’re aware that staying focused on boring tasks can be hard for those with ADHD. While this has to do with distractibility and reward-deficiency issues, the solution can be found in the now and not now mentality. If you can create an emotionally neutral yet effective system of reminders that brings a forgotten task back into the now at the right time, you have a much better chance of getting it done.

Here are just some of the activities you’ll find in this book: Allow Yourself to De-Mask Recognize Your Triggers Learn How to Nourish Your Brain Understand and Recognize Hyperfocus Identify Rejection Sensitivity Be Aware of Interrupting Push Aside Perfectionism

Growing” Through Life Develop connections (friends, spiritual, etc.). Self advocate. Ask for help. Structure + balance + flexibility = : )! Reward yourself. Don’t wait until perfect! Notice what you feel and your response. Don’t judge the emotion. “Chunk down”: divide every job into workable chunks. Find and explore your strengths! We know our weaknesses! Listen to your body and trust it. Let go of the negative self-talk. Be always at choice. You can always begin again! Find what works for you. No need to do things as others do! Sometimes letting yourseld just “do it” will allow you to run! Smile and breathe!

In some instances, the people in these stories suffered not from a lack of awareness of important emotions but from an inability to tolerate those emotions enough to deal effectively with them.

Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Why would a person push down their feelings? Because they are too painful, they are too much to bear. In other words, the pushing down of feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you are not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments. So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you are diagnosed with depression. Now, as a medical, biological problem, they give you a pill. I'm not here to fight against pharmacology. I've taken anti-depressants and they've helped me. They work sometimes. But they are not the answer. Because the answer is how does that childhood experience manifest in your life today. If you understand all of these historical, cultural, familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you, certain self-view, certain patterns of emotional relating, now you can do something about it. Now it is not longer "there is something wrong with me", it is just that "this is how I adapted to what happened to me." And therefore I have the capacity now, as a conscious human being, to become aware of all this and to transform myself. It's not so easy to transform yourself because, of course, these adaptions that I've talked about, originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way. And we don't know any other way of being, except there's something telling us that "this is not right." Something is telling us. So we can see individual problems like depression or ADHD or multiple sclerosis or anything else as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we are out of sync with our true nature, that we are misaligned somehow with actually who we are. And that something in us is trying to wake us up.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” ~Joseph Campbell

Hitting Roadblocks When you hit a wall, it makes sense to stop instead of trying to push your way through it. If you have trouble or become overwhelmed, paralyzed or feel like you are running in circles, stop doing whatever it is and take a break. Learn how to operate your brain expertly. Know under which circumstances it works well and when it has to struggle too much. Get to know when it needs more stimulation, less stress, more nourishment or structure or support, and when it is stretched too thin or wound too tight. Then, give it what it needs. ~Sari Solden, Author