The World Is ADHD Enough

What if James Bond had ADHD? Would The World Be Enough?

Once, while the guys were watching a James Bond movie in the other room, the out-of-context gunshots and explosions were rubbing me the wrong way, and I got to thinking about how people say “society encourages us all to be ADHD.”

Before I understood the medical side of ADHD, I agreed with those who say we are all more distracted, hyperactive, and impulsive, because of all the screens in our faces. In the time that I have been on the planet, the Internet went from a sci-fi idea to a thing you could surf to a basic need like beds and sheets and water and cars (all of which you can now buy on the Internet, of course). There were kids, in my childhood, who would watch TV for hours each day, but they were neither normal nor the norm. Today, nearly a third of American children live in a household where the television is on all, or most of, the time.

Ours isn’t, but we may, at any given time, have up to seven screens on in the living room between all of our laptops and cell phones. We laugh over the fact that going to movies is the only time our family of three ever has a one-screen experience anymore.

But some things are just crazy-making. To me the world itself seems to have gone completely ADHD whenever:

• Google Ads suggest I buy things I just bought
• The phone rings in the middle of a text conversation
• I get a text while I’m in the middle of writing another text
• I go to Facebook to check one thing and get lost there for hours

Still, we don’t see real life reflected back in art and the media. On TV shows, people walk around their houses without the constant soundtrack or chatter, having dialogue where one person finishes a sentence before another starts. Where they do one thing at a time, deliberately, with a quality of presence that is impossible to achieve in real life when there’s something interesting on TV, a ping sounds on the phone, or someone starts laughing at a meme thread they just have to share.

And there’s James Bond, sauntering through explosions. Really? Talk about hyperfocus! Do you ever see him frazzled? I’d like to know how he would handle frazzled, the way it happens in my crazy world, the real crazy world where people don’t chase each other through the streets with guns but do get hysterical because someone lost their keys or forgot their bag or couldn’t get started or missed a detail or a blew a deadline or just didn’t think to fully communicate.

We are surrounded by chatter and challenge. The guns fire and men utter threats and die and I put my hands over my ears and think: It's up to us as women and mothers, as adults, and as human beings, to filter out all the chattering voices, to create calm amid the chaos. Creating spaces, and times where our families can be peaceful and centered and thoughtful takes effort. Turning off the screens, holding the center, insisting on eye contact, that seems like hard work these days. But with or without ADHD, we need to nurture our values, tend to our relationships, and find life beyond the adrenaline rush.

TED Talk: A Difference In Cognition, Not A Disorder

HERE we go...!

We're Driven by Attention — Not Lacking It

Ready for a creative challenge? Get to know the sparkly flipside of ADHD, and let it energize your life.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to attention. When it is there, when it is not, how hard it is to summon, how hard it is to turn it off. For example, I can ask Enzo’s Uncle Zoom a question and never get an answer; his ears turn off when he’s attending to something inside his mind. Then there are times I want Enzo’s dad, "Dave," to just let something slide, for goodness sake.

There is really no deficit of attention in ADD. Your attention just doesn’t always go where other people want it to.

— Blogger Kristen Caven

There is really no deficit of attention in ADD. Your attention just doesn’t always go where other people want it to. For years, Uncle Zoom and I have tried to think of other names for ADD; we and others like us are absolutely driven with passion, and have boundless energy when there is something creative pulling us.

Thus, I was thrilled to discover the idea of the Interest-Driven Nervous System (IDNS). This is one characteristic, according to Dr. William Dodson, that every person with ADHD has, no matter what their other symptoms. Unlike the 90% of people who can achieve something if it is important or if there is a reward to be had or a consequence to be suffered, folks wired with an IDNS are only motivated when something really captures or holds their attention. As he puts it (consequences be damned), they are only motivated if something is:

• Novel,
• Interesting,
• Challenging, or
• Urgent

Or, as I like to think of it, if something is Sparkly, Annoying, Fascinating, or On Fire.

And by golly, if there’s nothing interesting going on, some of us will make something sparkle. Or set something on fire...

If you look at it this way — thank you, Dr. Dodson! — you can see that ADD is not at all about having Attention Deficit, but by being Attention Driven.

When your life really is out of order, ADD is indeed a Disorder. And exclusively following one’s Interests can certainly create Disorder. But here is the key to transformation: seeing ADD as a creative challenge intrinsically harnesses the power of the IDNS. Why? The IDNS thrives on challenge.

So if you accept the creative challenge of understanding your own mind, and work hard to structure your life in support of your strengths (easier said than done, like most things), it is theoretically possible that all challenges can be overcome.

Follow this line of logic, there is then only one thing an IDNS can lead to: an Interest-ing life!

Give a Kid a Little Extra Time…

A day at the beach, a great idea, and a kid who doesn’t want to transition.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned Enzo’s remarkable childhood ability to sit in the sand and have fun with a bucket and a shovel for hours on end. In the days before he discovered race cars, it was all about the dump trucks and front-loaders. He didn’t have the patience to get properly dressed, stay sitting down while he ate his sandwich, or watch a movie past the first act, but mention that we were going to the beach and that kid would get organized! The best present I ever got for him was three miniature shovels. One would have made him happy, but three meant he got to direct a crew. Holes were dug. Castles were built. Friends were buried.

Mastering the One-Track Mind

My son's obsessions run deep and fast. I can't wait to see how he harnesses his pedal-to-the-metal enthusiasms.

Since Enzo was barely out of babyhood, he’s had long-term obsessions. First it was construction machines. He could tell the difference between a street sweeper, a paving machine, and a combine harvester. We had to read Byron Barton’s Machines At Work and say “Goodnight Guys” every single night. At three he built his first collection: all of the Bob the Builder toys. He would go to sleep sometimes snuggling a front-loader.

The love goes deep. And the detail is fascinating.

After Useful Vehicles, he loved TRUCKS of all kinds — dump, fire, and monster — and he liked the song "Hello, I’m a Truck" so much that a friend made a tape of nothing but this song. Over and over and over…and the cassette was played over and over and over...

Then came the big love of his life: Trains. This was no surprise, since his first complete sentence had been, “I...hear...dat...train!” Between ages four and eight, he learned everything about trains and collected no less than seven sets. He could tell us the route of the Santa Fe and the B&O lines, and identified each type of engine that passed by with its model numbers. We were able to recycle an old family joke: “When God was giving out brains, you thought he said trains, and asked for one track.”

Does every child obsess on things? It seemed normal to me. I had my cats phase, my owl’s phase, and my horse phase in junior high, during which I only read books in which the main character was of the equine persuasion. With Enzo, trains gave way to Legos, Legos to Bionicles, and sooner or later, Road and Track magazine arrived, and the vehicle obsession turned to cars. Fast cars. Cool cars. Maybe you know someone like this. The love goes deep. And the detail is fascinating. When I drive down the street with him, I can point to any car and he can tell you its make, model, year, and some interesting fact about the company that made it. It’s a specialized talent that could certainly translate to a paycheck if we could ever figure out how to harness it...

This kid is built for learning. He has an intense ability to focus and absorb, and can stay on track with an astonishing and admirable focus...but only if it is a track he chooses. With a kid like that, you have to find ways to help him keep choosing a track that goes somewhere, be it school or a personal interest. Parenting is all about watching when our kids fall off of their track, wander away from it, veer off course precipitously every time a distraction goes by. Our job as parents are to constantly put our kids back on the track. Day after day, week after week.

The Learning Curve (feature)

I found a great post today over at ADDitude by a teacher who agrees with me.

At my first reading of my latest book.
Yes, it's about having a superpower!

"I think of my ADHD symptoms almost like super powers! When I let my mind run free with an idea, it’s like switching on the turbo boost. I can think of 100 different creative ways to do or say something in two minutes! Like many ADHDers, I can go into hyperfocus mode, too. The rest of the world fades into the background. A few minutes in a quiet room with some paper, pens, and pencils and I come out with a couple of solutions to any problem I’m facing.

Squeedle!!!

How I discovered my son’s distraction reflex is part of a hunter’s nature. Or a golden retriever’s.

A few summers ago we were on a road trip down south. The highway stretched out before us, cruise-control was on, and my husband and I were three-deep into our game of “top five Bruce Springsteen songs.” Suddenly there was a shout from the back seat, where we thought our tween son had dozed off with his nose in a Foxtrot collection.

The Interest-Based Nervous System

"Almost every one of my patients and their families want to drop the term Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder," writes William Dodson, M.D., "because it describes the opposite of what they experience every moment of their lives. It is hard to call something a disorder when it imparts many positives. ADHD is not a damaged or defective nervous system. It is a nervous system that works well using its own set of rules."