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So I land, drop my parachute off at my feet in a corner of the drop zone, pull out my laptop, and write a few thousand words in a few minutes, or record a bunch of videos for my audience, or answer a few hundred e-mails over the next hour. Why? Because my brain is full of the same chemicals that it would have if I didn’t have ADHD, or if I were on medication. It’s full of attention-producing chemicals.
This is why after an event or finishing a project I am usually on a high and want to utilize it to work instead of celebrating by relaxing and making small talk.
You wouldn’t take your eyes off the road for ten minutes to have a conversation with someone in the backseat while you’re going sixty on a crowded highway, right?
I don’t take Concerta every day, and more often than not I don’t take it at all. For example, I don’t take it when I’m on a six-country speaking tour. I don’t need it when I’m skydiving or when I’m training for an athletic event, because my body makes the chemicals just fine on its own at those points. I do take it, however, when I need to focus on tasks that don’t hold my attention, such as paperwork, listening at meetings, completing expense reports, and sometimes focusing on people with whom I need to do business.
Many of the most successful entrepreneurs (many of whom are inspirational to me) have ADHD: Richard Branson, Cameron Herold, Seth Godin (who actually turned me down for my second job after AOL, thankfully), John Lee Dumas, David Needleman, even me. We
because my assistant heard me “typing with purpose,” as she calls it, and quietly disconnected the Internet router, preventing me from sending my comment until I’d calmed down and taken another look at it to decide whether or not I should really send it.
Seth Godin shared a great story with me on the Faster Than Normal podcast. He mentioned that when he was in grade school, he felt like he wasn’t called on enough by his teachers. So he made a giant hand out of construction paper and attached it to a long stick, so that when he had an answer to a question, the teacher would be sure to see his hand above those of all the other students. Who does this?! On
Omg. I do.
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
I’ve done some nonscientific studies,
Productive lets you set little goals for things that you’d like to become habit, and reminds you to do them at intervals you set.
I’ve had time to do what I wanted to do, I wasn’t rushed, I got to the gym, I got my work done, I’ve been useful. And when it comes time to go to sleep, I’m exhausted in a great way. So
Sylvania connected lightbulb. It’s technically a bulb that has Wi-Fi built into it. Connect it to your network, and it can be controlled by an app and programmed to do certain things. Like turn on slowly and light up a room at 3:28 in the morning, for instance. So when my alarm went off at 3:30 A.M., and I opened my eyes and the entire room was awash in light, well,
“apple test.” It’s incredibly simple. When you’re hungry, ask yourself one single question: Am I hungry enough to eat an apple? Chances are, you’re not. If you were, you’d devour that apple without thinking about it. But if you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, yet hungry enough to eat a bag of nacho chips, well, that tells you that you’re not really hungry, but rather, your brain is looking for dopamine.
If I had more space, I’d fill it with more stuff, and that’s detrimental to the way I work.
in order to be truly free, I’d have to make sure I was also my own prisoner in the best way possible.
ADHD is tricky. As free as we can be, as much as we can come up with ideas that work on the fly, we can occasionally start to get cocky. We can forget that it takes only one bad decision to start a cycle that doesn’t end until we do.
So how does this relate to free will? Well, normal people have a different type of free will than we do.
Identify anything in your day that you can eliminate or minimize. What minor decisions do you agonize over? How can you eliminate them? Simplify. Create rituals, remember?
when you’re ADHD, moderation simply isn’t one of your best qualities, if it’s a quality at all.
eat between 1:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M.
protein shake after my early morning workouts,
sleep in my gym clothes.
Having to think too much about what I’m eating is as bad as eating processed food. It winds up taking up a lot of my time, and prevents me from focusing on important things in my life that matter much more.
there is a definite “sub-population of individuals with disordered eating, [and ADHD] plays a major role in the etiology and maintenance of the disorder.”
fill half their dinner plate with fruits or vegetables, one fourth with a protein, and one fourth with carbohydrates.
eating several servings of whole grains, which are rich in fiber, each day to prevent blood sugar levels from spiking and then plummeting.
“I know who I am when I don’t get enough sleep, and it’s not the person I want to be. My ADHD is magnified, and not in a good way. When I don’t sleep enough, I feel like I’m in a fog for the day, one that I usually can’t shake until I make up my sleep deficit.
Those Wi-Fi-enabled lightbulbs I told you about? In my bathroom, they’re connected to motion sensors that know the time of day. If I stumble in during the middle of the night, the light goes on at around 10 percent luminosity, a nice deep red. That prevents my body from “waking up,” and the second I’m done in the bathroom, I’m back asleep. No bothering with light switches, either.
in 2004, researchers completed a study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, that found that kids with ADHD showed an improvement in the negative expressions of the condition after playing outside in a natural environment. A similar 2008 study from the University of Illinois showed that attention improved in kids who took a twenty-minute stroll in the park more than it did in kids who walked outside in a downtown or residential area without much greenery.
For env. project Elise.
nature deficit disorder, which describes the human costs of alienation from nature, including diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional sickness.
absence or inaccessibility of parks and open spaces is associated with high crime rates, depression, and other urban troubles.
figure out what all of your triggers have in common.
lack of focus, lack of “workable time,” and constant interruptions.
If I had to go to a 2:00 P.M. meeting, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a full day’s work in, so I’d be hesitant to start any new project, and wind up futzing around until it was time to leave for the meeting.
With that running around my brain, I’m obviously not paying anywhere near as much attention as I should be in the meeting, so now I’ve got that thought in my brain as well.
Inability to be present / resentment from lack of fulfillment
it’s not so easy to see the forest for the trees when you’re right in the thick of it. Or, as my great-aunt used to say, “It’s hard to see the edge of the bowl when you’re swimming in the middle of the tomato soup.”
twenty-minute meeting, in theory, sounds awesome, but if it takes me twenty minutes to prep before I leave the office, then thirty minutes to get there, thirty minutes to get back, and another half hour to get productive again, that twenty-minute meeting just cost me two to three hours of my day. Two twenty-minute meetings a day could easily eat 85 percent of a day’s productivity. As
have meetings only one day a week. The
let only my assistant schedule things for me—I gave up control of my calendar.
make those “emergency meetings” as early as possible—with any luck, before breakfast.
working really hard on preparing the wrong thing, or not remembering that a meeting time had been updated,
devotes one hour a day to preparing for the next day’s meetings and events.
There’s a “feeling” you get when you’re rushed. It’s not just stress, although that’s a big part of it. It’s also nervousness, it’s a feeling of “incompleteness,” as in,
it tells the body to focus on saving fat, on the off chance that your stress is due to your encountering a woolly mammoth that wants to kill you on Forty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue.
This is illogical. More likely fat storage is to stave off starvation in future instead of efficienty burning fuels now?
she doesn’t so much as send an e-mail without tagging it to a specific project.
As I watched other couples walking through the lobby, I started getting more and more upset. It was clear we were going to miss our reservation, we obviously weren’t going to be able to get our table at this restaurant that I’d worked so hard to secure, we were
Catastrophizing
You can’t control people. All you can do is control how you react to people.
you want to “fix” things, because you want them to be perfect. We’re usually terrible at explaining things to people, but we’re great at pushing them out of the way and doing it for them ourselves.
one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself, as well as for others, is to live your life “one minute in the future.” This means you’re constantly on the lookout for the effect that things you’re doing right now will have one minute, five minutes, an hour, a day into the future. (People in AA meetings sometimes refer to this as “playing the tape forward,” which
if you put a project in front of JP, he’s going to immediately start it and work it to completion. Nothing will get in his way, except one thing: if you put another project in front of him. Do that, and the first project is now in competition with the second project, and both of them wind up not being finished.
“If I want to talk to my wife about something, I used to interrupt whatever she was doing, because I wanted to share it with her NOW NOW NOW! The problem is, she wasn’t focused on me, she was more focused on the fact that I just interrupted her, and I’d never feel like I was able to truly share anything with her. She didn’t listen, I got angry, and it was killing
