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February 24, 2022 - August 24, 2023
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.
Adverse Childhood Experience Scale, or ACEs.
ACEs scores run much higher in families where there is ADHD, either in a parent or in a child, or both.
the Grant Study—in
researchers from Harvard Medical School studied 268 Harvard College sophomores from the classes of 1939 through 1944 and followed them for the rest of their lives—was
Its main conclusion is beautifully and compellingly simple. 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.”
the term “dislocation” (which was coined by the political economist Karl Polanyi) to refer to the loss of “psychosocial integration.” Dislocation, he explains, is psychologically toxic and untenable. An individual will crack in any number of ways: disruptive behavior; extreme anxiety; withdrawal; school refusal; the beginnings of substance use; depression and thoughts of suicide; the development of an eating disorder; cutting; poor performance at work; loss of job; marital difficulties. The dismal list goes on.
Fear is the major learning disability, fear and shame.
Keep up with at least two good friends regularly. This is even better than going to the gym every day! One way to do this is to have a standing lunch date or a time reserved for a catch-up phone call every week.
Join some kind of group that holds meetings—a book club, a lecture series, a knitting circle. Then attend those meetings! The MacArthur Foundation Study on Aging showed this to be one of the two factors most associated with long life (the other is frequency of visits with friends).
Never worry alone. This one is key.
Minimize your consumption of news if it tends to upset you or rile you up. If you feel more connected to the world through watching it, however, don’t give it up!
Whatever you’re wrestling with, take a bow for working so hard to be a better person. In other words, connect with your desire to improve and give yourself credit for trying to do that.
Learn about your ancestors. You can do this either through archival research or asking questions of your elders. Asking questions has the added bonus of connecting you to those elders.
Along the same lines, talk to non-related old people about their lives, in detail. This is like reading a great novel.
Climb a tree and sit on a branch for at least ten minutes;
Many studies show that charismatic mentors—not grades, study habits, where they go to school, or IQ—make the biggest difference in kids with ADHD and VAST.
Most people who have ADHD or VAST are naturally creative and original.
It’s like an omnipresent itch to make something.
once we find a project to sink our teeth into, then presto! we light up like a Christmas tree.
We who have ADHD or VAST characteristics tend to fall in love in a hurry—with a person, with a subject, with a project, with a deal, with a plan.
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
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the Kolbe Index.
how a person exerts effort is defining.
This, she reasoned, would show us a person’s conative style.
the dictionary definition of “conation” is “the mental faculty of purpose, desire, or will to perform an action; volition.”
Kolbe calls this our MO, our modus operandi.
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 don’t join cults.
The realistic goal in life is not to be independent, but to be effectively interdependent.
there are five areas of your environment that we would have you focus on for yourself or your child: daily structure, nutrition, sleep, populate your world with positivity, and accept and find the right help.
Non-drug Treatments for ADHD, by Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg.
OmegaBrite.*1
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.
one of the most important is the release of a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF.
Remember, the frontal cortex is the CEO of the brain.
many school administrators recognize the importance of good old-fashioned recess and are protecting that free time—on the grounds that it improves learning and behavior—from those who would do away with it in the name of more class time.
It is interesting to observe that when a child is focused on exercise and play, his or her sensory and emotional issues almost disappear.”
significant improvements in accuracy rate and reaction time were observed only for the group of kids who had done yoga.
A 2011 Harvard study found that just eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction work increased the cortical thickness in the hippocampus.
“Ha” breathing technique.
To begin, inhale through your nose to a count of three or four. Next, exhale through your mouth to a count of six or eight making a soft haaaa sound as you do so. The inhale/exhale relationship is always at a 1:2 ratio. Using this kind of forced breath technique as you settle into meditation can interrupt those unwanted ruminations, immediately turning up alertness and attention.
Indeed, any medication works better if you want to take it. This is because of the placebo effect, a proven phenomenon that draws upon your mind’s ability to enhance the efficacy of any intervention, from medication to surgery to acupuncture to exercise to contact lenses to the next meal you eat.
a region deep in the brain involved in motivation (the caudate nucleus)
By increasing norepinephrine (NEP) we increase arousal, making us more awake. This improves our ability to take in information from the environment, meaning that our senses are more attuned. We are better able to “read the room” and our audio and visual understanding is clearer.
the prefrontal cortex (known as the CEO of the brain).
When it comes to the two types of stimulants, the difference is this: methylphenidate type drugs (like Ritalin) raise dopamine levels a little higher than NEP. In the amphetamine type drugs (like Adderall), it’s the reverse. Amphetamine drugs have a greater effect on NEP than on dopamine, though also only by a small amount.
For kids and teens, methylphenidates were found to be slightly more effective; when it comes to adults, amphetamines got the best results by a hair.
Marketed as Wellbutrin, Strattera, and Norpramin, these drugs were developed as antidepressants but soon found their niche in the ADHD world.
When they work, as they do for a certain segment of the ADHD population (which we cannot predict in advance), they can work beautifully. The downside is that, clinically, they have been shown not to be as effective as the stimulants for most people.
in addition to having some common side effects like insomnia, agitation, dry mouth, nausea, headache, constipation,
