Status Updates From Your Brain's Not Broken: St...

"Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. We know that we need to dig into the resilience barrel when one or more of our sources of confidence are affected: self, others, or environment."

"Notice, analyze, and celebrate successes. You can increase self-efficacy by teaching your children to identify successes, and to accurately assess their contribution. Use process praise such as, "I see you are making great progress. Tell me what you've done so far." Asking your child to talk about their process and progress will help them learn how to plan future assignments."

"It doesn't matter what your situation is, you can vividly evoke visual rehearsal, shift your emotional state, reframe the challenge, and rehearse desired actions. When you repeatedly rehearse...you build new neural pathways in your brain, and new positive patterns of behavior. Without mental rehearsal, you remain stuck in old action patterns."

Emotional Ladder:
#1. Present and Calm
#2. Attending To
#3. Autopilot
#4. Survival
#5. Delusional

"...Our brains fail to distinguish between true dangerous threats and more minor annoyances."

Whelp. That does help explain the volatility... >.>

"Tom Brown, a Yale-trained clinical psychologist who specializes in assessment and treatment of ADHD, reminds us: "Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD in the PFC allow a momentary emotion to become too strong--flooding the brain with one intense emotion. In other words, when our PFCs are not working effectively (or are overtaxed) our limbic systems go on high alert, scanning the horizon for danger.""

"You'll remember from previous chapters that those with ADHD have unreliable access to their PFC (prefrontal cortex), and compensate for it by overusing the limbic systems that govern emotion and memory."

On the idea of high-fiving one's past self for being considerate to your present self:

"To neurotypicals, this strategy may sound ridiculous. But for those of us with ADHD, and limited access to our prefrontal cortex, this strategy turns what would be a convergent thinking activity into an imaginative divergent one."

"Emotional Hyperarousal refers to the intensity of emotion that people with ADHD feel. We have passionate thoughts and emotions that are more intense than those of the average person. As I discussed in chapter 3, our highs are higher, and our lows are lower."

Convergent Thinking: a logical, systematic approach used to arrive at a single, well-defined solution to a problem by evaluating and narrowing down multiple options.

Divergent Thinking: a cognitive process for generating a wide array of novel and diverse ideas in response to a problem or open-ended question, often described as thinking "outside the box"

"In my ADHD-friendly family, we refer to this phenomenon of overresponding to intense heat as 'heat crazy', or it's less intense but still grumbly cousin, 'heat cranky.'"

"When our ADHD brains confuse what is a big deal and what is a small deal, we can respond to minor irritations with the same intense emotional energy as we would in dangerous situations. Fueled by our exaggerated emotions, we overreact to criticism with fear of rejection, worries that we are inadequate, low self-esteem, and insecurity."

Ain't THAT the truth.

I really like this concept of my current self being courteous to my future self, and my future self then getting to thank my past self for it. (I have been guilty of jokingly referring to some mess I have made as being "a problem for my future self.")