Smart But Stuck Quotes

“Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong; the person is flooded with one emotion and unable to attend to other emotions, facts, and memories relevant to that immediate situation. At other times, the working memory impairments of ADHD leave the person with insufficient sensitivity to the importance of a particular emotion because he or she hasn't kept other relevant information sufficiently in mind or factored it into his or her assessment of the situation.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“ADHD impairments: in brain chemistry dynamics; chronic procrastination due to; in coordination of brain rhythms; delays in brain maturation; as developmental delay or ongoing impairment; executive function clusters affected by fig; frustrations in marriage; how they affect processing of emotions; impact on employment; impacting ability to sustain treatment; impaired brain connectivity; impaired cognitive functioning; James' story on identifying; for managing conflicting or unrecognized emotions; working memory and. See also People with ADHD; specific executive function cluster”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“One recurrent factor that complicated the emotions of these very bright individuals was the ongoing discrepancy between what was expected of them by their parents, grandparents, and teachers and even themselves and their frequent failure to achieve the expected success. Most of these patients had struggled since early childhood with continuing conflict between their picture of themselves as exceptionally bright and talented and their view of themselves as disappointing failures, unable to “deliver the goods” expected of them. Some had been very successful in their childhood, earning high grades and strong praise during the elementary school years, then gradually lost status and self-esteem due to increasing evidence of their difficulty in coping with the escalating demands of middle school, high school, and postsecondary schooling.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“It is not unusual for children with ADHD, especially those who are not hyperactive and are very bright, to do quite well in elementary school, where they spend a significant portion of each school day in one classroom with a single teacher who can provide considerable structure and stability for each student in that stable group. The teacher gets to know each student and can support her in her academic work and in resolving difficulties in social relationships.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“It's very difficult for most people to understand how any individual can be very focused on certain tasks or can mobilize themselves to complete a task effectively under the last-minute pressure of an imminent deadline and yet be unable to force themselves to deploy these same abilities in an appropriate and timely way, especially for tasks that are obviously important. Most do not understand that when a person is faced with a task in which he has strong and immediate personal interest, either because he really enjoys it or because he fears that not doing the task will quickly bring some very unpleasant consequence, the chemistry of the brain is instantly altered to mobilize. And most don't know that this alteration of brain chemistry is not under voluntary control. ADHD clearly appears to be a problem of willpower failure, but it is actually a problem with the interacting dynamics of emotion, working memory, and the chemistry of the brain.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Typically their parents, teachers, and others who recognized their strong potential and wanted to help them fulfill it would urge, cajole, and pressure them to exercise “willpower” to show the same strength, effort, and success in those other domains that could significantly improve their future options in life. Most often, those with ADHD joined in criticizing themselves for continuing failure to “just make myself do it.” Both the well-intentioned critics and the guilt-ridden criticized shared the erroneous assumption that symptoms of ADHD could be overcome with sufficient determination and continuing exercise of presumably available willpower.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Many with ADHD in this age group stay up later than they really want to or should because if they try to go to sleep before they're fully exhausted, they can't shut their head off and just keep thinking about various things.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“This is not to say that everybody with ADHD suffers from poor work performance; many are quite consistent and productive workers, and some are truly outstanding employees. Available data simply indicate that the executive function impairments of ADHD significantly increase the risk that affected adults will have significant problems with employment.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Parents and teachers often find it difficult to believe that students who are very bright can be suffering from ADHD, especially if they're not troublemakers.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Many doctors and educators have not yet reached this understanding. They assume that a high level of intelligence confers protection against attention problems, and they do not recognize that a student can be very bright and focus very well for a few specific activities, including standardized tests, and still have significant difficulty in deploying his impressive intelligence for most activities of daily life, including some that the student himself considers quite important. Often these difficulties are taken as problems resulting from boredom or lack of willpower, when they are actually problems with chemical dynamics of the brain.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“This is a burden carried by many of those who have both high IQ and ADHD. At least until their ADHD is diagnosed and treated, they tend to suffer repeated reminders of how they are not performing up to the level expected by those who know that they are extraordinarily intelligent. They tend to feel disappointed in themselves, and they sense the disappointment of their parents and teachers.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“A longitudinal study of over a hundred hyperactive children and a matched comparison group followed into young adulthood showed that those whose ADHD persisted into adulthood continued to have significantly more difficulties with low frustration tolerance, impatience, irritability, hot temper, and emotional excitability than the comparison group. Another study demonstrated that deficient self-regulation of these negative feelings is found in a subgroup of adults with ADHD, and also that this type of emotional dysregulation tends to occur with greater frequency among siblings of those affected adults.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“While cleaning a room, they may get interested in some photos they pick up, soon becoming completely diverted from the job they had begun.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“many of the things we do, including the appraisal of the emotional significance of events in our lives and the expression of emotional behaviors in response to those appraisals, do not depend on consciousness, or even on processes that we necessarily have conscious access to.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“the emotional signal can operate entirely under the radar of consciousness. It can produce alterations in working memory, attention and reasoning so that the decision-making process is biased toward selecting the action most likely to lead to the best possible outcome, given prior experience. The individual may not ever be cognizant of this covert operation.16”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Getting unstuck: step1: evaluation and thorough explanation; step 2: consider options for treatment and/or accommodations; step 3: find supportive counseling or psychotherapy”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Apathy: as common ADHD symptom; Eric's story on experiencing”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“ADHD brain: being flooded by momentary emotions; delays in brain maturation; imaging studies on reward-recognizing circuits of the; imaging studies showing abnormalities in white matter in; immediate or delayed “payoffs” in the; impaired neurotransmitters and neuron networks in the; set of interacting impairments of executive functions in; structural and chemical impairments that underlie ADHD. See also Brain; Executive functions (EFs)”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“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.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“For those who suffer from ADHD-related impairments of EFs such as working memory, organizing and prioritizing, and sustaining and shifting focus, written expression is even more challenging.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“The task of generating and organizing words into sentences and then sequencing those sentences into paragraphs on a blank page is one that places much greater demands on EFs than do reading and math.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Several studies have found that children with ADHD tend to have more frequent and more difficult problems in getting along with their peers than do most children without ADHD.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Still others with ADHD don't manifest significant impairments until they experience the stresses of adulthood, when they encounter increased challenges to their EF abilities.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Some people with ADHD don't manifest significant impairments until they experience the stresses of adulthood, when they encounter increased challenges to their EF abilities.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Repeatedly he announced resolutions that he would hereafter carefully keep a calendar and to-do list for his academic assignments, but he found it very difficult to do this on his own.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“When I'm reading something I'm not intensely interested in, it's as though my mind is licking the words and not chewing them.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Eric's challenge is a clear example of a problem faced by many young adults, especially those with ADHD who feel and act apathetic toward work.5 It is often very difficult for them to feel motivation strong enough and consistent enough today for doing tasks that will pay off for them only much further down the road. If the task today is not intrinsically interesting to them, they find it very difficult to get started and to sustain sufficient effort to complete those tasks that are likely to offer them substantial payoff years later.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“Like many other young adults with ADHD, Eric tended to drive too fast.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“On several occasions, the neighbor student had awakened Eric, had a conversation with him as he was getting out of bed, and then left, only to find out later that Eric had flopped back on the bed and resumed sleeping, unable to remember the conversation when he awakened several hours later.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

“he was afraid to break off their relationship completely “because I don't know if there will ever be another girl who will care about me.” At first, I thought Eric was joking. He was a handsome, witty, charming young man with a winning smile and excellent manners and conversation skills. It was hard to imagine that he would not be very appealing to most people he met. Yet Eric quickly made it clear that regardless of what others might actually believe, he worried chronically and intensely that other people, male or female, did not really like him, “I always think that if they say they like me or seem friendly, they are just acting that way because they feel sorry for me and don't want to hurt my feelings.”
― Thomas E. Brown, Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD