ADHA

I was looking through some of the stories I have written, and came across a post from the 4th of February, 2018.

"I don't know quite what has happened. I've never really been able to get routines to stick, and I do so need them to stick. It would be wonderful to live in a house where things are normally looking rather presentable. Currently, things start slipping, and when they have really slup, THEN I do something about it."

And now I know why!  ADHD

Routines are one of the big challenges for people with ADHD. For neurotypical people, if they repeat a routine for 30-45 days then it sticks. I could do something for a 100 Days, or even 365, and if I don't consciously choose to do it the next day it doesn't get done. Each day I have to consciously make a decision to do things.

One of the biggest changes in my ability to keep the house clean and tidy is the Beloved and I are working at the same time. We share a list, and choose tasks, ticking them off as we go. We stop when the list has been completed, or after a set amount of time.

In ADHD circles this is called 'body doubling'. It keeps me on track, and it gets double the amount of work done.

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I should also say I am utterly brilliant in a crisis. My brain pops and whirrs and whizzes, coming up with wonderful solutions, and I am a creative person.  These are some of the positives of ADHD.

ADHD

 

I'm now as sure as I can be, without having an official diagnosis, that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But's a really crap name. My attention is often just fine, thank you very much. I don't often daydream. But hyperfocus is something I can do, and I perform well under pressure.

Now to work out ways to turn this to my advantage, and make it less of a disorder, and more of a superpower!

ICNU?

A friend is working on her PhD in psychology. She has ADHD, and posts very interesting little snippets. 

 It's a common misconception that ADHA simply means hyper and/or being unable to focus, when a more accurate way to describe it would be not as an attention deficit, but as an executive function deficit.

... how this actually affects people is 'ICNU': Interest, Challenge, Novelty and Urgency. If something doesn't meet one of those four categories, someone with ADHD just isn't goig to be able to do it.

Let's use doing the dishes as an example.

Is it interesting? Not even slightly.

Challenging? Not really.

Novel? Nah.

Urgent? Not yet.

But once the person actually needs clean dishes, then it gets dones, because now it meets one of those four criteria. In that sense, putting things off until the very last second is essentially a coping mechanism for ADHA, rather than a symptom.

In the last year or two, I've thought about whether I might have Attention Deficient Disorder. After Mel's post resonated so strongly with me, I took three different tests, and they all said I might have a moderate level of ADHA. These were just internet tests, not conducted by a phycologist, but I was shocked. Then a whole string of things slotted into place. 

Over the years I've developed coping mechanisms, and avoidance techniques. Some are good, others well, quite awful. I'm going to look into better coping mechanisms, and learn how to better fit into a world that doesn't quite fit.

The first thing I have learned is I need to make unpleasant, undoable tasks fall into one of the four categories, Interest, Challenge, Novelty, and Urgent. One thing I have been trying to do recently is split tasks into much smaller chunks, and set mini-deadlines. This move them into 'Urgent'.