Friday, March 22, 2024

How To Describe Adhd To Someone Who Doesn’t Have It

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Learn To Let Some Things Go

How to (Explain) ADHD

You cant change or control your partner. Building a healthy, thriving relationship means accepting them as they are, just as you want them to accept you.

Instead of focusing on what goes wrong, make more of an effort to recognize the things you value and appreciate about them: the way they make you laugh, their intelligence and creativity, your shared dreams for the future.

Fascinated By Nearly Everything

This first excerpt comes from Kyle Pennell, who earned a Quora Top Writer 13′ Award, and who’s profile bio reads, “Fascinated by nearly everything“.

His example reflects the curiosity that often consumes those with ADHD:

Kyle Pennell on What It’s Like Having ADHD :

Iâm extremely curious. The world absolutely fascinates me and I canât stop trying to learn more about it.Kyle Pennell

People tell me I have amazing insights and ideas but what do I have to show for them?Kyle Pennell

Kyle goes on to describe how he has to balance out his curiosity, and finishes with an incredibly insightful metaphor for what having ADHD feels like:

Kyle Pennell – ADHD Metaphor :

Adhd Has An Upside: Our Quirks Are Also Strengths

ADHD is not a one-size-fits-all explanation for behavior and difficulties. The disorder puts you at an increased risk of , , , substance use, and suicide. Factors like stress, boredom, disinterest, lack of sleep, being hungry, feeling overwhelmed by noise, or lack of downtime impact how well we adapt to certain work and social environments.

What I know now is that people of all ages can learn and succeed not in spite of, but often because of, their creativity, empathy, imagination, sense of humor, and experience managing stress.

What people dont hear enough: ADHD and all its unruly bedfellows can be managed and even make some people better at coping in extreme situations, such as a global pandemic, lockdowns, or layoffs. Effective strategies include accommodations at work or school . Tutoring, therapy, coaching, peer support, and medication along with a hearty dose of patience, all work well, too.

ADHD is not a trend or a fad. About 1 in 5 Americans live with learning/attention disabilities. That includes children, adolescents, and adults.¹ Those numbers are likely even higher since many are undiagnosed due to factors like stigma and lack of access to care and treatment.

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What Not To Do With Someone Who Has Adhd

Dont dismiss your partners complaints or disregard them because you dont like the way they bring it up or react to you. Separate who your partner is from their symptoms or behaviors. Instead of labeling your partner irresponsible, recognize their forgetfulness and lack of follow-through as symptoms of ADHD.

When To See A Doctor

What Is Going On? Is There a Comorbid Condition?  Big Bang Coaching

If youre experiencing some or all of these signs, you may have ADHD. The best way to determine if you have ADHD is to be evaluated by a mental health professional.

Receiving a diagnosis as an adult requires a different process than ADHD diagnosis in children. Your doctor or psychologist will have you complete an ADHD rating scale and ask you a number of questions. Theyll assess the history of your symptoms and whether these symptoms have had a significant negative impact on your work and relationships.

They may ask your permission to interview someone who knows you and your history well, such as your parent, partner, or someone who works with you, to get another perspective on your behaviors.

When diagnosing ADHD, your doctor will also rule out 16 conditions or groups of conditions that have symptoms similar to ADHD so that youre not misdiagnosed. However, these can be diagnosed as co-occurring conditions. They include:

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Establish Your Own Support Network

Its healthy to prioritize your partner and the needs of your relationship, but its just as important to maintain supportive friendships.

While you may not want to share every detail about your partner with friends and family, it can help a lot to know loved ones are there to support you.

When you feel stressed and need a break, you might meet a friend for a hike or jog. When your partner gets caught up in a project, you might drop in on family instead of feeling lonely at home. Make time for what you enjoy, even if your partner doesnt join you.

Counseling can also help, even if you dont experience mental health symptoms yourself. Therapy offers a safe and private space to talk about relationship concerns and explore strategies for working through them.

Diagnosing Adhd Is A Difficult Issue But Not For The Reasons You Think

While a lot of the moral panic around increased ADHD diagnoses are unfounded, theres no denying the legitimate difficulties of getting an ADHD diagnosis right.

ADHD has a high percentage of what we call comorbidities, which means coexisting conditions, said Matlen. People with ADHD often have at least one or two other conditions, like depression, anxiety, OCD, learning disabilities, bipolar disorder, or substance abuse. It takes a really good clinician to be able to figure out, alright, is this other disorder traveling with the ADHD and needs to be treated separately? Or is it caused by the ADHD?

As Quinn explained, You have to be very careful that youre not missing the comorbidities and treating them appropriately. But if you happen upon the comorbidity first, like bipolar disorder, you cant only focus on that and potentially miss the ADHD as well.

An added complication is that ADHD symptoms like inattentiveness, distractibility, impulsivity, mood swings, lack of motivation can easily mirror other medical conditions and mental health concerns. Determining whether ADHD is an overlapping versus misdiagnosis of those other conditions is difficult.

I always think of ADHD as a diagnosis of exclusion, Brown said. You need to ask other questions to make sure it’s not something else that looks like ADHD that you might be missing.

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What happens is the adult or parent has to become an advocate for themselves.

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How Can I Help Myself

Therapy and medication are the most effective treatments for ADHD. In addition to these treatments, other strategies may help manage symptoms:

  • Exercise regularly, especially when youre feeling hyperactive or restless.
  • Eat regular, healthy meals.
  • Get plenty of sleep. Try to turn off screens at least 1 hour before bedtime and get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep every night.
  • Work on time management and organization. Prioritize time-sensitive tasks and write down assignments, messages, appointments, and important thoughts.
  • Connect with people and maintain relationships. Schedule activities with friends, particularly supportive people who understand your challenges with ADHD.
  • Take medications as directed, and avoid use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.

How Does Adhd Or Add Affect Relationships

ADHD and Autism Relationship Accommodations — How to Get Your Needs Met

While the distractibility, disorganization, and impulsivity of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can cause problems in many areas of adult life, these symptoms can be particularly damaging when it comes to your closest relationships. This is especially true if the symptoms of ADHD have never been properly diagnosed or treated.

If youre the person with ADHD, you may feel like youre constantly being criticized, nagged, and micromanaged. No matter what you do, nothing seems to please your spouse or partner. You dont feel respected as an adult, so you find yourself avoiding your partner or saying whatever you have to in order to get them off your back. You wish your significant other could relax even a little bit and stop trying to control every aspect of your life. You wonder what happened to the person you fell in love with.

If youre in a relationship with someone who has ADHD, you may feel lonely, ignored, and unappreciated. Youre tired of taking care of everything on your own and being the only responsible party in the relationship. You dont feel like you can rely on your partner. They never seem to follow through on promises, and youre forced to constantly issue reminders and demands or else just do things yourself. Sometimes it feels as if your significant other just doesnt care.

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Why Organization Eludes People With Adhd

The ADHD mind is a vast and unorganized library. It contains masses of information in snippets, but not whole books. The information exists in many forms as articles, videos, audio clips, Internet pages and also in forms and thoughts that no one has ever had before. But there is no card catalog, and the books are not organized by subject or even alphabetized.

Each person with ADHD has his or her own brain library and own way of storing that huge amount of material. No wonder the average person with ADHD cannot access the right piece of information at the moment it is needed there is no reliable mechanism for locating it. Important items have no fixed place, and might as well be invisible or missing entirely. For example:

The child with ADHD comes home and tells Mom that he has no homework to do. He watches TV or plays video games until his bedtime. Then he recalls that he has a major report due in the morning. Was the child consciously lying to the parent, or was he truly unaware of the important task?

For a person with ADHD, information and memories that are out of sight are out of mind. Her mind is a computer in RAM, with no reliable access to information on the hard drive.

What Makes Adhd Symptoms Worse

Certain behaviors are expected depending on the age of a person. Because the brain doesnt develop at the same rate in everyone, cognitive functions may be poor in some people and not in others. A child 10 years old, for example, might only have the abilities of a younger child 8 years old rather than his or her same age peers. Therefore, as you or your child get older, the problem is not that ADHD gets worse, its that the childs abilities are not developing synchronized with age.

Although ADHD doesnt get worse, the tasks expected of the person become more complicated with age and circumstances, such as increased demands in school, therefore, the problematic behaviors become more problematic. For example, as the child may get a lower grade for turning in late work. Examples of other complications include:

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Why People With Adhd Are Time Challenged

Because people with ADHD dont have a reliable sense of time, everything happens right now or not at all. Along with the concept of ordination there must also be the concept of time. The thing at the top of the list must be done first, and there must be time left to do the entire task.

I made the observation that 85 percent of my ADHD patients do not wear or own a watch. More than half of those who wore a watch did not use it, but wore it as jewelry or to not hurt the feelings of the person who gave it to them. For individuals with ADHD, time is a meaningless abstraction. It seems important to other people, but people with ADHD have never gotten the hang of it.

William Dodson, M.D., is a member of ADDitudes ADHD Medical Review Panel.

We All Have Add Sometimes Its Not A Thing

Pin on ADHD

I was up late last night not sleeping. Thinking about how to to describe ADHD to someone who doesnt understand it or doubts it. The Stigma that comes with it.

How do I respond to the all too often minimizing statement? We all are ADD. I have that too. What you experience is normal for everyone

Ok then: take a bad day. Youre off day.

You misplaced your keys, glasses, phone and you are panicking, running around and turning the place upside down to find them because you are in a rush.

There is stress of not finding them and getting upset that they are not in the spot where they are supposed to be. You find them .

Why the hell were they in the pocket of a jacket you hardly ever wear, buried in the bottom of the hamper??

But now you are behind.

You run to the car and you might be late for work. You get to the car and realize you forgot your coffee, lunch and your work ID. You run back up and grab them. You trip up the stairs.

Get in, grab the stuff, lock the door and start to the car again. Then it strikes you that you may have left the stove on. You run back up and check it. Now you are really late.

You get to the car and realize you forgot your coffee upstairs again.

You have no time, you have to go. You get to work late. You are now late for a meeting. Log on and apologize and make up some excuse that traffic was extra bad, trying to save face.

You do you best to cover it up with a joke. Usually with self -deprecating humour.

This was a bad day. An off day.

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Having An Altered Sense Of Time

One of the hallmarks of ADHD is living in the now. People with ADHD find it hard to keep track of time. Theyre often late for appointments, cant accurately estimate how long it will take for them to complete a task, and leave complicated tasks until the last minute. This is referred to as time blindness.

The reason this happens, according to researchers , is that the brains prefrontal cortex which is responsible for executive functioning doesnt work as well at managing focus and behavior in adults with ADHD.

This is also the part of the brain that helps you plan for the future. Its what allows you to prepare yourself for whats coming next and plan how much time you have to realistically complete tasks.

If that part of the brain isnt functioning properly, then youre unable to accurately look into your future.

As a comparison, think of people who are nearsighted: They can only read things that are near to their face. Similarly, people with ADHD sometimes have difficulty anticipating and preparing for future events. The farther away an event is, the harder it is to deal with it.

How Common Is Adhd

About 11% of children between the ages of four and 17 have ADHD. Symptoms of ADHD typically first appear between the ages of three and six years old. The average age of ADHD diagnosis is seven years old. In children, its three times more common in young boys than girls.

ADHD isnt just a childhood disorder. About 4% of American adults over the age of 18 contend with ADHD behaviors on a daily basis. In adulthood, its diagnosed equally between males and females.

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Preparing Students With Adhd For College

Once you complete the cycle a few hundred thousand times or more, you become defensive every time someone says “What’s wrong with you?” or “I just told you that, don’t you remember?” or “You need to try harder” or “You only care about yourself” or “You’re just making excuses.” Sadly, those are only some of the nice things people say. Soon, people begin to dismiss you, or call you names and even laugh at you. They try to force you to do what they themselves can do. They are struggling to manage their lives and yours and they learn that you will step up your efforts if you feel bad enough.

Soon, you begin to avoid interactions with people and even isolate yourself, just so that you can feel a little break from the onslaught. However, this too is perceived as being selfish and uncaring. You may begin to defend and retaliate in order to protect any remaining self-worth. This causes severe mistrust and conflict. Meanwhile, depression has been creeping into the picture and you are not aware of it until it has you in its claws. You begin to play the victim, because you believe they must be right. The psychological impact of this is incredibly damaging to self-esteem and personal growth. The impact of this on careers and relationships is not hard to see.

What Are The Symptoms Of Adhd

This is What It’s Really Like to Have ADHD

Children, teenagers and adults with ADHD have an ongoing pattern of three types of core behaviors:

  • Inattentiveness: Difficulty sustaining attention to tasks.
  • Impulsivity: Doing things on sudden urges, without thinking such as talking out in class, throwing a toy, or interrupting someone in conversation. In adults, the impulses may be irresponsible such as spending too much money.
  • Hyperactivity: Restlessness such as fidgeting, inability to stay seated when sitting is expected such as in church or school, moving or climbing when its inappropriate to do so.

Children, teens and adults with ADHD are diagnosed by the behavior pattern that is most actively present. The three most common ADHD presentations are Predominantly Inattentive, Predominantly Hyperactive/Impulsive and the combination of these types.

ADHD Predominantly Inattentive Presentation is defined by the following nine behaviors:

Behaviors of the ADHD Predominantly Hyperactivity/Impulsive type include:

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Cant Concentrate You Must Have Adhd

Everyone experiences moments when they cant concentrate. This doesnt mean you have ADHD. There are several other symptoms to consider before a person could is diagnosed with ADHD.

When behavioral health specialists work to diagnose ADHD, or any other mental illness for that matter, they use standard guidelines set by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Theyll also look at the childs behavior paterns in comparison to the behavior of other kids of his/her age.

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