ADHD: Scratch'n The Itch With Distraction (Part 1)

Image courtesy of Niklas

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We all know ADHD as the disorder of distraction.  That issue with the brain that makes it hard to focus or at least stay focused.  Kids these days are medicated out the wazoo for it and even adults are starting to take drugs to stifle this unproductive side effect.  But what IS ADHD exactly?  And more importantly, how does someone struggling with this disorder deal with it?  In this two part post I plan to answer these questions as I share my own struggles with these four letters of the alphabet.

Daydreaming in the classroom.

If we could go back in time to when I was in 5th grade and watch me as I sit at my desk while the teacher spoke in front of the room, you would see a red haired little boy staring out the window, dreaming of everything EXCEPT the words coming out of the teacher’s mouth.  It was a classic situation for the teacher to ask me a question, knowing that he was just waking me up from a daydreaming session.  I’d have absolutely NO CLUE what the answer was as I had been a million miles away until that very moment.

I was pegged as a daydreamer or just plain lazy.  I didn’t seem to care about school as I never paid attention in class.  And yet when I got home I would spend hours working on my own ‘projects’ that involved all kinds of thinking and learning.  So apparently I was just hell bent on going against the system.

By the time I reached high school I was so far behind in my understanding of the current curriculum that my 10th grade failure was an inevitability.  I blamed this on my drug use, but the fact was, that alone was my escape from the burdens of being behind.  I figured, “What the heck, I’m failing anyway.  I might as well go out with a BANG!”

By the grace of God, I eventually did a 180 and finished my 5 years in high school on a positive note, but not without the scars to prove my past struggles.  I always said that school just wasn’t for me, but later realized that it wasn’t the school OR me, but that ADHD ‘itch’ that I had never learned to properly scratch.

What is ADHD?

You can read about this subject all day long and never hear exactly the same thing twice.  It is still something the scientists and doctors are grappling with, but I can tell you what I believe it is based on extensive study as well as first hand experience.

The frontal lobe of our brain is where we get our personality and emotions.  We use it for problem solving, motor skills and so on.  When you have ADHD, your frontal lobe is not naturally as stimulated as someone without ADHD.  In other words, without something encouraging stimulation, a person with ADHD will be under stimulated in their frontal lobe.  When I say ‘encouraging stimulation’ I am talking about things like watching an exciting movie or playing a fun video game and so on.  This is why a person with ADHD will seem totally fine when put in the right environment.  But sit them down in a boring class room or business meeting and watch them squirm as they can’t seem to scratch that itch.

What’s this whole ITCH thing?

Think about the last time you had a bug bite.  It starts to itch and so you scratch the effected area for temporary relief.  If anything, it actually feels GOOD while your scratching it.  Now let’s say you started to feel it itch and yet you were tied down, completely unable to access and therefore scratch the itching area.  Could you, in that very moment, focus all of your attention on something else?  Especially something that didn’t directly interest you?  Well this is precisely what it feels like for someone with ADHD to sit in a class room while trying to learn a subject that doesn’t interest them.

Tapping your feet.

One common attribute of someone with ADHD is being fidgety.  I tap my feet all the time.  But why do I do this?  Is it because I’m nervous?  No, just bored.  Recently I read an article that cleared this mystery up for me.  Basically, when you tap your foot or any part of your body for that matter, you are in essence, scratching your frontal lobe.  You are actually stimulating your frontal lobe which gives you temporary relief from the itch that you would otherwise feel.  Stop tapping and you instantly feel that uneasy feeling come rushing back.

Being in the right environment.

When I was 17 I was professionally tested for the presence of a learning disability.  I had been struggling in school and my mom was hoping to find some answers as to why.  So I spent an entire morning, one on one with the ‘tester’.  She started out asking me questions about school and home and my hobbies, etc…  Then we moved on to some fun, simple tests.  Some were puzzles and some were written.  Some were even games that I quite enjoyed.  By the end of the process the women created a report that basically said, “Your son is very intelligent, quite focused and has no learning disabilities what so ever.”

Looking back on this I can’t help but laugh.  Are you kidding me?!  Of course I was focused!  I was sitting there, one on one with a person that wanted to play games with me.  They were quick and it consisted of jumping around to different tasks.  This is a PERFECT learning environment for someone with ADHD.  If anything, you might find it to be TOO MUCH for someone WITHOUT ADHD.  See, we attention deficiters excel at multitasking.  Give us one thing to do and we struggle.  Give us 5 things to do in the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME and we excel.

How to deal with ADHD.

OK, so you’ve got the itch and you want to learn how to scratch it in a productive way.  Do you start taking drugs for this or is there a way to self medicate that is effective without causing other issues in the process?  The answer is a simple, IT DEPENDS.

Many adults excel with the right medication.  Liz, for example, has been taking Adderall since she was in college.  Especially since they came out with the timed release version, did she really start becoming more productive with her daily tasks.  (She currently doesn’t take it because of her pregnancy, but plans on getting back on it as soon as she can.)  She would take it first thing in the morning and within an hour it was as if someone turned the light switch on in her head.  The entire day she could focus and accomplish anything she set out to do.  For her, it’s been a wonderful thing.

I, on the other hand, tried taking Ritalin for a time and found it to be an interesting experience to say the least.  It truly helped me focus, but to the extreme.  I actually found that I lost my multitasking abilities and easily felt overwhelmed.  I could sit for hours working on one particular task without any issue at all.  Before, maintaining a similar state of focus would only last 20 minutes, TOPS.  But the combination of the evening CRASH (coming off of the medication) combined with the single focused mindset, led me to quickly stop taking the drug.  I decided that I would self medicate by keeping myself stimulated naturally (I’ll speak about this in tomorrow’s post).

Until tomorrow…

Tomorrow I will continue this discussion with part 2.  I will share some tips on how to naturally stay focused and talk about the dangers of ‘scratch’n the itch with distraction’.  I’ll see you then!