CADDAC Conference 2009
I had the opportunity this past weekend to attend the CADDAC conference in Toronto. To my knowledge, it was the first-ever 2-day ADHD event of its type in Canada, and it was excellent. It’s a tricky thing to find a balance of speakers and workshops that can engage and enlighten everyone from experienced clinicians and coaches to newly-diagnosed young adults, but the organizers did a really admirable job. Over the course of my next few posts, I’ll be writing about what I found to be most exciting and informative aspects of the conference.
While I was unable to attend the comedy show with Canadian stars Rick Green and Patrick McKenna on Saturday night, I was truly excited to see what a central a role it played in the promotion of the conference. And while ADHD is unquestionably a very serious mental health issue — with profound implications for public health — it can also be very, very funny. Putting first-rate Canadian comedians (both of whom have ADHD themselves) in such a prominent place at the conference was a great reminder of how much better it feels to have ADHD when we can laugh at it.
Highlights of the conference that I was able to take in included:
- Two powerful lectures by American psychiatry professor Dr. Russell Barkley. The first, which began with an overview of the neurophysiology of ADHD, explored the central role that poor Executive Function plays in creating the symptoms of Adult ADHD. The second was an overview of the latest research on the major life activities that are impaired by having ADHD. Barkley argues that ADHD needs to be acknowledged as a major public health issue, with substantial implications for the economy and society.
- An inspiring presentation by Olympic rower and 2-time medalist Jake Wetzel. Wetzel talked movingly about the frustrations of having ADHD as a teenager, and the importance of making the best of your strengths, minimizing your weaknesses, and following your passions.
- Steve Ilott’s workshop on “Decluttering Your Mind and Space,” which included many valuable, ADHD-friendly tips on getting clutter under control - and keeping it that way.
I’ll be blogging more on the conference soon.
Twitter is Great for ADHDers. But Proceed with Caution
You can’t turn around these days without another journalist or blogger fulminating about the great blessing (or scourge, if that’s your persuasion) that is Twitter. It’s now transcended the blogosphere, and virally infected the hidebound world of newspaper journalism: The Globe and Mail, the grand old dame of Canadian papers and the nation’s self-proclaimed paper of record, has run at least half a dozen Twitter-related articles in the last fortnight. The New York Times had three articles on it yesterday alone (according to Lance Armstrong’s Twitter feed. I’m a retired bike racer; of course I follow him on Twitter!).
Twitter seems to have reached a tipping point.
As a coach who specializes in working with adults with ADHD, I am very conflicted about Twitter. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s the Social Network That Will Change Everything or merely a passing fad, there’s still a lot to think about. Overall, I think that Twitter has so much to recommend it that having ADHD is no reason to avoid it. I do have several concerns specific to ADHDers on Twitter, though, and I think it’s especially important to be aware of the very real challenges that Twitter presents to those who are easily distracted by technology. Read more
Battling the Raccoons
I want very much to be posting more on this blog, but I’m not a very good raccoon.
Some of the biggest and meanest raccoons in the world live in my garage. To be more accurate, they don’t actually live in the garage. They live in the walls of it. In a baffling fit of throwing good money after bad, the previous owners of my house decided to cover the wooden walls of the detached garage with vinyl siding. The raccoons, not to be put off by the depressing gray shade of the siding, found that they could burrow between the siding and the wooden walls, creating a nice, cozy abode for themselves. So far as I can tell, they only emerge from their comfortable subsidized housing to prowl the neighbourhood for tasty food waste.
Since Toronto has a municipal food waste collection program, almost every house in my neighbourhood has a green bin somewhere outside the house, expressly designed for food and organic waste –which includes diapers, by the way, in my house and many of those around me. And the raccoons love nothing better than to make sport of trying to pry them open. The latches on the green bins were not in any way designed to defeat raccoons, and those who fail to attach an aftermarket strap or lock run the risk of seeing a week’s worth of rotten veggies and meat scraps on the driveway in the morning. Like most people, I learned this the hard way.
So you’ll appreciate that I am no fan of raccoons. But the biggest raccoon of all lives right in my house, and he is me.
Get on the Ball!
“A chair is a very difficult thing,” concluded Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the great modernist designer and architect. It needs to be strong enough to support a person’s weight, and it must allow the sitter to assume a comfortable position for his or her chosen task - reading, writing, watching TV. And if you ever intend to move it, it needs to be made of materials light enough to allow that to happen.
Mies wasn’t even thinking of ADHD. In addition to the basic requirements, he didn’t consider the people who want — or need — to combine their sitting with bouncing, spinning, wiggling, or leaning back and forward.
If you, like me, are an ADHDer who has to spend a lot of time at a desk, sitting at a standard-issue office chair can be torture. You may have been the kid in class who endlessly twisted and turned on your chair in math class. Or you may have driven your parents crazy at the dinner table because no matter how much they pleaded with you, you just could not sit still. And now you have a job that requires you to sit at a desk, looking at a screen, for the better part of eight hours a day.
Maybe you need something different to sit on. Read more
Do You Like Bicycles?
16. Do you like bicycles, even if you don’t ride them any more?
-from Edward Hallowell’s ADD Self-Assessment quiz, in Delivered From Distraction
I love bicycles. Ever since pretending to be Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon, (riding a bike wholly unsuited for the job, with an ending that was, while less spectacular, just as final for the bike), I’ve had a passion for them. I’ve commuted all over Toronto by bicycle since I was a teenager, I’ve raced road and mountain bikes, I’ve done some bike camping. Weather permitting, I travel everywhere by bike, and now, I take my kids with me. In my garage, ten bicycles vie for maintenance and attention (4 are my wife’s - I married well - and two are my sons’, but still). That doesn’t include the well-used Burley trailer, the tandem Trail-A-Bike, two very small kids’ bikes, a couple of frames, and a unicycle I got for my 40th birthday. Lots of wheels and boxes of parts. Then there’s the tools. It’s all a bit much.
I realized that bikes and cycling were part of my ‘otherness’ when I first saw Breaking Away, the 1979 coming-of-age movie about a teenager who doesn’t fit into midwestern America. Dave longs to escape from the confines of his drab Indiana life. He wants to be an Italian bike racer. Breaking Away struck a chord with me not because it’s a great movie (it won an Oscar, and was nominated for several), but because I immediately understood the film’s use of the bike as a symbol of freedom, challenge, and escape. And though my life was hardly at all like that of the main character, I shared his experience of being unusual, not exactly a perfect fit with my surroundings. Like Dave, getting strong and fast on a bike was a way for me to embrace myself as a misfit (as far as North American sports of the 80s went). Cycling informed my identity. And on the road, with traffic to contend with and the world whizzing past my ears, my mind was calm and my thinking was clear. I remember the moment clearly: as I watched the scene where Dave drafts a truck at 50 m.p.h. to the strains of Mendolsohn’s ‘Italian’ symphony, a passion was born.
ADHD Kids Perform Better When Allowed to Move Around: Study
A study published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology March 10 found letting kids with ADHD move around may be helping them to focus on their work.
As it turns, in a group of boys aged 8-12 with ADHD, they were more successful on tasks requiring working memory when they were allowed to fidget, stand up, and be active in class. Even chewing gum (not a habit of which I am fond) can help to keep an ADHD mind stimulated. Read more
Successes Remembered
“Dad, I’m going to remember today as one of my best days,” said my son William cheerfully, as he prepared to head off to bed.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say anything like this. Though he’s in Grade 3, closing in on his ninth birthday in a few weeks, he seems more and more capable of the ennui of a junior high school kid these days. It seems like only a few weeks ago that he was a relentlessly cheerful and compliant little boy, but more and more he’s testing us, complaining more stridently about homework and chores, pushing the limits of acceptable family behaviour. Bedtime is one of his favourite areas of protest, and I was braced for a moderate amount of sulking, stomping, and grudging acceptance.
“I’m really glad to hear that,” I replied. “What made it such a good day?”
“Well, I got my green belt at karate today, and my school sweatshirt arrived, and it was Cub night and we’re working on our Kub Kars. And at recess my friends and I played some really fun games.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It really has been a pretty great day.”
What I enjoyed more than anything about what William said was how quickly and easily he was able to recall them, and to acknowledge that today really had been a bit above average. And while not all of the good things that happened were entirely of his doing, a couple of them sure were: the karate belt was the direct result of his steady practice, and recess turned out well when it was his turn to “lead” the games he played with his friends. He doesn’t always do it this well, but today, without prompting, my child recognized his own successes.
Most of us could certainly do a bit more of this. We live in a culture that is driven by fuelling unrealistic aspirations, for wealth, health, beauty, and a well-organized laundry room, and we’re constantly invited us to confess our failure to meet the standards of the day.
Many of my clients have experienced this sense of failure a great deal. Having lived with ADHD all their lives, they’ve heard a lot about where they’ve fallen short of expectations. They’re messy. They’re aways late. They don’t focus at school. They make impulsive decisions. They’re disappointing. The accumulated weight of all the unmet expectations is so great that they often don’t know how to begin to describe their successes. Finding ways to mend this wounded sense of self-esteem is at the root of healing the damage of ADHD.
I often ask my clients to create what I call a success log. I used to use the term success diary, but I found that the notion of keeping a diary seemed to elevate the level of stress many of them felt about recording their successes. Maybe diaries seem too overwhelming an idea. So my clients can call it whatever they like, put it in any format they like, and use the medium of their choice, but they have to use it regularly — daily if possible. I urge them to document all their successes, even those where it might seem they “didn’t do anything to deserve it.” In fact, it’s often those successes that at first blush appear to have simply happened that turn ou to be of the greatest interest, bringing connections to light that they hadn’t considered before.
My success log is a simple point-form list that I make on each week of my Moleskine 18-month Weekly Notebook planner. I try to make entries every day, and I keep them short. The point here is to capture the information, not to analyse it.
Where do you record your successes?
Reframing Redux
In my last post I wrote about the value of reframing as a technique for redirecting pessimistic and harmful perspectives on difficult situations by striving to view every situation - even those that might be seen as failures - as opportunities to learn and improve. Of course, there’s nothing new or magical about reframing; at its most basic level, it’s just another version of an extremely well-established principle, espoused by grandmothers the world over: always strive to look for the good in things (and people). Anyone who’s ever been reminded by a teacher or workshop leader about the most effective ways to give and receive feedback has learned it too: offer several positive observations for every one that might be seen as negative.
Most people find this remarkably easy to do when evaluating others. But many of us struggle to look as hard for the positive in ourselves. People with ADHD often find it especially hard. They’ve rarely heard much supportive, constructive feedback, and many have experienced a lifetime of largely negative criticism. No matter how beautiful the ‘pictures’ of their lives are, the ugliness of the ‘frame’ distracts them, and they fail to appreciate it.
I recently had a chance to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario, recently reopened after a breathtaking renovation by renowned architect Frank O. Gehry. Maybe it’s not surprising that an art gallery should get me thinking about reframing; pictures and frames are their stock in trade, after all. But I found myself thinking about the gallery itself. During its planning and construction, the renovation was sharply criticized by many commentators as a lipstick job, limited and superficial rather than substantial. My experience was entirely the opposite: I found it spectacular. And while many of the collections in the gallery were the same as they had been before the renovation, the “frame” of the gallery made it possible to experience the artwork in entirely new ways. I was able to look with fresh eyes at paintings and sculptures that I had seen many times since my first childhood visits to the gallery. The change to the frame enabled me to enjoy powerful new perspectives.
My reframing at the art gallery happened completely by chance, and the extra enjoyment I got from the act of reframing was an unexpected bonus. Most of the time it needs to be a more deliberate act, initiated to put a negative circumstance (or at best, a neutral one) into a new light . While there are countless ways to initiate, or trigger, the reframing process, my aim is to find the simplest most reliable cue that I can. Since my style of learning and retention responds well to words, music and sound, I looked for a sonic cue that I could trigger when faced with the need and opportunity to reframe. For the moment, I’ve settled on the hook of a popular song from the ’80s: “Freeze Frame,” by the J. Geils Band. I replaced the opening words to the song - the same two words as the title - with the word “RE-FRAME!”, sang it to myself in the urgent, explosive way that the song begins… and it resonated perfectly for me. I’ve never really liked the song, or the band, but their valuable contribution to my arsenal of helpful self-talk has helped me to reframe their place in my memory.
A Reminder to Reframe
My fragile, aging body reminded me yesterday of the importance of reframing difficult situations as worthy challenges. I’m signed up to race the 20 km Fischer Loppet at Hardwood Ski and Bike tomorrow, and despite my limited training this season, I’ve been feeling pretty good about it. I have fast new skis, I know the race course well, and I’ve been focusing a lot on good technique. But when I woke up yesterday morning, I knew right away I’d have at least one unexpected challenge on my plate: a bunch of muscles in and around my lower back were in agony. I herniated a lower back disk three years ago, and despite a nearly complete recovery, I’ve had to live with an injury-prone back ever since.
I was furious with myself. The strain was almost certainly a result of pushing too hard on my bike on Wednesday. I haven’t been to yoga - great for my back - in months. I could see a really race result slipping away.
As is so often the case, it was my wife who triggered the reframing. “You’re doing this to have fun, right?”
Yes, I agreed. I’m almost 43 -I’m not trying out for the Olympic team.
“And you can always withdraw.”
True. And if it keeps hurting like this, I will. I have a whole season of bike riding to look forward to, and I don’t want to risk that.
It’s often difficult for people with ADHD to see the positive side of things. Our attention has so often been called to what’s wrong that we have a hard time acknowledging what’s right. Certainly that’s how this flare-up in my back made me feel.
Peter Jensen, a superb motivational coach who works with elite athletes, taught me about the concept or reframing. Reframing involves taking the “picture” of your life, and taking it out of an ugly (negative, pessimistic) frame, and replacing it with a beautiful (postitive, optimistic) frame. The “picture” does not change, but the context changes completely.
Here’s how I reframed my back flare-up:
- I acknowledged that I race for fun, and that if I have to withdraw, I can.
- I took the injury as an opportunity to visit my friend Ed Tonus at Active Healing Centre. He’s the best massage therapist I know. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and he did a fantastic job working out the worst of the discomfort.
- I made a commitment to myself to devote more of my workout time to strengthening my core and improving my flexibility - both of which should reduce the chance of another injury.
- I reminded myself that my family and I have made the race a chance to get out of town for a couple of days and enjoy a hotel pool, sauna, and hot tub. My kids are thrilled.
Reframing isn’t always easy. But when you can make it happen, it’s a powerful way to turn a difficult situation into an opportunity for growth and positive change. I’ll be blogging more on techniques for managing personal change soon.
How to Love Monday — Start by not Hating it
I want to love Mondays. I mean it, I do. I want very, very much to be one of those people who launches forth into the week with a spring in his step and a well-flossed smile. The detritus and chaos of the weekend (in my family, that’s usually skis and boots in the winter, two days’ worth of cottage supplies in the summer, and always, always, the inexplicable mess in the breakfast room) will be squared away, and the house — and my wife and kids — will be ready and eager for a fresh start. When schoolyard conversations with other parents drift toward how hard Mondays are in their house, I find it all rather tiresome.
But secretly, I agree. Monday is hard, especially for families with school-aged kids. And when ADD is added to the mix, the risk of things going nuclear before the kids get to home room is substantial. I have ADD, and it’s possible that two of my three kids do, too. More than once in the final minutes before we all head out the door on Mondays, I’ve found myself barking like a drill sergeant to get jackets, boots, and backpacks in order before the long march to school. And by the time I wave (or if I’m lucky, am hugged) goodbye by my kids, my stomach is knotted with shame and regret. I’ve already had to tear the kids away from Harry Potter, Lego, and memories of the weekend. Why would I do anything that makes it even harder and more painful to begin the week?
As an ADD coach who works with adults and families to manage, among other things, the overwhelm of daily life, I feel like a bad parent when this happens, as well as a hypocrite. I’m neither of these things, of course — I’m a pretty good dad, I know it, and I’m not trying to buffalo my kids into grudging compliance. It just comes out that way sometimes. Overwhelmed by the task of juggling the needs of three kids under nine years old, I react by applying pressure. “Dad, the more you yell at us to go faster, the slower we get!” protests my eldest son. Never a truer word was said.
Einstein described insanity as dong the same thing over and over again and expecting the result to differ. In an effort to avoid being labeled insane (by even more people than already think I am), I’ve chosen to examine what I could do differently to get a different result. After looking for the root causes of these rough starts, I’ve created the 3 “L”s: a simple 3-step system that — here’s the critical part — I put into motion on Sunday night. If your family, like mine, gets caught behind the 8-ball on Monday mornings, try these steps:
- Laundry: I’ve wasted many, many valuable minutes furiously struggling to help my kids find clean clothes for Monday morning. Do a couple of loads of essential laundry on Sunday night. Even if they’re still in the dryer while you shower and eat breakfast, everyone can head off with clean clothes. Even better, if your laundry is caught up, especially for younger kids, help them choose their clothes for Monday as they go to bed Sunday night. Do the same for yourself –especially if a shirt needs ironing or shoes need polishing.
- Lunch: Is anyone staying at school for lunch? Do you take your lunch to work? Try preparing lunches as you clean up the kitchen after dinner the night before. Make sure lunch bags and Thermoses are ready to be loaded while you’re preparing breakfast.
- Launch: one well-known ADD coach advises creating a “Launch Pad” by the front (or back) door of your home. The launch pad contains all the crucial items you need for the day. If the launch pad is properly “loaded,” you minimise the chance of needing to scramble through the house to locate crucial items at the last minute. Consider creating a launch pad checklist (astronauts swear by them!). Launch pad checklists can be as long as they need to be. Mine looks this
- wallet
- keys
- mobile phone
- lunch
- briefcase, gym bag, backpack — don’t forget key books, files, running shoes, etc.
- in winter: gloves, hat, scarf
- in summer: bike helmet, bike shoes, bike lock
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different variations on the “3L” approach. People (and families) with ADD often find planning ahead to be a challenge. But once it’s structured into their routines in a way that works for them, they can be extremely organized and effective.
