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.
