artsymaci

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“Know this: you can start over each new morning.”

— Unknown

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happy valentine’s day! i hope you had some good chocolate!

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Adhd is forgetting what you were thinking about/saying 0.2 seconds ago

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When you’re trying SO HARD to verbalize how you feel or what something feels like but… words…just…don’t… work??

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Time blindness is the weirdest aspect of executive dysfunction and so weird as an experience to live with. It’s like you see the clock, the clock says 3pm, you look at the clock again and it’s 3:02, then 3:05, and then you look again and it’s 8pm and WHAT THE FUCK.

You don’t even need hyperfocus. But hyperfocus is like the Warp Speed:tm: version cause when that hits, it’s 3pm and then it’s the next day and why is the sun rising and when did i last eat and oh god i need to use the bathroom. And oh, also, you’re EXHAUSTED. The act of your brain tunnel visioning on something drains you (but that’s another topic).

Time blindness is…. having the general knowledge that today is Wednesday, and you need to do something on Thursday. Thursday is logically tomorrow, but the mysterious void of time is like ‘that’s like next week or something.’  It’s knowing you have to do something in three weeks on the 21st. And as the days creep closer, the 21st is stuck in a constant state of still being 3 weeks away, despite the fact it’s now tomorrow.

It’s wild. ADHD is literally living in a constant state of “There is Now. And there is Later.” and there’s no in between; no dates, no times; no hours, weeks, or months. It’s just Now and Later, and oh god why is is X o’clock already!?

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How You Should Not Speak to Someone With ADHD

If you, your child, or your spouse/partner has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), you may inevitably encounter naysayers who simply do not understand the condition and its impact in everyday life.

Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions about ADHD and these misunderstandings can be very hurtful to people living with ADHD. Some inaccurately render ADHD as a myth or a fraud a “made up” disorder which is over-diagnosed and over-medicated. Others perceive ADHD as a benign, inconsequential condition that is easily managed with good parenting and disappears as a child moves into adulthood.

Whether you are the parent of a child with ADHD, the partner or spouse of someone with ADHD, or have ADHD yourself, you have likely heard some (or all) of the following faulty and provoking statements about ADHD.

If you are someone who wants to be supportive of a family living with ADHD, you may be interested in the following list.

1. “ADHD isn’t real. Why don’t we just let kids be kids?”

2. “Everybody has a little ADHD. It isn’t a big deal.”

3. “ADHD is too quickly and too frequently diagnosed.”

These first faulty statements have to do with the validity of ADHD as a real condition. Friends may innocently claim to have had an “ADD moment” or to have “a little bit of ADHD.” You may hear people complain that “we don’t let kids be kids anymore” or that “we are too quick to diagnose a child who is simply active and energetic.” Certainly, everyone experiences occasions of forgetfulness and inattention. And what parent hasn’t experienced their child’s behaviors veering out of control? These are normal occurrences.

For children and adults with ADHD, however, these are more than an occasional problem. For someone with ADHD, symptoms are present at such intensity that they significantly impair day-to-day life.

4. “If you would just try a little harder, you would do better.”

5. “He (or she) is just lazy.”

6. “People use ADHD as an excuse for bad behavior.”

Sometimes, people make the inaccurate assumption that if a child or adult with ADHD would just “try harder” they could be more successful. This can lead the person with ADHD to be labeled in negative ways “He is just lazy” or “She is apathetic and just doesn’t try.” To add fuel to this fire, it is common for someone with ADHD to show fairly dramatic fluctuations and inconsistencies in their performance. It can be puzzling to others when someone is able to complete tasks quickly and correctly at times, while at other times they perform these same tasks quite poorly.

This uneven pattern of productivity and accuracy is common for someone with ADHD and can be beyond frustrating for those who don’t fully understand the impairments associated with ADHD. The truth is that people with ADHD exert a tremendous amount of energy and effort just trying to organize, focus and keep themselves on track. ADHD is never an “excuse” for behavior, but it is often an “explanation” that can guide you toward strategies and interventions that can be of help in better managing symptoms.

7. “That child just needs more discipline.”

8. “ADHD is caused by poor parenting.”

Unfortunately, many parents of children with ADHD have to deal with these types of judgments around their parenting ability. It is simply not true that poor parenting or a lack of disciple in the home leads to ADHD. It is true that children with ADHD can be much more challenging to parent! It’s easy to become frustrated and doubt your own parenting skills when you have a child with ADHD, especially when these misperceptions around the causes of ADHD exist. ADHD is a neurobiological condition that is primarily caused by genetics.

Certainly, a person’s environment can have an influence on the expression of ADHD. Both children and adults with ADHD benefit from structure, routines, and behavioral interventions.

9. “Students with ADHD who receive special accommodations have unfair advantages.”

If ADHD is affecting learning and impairing academic performance in the classroom, a student may receive instructional support and accommodations. The purpose of such special accommodations is to ensure that the individual educational needs of the student with disabilities are met as adequately as the needs of those students without disabilities. Rather than giving an unfair advantage to students with ADHD, it levels the playing field.

10. “ADHD in females is less severe than ADHD in males.”

It is a common misconception that girls and women with ADHD are less affected by their symptoms than males with ADHD. The fact is females with ADHD experience significant struggles that are often overlooked. Females with ADHD are often misdiagnosed as having depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. Girls with unrecognized, untreated ADHD tend to internalize problems to a much greater degree and are at increased risk for cigarette smoking, alcohol/drug abuse, sexual promiscuity/pregnancy/STDs, self-injurious behaviors and overall lower self-esteem as compared to their male counterparts.

Like undiagnosed males with ADHD, undiagnosed females are also at risk for chronic underachievement. The difficulty mothers with ADHD face coping with the demands of everyday life can easily overflow into parenting. Because of the genetic link to ADHD, many of these mothers will be parenting children with ADHD children who require even more in terms of organization, attention, and consistency.

Accurate Information on ADHD

The above myths and faulty statements that are so frequently spoken are especially harmful because these inaccurate beliefs often prevent parents of children with ADHD and adults with ADHD from seeking treatment. Without appropriate interventions and supports, many continue to struggle needlessly. It is important to correct these misperceptions.

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Why We Feel So Intensely: Understanding ADHD Emotions

Anger, outbursts, anxiety, irritability, impatience: more than most people, ADHDers can be driven by emotions.

by Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D., author of Smart but Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

Emotions Rule

Few doctors factor in emotional challenges when making an ADHD diagnosis. In fact, current diagnostic criteria for ADHD include no mention of “problems with emotions.” Yet recent research reveals that those with ADHD have significantly more difficulty with low frustration tolerance, impatience, hot temper, and excitability than a control group.

Processing Emotion: A Brain Thing

Challenges with emotions start in the brain itself. Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong, flooding the brain with one intense emotion. At other times, the person with ADHD seems insensitive or unaware of the emotions of others. Brain connectivity networks carrying information related to emotion seem to be somewhat more limited in individuals with ADHD.

Fastening on a Feeling

When an adolescent with ADHD becomes enraged when a parent refuses him use of the car, for example, his extreme response may be due to “flooding” – a momentary emotion that can gobble up all of the space in an ADHDer’s head just like a computer virus can gobble up all of the space on a hard drive. This focus on one emotion crowds out other important information that might help him modulate his anger and regulate his behavior.

Extreme Sensitivity to Disapproval

ADHDers often become quickly immersed in one salient emotion and have problems shifting their focus to other aspects of a situation. Hearing a slight uncertainty in a coworker’s reaction to a suggestion may lead to interpreting this as criticism and an outburst of inappropriate self-defense without having listened carefully to the coworker’s response.

Bottled Up by Fear

Significant social anxiety is a chronic difficulty experienced by more than one third of teens and adults with ADHD. They live almost constantly with exaggerated fears of being seen by others as incompetent, unappealing, or uncool.

Giving In to Avoidance and Denial

Some people with ADHD don’t suffer from a lack of awareness of important emotions but from an inability to tolerate those emotions enough to deal effectively with them. They become caught up in behavior patterns to avoid painful emotions that seem too overwhelming – looming deadlines or meeting an unfamiliar group of people.

Carried Away with Emotion

For many ADHDers, the brain’s gating mechanism for regulating emotion does not distinguish between dangerous threats and more minor problems. These individuals are often thrown into panic mode by thoughts or perceptions that do not warrant such a reaction. As a result, the ADHD brain can’t deal more rationally and realistically with events that are stressful.

Sadness and Low Self-Esteem

People with untreated ADHD can suffer from dysthymia – a mild but long-term form of depression or sadness. It is often brought on by living with the frustrations, failures, negative feedback, and stresses of life due to untreated or inadequately treated ADHD. People who are dysthymic suffer almost every day from low energy and self-esteem.

Emotions and Getting Started

Emotions motivate action­ – action to engage or action to avoid. Many people with untreated ADHD can readily mobilize interest only for activities offering very immediate gratification. They tend to have severe difficulty in activating and sustaining effort for tasks that offer rewards over the longer term.

Emotions and Getting Started 2

Brain imaging studies demonstrate that chemicals that activate reward-recognizing circuits in the brain tend to bind on significantly fewer receptor sites in people with ADHD than do those in a comparison group. People with ADHD are less able to anticipate pleasure or register satisfaction with tasks for which the payoff is delayed.

Emotions and Working Memory

Working memory brings into play, consciously and/or unconsciously, the emotional energy needed to help us organize, sustain focus, monitor and self-regulate. Many ADHDers, though, have inadequate working memory, which may explain why they are often disorganized, lose their temper, or procrastinate.

Emotions and Working Memory 2

Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong. At other times, working memory impairments leave the person with insufficient sensitivity to the importance of a particular emotion because he or she hasn’t kept other relevant information in mind.

Treating Emotional Challenges

Treating the emotional challenges of ADHD requires a multimodal approach: It starts with a careful and accurate evaluation for ADHD, one that explains ADHD and its effect on emotions. ADHD medication may improve the emotional networks in the brain. Talk therapy can help a person manage fear or low self-esteem. Coaching may help a person overcome problems with getting boring tasks completed.

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Not to be controversial but…

You cant fucking “grow out” of ADHD

You cant grow out of nurodevelopmental disorders, just because you “can’t sit still” doesn’t mean you have ADHD

You will never grow out of it, and you will have to learn to live with it.

If you say “i had ADHD” when you were younger you’ve either learned how to live with it really well or you never had ADHD.

Just because you were a hyper active little shit when you were younger doesnt mean your fucking ADHD.

Well that the tea, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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“People who show you new music are important.”

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REBLOG IF I CAN BE YOUR FRIEND.

& message you without being judged.

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I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed

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a balanced dinner at 4:00 of alphabet chicken nuggets, fries, and dr. pepper

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ATTENTION ALL GIRLS AND LADIES: if you walk from home, school, office or anywhere and you are alone and you come across a little boy crying holding a piece of paper with an address on it, DO NOT TAKE HIM THERE! take him straight to the police station for this is the new 'gang' way of rape. The incident is getting worse. Warn your families. Reblog this so this message can get accross to everyone.

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all pedophiles should die and theres literally no downside to them all dropping dead

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this is the money dog, repost in the next 24 hours and money will come your way!!