What is ADHD? #069
What do you say when people ask you: What Is ADHD? I didn't have a good answer, so I dug into the scientific research. We're talking about the neuroscience of ADHD, what happens in your brain between the neurotransmitters, neurons, and synapses, that make up this medical condition. I'll also debunk some ADHD myths and common misconceptions, as well as explain how stimulants affect the ADHD brain. There is so much more to ADHD than meets the eye. When you understand how your brain works, you can be far more confident that your decisions fit your lifestyle and choices.
Mentions:
Patricia’s free class: Lower Your Holiday Stress
Attention Deficit Disorder by Dr Thomas Brown
DSM-5 Criteria for ADHD Diagnosis
The Disorganized Mom’s Guide to a Peaceful Morning: free how-to video series to bring calm to your mornings
Patricia Sung 00:03
Welcome to motherhood in ADHD. I'm your friend Patricia. My mission is to be a lighthouse for mothers with ADHD helping you find your path to success by learning to appreciate your ADHD as an asset I'm seeking to do change the paradigm that ADHD means your life is doomed to be a hot mess. So I'm sharing strategies and encouraging you in your pursuit of happiness to love who you are every day of your ADHD
Patricia Sung 00:37
Hey there successful mama, it's your friend Patricia. Okay, let's take a look at our review of the week. And this one comes from M Tivoli. She titled it heart.
Patricia Sung 00:48
Thank you so much, Patricia, for your messages of hope, encouragement and even challenge at times. I am a 34 year old mom of two little ones and discovered less than a year ago that I have non hyperactive ADHD, it was a relief to find out what was the root cause of many of my struggles. But it has also been difficult to know how to tackle some of them. Thanks to an ADHD Coach, your podcast and other resources, support and a lot of prayer. And beginning to find the grace I need to accept who I am, as well as the tools I need to improve where I can smiley face, keep up the good work, and God bless, Miss Tivoli, thank you so much. That review just embodies in a nutshell what I wish everyone would do in the first year of getting diagnosed with ADHD, I am so proud of you for seeking out help and resources right away, because a lot of us just kind of shoved it all down and pretended like it wasn't there for a while. And I am just so proud of you for taking those steps. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much for the sweet, sweet words of encouragement right back at me. And I am just so blessed that through this podcast, I can be just a tiny little piece of helping moms like you love themselves a little bit more and find their success and their motherhood. I'm going to encourage each one of you please scroll down to the bottom of the iTunes app and hit those five stars so that we can keep on sharing all this encouragement with our community.
Patricia Sung 02:23
So I was at lunch with a friend of mine earlier this week. And she is a counselor and she specializes in successful women who are struggling with something like anxiety or ADHD that's kind of holding them back. And she was telling you about this really cool new training that she had gone to. And the facilitator was saying, when you're working with people with ADHD, you need to have them focus on that feeling. And she said he couldn't explain it. But he said, if you ask somebody with ADHD, they'll just know the feeling of ADHD when you ask them to. And she was like, is that true? Do you just know the feeling I'm talking about? And I was like, Yep, exactly what feeling that is? So in her very counselor reweigh she asked was okay, like, can I ask more questions? And she was like, How does it feel, to have ADHD and I was trying to put into words what it's like, in my brain. And so I wanted to share with you in case this would resonate with you, what is it like inside my ADHD brain. And keep in mind, I'm not a doctor, or nurse or anyone with fancy letters behind their name. I'm just a girl with ADHD, who's going to share my experience here. In all the years that I've been researching ADHD, my favorite analogy is the train station one and I've known about it for years.
Patricia Sung 03:45
So I can't tell you where I heard it. I don't remember. Even if I read it last week, I probably wouldn't remember. But anyways, the train station analogy is that your brain is like the train station. And there's all these trains zooming in and out. And every thought is another train that comes zipping in and out of the station through and some of them are loud, and some of them are fast, and some of them are quiet and slow and chugging along. And some of them get stuck. But there's no one in charge of the train station. All the trains are just zooming in and out chugging over here, checking over there, and there's nobody telling the trains where to go. And so you end up with these collisions and trains start zipping out the station and you don't know where they're going. And it's just a lot of commotion. It's so much noise and action, and it's overwhelming. And also for me, I have like a fogginess to it where it's almost hard to identify some of the trains that are farther out and keep them all straight in which one is that and you're squinting and trying to figure out which train is that? Where is it going? And it's just it's overwhelming. Like I'm even getting a little panicky just talking about it. And so, the issue is I can't prioritize which train matters most because just because a train is loud and obnoxious, that thought doesn't necessarily need to be at the top of the priority list. And I can't tell which one is the most important. And usually the noisy things get the most attention. But that's not a correlation.
Patricia Sung 05:17
Like for me, if I'm sitting in like a restaurant, or I'm at a dinner party, and there's another conversation going on very close to me, it's like somebody's like sending lasers into my brain with their conversation. And as much as I want to tune them out, even if I'm really not interested at all in what they're talking about, I can't turn them down and ignore that noise. It's still right there in my ear. And I think about like, when, if there's like a low priority thing, like one of the things I was joking about with Carolyn is like, we got off on a tangent, and she's like, No, hold on, let's let that train, just circle back around. And I laughed, and I was like, I know that we can, because I'm with you, like, you'll make sure that train circles back around. But if I were to say to that train, circle back around, I don't know where it's gonna go, or when it will be back, or even if it will be back at all.
Patricia Sung 06:05
So that's why I'm always writing things down. Because when I think about them, if I don't write them down, then like, that trains off, and it's it's gone. And maybe a comeback, I don't know, but it might not. And sometimes these fast, shiny trains zip in, and you jump on the train, because it looks exciting. And you want to know where it's going. And then you look up three hours later and realize, like, Oh, crap, where am I. And if that's something you needed to hyper focus on, like a work project, then that's great, you probably did just six hours of work in that three hours that you are hyper focused on that activity. But the problem is, if you're supposed to be doing something else, and all of a sudden, you're like, finding the end of the interwebs. Like, that's a problem, you didn't need to spend an hour investigating something that doesn't really matter. And so easily, you can get hyper focused on things that aren't relevant at the time. And then you're frustrated, because you look up and you're like, wait, I'm not even sure how I ended up where I ended up. But this is not where I want to be. And I because there's no one in control of the train station. It's not like there's anyone there to say, Oh, don't don't get on that one.
Patricia Sung 07:13
That's not a good one, come back over here, you belong on the beat train, don't get on. If it's a bad one, that doesn't happen. And then you have the issue of sometimes the slow unassuming trains, bike, the laundry train, or the dishes in the sink train are just kind of bumping around back and forth, not getting anywhere, and they just pile up because no one was paying attention to the boring train. That's not fun. So that means that those routine things that need to get accomplished in life don't get accomplished. The other thing I like to explain is like if you're trying to learn something, and you need a quiet space to focus, and someone takes you to Time Square, to do this important focus thing. Like a lot of times I you know, look around in different ADHD like Facebook groups and stuff to try to see what people are struggling with. And one of the things I often see is like they're trying to get their kid to learn something. And I'm like, Well, you can't try to teach a kid how to learn to read.
Patricia Sung 08:13
If you're sitting in Times Square, there's no way anyone could focus in that environment with all the flashing lights and the electronic billboards, and the people bustling around and the taxis flying by in the honking like it's just so much it's overwhelming. You can't concentrate on something that you really need to like hone in on to learn. You can't turn down Time Square, you can't tune it out. It's not possible. So to ask someone with ADHD to just pay attention harder, I mean, imagine if you're sitting in Times Square and somebody's like, here, I need you to mental math, add up these numbers or whatever thing that's going to be difficult for you like that's hard. And while I'm not a hyperactive person, I don't have the hyperactivity portion. In terms of my body. I still have hyperactivity in my mind, like my brain is always going, I can't turn it off. I'm also hyperactive and my fidgeting, like I'm constantly bouncing my leg or fiddling with my fingernails, they're still that motor that never slows down. And so what can we do about this erratic train station? For me, medicine makes a huge difference. It just lifts the fog out of the train station.
Patricia Sung 09:25
So I can clearly identify all of the trains. And it also gives me like a control tower kind of view where I'm up high. Birds I can look down in survey instead of being in the midst of all the trains running around like crazy, I can look down and see what's going where and have a little more direction. And I'm going to do a whole episode on a medicine. I've had one kind of brewing in my head, but it's a touchy subject. So I have kind of laid off on it. But I think I'm ready to jump into that soon. But basically just Keep in mind that just throwing medicine at things doesn't solve problems. I love the saying pills don't give skills, like just because the medicine lifts the fog and gives me a bird's eye view from the control tower doesn't mean I magically know how to use the control tower buttons like you still have to build that skill of learning to use all of your tools. It's just that the medicine creates an environment in which you can learn better, it's not going to magically make you know stuff. It's not a magic fairy godmother that waves a wand and then your life's together. But it does give you a calmer, more organized environment once you found the correct medicine and the correct dosage, which is a whole project in itself. So I'll just let that one go there.
Patricia Sung 10:48
But another thing that helps me a lot is my routines, I'm very routine oriented. I never realized how much I loved routines until I started teaching middle school in your you know, in your day is very routine driven by the periods of the day. And that made such a huge difference for me in creating those habits and loving that routine. Because routine allows me to get finished the things that have to get done, and give me the freedom to then have space for fun stuff. Because I'm not enjoying myself when there's mountains of dirty dishes in the sink and piles of laundry to be done. And my house is a disaster and things aren't getting done. Like I'm not happy when my life is chaotic.
Patricia Sung 11:34
So I like routines for the end goal of having calm in my life. And I've spent a lot of time building those skills to be able to do all of the things I need to get done. I tend to work with white noise that allows me to drown out all of the lower volume things, so that I can only focus on what's standing out, which is really important to me, and and the main thing that I think is really hard about all these solutions, it is all trial and error, what works for me, isn't going to 100% work for you. And what works for you isn't 100% going to work for me, you're going to have to take pieces and parts of what I suggest and find the recipe that works right for you. And the whole thing about trial and error means you're going to have to try a lot of stuff. So you got to get to try and but then no, you're gonna have a lot of error, there's gonna be a lot of things that just don't work for you. And that's okay, if everything works for everybody, we'd all be these little robots that had no creativity, just know that in this trial and error process, you have to try a lot. So there's a lot of effort involved. And there's gonna be a lot of error, a lot of things that don't work out and that's okay, but that's leading you to the solution that does, I hope that my train station analogy from some brilliant mind that I can't remember is helpful to you. In maybe you trying to explain this to somebody else on how the thoughts can be overwhelming and feel out of control. And that you can find some comfort in knowing that you're not the only one with a fast mind that just zips around all the time.
Patricia Sung 13:21
So successful mama if you want to find some more folks that are like you please join me in our motherhood and ADHD community on Facebook. We just started it so you can be one of the first members and I'd love to have you in there sharing your stories and encouraging other mamas in their journey together towards a successful motherhood. Okay, love you lots and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to motherhood and ADHD. For more resources head over to our website. www dot motherhoodinadhd.com