Brain Bubble

I'm currently taking a workshop through work. This week, they assigned a little over half an hour of video as part of the prep work, including a 20 minute video. When I pointed out that this was an accessibility issue and could be a major hurdle for some people (including me!) I got the response "You're right, without captioning, the videos aren't fully accessible." Once I explained that wasn't the only issue, the teacher did see the concern and thank me for the feedback, but I'm really frustrated by the frequent repetition of this. They also explicitly said that some of them were concerned not to assign only print/text. I believe that I may be an extreme point on this, but I have heard from so many people with ADHD that learning from videos is really hard. Especially slow, talk heavy videos. I think this is an issue that is frequently ignored: obviously videos are easier for everyone, right? I want to figure out a way to push, at least at my own instituti...

One of the kids in my house is a classic super bright, extremely ADHD kid. While we've had some issues along the way, she has a team of adults, including family, teachers and psych professionals who understand what she is dealing with and want to help her, rather than punishing her. I look at this and I'm so glad she has it, and at the same time, I can't help but feel envious. When I was a kid, if you were smart enough to get by, anything else you did was just acting out. No one talked about helping with your focus issues, they just chastised you for not paying attention. If you got good grades, you could get away with a lot, but also no one would acknowledge the ways that you were struggling. I was lucky. I did have some help from my mother in very informal ways, I had a few excellent teachers who helped where they could, and I figured out a lot of coping strategies on my own.  Still, I have to wonder what it would have been like not to have to figure it all out for myself...

Sometimes you finally accomplish some terrible impossible task that you've been putting off for so many months that it is painful and embarrassing. It takes (of course) 10-15 minutes and is ridiculously simple. At the end of it, you are torn between being proud of yourself for finally having DONE THE THING and furious at yourself for putting this trivial thing off for many months.

Important Note: This was first written in March 2020. Read the rest in that context: I am fine. I'm coping and I have two wonderful partners here who support me. I am getting things done, I am not causing or risking harm to myself or anyone else. Nothing serious is wrong, outside of the world falling apart. I have really good coping strategies. They work as long as I'm not under extreme stress and I'm able to use them. When they break down, I notice quickly. Not too long after, the people around me start to notice. Right now, I'm struggling because of general stress and anxiety about the world and people I care about, because my rituals are severely disrupted (I can't go to the gym, I'm not at the office), because I'm getting very little completely focused alone time, and because I don't have access to any social outlets that charge my extrovert battery. Some of my coping strategies I can still use: ones that are completely internal, and ones that I can ...

I’ve focused a lot so far on the struggles I have with my brain and how I cope with them. That’s important, but I don’t want to ignore the benefits of how my brain works. Today I’m going to talk about how my distractability can be a very good thing. I can be distracted fairly easily from basically anything that I’m not currently hyperfocused on. That sounds like a bad thing, and--to be honest--a lot of the time it is. However, knowing and harnessing that makes it much easier for me to extract myself from bad mental spaces, brainsucking loops and even just grumpy moods. If I’m upset about something, and I realize that my upset state is not productive, I have a set of patterns that allow me to process as much as is productive, and then actively utilize distraction to take myself away from it. As previously mentioned, I’m a high-energy, high-intensity, high-enthusiasm person. As long as I can find something to be excited about right now, I can engineer a switch to a more positive emotiona...

To be clear, I know everyone deals with impostor syndrome, and I do not have clinical anxiety. As far as I can tell, I tend to think about things in many of the same ways as my friends who do, and have many very similar thought patterns and obsessive thought cycles, but mostly I don't find it distressing. I also don't seem to get hit by rejection sensitive dysphoria the same way that a lot of my ADHD friends do. I think some of this is real, and some of this is very long established coping strategies. But I want to express gratitude to all of you who are following these posts, and seeing yourself in them and comparing experiences. I have a Ph.D. and a good job, and successful relationships. I'm happy and have had the right combination of privilege, luck, and a lot of hard work, to build a life that I love. I also have never had any diagnosis for any of the things I'm describing.  The fact that I don't have a professional diagnosis and that I've done so well for ...

As I mentioned in my self-description, I am a very impulsive person. It's easy for me to make major decisions on the spur of the moment, or get wrapped up in something I'm excited about now, even if now is a terrible time to be doing that, or maybe it's really not something I should be doing at all. This is particularly true if I'm in a high energy, high excitement state. Since I go hard into extrovert mode when I'm around people I like, and absorb energy from those situations, I'm basically in that sort of state any time I'm at a party, con, or similar situation. This can be a dangerous combination, given all the exciting people! In addition, if I'm hyperfocused on something, it's really easy for me to miss really obvious clues in my surroundings, and make bad decisions because of it.  To help address both of these issues, I make a lot of my decisions in advance, and force myself to abide by those decisions in the moment, even if I don't want to...

I just finished a workout, so I think it's time that I tackle what is probably my second most important coping strategy after my external brain. I mentioned in my description that I am very much classic hyperactive subtype ADHD. My brain wants to be moving all the time. Small fidgets help a little bit, but only a little. Getting up and walking around the apartment periodically helps a bit more, but doesn't fix the problem. In order to get basically anything productive done that requires sitting, I need to be getting at least an hour of real exercise in a day. It doesn't have to be high intensity, but it has to be one or two solid blocks of time when I can really get moving. If I'm struggling with work in the middle of the day, one of the most useful things I can do is go to the gym or go for a bike ride. When I come back, I'll have much more focus. As a physiologist, I can talk about Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor, and things like that, but I really think the key ...

This morning, I spent 15 minutes processing an email task. That sounds routine, except that the email and the task had been sitting around for literally months. A truly ridiculous and embarrassing amount of time for a trivial task. There was nothing particularly terrible about this email. It was just impossible.  The impossible task is something I struggle with a lot. I am not going to talk in this post about how I get myself to do impossible tasks. As demonstrated above, I don't have a great solution. If I did, they wouldn't be impossible anymore. I can talk in the future about how I try to deal with them, but the truth is, I often fail. Sometimes for months, like with the stupid email. What I am going to talk about is how I try to have failing to do the impossible task not spill over to be a problem in the rest of my life. The biggest issue with impossible tasks is that sometimes the fact that I can't do that, means I also can't do anything else, because that's th...

I live a very complicated, and very organized life. One that most people I know would have trouble managing. And yet I have an extremely disorganized brain and cannot keep anything straight. The (not really at all) secret: I'm a very disorganized human, but a very organized cyborg. I figured out in middle school that I couldn't live the life I wanted without a lot of external help. With the help of my parents, I started figuring out ways to keep all the information that I needed straight outside my head. It took a long time to get anything consistent and useful, and I went through many different options, but the fact that I started depending on external resources very heavily and very young meant that I got really good at it. I am also someone to whom small repetitive rituals are supportive and comforting. I know that this is true for some ADHD people and not others. I have ritual patterns that somewhat resemble compulsive rituals (although they are not generally connected to o...

I'm going to start this off with a brief (ok, I failed at brief) summary of how my particular brain works. Warning: this got very long. The main (and probably most obvious) oddness of how my brain works basically boils down to ADHD. This has never been technically diagnosed, but it seems accurate, and it's a good enough shorthand for me. Since ADHD presentation is hugely variable, I'm going to list the ways in which this mainly manifests in me.  - I am absolutely incapable of sitting or standing still. I'm pretty classic hyperactive, in ways that most people seem to grow out of. I never have.  - My brain prioritizes anything that is moving or talking over anything that isn't. Absolutely, full stop, under all circumstances.  - I am extremely impulsive. If I don't have things in place to stop myself, I will make major changes and decisions on a whim.  - My brain is a very disorganized place. I have very little ability to pull specific facts out at specific points,...