You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (46 page)

Why Do We Have to Read So
Much About Meditation?

Some of you are probably wondering why we are spending so much time on meditation in an ADD book. There are all kinds of books out there on meditation—how to do it, why to do it, and so on. Those books can be
helpful, but they don’t speak directly to the ADD experience—namely, that the brain noise is so much louder and the restlessness several notches more intense than for those without the ADD challenge. They also don’t address the reasons for apparent “failure” in the past.

The other reason for including this material is that we believe it is absolutely critical for ADDers to develop some form of
accessing a meditative state of mind. We pick up some habits in the course of compensating for ADD that serve us poorly in the long run. One of the most common and the most deadly is the habit of running on adrenaline. This is how the pattern begins: Early on, we discover that excitement wakes up our sleepy brains. We then, generally without conscious thought or choice, arrange our lives in such
a way that there is a fair amount of drama and crisis happening on a regular basis.

Now, we know you may be reacting to what we said in the previous paragraph. Your experience is that the drama and crisis happen because ADD makes you foggy about details, or forgetful. The drama is the result of dropped balls and missed deadlines, right?

The answer is: yes and no. Of course the fogginess of ADD
is a major player in the less than tidy experience of living with the disorder. The question to ask is not which explanation for the resulting mess is true, but how do the contributing factors work together. At this point in time we don’t really know the answer to the chicken or egg question when it comes to ADD. We do, however, have an inkling about how the sleepy brain phenomenon and the adrenaline
habit interact.

The Stimulus Junkie

Let’s start with the core symptom of ADD … a brain that is not awake and alert enough to function at an optimal level. The owner of said brain (we’ll call her Carol) discovers that she can improve matters by feeding it more stimulation. Adding more activities to her busy schedule is one method, so is waiting until the very last minute, creating a fear-based
deadline crisis. Short term, these strategies solve the snoozing brain problem. There is an immediate rush of neurotransmitters available to help Carol push through the tasks at hand.

Carol learned to be a stimulus junkie in her teens. She didn’t find out she had ADD until she was thirty-seven years old. She had no medication or information about how her brain worked when she was forming her life habits. Those habits have been practiced so many times they are like second nature. The
grooves of those habit patterns are deeply etched in Carol’s mind at this point.

Carol hires
one of us as an ADD coach. She has been on medication for several months and is wondering why her life is still chaotic. She has a schedule that would break the back of most human beings. There is no room for the kind of personal time that would allow her to rest and rejuvenate. Carol is wondering if she needs to be on a higher dose of medicine.

Maybe, maybe not. This is where the chicken and
egg problem gets tricky. In some cases, having a little medicine is worse than none at all. You have enough stimulant on board to be more aware that your functioning is not optimal, but not enough to solve the problems. So sometimes the answer is to increase the dose of stimulant. However, it is never the final solution. The only thing medicine does for you is to turn down the noise and thus help
you become available for the learning. We are not talking about formal school at this point but the life classroom in which we are all enrolled.

Coaching Carol

Carol is not exactly flunking at the moment, but she is on probation. She gets sick a lot, is often angry and impatient with friends and family and still has difficulty making progress on the goals she has set for herself. As coaches,
how do we help Carol get off probation and onto the track of steady growth and progress?

Our initial-session homework has three parts. First, we would give Carol a prescription to begin some form of meditative practice. She might have an interest in yoga, tai chi, knitting or walking. It doesn’t matter which … they all work. Next, we would request that she read our chapter on balance and begin
to look at ways she can eliminate some of the tasks on that massive “to do” list she has going. Finally, we would ask Carol to put a time space between any request and her response. For the next week she is to answer any requests for help with “I will
consider your request and get back to you” … in an hour, the next day or next week—whichever time frame seems appropriate. Of course, if one of
her children has fallen out of a tree and is hollering for help because he has a broken leg, Carol has permission to respond immediately. Anything other than a true medical emergency, however, can handle a delay in response.

You may have guessed where we are going with Carol’s coaching homework. Our intention is to help Carol take the first baby steps toward awareness of the need for personal
breathing space. Note that we used the word “awareness.” We don’t expect Carol to report back in a week’s time having started a daily meditation practice and tossed out all the extraneous busyness in her life in one fell swoop. Often, the first week, or even the first several weeks, of ADD coaching are spent dealing with the ADDults’ guilt because—oh gosh, oh golly—the dog seems to have eaten their
homework! Our job as coaches in this case is to normalize the clients’ experience. To reassure them that it takes time to form new habits and that our many successful clients also generally started out in a hit-or-miss fashion.

So Carol comes to next week’s coaching call apologizing profusely because she didn’t have time to read the book chapter, only remembered to put the time space in once
and missed the tai chi class she intended to take. We then congratulate Carol for taking the first steps—she thought about reading the chapter, remembered at least once to delay her response to a request and found a class for herself. Great! Even more important, Carol had a big aha about the impact of her frantic style on her ability to function. She observed herself in motion as a result of our initial
conversation and noticed that she made more mistakes and snapped at her children on days packed with back-to-back activity.

Now Carol is ready to own the problem. She recognizes the need to slow down, even if she isn’t sure yet how to make that happen. Over time, we will help Carol take the steps necessary to “deadrenalize” her mind, her body and her life.

The following is a list of principles we would work with in the initial weeks and months coaching Carol:

1. Much of the speed involved in an adrenalized lifestyle is self-induced.
   
2. It is possible to resist the hurry-up entreaties of others.
   
3. Nothing is worth compromising your mental, physical and spiritual health.
   
4. It’s okay to clear your schedule of everything other than basic survival activities.
   
5. The time you free up by doing #4 is to be used only for self-care until you have calmed yourself down.
   
6. If you get caught up in your responsibilities to your children, spouse, relatives, coworkers … remember this handy dandy rule from the airlines: “Put your oxygen mask on first, and then assist your child.”
   
7. To our knowledge, no family ever died from eating pizza seven days in a row.
   
8. Never underestimate the importance of a full night’s sleep. Running on empty in the sleep department will definitely lead to more stress and difficulties in the typical ADDer’s life.
   

Most of the resistance to following these principles comes from the belief that you will turn into Rip Van Winkle and snooze for all eternity if you get off the frantic treadmill. If you don’t push yourself, this thinking goes, the whole show will just stop. You will
never be a functional member of society again.

We promise that if you take the time to slow down and make real choices about your life, your functioning will eventually far
exceed your performance (even on your very best brain days) in hurry-up mode.

In true ADD style, we just took a somewhat meandering path from our statement about the interaction between the sleepy brain and the adrenaline
habit. So be it. There really was a point to the apparent detour. We needed to cover some background before we proceeded with this discussion.

Carol’s Brain Boosting Methods

Let’s go back to Carol. Because she has lived her life with a brain that is not consistently alert, she has learned various means to give it a jump-start:

1. Scaring herself—this is what she is doing when she waits till the last minute.
   
2. Creating excitement—drama, too many things to do.
   
3. Mentally beating herself up (this is what she is doing when she makes herself wrong for failing to do her “homework” properly). S’M folks say that they engage in certain practices because it is stimulating. The mental version can produce similar results.
   

Of course, this is a very short list. There are a gazillion ways to stimulate,
or overstimulate, yourself. High-risk activities such as speeding come to mind. But we won’t get into all the ways and means in this discussion.

Earlier, we stated that an adrenalized lifestyle was deadly. This is both literally and figuratively true, but we will address that a bit later.

The immediate problem for Carol is that the temporary methods she uses to pump up those brain chemicals
act much like the junkie’s fix. There is a short-term rush of increased functioning, followed by a crash. The crash may involve complete
shutdown, with the need for a nap, or a day spent in bed. Often, the crashee doesn’t actually stop in his or her tracks but continues to limp along in a shuffling imitation of their daily routine. This phenomenon is a variation on the out-of-body experience …
one’s body goes through the motions, but the mind is on some other planet somewhere.

The symptoms of ADD are magnified during a postadrenaline crash. Yes indeed, the adrenaline solution creates the very problem it is intended to solve. In addition, the crash and recovery time take longer than the time spent functioning in adrenaline mode. We know this because we have observed the results of a
stimulus junkie pattern in ourselves and in over a hundred clients. This brings us back to the interaction of the “not alert enough” brain and stimulus addiction. Which comes first is almost impossible to tease out in ADDulthood. They feed upon and magnify each other. It is essential to address both problems in order to stop the vicious cycle of adrenalization and crash.

Working with the M & Ms

In this part of the book, what was formerly (in the first edition) a series of chapters on treatment has become a section labeled The “M & M & M & Ms”—short and catchy for meditation, medication, mental hygiene and moving forward. In our experience, both as ADDults and ADD coaches, these four areas of focus are essential components of a successful recovery plan.

All the “Ms” work together in
concert to help you clear away the mental debris that interferes with your optimal functioning.

Here is a little story that illustrates how the M & M & M & Ms can interact to break up a stimulus junkie pattern:

Dave is an ADDult in his fifties who originally hired Kate as an ADD coach. He hoped that coaching would help, because medication had been a disaster for him—or so he thought at
the time.
Dave described himself as sensitive to medications in general. He said that taking medication caused unbearable anxiety. He tried some herbal remedies and found that St. John’s wort helped him a little bit with depression.

Since medication was not an option, Kate and Dave focused on meditation and mental hygiene in their sessions. Dave learned to put a space between requests and his response
to the request. Over time, he was able to be more mindful about how he spent his days, and got rid of a lot of unnecessary stress/activity in his life. They worked on Dave’s self-talk (mental hygiene), helping him to relanguage old, self-defeating beliefs about himself. It became apparent that much of Dave’s frantic lifestyle was a result of his sense that he wasn’t good enough, that he had always
been “behind” and therefore had to run like hell to play catch-up. Dave also began a practice of moving meditation, gradually making it an integral part of his daily routine. Eventually, Dave expanded the mindful mind-set from his meditation practice to situations in his everyday life. As he describes it, he settled his system down. He was no longer addicted to adrenaline. At this point, Dave decided
to give stimulant medication another try. This time, the medication trials were successful. He found an optimal dose and kind of stimulant that increased his alertness without increasing his anxiety. The interesting part of this story is that the medicine that finally worked for Dave was one of the ones he had tried before he began coaching. When Dave had done the readiness work that enabled
him to be more relaxed and aware, he then was able to move forward, to take the steps needed to design a life that was a better fit.