ADHD is a Time Machine that only moves forward.
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder involves a peculiar relationship with time.
It’s how a writer could post their New Years blog post saying how this year is going to be so much different than last year and postulate about all of the wonderful things they’re going to explore through writing, and then not post another article for a month, putting them behind their rate at the same time last year.
No, I’m not talking about anyone in particular.
To better understand what is happening and to hopefully offer some insight to you, dear reader, into why ADHD deserves to be taken seriously as a neurological disorder, let’s dive into the great mystery of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder’s relationship with time.
First, let’s talk about precisely what I’m getting at here. One of the main deficiencies of ADHD is in the way dopamine signals fire off in the brain. This so-called dopaminergic signaling is responsible for the time-distorting effects of ADHD. It is the same type of issue seen in diseases such as Parkinson’s and schizophrenia. Time-related tasks and attentiveness also both happen to be tied to the frontal lobe of the brain. While prefrontal cortex activity is down for those with ADHD, activity in the Default Mode Network of the brain — which activates during moments of self-reflection and mind wandering — is up.
In other words, people with ADHD are hard-wired to struggle focusing on anything, daydream like it’s a full-time job, and lose complete and utter track of time.
As if it could get any worse, adult ADHD is still a subject of debate as something to be taken seriously or not.
Medication tends to help this issue, but those with ADHD also tend to self-medicate if they don’t have a prescription or adequate health insurance. In the United States, matters are only made worse by the lack of mental health services. Since ADHD is still largely believed to only affect children, the number of specialists in adult ADHD is slim. This leaves the estimated 8 million adults in the United States that have ADHD, or roughly the entire population of New York City, to wonder and wander in search of something, anything, to spur them into motivated action.
Any online self-help guru will tell you that motivation is, ironically, a poor motivator. They will tell you that discipline is a far better trigger for action to occur. Usually, they will tell you that you have to just do it™, and if you don’t just do it™, then you have no one to blame but yourself. Obviously, the first step in self-help is to help yourself, right?
Except that, for someone who is deficient in the parts of the brain that regulate these things, it is extremely difficult to get going in the first place. The first step is always the hardest, as they say. In the case of someone with ADHD, the first step is a tall wall, and we can’t seem to find a rope or ladder on our side of it. Medication and careful planning are the rope and ladder, in this case.
Only now, we live in a world where people are placing less trust in pharmaceuticals, and for Americans particularly, the lack of access and affordability in healthcare makes professional treatment an expensive venture.
So, what can we do? We know that adult ADHD is still debated as a serious disorder, that the usual tricks for getting started don’t necessarily work for those with ADHD, and that getting treatment in the States usually comes down to a person’s ability to pay for it. Add to that a casual declination in pharmaceutical trust, and it leaves us attention-deficit folk without many options.
Allow me to present a few.
To start, the importance of concrete planning cannot be understated. We do not have a great relationship with time to begin with, so we are forced to make one to keep up with the world. Just this week, I took everything I had on my agenda and everything I wanted to get done written down in a conspicuous place that is hard to ignore — on a chalkboard near my front door. That one step alone has kept the time I’ve allotted for the things I want to get done near the forefront of my mind. Everything I’ve written has been actionable, and not so grand that it is unreachable. Does it mean I’ve accomplished everything I wrote on the chalkboard? No. But that’s why I’ve left myself a little note on the bottom:
“All week, LOVE YOURSELF.”
It’s okay to not do everything that you wanted to do in a week. It’s okay to get distracted, to slip, and to fail. What is not okay, or productive, is beating yourself up over it.
This week, I’ve brought my casting profiles back online and taken a crash course on the stock market. I’ve worked, I’ve made some money, and I’ve seen some really cool art up close, including one of three surviving paintings of Louis XIV that he stood for, the original print of “Earthrise” from the Apollo 8 mission, and several hand-drawn maps of the Americas that precede the Revolutionary War.
The reason I bring these up is because I was so struck by the timelessness of these pieces. At their worst, they are imprints in the concrete of history. At their best, they are a reminder of the incredible things humans have achieved with the relatively limited tools they had at their disposal: a portrait of one of France’s most ruthless kings, whose personality was so loud and the brush of the painter so precise that you can still see Louis’s shit-eating grin; the first-ever photo of Earth from lunar orbit, taken from inside what is essentially a tin can, launched from a 360-something-foot rocket with a computing power four factors less than our smartphones; and two remarkably accurate maps of America, drawn centuries before we ever achieved flight or shot a person into space to confirm beyond a reasonable doubt the shape of our continents.
If genetic history is to be believed, then we survived our early history thanks to what is now known as ADHD. The same disorder that allowed me to consistently find four leaf clovers in baseball fields while “playing” the game as a child, and also made me wildly inattentive in class, probably allowed our ancestors to see and hear things in the brush that others couldn’t. The greatest hunters and gatherers of our past would probably struggle in modern society, the same way we modern carriers of the disorder do. So don’t feel bad, or beat yourself up, because you feel that this world wasn’t made for your pace. You may just be longing for the wilds.
If you have ADHD, and like me, you have a hard time getting started or keeping track of time or simply wonder where the years went, know that you are not alone, and despite what I said earlier, there is help for you. There’s dozens of us — dozens! — and we all understand where your head is at. Some have even gone to school to study this disorder further and understand it so firmly that they charge money to treat it.
There’s no one-stop shop for specialists, so check your local search results for “ADHD Specialists near me,” or, since we now live in a more remote world, search for “Online ADHD Specialists”. You should get several results. Find the options that best suit you, send out some feelers, and wait to see who bites.
Dealing with ADHD is challenging. Just remember that you don’t have to face it by yourself. There is never a bad time to ask for help — but it is imperative to ask, time be damned.
SOURCES:
https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/adult-adhd-facts-statistics
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8293837/#sec-3title
Thank you for sharing this blog. Great post! The analogy of ADHD as a time machine that only moves forward is a unique and insightful way to think about the condition. It's important for those with ADHD to focus on the present and develop strategies to manage their symptoms. Thank you for sharing this perspective. I also heard about ADHD Treatment in Chennai who provides better treatment and solutions.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this. This article is an thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the experience of Adult ADHD Treatment. The comparison of ADHD to a time machine that only moves forward was particularly poignant, and highlights the unique challenges faced by individuals with ADHD in managing time and staying focused.
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