One Year Anniversary

       It’s been about a year since I was diagnosed with and began treatment for bipolar disorder. It’s been a long, gruelling journey and I still have a long way to go, but I think I’m impressed with the progress I have made and I’m glad to be done with the process of medication adjustments. I still have my moments but for the most part I no longer spend days in bed because I’m too depressed to do anything, I don’t go into hypomanic episodes where I lose all impulse control and end up drinking excessively, the fits of rage and intense mood swings have disappeared, and I’m gaining more confidence because I now have some control over my life. Most of this is due to the cocktail of drugs I take every day but I also owe a lot to my therapist, she’s helped me take some of the blame off of myself and changed my way of thinking about things (at least to some extent). I hate that it took so long for them to figure out what was wrong with me because I spent years hurting people and making them think that I’m unstable and just not a very good person. I’ve definitely dug a pretty big hole for myself but hopefully I’m on my way to getting myself out of it.

       I’ve also learned a lot about my learning disabilities in the past year and this has helped to explain many of my perceived “inadequacies.” I now know that my difficulty with doing things the way others can is not my fault and has nothing to do with my intelligence or capabilities and I also know that ADHD is a lot more than just the inability to pay attention. Unfortunately, I’m still expected to fit into the little box of expectations which occasionally makes me appear incompetent. I can’t make everyone understand what exactly my disabilities entail and I’m always going to have to do things that don’t come as easy to me so I’ll have to work harder than most other people. I don’t mind the hard work but it would be nice to have things catered to my abilities on occasion. I have to give a talk next week which is a little scary because I know I have difficulty understanding what people are asking me sometimes, my working memory is less than ideal, and it can take a while for my brain to actually process the question (meaning that I’ll know the answer about 30 mins or so after the question has been asked). This can all lead to an incredibly embarrassing moment, hopefully I’ll get out of it with my dignity still intact. 

       What do I still have to overcome? I think the biggest things are the inability to get myself motivated and my inherent need to procrastinate. Motivation and procrastination are a big problem with ADDers and I am no exception. I often dub myself the world’s greatest procrastinator and I’m sure people who know me can vouch for that. In general, I work better under pressure so if there is no impending deadline it’s hard to get myself motivated to do something. One of the strategies is to set your own deadlines but I find it hard to stick to that if there’s no one else depending on me, so that’s something I still need to work on. In terms of just motivation, ADDers tend to get bored with things pretty quickly (hence our consistent lack of follow through) so I lose my motivation for working on a project a lot sooner than I would like. I’ve tried a couple of things to improve on these problems but again, I lack the follow through so about a week after implementing my new strategy I’m right back to where I started. At least I’m trying though and hopefully one of these days I’ll find a strategy that works.  

I'll Do It Tomorrow...

     I think that procrastination is one of the biggest challenges I face on a day-to-day basis, and it’s been this way for as long as I can remember. In high school, I don’t think I ever started an assignment or started studying for a test earlier than the night before. I could never get myself to sit still and focus long enough to be productive if there wasn’t the pressure of an impending deadline forcing me to do so. I now know that this is largely because of ADHD, but at the time it seemed like laziness or indifference. This also explains why I was able to focus for hours when I was pressured into completing an assignment---ADHD can cause periods of hyperfocus during which you can literally tune the entire world out and be concerned solely with the task at hand (imagine how productive we’d be if we could bring about this level of focus at will). Moving on to university, I still could not get myself to start an assignment if it wasn’t due the next day and trying to study for exams was a nightmare (I often wonder whether I would have done better in school had I been diagnosed earlier, not that I did badly per se). Unfortunately for me, this was compounded by my depressive episodes during which I was completely apathetic and struggled to get out of bed.  

     And now I’m in grad school where procrastination is not an option if you actually plan on completing your degree in a respectable amount of time. Every day I fight against my desire to put work off for “just another hour.” The only problem is that that extra hour becomes two, and then three, and then it becomes tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. Waiting until the last minute to complete an assignment or study for an exam is not the best strategy, but it is doable. Waiting until the last minute to complete all your experiments? No amount of hyperfocus is going to get you out of that grind. You may as well just drop out and save yourself the tuition, that is, if your advisor hasn’t sent you out on your ass already. Procrastination is just not an option at this point in my life and I’ve determined that I need to do something about it. Maybe I’ll look into that later today, no make it tomorrow, ok maybe next week.

     My therapist told me about this website, totallyadd.com, that’s all about living with adult ADHD and there is a three-part blog posting that talks about procrastination and how to start getting out of that habit. It talks about changing your mindset when it comes to work, chores, etc. so that you no longer see these everyday tasks as grueling, and also by thinking of what you get to do after (leisure activities) as your reward for completing the tasks. In theory, this is a great idea, but how many of us are actually capable of changing our own mindset without some sort of external praise, or maybe a drill sergeant screaming at us. Although these blog posts are always in my mind, I don’t seem to be able to actually do what they’re suggesting. Instead I came up with my own method: quitting cold turkey. I tried to become my own drill sergeant, telling myself to “DO IT NOW!” rather than sit and watch TV or waste hours surfing the net. Unfortunately, quitting cold turkey requires A LOT of willpower and my inevitable disaster of a method stopped working after about a week. There are a number of other strategies out there for people with ADHD such as making to-do lists, learning time management skills, etc. but I’m not at a point where I’m willing to put in the effort, partially because I can’t see myself ever overcoming my inherent tendency to procrastinate. Hopefully I get past this stage soon, otherwise I’m toast. 

A Day In The Life...

     The alarm goes off, provided you remembered to set it the night before. [I have become slightly OCD about setting early alarms and having numerous reminders on my phone because if I don’t, I forget or will be late. I’ll miss the ever-so-important appointment that I waited months to get, I’ll leave a friend or colleague hanging, or I’ll wake up three hours after I’m supposed to be at work. Doesn’t really leave you thinking that I’m a dependable person does it?] You eventually muster up the willpower to drag yourself out of bed and you start into your morning routine: breakfast, shower, get dressed, brush your teeth. But for a person with ADHD, this doesn’t always go as planned. You lay in bed too long, you put on music and dance around when you should be eating breakfast or getting dressed, anything and everything becomes a distraction that’s just begging you to procrastinate a bit, and before you know it, you’re running late.

     You get to school, hoping no one really notices what time you stroll in at (but they obviously do), sit at your desk and start up your computer. Email gets checked, Facebook gets checked, sometimes Twitter or online news articles, and then you start to piece together what you need/plan to do that day. Most people would then set to work, being more productive before noon than the student with ADHD will be all day. This is because you have an inherent lack of motivation and follow through, an unrivalled urge to procrastinate for “just a little longer.” Plus, you can’t get yourself organised enough to start working and you just can’t seem to sit still and focus on anything for longer than 30 seconds. Then guess what? It’s lunch time and you have done nothing productive all morning. That’s okay, you’ll stay later tonight and get everything done. You finish lunch and finally start to get your act together. You get a bit of work done and start to do some reading but you keep zoning out. You re-read a paragraph three times before you are actually aware of what you read, and by this time you’ve been sitting for way too long so it’s time for a walk or a coffee break. By the end of the day, you have completed a quarter of what you planned and that promise to stay later? Well, it no longer exists because you have exhausted your concentration capacity for the day, so you head home.

     You get home, go for a run or hit the gym, shower, make dinner, and then you have four hours to kill until it’s time to hit the sack. Since you didn’t get much done during the day, you decide to do your work now. You hunker down on the couch (it really should be at a desk, but I don’t do well at desks so it ends up being the couch) and start in on the copious number of journal articles you’ve been meaning to read (again, always meaning to do things) or crack open a textbook. Three paragraphs in and you find yourself looking around the room, daydreaming, worrying about something completely irrelevant, the list goes on and on. And before you know it, you need a snack or the laundry needs to be done or the floor needs to be vacuumed, anything that will tear you away from those readings and get you moving. Even watching your favourite TV show becomes a chore because you just can’t manage to sit still or focus long enough. Now you’re blasting your music and dancing around the apartment because you just need to be moving and when bed time rolls around you’ve once again accomplished nothing. However, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes when you’re really interested in something or you’ve procrastinated for as long as humanly possible, you end up with a crazy intense ability to zone out the world and focus solely on the task at hand. These moments are wonderful, but a lot rarer than the moments of sheer restlessness.  

     Anyway, you get into bed but you just can’t shut off your mind. Thoughts keep racing, you’re worrying about everything all at once, and you start to toss and turn as you attempt to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. Occassionally, you drift off after an hour or so. More often than not, you’re out of bed again, listening to music until three o’clock in the morning.  It is only then that you can finally fall asleep. Unfortunately, the alarm is set for 7:30 am, leaving only four and a half hours for you to get your beauty sleep.

     Medications help but there will always be that inherent lack of motivation and follow-through, especially when you combine the ADHD with the depressive phases of bipolar disorder. Hopefully one day my "mental health team" will be able to help get me to a state of being stable and productive.