This finding reminded me of something Tim Bilkey M.D. told me in a consultation following his diagnosis of my ADHD. He noted that in his clinical practice he was finding that patients with ADHD had cravings for salt in snacks not sugar. He wondered whether there might be some connection to the fact that the most commonly prescribed drugs for this condition–Dexedrine and amphetamine–are technically salts.

Study co-author Jason Watson, assistant professor of psychology, said: “The potential implications are that if we are all paying attention as we are driving, some individuals may have enough extra flexibility in their attention to notice distractions that could cause accidents.”

However he went on to say, “That doesn’t mean people ought to be self-distracting by talking on a cell phone while driving — even if they have better control over their attention. Our prior research has shown that very few individuals [only 2.5 percent] are capable of handling driving and talking on a cell phone without impairment.”

I have been puzzled lately, by how quickly I can be moved to tears, not in public, but in the privacy of my own apartment.  Any suggestion on television or on the Internet that has to do with human suffering can trigger tears.  After the potential for embarrassment I do hold them back in public.  It doesn’t seem appropriate for a person with a second degree black belt in karate.  But I am still affected.

On the other hand there is an upside to being an adult who has ADHD.   Years  of failure and defeat but never giving up means you have to have developed resiliency.  It means you have staying power and you can survive.  If you are an adult who has just been diagnosed–this simple fact may offer hope, perhaps enough hope to help you raise your self esteem.

My visit only lasted a few minutes and the medical part of it was over before I knew it.  He concurred with the medication I was taking and with dosages and schedules.  Then he quizzed me on my background and interests, as it turned out, to see if I might be of service to the ADD/ADHD community.  It wasn’t his suggestion but this meeting was one of the reasons I started this blog.  I heard him speak on a couple of times and my appointment with him two years ago only lasted perhaps 20 minutes but I will miss him.  Not only was he a great resource to the ADD/ADHD community he was, in my experience, a kind and caring individual.

It was on reading his obituary and remembering his visual/non-verbal working memory test that led to a mini-ah ha moment.  I had always marveled that one of the profound and noticeable effects of even a small dose of ritalin would lead to a great improvement in my hand-writing.  I’m no expert but I would bet that there is a large component of visual/non-verbal working memory skill in handwriting.

I had come to the conclusion that my ADD was getting worse and I had lost the ability to read long-form narratives. Having read about about a new book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I’m now not so sure about the ADD being the culprit.   Author Nicholas Carr says that the Internet has changed our brains to the the point where we can’t concentrate on most deep-thinking tasks without seeking distractions.  See The Glove and Mail website here for more about Carr’s thesis.

I feel a bit vindicated that the problem may be our modern world and not the disorder I thought I had wrestled into some form of manageability.  One thing I do know, as I am now in the middle of the third novel this year, is that things started to change two years ago. Why then?  I was making frequent trips to a lodge in Algonquin Park where the only distractions were the forest, the other guests, the animals, the odd canoe and some of the best cooking I have ever tasted.  I did take up my notebook computer and once every evening I would watch a DVD on it. Most of the rest of the time I read novels. I knocked off about four that summer and although I only went up half the time last summer I completed a couple more.  Two summers ago those novels were the first I had read to completion in more than a decade. With no distractions it seemed my brain was content to revert to a state where it didn’t require new and novel distractions every couple of minutes.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not complaining and I don’t think the Internet is the end of the world as we know it. I’m just observing. I’m also aware of a quote from Canada’s premier literary critic Northrup Frye who said,”The book is the most technologically advanced communications medium ever invented because it moves at precisely the speed of the reader.”  Frye died before the Internet reached its current level of penetration into our lives. I wonder if he would agree with those words today.

Carr says that long-form narratives are not the way our brains have always worked.  To the contrary, according to him we are programed to be easily distracted.  He goes on to say that gathering information from Google or other methods on the Internet, take in information from many different sources at a fairly shallow level and the information never makes the transition in our brains from short-term memory to long-term.  With print there are no distractions and we get much more information more deeply into the brain and thus into long-term memory.  That information can then connect in our brains to other information, other material we have read, or even with our own experience.  Using the Internet  information is held and manipulated mostly in short-term or working memory but then it is gone or is not available to connect with our own experience or learning.  In other words, I guess, we don’t learn at depth.

When asked how he managed to keep from being distracted enough to write the book, Carr said it took him two weeks before he could overcome the panic of not checking his email or other activities on his computer.

What’s my point? Well it comes back to the up side and the down side of neuroplasticity again. If you think reading long-form narratives is a good thing then the Internet can change your brain for the worse.  The up side is that you can change back if circumstances, or desires, warrant it.

The next section we work on after “ADD moments and victories” is described as “working on exercises”.  In this section, anyone in the group who has taken on a longer project shares on their progress.  The longer project could be setting life goals, or a budget, or following a process found on the Internet, or elsewhere, that seems useful to that individual.  This is followed by “report on success with goals set at the last meeting”.  Here we talk about progress or success, stumbling blocks or any readjustment in plans  to accommodate obstacles.  I should point out that there is no interchange in these sections.  Participants do not comment or ask questions until the next section which we call “requests for feedback”.  Then and only then do we ask questions or comment on something someone has said and only on the part on which they have specifically requested feedback.  Our exprience tells us that we are sometimes prone to make comments or criticize other participants efforts and lose sight of our own activities.  The final section is “plans for the period until the next meeting” and this section is divided into action items, with notations for what is to be done, how, and by when.

There have been people arriving on our doorstep who share just about experiences–mostly negative.  Nothing is said to them, but after awhile they either notice that no one else is sharing in the same manner or they run out of things to say and drift away.  We call our process peer coaching for a reason.  It is not a support group in the usual sense.

Peer coaching is not a replacement for the personal coach.  The two founders of the group both used a coach for a period of time and benefited from it.  Peer coaching is an alternative…perhaps even a supplement.  If you were to ask me, I would probably say that it is not as effective as personal coaching but it is a lot less expensive.  We are still fine tuning the process.  What we don’t have is a way of checking in as most personal coaches do but hopefully we will find a way to do this and experience the same benefits.  What I do like about peer coaching is the sense of independence and this may sound weird since we do it as a group.  The key feature is that there is no professional in charge.  We are in charge and this idea can be quite liberating.

He said, “I’m going to start you on some medication trials, personally I would advise you to take a martial art and I would look at getting a personal coach.”

When I inquired further about coaching he gave me a name and phone number and I called the person and set up a first meeting.  The cost at the time, I believe was around $500 a month, which took me aback a bit but within a month or two my earnings were up to the point where it wasn’t too much of a burden.  After about three months though, I started to have second thoughts and in spite of the coach’s suggestion that if I followed the process more closely more earnings would improve, I decided to take a break.  I never went back although I did try to find another coach a few years later.  At that time there were only a few in Toronto that specialized in helping clients who had ADHD.  One took weeks to return a phone call and then suggested, by email, that I call at a specific time and when I did there was no answer.  I decided that he probably also had ADHD and could benefit from his own coach.  I then discussed the matter with a friend and mutual sufferer and in the course of our conversation we came to the conclusion that we both had enough coaching experience to try coaching each other and set up a process to do that and invited others to join us in the experiment in weekly meetings.  We call it peer coaching.  That was some years ago and although we now meet bi-weekly we are still going strong and last meeting added two new people to the group.

So what do we do?  There is actually a fairly rigorous process that we set up.  The meeting begins with someone volunteering to chair the meeting and there is a printed agenda. The meeting begins with each attendant invited by the chair to share on a personal update since the last meeting, new information which any of us might have come across concerning ADHD or anything else in neuroscience that might seem helpful and then what has become one of the most important aspects of the meeting although it wasn’t planned to be that.  We share what we call ADHD moments and victories. This could be any of the things that make our lives miserable from losing the keys to our front door, or the car, to getting the time wrong for an appointment.  What tends to happen is that these little tragedies  have a brighter side in that we get to delight out companions with the stories at out next meeting.  Victories could mean something such as finding a device that attaches to your keychain that beeps when you clap your hands or getting the time wrong for an medical appointment and calling the office to apologize and asking if they might be able to accommodate you later in the day.

I will describe the other elements of peer coaching in my next post and in a subsequent post try to explain why the psychiatrist that diagnosed me suggested I take a martial art.

I replied that I was okay with it and then she began to tell me this was not an isolated incident and about how frustrated and defeated she felt. I asked if she had considered an assessment. (Shouldn’t everybody?) She said she wanted to but her husband insisted it was just a phase and that she was just like any othen child of her age.   She seemed to be without hope and then suddenly the two returned and I turned back to my meal with a new perspective on what was actually going on and the drama of what had been to me, just minutes before, just an annoyance.  I left the restaurant much saddened and perhaps a bit ashamed of my inital reaction.  I’ve thought often of that day and that sad woman and how utterly without hope she seemed and wondered how many of the situations that annoy me at the time have a similar kind of back story. In my last post I wrote of the artist getting his paintings blown around by the wind, to his annoyance and then giving up trying to control the situation and going to the beach where he welcomed the same wind as a cooling breeze.

I get angry far more than I’m comfortable with but, as best I can, I now try to pause and ask myself some questions. Is my brain trying to wake me up? Do I have all the facts? And perhaps the most important question, do I really want to feel this way? Most of the time I don’t want to be angry but occasionally I let it spin out a little and then die of it’s own lack of inertia and try to return my brain to a more beneficial state.  If it isn’t late at night, when I should be in bed, and my brain is trying to wake itself up, I ask if there is a better way to accomplish that.  Can I go for a workout or even a walk?  Am I hungry?  Have I taken on too much that day?  Do I need a nap?

For people like myself, with ADD, anger can have a purpose.  It can wake up the brain.  So does worry and my brain can be like a guided missile, looking for something to either get mad about or to worry over.  I don’t like it but I know it works that way.  Sometimes when I stay up late to watch television, I can feel myself getting angry at some item in a documentary or a newscast and I realize that it is one o’clock in the morning.  I then have a choice.  I can continue with the anger and wake myself up in which case I’m done for going to sleep for at least two hours.  Or I can go to bed.  These days, usually, bed is my choice.