One Brain's journey

When I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, a process that took a couple of months, I asked the psychiatrist, “Now what?”

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.

Ever so often my life gets thrown out of whack by a car that won’t start or a check not received or even just some bad weather that seems to be preventing me from whatever personal plan I am trying to execute at the moment. I get angry or depressed or some similar expression of unsettledness. And then, hopefully before too much time has elapsed, I remember what happened to my friend Brendan. He had a long stay in the hospital with stomach cancer and, after most of his digestive system was removed his friends and family were warned that the end was near. It wasn’t and Brendan survived. As he made the gradual re-entrance back into his life there was one particular thing that bothered him for some time and it revolved around some person, any person, describing how their day was ruined because their car wouldn’t start or some other such annoyance. Brendan told me this on my last visit to London where he lives and I vowed that I would try not to ever be one of those people.

I found that, with a little practice, I could put such an occurrence aside and move on with life most of the time. It echoed Abraham Lincoln’s comment that most people are about as happy as they choose to be. The promise of neuroplasticity is that your can exercise some control over what your brain does. Now that’s not to say that it is easy. It isn’t but it is possible. The promise too is that not only can you change your brain you can change it by yourself.

Last winter, one 20 degrees-below-zero night, I was on my way to meet some people and, after driving a few blocks in my car, it started to run, roughly, on three cylinders with a lot of noise and smoke. I immediately drove home parked it and called the friend I was supposed to pick up at her home to say I couldn’t make it. She said she wanted to see the movie we and our friends had planned to see and was going to go anyway–on public transit. To my own amusement, I found myself feeling disappointed that she wasn’t going to just spend the evening at home as I thought I was about to do. As I was on the phone, talking to her, standing on the street, my local bus appeared in the distance, headed to a stop right where I was standing. I thought of Brendan, and how I had resolved not to have a day ruined by just the sort of occurrence I was experiencing. I told my friend I would meet her at the theatre and got on the bus and turned my attention to how I would complete the journey; meet up with her and our friends. It was magic. It worked and really wasn’t that difficult. After the movie our friends drove us home. We had seen the film we had intended to see, spent time with good company and the only bump in all of this was that my car still didn’t work.

Arriving home I typed the symptoms of what the car was doing into Google, fearing that it was something really expensive, my head now back into the problem and what I got back was that the symptoms matched that of a part that I had received a recall letter for but hadn’t got around to attending to.

The next day I called my auto service and had the car towed to the dealership and a few hours later they called to say the part was repaired under the recall as I had suspected. They even came, picked me up and drove me to the dealership to retrieve my car.

I try to remember this not just when my car won’t start or run right but whenever there is any kind of glitch in my plans and try to ask myself the question, “Do I want to deal with the problem the best I can and get on with my day?” Life’s too short, as they say. But more importantly, I know I have it within me to change the way I react to such event. A good friend once asked me the question: “How many of the things you have worried about have actually happened?”

The humorous answer is: “Hardly any of them and so I guess worrying about them has a positive effect.” But the true answer is just the first part of that statement…hardly any of them. How upset would I have been about my car breaking down had I known how easily it would be dealt with? Not much. I’m at a point in my life where I can see the end of it and how I spent that time is incredibly important. I want that time to be filled with moments with my friends enjoying mutual interests not stuck at home brooding about a broken car.

For the last few weeks I have been engaged in writing a proposal for a television series about traffic of all kinds:  automobile, bicycle, pedestrian, airplane.  A few days ago I came across the story of the town of Drachten, in The Netherlands  where they have taken down all the traffic signs and traffic signals and reduced both traffic deaths and accidents.  Why?  Well it seems when the roads might be shared by bicyclists and pedestrians people drive more carefully.  Drachten has been such a success story that there are at least six other communities in Europe that are trying out the idea. I like stories like this because they indicate a success that is counter-intuitive or, put quite simply, goes against the flow.

It seems that there is another community in New Jersey where, in the 1920′s, the community leaders decided to design the town to be car friendly.  There were no traffic engineers back then (there was hardly any traffic) and so the idea was turned over to, well ordinary engineers.  They went about building a system that mimicked the flow of water and in hydraulics, if you want the water to flow nicely, yoiu remove any obstacles that might slow it down.  You know–things such as cyclists, animals or people.  Hence the idea of sidewalks elevated just a bit above the roadway where the pedestrians could carry on whatever they wanted to: walking, sitting, eating along with their dogs and whatever other encumbrances they might want but where it would not hinder the progress of automobiles and trucks.  Of course, at certain points these pedestrians might want to get to the other side and since they were tax-payers you had to at least pretend to accommodate them, traffics signals were developed to allow them across the streets (quickly) and then the cars could go back to racing on to their various destinations unimpeded.

In Drachten, the only accommodation to making a change in direction whether you are a driver, a cyclist or a pedestrian, is a roundabout in the middle of town.  Cars must enter from the left but cyclists and pedestrians can enter wherever they want.  It would be chaos right?  Well that’s the point.  Since it is chaotic drivers tend to be more mindful and to drive more cautiously.  I have a number of friends who are fire-fighters.  They  hate speed bumps.  Some of them are paramedics and they tell of back injuries made worse by speed-bumps.  Studies now show that speed-bumps actually cause drivers to speed up, almost as if they were making up the time lost going over the bumps.  So why do homeowners still insist on having them installed on their streets?  Because intuitively they understand that the bumps will slow traffic even if they don’t.

Why is this discussion taking place in a blog that is primarily about neuroplasticity?  For one thing if you want to get your brain to change a habit, you must first get it to break the routine, to know what it is you want to accomplish.  Vision is absolutely essential to changing habit.  So is perseverance and so is thinking it through with all the facts you can find.  But there is another reason I have written about this.  I don’t like control freaks.  I particularly don’t like control freaks that haven’t thought it through where the issue is not getting you to do something differently but getting you to do it there way.  And then were are back to neuroplasticity again because almost everything we know about this topic has been discovered in the last ten years, where most of the knowledge in this fields is still undiscovered, we must question everything.  This consumes both time and energy and beyond that…it is just hard.  But if you want to change, successfully, you have to do it just as the people in Drachten had to do it.  But if you do do it, the results might just amaze you.

There was a Seinfeld episode where the running joke was about a book supposedly entitled: War–What Is It Good For? I was reminded of it tonight in a discussion about anger with a group of friends. A continuing theme in our talk was about perspective and one participant told a story about living in Miami Beach some years ago,  making a living as an artist.  He wasn’t doing the  fancy gallery stuff.  He was selling his paintings on the street. One particularly blowy day, when he really needed money to pay the rent, he was getting angrier and angrier at the wind that was gusty and was blowing his paintings around causing him to scramble to keep from losing them. He described how he would just seem to get it under control and then another gust would come and he would have to start all over again. Finally, he called a friend that suggested he call it quits and he did.  Arriving home he decided, since he couldn’t really sell any of his work that day that he might as well go to the beach.  He did and when he got there, he found a nice secluded spot, spread his towel out and sat down. Just as he did so, a breeze came up and he thought to himself, “Wow what a lovely breeze?” Then, in a flash he realized it was the same breeze…the one that had been tormenting him less than an hour before.

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.

Today I came across reference to a new therapy called the Dynamic Neural Retraining System (DNRS) that employs the principles of neuroplasticity to cure chemical sensitivities, Cronic Fatique Syndrome, Fibromialgia even Gulf War Syndrome. At first glance it looks a bit like snake oil but on closer examination it caught my interest.  The system was developed by Annie Hopper whose life was devastated by multiple chemical sensitivities that resulted eventually in the lose of her job, her family and even her home.  She began to educate herself in various approaches to treatment and in the process noticed that many of her symptoms were similar to those of persons suffering from Acquired Brain Injury (ABT).  ABT usually results from a blow to the head. She developed DNRS based on methods used to treat ABT and now conducts three-day workshops to provide participants with enough familiarity with the system to carry on treatment on their own. Her website has many testimonials attesting to its effectiveness.  At the time that her life was overwhelmed by these chemical sensitivities, Hopper had a therapy practice employing what is described in her bio as core belief counselling.  I experienced something known as Core Belief Reengineering (CBR) about 15 years ago with some success but nowhere in her bio does it say that the counselling Hopper did was based in CBR.  However, I did make this leap.  About 15 years ago many of my friends were going throiugh the process of CBR with the only practitioner in Eastern Canada. I became intrigued. At the time I was a sucker for anything except chemicals or pharmaceuticals to make me feel better. I had just exited a relationship that in many ways was the most normal I had ever experienced and I was about to turn 50. There were a number of other things going on but suffice it to say I was an anxious mess. I have had anxiety most of my adult life in addition to the other numerous mental health disorders I have made reference to in past posts but pn top of all that I began to experience symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)–probably because of the high level of anxiety. OCD is a devastating disorder and I count myself fortunate that I only had symptoms for a short time.  When my friends doing CBR started to report life-changing results I decided to do it.  I was also intrigued by the term reengineering. I was working as a management consultant at the time and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was all the rage in the business world with huge global corporations, such as Ford Motor Company, were being transformed by it.  The idea of applying similar principles in a therapeutic model was most intriguing..  Towards the end of my therapy sessions a number of things happened. A chronic pain in my left hip, the result of a shortened ilioibial band, disappeared. The OCD symptoms also went away and then miraculously my asthma seemed to be cured. Now I’m a skeptic and in spite of what I was experiencing, I was hard-pressed to ascribe  these changes to CBR. The disappearance of asthma symptoms I thought could also be due to a new mattress, new pillows and new bedding. I knew, at the time, that one of the main causes of asthma is dust mites and with a new bed I would have been dust mite free.  Having both allergies and ADHD I have seen many different kinds of alternative treatments and most of them leave me cold to the point where am long past any interest in exploring any of them that don’t seem to be backed by solid scientific research such as Cogmed Working Memory Training. Having said this there are few alternative therapies rooted in sound science available to address mental health issues that exploit neuroplaticity other than Cogmed. In fact, DNRS is one for the first I have come across. Taking this into account plus my own experience with CBR and my rather grudging acceptance that some really benficial changes did happen, if not as a result of CBR, at least simultaneous with doing the therapy, I am intrigued and will write further about this in future posts.