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Book Review: ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life

June 30, 2012 in ADD, Book Reviews | No comments

“The expectation is no longer to simply ‘sit still and listen.’ It is to ‘take charge of your life.’ ”

This was the first passage I highlighted in ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life because it rings true for so many creative minds. Especially for those of us who pursued a studio art major in college, we usually found ways to circumvent the need to “sit still and listen” beyond our capacity. Circumventing “take charge of your life,” however, takes a different toll.

The highlighted passage above concludes: “Taking charge requires learning to organize.”

Unfortunately, learning to organize is something we’ve all tried before with limited success. We’ve embarked on our new course with the best of intentions, only to watch everything crumble and fade when the novelty wore off.

That’s okay. It happens.

In ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, authors Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau acknowledge the tendency for new organizing systems to fall apart, giving insight into the ADHD tendencies that make sticking with a new system so difficult. However, instead of offering strategies to counteract those tendencies, Kolberg and Nadeau propose that we work with them.

If you’ve ever tried to fight your natural disinclination to organize, chances are you’ll find this idea very refreshing. Not only do Kolberg and Nadeau acknowledge that strategies running counter to your brain’s natural chemistry are unlikely to work long-term, they get at a deeper issue: rather than forcing ourselves to fit the mold we think we’re supposed to fill, we need to find a way to meet our unique psychological needs in ways that are not costly to ourselves and the people we love. Only at this level of self-awareness can we configure a system for organizing our lives that allows us to care properly for ourselves and others.

Practically speaking, Kolberg and Nadeau outline a fairly comprehensive strategy for using your ADHD tendencies to support your organizing and, where that’s not possible, sharing the load with friends and family so they can provide much-needed support. They rightly point out that even if your helper isn’t physically doing anything to help you, he or she will keep you on task just by providing a supportive and grounding presence in the room.

One of the most important tenets of this book is that you need to “make the race short, so that you’ll be able to cross the finish line without stopping.” This is not tantamount to admitting defeat. It is acknowledging a simple fact: you are a sprinter, not a distance runner. Structuring your life as a series of sprints, not a marathon, will facilitate many more successes and lower your anxiety level, which will in turn increase your executive functioning capacity.

The authors include lots of helpful tactile exercises, like this “how wide are your interests” concentric circle activity.

Kolberg and Nadeau also do a pretty complete job of identifying what elements of organizing feel uncomfortable. For example, my husband has a strong averse reaction to putting things in cabinet, drawers, or file cabinets. I used to try to make him use these things to store his belongings, but eventually I learned he actually loves putting things away in their “home” — he just doesn’t like not seeing them. After I helped him set up a few organizing systems using baskets, not drawers, he began putting his things away regularly. This is what Kolberg and Nadeau refer to as an “out of sight, out of mind” person.

ADHD adults face many organizing challenges, and understanding the uncomfortable or negative feelings around a certain task is often the key to creating a system that works. As you have probably learned, “when a plan doesn’t ‘feel right’ to you, it’s not likely to work.” The authors even offer several creativity-centered ideas illustrating how you can turn an overwhelming organizing task into a creative product, which I thought was great in terms of finding a way to make a system “feel” right for you.

I have two criticisms of this book. Firstly, the anecdotal stories seem to paint a pretty uniformly rosy picture. The mini-plotline became formulaic very quickly: ADHD adult’s life was a mess, ADHD adult got help and created a system that worked for them, and now ADHD adult is enjoying a high level of success. With all the acknowledgement of how easily organizing systems can fail for ADHD adults, I would have liked to have seen more anecdotal evidence of this. Even the best of systems can break down, and readers need to see that. They need to know this book, like any, is not a miracle cure, and “try, try again” is one of the most valuable skills an ADHD adult can learn.

Secondly, each chapter progresses in a sequence of strategies you can do with a.) yourself, b.) a friend or family member, and finally c.) a professional organizer. I think this sequence was supposed to demonstrate that no matter how many support systems or people you have available, there is always something you can do to make things better. However, in its execution this format puts the advanced strategies out of reach for many people. The authors even flat-out recommend on occasion that you not attempt a strategy without a professional organizer. I know not all artists — and not even all artists with ADHD — are poor and starving, but it is nonetheless safe to say most of us aren’t earning the kind of money that affords us the luxury of hiring a professional organizer.

At the same time, I very much appreciated the authors’ cursory treatment of stimulant medication. While medication is monumentally helpful — and I think necessary in the early stages of forming new ADHD-friendly systems and habits — I always remind people it is there to support good strategies, habits, and systems. I am medication-free right now and while maintaining order is hard work, it is doable if I work with and not against my brain chemistry. That philosophy is a central thesis throughout this book, and it’s one I really appreciate.

A final note: as you read Kolberg and Nadeau’s book, you’ll stumble upon little insights that aren’t strictly related to organizing, but that state truths in simple, yet new and enlightening language. For example:

“Those with ADD crave a sense of aliveness more intensely than others. Some ADDers are so intolerant of boredom that they start an argument or create a crisis to avoid understimulation. Stimulation-seeking behavior can be either your key to success or your undoing, depending upon how it is managed.”

If you’re an artist with ADHD, chances are that sounds very familiar. If you’ve had little success taking charge of your life, feel out of control, or just plain hate the idea of “organizing strategies,” this book is well worth a read.

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Breaking for Creativity

June 14, 2012 in ADD, Everyday Life | No comments

Have you ever been afraid to take a break? Stayed up all night on a creative project because you couldn’t pull yourself away? Because you felt compelled to devour every last second of inspiration, lest you lose focus and never recapture it?

The first time I took an ADHD medication, I spent the day cleaning up a room in my home that had been out of control (and out of use) for months. My clearest memory from that day, even stronger than my feeling of accomplishment at the end, is fear.

I had never worked so diligently on a task for so long. Having no referendum for this kind of experience, I was terrified that if I so much as stopped for lunch, I wouldn’t finish the project.

When I reviewed Unclutter Your Life in One Week, I warned ADHD readers of the dangers of creating a “blank slate” during an uncluttering process. If you empty an entire room into the hallway, you need to make a plan for putting everything away before your focus fades.

Once you learn about this foible, it’s easy to view breaks as your enemy, even if that fear is subconscious.

If I don’t stay up and paint now, when will I? I need to take all the inspiration I can get when it comes.

If I come back to this piece later, I’ll forget what I was even writing.

These are legitimate fears. However, as with anything, a balanced perspective is key. I read a recent article on Lifehacker that said taking breaks is actually “important to help you stay creative and productive without burning out.”

The key there, though, is to make sure breaks are mindful, not just distractions. The most important line in the whole article may be this one: “resist the urge to check your email or find out what your friends are saying on Twitter, and use the moment to refill your water bottle, grab a cup of coffee, get focused, and dive right in.”

I spent a recent weekend at our beach house, which has no internet connection and where 3G coverage is a bit spotty. Occasionally this feels like an inconvenience, but mostly it feels like the most productive kind of break. Only here would I think to go for an hourlong walk before sitting down to write. Only here is it not worth it to wait for my Facebook news feed to load. Most of my time is spent reading, walking, thinking, writing, or catching up on the news­ — mindful activities that ready me for what’s next.

So next time you’re about to switch tasks or you’re getting hungry or you need to sleep soon, don’t be afraid to take a break — a real break. Remember that your creative mind needs breaks to stay in peak operating condition. Ever wonder why you think of so many things in the shower? Starting today, train yourself to resist fidgety distractions like compulsive email-checking or reading your Facebook news feed, and instead be compassionate to yourself by providing nourishing breaks to get up, stretch your legs (and mind), and pour a new cup of coffee before digging back into that big project.

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Making Room for the Future

June 4, 2012 in ADD, Photography, Visual Art, Writing | No comments

Has your creative work crossed between mediums over the years? I know mine has, especially throughout my early 20s.

I bought a full set of watercolor paints and produced several half-finished paintings. Then I went through a long phase with oils, which made up the bulk of my BFA studio concentration. I fell in love with black and white silver photography and have supplies for a full darkroom stowed away in my spare bathroom. There is a roll of backdrop paper somewhere in the house from my short-lived portrait phase. I’ve now dedicated a space on my bookshelf to copies of the shooting scripts from some of my favorite movies, which I intend to use as script-writing reference. I am unsure how many guitars inhabit our house, but there are at least three. I still have a lithography crayon in the pencil cup on my desk.

Sound familiar? Artists with ADHD suffer from a degree of insatiability that can leave us catching every wave of inspiration we can find — even if that means a new creative fling every month.  It can also leave us with a home stuffed with supplies and equipment from our massive backlog of unfinished projects.

Sometimes holding onto those old things serves as a visual cue for us — a reminder that, yes, that was a creative avenue that inspired us and we will get back to it someday. If we let go of our old set of oil pastels, we’re admitting defeat. Without seeing them in the house we may fear we’ll never get back to pastel drawings.

However, letting go of supplies from past projects makes room for the future and lets us open ourselves to new inspirations. Letting go of the guitar also means letting go of the guilt you feel every time you see it and remember you haven’t played it in years.

Last week I cleaned out my freezer and unearthed a box of 110 cartridge film left over from my toy camera phase, along with some 8×10 photo paper. Knowing I would be chemical free for a little while, I decided to find these supplies a new home. Not just because I needed space in my home and in my mind, but because the stuff wouldn’t even be any good by the time I got back to it.

Still, attachment to art supplies runs strong. Once I’ve held it in my hand, it’s so hard to let go because I just can’t imagine not using it next week.

To ease the pain of separation, I decided to donate my film and paper to some undoubtedly broke BFA students at my alma mater. This afternoon I packaged them up, slapped a shipping label on them, and sent them away to my former photo professor.

Simplifying life and focusing on current creative projects that I’m actually working on feels great. But so does knowing some of my leftover supplies can help someone else. If you’re drowning in a sea of creative clutter, I highly recommend enlisting an objective friend to help you sort through it and identify anything you aren’t likely to use in the coming months. Almost every town has a school with an art program with students that could use your supplies, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you using them as a device to let go of some long-unfinished projects.

 

 

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Book Review: Unclutter Your Life in One Week

May 20, 2012 in ADD, Book Reviews, Everyday Life | 2 comments

While reading for my most recent book review, a common theme kept popping up: clutter.

A coworker told me about a job he took once in college, helping an art professor clean his office over winter break. When he entered the room, he found so much clutter there was literally a tunnel leading to the professor’s desk at the other side of the room.

Thinking back to my own college experience, where I knew more than one artist with a messy office, it’s easy to say “that’s kind of just how we are.”

Creativity, however, does not feed on chaos. I do my best work in a clean, uncluttered space where my ideas have room to grow. I’d be willing to bet most artists feel the same way, but many of us struggle to control our propensity to generate mess and clutter.

If you’re looking for a good overview of uncluttering strategies and philosophies, Unclutter Your Life in One Week may be the book for you. Author Erin Doland comes from an organic place, articulating an uncluttering philosophy motivated by a desire to clear the path to our “remarkable life.” Any ancillary distractions create roadblocks that keep us from living the remarkable life we deserve.

Creativity does not feed on chaos, but many of us struggle to control our propensity to generate mess and clutter.

Readers who don’t naturally crave structure and rules may find that philosophy helpful as they create new habits. Much like I won’t exercise for its own sake by taking a jog, but I will spend two hours working in the yard because it produces immediate visible results, we need to find a meaningful purpose for seeing our ofttimes-difficult uncluttering projects through to the end.

To gain the most benefit from this book, readers–especially those with ADHD–need to contextualize the program before beginning the first chapter. You will not complete this process in one week. You will not even complete it in one month. This program may be achievable in the stipulated timeline for a highly motivated adult who has cleared their work schedule and prepared significantly, but those adults are probably not the ones who need to read a book about uncluttering and organizing.

Rule #1 for adults with ADHD is setting reasonable, attainable goals. Learning your limits and breaking projects down into realistic pieces will enable you to achieve success more often, thus boosting your self-confidence and helping you stick with a long-term uncluttering and organizing strategy. The program in this book consists of several long, hard, focused days of work. ADHD adults need to contend with the issue of project fatigue, even with the help of medication, so I highly recommend using this book as a general guide and discarding the timeline and schedule Ms. Doland suggests. Trying to accomplish that much in so little time will likely lead to fatigue and a collapse of productive energy, which can be incredibly demoralizing to adults who are well-accustomed to trying and failing at new organizing strategies.

That said, Unclutter Your Life in One Week presents readers with some solid organizing philosophies, all rooted in the belief that we deserve a remarkable, satisfying life. I particularly liked Ms. Doland’s suggestion to prioritize the “firsts” in your life: the first place you see when you wake up in the morning, when you arrive at work, when you arrive home after work, etc. Ensuring these first impressions are a positive experience every single day sets the stage for productivity and satisfaction. It’s tempting to get a pesky lingering task off your list because you think you should get it out of the way first, but it’s best to start with improvements that directly impact your quality of life. The rest will follow.

Another fresh idea I loved was the instruction to create a blank slate before setting up new organizing systems: empty everything from your desk and into another room, scrub the surface clean, then start thinking about where things should sit.

However, there is a significant danger for adults with ADHD of beginning a project like this with great gusto, only to lose steam and leave behind a mess in the other room. ADHD adults should be extra careful to break projects down into smaller tasks so as not to overextend their focus.

We should never tell ADHD adults that how they spend their time directly reflects the values they hold in their hearts.

Likewise, the author suggests sorting items into bags to donate to Goodwill and putting them in the garage to take later. I cannot tell you how many times we have had several large bags of items piled in the basement or the trunk of the car for months, waiting to be taken to the electronics recycling center or the donation bins. The author doesn’t mention a strategy for making sure these nicely sorted items actually leave the house, but ADHD adults should make sure to consider this before accumulating bags and boxes of items to donate.

The key to making this book work for ADHD adults, especially creative types who don’t always love schedule and structure, is breaking these projects down into manageable pieces. I suggest using paper folders and lists or a project management platform like Springpad or Wunderkit to outline each “day” in Doland’s week and create discrete sub-projects that can be completed in no more than 30 minutes (or 60 minutes with a short break): that includes gathering materials, completing the project, and cleaning up.

My only big disappointment came toward the end, in the chapter on assessing your hobbies and leisure activities. Ms. Doland provides a structure for assessing how you spend your time and rooting out hobbies that “you are just not that into.” This is, at its core, a great idea.

However, she goes on to suggest alleviating some guilt by letting go of a hobby if you don’t spend at least an hour a month on it, stating plainly that “if it were really important to you, you would pursue it.” This is a familiar refrain for too many ADHD adults. For people who are struggling and failing to do what they know they want to do, statements like “well, it must not mean that much to you” are judgmental and damaging. I will never forget how it feels to be told “lazy is as lazy does” by a loved one, and I would never advocate implying to ADHD adults that how they spend their time directly reflects the values they hold in their hearts.

I acknowledge this book is not directly targeted to ADHD adults, but people who have reached such a level of disorganization and clutter that they purchase a book on the subject likely land somewhere on the ADHD spectrum. I think the failure to address that directly at some point in the book is an unfortunate omission when paired with assumptions and judgements like those mentioned above.

Overall, however, I still recommend this book to anyone struggling with a claustrophobic level of clutter. Ms. Doland hits the nail on the head when she says you cannot possibly live your best life when you are drowning in clutter and distractions. Despite wishing more attention was paid to the specific challenges faced by ADHD adults, I agree wholeheartedly with the central thesis and can attest to the fact that an uncluttered life begets and uncluttered mind. An uncluttered mind, in turn, opens the door to unencumbered creative thought.

For some continued pre- or post-reading, check out the companion website at www.unclutterer.com.

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Spring Cleaning: Slash Smartphone Distractions

May 7, 2012 in ADD, Everyday Life | No comments

Smartphones can be an indispensable tool to help you stay organized. Without my iPhone, I would have much more trouble managing my life and projects effectively. However, the iPhone has just as much capacity for sabotaging productivity, especially if you allow app clutter to rule your phone and distract you from its more useful features.

iphone

via Twicepix on Flickr

So how about celebrating Spring by cleaning up your home screen and streamlining this ubiquitous part of your life? I’m currently reading a book called Unclutter Your Life in One Week – which I’ll review shortly — and have applied some of the author’s philosophies to my iPhone with great success.

Here’s how you can take a little bit of time — maybe a couple of hours (with distractions) at most — to make sure you’re getting the most out of your smartphone:

  1. Open a new spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or Google Documents. I always take a minute to format my list so it is visually appealing. This helps keep me engaged in adding things to my list because I enjoy looking at it. To get you started more quickly, I recommend clicking here to download my template. If you don’t have Microsoft Office, you can upload the file to Google Documents and edit it there for free.
  2. Go through your phone and fill out your spreadsheet, listing every app that has an icon on your home screen(s). Use a consistent system for expressing when you’ve last used an app. I choose less than 1 week, less than 1 month, less than 6 months, less than 1 year, more than 1 year, and never. If you haven’t used an app since the first day you installed it, choose never.
  3. If you’re using my template, any apps marked as never, more than 1 year, or less than 1 year in the last used column will be red. Use the Sort & Filter feature to filter by the red cells in the last used column. You’re now viewing your least-used apps. Scan the list for any special-case apps that you seldom use but are important to keep. I chose to keep my NYC subway map and TKTS app because I use them every time I travel to New York for a Broadway show (usually once or twice a year). Delete the rest. You’re not keeping apps you think you should use, and you’re not keeping the apps that make you look smart or tech-savvy to friends who happen to pick up your phone. You’re keeping what you actually use.
  4. Now, do the same for the yellow ones: apps you haven’t used within the past month. Scan for the same qualities listed above. You might see something like OpenTable, which you use often but you haven’t been to an OpenTable restaurant this month. I keep Dropbox on my phone so I can access my important files in a pinch, but I don’t need to do so on a monthly basis. Keep them, delete the rest.
  5. Now, filer by the green cells: the apps you use at least once per week. Think through your daily routine. Mine goes a little like this: at night before I go to bed, I check the weather to help me decide what to wear the next day, then set my alarm. I use my phone and text messaging throughout the day. I record my hours as I’m leaving work. I often use a calculator at the office. If I see something is running low while I’m preparing dinner, I add it to the grocery list. These apps, the ones, you use as part of your daily routine, are the ones — the ONLY ones — you will put on your first home screen.
  6. Move everything off of your first home screen and onto another one so you have a blank canvas. Organize your daily-use apps according to what you use together (for example, the clock and the weather, the food diary and the grocery list). Think about which apps you access constantly or need to get to quickly. Put them in the stationary row at the bottom if you have one.
  7. If your phone allows you to organize apps into folders on your home screen, follow this rule: get rid of the folders on your first home screen (the one you see immediately when you pick up your phone).
  8. If your phone contains default apps that you seldom or never use, put them all together on their own home screen so you won’t need to see them or page past them to get to your more useful apps. Organize seldom-used apps on additional home screens just past your first one.
  9. Live with your newly organized home screen(s) for a week. Is there anything on your first home screen you aren’t using as much as you thought you would? Move it to a new one and replace it with something you find yourself using more frequently. The iPhone allows you to access the camera from the lock screen, so even though I use the app at least once a day I have no need to put it on my first home screen. Instead, I made room for my new food log, which would be easy to forget and give up on after a few days if I didn’t see it every time I use my phone.

One last comment about app cleanup that you may find controversial: when I did this, I deleted all games from my phone. I also block all games on Facebook. These games are fun, sure, but before you install too many ask yourself this: what is really important in my life? How many hours am I spending on each of these games, and how much am I spending on the projects that really matter to me? To be fair, I am am by no means anti-gaming. I play World of Warcraft almost every day. However, WoW satisfies an additional social function in my life because I connect with several good friends via the game and I’m an integral part of a team. Mobile and Facebook games are, to me, just a black hole for time and energy. Now that I no longer have eight Words With Friends games going at once, when I look at my phone during a few minutes of down time I catch up on blogs, news articles, and emails. I check in with my project management app to gauge my progress on home and creative projects. My mental energy is directed toward things I have identified as important priorities in my life.

That said, you may have any number of reasons you wouldn’t want to toss out all of these games. It’s all about moderation and identifying what is important to you and why.

One thing is certain, though: once those priorities are reflected in your simplified, uncluttered home screen, your smart phone will spend a lot more time working for you and a lot less time distracting you from what’s really important.

Do you have a different method for curbing phone clutter? Feel free to share!

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Sometimes It Pays to Pay

April 23, 2012 in ADD, Everyday Life | No comments

Sometimes, it pays to pay someone to help you catch up on a task that has gotten out of hand. Sometimes, that little breath of relief is all you need to make some headway on a creative project that’s been suffering.

overgrown garden

In some cases, the metaphor for a long-outstanding task's effect on your motivation and inspiration is just too obvious. Look at that poor garden choked with weeds!

A coworker recently told me a story about a job he had over a college winter break. A professor had asked him to help clean out his office, and when he arrived, he found it worse than he ever expected: the professor’s desk at the rear of the room wasn’t accessible via a tiny path through the walls of clutter, it was accessible through a tunnel of clutter. One had to pass under junk literally balanced overhead.

Though this is an extreme example, I, too, knew more than one professor with a messy office when I was in college. One of the professors I admired most worked at a desk whose surface I never saw. I got the idea that many artists were “just like that.”

Perhaps you have experienced a similar situation in your own life. Maybe it’s not the whole house, but just a closet or a room that gradually got away from you until cleaning it up felt too overwhelming to consider. I know it happened to me. In fact, I wrote about it in my very first post about medicating ADHD as an adult. I had moved furniture around upstairs to create a beautiful office work space and, characteristically, I had left behind plenty of unfinished business:

…when I created my office, I left behind another room. A room with too many furniture pieces, a room where we discarded everything we weren’t sure what to do with. Every time I entered this room to clean it up, my thoughts seemed to disperse, fleeing in every direction as an overwhelmed feeling washed over me and I shut the door again. I literally pretended this room did not exist in my house for four months.

That time, I successfully cleaned it up. Almost a year later, I demolished the walls of that same room for an exciting renovation project and got stymied by the more detail-oriented task. That room still sits bare to the studs after seven months.

Unsurprisingly, these looming and often embarrassing unattended projects sap creative energy.

There is no shame in asking for help in reaching your full potential.

I recently decided that, while paying someone to put up the drywall — which is sitting and gathering dust in a corner — in our spare room is cost prohibitive, there is other work that is not. For example: ever since my shoulder surgery in 2010 set me back on the garden, I have hardly touched it. This spring, I got fed up with the back yard. It was overgrown and unkempt and just plain embarrassing. I stopped wanting to talk to my neighbors because I didn’t want them to see me writing on the porch when the back yard (which they have to look at, too) was such a terrible mess.

Rather than add this to the list of overwhelming problems ruining my life, I took decisive action. My boss had a neighbor who was looking for odd gardening jobs. We were getting a tax refund. I had been eyeing the neighbors enviously as they took advantage of those bright Spring days to work in their gardens.

A few days later I found myself not in the yard, but sitting on the washing machine, escaping the unseasonable heat and working on the script I haven’t touched for weeks. Why? Because hiring someone to help me catch up on the garden had energized me to do the creative work that enriches my life and gets me closer to my big goals. Now all I’ll need to do is stay on top of the weeding, which is much more manageable than a large-scale rehab.

new garden

I realize hiring someone to give you a boost on household tasks may not be a possibility for everyone — the term “starving artist” has a few roots in truth — but it’s worth considering. If money is tight you may want to set aside an unexpected windfall like a tax refund. Or you could calculate how much you spend on one unnecessary thing and put the money in a jar for your project instead. Think cab rides instead of walking or taking the bus, lattes at Starbucks instead of making them at home, ordering Chinese instead of planning your meals and cooking during the week, paper towels instead of real ones, cigarettes when you keep saying you should quit. The possibility of an exciting reward may even provide the motivation you need to stick to these good habits.

These looming and often embarrassing unattended projects sap creative energy.

Also, just because you pay someone to redo your garden doesn’t mean you need to have them come every week to mow your lawn. Hiring a service to scan all your old photographs only needs to happen once if you’ve moved on to digital.  A cleaning service can provide a single-visit deep clean to make it more manageable for you to start a regular cleaning schedule of your own.

Even if you grew up in a household that wasn’t the type to pay others to do work you could do yourselves, there is no shame in asking for a little help in reaching your full potential. Remember, once a task becomes overwhelming (like a garden that hasn’t been tended for two years or a renovation project that has left you without a kitchen for 10 months), you are going to have an extremely difficult time breaking it into bite-size pieces and getting started again on your own. If a little money is all it takes to put you back on your feet and able to rededicate yourself to a creative project, so be it.

I’m interested to know if any of my artist (or non-artist — you’re welcome too!) friends have benefited from paying someone to help them over a task that had become an insurmountable hurdle. If you have, please share!

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Book Review: Is it You, Me, or Adult ADD? Stopping the Roller Coaster When Someone You Love Has Attention Deficit Disorder

April 15, 2012 in ADD, Book Reviews, Everyday Life | 7 comments

You Me or Adult ADD cover art

I tend to read a lot, and as I read books about adult ADHD and/or creative work, I’d like to write and share reviews with you.

Recently I finished Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? Stopping the Roller Coaster When Someone You Love Has Attention Deficit Disorder by Gina Pera.

If you don’t read the whole review, know this: Stopping the Roller Coaster is an absolute must for anyone in a long-term relationship where one or more partners have ADHD. Even without a formal diagnosis, I recommend it to any creative person who has been called irresponsible, lacking common sense, disorganized, or plain old hard to live with.

In my senior Business of Art course, our professor gave the women in the room some frank advice: keep your name when you get married. Artists are difficult to live with, he said. If we built an art career — very much about name recognition — only to have our marriages fail, we didn’t want to sabotage that career by reverting to a previous and unfamiliar name. We didn’t want to start from zero with networking and with search engine optimization because our names were our business.

And having a marriage fall apart was, he warned, going to be more likely for us than for regular folk.

Why? That singular dedication and drive, that chaos, that unwillingness or even inability to prioritize our spouses and our practical responsibilities over our work, which we might get wrapped up in for days or weeks. We may not come to bed until 3:00 a.m. We may not pay the bills on time or remember to pick up the dry cleaning before a formal gala. We may appear not to care about anything or anyone when we are working.

Having a marriage fall apart was, our professor warned, going to be more likely for us artists than for regular folk.

That sounds an awful lot like ADHD, which affects a great deal of intense creative thinkers. In fact, my husband — a computer programmer, which is a cousin to artist — fits this description exactly.

When I read this book, I gave it to him immediately, saying, “this is a book about us.” He now credits Stopping the Roller Coaster with changing his entire perspective on life.

Stopping the Roller Coaster focuses not just on obvious task completion problems associated with ADHD, but the oft-overlooked range of executive functioning deficiencies that create serious relationship schisms and render typical couples’ therapy and communication/conflict resolution strategies ineffective, including:

  • Listening — really listening — to your partner and comprehending what they’ve told you
  • Empathy
  • Seeing a situation from your partner’s perspective
  • Comprehending cause and effect, including the impact your behavior has on your partner
  • Emotional regulation, biploar behavior, and/or heightened emotional responses to everyday situations
  • Handling adult responsibilities and being reliable when your partner needs you

Pera also hits on the surprising manifestations of hyperactivity and in attentiveness in adults:

  • Hyperfocus — getting absorbed in a project to the exclusion of anything (or anyone) else
  • High-risk behavior, including substance abuse and aggressive driving
  • Picking fights, then blaming your partner for becoming upset as a result of the conflict
  • Blurting out private or inappropriate information about your partner in social settings
  • Insatiability and an inability to feel satisfied with anything (or anyone) in your life

The extensive research and real-life anecdotes open the door for couples to see clearly and begin to make sense of the ADHD partner’s “confusing ups and downs of selfishness and generosity, irritability and sweetness, brilliance and boneheadedness.”

For many readers, Pera’s research will bring together disparate pieces they never knew belonged to the same puzzle. For those with unrecognized/undiagnosed ADHD, it will be a revelation. My husband responded after the first few chapters that he couldn’t believe everything he “didn’t like about [himself]” had a common root and could be changed with proper strategies and medication.

For that sense of hope alone, I recommend this book for any adult who is consistently late, has trouble thinking before speaking, misses deadlines constantly, and struggles to manage long-term intimate relationships. Often these people know they are not reaching their full potential but feel powerless to get their lives under control. Because they are perfectly capable of focusing — hyperfocusing, even — on things that deeply interest them, their partners and colleagues come to the sensible but wholly incorrect conclusion that they just don’t care.

Pera concisely debunks the idea that mental disorders are a “gift”

As I mentioned in my previous post about the notion of crazy or tormented artists, absent-minded computer scientists, and other brilliant and gifted people with little common sense or life skills, it’s not an either/or proposition. Pera concisely debunks the idea that such mental disorders are a “gift” and stresses that our “strengths are independent of [our] ADHD” and, in fact, the “ADHD fog can obscure the best of qualities.” Treating these disorders doesn’t remove our capacity for innovation and brilliance. Quite the contrary: it frees us from our feelings of helplessness and lack of control.

Many readers may find the consistent roller coaster metaphor helps them string together concepts expressed throughout the book. I found it tedious and distracting because I prefer to delve straight into theories and statistics. However, my distaste for the visual metaphor was by far my biggest criticism, and I suspect Stopping the Roller Coaster has saved more than a few marriages. I had no idea how lucky we were until I read all those other couples’ stories!

There is an audio book version available, which I purchased for my husband because he prefers to read books that way. If you are an audio book fan, be warned: he found the narrator a bit too “frowny” during the anecdotes and examples of ADHD partners’ bad behavior, which undermined the spirit of the text. That said, if you feel you or your partner will only read the book in this format, it’s still well worth the investment. Personally, I preferred the Kindle edition so I could make copious notes, bookmarks, and highlights that would be sortable and searchable later.

All in all, Stopping the Roller Coaster combines just enough science for the lay reader with a wealth of real-life stories from people in long-term relationships with an ADHD partner. It can feel disorienting to read so many stories you thought were unique to you, your marriage, or your partner, but the end result is hope: hope that you can be successful in all aspects of life, hope that this is not the price you pay for talent and creativity, hope that you can reduce the baseline of anxiety and frustration in your home, and hope that you can take control of your life in a way you never thought possible.

Full disclosure: Mix Tapes & Scribbles has an affiliate agreement with Amazon, so I am eligible to earn a commission for sales generated from the links on this page. Feel free to purchase your books however and wherever you want.

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Medication & The Crazy Artist: Are We Becoming Zombies or Finally Putting Our Potential Within Reach?

March 31, 2012 in ADD, Medication | 4 comments

Was every legendary artist crazy? It’s a question a lot of people ask, especially those of us who earned an art history minor through many hours fighting off sleep in a warm, dark room, listening to the soothing click-click of the slide projector. Dry as that may sound, art from every period in human history has a fascinating story to tell. All the violence, the longing for the divine, the hedonism and academia of our collective history is hidden in these images.

Of course, once you enter this world you can never again look at those Starry Night mousepads or jokey The Scream souvenirs in quite the same way. You can’t help but catch the irony, given the tormented psyches that created them.

In college I was particularly taken by van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. It is rumored — though, like with many facts surrounding his death, not confirmed — to be his last painting, created just weeks before he shot himself in this same wheatfield.

Van Gogh struggled all his life with mental illness, and eventually succumbed to it. Society is quick to romanticize cases like this, however tragic, because we believe a little dose of crazy is necessary for great art. However, we forget the other side of the coin: van Gogh didn’t relish his illness. He wanted to overcome it, even moved away from gloomy Paris to try to get away from it, and hated the times when it immobilized him and prevented him from working at his highest capacity.

You may laugh if I draw a comparison to ADHD, but consider this: in adults, ADHD is often misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, anxiety, and/or depression. For many of these disorders, it can be easy to glorify symptoms: depressed people can find beauty in sadness, and by its very nature bipolar disorder provides the highest highs as a counterbalance to the lowest lows. I have met people who choose not to medicate their bipolar disorder because they don’t want to “give up” the manic end of the spectrum.

Using a stimulant medication like Adderall or Ritalin as an adult may create a feeling of stigma over taking a medication intended for hyperactive kids. It may cause fear of becoming a “zombie.” It may even go against our creative grain: artists are supposed to be scattered. The ups and downs and constant agitated thought are part of what keep us spontaneous and inspired. After all, we don’t aspire to be super-organized, rational, socially adept professionals with sparkling clean work spaces and a meticulously balanced check book…do we? Isn’t that why we scoff at the corporate world?

All of those common misdiagnoses are, on their own, crippling disorders. Interestingly, the key difference between bipolar and ADHD is the frequency, not even the severity, of the mood fluctuations. To be diagnosed with high-frequency bipolar disorder, patients must demonstrate four mood cycles in a twelve-month period, and each period of depression or mania lasts not less than two weeks. For ADHD adults, this can describe mood fluctuations throughout a single day. While bipolar mood shifts have no grounding in external events, people with ADHD experience the world more vividly and spin off into extreme highs and lows as a result of trigger events.

A year or two ago I expressed a degree of sympathy for my highly pragmatic best friend and office mate, who I have seen lose control of his emotions only once in the five years I have known him. He is always on such an even keel, I suspected he was missing out on the intense — even blinding at times — glitter with which I experienced life on a daily basis. Granted, I could spiral into abject despondency just as easily, but that seemed a small price to pay.

Many of our most beloved creative icons were tormented, even destroyed, by mental illness: Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Jackson Pollock. Consider this quote from Edvard Munch, on his inspiration for his famous painting The Scream:

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

It’s easy to romanticize this vision of the tortured artist. Indeed, I resisted medication for a long time because I didn’t want to turn down the volume and brightness on life.

However, I’m left to wonder if that higher plane is where I do my best work. I’ve been working on a script I started last year, and I’m learning that writing characters is strikingly similar to acting them (disclaimer: I don’t really know anything about acting).  So I’m taking a cue. When I watch actors prepare for a performance, I see them practicing an awareness of their bodies and a serenity in their minds, as if they were creating a blank slate and opening themselves up, preparing to accept the character. This grounding, this pulling in of one’s consciousness, is how I need to approach my script-writing. It begets a slower, steadier pace than I am used to, but a calmer mind keeps perspective. It doesn’t fluctuate between feverish bouts of inspiration and devastating periods of artist’s block. The other day, when I skipped my afternoon medication dose, the emotional whirlwind actually prevented me from sitting down and working on my script. Anguish and lack of control doesn’t always beget great work.

The decision to medicate a disorder or live with its effects, good and bad, is complex and highly personal. When we allow stereotypes and popular opinion to influence that decision, the ramifications — both career and personal — can be tragic. Medication for a recognized imbalance in brain chemistry is no different than eyeglasses to correct nearsightedness or medication to correct an underactive thyroid. The sooner we can all see it that way, the sooner we can make informed decisions about how we care for our minds and bodies.

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Sharpening Goals to a Point

March 24, 2012 in ADD, Goals | No comments

Recently I had to tackle an issue that is always tough for me: prioritization. Settings priorities — and the related task of setting boundaries — can be especially difficult for ADHD adults. However, effectively managing priorities and knowing when to draw a line can have a huge impact on quality of life.

Every January, I outline my goals for the year. I follow up by keeping lists and tracking my progress. This year one of my goals insists that I “don’t abandon good ideas or things I love.” Because such a broad statement demands specifics, I defined that to mean:

  • Playing the piano at least three times per week
  • Completing the first 100 photos for a new project I have in the works
  • Hosting a literary reading
  • Continuing to meet with a close friend regularly to pursue our joint creative endeavors (whatever those turn out to be)

Years' worth of projects can sit unfinished if they ALL take priority.

These ARE all good ideas, and I do love them. However, this list represents one relatively small piece of a pretty ambitious plan for the year. And as much as I would love to think I can push myself hard enough to succeed at all of it, I hit a breaking point pretty quickly. I’m currently medicating my ADHD, which is a tremendous help, but maintaining a high level of focus can be exhausting. I need to schedule intentional downtime to avoid a complete meltdown.

Perhaps the biggest benefit I get from medicating is additional perspective. My brain comprehends things in a totally different way. In this case, that meant instead of getting overwhelmed by my list and beating myself up for never completing anything I start, never meeting my goals, and being totally disorganized and unmotivated, I could rethink my context: had I set reasonable goals?

When I check off goals for One Task, One Stone, I will give myself credit for completing a daily to-do list even when I haven’t done everything on one condition: that I was together enough to rethink my list and cross off any unreasonable items by noon.

It’s just as valuable to take stock midway through a process and retool your goals as it is to accomplish everything you originally set out to do. Perhaps more so, because this demonstrates the capacity to assess what is reasonable and what needs to be cut to better preserve the important stuff.

This leads me back to priorities. Is it more meaningful for me to check off everything on the list, or to determine my own capacity and focus my energies on that which is most important? Lately I have begun to realize, for the first time ever, that it’s the latter. Life is about balance, not constant motion. I need to hone a valuable skill: identifying one or two projects to work on exclusively and letting the others go – or at least saving them for later when I can do them justice. Sharpening my focus not only gives me hope for actually finishing a project, it leaves time to rest and recharge so I come to my work prepared to give it my best. Only when we learn to suss out what truly matters to us and give it more than a fleeting cameo on our to-do list can we look forward to feeling successful and fulfilled.

 

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Sharpening Focus

March 17, 2012 in ADD | No comments

You might have noticed I haven’t posted for a while. This doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the blog, but I have spent some time considering my audience and my reason for blogging. While applicable to creative projects, many of my posts have revolved around goal-setting, work process, and systems to achieve success.

The experience — and I think it’s a common one — of surveying a landscape of ambitious, smart, inspiring, and unfinished creative projects in one’s life resonates with me. Living in a household comprised of two talented adults and countless projects full of potential (but few results) has inspired me to share not just what our lives are like, but some effective strategies for regulating and channeling our efforts.

Mix Tapes & Scribbles has been headed this way for a while, so really I am just formalizing a sharper focus: gifted, creative adults with learning disabilities. I want to share more articles, more strategies, more stories that shed light on what can be a monumentally frustrating problem. Learning disabilities are not correlated with low intelligence or talent. In fact, the opposite is often true, making the string of unfinished projects, unpaid bills, and/or failed relationships all the more painful when viewed through the lens of unrealized potential.

So from here on out I want to use this space to give voice to those creative minds among us who are brilliant, talented, fascinating, and a bit hard to live with. I want to provide a space to share our unique strengths, struggles, and triumphs.

I’m hoping to reorganize a few things in the sidebar and add a resource page over the next week or so, then develop some kind of reasonable posting schedule. If you want in or have suggestions, please let me know!

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