Attention Deficit Disorder in adults is a real thing. Know why I know this? Because my Psych told me the other day that I have it and gave me a good book to read on the subject of ADD: Driven to Distraction by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey. It deals with ADD in a broad scope so some of the things in it don’t apply to me. They talk about kids with ADD for example, and both adults and children with ADHD, both of these don’t apply to me. I didn’t have ADHD as a kid either according to their description of it. But the stuff about adults with ADD nails it right on the head for me. I fit about 92% of the profile for an adult with ADD (the 92% is an estimation but I don’t like round numbers so that’s what you get, it’s an ADD thing). Here are my personal observations on the subject only slightly influenced by the things I read in the book I just mentioned.

ADD & Depression

Depression is one of the most common side effects of ADD in adults. It turns out that people who are constantly misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and mistreated by all the peers and authority figures in their lives are more likely to suffer from depression. Go figure, hey? Apparently most people have a driving need to be accepted by their fellow man (or woman as the case may be). It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that depression is more often a side effect of some other mental disorder than a stand alone condition.

On the flip side, adults with ADD are some of the most resilient people you will ever meet. If we have fought this losing battle long enough to finally feel understood for the first time, we will stop at nothing to reach for the stars. There is a large list of famous people with ADD who’ve done just that. Richard Branson, and Jim Carey are just a couple of big name examples of what we can accomplish if we learn to use our unusual thought patterns to our advantage.

Intermission

OK, I admit there was a two-hour gap between the last three sentences as I researched “famous people that have ADD”. But on the plus side, other than actually finding famous people that share my brilliance, I also discovered that I share a middle name with both Jim Carey and Buzz Aldrin and that’s pretty cool. Wow, tangent. I’m going to leave that in here because this is, after all, an article about ADD.

ADD & Memory

Another common side effect of people with ADD is memory loss. We tend to forget important appointments, grocery lists, and especially “what did I come downstairs for?” The theory, as it was explained to me, goes something like this: memory loss itself probably has nothing to do with ADD. As a matter of fact, if you ask any spouse of someone with ADD, we have an amazing capacity to remember details that baffle most people but I can’t remember to zip up my fly most days. The problem comes in when everything that is input to our brain first has to get filtered through our ADD screening process. And that looks a little like this: information enters my brain, ADD filter looks at the input and measures its importance based on its relevance to whatever random thought is occupying the computing parts of my brain at that exact second, input gets stored in memory based on that rating and linked to that reference.

Here is an example: input is: I discover that my car is low on gas and I have a long trip to make tomorrow afternoon, I decide that I should fill the car with gas on the way home from my appointment today in preparation. ADD screens that information and rates against the details of the appointment I’m about to go into and decides that, in relation to my appointment, my car running low on gas will have little to no impact, so my ADD relegates the car needing gas to a low priority memory slot. Needless to say, although I remember no less than six times before leaving for that trip, I didn’t remember on the way home and it didn’t occur to me when it was convenient to go get gas. So I leave on my trip and remember I need gas exactly halfway between two gas stations when the gas light comes on in my dash board. At this point its down to luck as to whether that distance is small enough that I can make it to a gas station.

I have run out of gas as an in-town delivery driver because my ADD brain didn’t give enough priority to my needing to gas up my car. It was really hard to explain to my boss why I ran out of gas waiting for the next call in the parking lot of a liquor store across the street from a gas station. “I forgot to get gas” just sounds a little lame at that point, but I did exactly that once and had to wait an hour for roadside assistance.

Problem solving and learning

We tend to approach things differently than others. Doing things “the way it’s always been done” doesn’t work for us, so we tend to try a lot of other ways to get the same result. And for those of us that weren’t diagnosed with ADD until we were adults, we usually had to try other ways without the blessings of our parents, employers, or spouses. This is what often makes us feel so alone. I risk doing it wrong a hundred ways before I do it right, but it also means that when I get it right, I can teach the right way to others because I have done all the possible wrong ways and even invented a few that nobody else thought about. I’ve gotten used to just trying to figure things out myself because what works for other people doesn’t work for me. It also means that I’ve gotten used to doing something every wrong way before I figure out the right way. Even trying to copy other ADD people doesn’t work very often because our set of “what works” is rarely similar enough to use the same approach. Most of us find that persistence is the key to success and trying any hair-brained idea might just be our next success story.

The Good Stuff

A couple of other quick notes about the up side of ADD. Dr. Hallowell says in his book that people with ADD tend to be smarter and more creative than the average because we’ve had to cultivate those two traits in order to cope with our inability to copy the success plans of others. From my experience with those that I know who have ADD, he is right. Everyone I know with ADD is either self employed or has the freedom to do his or her job any which way they want as long as it doesn’t hurt the company or the clients. As entrepreneurs, we tend to have the ability to wear all the hats required to be successful. Our biggest problem with this concept is that most of us have never learned to trust our own abilities because of how much failure we have had and how unreliable our own brains have been. Those of us who do succeed typically have found a system that keeps our days reasonably predictable while leaving enough room for distractions.

What Should I Do Now?

The secret to living with ADD is two things in a nutshell. Scheduling myself enough to reduce the risks of ‘forgetting’ something. And having someone I can trust to help me understand my limitations and see my opportunities. According to the doctors that wrote the book I mentioned at the start of the article and my own psych, these two things are far more successful in dealing with ADD than drugs have ever been. My short term plan is to work on the scheduling part. The “someone I can trust” is, at the moment, my counsellors and my psychiatrist. I hope to have a life coach or accountability partner that I can talk to everyday who will help me figure out a useful plan for my life and keep me on a growing and learning pattern. I may still need drugs too, but I will need to build a strong routine with someone that can keep encouraging me to stay with it.

I hope you’ve learned something here and I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with ADD and/or depression. Comment or drop me a line and we can share our stories.