Therapist Reacts to ADHD TikToks

they sort of can't swap tasks so once you have one task on deck once you have like one active task you can't table it for other tasks and come back to it later so today we're gonna be running we're going to be going through a couple of things we're going to be talking about we're going to be reacting to some adhd tick tocks so talking a little bit about adhd and then we're also going to be talking a little bit about why we sometimes just feel relief instead of accomplishment when we do something right so sometimes we have this idea that like when i accomplish something i should feel accomplished but sometimes when we accomplish things all we feel is relief like when you you're you're panicking about the final panicking about the final exam and then you take the final exam and you don't say like yay i did it it's like oh my god i'm thank god that's over and so it's really challenging because if you're living a life where all of your actual accomplishments just feel like relief instead of any kind of achievement it can be really hard to kind of motivate yourself and so we're going to be talking a little bit about that we're also going to be talking a little bit about anger today so i think anger is one of the emotions that we haven't touched on too much um i think anger is a really really interesting emotion we're gonna kind of dive into what makes anger kind of unique is an emotion and so hopefully that'll be helpful okay so let's dive in so i'm seeing that people are having different kinds of responses to this right so this is kind of an interesting perspective on adhd people kind of call this i think white noise or even like warm brown noise is one of the terms um and so one of the things that is kind of interesting is that when when people make tick tocks like this they'll say that this has been scientifically proven to be effective and for some people you know we're seeing a variety of different responses some people are feeling very very different some people are feeling not different at all some people actually feel like this is troublesome because it actually like triggers their tinnitus like symptoms or reminds them of tinnitus or tinnitus and so i'd love to talk a little bit about you know how scientifically valid this is and actually what's going on because this is a really interesting principle of adhd so it turns out that this is actually has some scientific validation so neuropsychological and neurophysiological effects from white noise in children with and without adhd so this is a really interesting paper it's in the public domain you all can access it yourselves but it is interesting because people have done studies on the effect of white noise for people with adhd and what they sort of discovered is that sometimes white noise can help people with adhd and the reason for that is really fascinating so if you take someone with adhd what you find is that their adhd symptoms fluctuate with the environment and the more boring of an environment the less stimulus you have in the environment the worse the adhd becomes so i'll give you all kind of a simple example if i take a kid with adhd and i if i take two kids with adhd and i put one in a room with a chair and absolutely nothing else and i take another kid and put them in a room with a chair and some toys and some other things let's say it's like a seven-year-old kid we'll see that these kids behave very very differently and generally speaking the less stimulus so when we get into very very low stimulus environments those kids will be fidgety more they'll have difficulty paying attention and essentially there's a theory that suggests that there's an optimal level of function for kids with adhd and they will stimulate or create different kinds of stimulus by moving around or making noises or wandering around or exploring things to try to get their threshold up to an optimal stimulus level and if you provide appropriate stimuli then the adhd behaviors will actually go down so the interesting thing about the white noise kind of perspective or warm brown noise or dark brown noise or whatever you call it is that there is some scientific evidence that some amount of increased stimulus will actually help people with adhd focus more because you're sort of getting out of that low stimulus period where the adhd is looking for something to kind of jump into now the interesting thing is that this can be contrasted with too much stimulus so we're going to take a quick look at what that looks like i'm starving let's go to the kitchen get some food in the kitchen i still didn't put away the rest of the groceries okay let's get that done quick i'm serving bread let's grab the bread maybe i forgot tortillas again i want a quesadilla yeah whatever i'll get them next time it's just so boring what's next what's next could make a smoothie smoothies are really good is that bowl still sitting there okay wonderful things that's been sitting there look at those so like notice what's happening here is this person moves around right they're increasing the amount of stimulus that they have access to their mind is moving towards different things is the vase they're kind of having trouble focusing right they're doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that such a gross feeling perfect how can she think of so many trains of thought at once that's actually the challenge is that it's not really so many trains of thought at once it's actually [Music] don't forget the meeting i have that meeting soon i should really go and get ready for that so much work maybe it comes from the latin word pilla i feel like i'm forgetting something flowers flowers i need to go and put the flowers right so i feel like i'm forgetting something so this is like another good example of this stimulus balance so what i found working with people with adhd is that if you're under stimulated by your environment your mind will start to wander and you'll try to create self-stimulating kind of things you'll wiggle around you'll fidget you'll get distracted stuff like that and so the the research on things like white noise suggests that what you can actually do is if you're under stimulated what that's what you're going to do if you have adhd or sometimes is that you'll create other stimuli for yourself to get to your optimal level the interesting thing is that if you go above the optimal level you have what we see in this next tick tock which is an over stimulated environment where as you're getting okay i'm thinking about this grocery list i'm thinking about this you know set of flowers i got to do this i got to take my pills i gotta unload my groceries and and so as you move around the environment you're getting bombarded with lots of stimuli and as you get bombarded with lots of stimuli your adhd symptoms can't really cope with that and you can't focus on one thing so if you want to sit down and do some work what you actually find is that there's an optimal level of stimulus balance which most people with adhd will find so white noise is a really good example of you know upping if you're on the low end cleaning up your room and removing a lot of distracting stimuli is a good example of what you can do if you're over stimulated and getting distracted but the key thing here is that it appears that through research on like you know on people with adhd and people without adhd what we find is there's an optimal level of stimulus which allows you to focus best if you have adhd the really tricky thing i saw there was a question about social media and technology what's really devastating is that we're living in a society now where technology is crippling people with adhd because what happens is is in the past like let's say i'm trying to study and i'm in a library and so as i is as i'm under stimulated i'll start to get distracted and move around and things like that the problem is with the easy access of technology and with how addictive technology is to the adhd mind it's really easy to slip into that stimulus and get caught up in it for hours at a time so what's happening is as you try to focus with adhd and you don't have enough stimulus you'll reach for your phone and then a 15 second distraction because of the way that things get populated and there's this post and that post even as we're looking at tick tock i want you all to notice what tick tock bombards me with right so like even as i look at this there's just not one thing there's some recommended videos over here with screenshots all right if i if i mouse over them there's like more stimulus and what i'm going to do is i'm going to look at this i'm going to look at this like i'm going to look at this stuff over here there's comments so what's happening right now is as my mind is seeking stimulus it finds a ton of it if i slip into technology usage and then the problem becomes since these platforms are so good at accommodating my shifting attention they reward me for clicking on lots of different things right and then i've got the central video which then holds my attention for a minute and i click on this thing and i click on this thing and i click on this thing so what we're sort of seeing in society is that people with adhd are actually being like crippled their symptoms are getting worse more people are being diagnosed with it because technology sort of takes advantage of this stimulus of this lack of stimulus balance so if you're someone who's kind of struggling with this these are both very common experiences where some amount of increased stimulus if it's kind of thoughtful and can't distract you can actually improve your focus and there's research that actually supports that and we also see the opposite as well which is that if you're over stimulated and there's too much sensory input that will actually worsen your symptoms so there's even research that shows that people with adhd who operate or try to work in clean spaces are able to focus more and there's a bunch of stuff on on we kind of cover this in more detail in dr k's guide but about top down versus bottom up kind of stimulus stuff and sort of attentional control and so both of these things are are kind of true right where you're over stimulated it's going to distract you if you're under stimulated you're going to create distractions to get to your optimal stimulus balance so if you're in this kind of situation it's really important to think a little bit about okay what's my optimal stimulus balance and what are things that i can kind of do to increase it if i'm under stimulated but also use things that are not going to lead to further distractions like technology what's the scientific evidence so there's a lot of scientific evidence it's two things that y'all can look at one is um you know we said we took a look at this paper which is pretty preliminary but there seems to be some evidence to support this so you all can look at the optimal stimulation theory and moderate brain arousal model those are two models that have been studied in adhd and for the other side i would look at top-down versus bottom-up attentional control studies so those are kind of the two things that we've sort of explored scientifically which seem to have some support let's keep going i thought you said you had a busy day today yeah i'm in adhd paralysis what's that my brain physically won't let me do anything what caused it sometimes nothing causes it but today it's because i have a package that's coming at 8 pm you can't do anything before that package comes yeah i like to call it my waiting mode you're not just being lazy no my brain's currently going like a thousand miles per hour telling me i should be doing things but can't yeah i'm in so adhd paralysis is a really interesting phenomenon um it's something that hasn't been that well studied so like there are aspects of this that have been well studied and aspects of this that haven't been really that well studied and what i tend to find is that when we look at things like adhd paralysis there's a lot of low quality information like opinions and and you know the stick talk is actually pretty good because i think it's representative of people's experiences but for example a lot of people will correlate adhd paralysis with procrastination right so they'll kind of say like oh i'm putting off tasks i can't focus on anything you know if you've got 10 things to do today and you're getting a package delivery at 8pm i'm putting off those other things so that feels like procrastination so this once again is my opinion i did some research into this phenomenon and really didn't find great scientific studies about this so i think what we're doing is we're sort of learning more about novel features of adhd as people are getting more diagnosed and it's becoming more of an issue and especially adults with adhd because this kind of like task paralysis if you look at the original research on adhd was done mostly in children right so adhd for a long time was specifically kind of a childhood diagnosis and as more and more adults are getting diagnosed with it we're sort of discovering different manifestations of it so what's going on with adhd paralysis so the first thing is in my experience as a clinician once again this is an opinion okay what we do sort of know is that this probably has to do with an executive function deficit so what we know about adhd is that it's a neurodevelopmental disorder and what that sort of means is that the brains of people with adhd seem to develop in a different way and one of the ways in which they develop differently is in their frontal lobes so the frontal lobes are responsible for something called executive function executive function is our ability to plan and execute tasks and people with adhd struggle with this so what's happening in in if we sort of take a neurotypical person is if they've got something to do at 8 pm what they can sort of do is like they can plan up to 8 pm so if i've got 10 things to do today and one of them is 8 pm my brain is good at automatically sequencing those tasks so i can do this at 10 am this at 1 pm this at 5 pm and this at 8 pm and all of my stuff will get done i'll sort of be or i'll be efficient you know i'll leave six things for tomorrow but i can get these four things done today what we tend to find in executive dysfunction is that this sequencing is kind of a problem and the simplest way that i would describe it in terms of my clinical work with people is that they sort of can't swap tasks so once you have one task on deck once you have like one active task you can't table it for other tasks and come back to it later so in my experience this is actually a sequencing problem where once you've got something in your mind you can't set it down and do other things and so what this ends up as is what people call kind of colloquially adhd paralysis or task paralysis which is if i've got one thing at 3 pm i can't do anything else and you may think well that's that sounds you know like it you know it sounds like a real problem and it sort of is in terms of function but there may actually be a very good reason for that and that's where remember that if if we get distracted right so this is the challenge with adhd if we get distracted we may not remember things we may not come back to things since our brain can't sequence and kind of execute on tasks in in time what we sort of do is our brain sort of almost learns that okay this is the task that i've got on deck it's almost like your brain can't save something and close a document and open it up later that if you come back to a task that you left you know alone if you tried to close the document it doesn't save any of the progress that you made which is also another really really common experience for people with adhd which is that they have difficulty with task completion because any time they get distracted when they go back to the task they can't pick up where they left off and so i want y'all to just think about this for a second if your brain can't pick up efficiently where you left off what is the adaptation going to actually be don't get distracted don't lose sight of it you can't ever put it down we're operating with a word document or some kind of word processor that can never save so what does that mean that means once the task comes on deck we have to hold on to it and we can't let anything else get in the way so in my experience with working with people with adhd this adhd paralysis actually has to do with an inability to sequence out and pick up tasks so that's where there are the good news is that there's some organizational tools that you can sort of do and you can use and this is something that we i think this tic-tac represents well is that this person is just using their mind or their brain to do all the work right there's no and this is what we kind of see if you look at actually treatment for adhd adhd treatment is really interesting because a lot of what if you look at cognitive behavioral therapy for adhd a lot of it is not like talking about your feelings or discussing your traumas or things like that it's actually more education and teaching people how to build like uh you know a priority list how to kind of get organized how to build like a task list how to build a to-do list how to sort of make sure that those to-do lists have time anchors and things like that so you don't forget things you don't you know you're not and you don't end up with lateness and in our adhd guide which is coming out soon for example what we sort of focus on is helping people build to-do lists that protect against two things forget forgetting tasks and being late on tasks so any kind of organizational system that you have if you've got adhd should protect against these two outcomes is being late and forgetting right so stuff should be on time and it shouldn't be forgotten so if you're struggling with adhd paralysis the first thing to kind of think about is think a little bit critically about whether this is the same as procrastination because in my experience procrastination is putting off a task purposefully because you're avoiding something about the task either you're perfectionistic or there's some kind of emotion associated with it whereas adhd paralysis is actually a sequencing problem it's not that you're putting off the other eight tasks because they're challenging in some way it's that your brain is stuck on one task and since that's occupying so much of your ram you can't shift to something else so those are actually two very different things and what i tend to find in people who associate adhd with procrastination is that they're trying to solve the wrong thing which is why their solutions don't work and they continue being stuck in adhd paralysis does that make sense download more ram great point so this you all are joking when you say when i see drop me stuff is saying download more ram et cetera right so casvot vax is saying download more ram y'all are right that that is a solution for a while so this is also something to understand you know what the download more ram is the equivalent of in kids with adhd is a high iq so this is what happens with kids with adhd they start to struggle in adulthood especially the ones that are actually above average intelligence because what they do is they muscle their way through things using brute force extra resources so if imagine for example like i'm using a word processor and i can't save my documents so what i'm going to do is put ram into my computer so i can have more documents open at the same time right so you're like literally investing more resources in a inefficient process which is exactly what happens with smart kids with adhd they just brute force use intelligence i can't pay attention to class so what i have to do is use cognitive reasoning inductive reasoning deductive reasoning to answer questions when the teacher calls on me i want you all to really think about this if you're a kid with adhd when the teacher calls on you and you're not paying attention the miraculous thing is that a lot of adhd kids know the right answer anyway even though they're not paying attention and how how do they know the right answer because they look around they're like oh crap the teacher called on me they look around they look at what's on the board oh we're doing math class i see a problem on the board they're asking me a question let me figure out what the answer is this is the answer and you say it in five seconds and the teacher's like okay i guess you were paying attention no you weren't paying attention you were brute forcing things with extra iq this is actually what's really really sad about kids with adhd is that as they download more and more ram they fill up all of their you know motherboard slots with ram to try to compensate for not being able to save documents the problem is at some point your motherboard fills up and as your motherboard fills up and you can't brute force it anymore you're stuck with all of this ram and the inability to save documents so this usually happens in adulthood for kids who are very very intelligent and have adhd and they hit a wall because suddenly you can't pack any more ram right like you hit this really hard wall and that's what's actually really devastating because this entire time sometimes they'll even get iq tested right you'll take this five-year-old kid with like very high expectation parents and they'll get them iq tested at the age of five oh the child is gifted your child has an iq of 140 a bunch of expectation extra classes ap classes gifted and talented classes and the kid is struggling struggling struggling struggling because they have no hard drive they've got no hard drive and they're just packing in ram packing and ram packing and ram and so their life becomes harder and harder and harder but actually because they're so exceptional they can manage it up until a point but at some point you got to have a hard hard drive you got to have disk space you can't store everything in ram and that's what they run into this it's a hard stop for these people it's so challenging make sense let's move on great but i i love i love the memes comments you all don't realize like how epic your comments actually are i got three looks and that's it could i interest you um oftentimes adhd will manifest in with different symptoms right so people will say oh i've got three looks like i've got like over sharing talking too much and zoning out the interesting thing is that i think all three of those are actually kind of the same thing so even when you're zoning out what's going on there's a bunch of stuff going on in here right so there's over sharing which is like talking too much right are you like you're talking too fast and people aren't really able to pay attention but even when you're zoning out it's the same process it's just whether your mouth is opening and you're emitting sound or not right but mentally the process is the same it's just we've got two modes we've got communication mode or we've got silent mode but on the inside it's actually the same distractible high speed kind of thought process does that make sense is this also relatable to people without adhd or do i maybe so this is exactly why we stream this kind of stuff so remember these are tick tocks right these are not diagnostic evaluations or diagnostic criteria or things like this but if this kind of stuff resonates with you i think it's very reasonable to go get a clinical evaluation for something like adhd so remember that adhd is a spectrum okay attention is a spectrum so there's people who have very good attention people have highly distractible attention if it's impairing your function then it's more likely to have it be a disorder right so that's generally speaking the line that we draw in psychiatry is does it impair your function or not but the other thing the other reason that we're doing this is because what we're finding is that attention spans seem to be decreasing we know that epidemiologically the diagnosis of adhd seems to be on the rise but that begs a really interesting question are more people having adhd or are we just get getting better at diagnosing it is the amount of people who have adhd actually has been the same but we used to miss a bunch of people and now we're just catching them so we're the diagnosis rate is increasing but it's a little bit fuzzy is it because we're is there more awareness of it or is something happening in our society is something in the water is something happening with technology that is making us more adhd and i suspect that the answer is actually a combination of both that if you look at things like the uh what can i say like the progression of attention span on the internet it's getting shorter right so there used to be blogs and they've been replaced by tweets and now it's kind of funny funny because we've gone so far on that side that now that we have twit longers and on twitter we'll have like these twitter threads right one out of nine two out of nine three out of nine so you're kind of swinging back the other way if you look at things like you know youtube videos used to be whole videos and then we had vines for a little while and then we had video essays and things like that and now we're moving towards youtube shorts twitch clips tick tocks you know things like that shorter form content shorter form content so probably i suspect that it's actually due to technology but i also think we're getting better at diagnosing it so if this stuff resonates with you i highly encourage you to you know go get evaluated because adhd here's the other thing clinical opinion here but in my experience adhd is the most over diagnosed and simultaneously the most under diagnosed psychiatric illness what does that mean how can something be over diagnosed and under diagnosed it's because we miss adhd in a lot of people it's under-diagnosed because we have the smart kids who compensate right so they have adhd but since they compensate with iq we miss the diagnosis the other reason that it's over diagnosed is that there's studies that show that for example the more kids in a classroom the more likely they are to get diagnosed with adhd so when you have other kinds of attentional problems when you've got you know parents who for example don't teach their kids to sit down and study and they go to school and like they don't have enough individual support they'll get diagnosed with adhd started on medication and sent out the door so we get a lot of misdiagnosis over diagnosis and a lot of missed under diagnosis so now i'm seeing i'm saying go get evaluated what i'm seeing is a lot of people are getting pushed around in terms of getting diagnosis so uh you know one person is saying i tried talking to my doctor but he rolled his eyes and referred me to psychiatry who said they were going to call me back three months ago so i would follow up right so i think this is what's really challenging is that there's a there's a lack of mental health resources and professionals based on the size of mental health problems someone else is talking about um like you know being in a queue in brazil for getting a diagnosis um you know things like that so just uh this is unfortunate right is that like what's happened is for a long long time like let's say a hundred years or so medicine the field of medicine has heavily over i would say in an imbalanced way over-invested in physical medicine so what what happened is we left kind of psychiatry and mental health by the wayside and so that's it's sort of okay in a sense because there were bigger problems right so we were focused on heart disease and cancer but about 10 years ago actually mental health rose to the top in terms of highest amount of morbidity and mortality i think in the u.s and globally as well so mental health actually causes more damage to our society than cancer and heart disease which used to be number one and number two so i think that we're really lagging behind in terms of like getting resources and this is the real real challenges when i say go see a therapist or go see a psychiatrist go get evaluated the fact that there isn't enough supply unfortunately doesn't change the right answer right this is what's really tricky about the world today is like the right answer is to still if you've got an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder you probably need clinical help right like it's kind of like saying okay like if i've got a heart attack and the emergency room is full what do i do then it's it's not like there's an all like you need to go to the emergency room this is a systemic problem it's a fault of society that these wait lists are so long that so many countries have poor understanding about mental health that we're under resourced to deal with mental health and like it sucks to be alive in this kind of world where you need services and they're not available right but the truth of the matter is that like you still gotta get evaluated if you concerned you have adhd if it takes three months if it takes three months that's the kind of thing whereas as a clinician i can tell you it's gonna drastically alter getting mental health treatment early drastically alters your course in life three months may feel like a long time but we know this in terms of for example early interventions for schizophrenia or if you can catch it early you can actually substantially alter the course of this person's life you can help them graduate from college and then a college degree allows you to get different jobs different jobs allow you to form different kinds of relationships allow you to build a life that's worth living so early intervention is really important so i know it can take a long time i'm sorry that y'all are in that situation i wish i could do more right we're doing what we can in terms of aoe but go see a professional even if it takes a while and stay on top of it because this could be really important what people think hyperfocus is hey man you want to waste some time no not now i'm hyper focusing wow i gave up on that problem hours ago incredible hyper focus can seem like a superpower what hyperfocus actually feels like hey buddy you've been at it for a while [Music] jesus christ was that your stomach what the eye of sauron dude when's the last time you ate i don't know i'm almost done can you just go away okay hey just eat this okay yeah dude that's devastating this is something that's going around nowadays is this concept of hyper focus so what people tend to find is that even if you have adhd you're able to enter periods of intense focus on a particular thing now some people some studies have sort of hypothesized that this is similar to the flow state i think there's a lot of merit to those and i've worked with people who have adhd who have entered periods of hyperfocus that have been very very productive there are different perspectives though and one is we're going to talk about something called perseveration so perseveration is the inability to shift your attention so this is something that people sometimes forget about adhd is that it's an attentional disorder it's not necessarily an inattentional disorder okay so it's a tension deficit hyperactivity disorder or attention deficit disorder so there are two dimensions of attention one is the ability to get distracted or not get distracted right one is the ability to focus on something and not lose sight of or not get distracted by something else that's what we usually think about so if we watch the earlier tick talk about the girl kind of walking around and getting distracted by a thousand things we think about the inability to hold your attention in a particular place is what adhd is there's another side to that coin which is perseveration or hyper focus which i still sort of think of as a problem and we'll talk about that in a second which is the inability to let go of something because here's the real problem with hyper focus is that it's generally speaking not controllable right that's where what i tend to find in in when i work with people with adhd is that they're looking to harness that in a consistent way right they're like oh if i can just hyper focus then everything would be so awesome if i could hyper focus every day everything would be great i just need to figure out how to hyper focus better hyper focus better hyper focus better but the whole challenge of hyper focus if you have adhd is that you can't control it right so you're like looking for this thing looking for this thing every once in a blue moon like it shows up and you hyper focus on your exam and you get a bunch of programming done and stuff like that i've worked with like engineers and stuff at very prestigious firms like developers right and they're like oh if i can harness it like sometimes i'll show up at 8pm and then i'll hyper focus through the night and i'll get all of my coding done for the whole week and they go around trying to chase these kinds of hyper focusing episodes so this is the kind of thing where i think it's like it's kind of tricky because is this perseveration is it a sign of illness or is it like funk like useful and that's where like i want you all to remember that there are features for diagnosable psychiatric illnesses that can actually be beneficial and generally speaking when we think about diagnosable psychiatric illnesses part of the reason that they exist is because they are a hyperactivation of a useful feature another good example of this is something like hypomania so hypomania and bipolar disorder allows people to be functional with like two to four hours of sleep a night so what we tend to see is that people who are like functional with two to four hours of sleep a night can accomplish amazing things until the hypomania crashes into a depressive episode and then for six months getting out of bed is a struggle so hyper focus can be useful some people can sort of align it in kind of a productive way but generally speaking what i tend to find is that if you have a choice between you know random periods of hyper focus on random tasks too because you can't necessarily hyper focus on what you need to hyper focus on in fact a huge problem with adhd especially if you talk to people like parents is like their kid will perseverate with legos they need to do their homework but they can sit and focus on legos for eight hours at a time or they can play minecraft for 14 hours at a stretch without food or water or whatever and so like if you could shift that to studying imagine what you could accomplish and there are people who are able to sort of you know find some happy medium there but generally speaking i think this is a more accurate representation of hyper focus is if you look at you know these different kinds of blogs and stuff like that they'll talk about oh you know like harnessing hyper focus for your optimal productivity and like accomplish like make six thousand dollars an hour if you just like hyper focus properly right and take these new tropics and buy my book by the way and use these supplements that'll enhance your hyper focus with adhd pay me money and the dream that you crave will become true you can hyper focus whenever you want and there's a part of that that may be real right there's a part of that about cultivating hyper focus cultivating the flow state which is probably somewhat similar but we've got to be really careful because sometimes this can really cross over into perseveration and in my experience hyper focus is more like winning the lottery than it is about you know having a salary it's like every now and then it really the stars align and you can do a lot but it's just not a consistent there's just a lack of consistency to it so this is what's super challenging about it so you know this is the kind of thing where when i work with people who struggle with any kind of diagnosis there are oftentimes certain parts that are advantageous which i know sounds kind of weird and it's fine to try to cultivate those parts and and sort of emphasize those parts and things like that but this is also the kind of thing where you got to be a little bit careful i mean if you try it for a while it's really not working then i'd recommend something else right instead of trying to make the stars align over and over and over again maybe get some treatment maybe do something about it maybe alter you know your focus on building your attention meditate more build your executive function so that you can control your attention a little bit better so all the kind of treatments or other kinds of supportive things that you can do can still be helpful questions ginger tonic is saying not me hyper focusing on the stream while i plan to clean my house absolutely right this is the challenge i want to play games but got distracted by the stream i don't know if that's a win or a loss for you so there are a lot of questions about things like building executive function how do i read books with adhd so let me try to summarize this so there's like the key thing is that we break this down in a lot of complexity because this is a complex issue we break this down this is why we built a guide right so we made a guide that's like 20 hours of stuff around adhd and how to build executive function and all this kind of stuff but i'll try to give you all a summary so here's my general approach to working with someone with adhd there are some things that you can level up your brain for and the key thing about adhd is you can't just level up your brain a big part of protecting against adhd is not just improving your executive function it's actually creating external systems to accommodate for whatever weaknesses you have in your brain it's an oversimplification but that's generally how i think about it and this is where like this is true for i think kind of anyone right this isn't just exclusive for adhd any kind of any human being has a unique cognitive fingerprint that has particular strengths and particular weaknesses and this is where if you want to think about how to be successful that's where you've got to level up some of those weaknesses but a big part of it is actually accounting for some of those weaknesses in other ways right so let's say i'm running a company and i'm really really good at operations but i'm not great at creative thinking so i can try to boost my creative thinking to a certain amount but there's going to be a certain point where like the you know the most ideal solution is that i partner with someone who's good at the creative thinking and then we work together so it's using external things in addition to leveling yourself up so just to give you all a simple example of this like how we pair these together when i'm working with people with adhd i'll teach them to meditate which is one of the simplest ways to boost executive function and that too i personally believe this is less signed or not scientifically supported right so the studies are on mindfulness and people garble all the different interventions they don't like just call it all mindfulness but you can do very different things one will be a month or a meditation one will be some you know observing your breath whatever so in my experience particular meditations are more effective for attentional problems compared to depression or anxiety or whatever so you can use meditation to boost your executive function but a key part of that is also like getting organized learning how to prioritize building a to-do list that protects you from getting distracted right so it's like using notifications and calendars and things like that so you don't have to level up your brain so much that some of it you can actually like gear up on the outside right there's like the stats that you level up and then there's the gear that you equip and the damage that you do or you know the power of your heels or things like that all that stuff is a combination of stats plus gear and when it comes to figuring out your adhd that's the attitude that i take that's the approach that i take some stuff you've got to level up but some stuff you've got to externally gear and it'll do the work for you and the problem is that a lot of times with people with adhd all they want to do is level up they're running around like deprived you know running around with a loincloth with no weapons and just jacking up their strengths as much as they can so they can start you know punching people in a video game and it's like at some point you want to equip a weapon if you want to increase your dps like you can jack up your stats as much as you want to it's just not that not going to be that efficient and when we see real progress and this is where if you look at the you know evidence-based psychotherapies that we have for adhd a lot of is actually not about leveling yourself up or doing any kind of internal work a lot of it is about gearing up properly so someone else is asking what if i was told i was i as a child i have adhd but i'm good at getting things done remembering things staying organized now was i misdiagnosed i can't say whether you're misdiagnosed or not because i don't know if you meet the diagnostic criteria today and i don't know if you met the diagnostic criteria before right there's a lot of stuff that goes into the diagnosis of adhd what i can say is a couple of interesting principles the first is remember i said that adhd is one of the most over diagnosed illnesses in my experience so it's possible you're misdiagnosed the other thing to remember is that adhd can uh generally speaking small percentage of people we're talking 25 percent of people or less will grow out of adhd so remember that adhd is an executive function deficit and the executive function comes from the frontal lobes and the frontal lobes develop until you're about 30 or 32. so we tend to find is that as people grow up they can look like they have adhd before but as their frontal lobes develop they can essentially quote unquote grow out of it the unfortunate thing is that as you really look at good epidemiologic studies on what percentage of people grow out of it unfortunately it's the minority of people so were you misdiagnosed i don't know you could have been misdiagnosed you could have been someone who [Music] was appropriately diagnosed but grew out of it because your frontal lobes developed or you could be someone who still neurodevelopmentally has adhd but has developed the appropriate compensatory mechanisms you've geared up enough to where adhd doesn't affect you and that's what we see in treatment with adhd that when you do for example cbt with adhd and you help people build these you know organizational systems and stuff like that they no longer meet criteria for the disease in terms of impairment to function so it doesn't cure your adhd because it doesn't change your brain but you you gear up enough to where like you can do dps fine great question you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

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Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist

Id: uMK4gdR7c18

Length: 44min 48sec (2688 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022