Frustration

How many times had you lose an opportunity because of a little mistake or a chain of little mistakes? How many times had you a group work in danger just for being careless? How many times had you lost friends just for being impatient? How many times you had find yourself asking why didn't you pay attention to that class/advice/lecture? How many times had you passed a bad time just for a small distraction?

How many times.....

Theres is a time in adult life when you start to consider that you're not going anywhere if you kept to doing things the same way you always do. Einstein once said that mad people are the ones that think that something can change if they do the same thing each day. Then: Why do we keep repeating the same actions? It's some kind of spell or something? The answer is more common on these days: It's our comfort zone. 

But, don't miss understand me, this is not another couching website, self help book or anything like that. Modern life has given us several ways to ease our life. Living in such easy environment makes our needs of effort near to zero.  Food, ceiling and even sex it's undemanding this era. The wish of becoming successful is only limited by the society, at the same time we ignore society while being in our smartphones. Surely the chances of an ADHD patient back in stone era was very low compared with nowadays. Information era is intoxicating our minds with data we don't have to know, events we don't have to attend, people we don't have to know, food we don't have to eat, images we don't have too see and audio we don't have to hear. Unnecessary information tracks with itself a lot things that are wasting our time. Life is for now a limited resource and  is better to earn something from it. 

If you don't believe me try the QualityTime App. This app will track how much time are you spending in your phone. Luckily if you have no problems focusing you it'll count 3 or four hours only in social media. If you sum 3 hours per day during a month it's 90 hours, 1080 hours per year. Maybe you are thinking: "But it's my way to rest" or "I communicate with my friends using that apps". Don't my mind me if you think different, but social media is not for rest, your mind is occupied reading or watching photos or videos, commenting, reacting, uploading. Is your communication more effective using these apps that speaking directly? You feel more connected with your friends or family? Things are the same when you're face to face?. If you're not longer and edgy teen, the answer is probably yes.

This is an invitation to invest your time in something productive. Aside publicity and networking social media and entertainment could be blocking your path. I'm sure you could change the word with your work and you could be more effective if you get rid of superfluous information. For me in now concentrated in learn new technologies, work in my leadership skill, be fluent English,  and finish the university. 

Never forget, step by step. Success is not the happiness, happiness it's in the road to success.

Living the covid-19 with ADHD

The actual world's outbreak Covid-19 is propagating at an exponential rate and taking measures is necessary at personal level to elude a possible infection.

Due to my ADHD condition forgetting the security recommendation such as put a cover if you are going the street, clean my hands, and not touching my face, eyes or nose could be easily forgotten. The best strategy to follow in this case is using a strategy I like to call reaction function.

Reaction function uses the formal definition of function for mathematics to creates new habbits or remove bad ones. The concept is very simple: Given an action you perform daily, do another action you want to make an habbit after finishing it. In example, every time you brush your teeth, do a push-up. Although the instructions are very simple, in the practice it's a bit complex.

First of all you need to recognize what kind of things you do daily and then write them in a peace of paper. Them you could select a new habbit for each one, but I suggest you to start with no more than two new task at the same time until the are attached to your everyday. Write each one at the side of one of your daily practices. Now it's time to program your gray matter: close your eyes and imagine yourself doing the daily custom you've selected. Remember how it feels, remember the individual actions you follow to make it. For the teeth brush case, i.e. watch yourself entering the bathroom, taking your brush from the cupboard, applying toothpaste, putting the brush in your mouth. Visualize your hand moving, the feeling of the bristles on your teeth, the way you change the brushing spot, etc. After that imagine yourself making the new action. Repeat the process 2 or three times. If the programming works, you'll remember the new habit immediately once you are making the daily one. Putting context to your memory is a great cheat to memorize things. Similar techniques are used in the cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Apply this for the security health care recommendations and you will be finding yourself abiding them, or at least the major part of the time. 

Probably all the lazy or careless people you know are ADHDers

If you've been following this blog you may know that I discovered my ADD problem only five months ago (December 2019) and since that point my live has change drastically. Before this finding I couldn't find anything that helps me to concentrate on my personal projects. I'd tried everything from self-help books to advanced strategies to avoid procrastination: Pomodoro technique, self-restraint, calendar applications, meditation, yoga, etc. Now after studying a lot about ADHD and the implications in the limbic system, symptoms, strategies, medication and so on I could say that a lot people out there are currently suffering it.

Medicine as other sciences follows a pattern-based criteria to determine whether given some symptoms someone is showing signs to a certain illness. If you a are fully capable of distinguish symptoms in an individual according to a criteria obtained from a reliable source them you could be sure you're right in a diagnostic. For ADHD in particular, traits manifest as identifiable behaviors (Look a basic symptom descripton here). Between my circle (Which is mainly composed of people that I'd known for many years) I have already found four people that have a high chance of bear the malady, my best friend and my twin brother and my crush are part of them (curious that the closest people around me are the same).

Yes, there is a big probability that I'd chosen people based of the similarities we share, but it stills means that there are four more not diagnosed individuals. My theory is that at least 10% of the world population suffers ADHD but they look so similar compared to people with neuro-typical brains that it's very onerous to discover this kind of decease in a society thats put so much pressure on working hard. All the effort of neuro-typical ones will qualify this conduct as lazy or careless instead of looking after other explanations. 

 If you're reading this and want to empathize with other people with ADHD you could put your bets on discovering another patients. Anyone that looks lazy, careless or clumsy is a possible case, don't blame them and guide them to a professional.

A certain problem with emotions

ADD driven emotions can modify the patient feelings drastically from time to time. Again speaking from my experience there are a lot changes I could show during a day when I'm taking decisions that are related to feelings. 

As you may know ADHD produces impaired activity in the Limbic systems which regulates emotions and attention. If you want more specific data you could check this video and its description for papers a more articles.

Being impulsive causes me a lot of trouble when I was younger. Don't miss understand me: There is a lot of impulsivity in my daily basics, but usually I control my reactions. One of my most recurrent problems tied with impulsivity was fighting whit my friends, specially my female friends. I was used to demand a lot of attention, when I did not get it, I started to feel frustrated. Frustration droves me into a spiral of positive feedback in where my only actions were asking for more attention and feeling more awkward and frustrated. Finally I was beginning to say things like "You don't love me" or "I don't mean nothing for you" or more intense things until the other person was getting tired and then blow me up. 

My self-soothing was very similar to Jessica in the video. The way I started to note this was when I got my first senior developer job. When I was feeling sad or lone my response was going for a cafe in Starbucks, or buying a subway, an expensive breakfast, etc. Another wrong self-soothing was playing videogames all day. Nothing healthy at all. 

For the final point (because we aren't either going to speak about refocusing our attention) and my bigger problem with ADD is not taking actions in line with my goals. This is like my everything until I was diagnosed. So much to say in here: During my first college year I started to study in an institute called Intenalco. The goal was to keep my grades high so I could get a scholarship but I did not put enough effort in studying at all I lose the scolarship and then forced to chage to another school. The next two years my main focus would be to finish without loosing any course. I ended up engaging in a relation ship an them leaving the institute just to enter into the university. My first university year was like the first year in intenalco, wanting a scholarship and not fighting for it. During that time I used to spent my time with friends and not going to classes: A nightmare.

 

Not listening at all

One of the main symptoms of ADHD includes not being focused on conversations. For a living untreated creature like me it's an everyday situation. I'm very sure that there are lots of people that thinks I ignore them buecause I hate them or I don't really care at all about their lifes when in realty I got a lot of problems to focus on their words, even when I'm really interested in a subject. 

Getting lost in words is a very problematic subject for ADD patients. The human has an intrisic need for communication that it's on his top during adolecense. Girls between ages from 13 to 25 tend to be very comunicative with persons in it's environment, finding someone that doesn't listens only results into a failed interaction, meaning the'll go to search someone else who really listens. Yes this means I got problems establishing relations with girls overall. 

Listening to someone is one of the bigger signs of respect you could show. Listening means you are trying to understand the other stories, experiences and feelings. Listening shows that you care. That's why when you have problems listening to others your social life gets difficult. For our luck there are so many emphatic people out there that understands the difficult that some persons have to listen, not because they know about ADHD, but because they have patience and a warm way to approach the other weaknesses. This kind of people take the time to met the person inside and not only what they show on the outside, it's a matter of time to them to realize that even when you don't listen, you care the same as well as a  normal individual.

Leaving out the personal relationships, normal interactions suffer a lot when you don't get the message. You might note yourself asking many questions in a day. In the worst case you'll be concerned about your image and just go on without the information your colleague is giving.

There would be other escenarios in which the talker will get frustrated and lecture you or he'll just give up on the message and continue his work. This last case is frustrating. Experience talking, the best advice I could give to you is too tell about your problem to your coworkers, be patient and don't be anxious about the information pieces losed in the communication process, not all the subjects in a conversations are really important. Other tip that could be helpful is to move critical messages through written media like emails or chats. That way you could check at any time if you're missing information.

Recognizing the constant tendency of ADD to affect your everyday listening is a primordial step to start building  a asymptomatic future and therefore declare yourself cured. 

Some benefits about ADD.

I'm wrintting this at the age of 27 years. My ADD was discovered just 3 months ago and practicaly I could blame it for all my problems. Having this kind of curse on me really limited my growth as a proffesional, as a friend, as a part of a family and in general as a human being, this drove me into depression. However one of the advantanges of having ADD is that I could forget the depression and pain really fast. In order to do catharsis I decided to contemplate what kind of benefits did the malady bring to my life and came with this entry.

In first instance I must say that the inability to concentrarte into a task for a long time brings an oposite logical secondary effect: You do a lot of different things. Having such spectrum of different practices and experiences give you a general idea of how almost everything in the world works. Computers, mathematics, biology, logic, music, videogames, sports, dancing, theater, just to give a general overview of the things I've study and experiece throughout my existence.
Futhermore combining the skills learned from various activities could lead intro more productive learning of new, unexplored areas. Associating new observations with old knowledge makes the learning process soft and cozy. 

Only those two just to be optimistic. But hey, it's something.

Is meditation really a cure?

Relation between meditation and ADD

If you already watched the netflix documentary "Take your pills" as I suggested in a past entry surely the Eben Briton experience catched your attention. Briton leave his adderall treatment and mention that he got great improvement about ADD symptons taking meditation sessions during his day.

Meditation from my experience is when you put yourself into a concious state that tries to isolate your thoughts from the outside world and make them less frequent just by focusing in a simple action like breathing. The results of a good meditation session is that you will find your head speaking less and it could be bothering when you don't make it an habbit. Taken from this WebMD article here is why meditation could help with ADD:

"Mindfulness meditation strengthens your ability to control your attention. It teaches you how to observe yourself and to focus on something. And it trains you to bring your wandering mind back into the moment when you get distracted. It can also make you more aware of your emotions so you're less likely to act impulsively."

"Meditation is thought to help with ADHD because it thickens your prefrontal cortex, a part of your brain that's involved in focus, planning, and impulse control. It also raises your brain's level of dopamine, which is in short supply in ADHD brains."

 

My Meditation Techniques

You could find usefull meditation techniques in the internet or in your local yoga classes. Today i'm going to teach you about the one I have learned, there are 3 and they are breathing focused:

Circular breathing:
Find a quiet place or at least a place where you'll not be bothered. Put yourself in a confortable position, preferably sitting, especially if you fall asleep very easily. Close your eyes and start focusing on your breath. Imagine a withe circle and inhale during five seconds. While your lungs are filling put a sparkle on the circle left edge and start to move it around the circumference when your lungs are full the sparkle must be in the right edge of the circle. Start to exhale and count 5 seconds again, at this point and move the sparkle to the left as your lungs are emptied, when there is not air left the sparkle must be in the left and then you'll proceed to repeat the process. Your mind must be only thinking in the circle, the sparkle and your breathing. Whenever you feel you're getting distracted with your thoughts or external noises or events, you must restart the process. 

Triangular breathing:

Same concept as the circular breathing but this time you'll see your breathing as a three parts: Inhaling, retaining and exhaling. The sparkle will move in each side of the triangle while you're doing each of the steps. 

Square breathing:

Add an extra step to the triangular breathing after exhaling. You'll wait with your lungs empty for a period of time. 

On each technique you can increase or decrease the time between the step change (i.e. For triangular breathing you may inhale, retain and exhale each step for a period of six seconds, then make it eight seconds and so on). Be mindfull you could feel dizzy for a couple minutes after practicing breathing meditation.

Benefits

Meditation gives you the mind power to return to a conscious state after distracting. Also there are several studies that affirm that meditation could help with weight loss. 

Cons of meditation as a treatment
The primary problem on using meditation as a treatment for ADD is that relys on the willpower of the patient. If you're not into a group or some other space that motivates you to meditate, efforts could always result on failure.

Attention span average

I want to take advantage of my interest in meditation and this entry to mention that you might find infromation about the human average span time decreasing during 2018 through this picture:

At the start I wanted to use that "fact" to support my point, but some investigation leave me to this article that explains it's false.

A story about symptoms and how you could missunderstand them

One of the biggest problems of the attention deficit disorder(ADD) is the dificult to difference them from a normal behavior.

Ten years ago I got my first job as a tecnology supporter in a company called imporfenix. The first six months in the company were as an apprentice. During the time in imporfenix I got a lot of problems because I was very clueless. It's true as an apprentice you tend to make a lot a mistakes, but my case was something unique:

• One day I was alone on the tecnology office, because the other 3 members of the department were busy in other offices attending reunions and other support activities. A mate from the accounting deparment went to the office and asked for help about an error on his computer. I tell him I could connect to his computer via remote desktop but he insisted that he was having a lot of troblue because of the error and he needed a fast way to make it work, so I decided to follow him. Before leaving the office I put the door lock (the classic button lock door knoob) and before clossing it my mate asked if I was carrying the keys and I immediately answer yes, before clossing it again he ask me: "Are you sure?"without hesitating I replied yes again. Before the last centimeter of the door was closed a last "Sure?" when out of his mouth, meanwhile  the door closing sound was on the air and I was whispering yes while looking in my pocket to get the keys and show to him once and for all that I got keys. When my hand reached the bottom of my pocket my mate suspicions were confirmed: The keys were inside the office. 
• During an important event at the company resort I was in charge of the sound in the auditory. My duty was to test the sound 2 horus before the event start, I setted the stereos correctly, but nothing seemed to work, 1 hour before the event I told the general manager(and the main speaker of the cofference) about the mishap. The manager was very upset because of the situation and told me to fix it immediately in front of a lot of people. With the pressure of fixing an unfounded problem I started to sweat and try to do everything even pressing buttoms that I did never pressed before, but nothing worked. A few minutes before the event start one of the logistic directors went near me and gave me a hand. The problem with the stereo was that te volume must been over certain level to be really hearable. Because of my mistake the director of the thecnology area(my boss) went to the resort just for nothing, and in his way home he gotinvoled in a car accident, fortunatelly he got not injuries, but his car was full lost.
• After moving to a brand new offices, the company was in a lot of work because of inventories. One of the logistic managers was having problems with his computer during the process and my boss told me to buy a SSD (Solid state disk) to improve the laptop capabilities. The disk was adquired by the hands of one of our best providers, so I dispose myself to make the change. I set up a table and a screwdriver then started to remove each screw, one by one, before I started to remove the last screw I found difficulty turning it so apparently applying more force was the best solution I could thought. The constant pressure ended up damaging the screw, after my fault that screw was nearly immovable. That day the lecture from my boss was long and then he send me with the laptop to home a said that was better from me not to return unless I got a solution for the issue. The start smile at me back then because my grandfather worked at the screw industry and did a great job removing the little metal piece.

I would be repetitive saying that you might think that I was just very clueless but here I'm going to link these anecdotes to an ADD symptom: Constantly you will find yourself having difficulties paying attention to small details and have a tendency to make careless mistakes: In my mind the keys were clearly in my pocket and isntead of cheking it, I just ignore my mate suggestion to check again. Same in case two, checking the volume at max rate would be probably a better option to just make few changes on the volume level. On max volume even static would sound in the stereo. Not to speak about the last case and how I tried to force a faling method.

There were many other little mistakes during my carreer and the quantity was the law. If someday you find someone who is clueless, careless, and easily gets distracted is not crazy to think he's facing an undiagnosed ADD. Told him about ADD and how problematic could it be for his professional life.

Pre-diagnosing add

Personal experience

As many other mental illnesses ADD must be diagnosed by a professional, but as a explained in the last entry "Living with ADD in a third world country" there is a lot of people that may find difficulties to get a psychiatrist in Latin America, so in this entry I'll give you a set of advices you might find useful for pre-diagnosing ADD.

There is a particular symptom that add shared with many other mental disorders and that is that the malady is cerebrally negligent, this means that it negates itself. In other words you may find yourself repeating things like "I'm human and humans make mistakes", "Yeah I lost that class but I'm tired and I would probably be sleeping in the classroom" and the old "I'm like this and there's nothing I can do". The very problem with ADD is that you could be missunderstanded as a loafing person: If you're oftenly skipping your responsabilities maybe you're suffering ADD. This could be clearer if you don't find a real solid reason for doing it. For example take this case: Even when you're liking math classes and you're not paying attention because you're not in mood.

Ofthenly an ADD carrier could not meassure correctly the consequences of their actions. This is a difficult one to explain, there are so many cases in wich you could take bad decisions and is unclearly if they where driven by the illness. So I made a very logic way to distingish a kind of ADD bad decision: When the consecuence of your choose could be solved in a specific period of time that you know and you take that temporary loss. For example, skipping courses on the university, you could take it later, you loose a semester but eventually you'll have a chance to course it again, another example is when you stay up late, because you can sleep during day. However if I have addressed this kind of bad decitions as ADD related doesn't mean there are not other kinds of decision you would made as a result of the symptom. In my personal case I could enumerate the following: Fighting with friends and making it worse, confesing to a girl that clearly doesn't like me, constantly lie about unimportant matters, choose to do a task instead other when I can take both, drinking coffee even when told not to do by the doctor and buying things with money I need to save for other things.

Procrastination is a very good friend of ADD. For many years I blame myself for procrastinating a lot, look for many options to avoid it but it was impossible. You're not capable of stay attached to a single activity for more than 4 hours, in the worst cases you will be taking a step out of class in less than one hour. 

 Netflix documentary: Take your pills

If you have a netflix account you must check this documental. "Take your pills" speaks about the farmacy industry that supports the adhd and how this drugs are being taken by normal persons to improve it's own concentration. The documental give a lot of context of about ADHD history and showcases a lot of people involed with the disorder. You may feel some sort of identification with theese interlocutors and that's a serius ground to think you're in the same circumstances.

A solid way to pre-diagnosing ADD

If you have prefferences for scientific tested methods isntead of a person experiences you should look for the add test found is this link featured by ADDA. 

About ADDA take from add.org:
The Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA) is the world’s leading adult ADHD organization. We are an international non-profit – 501C – organization founded over twenty-five years ago to help adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) lead better lives. Since its inception, ADDA has become the source for information and resources exclusively for and about adult ADHD. ADDA brings together scientific perspectives and the human experience to generate hope, awareness, empowerment and connections worldwide in the field of ADHD.  

The test would give a solid answer whether you have ADHD or not but don't take it too serius if are incapable of interpret the questions or the teoric justification founded in the website, you should instead speak with a psychiatrist.

That's all for now, thanks for read. My next subjects will be:

- A story about symptoms and how you could missunderstand them.
- Is meditation really a cure?.
- Some benefits about ADD.

Living with ADD in a third world country

There are several implications about healthcare just by living in a third world country like Colombia. Just to put a bit of context I'll speak about the social stratification. 

Social stratification is latin america in general is the way the goverment divides the people in the country acording to profit (or at least thats what they intend to do). Leaving in a low stratum (meassured in numbers like 0, 1 or 2) means you are poor or at least that you live at a poor neighborhood. Living in stratum 3 or 4 means that you are in the mid class. Anything beyond the level 5 means you're in a good spot in the country economy. Now speaking about numbers, stratum 0 or 1 families live with less than 200 dollars a month, 2 or 3 live with $200-$700, 4 and 5 arround $1000-2000 and so on. Lower stratum families pay less taxes than higher ones, 70% of the poblation is on stratum 3 or bellow.

Being divided by profit means you pay less for healthcare too, sadly also means your getting a worse service too. Getting a medical appointment with a psychiatrist is really hard, it could take from 3 to 6 months in the worst cases.

Another thing to have in account to get an idea of how problematic could be having ADD living in Colombia is that people in general pay less attention to mental illness. Even if you born is a house with parents that have gone through university you may not be categorized as someone witht learning problems, you just be looked at like you are some lazy person. 

Having a bad healthcare plus a low recognition of mentall illness could leave someone with ADD on its own. Event after getting an appointment with a psychiatrist, if you have bad luck you'll not recognized as someone with ADD if you are not having serious symptoms. My recomendation is to read and have an strong, solid knowledge about ADD before going to see the psychiatrist so you get a correct and fast examination in just one session, don't over exagerated the problems or you'll be diagnosed with another illness.

Lets say you overcome both of this problems and manage to get a prescription for your medicines. Then you have to buy it at full cost because the healthcare does not cover them. As in other countries ADD medicies are strong regulated so getting them by any other means is near impossible. 

My conclution after all this talk is that you my find yourself in a dificult spot getting treatmen in an a Latin american country you must be pacient and study a lot about ADD beffore getting to the see a professional. And if you're from other country and you are visiting Colombia you better bring your pills.

My next subjects will be:
- Pre-diagnosing ADD.
- A story about symptoms and how you could miss understand them.
- Is meditation really a cure?