The Opposite of Happiness is Not Sadness. It’s Boredom

Strategy one is to run away from boredom as often as the situation allows. Being bored makes us feel sluggish, dull, not alive so we need to avoid it whenever possible. Here are some ideas on how to beat the boredom blues:

“My brain is an overstuffed garbage can the lid doesn’t stay on, and stuff is falling out all over the floor.” This is how my son describes what it is like to have ADHD.  When he was diagnosed, I thought I understood ADHD.  I was a published academic researcher with a Ph.D. in pharmacology who studied ADHD medications.  It turns out my background as a scientist did not prepare me for the challenges of being a mom to a son diagnosed with the inattentive subtype of ADHD. 

The ADDitude Symptom Checker will guide you through a series of questions based on your primary concerns, and then compare your responses to symptoms of more than a dozen common psychological and learning conditions.

Because my husband and I spent countless hours wondering if certain behaviors could be controlled by our son with Inattentive ADHD, I found this excerpt from an ADDitude magazine to be essential reading.

Virtually all of the risks of ADHD come from not treating ADHD aggressively with a commitment to long-term management…..

For children, there is the Conners 3 Global Index (Conners 3GI) to measure improvement. These are forms your treating physician would supply to you and your child’s teachers to complete.

Years ago, Lynn Weiss, Ph.D. and author of numerous ADHD books said people with ADHD can do anything, they just have to figure out what works for them. After years of struggling to manage a household, I finally figured out ways that work for me.

Adults with ADHD don’t typically try to understand why things went wrong. We move on to the next shiny thing. ADHD medication slows down our racing thoughts, so we can ask, perhaps for the first time, “Is this the best thing to do?” or “Is this the right thing to say?”

I recently discovered free music videos that provide “Deep Focus … for ADHD Relief and Concentration.”  The RedGreen Productions company posts videos that vary in length from 2-12 hours!

Any child or adult with or without ADHD has many factors influencing long-term outcomes in his or her life.

We’ve known, for over 30 years, that adults have ADHD.  Why are there still clinicians who are unable or unwilling to diagnose or treat adult ADHD?   Why, when I visit online ADHD groups, do complaints about uninformed clinicians dominant the discussions?  

There are two meanings to myths. One is warm and fuzzy—traditional stories. The other is deadly—widely held but false beliefs. Certain myths about ADHD contribute to our early deaths.

In my next several blogs I provide the findings from research about the various life domains where (untreated) ADHD usually causes significant problems in a person’s life…

Take the quizzes and get an email with feedback on ways you may be different in that dimension…

· I hate how people deny that it's a real issue.

· I hate that people assume I'm lazy when they have no idea how much effort I put into managing my life.

· I hate that I need to take medicine.

• Like putting glasses on my brain

• Night and day for me

• College GPA before 2.5; GPA after 4.0

1. Getting started. The need to clear my brain of many issues before I am ready to take on mundane tasks.

2. Keeping my home clear of clutter.

Our small non-profit, the Inattentive ADHD Coalition, wants to achieve something big—that children with inattentive ADHD are diagnosed by age 8—and we’ve been told the way to do that is to focus on just one thing.

If you want an ADHD evaluation, you are in luck. Before Co-vid anyone wanting an evaluation, diagnosis and medical treatment for their ADHD needed at least one in-person visit with a physician before having follow-up visits via telehealth.

It seems that the more I learn about ADHD the less confident I am about what I know! I tell people (because this is what Dr. Dodson wrote in an ADDitude article) that people with Inattentive ADHD often need less than the recommended dose of a medicine