Interest is a KEY for ADHD

There are many ways to look at ADHD, partly, I suppose, because it’s so complex that it manifests differently in each of us. My ADHD is not exactly the same as yours.

One phrase that I like and have used to create motivation is we have an ‘Interest Driven Mind.’ If I’m interested in something, I can spend hours happily working on it, exploring it, or learning about it. If I wasn’t interested, then it was drudgery. Now, I’ve learned I can get the dreaded, boring chores done if I can find a way to make them interesting.

Perhaps this is where ADHD overlaps Autism? The ability to stick with things, maybe even obsess over, things that spark our interest and the ensuing surge of Dopamine, Serotonin, and Endorphins that make us feel happy and alive.

Hi I’m Rick Green, I’m a comedian with a degree in science who also happens to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

On my YouTube channel Rick has ADHD I posted a video about how the people who are the most adamantly opposed to you having ADHD, or they might have ADHD, or even that ADHD is a real thing and not just made up by who knows, those people very often turn out to be the ones who have ADHD themselves.

Part of the reason is they look at the list of symptoms and go well that’s normal, well that’s a problem because the symptoms are on a a scale, on a a a spectrum you could say, and so it’s you often lose your keys, often forget what you’re doing, often fails to, often starts things and doesn’t finish, whatever.

All of these symptoms are ‘often’, so people will say I lose my keys, yeah five six times a day, three times in five minutes, that’s when it becomes impairing and disheartening.

And part of the other problem is with ADHD is that you’re much higher risk for depression, anxiety, people with Tourette Syndrome 75% have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and it puts you at risk for all kinds of things, and then accidents.

And the costs can add up, one study found that we tend to live 10 years shorter lives, 10 years, car accidents, not taking care of our health, addiction, drink, it it goes on, anyway.

So somebody wrote, there were great comments and one by Janet Hughes was, when I was diagnosed in my 60s, I was 47, 60s brackets you can guess in the wake of diagnosis of adult children, my husband agreed that I made sense of almost everything, but at some point he asked how on Earth I managed to get nearly all A’s in my undergrad studies, a master’s with first class honors, and a PhD, and I had to think about that.

My answer, because I never attempted anything in my tertiary studies that I couldn’t do standing on my head, she goes on about how she was interested in these things, and that’s a key with ADHD, when we are interested we can stick with something, and we can focus like nobody’s business, now the problem is that when we’re interested it could be interested in organizing paper clips, or it could be interested in making videos about ADHD, or it could be, if you’re lucky, having this.

A huge model railroad, when we are interested in something we can stick with it, I’ve been sticking with this for over half a century, and yet at other times I can’t sit still long enough to carry on a conversation.

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