Posted on by Nathan Payne

Impulse Control, An Inside Look at ADHD

In my last post, I discussed the Executive Functions and how they relate to my personal experience with ADHD. I demonstrated the interconnected matrix of how I view this entanglement that the executive functions can create through ADHD, but I didn’t cover every aspect of those executive functions.

In this post, I want to discuss in detail the effects that ADHD has on our ability to control our impulses. There are positive and negative aspects of this characteristic, and my personal understanding may not thoroughly demonstrate what other ADHD individuals experience. This is my experience.

I remember my first taste of freedom. I lived on a rural country road on the Western side of Vermont. This particular area of Vermont is dominated by rather flat tracts of land that lend themselves to farming. The street I lived on extended for several miles in a fairly linear fashion. This street is where I first started riding my bicycle and, as is typical, I didn’t start doing it when other kids did. Where other kids around me were learning at about five years of age, I didn’t learn to ride until I was eight. It just didn’t matter to me until then, but when it did, I came alive.

I rode that street back and forth, day in and day out. Once I tasted the freedom, I couldn’t let it go. My bicycle became my “escape.” Whenever the pressures of life became too much, when I experienced boredom or restlessness, I would jump on my bike and ride off. This soothed the innermost parts of my mind and helped me cope with the doldrums of my life.

Without knowing it, I was self-medicating.

This behavior continued throughout my life. Everything became a game for me. If I couldn’t make something fun, I didn’t want to engage in it. The better I could apply a sense of fun, i.e., a stimulus-response that excited my neural pathways, I became restless, fidgety, and distracted.

This restlessness had its place, and it benefitted me in many ways, but it readily became overwhelming. Too much mental noise and I would need to compensate.

As I grew older and learned what behaviors excited me, I turned toward these behaviors, and they took on new meanings as I developed new skill sets such as playing video games, driving cars, climbing trees, and jumping off cliffs. Adrenaline played a significant role in how my brain reacted to situations. If I wasn’t engaged with an activity, i.e., felt little to no stimulation from said action, then my distractibility would come, but when I felt said stimulation, I would hone in on tasks with a tenacity few others could apply.

Life became a balancing act of moderating these two extremes. For me, I became an adrenaline junky of sorts. I couldn’t live the cliff jumping, parachuting, bungee jumping sort of lifestyle, but I could drive fast, take risks, and otherwise engage in what others considered “risky” behaviors.

I’ll never deny that my behaviors were riskier than what many of my peers seemed to engage in, and I certainly could have made mistakes the same as anyone else, but what people on the outside couldn’t see was that I had an ability other people didn’t seem to have. I could process considerable amounts of information; in any given situation, I would weigh the risks (as best as any human can), and come up with a conclusion that was right for me. I didn’t know how I did it, or why. I didn’t even know if others could do it, all I knew was that I could and that I felt a need to do so; that it “improved” my brain’s capabilities, cut out the noise, and allowed me to feel accomplished. What I could do, others rarely could.

I’ll give you an example.

One day a friend of mine and I were driving to school, but we weren’t doing it in the “normal” fashion; no, we were racing down the road at eighty plus miles an hour and faster. As we approached a railroad crossing, with me in the lead, I quickly analyzed the following scenario.

The train was already across the intersection, there were two civilian vehicles and a log truck on the side of the road I could observe. On the other side? I didn’t know, but I did know where these vehicles were most likely to be located,.i.e., I considered the probabilities and understood that there existed a more-than-likely chance everything on that side of the intersection would be right where it was supposed to be.

I measured the gap between me and the intersection, my rate of speed, the distance needed for the train to clear the tracks, and the train’s visible speed. I did all of this in a split-second and understood that I could, at the rate of speed I was traveling, squeeze my vehicle through all of these obstacles, negotiate the small chicane of the roadway, and come out the other side, in my lane, with minimal risk. Because I was familiar with the road, I knew my car would lose the smallest amount of traction across the railroad, and I knew how I wanted to compensate.

I could measure and feel all of these things in a matter of moments without understanding how I knew all of it. To me, it was a simple math problem written out in word format; if a train is traveling at x miles per hour, and has y distance to travel, can a vehicle traveling at eighty-five miles an hour negotiate this intersection. For me, the answer was quite simply a resounding yes. The only variable that created risk was that I didn’t actually know what was on the other side of the train.

This is just one example of many that I have in my life where I could “see” what other people could not. I could observe and measure situations other people couldn’t. They didn’t seem to have the capacity or desire. Where I wanted to move fast, make connections, and process information with an intense curiosity, others were content to wait, think linearly, and be fed information.

I tell you all of this to better understand why it is that ADHD individuals can seem impulsive. In a way, we are, but some of us are vastly intuitive and calculating. We process information differently, and so for us, it doesn’t feel impulsive. For us, it is an extension of who we are and what it means to have a brain that functions differently than everyone else’s.

With all of that said, I do want to indicate that I do not condone this type of behavior; driving fast and taking risks should be done in a closed environment with proper safety measures. Although I engaged in these behaviors and survived, I am sure others did not. I understand the risks I took, and I understand the consequences those risks could have led to; I could have hurt myself and others.

What I needed was an outlet. I needed for someone to understand who I was, what I was doing, and why. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that, and so I “acted out.”

Perhaps in another ten, twenty, or thirty years, society will better understand what it means to be ADHD, identify it sooner, and provide a better support system for dealing with it. Medication and behavioral therapy is one approach, but what if we lived in a world where ADHD individuals had “playgrounds” that catered to their tendencies and understanding of the world? What if we got more creative and stopped trying to push them into a way of life that causes them, and everyone around them, pain and frustration. What if we applied our efforts and resources to another means of living for these people?

In my mind, it makes sense.

Posted on by Nathan Payne

Executive Function Imbalance, The ADHD Mind

I am currently sitting at the computer, yet again engaging in an activity that is one hundred percent inspired by my ADHD. How do I know this? Because ADHD is my life. It has existed since I can remember, and it permeates everything I do. I may only have been diagnosed in the last thirty days, but the diagnosis is simply a confirmation and label. I am intimately aware of the processes my brain has always followed. Now, I have a new language to describe it.

Everyone is different, obviously, but my different affects a rather small portion of the population, therefore, it is a more pronounced version of different. As I said in my earlier post, I am an outlier.

Why do I tell you all of this? Because I am exploring this newfound definition of my life and trying to gain insight into what it all means, and how I can better manage my life. I am investigating something I have never explored before, and so my ADHD brain readily goes into ‘hyperfocus;’ the remarkably valuable part of ADHD that allows me to accomplish things I otherwise have a hard time doing.

Hyperfocus is one aspect of my ADHD, and it speaks to how my brain’s Executive Functions are imbalanced. There are eight Executive Functions, according to resources I have started researching. They are Impulse Control, Emotion Control, Flexible Thinking, Work Memory, Self-Monitoring, Planning & Prioritizing, Task Initiation, and Organization.

It is believed that each of these skills needs to be “developed” to have a well-adapted individual who can navigate the various aspects of the human experience, especially in regards to meeting and exceeding social expectations.

As I understand it, these functions operate in one of two ways for ADHD individuals. We seriously lack in a particular executive function and remain that way for the better parts of our life, or we forever vacillate across a broad spectrum of near-polar opposites and seldom exist in the standard understanding of what it means to be “in balance.” Each mode of operation, and the particular “balance” that exists between each executive function during any singular moment, largely determines what form of ADHD a person can exhibit.

For me, Organizing is a near impossible task. I would say that this function is “underdeveloped,” and it has been that way my entire life. I have struggled at every turn to remain organized. Every attempt has failed. I could not maintain any system for any discernible length of time that I, or anyone else, would ever consider a success.

This lack of organization is visibly recognizable by the physical disorder surrounding me. I have difficulty keeping any area tidy, and I commit my life to a chaotic conglomeration of stacks that mean little to anyone except me. It also has an effect on my ability to Plan and Prioritize. The mental disorder, i.e., the inability to organize my thoughts, is easily recognized through my failure to plan ahead and prioritize critical tasks.

To compensate, I became extremely adept at utilizing the Flexible Thinking executive function, i.e., this function became “overdeveloped.” Lightning fast thoughts that could critically analyze tremendous amounts of data, and stretch across a broad spectrum of topics, became essential. I could, under pressure and with sufficient interest, bring to bear an extraordinary amount of processing power to any problem I deemed worthy of such effort.

This overdevelopment, however, created another side effect; those lightning-fast thoughts? They occurred without cessation and came with an extreme need to follow those thoughts. What is the point of having all this information in your head if you’re not going to make connections, and follow them to their logical conclusions?

With all of that going on, my brain needed to establish a framework to work from. I began devouring information. I consumed so much data at such a tremendous rate of speed that I needed to create a system for retaining, and processing, all of it. In comes Work Memory.

I have Work Memory in gobs. It doesn’t always operate the way I want, but it exists there on the surface seizing, holding onto, and repeating information at a moments notice.

As you can probably see, this characteristic of regurgitating information feeds back into the Flexible Thinking trait I overdeveloped. One thought spurs another, and then another, which then connects to yet another. These thoughts can span space, time, disciplines, theories, and generally anything I’ve ever come across and considered noteworthy. Work Memory, for me, is another function that is “overdeveloped.” From here, we continue on with the Executive Function of Self-Monitoring.

My particular circumstances may have had a unique effect on how this function developed. Early divorce within my family caused me to move around a lot as a child, and I had to adapt to new environments quickly; each with a new set of interpersonal dynamics. By quickly interpreting what others thought, how they felt, and how I was perceived, I readily understood the metrics each community utilized to measure value, and so I often sought to adapt to the various expectations of these communities in an attempt to “fit in,” but the quandaries ADHD brings with it were already established.

I readily surpassed many of my peers in a variety of subjects, and I continually demonstrated what most would consider an above average intelligence. My way of life worked, for me.

All of these components to my being leads to, in a fashion, Task Initiation. I didn’t know how to submit to the regular constructs of time and space that everyone else seemed so ready to grasp and attempts to do so met varying degrees of failure. I would fidget, become distracted, and otherwise let my mind and body do what it knew how to do. When allowed, I regularly delivered an end result I believed was the foregone conclusion to what everyone wanted; they desired an individual of intelligence, and I demonstrated this repeatedly. My methodologies simply didn’t produce what others deemed necessary; they wanted me to sit, stay attentive, do homework, and otherwise conform to these established systems and metrics of performance that felt irrelevant to me.

My teachers wanted me to follow a process that was inordinately difficult for me, and yet, doing it my way, I came up with the same and often better results than my peers. I excelled at gathering information, comprehending it, and I could articulate my findings through in-class engagement and evaluative testing designed to measure all the above. I had all of it. I just couldn’t sit still, stay focused, or perform menial tasks I saw little to no value in.

Then, social expectations started to increase. I was regularly criticized for my inability to stay organized, plan, and prioritize. If I didn’t jump to a task others thought was necessary for me to do, I was called lazy, told I procrastinated, and that I was not “living up to ‘my potential.'”

From here, my Emotion Control function started to deteriorate. I had regular mood swings that went from happy to sad, and then to angry, and back around again.

I became ashamed of this cyclical nature I couldn’t break. I wanted to exceed in everyone’s eyes. I wanted to be the person that everyone seemed to think I needed to be. I wanted to be the same as everyone else because they didn’t have the same problems I had. They at least were understood, or so it seemed from the viewpoint of an adolescent who always felt like an outsider.

This cycle continued for thirty-five years, and then everything started to fall apart. By continuously using my energies toward the goal of conforming, the emotional accumulation of so many failures became too numerous. The anxiety of “trying to do it all,” reached a critical mass. I couldn’t do it anymore.

The notions of “Be yourself,” when you have ADHD, means to step outside of social norms, accept the differences, and try to live a happy life despite all of it. I will never fit the mold of society, and I have to understand that. The world may not ever understand, and that is okay too.

Yes, I can be more aware of, and improve, some of my executive functions, but forcing myself to reprioritize all of them to conform to others’ expectations of me? That notion has died.

Life is always going to be difficult, and I can’t change what has come. I can only prepare for what is ahead, and try to do the best for me and mine. With this new perspective that my diagnosis has given me, I am better prepared to handle all that is ahead of me.

If anyone reading this can relate, and still feels as though they are trying to “fit in,” I highly suggest giving up on this idea. ADHD individuals and non-ADHD individuals alike need to give up on this idea, but individuals with ADHD even more so. Our development is wildly different from that of many other people. It is currently estimated that we represent less than ten percent of the population and as little as five percent.

The way we live has its drawbacks, but it also has its benefits. A lot of what we do other people struggle with. Our problems arise because we are outsiders. Our brains provide a worldview others rarely see, and although we can often see from their point-of-view, we cannot exist there; not wholly.

Recognizing that early on allows us to live a healthier and more robust life that fits our needs instead of other peoples’ needs.