Re: Concerta? Does it work for you?

[Anonymous]

Right… hmmm… gotta slow down and read the whole question before answering! Sometimes I wonder how I get through school! Did I mention I’m 28 and went back to school 5 years ago as a mature student and there is not a single semester where I do not fail to hand in at least one paper! One of my friends came over once and she declared: “so that how you juggle it all! You just don’t clean!!” Not fair! I read a post once where a lady said she suffered from the CHAOS syndrome: Cannot Have Anyone Over by Suprise!! LOL!! Love it!!

Coaching is one way… medication is another… there are certain this that we are not wired to do well! No medication can compensate for everyting! I thought that at 108mg I would be fantastic… but no… there are certain things that are just not natural for us Add-ers, medication ca support us if we put the effort but it will not make us good at some thing that we never learned how to do efficiently. You can’t take 4X the dose of ritalin and not open you book to study and wnder why you failed an exam… I guess we just didn’t naturally pick up by observation what others did, by trial and error because of our deficits in executive functions… that means that to take back control in a area of your life that isn’t in control, it will take more that meds… meds will help support your efforts, but you need to develop skills that you haven’t learned, break down the taks, determin where the weakness lies, make a game plan, stick to it…

For example, did you know cleaning requires many executives functions like task initiation, working memory, planing, organizing, prioritizing, sustained effort… if your meds aren’t right… you will have a hard time getting started, avoid a task that demands of you a certain set of skills that arent your strenght, you may get distracted many times along the way, making the taks 20X longer that it should be, forget what your are doing or had intended to do which is your working memory that get your frustrated because your are lost in your own kitchen (and since you called yourself slob in your post I bet you have a tendency to be hard on yourself when you struggle with something simple), you may have trouble with planning so you start to vaccum before you clean the counter so the the floor is dirty again, and organizing (if you are like me, everytime you put something away in a logical place it is never to be found again!!!) , and then you can’t really evaluate the scope of the task so you feel like you must reorganise the cupboard before you do the dishes so you have enough room the put the dishes away, the realise the inside of the cupboards are dirty so you take everything out to clean them and that is such a huge job (not what you had intented) and you¸get lost in the perfectioninsm of it… get tired before your done because trouble with sustained attention and on task persistence once you will switch from scrubbing the cupboards and will have never washed those dishes! Sound familiar? A little over exagerated perhaps! LOL!!

My best trick: LISTS! Give it a try!

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