Reply To: The 'Unritalin Solution'

[dithl]

Hi, I just want to pull a couple points to comment on, because to me, it speaks to the difficulty of managing ADHD,

@K, Daddyrocks wife, you said, “I can’t make them follow the routines I set up or the strategies I encourage or anything.”

@kc5jck responded with “Strategies are not like easily adopted bad habits. You can’t do the once and expect them to stick. Agree on those you think will help, and stay on top of your family until they get ingrained with their behavior.”

I have been “doing” ADD for 8 years now…and have probably tried easily over a hundred different strategies. Everything from hanging my keys on a big fob on a hook beside the front door (worked!) to making several different versions of chore lists (um…still in progress) to using “Leechblock” to limit my time on-line (did NOT work for me, too easy to sabotage…)

My strategy “fail” count is much, MUCH higher than my strategy “success” count. If I was to roughly estimate, probably at least 20 attempts per success. However, overall, I consider that I’m managing ADHD well. Sometimes I give up for awhile on a certain attribute I am trying to manage (e.g,. my sleep schedule is totally out of whack right now, which is fine because I don’t have a lot of demands at the moment).

Some strategies are easy, and a perfect fit right away.

Some strategies don’t work right away, but with a little tweaking and persistence, they become routines that just fade into the background and make everyone’s life easier.

Some strategies just don’t work for the individual. Give it up, move on, cross your fingers that you will find something to help with the problem you’re targeting.

It can be hard to distinguish between those last two. How long do you stick with a strategy until you decide it just doesn’t work? Two weeks? Longer? Add to that the fact that once novelty wears off, motivation to stick with the strategy plummets.

So…I guess my point here is that “strategy management” is a life-long experimental process. Some stick, some don’t. New situations will create the need for trying out new strategies. And part of the nature of ADD is that we will abandon some that maybe could have worked. And at times fail to observe when they are working, or not working. Sometimes we just don’t want to try. Until a crisis hits us in the face.

I am not even going to try to imagine what it’s like from the outside…especially with three in the house. I don’t know if any of this helps, but thought I would try to add perspective from the inside…

And I agree — it’s good to have you as members. And you *totally* rock for working on your degree 🙂

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