We all have ADHD symptoms. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us.
Before you get on me about being insensitive to people who actually have ADHD, let me assure you that’s not my intention. I’m not here to doubt the existence of the condition or validity of the diagnosis. Actually, I truly believe that ADHD is a REAL condition and not the product of poor parenting and a desire to make kids easier to deal with, though it may be over-diagnosed for those reasons and others. I’m simply stating that all of us suffer from distractedness and inattention to a degree. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…
photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethcanphoto/134245664/}Beth Rankin{/link}
We all have ADHD symptoms and behaviors to an extent, and there are lots of things in our culture and lifestyles that make it worse. Things like television, video games, text messages, and the internet. There’s a simple reason for this.
Focus and concentration are skills, not the standard way we’re designed to operate, and they take practice. TV and the rest are the opposite of practicing focus, so naturally they’re going to make our concentration worse rather than better. They’re also going to make things even harder for those people who have the actual medical condition of ADHD. So stop blaming your lack of concentration on technology. It’s not causing anything; it just makes it easier to express and indulge. It’s like feeding sugar to someone who’s already diabetic; it’s not going to cause diabetes, but it sure isn’t going to help matters.
Here’s something to keep in mind when a study comes along that says technology causes ADHD. The only way in science you can prove cause and effect is to conduct an experiment and see what happens. An experiment to prove that technology causes ADHD would mean that the researchers would have to have 2 or more groups of kids and make one group use technology excessively while the others were restricted to varying degrees (one used none at all, one used only an hour a day, etc.). A scenario like this would not only be extremely difficult to create and maintain, it would be extremely unethical and never approved by a research board. All studies on technology and ADHD are correlational, meaning the two are related, but we can’t say for sure exactly what that relationship is.
But back to the idea that focus is a skill and not the natural way of doing things, since I kind of went off on a tangent there. This means that we all need to stop trying to fix our attention difficulties. They’re not an illness or a condition that needs to be medicated.
They’re normal.
It’s when these behaviors become excessive that it becomes a problem. It’s like depression: there’s normal depression and there’s clinical depression. Most of us fall into the normal category for ADHD symptoms.
The truth of the matter is, we all need the ability to be distracted sometimes, to be able to multi-task rather than to focus once in a while. It’s fine to be in the moment and focus on a task when you need to or want to, but then you need to let your attention lapse. Sometimes, life is too boring to focus on, and the ability to be easily distracted is essential to keep from killing yourself. Not to mention that constant focus is exhausting and leads to burnout.
Even that perfect state of “flow” eventually has to end, or we’ll starve.
If you’re truly having trouble concentrating to the point it’s impacting your life, start practicing how to focus before you go to the doctor for an ADHD diagnosis and some Ritalin to make it all better. Guess what? Ritalin helps EVERYONE concentrate better. The fact that it helps doesn’t mean you have ADHD. It means you’re taking a stimulant. Ask a college student during finals. But a pill for a quick fix isn’t going to solve your problems.
photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/2987926396/}Rennett Stowe{/link}
For those of you who have a little trouble concentrating once in a while and find yourselves thinking you have ADHD and looking for a fix, I feel sorry for you. Normal human behavior is not an illness, and if you think it is, you’re a special kind of hypochondriac.
We all need to quit making everything in our lives into a disease, we need to quit medicating aspects of our behavior that are inconvenient, and we need to quit blaming our lack of focus on technology. Technology just plays to this normal human trait; it doesn’t cause it. If you didn’t have your cell phone to distract you, you’d be staring off into space out the window instead. Quit kidding yourself.
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