ADHD - There is nothing wrong with you, just a misunderstanding of how your mind works

ADHD and ADD are very misunderstood and the mainstream approach is to medicate (especially kids at school). 💊

The reality is that every person experiences some degree of ADD.

ADHD Symptoms

You naturally have a surplus of attention for the things that you value most, your highest values. 👁

You will notice the intricate details of these things and you will retain information in this area of your life and have a very highly focused mind 🧠 in this area, because the information is meaningful and important to you.

(When I was 12 years old I knew the jumper number of every player in the Richmond Football Club🐅)

You will also experience an equal and opposite deficit of attention in the areas of your life that you perceive to be low value, because these tasks/activities are not important to you, your mind will switch off 😴and you will either zone out or go inter a hyperactivity state as a compensation for the disengagement.

From this perspective ADHD symptoms are actually very valuable feedback, they are guiding you to your purpose!

Some individuals have a values hierarchy that is very concentrated in a specific area, they value a small number of things very highly.

These people are often geniuses, because they are the ones that notice things that others don’t in their area of expertise. 🤓

When they start to understand themselves, understand their values and what drives them and they allow themselves to move into the area they love, they start to excel.

The compensation for this genius-level focus is that they have more pronounced boredom in their low-value areas (labelled as ADHD).

Other people have a more dispersed values hierarchy, where they value lots of things a little bit.

These people still have high values where they demonstrate a surplus of attention 👁 and low values where they have a deficit of attention, 😴 but the contrast between the extremes it is less pronounced.

The more the person knows themselves and knows their values,

the less unrealistic expectations they place on themselves to stay focused on low-value things, the less ADHD they experience.

(So the more you understand yourself, the less ADHD you experience because you learn to fill your time with things you love to do where you have hyper-focus instead of filling your time with things you don't value where you have boredom & burnout.)

The problem usually arises when there is an individual who is attempting to inject other people's values into their life (because they are subordinating to others or haven’t quite understood their own purpose yet) and has an unrealistic expectation on themselves to be focused and attentive on things that they don’t value, triggering ADHD symptoms.

A common example would be the kid at school who has a low value on maths class and the teacher who is projecting her value of maths onto the kid, telling him what he “should” be focusing on and thinking that he has a problem and needs to be ‘fixed’ with a drug. 💊

The reality is that in that example the teacher just hasn’t taken the time to understand the kid, what is important to him and what drives him.

The kid isn’t trying to be a problem for the teacher, he just can’t see the link between whatever the teacher is teaching and what is valuable to him.

If you were to imagine yourself in a situation where you are forced to study something that you have absolutely no interest in you would probably act in a similar way.

Everyone loves learning about the things that they value, no one likes being told what to do or forced to sit through things that don’t interest them.

Once you understand yourself and what you value most 💎 you will then understand why you have a surplus of attention in one area and a deficit of attention in another.

You can also do exercises to link in your mind the things that you see as low value to things that are high value for you, so that you can bring focus into those areas. 👁

#ADHD #ADD