Dr. Hallowell

03/23/2023

Tomorrow, Thursday March 23rd, I'll be on Collective[i] Forecast, a weekly series via Zoom that features innovators across the business, scientific, medical, government, and technology. (To give you a sense, past invited speakers include Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Goldie Hawn, Brian Greene, Turing award winners: Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Bob Metcalf, and many other amazing folks).

Collective[i] is an AI company focused on researching and developing in intelligence that helps company's grow revenue. Collective[i] produces this series designed to help their community plan for the future and collectively learn from the world's greatest minds.

My session is tomorrow from 1:00pm ET-2:30pm ET. There is no charge to attend. To sign up, go to www.ciforecast.com. Feel free to submit a question for me!

Conversations with the global leaders and innovators whose work is redefining how we work and live.

01/02/2023

New Year’s Family Football

Tailgating in the parking lot on New Year’s Day before the New England Patriots final home game of the season, with my wife Sue and two of my three kids.

I believe in the power of connection and love to catapult life out of the ordinary into the extraordinary, into the heady world of the meaningful, consequential, and ecstatic.

Love and connection come in dazzling variety. If you’ve prioritized love and connection in your life, you list a boatload more connections you cherish.

In my family’s boatload are the Patriots, ever since that fateful day—Jan. 21, 1993—when the team hired the great Bill Parcells to coach the team, which prompted me the second I heard the news to drive to the stadium to buy the season tickets which we have to this day, 30 years later.

Three decades of tailgating may not sound momentous, but for us those Patriot Sundays rocked our world. They provided us a place and time to eat, drink, laugh it up, and be super merry together. They regularly set a stage for us to throw a football around, to party and cavort with each other as well as with the thousands of other tailgaters in the huge parking lots. We got group consolation and opinionated finger-pointing when the team lost, and an hour's car ride home of whooping it up when they won.

May each of you have your equivalent of tailgating. Most loves and connections are free and infinite in supply, but, in their busy-ness, people often neglect them. To live life to the fullest, all we need do is make time to develop and cherish them all.

Happy New Year!

04/13/2022

You can join my one-week course this summer either in-person or virtually! We'll be covering all aspects of a strength-based approach to ADHD, with modules particularly useful for those in the health and education fields.

From childhood through adulthood, ADHD presents not only problems, but also unique opportunities for change, growth, and success.

Join us and Dr. Hallowell in-person and live online from August 15th - 19th as we explore the entire world of ADHD in its human, clinical, and scientific dimensions to provide a solid, practical basis for understanding ADHD at all ages in all contexts.

Link here: https://www.cape.org/courses-1/unwrapping-the-gifts-a-strength-based-approach-to-adhd-across-the-life-span

04/08/2022

Why Coaching?

When I was learning about ADHD from my patients, back in the 1980’s, I discovered that many of them did not necessarily need a traditional therapist, a professional trained to help someone sort out and resolve emotional conflicts while learning how to make wise decisions. No, what these patients needed more than that, children and adults alike, was someone to help them sort out the nuts and bolts of daily life and help them resolve the problems that arise from missing deadlines, forgetting appointments, leaving key materials at home or in the car, and failing to wear socks that match. What we now call “executive functions”.

People needed what I came to call a “coach,” someone to help keep them on track throughout the day, the week, the month, and the year. The coach would help the person set goals and work systematically toward them; develop systems to be on time and arrive prepared; learn methods of avoiding procrastination while also completing a project rather than abandoning it halfway through.

The more I learned about ADHD, the more I could see that people with this condition often knew what they ought to do and wanted to do; they just couldn’t do it. They needed help in organizing to be able to do what they knew needed to be done. If you understand ADHD, you know that while most of us who have the condition can create brilliant schemes and beautiful tableaux, we can’t always deliver them to the right place on the right day at the right time. We desperately want to take responsibility, we want to deliver the goods, but try as we might, we sometimes just can’t.

To do that, we might need a coach. All the lectures in the world on taking responsibility will not instill what we lack in an ability to enact our plans, sort our socks, and cross our t’s. A coach can help a person compensate for weaknesses in executive function, but the coach also serves as a moral support, a cheerleader, always there to bring in the sunshine on dark cloud days.

Executive function coaches do not usually charge high fees. They get trained at one of the coaching schools that have grown up since coaching for ADHD was introduced in Driven to Distraction in 1994. Since then coaching has ballooned into a huge industry, well beyond the needs of people who have ADHD, and even within ADHD coaching, there are many schools, academies, courses, and programs. As yet there is no state certification or licensing, which means you want to check out the background and training of whichever coach you consult.

If you or someone you care about has ADHD consider hiring a coach. It is a practical, cost-effective intervention that complements the other elements of whatever treatment plan you select.

You can also learn more at Ask Ned on Facebook Live next Thursday April 14 at 1pm est.

03/29/2022

ADHD and Stress: the love-hate relationship

What is stress? Perhaps it is any task, person, physical condition, impending event, or chance occurrence that takes you out of your comfort zone and causes you to worry, brood, ruminate, lose focus on what you’re doing, and often induces physical changes like elevated blood pressure and heart rate, rapid and shallow breathing, fearful feelings and a sense of impending problems if not disaster.

Why would anyone like that? The definition I gave highlights the negative aspects of stress, what I call toxic stress. But there is such a thing as positive stress. For example, feeling anxious before you go on stage or take a test can actually improve your performance. If the anxiety gets too high, then it impairs your performance. But as long as it doesn’t get into the danger zone, some anxiety, some stress, promotes peak performance.

People with ADHD love stress, because we are adrenaline junkies. We often, consciously or not, seek out or create stressful situations in order to help us focus and super-engage with whatever we’re doing. The surgeon who has ADHD hyper-focuses while performing surgery. The rush of adrenaline he or she gets in the O.R. improves the quality of the surgery. When the operation is done, there’s a come-down which makes doing the post-op note, the paperwork, onerous and prone to be put off.

A trial attorney loves the crucible of the courtroom, the drama of playing to the jury, cross examining the witness, manipulating the judge, and trying to get under the skin of the opposing counsel. Stressful to be sure. If you measured the physical factors I mentioned in the attorney in action, they’d likely be slightly elevated, not too much, but just enough to take the attorney into “the zone”. The trader on the commodities exchange, watching five computer screens simultaneously, tracking three cell phones at once, while also texting and emailing, while also glancing every few moments at the Bloomberg ticker finds himself or herself in seventh heaven, in the midst of what many people would think of as holy hell.

Stress can be your ally or your enemy, depending on how you manage it. If you use it to get pumped up and deliver your best effort, then that’s great. But if you allow it to run away with you, and take you off into the world of hyper-stress, then not only will your performance deteriorate, but you’re putting your health at risk to boot.

Lots of people use medication to manage stress. While that’s ok, I’d not turn to meds first. Instead, use insight and anticipation. Know what’s coming so you’re not surprised when it hits. Practice preventative maintenance as well. You are not nearly as likely to let stress reach toxic levels if you exercise regularly, get enough sleep, eat well and don’t misuse substances; make sure your day has moment of positive human contact and connection.

So, learn strategies to turn stress into good stress, while also learning how to keep it from becoming toxic.