Be aware of your tendency to hyperfocus, and redirect it to positive things, rather than self-punishment or negatives

From a series of stories shared with me by Hunters in this Farmer's World

One of the most common stories I hear from Hunters in this Farmer’s world is how they’ll beat themselves up for their ADHD, often hearing the voice of a parent or teacher as they’re doing it. Bill figured out how to put an end to that self-destructive cycle…

From Bill in Kansas City:

I’m a binger. All my life I’ve binged on things. In school, I binged my homework. I used to go through a different set of friends every six months or so. I went through relationships like that, too: very intense for a few months, then I’d lose interest. I understand that this is the hyperfocus part of my ADHD.

One of the unpleasant parts of my binging is that I’d also binge on self-criticism. While I was growing up, my mother was always telling me how I wasn’t living up to my potential.

My father was more blunt: he just called me stupid. But we all knew that I had a very high IQ, even if I did start flunking out of school around the 8th grade, and never graduated from high school. (I got a GED, and, at 24, binged two years of college; now I’m an engineer with a radio station.)

There was always this voice in the back of my head, usually my father’s voice, criticizing me every time I did anything. Every time I broke up with a girl, every time I changed jobs, every time I didn’t follow through on something or did something wrong I’d even find myself criticizing myself for mistakes I made in traffic.

This self-criticism would sometimes run in very large binges, too, sometimes for weeks or months. During those times, I’d get very de­pressed, be really hard on myself, and that made it even harder to do a good job or have good relationships. This then gave me even more junk to criticize myself about.

I tried going to a therapist about my self-criticism, but all he wanted to talk about was my parents and my childhood, and I thought, this is dumb, this is what I’m trying to escape. Why wallow in the mud when you want to clean yourself off?

I tried it for a while, let him get me all worked up and cried a few times. I spent one afternoon hitting his desk with a newspaper and shouting at my father, but it didn’t do a thing for my self-criticism. If anything, actually, it seemed to make it worse.

(I’m not talking about hearing actual voices in my head, by the way. I’m not like the Son of Sam. But I’d be saying things to myself, and adopting my father’s tone of voice, even, when I said them to myself in my own head. I think many people do this.)

But at least this therapist got me interested in the idea of changing myself, and maybe learning ways to do it. So I started attending seminars and classes at the local New Age center. Most of them were way too weird for me, and I found myself sitting in the room silently criticizing the person speaking, and then criticizing myself for being there wasting my time and money listening

But one guy said something that changed my life, so I suppose it was all ultimately worthwhile. He said: “We can’t always control what happens to us in life. But the one thing that we can control is our reaction to the things that happen to us.”

I thought about that for a week, at first making fun of it in my mind, then finding ways to criticize it, and then finally realizing that it was true. So I decided to change the way I reacted to things.

I know this sounds stupid, that you can just decide to change things. And my therapist would have told me it was impossible, although I’d dumped him by then anyway. But I did it anyway. I did it by giving myself reminders (I put PostIt notes on my bathroom mirror), and by putting some effort into it.

Whenever I noticed that I was being critical, I’d force myself to find something good to say to myself, too. I applied this to everything: my criticisms of other people as well as those of myself. That way I was doing it all the time.

So I’d say to myself, “That was pretty stupid, the way you could have made it through that yellow light but instead you hesitated and didn’t.” Then I’d notice that, and say to myself, “But many people would say that that’s good driving, to be so cautious, and, besides, you’ll get to your destination soon enough anyway. It’s no big deal, and probably was the right thing to do.” Or something like that.

The area where this was even easier was with my ADHD behaviors. I used to kick myself around the block for them, for interrupting people, or forgetting things, or whatever. Now I just tell myself that it’s ok, that that’s just because my brain’s wired differently, and it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person, or defective. I’m just different from other people, and I have a lot of strengths, too.

I really binged this for the first few days, which then made it a little easier to stick to it as a habit. I found that when I do it regularly, I don’t criticize myself so much. And even when I do it now, another voice inside me says that I’m ok.

The biggest result of this is that I’m happier. I don’t mean that I’m happy-talking myself into being happy, like some of those idiots at the New Age center (there I go again). Well, they may have been idiots, but they had some good ideas once in a while, too, and one of those ideas has really improved my life.

I am actually happier. Because I don’t criticize other people and situations so much, I’ve discovered that most people aren’t really so bad or so dumb. And life isn’t so bad, either. Because I’m criticizing myself a lot less, I feel ok about myself more, too.

I’m probably not doing a good job of articulating this for you, but at least I’m trying and I hope you understand what I’m saying I think this is a useful technique for anybody with ADHD, and maybe even for people without ADHD.