ADHD: Can You Learn to Pay Attention to Paying Attention?
Sometimes, the biggest benefit of using medication — even for a short while — is that it can give us insights into that process of paying attention to paying attention.
Most people never give much thought to the way their attentional mechanism works. We don’t “pay attention to paying attention,” and the result — particularly for ADHD Hunters — can really hold us back. Sometimes, the biggest benefit of using medication — even for a short while — is that it can give us insights into that process of paying attention to paying attention:
Stephen is a high-school student in Atlanta, and tells how using Ritalin gave him an insight into how he experienced the process of paying attention:
Through my first years of school I was the class clown, always cutting up and having a great time, but I was also able to keep my grades together. I mean, my parents weren’t complaining, and, while my teachers always said I wasn’t living up to my potential, they didn’t flunk me, either.
Then I hit the 8th grade.
I’ve talked with a few other ADHD kids online, and we all agree that this is called “hitting the wall.” It happens to different kids at different grades, and probably has to do with how tough your teachers are or how big the school is or whatever, but the wall for me was the 8th grade. That was the year when I couldn’t fake it anymore. I had to start paying attention in class, and I had to start doing my homework.
The problem was that in all those previous years of school, I’d always been able to just slide by, paying attention half the time, catching things here and there, and doing well enough on tests that I could get by, even if my homework was sloppy or done at the last minute. For that matter, before the 8th grade, I never really had much homework.
But in the 8th grade I had to start studying, as I said, and the problem was that I’d never learned how. I literally didn’t know how to pay attention in class, and I didn’t know how to do my homework. And I couldn’t figure it out.
So my mom took me to our doctor, who said I had ADD and gave me Ritalin. I didn’t notice much difference from it, but everybody around me said that they did. The one thing I did notice, though, was that now I could pay attention in class. At first it was a shock. Wow! After an hour of boring biology class, I was still listening to the teacher! It seemed that time was moving smoothly for me, and I wasn’t bored. This had never happened to me in my life.
I told my mom about it, and she said that I should pay very careful attention to what it felt like to pay attention. I know that sounds kind of dumb, but she was right. With the Ritalin, I could pay attention, and by paying attention, it was son of like training wheels I guess, I learned how to pay attention to whether or not I was paying attention.
Now I’m a junior in high school, and while I still have a prescription for Ritalin, I only take it if I have to study for a really hard test or something like that. I’ve learned how to pay attention. I don’t mean it’s easy. The Ritalin still makes it easier.
But I know how to do it now without the drug, and I think that is a very important thing That will be important when I grow up and go out in the real world and try to get a job or go to college.
So for me, taking Ritalin was a good experience.
In the military I was prescribed a medication for ADD.
I thought it started with a "Z". I can find no reference to it now.
Did the DoD experiment on me...