I'm Dr Tracey Marks this is part 2 of a series that I'm doing on ADD or ADHD. Today I'm talking about other symptoms or other problems that can look like ADD but aren't really ADD or aren't the official disorder. ADD is a disorder of childhood that can continue into adulthood it does not show up for the first time at age 40 when you've had a successful career and now after your promotion you have some additional responsibilities, a new baby at home and you can't keep up with your work.
If you're having these kinds of problems you don't want to use stimulants to push yourself to achieve more. What else can cause attention problems? If you're anxious, you can have trouble focusing.
If you're depressed or have bipolar disorder, you will have trouble focusing. and you may even have memory problems if you have depression. If your problem is anxiety and you use stimulants to better focus it can take your anxiety through the roof.
It's the same with mania. A person who has mild or hypomanic symptoms and has trouble focusing can be escalated into a full-blown manic episode with psychotic symptoms if they take stimulants. Another thing, being sleep-deprived can cause focus and thinking problems.
If you're stressed out because you've got too many things going on, you can have trouble organizing your thoughts and concentrating. Not everyone who has ADD as a child takes medication. So there's people who never - didn't start taking medication until they became adults.
Whether or not you take medication depends on the severity of your symptoms. You could you may have had some symptoms and problems as a child but you were able to compensate by studying longer or maybe you just got mediocre grades. But as the demands on your brain got greater and greater like college or graduate school, it became harder and harder to compensate.
So I've seen many people who start treatment for the first time in college or graduate school but they still had a history of disorganization and impulsivity or difficulty staying on track with tasks. But it's very unlikely that you manage to get by all of these years until age 30 or 40 years old to now need stimulants because you've got a lot going on. Too much on your plate can make anyone have difficulty paying attention and getting all your tasks done.
If you make the mistake though of taking stimulants to get more done, you can burn yourself out because with the stimulants you're forcing your mind and your body to go beyond what it can do naturally. And that might work for a little while, but the success is usually short-lived and a person can crash and burn. What is the crashing and burning look like?
Very bad anxiety or depression. So you don't want to push yourself past your normal capacity. Another example of this concept of pushing yourself too hard is having a job that requires you to work all day and then when you get home you've got to work in the evening.
Some people will want to take stimulants in the evenings so that they could get in another few hours of work and someone will say to me "by 9 o'clock I'm really starting to drag, I just I just can't get through it. " Well if you've been up since 6:00 a. m.
it's only natural that your body is going to start slowing down by 9:00 p. m. Our minds aren't meant to be super sharp for 16 straight hours.
So if you notice that as an adult in your 30s or beyond that you've got a lot going on and have trouble keeping up with things before you assume you have ADD and need stimulants, first take a step back and allow yourself to decompress and try and reduce your responsibilities. If that doesn't help, then you may want to be evaluated for an anxiety disorder or depression.
