Book notes: ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction

ADHD 2.0" is a comprehensive guide to understanding and managing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Written from authors with ADHD, which are also psychiatrisc.

Page xv · Location 80 Still others—even less charitably—think ADHD is a fancy term for laziness and that people who “have it” need some good old-fashioned discipline! In fact, “laziness” is a word about as far from accurate as it could be. The mind of someone with ADHD is in fact constantly at work. Our productivity may not always show it, but this is not because of a lack of intent or energy!

Page xv · Location 84 First of all, it’s not rare. It occurs in at least 5 percent of the population, though we believe that that number is much higher because there are people who seem to be doing well in life (but who could be doing so much better) who do not get diagnosed.

Page xv · Location 89 Ignorance regarding ADHD costs lives. Compared to other killers from a public health standpoint, ADHD is bad. Smoking, for example, reduces life expectancy by 2.4 years, and if you smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day you’re down about 6.5 years. For diabetes and obesity it’s a couple of years. For elevated blood cholesterol, it’s 9 months. ADHD is worse than the top 5 killers in the U.S. combined.

Page xvi · Location 98 Having ADHD costs a person nearly thirteen years of life, on average.

Page xvii · Location 119 We often explain ADHD to children using a very simple analogy that certainly resonates with adults, too: A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It’s the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one’s brakes is the name of the game. Chapter 1: A Spectrum of Traits

Page 15 · Location 331 variable attention stimulus trait.* Chapter 2: Understanding the Demon of the Mind

Page 20 · Location 441 Enter one of our world’s greatest triumphs of the past thirty years: advances in brain science. After millennia of moral (It’s all a matter of willpower; suck it up); religious (Give your suffering up to God or “Whate’er He gives, He gives the best”); or philosophical (Control what you can, accept what you can’t) explanations and remedies for mental anguish, we now live in an era when we can assess the actual substrate in which the action occurs, namely, your brain and its attendant nervous system.

Page 33 · Location 646 Don’t feed the Demon. Shut off its oxygen by denying it your attention. Do something else that engages your mind. Stay in action! Chapter 3: The Cerebellum Connection

Page 34 · Location 652 The Cerebellum Connection Chapter 4: The Healing Power of Connection

Page 51 · Location 914 Dr. Vincent Felitti, then chief of preventive medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, was running an obesity clinic for women and getting pretty good results.

Page 52 · Location 927 It turned out that many women dropped out of Dr. Felitti’s weight loss program because losing weight made them feel unbearably anxious and vulnerable.

Page 52 · Location 930 Felitti’s accidental discovery led to a landmark study, one of the largest and most important public health surveys ever undertaken.

Page 54 · Location 957 The Rabbit Effect. The title derives from a study on rabbits who were fed a high-fat diet to show the effect of high cholesterol on the health of the heart. Not surprisingly,

Page 61 · Location 1074 Join some kind of group that holds meetings—a book club, a lecture series, a knitting circle. Then attend those meetings! The MacArthur Foundation Study on Aging showed this to be one of the two factors most associated with long life (the other is frequency of visits with friends). Chapter 5: Find Your Right Difficult

Page 73 · Location 1259 What drives me is, unfortunately, not what makes me happy. A way to explain it is that the way my brain works is such that I constantly need to be working on impossibly difficult projects. If I’m not doing that, I get bored and restless. I told my wife that if you stuck me on a beach for a week and forced me to relax, and took away my iPhone and my pen and paper, after thirty minutes I’d start writing to-do lists and business ideas using my own blood. But that is not what makes me “happy” because such work is hard and stressful. So it’s sort of a catch-22. Either I’m doing what drives me, which is intense problem solving every second I am awake, or I’m bored/ anxious/ don’t know what to do with myself. Chapter 6: Create Stellar Environments

Page 79 · Location 1359 How many times have we been alerted or reminded and, because we’ve fully intended to follow through, turned the alarm or alert off… only to realize hours later that our mind took off on another track and we missed the proverbial (or literal) train?

Page 79 · Location 1361 The trick is to set up backup reminders and systems—even

Page 79 · Location 1362 in the form of asking a partner or spouse to call or nudge you to help keep you on task. Chapter 7: Move to Focus, Move to Motivate: The Power of Exercise

Page 105 · Location 1758 There is no one perfect formula for the right amount of exercise or the best target heart rate to help with ADHD and VAST issues; there are too many variables. That said, we recommend that you do some sort of physical activity for at least twenty minutes every day. Make it fun and interesting, and something you will want to do again. Chapter 8: Medication: The Most Powerful Tool Everyone Fears

Page 114 · Location 1886 beautifully. The downside is that, clinically, they have been shown not to be as effective as the stimulants for most people.

Page 114 · Location 1887 these drugs are slower-acting and may take a number of weeks to reach peak efficacy, in addition to having some common side effects like insomnia, agitation, dry mouth, nausea, headache, constipation, and, in the case of Norpramin, cardiac arrhythmias.

Title: ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction Authors: Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., John J. Ratey, M.D. ISBN10: 0399178742 ISBN13: 9780399178740