Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Attention Deficit to Everything Disorder

I think I have Attention Deficit to Everything Disorder (ADED), but I've never been officially diagnosed. I don't think I'd be able to focus long enough to hear what a doctor would have to say to me, anyway, so it hardly seems worth the money to have one tell me what I already suspect. There are actually lots of subgroups to this disorder, one of them being ADCD, or Attention Deficit to Cooking Disorder. I have a feeling that this may be why there were lots of burnt carrots as I was growing up, but I don't have the nerve to ask. I can't even count the number of times I've burned broiled cheese sandwiches. I put them in the oven, and something says, "I don't have time to just stand here and watch cheese melt," so I go looking for something to do to make good use of the 2 minutes it will take for the sandwiches to cook. I walk into the other room and I might sit down at the piano, or pick up a book, or start to clean up something, but somewhere along the line I completely forget that I was cooking anything at all, until the smell of smoke fills the air, reminding me.
Or there's the ADHCD, Attention Deficit to Housecleaning Disorder. You know how when you're trying to clean a room and you go into the next room to put something away and get distracted in that room, setting off a chain reaction that ends up with lots of projects started and nothing getting accomplished? You do? Well, now you know what to call it.
The one that really gets me, though, is ADSRPD: Attention Deficit to Scripture Reading and Prayers Disorder. My intentions are there, and I will set my alarm to wake me up in plenty of time to do both of them to get my day started right, but as soon as I walk out of the room and see the computer sitting there, I have to turn it on to make sure nothing vitally important has shown up during the night. Nothing ever has, but that doesn't stop me from needing to check it anyway. I have found that once I sit down in front of that machine, even if it's just to "check" my emails, and even if there isn't anything worth reading at the moment, I can't seem to pull myself away from it and the time passes until the children get up and I've missed my chance.
I haven't made any really good strides in conquering my ADCD, and ADHC, but I am making baby steps in the last one. I realized that part of my problem was that I'd forget what it was that I got up for in the first place. I'm not that old, but I think I've been suffering from "senior moments" since I started having children. My husband occasionally asks me if I can remember bumping my head really hard at some point, but of course I can't. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to try to be more consistent with morning prayers and scripture study. I know some people study at night before they go to bed, and if that carries them all the way through until the next night, that's great. For me, though, I see doing those things first thing in the morning as tuning my internal radio dial to the Celestial Station so the signal will come in more clearly during the day. Sometimes the radio gets bumped during the day and I have to retune the dial, but setting it where I need it to be gives me the best chance for having the Spirit with me for the rest of the day. I also decided that I wanted to do some indexing for the Family Search program every day so I came up with an acronym that I could say to myself in the morning to keep me on track with these goals. I simply call it my PSI (Prayers, Scriptures, Indexing) routine, and I do them in that order. I have gotten much more consistent with the P and S parts of it, and the 'I' seems to happen in spurts, but because I've made it part of the acronym, I never forget about it completely, and eventually I return to doing it. Apparently 3 things is all I can handle on that one, because I expanded it to be called the PSIX routine, with 'X' referring to exercise, but so far that one hasn't happened with any regularity. Some days are better than others, of course, and perfection is a long way off, but all I can do is keep trying, one day at a time. For me, the PSI routine has greatly reduced my ADSRPD. Now I need to figure out how apply it to cooking cheese sandwiches.

2 comments:

Mary said...

I am enjoying your blog, which I found by way of Mindy. I don't read it daily, but I do like browsing through your posts occasionally and landing on one that hits home.

Today, it was this one. Broiled garlic bread is the regular victim of my ADCD. My condition is so bad that tonight my husband came to dinner and congratulated me on NOT burning the bread. (Today's small miracle.)

I follow the XPS routine each morning. I find that exercising for 20 minutes wakes my brain to stay focused on my prayer and the scriptures. It means getting up an hour before anyone else, but I love the quiet beginning to my day and it definitely arms me with love, patience, and especially the Spirit for whatever lies ahead each day.

Melody said...

I wondered how you found out about this. Thanks for the comments. Funny that I would stumble on this tonight, since I'm about to write a follow up to this article. I hadn't thought about doing the "X" first, but maybe that would get me doing it. It just sort of sits out there in parentheses right now. :)