Dr. Micaela

So please don't buy into that narrative of, yeah, you just need to stop thinking about it because that is not an easy thing to do.

So if you notice that your mind is still doing things, you need to actively occupy your mind.

So maybe that's do like a crossword puzzle.

I don't know, those require thinking.

Or hopping on like Call of Duty where you're going to be on chat so you can be talking to people and you're coordinating your activities or whatever, right?

Maybe that's when you start jumping onto, I don't know, Pinterest to plan your next vacation.

I'm not sure, right?

But if you notice that your brain is doing a thing, that means you need to actively engage your brain onto something else, right?

Now, another thing that can be really helpful for people with ADHD is actually doing something physical.

So if you think about like sustained attention and exercise as also working kind of in the opposite effect of how a neurotypical brain works.

So a lot of times I use this when I have kids with ADHD.

And their parents are like, they must sit down and do their homework the moment they get home from school because otherwise they won't do it because they don't focus and they bounce around the room and et cetera.

That is the worst possible thing you could do.

So if you, for kids, and I know we've got at least one person here who's probably still in school, the worst thing you can do is the second you, thinking about sustained attention as a marathon, right?

So you're gonna run a whole ass marathon and then you're gonna come home and run another whole ass marathon, shut up.

Don't do that.

So thinking about it as a flip, right?

I'm going to run a whole marathon for my day of lots of thinking and focus and attention.

And then I'm going to do something physically active to reset my brain.

And then I'll go back and run around the block a few times.