Change Your Brain Every Day - How Do You Know if You Have ADD?

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

People with ADD tend to have a difficult time managing their everyday lives, but how do you know if you have it? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen reveal the 5 hallmark symptoms of ADD. If you know you have ADD, and more specifically if you know what type of ADD you have.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. So how do you know if you have ADD? There's so many myths and misconceptions. I was on the radio this morning and this woman was talking about her 24-year-old daughter who was starting to take stimulants. And she starts off with, well, unfortunately, she saw this doctor

who diagnosed her with ADD and she just was really negative about it, which many people in society are. And by the end of our call, she was, oh, I can support her much better because having untreated ADD is associated with so many bad things. And I have to tell a story. I have to tell a story. Well, apparently I have no joy. Because you just reminded me. I mean, we're, I'm working firsthand with somebody who we've been working with for a long time. And you know, it's a process sometimes. Sometimes it's a process because there are many things going on with some people. Some people have ADD, but they've also got dear Lord, emotional trauma or bipolar or who knows okay like so many people have so many things

going on so it's this process of you know unlayering it sort of uncovering what's going on with the person and dealing with with the most critical things first but in dealing with this person i think we both suspected the add early on we both kind of knew that it was there but we had to deal with the most critical things first and And then finally, as I was dealing with her and I suspected, I heard something that, that really scared me because it reminded me of someone in my childhood that I just always was failing and was, was an addict and kept going back to drugs because they felt like a failure. And I heard something in her voice that I knew that I knew that I knew that if we did not, like, if she felt like a failure, she had just finally gotten a job.

And I knew that if she failed at this job, she was going to like fall off completely and it was just going to devastate her. And so I called you and I'm like, this can't wait. Like we need to take care of this now. Like, this is, this is just a problem. I don't know what you need to do, but you need to do something right now. You need to this so so i drag you over the dynamic in our relationship yeah you know she finds a puppy that needs to be fixed and she goes you fix it right but i bring the puppy home and the strays so so we go over there it's like night time and we go over there and i'm like i but i knew i knew this was a problem. So, and you agreed. And so you already, and so you said, you know what, we're going to, we're going to treat this ADD. I know

that there's ADD. We've been sort of like getting everything else under control first, but now it's time. And so you put her on a stimulant and some, you know, some people are great with stimulants and some aren't. That's your, that's how you, your book Healing ADD, what I love about it is it talks about all the different types of ADD. Everybody is not the same. I'm not the same as, you know, someone else with a different type of ADD. Anyways, she had gotten a job and her self-esteem was just suffering because she could not focus. I kid you not. One day, one day, one day, and everything turned around. And all of a sudden she calls me the next day. I am a rock star. And she literally, that's what she said. She was so excited.

She started getting all this, like, um, you know, this, this reinforcement and positive feedback at work. And then they started like already like moving her to busier shifts and like doing things like this. And then she gets a second job. And, and and i'm like this is a person who couldn't focus to get through a basic day without a job and now she's got two jobs and she's excelling so how does someone know whether or not they have add so the five hallmark symptoms are short attention, but not for everything. It's short attention span for regular routine, everyday things, homework, schoolwork, paperwork, chores, the things that make life work. The thing that confuses people

is for things that are new, novel, highly stimulating or frightening. People with ADD can pay attention just fine. And so many people with ADD say, and President Bush said this, the second one, he said, well, I can pay attention if I'm interested. And I like hit my forehead and go, no, not two ADD presidents in a row, right? Given Clinton and all the impulse control issues. I'm like, please, not another one. And so it's short attention span, and it's sort of the story of their life for things they don't really want to focus on.

Distractibility. They see too much. They hear too much. They see too much. They hear too much. They sense too much. So where most of us can sort of decrease the distractions around us and focus on what's in front of us, it's like the world comes at them too fast and it distracts them. They're often very sensitive to light, to noise, to sounds, to touch. And it can just really impair their ability to focus. They're often disorganized. If you look at their rooms, their desks, their book bags, their filing cabinets, they're

often a mess unless they have the over-focused ADD type, then certain areas are perfect and other areas are a nightmare. They tend to procrastinate. They put things off, put things off, put things off until someone's mad at them and they have to get it done. So they need that stimulant. Right. They need the pressure. And they tend to be impulsive. Not all of them. The N10 of ADD is not very impulsive. What about anxious? The anxious ADD is less impulsive. But the classic ADD for sure, the prefrontal cortex, so that's the front third of your brain, largest in humans and any other animal. It's less active in people who have ADD. And it's the brain's brake. It stops you from saying

or doing things that can get you into hot water. It actually processes, well, what's the consequence if I say this? What's the consequence if I do this? So you think ahead to have control over your impulses. When the prefrontal cortex is low, either because you have ADD or you had a head injury, the thoughts just get out. So when I lecture, I'll often go, how many of you are married? And half the audience will raise its hand. And I'll often go, how many of you are married? And, you know, half the audience will raise its hand. And I'll go, is it helpful for you to say everything you think in your marriage? And the whole audience busts up laughing because, of course, it's not helpful. Right? I mean, we all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that no one should ever hear. But if you're around people of ADD,

they just don't have a filter. And those thoughts get out, which is why your mom's actually very funny often. She's hilarious. Filter, filter, filter. And so if you have two, three, four, five of those symptoms, and they've sort of been the story of your life, it's really important to get them treated. And unlike the mother who was so sad her daughter got diagnosed with ADD and got put on a stimulant, I'm like, if she really has ADD, what's the fallout? Well, I mean, look at the person I was talking about, the story that I told. That was literally like putting glasses on her for her brain.

So like I've heard you use that analogy, but that's exactly what it was like. And like every day she would call me and she's like, I don't know what's going on. I feel like this is the first time my brain's ever worked right. Like it was just like, it was a miracle. Like literally I've never seen anything that extreme. And I've seen it for 35 years. That's crazy. So treating people with it, which is why when I hear all the negative chatter about treating ADD,

it's just a mistake. Now, we should be clear, not everybody does well on a stimulant. Not everybody does. That's why I wrote Healing ADD. I talk about seven different types of ADD. And looking at the study, we talked about head injury. So that could actually be type 8. I've been thinking about that actually for a long time. And now this article was actually published in JAMA Neurology. So really great journal. So not everybody does well on a stimulant.

That's why scans can be so helpful. Well, do you have ADD? What type do you have? And how can the scan give us a roadmap to inform our path? And when it works, it just is dramatic in how effective that can be. So when we come back, I still want to touch on what we talked about in the last episode, which was some of the issues that go on between people who have ADD and either other people, if they couple up with people with ADD, or even if just in normal relationships, you know, if someone with ADD in a relationship, what are some of the dynamics that happen there and how can those best be worked through?

Well, why don't we also talk about ADD in marriage? Yeah. I actually wrote a book about ADD in romantic relationships. Yeah. I want to know more about that one. I want to. Stay with us. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com.

Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.