Quotes from Edward M. Hallowell

While trying harder helps just about everything, telling someone with ADD to try harder is no more helpful than telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder. It missed the biological point.

Instead of describing ADD as an inability to concentrate, this model presents it as the ability to concentrate on everything. The world always is alive and ripe with sources of interest.

No brain is the same. No brain is the best. Each brain finds its own special way. —From a poem written by Edward Hallowell to his five-year-old daughter

In this era, you must deliberately preserve and cultivate your most valuable connections to people, activities, and whatever else is most important to you. Anyone can cultivate these connections, drawing from them the strength and will a person needs to handle the best and worst of life, but only if you plan to do so and insist on adhering to your plan .

Another, less polite way of saying it: People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors. We hate hypocrisy maybe more than any other human failing, and we can spot it a mile away.

What they don't understand—and the wide world certainly does not understand—is that these reckless acts do stem from a biological need to alter their inner state. In pain, they feel compelled to seek relief immediately.

life is a process not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

In many ways the most dangerous aspect of undiagnosed and untreated ADD is the assault to self-esteem that usually occurs.

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.

ADD is a neurological syndrome whose classic defining triad of symptoms include impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity or excess energy.

Don't stay too long where you aren't understood or appreciated. Just as people with ADD gain a great deal from supportive groups, they are particularly drained and demoralized by negative groups, and they have a tendency to stay with them too long, vainly trying to make things work out, even when all the evidence shows they can't.

Whatever you do, please don't think of sleep as wasted time, an indulgence, or a generous reservoir from which you can steal time for work. Do what your brain and body beg you to do: get enough sleep.

The term attention deficit disorder completely misses this point. It is not a deficit of attention that we ADD-ers have, it is that our attention likes to go where it wants to and we can't always control it.

You tend to ignore the structures that would guide you to take care of yourself if you are taking care of others too much.

Your reflex to help others starts to control you if you don't understand what's happening and take steps to prevent it.

Often those objecting to the diagnosis will be using their objections to conceal an emotional agenda. They may be angry with the person being diagnosed. They may resent him for all his past sins, and they don't want to see him get off with just a diagnosis. They want punishment. So they will grow angry at the notion of ADD, and try to discredit it. At these moments it is best to stay with the science, to stay with the facts we have about ADD.

The sense of growing panic, the feeling that gibberish is being passed off as coherent conversation, the fear that the world is engaged in meaningless discourse masquerading as meaningful exchange—these are the blurry states individuals with ADD negotiate each day.

Mastery means making progress at a task that matters to you and is challenging.

In the world of ADD, there are only two times: there is now, and then there is not now.

If we weren't so dreamy and curious we could stay on track and never get distracted.

never before has it been so easy to stay in touch with so many people electronically, but rarely has it seemed so difficult to maintain genuine human closeness.

Humor is a key to a happy life with ADD.

Barkley's comment that ADD is more impairing than any syndrome in all mental health that is treated on an outpatient basis. More impairing than anxiety, more impairing than depression, more impairing than substance abuse. The "morbidity" of untreated ADD is profound.

ADHD" is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages it.