Metadata
- Authors: Pera Gina
- Full Title:: Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Read date:: 2025-09-17
Highlights
This book is “pro-medication” and makes no apologies for it. (View Highlight)
a few or many of these other difficulties: •  Losing track of priorities •  Arriving late to events and missing deadlines •  Having trouble initiating tasks and following through to completion •  Being chronically disorganized •  Managing finances poorly •  Losing their temper easily •  Overspending, smoking, video gaming, and other addictions •  Not being “present” in relationships (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-18
Not to mention all the confusing ups and downs of selfishness and generosity, irritability and sweetness, brilliance and boneheadedness. (View Highlight)
All this work has left him exhausted, he’ll say. (View Highlight)
ADHD is considered a syndrome: a condition with multiple symptoms that vary among the individuals who have it. (View Highlight)
Many researchers suspect the true adult population with ADHD lies closer to 10 percent—and possibly as high as 16.4 percent.5 It all depends on how broadly the diagnostic criteria are applied. (View Highlight)
As for the parallel myth, that ADHD in children is overdiagnosed, one recent study confirms the general scientific literature in showing that, in fact, the opposite is true.7 Researchers found that of the 8.7 percent of U.S. children who met the criteria for ADHD, only about half had been diagnosed and one-third were consistently treated with medications. (View Highlight)
In other words, you often can’t see how your actions will result in predictable consequences, which instead seem to come out of nowhere. (View Highlight)
adults with ADHD seem to require higher-than-average stimulation to release brain chemicals that fuel attention, motivation, and self-control. (View Highlight)
Grasp the central challenge of ADHD: self-regulation. (View Highlight)
(In fact, it’s the mere anticipation of a reward that our brains find most stimulating; in comparison, the actual reward can feel like a letdown.) (View Highlight)
experts view ADHD primarily as a developmental disorder—that is, a condition that shows up early in life and interrupts or slows normal development of certain physical, emotional, and social skills. (View Highlight)
That part of the brain is thought to perform an all-important function: self-regulation. (View Highlight)
Genetics exerts the single largest influence on a person’s likelihood of having ADHD, making it almost as strongly heritable as height (which is highly genetic). (View Highlight)
When one child in a family has ADHD, a second child will also have it about 20 to 25 percent of the time (compared to 5 percent in the general population). (View Highlight)
ADHD symptoms reflect an inability to stop, or inhibit, undesirable behavior, as born out by more than 200 studies in the literature. The “mental brakes” just don’t grip very tightly. (View Highlight)
How do I know that he was trying to hit the brakes? Because now he tries and can, thanks to medication. He can even stop whatever he’s doing—and listen— without biting my head off. Conversation is not a problem. In fact, it’s a joy. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-19
She couldn’t understand what was ADHD and what was personality or family conditioning—or, for that matter, where ADHD ended and jerk began. (View Highlight)
Brooks advises that you try to start distinguishing essential ADHD challenges from common “red-herring” attitudes and negative mindsets. In other words, most adults with ADHD have lived for several decades not knowing they have ADHD; consequently, they’ve usually developed some counter-productive coping skills and distorted explanations to explain their challenges. (View Highlight)
The experts call the self-regulating set of brain capacities Executive Function (EF). In general, EF is the ability to plan, focus, activate, integrate, prioritize, and modulate effort. (View Highlight)
forms the very foundation of a mature and well-functioning personality. Moreover, the existence of this capacity is hard-wired, Gualtieri emphasizes. That means it’s based directly on the brain’s prefrontal cortex and its connections throughout the brain. In other words, you don’t learn this capacity. “The functions can be enhanced by learning and experience, but they are hardwired to begin with,” he adds. (View Highlight)
Barkley breaks out ADHD-related impairments of EF into five “mental modules”:
-  Poor (“leaky”) working memory
- Â Delay in developing an internal voice
- Â Difficulty regulating emotion and motivation
- Â Challenges in pursuing long-term goals
- Â On-again, off-again performance (View Highlight)