By Jeff Copper, MBA, PCC, PCAC, CPCC, ACG – November 4, 2024
If you have ADHD, you may find that your biggest problems are related to specific types of tasks. For example, boring things can feel like a big challenge. But more importantly Multifaceted or unclear tasks can leave you feeling overwhelmed and stuck. So how do they relate to ADHD?
Let’s look at it this way: ADHD is best understood as “Cognitive impairment” is not an indicator of low intelligence. In one of my latest videos, I shed some light on how ADHD affects cognitive function. This is especially true when processing complex and ambiguous tasks. Do we think of ADHD as a thought disorder? Or does it simply present a unique set of challenges that make our normal ways of thinking and learning more difficult?
As I’ve looked at the research, one thing is clear: ADHD is often misunderstood. It’s not about intelligence. People with ADHD can be highly intelligent and creative. But the brain works differently. Struggling to focus, organize, and manage time above all else But there’s good news: People with ADHD often have important strengths. Including unconventional ideas and great creativity. The key is to harness these strengths through practical strategies that enhance performance and learning.
If you are dealing with ADHD yourself or know someone who is, this deeper understanding can help you overcome shame and help you reach your full potential. Want more insight into ADHD and strategies for thriving? Please watch my video, “Is Your ADHD Affecting Your Thinking? You Won’t Believe This,” and subscribe for more content on how to manage your interests! Leave a comment as I would love to hear your thoughts.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome everybody to this edition of Attention Talk Video. I’m your host, ADHD and attention coach, Jeff Copper. I’m really excited about this particular video. It’s taken a while for me to kind of think through this a little bit. If you’re listening to this channel or if you’re new to this channel, I really don’t sugarcoat things. ADHD is an executive functioning impairment. Impairments need accommodation. My eyesight’s impaired, I wear glasses, and I’m able to see. When we think about ADHD as an executive functioning impairment, people know we use executive functions to plan and organize, stuff like that. But what really is it? And when we’re talking about executive functions, it’s really about problem solving towards a goal, and it’s really a thinking impairment. And so the thing about thinking is we have thoughts, we’re bombarded by thoughts, and you really can’t do anything about them or you can’t control them.
The issue in life is which thoughts you choose to pay attention to. Now, we use thoughts when we’re thinking. The purpose of this video is to kind of give you guys an understanding, a delineation of where the issues with ADHD arise, and it is a thinking impairment, but people think all the time, so I found it useful. Really, let’s break thinking down because we use thoughts and we think, but we do it so in very different ways. So to do that, I’m going to screen share a table that I’ve got or that I have derived. And basically what I have here is we have levels of cognition. Now are these 100% right? I don’t know. Probably not. But the purpose of this is to say, the point that I’m trying to get at is really kind of illustrated here and think of this as an executive function engagement and continuum.
On the far left, we have automatic thinking. Automatic thinking is like daydreaming or worrying. It’s just a moaning. The note is that it’s a passive reflexive activity, and there’s really no goal. You’re kind of floating on a breeze, you don’t really have to go anywhere. And the point really here is it doesn’t take a lot of effort to daydream. In fact, it’s actually soothing and worrying, it’s just there. Now, if we increase it, we go add a little bit more effort to. It is what I call shallow thinking, which is there’s shallow thinking, which is more complicated for me to explain, but just basically emotions or judgment. Just to jump to a conclusion like that person’s a jerk. It requires a little bit of thought, but do you really have to justify? I mean, people make judgments all the time. A little bit more cognitive effort, but not a lot.
And the idea is really just to form an opinion or a belief just to try to make sense of something. Next we go to learning. The thing about learning is we’re learning something like the Pythagorean theorem. It’s already known information. We’ve already done that. It’s a transfer of knowledge from one person to another. And what you’re doing is you’re really trying to discern discrete small pieces of information. And the goal is just to understand that piece of information. And so it requires a lot more cognitive effort than judging, but still there’s more. Then we have what I call contemplative thinking. This is kind of actual reasoning, and what you’re doing is you’re looking at data and you’re trying to make an opinion or judgment kind of like shallow thinking, except it’s a little bit higher level of analysis, and you’re really just really trying to form a hypothesis about something.
Now, as you go higher in school, there’s more contemplative thinking that kind of goes along with it. But what I really want you to notice is I’ve color code this. You go from green, which is relatively easier thinking to yellow where you’re increasing your effort. But now we get over here to problem solving. Problem solving is basically applying your knowledge towards a goal. And what’s really important is it’s addressing real-world problems and the key terms, it’s multifaceted and ambiguous, multifaceted and ambiguous, and the goal is to innovate, address problems or fix things. And the thing about this is multifaceted and ambiguous. Planning is multifaceted and ambiguous. Managing time is multifaceted and ambiguous. A lot of people with ADHD will go sit down to do a report or they’re going to do maybe a report at work or write a paper or something in school, and what they’ll find themselves is this is the part where they have to write it.
Often they’re going to go down a rabbit hole. In other words, they’re going to go to learn more about it. Notice is that learning is cognitively easier than actually problem solving. Now, this is, I’ve been talking about this kind of indirectly for a really long time. Working memory is a challenge with people with ADHD. It’s problem solving towards the goal. When you’re learning, it’s cognitively easier, so it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole to go learn about more information about the paper or the report you’re going to do. Understand though that it’s actually an escape. You’re giving yourself the illusion that you’re working on the report. By the way, sometimes you are, but a lot of times you’ll continue to go down these rabbit holes because cognitively it’s easier to continue to learn about it. The issue with ADHD is the application.
When you’re crossing over this line to this, this is where the impairment with ADHD really exists, and this is where you need the accommodation. This is where externalizing, talking out loud, collaborating with people really comes into play. Really, really comes into play. And so the idea here really is, I wanted to bring this to your attention because if you begin to take a look at this, ADHD is really a problem-solving impairment, it begs to say, you need help problem-solving outside your head and realize is you can make a list of things that you need to do. But executing that list is actually problem-solving. Often there’s multifaceted and ambiguous things to solve the problem, and that is this wall, a glass wall that people run into. And all too often they’re not saying, I need to make thinking easier. Wow, that’s a lot. I hope this has given you pause to think and really begin to understand that when you see a focus problem, really it’s an emotional urge to escape the difficulty in thinking often to go learn more.
And so this insight can just really make a lot of sense of the videos that I’ve made. If you’re new to this channel, please subscribe. We try to provide useful information on a regular basis. If you’re been around for a while, what do you think? Go back. All the videos I’ve done on working memory and the challenges of it, does this make sense? The fact that procrastination is rooted in ambiguity really ties together with this. Also, we do what we do for you. Contribution to the channel by hitting the thanks button would be greatly appreciated. With that, we hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Attention Talk Video. Take care.