weekly time management

I updated my own weekly time sheet. So I thought ‘why not sharing this with the rest of the world’. So it’s available for download in the Box at the right if you scroll down. The small squares next to the hours are meant to be used for colouring. For example I make the little square red when planning study time, and green when having a break. I try to always put some green after some blocks of red. Sleeping time I usually make green as well cause I use it to define my ‘personal time’ not only breaks. There are some other colors as well I use like at the moment orange for waking up time and before going to bed time. Yellow I use for eating time. So I get immediately an idea of what I am busy with in a day. Let me know if you find this useful!

 

Adhd characteristics

This is a summary from some of the characteristics adhd’ers have. This is NOT a criteria list as seen by DSM or other diagnostic instruments. It is to give you an idea what adhd is about.

- easily distracted: people with adhd keep an eye on their complete surrounding all the time. Their attention goes especially easily to quick and small changes. That’s why it can be difficult to keep the attention on a  conversation.

- Small but intense attention range. But it is difficult to put minutes of hours on this. They can keep focus on something going from seconds to months. Job switching is an often seen phenomenon because they are easily tired of the job. Adhd people often have several marriages or short but intense relationships. When they have to keep their attention on a task that is boring they score mostly much lower than non adhd persons.

- Lack of organisation and impulsive decisions. To organise and plan their stuff is often very difficult for people with adhd. Their room is more like a battle field with their desk a chaotic place and non ordered files and piles of books. The difference with people that haven’t adhd and do this too is that they can find their things back in the mess. But most adhd’ers forget where they placed everything. When it is visible they will find it and not forget it that easily but when they begin to make several piles and put stuff everywhere then it becomes harder. Sometimes you find something you even forgot you had. It’s like a discovery trip in your own room when you clean up. This happens ’cause when they are busy with one project they start already with something else and forget/are tired of the first one. The newly is more interensting and the mess from the rest just stays where it was.

- Deficit in time consciousness. Normally time feels as one continuüm but with adhd every task feels like a battle against time so they can get a lot of time pressure. When someone with adhd is not very busy they get an extreme feeling of boredness. This can lead to alcohol and drugabuse while the time pressure creates a chronic feeling of impatience. The emotional state of people with adhd also gets affected by this ofcourse. They can have extreme mood changes from negative to positive. Especially the negative ones seem to take long while the positive ones fly by.

- Need a lot of effort to follow instructions. This seems to match the attention deficit concerning boring or in their eyes unimportant tasks. When they get instructions they can be as well easily distracted by their surrounding so they often don’t have heard or understood the instructions. An other explanation is that they don’t like them to be told what to do.  A third explanation could be that adhd’ers often have difficulties to process verbal information. They don’t have an automatic mentalisation of the words so it doesn’t get processed properly in the working memory. So for example when they have to go the store to get things they keep in mind what they were about to do and what they need until.. another interesting stimuli comes along and they often will forget what they needed to do or bring and keep busy with the new thing. Like meeting someone on the way and not going to get the things they needed to get.

- They tend to have more depressive complaints and daydreaming. One explanation says that bad food habits with a lot of sugar cause a sugar drop after the meals by which one feels more tired and unhappy. Another explanation is that people with adhd are ofter more bored due to shortage of challenges, and that this often is seen as depression.

- Risk taking behaviour. People with adhd have strong mood switches, jump from one conclusion to another and make impulsive decisions. Often this has catastrophical effects but this also means that such people can be the mechanism of change in our society and culture. When having a strong motivation and inspiration to do something nothing can stop this in their mind and they can achieve great things. For example research states that several founders of the VS would have had adhd. People with adhd are in such cases often seen as passionate persons.

- Easily annoyed and impatient. People with adhd are mostly very direct and spontanious. This causes sometimes difficulties in their social interactions. They cannot understand why people take offence at what they say. For them it’s like when something doesn’t work then act! No matter in which way.

There could be much more said about the characteristics so don’t take this as an exhaustive list of symptoms but just a quick look on what people with adhd are. This is also a continuüm. Some people have more or less from the different things. And all people will probably recognize something for themselves that they do. This are not criteria exclusive for persons with adhd only. We need to see the whole picture and combine the different criteria to speak of an attention hyperactivity deficit.

 

New insights on Ritalin

In a paper publishing online this week in Biological Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology researchers David Devilbiss and Craig Berridge report that Ritalin fine-tunes the functioning of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – a brain region involved in attention, decision-making and impulse control – while having few effects outside it.

Because of the potential for addiction and abuse, controversy has swirled for years around the use of stimulants to treat ADHD, especially in children.

Yet, despite their prevalence, we know remarkably little about how these drugs work, says Berridge. In 2006, his team reported that therapeutic doses of Ritalin boosted neurotransmitter levels primarily in the PFC, suggesting a selective targeting of this region of the brain. Since then, he and Devilbiss have focused on how Ritalin acts on PFC neurons to enhance cognition. By helping pinpoint Ritalin’s action in the brain, the study should give drug developers a better road map to follow as they search for safer alternatives.

At the same time, the results support the idea that today’s ADHD drugs may be safer than people think, says Berridge.

Mounting behavioral and neurochemical evidence suggests that clinically relevant doses of Ritalin primarily target the PFC, without affecting brain centers linked to over-arousal and addiction. In other words, Ritalin at low doses doesn’t appear to act like a stimulant at all.

“It’s the higher doses of these drugs that are normally associated with their effects as stimulants, those that increase locomotor activity, impair cognition and target neurotransmitters all over the brain,” says Berridge. “These lower doses are diametrically opposed to that. Instead, they help the PFC better do what it’s supposed to do.”

In the lab, Devilbiss and Berridge studied PFC neurons in rats under a variety of Ritalin doses, including one that improved the animals’ performance in a working memory task of the type that ADHD patients have trouble completing.

Using a sophisticated new system for monitoring many neurons at once through a set of microelectrodes, the scientists observed both the random, spontaneous firings of PFC neurons and their response to stimulation of an important pathway into the PFC, the hippocampus. Much like tiny microphones, the electrodes record a pop every time a neuron fires, Devilbiss explains. Analyzing the complex patterns of “voices” that emerge is challenging but also powerful, because it allows study of neurons on many levels. “Similar to listening to a choir, you can understand the music by listening to individual voices,” says Devilbiss, “or you can listen to the interplay between the voices of the ensemble and how the different voices combine.”

When they listened to individual PFC neurons, the scientists found that while cognition-enhancing doses of Ritalin had little effect on spontaneous activity, the neurons’ sensitivity to signals coming from the hippocampus increased dramatically.  Under higher, stimulatory doses, on the other hand, PFC neurons stopped responding to incoming information.

“This suggests that the therapeutic effects of Ritalin likely stem from this fine-tuning of PFC sensitivity,” says Berridge. “You’re improving the ability of these neurons to respond to behaviorally relevant signals, and that translates into better cognition, attention and working memory.”

Higher doses associated with drug abuse and cognitive impairment, in contrast, impair functioning of the PFC.

More intriguing still were the results that came from tuning into the entire chorus of neurons at once. When groups of neurons were already “singing” together strongly, Ritalin reinforced this coordinated activity. At the same time, the drug weakened activity that wasn’t well coordinated to begin with.

All of this suggests that Ritalin strengthens dominant and important signals within the PFC, while lessening weaker signals that may act as distracters, says Berridge.

Source: http://psychcentral.com