"Robert, stop it!"
Those words haunted me most of my life, whenever men and women became overwhelmed by my behavior. I just didn't understand what the problem of theirs was. Neither did the voices in the head of mine.
The voices were continuous and just mine, not God or Spirits, and they didn't tell me to do anything antisocial. Rather, best natural adderall alternative each (I counted eight) was really a stream of standard thoughts, running concurrently, similar to an eight-track tape playing all tracks simultaneously. I frequently wandered into a conversational form described by friends as a "Robin Williams monologue," telling jokes, making puns, leaping from subject to topic, and also changing voices and character.
But the head of mine had always been like that. To me, everyone else moved and thought gradually, took forever to get to the point. I was driving my friends, coworkers as well as family nuts, and also I could not to do anything about it. I was also a compulsive eater, hurting the overall health of mine. Often the decades of mine of meditation practice could not handle the internal restlessness.
Then an odd conjunction of events led to help. The sister-in-law of mine, Tina, an Army physician, suffered an injury and needed assistance driving home from Illinois to New York. I was available, therefore I spent 3 days together with the household, during that time Tina got to look at me at close hand. She soon bluntly explained, "I really, really, really think you have ADHD." When Tina, a lieutenant colonel as well as formidable diagnostician, uses three "reallys" in a sentence, you'd better take her seriously.
But ADHD? Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Me? I had thought all, ADD, and ADHD those other new acronyms were children's ailments. I could not have ADHD; I was from the development which found super fast flashing of movie trailers and TV shows with handheld camerawork challenging, indeed painful, to observe. My attention span could be measured in hours and minutes, not milliseconds and sound bites. I was a skilled systematic zoologist, a profession committed to compulsive organization of vast amounts of data. But no, I couldn't have ADHD.
But as we talked about my symptoms, it became obvious that kids don't have a monopoly on brain chemical imbalances. I'd all the usual symptomatic suspects. Despite earning my two masters and a doctorate, institution had constantly been excruciatingly uncomfortable in my view, from being still in the seat of mine to following laboriously gradual lectures. I tested badly because I both read too much into a question or knew all about the rare exceptions. In conversations, I frequently completed other people's sentences.
Getting to sleep was always an ordeal because the thoughts of mine wouldn't turn off. Though I'm incredibly goal oriented, I found it challenging to complete some tasks because I'd a great number of projects happening simultaneously. For example, I'd spent a season composing a CD ROM component to the sharks and rays of the world, but had put off getting it commercially published. On certain things I driven like a laser, while on others I was dark as a candle. I noticed my very own physician along with a neuropsychologist &, sure enough, got the ADHD diagnosis.