October 2024

ADHD

• ADHD Explained
• The ADHD Brain 🧠
• Nutrition & ADHD
• Lifestyle Tips For ADHD

The ADHD Brain 🧠

Their thought, actions, and feelings are either too loud and overwhelming or depressed. Their mental, physical, and emotional responses are either too fast, impulsive, or sluggish.

How self regulation happen

Different parts of the brain need to cooperate for self-regulation to occur. If any of these parts fail to play their role, self-regulation doesn’t happen.

Self-regulation depends on three components:

• The integrity and efficiency of automatic parts of the brain, such as alertness detection and the filtration of information.
• The integrity of the top-down or executive function.
• The capacity to integrate these two processes with the intention to achieve your goals successfully.

Alertness & detection

Alertness and detection are the capacity to notice a signal from our surroundings. People with ADHD tend to be distracted or have breakdowns in alertness, making them miss important cues from their environment. Stimulants will benefit them as they increase their capacity to stay alert.

EEG tests of the frontal cortex of people with ADHD find that some have excessive slow-wave electrical activity in their brains, which is usually typical for people when they are asleep, implying that their brain is under alert. Others have an influx of short, rapid brain waves, indicating an overactive brain.

Information filtering and accumulation

Sense impressions constantly bombard us, but most of us can filter through the flow of these impressions and focus on the ones that are relevant to the task we are engaged in or to our goals.

For most people, sifting through impressions, comparing them to past experiences, and arriving at a sound understanding of their encounters is a speedy process. However, for people with ADHD, that process might take longer, and the results might be inefficient and distorted.

Alertness, information filtering, and accumulation are bottom-up capacities of the brain because they happen unconsciously and are beyond our control.

Executive function

 Executive functions are a set of mental skills that regulate thoughts and actions. These include working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. We use these skills to achieve our goals.

Executive control functions are considered top-down functions because they manage brain activities from the rational mind, AKA frontal cortex, down to inhibit other, less logical parts of the brain.

The capacity of people with ADHD to prioritize their goals and to hold information in their short-term memory is compromised. For some people, that means that they struggle with top-down functions.

For example, frustration and anxiety can create a vicious cycle that hinders the ability to focus attention and prevent impulsive behavior. A frustrated or anxious person has a lower capacity to resist distractions and temptations. On the other hand, a person whose mind is spiraling will have less capacity for controlling their emotions.

Self-regulation involves automatic bottom-up and conscious top-down aspects, which implies that ADHD is not a problem of willpower.

Developing self-regulation:

Self-regulation develops throughout life but is not a linear process and does not include all self-regulation capacities in equal measure. For example, teenagers’ ability to reduce impulsivity and risk-taking lags behind their ability to focus on a task.

The capacity of children with ADHD to self-regulate looks like that of kids a few years younger than them. Some kids with ADHD seem to grow out of their ADHD symptoms when they become adults. In others, their ADHD is a lifelong challenge.

The brain of the ADHD person

Some teens and adults with ADHD have about 8- 10% smaller volumes of grey matter and smaller key brain areas and networks, such as the prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, hippocampus, and amygdala.

Research suggests that the brains of children with ADHD don’t just develop slower than the brains of other children; instead, their patterns of development are different.

In some kids with ADHD, the pattern of network between major brain centers develops differently than in their peers’ brains.

If we use the radio metaphor again, it is as if you are trying to listen to a talk show on your radio, but the towers that transfer the signals from the studio to your radio are malfunctioning. There are breaks in the sentences the anchor is saying, and you struggle to understand their meaning. You feel exhausted and frustrated by your effort to create a coherent sense of what’s going on.

Nature vs. Nurture

A combination of genetics and environment determines brain development in children.

Research on ADHD shows it has strong genetic components, which is demonstrated in an increased chance of kids having ADHD if one of their parents was diagnosed with ADHD.

At the same time, ADHD is associated with a slew of environmental factors, from exposure to chemicals and stress during pregnancy to low birth weight or preterm birth and neglect during the early years of infancy and childhood.

Epigenetics, a new field that studies how behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way genes work, suggests that while genes might predispose a person to ADHD, they don’t entirely cause the syndrome. Instead, when the disposition and the environmental factors come together, they lead to ADHD.

That is important because if you assume that genetics alone is responsible for the occurrence of ADHD, then the solution is biological, mainly pharmaceutical. But when you include environmental factors as part of the ADHD pictures, then you consider what lifestyle can help the person with ADHD to regulate their thinking, feelings, and actions.

ADHD on the spectrum

Some people are naturally organized, while others thrive in chaos. Some like their routine and need time to make decisions, while others follow the flow. The ability to manage thoughts, behaviors, and emotions is a spectrum. As a society, we define when a trait becomes a disorder. There is a fine line between an easygoing person who may be more spontaneous and someone with ADHD, which we use to decide who needs intervention.

Labeling a child or an adult with ADHD is beneficial if it helps them get the support that they need. It can help prevent low self-esteem and depression. At the same time, it might help the parents, teacher, and other professional when they attempt to provide the support the child needs.

Although neuroplasticity is lifelong, brain development during childhood is dramatic. Areas of the brain and networks being used become more robust, and those neglected are weakened and die. For the child with ADHD, it means that early diagnosis and treatment can help strengthen networks that otherwise would be neglected.