I was just saying this to Somegirl yesterday, that I thought blogging actually made ADD-type concentration problems worse. Looks like there’s something to the idea:
Today’s world, with its energy, excitement and excess, its novelty, chaos and confusion, its dust storms of data, its creative spirit and irreverence, its speed and its incoherence, looks much like another world I know well: the world of attention deficit disorder, or ADD. People with untreated ADD rush around, feel impatient, get frustrated easily, lose focus in the middle of a task, bubble with energy but struggle to stay organized, forget where they’re going or what they’ve gone to get, fail to complete what they are doing, feel they could do a lot more if they could just get it together, procrastinate and feel busy beyond belief but dissatisfied with their performance. Sound like anyone you know?
As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen an upsurge since the mid-1990s in people who don’t have true ADD but do suffer from many of these symptoms. They complain of being distracted, disorganized and overbooked. They suffer memory loss from data overload and wonder if they have early Alzheimer’s. They multi-task and (surprise!) feel they do nothing well. I call it a severe case of modern life.
What? What? What??
Or perimenopause…
It’s all about learning to ignore things that are not important to you or your life. Of course that can take a lifetime, but let’s be honest, do you have somewhere else you need to be?