Greetings from Honduras where I’ve been traveling for the last four weeks. The abundance of things to do and the lack of many good places to plug in my laptop have distracted me from posting this month. But today I read a blog from an American expat who lives here, and it got me thinking about the ADDexecutive:

La Gringa wrote about culture shock:

Isolation: I didn’t realize how much I would miss the English language. I knew some Spanish, but Honduran Spanish didn’t sound anything like I learned or had heard on television. I didn’t understand people and they didn’t understand me. I found myself tuning out to everything around me, just like I do for commercials on TV.

La Gringa was talking about language, but it got me thinking about travel to places where there’s lots and lots that we don’t recognize or understand. In these circumstances, does our ADD push us to zip our attention all over the place, from one new thing to the next? Or do we rapidly go into overload, and find ourselves hyperfocusing on any one thing we do understand, or maybe nothing at all?

When the senses are bombarded with new stuff, how adaptive are our filters?  I ask this not only in the context of travel, but in the context of any situation — business or otherwise — in which we find that there’s a lot going on that we don’t understand.  How do we find the ability to figure out which things need our attention?  (Never mind the secondary need to keep our attention there, amid the distractions.)

When it’s crunch time, one of my friends puts tempting but non-critical projects in a cabinet and shuts the door. Another turns his monitor off and puts his keyboard away when he needs to avoid the web and email.

Is there anything you can put away today?

Similarly, some folks shut their office door when they don’t want distractions from the outside.  However: Others make sure the office door stays open so that they are constantly reminded that they’re in a place with other people who are working – not just sitting in their offices reading interesting newspaper articles or playing Scrabulous.*

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*if you don’t know what Scrabulous is, do NOT, repeat do NOT Google it to find out.  The job you save might be your own.

“Yeah, we know we want to chase after every shiny penny.” That’s what one of my clients used to say, sheepishly, every time I’d remind them to focus.

There’s so much business to chase after, and every shiny penny looks like it’s worth chasing…

Try this today: when you feel the urge to do something big (like bid on an RFP you just saw) or even something small (read a trade journal article that caught your eye), ask yourself, “is a shiny penny pulling me away from what I really ought to be doing?”

You might do it anyway, but at least you’ll know

“Is that your dinner? Do I need to call your mom?”  Shay the bartender asked me that back in ‘99 when I sat down at 6 p.m. for two packs of peanuts, some Nabs and a Diet Coke.  I had an office next door and was pushing hard to get something out by late that evening.

And she was right, of course.  That was my dinner.  And if I made a habit of that diet, she was going to have to call my mom.

I’ll write in another post about diet and brain function with specific regard to attention deficit disorder.  But it doesn’t take a PhD neuroscientist to know that we’re not going to be at our best on peanuts, Nabs, and a Diet Coke all day long.

Meanwhile, here are some general food/brain links for you:

“Eleven Steps to a Better Brain” at The New Scientist.

“Diet and the Brain” at The Society for Neuroscience

“Food for Thought” at The Diet Channel. 

By the way, if one of your New Year’s Resolutions is “Eat Better During the Work Day”, good for you.

For people with attention deficit disorder, is compulsive internet surfing an example of no focus or an example of hyperfocus?  On the one hand, the addicted surfer is constantly moving from one website to another.  On the other hand, the addicted surfer is clearly focused on one thing: “the internet” and the computer he’s using to access it.

In any case, South Korea is doing something about it.  From the New York Times:

Compulsive Internet use has been identified as a mental health issue in other countries, including the United States. However, it may be a particularly acute problem in South Korea because of the country’s nearly universal Internet access.

It has become a national issue here in recent years, as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.

…To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

In September, South Korea held the first international symposium on Internet addiction.

“Korea has been most aggressive in embracing the Internet,” said Koh Young-sam, head of the government-run Internet Addiction Counseling Center. “Now we have to lead in dealing with its consequences.”

– Martin Fackler, “In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession”, New York Times, 17 November 2007.

It hit me today that “I’m afraid I might miss something” is closely tied to many of my ADD triggers.

• Some folks are laughing down the hall? Of course I go visit — I might miss something!
• Channel surfing because there’s nothing on? Sure I could turn off the TV, but I keep clicking because — I might miss something!
• Stick with a job I like and get better at every year, or go work somewhere else that just made a shiny new offer? Better take the new job — I might miss something!

The opportunity for something “new” can trigger ADD from many different angles: departure from boredom, curiosity, the excuse to physically get up and move, etc. But add another angle to the story: the fear we might miss something.

We’ve talked earlier about the “regular” kind of fear at “Fear is the Mind Killer“. But this “fear that I might miss something” is more subtle — a different kind of anxiety. We’ll take a deeper look at this in later posts, one of which will be titled “The Grass is Always Greener…”