Sanskratio

I don't know how to react to these sort of self-questionnaires about ADD. They seem to indicate that I might have some sort of attention problem, but then again I feel like my answers are the only way anyone could feel. But I guess not all feel this way.

Adult Self-Report Scale-V1.1 (ASRS-V1.1) Screener

1. How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project once the challenging parts have been done?

Always.

2. How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?

Very often.

3. How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?

Often.

4.When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?

Almost always.

5. How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit down for a long time?

Somewhat often.

6. How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?

Sometimes, not too often.

I've been doing on and off all sorts of small scale self-improvement type of stuff lately. It's funny how it all seems easier when the goal is to improve cognitive performance instead of general health. I'm much more concerned of how my brains work than I'm of my health in general. Whether or not my focus should be on cognitive performance is irrelevant. It's just how it is for me.

Anyhow, the most effective changes are really rather unsurprising. Diet, exercise and sleep. Especially sleep. Just by fixing these three you'd get a clear improvement on your day-to-day life. Taking Omega-3 supplements will probably improve your cognition too.

But it's not enough that I found a better goal. I need to measure the performance of my cognition too. What's been holding me back is that it's difficult to come up with a good metric for this type of elusive goal. The solution, however, is not to find the perfect metric for various aspects of one's cognitive performance but to start measuring something and to fine-tune to process later.

Note to self:

I don't want to draw too wild conclusions about this yet, but I accidentally skipped two days of taking Omega-3 supplements and I had extreme difficulties to concentrate and a really distracted mind at work. The incident might very well have been just an accident, but the difference in feeling was pretty concrete and significant.

I'm pretty sure I'm not a "real ADHD" insofar as concentration problems haven't been ruining my life or anything. I do feel that my relative inability to focus (at times) has had a negative impact on various aspect of my life, but it's not like I cannot function most of the time or anything. But anyhow, the feeling at work, which I did recognize as a familiar feeling from my past (I've had a leave of absence from work for over a year just recently), was pretty much what I imagine real ADHDs feel.

It's not like I would constantly feel an urge to check if I have new email or if there's anything new on the web. It's more like the whole mind is completely distracted and it feels almost impossible to focus on anything. It's like a buzz inside the head. The idea of starting something feels almost painful. (Luckily there's always something one can do even if some big task seems, at the time, impossible to get started with.)

The strange thing is that this feeling occurred just after couple of days of missing my Omega-3 supplements. After starting taking those supplements, I recall feeling pretty "normal" most of the time I'm working. But like I said, I'm not sure what the real reason was. Sometimes I get distracted by the nature of the work I have to do during the day. For example, a lot of different tasks concurrently usually distracts the mind.

Now, I do track my mood during the workday, but so far I haven't looked at the data. It will take a whole lot more than just couple of days, because my work days are so different that it takes time to eliminate the effect of different types of work days from these measurements.