Understand your Brain

Ari Tuckman wrote Understand Your Brain, Get More Done: The ADHD Executive Functions Workbook for adults with ADHD experiencing executive function issues and ready to work on it. As a workbook, it is meant to be done independently, but not necessarily sequentially. Having read it through there are repetitive, but if someone were to hunt and peck through the text, as the author recommends, this would be less of an issue.

Tuckman identifies 7 areas of executive function that often impact the lives of people with ADHD: response inhibition, working memory, sense of time, prospective memory, emotional self-control, self-activation, and forethought and hind thought. Each element has a chapter with strategies centered around two or three main ideas. For example, for working memory he identifies the following three basic ideas into which strategies can be categorized:

1. Make important tasks and items stand out more to make it more likely that your attention will stay focused on them.
2. The fewer distractions, the easier it is to stay focused on and remember what you should.
3. Write things down rather than keep them in your head. (p. 42)

This brings back college. Anytime I had a paper to write or a test to study for, the first thing I did was clean my room. I knew that if my room and desk were disheveled, I would be distracted and have difficulty focusing. Some people looked at me funny when I said I had a paper to write and they saw me taking the trash out or fetching the vacuum. It was what I needed to do. I learned to allot time in my process to pick the place up before I started and I was then able to complete the academic task at hand. People with ADHD often struggle against picking things up and putting them where they belong, but if they are put away, they become less distracting and you are able to accomplish more. This idea of limiting distractions is seen in several areas of the book, a testament to the challenge and thus the importance of this activity.

The book is full of place to be involved. It asks the individual to identify which strategies they have used, what their past experiences with the strategy was, obstacles that interfere with using the strategy and how and where it might be used in your life. For example, one element under the first category in working memory is "do it right away." When a permission slip came home I always immediately signed it, attached an envelope with any necessary funds and returned it to the child's backpack via a homework folder. Otherwise I forgot to do it. With my email, I try to immediately respond to anything so that I do not lose it in my in box.

After identifying past strategy use, the author asks you to select two from each category to examine in more depth. Then he ask the reader to select a couple of strategies to try out. He proposes making a written commitment to try them out and to visualize the rewards of using them. He also suggests including a personal reward for using the strategies. Once strategies have been tried out, he asks the reader to evaluate their implementation. His book stresses the idea that things are hard, and refinement of implementation is essential. He suggests looking at how they present lessons to learn about work, relationships and home life. This self evaluation is critical for helping to maintain motivation. Presumably learning to do better will improve your life. Recognizing that making a difficult change has benefits and what precisely those benefits are is essential.

While the target audience of this book is people with ADHD, others with executive function weaknesses would benefit from many of these exercises. While many of these tasks could be used with high school students, younger students would be likely to struggle with the self-evaluation and meta-cognition required to use this strategy without extensive support.