My, those responses (and this one!) are very familiar indeed... I usually use a metaphor of juggling too many balls at once to describe how it feels to me.
I ended up clocking my own morning from the moment I read the thread:
- Read partway through thread. - Remember that we have Stuff To Do, self. We made a list. - Examine list. Recite first part of list out loud: "get dressed, get laundry together, take laundry downstairs, get food, get Ritalin, feed neighbor cat, vacuum, do laundry." - Open closet. - Decide I must have some kind of Amusing Shirt since I will be cleaning (Amusing Socks are right out because the vacuuming is due to dogs shedding like crazy, and I do not want to cake my new Amusing Socks with dog hair right off the bat). - Cannot find Amusing Shirts, but do note that closet is Slightly Out Of Order OMG. - Begin rearranging closet. - Stop self and remind self that we have Things To Do. - Find Amusing Shirts hanging right in front of me, sheesh. - Get dressed. - Pile laundry into laundry basket, after nearly getting re-captured by computer and fretting over cluttery shelves. - Take laundry downstairs and put by laundry room. - Obtain food (single string cheese stick) and take Ritalin, good job! - Go to neighbor's house and open blinds for cat. - Shake cat off of foot. - Return home; take out vacuum. Herd dog into laundry room after brief debate about whether vacuuming or laundry should come first. - Vacuum carpet downstairs. - Realize vacuum bag is entirely full, and vacuum contents are backing up into hose. Ew. - Endure one moment of intense temptation to use the above as an excuse to not vacuum. - Persevere and change the vacuum bag, grumbling all the while. - Realize the Ritalin is kicking in! - Finish vacuuming downstairs, then go on to do the stairs as well, sort the laundry, start the first load. - Retreat to LiveJournal and pray that it won't catch me for too long because the floor up here really needs help too... but there's so much to do in here! Floor! Shelves! Clutter! Oh god! - Distract self by writing comment.
Yay?
edit: Pedantically realize the above list as originally posted is not grammatically parallel, get twitchy about it, return, repair. Send help.
*goes to read thread* Oh my god these people are me. Exactly. Eerily. I am going to print out some of these to give to therapist.
My own most recent analogy: pop rocks in the brain. Thoughts fizzing up and popping all the time, a carbonated chorus of still images and video clips and snatches of dialogue and music and colors and textures and memories. And it won't shut up and let me sleep. :)
Argh. I know that I have reacted with "that's way too familiar" to at least one other of your ADD/ADHD posts before, although I don't recall the details.
This time, I opened the link, read about 1/4 to 1/3 of the answers, found a lot of them to have familiar aspects but kept reminding myself it couldn't possibly apply to me because I did well in school and I don't lose my keys very often and when I walk into a room and forget why I can quite often retrace my steps and figure it out... even if I find it incredibly difficult to stick to one task at a time and to focus on conversations (but that's the social anxiety, right? even though I don't have seem to have social anxiety in short encounters or dealing with strangers or such where roles are clearly defined... just in following conversations with multiple people or where roles aren't clear to me or if there's background noise or... etc. But a shrink diagnosed it as social anxiety soo that's what it must be because it's not like they ever make mistakes :P)
Where was I? O right, could only read about a quarter of the responses before the feeling of "I should be doing something else right now" and all that talk of housework meant that I suddenly felt motivated to clean the bathroom sink -- which has been overdue for a while but is not as urgent as the laundry I intended to do today or the kitchen counters and dishes which are rather dire due to spontaneous banana bread baking yesterday.
But the motivation was for the bathroom sink, and so the bathroom sink must be cleaned first. And actively cleaning allowed me to think more clearly through some of the familiar and not familiar ADD symptoms I'd been reading about, so I kept going and wiped down the top edges of the light switch and the socket where the towel lint had collected, and the edge of the tub, and then I nearly fell and brained myself and *did* possibly mildly pull a muscle to climb up on the back of the toilet to reach up and finally wipe off that smudge high up on the wall where a moth got swatted last summer and it hadn't ever previously been worth the effort to clean it off before but I was busy THINKING dammit and therefore the smudge must go.
I'm still off work and probably will be for a couple of months yet, due to the fibro being so bad after a year of near-fulltime high-stress work, and as I've told the doctor on my last visit, I could work through the pain better than I can through the chronic fatigue and I would like to treat the fatigue too, not just the pain, and he got my back up by saying the fatigue might be psychological and caused by depression and I am so tired of everything potentially psychological defaulting to "must be depression" because I have been depressed in the past -- but because I have been I know this isn't it this time and no I don't want another prescription for another course of anti-depressants because I know from experience they don't help with this not-depression and also maybe what had been diagnosed as anxiety disorder in the past as well as the depression were largely due to feeling overwhelmed and being too hard on myself about feeling overwhelmed by things that other people can manage fine, and maybe that overwhelm is due to some other underlying thing that never gets investigated.
[ARGH hit comment limit, continued below, so sorry for teal deer]
This is not at all a new theory for me, although it usually gets repressed due to an inability to communicate it effectively to doctors... in the past I've had a narcoleptic friend recognise so many symptoms of narcolepsy ("gapping out", inability to focus, etc) that he strongly recommended I get tested for that despite my insomnia (brain won't shut down type), and in the sleep test I surprised myself by managing to fall asleep -- with all those wires and cords glued to me -- much faster than I ever could at home but results were still normal with a side of onset-insomnia. Another friend with high-functioning autism suggested I get assessed for that due to apparent similarity, but I didn't... I don't want to be all copy-cat hypochondriac, but... my brain is still trying to latch on to something here and match it up with the parts of itself that never seem to work as expected by society.
There's more I could say, I think, but I am feeling a strong need to go do something else again and I have rambled on long enough in your journal (I could try to copy and paste to post this in my own journal but that seems overwhelmingly complicated right at the moment.)
And now cue the "must have done something wrong, somehow, somewhere" as I find myself reluctant to hit the "post comment" button. [ESPECIALLY after discovering I overran the comment size limit.] Argh. Sorry?
No worries! Feel free to tl;dr here any time! :) It may feel like you're shopping around, but I figure getting things checked out and possibly eliminating possibilities is all for the good. I also know that other things (anxiety is the only one I remember offhand, possibly chronic sleep deprivation) can mimic ADHD symptoms - that's why they ask you if you've started experiencing these things recently, during your adult life, or have they been chronic, occurring since childhood. And either way, if you *don't* have it, I suspect the same sort of coping mechanisms that help people with ADHD might help others with the same symptoms, even though they may not have the same root cause. So a bit of research and exploration into the topic won't go amiss, if you decide to do so.
(Upped my medication today, which seems to be having the effect of making me *more* distractable ... hopefully it'll settle in sooooon.)
Aww, thank you. I know this rambling is being incredibly self-centred but it's easier to organize my thoughts to put it in to words "to you" than just to myself.
I think a lot of it is since childhood -- which I don't remember a whole lot of, but I do remember learning by grade 6 or so how to turn an escaped giggle (at my own thoughts or something I was hiding reading during class) into a weird cough-like or sneeze-like sound so I wouldn't get in trouble, and I was first diagnosed with depression at age 13 although I know it was nothing new at that point, just drowning under the pressure I put on myself and the guilt trips my parents would apply whenever I dropped one of those balls I was juggling. Treatment at the time didn't help, I just learned to hide it better because my parents REALLY couldn't cope with it and laid on more guilt trips about my failure to maintain proper and acceptable mental health.
I never got anything out of "so, tell me what's bothering you" or "tell me what's on your mind" talk therapy, because I could never narrow down "what was on my mind" to one thing, and being put on the spot about it caused a static-like effect (snow on the TV screen type of static, not static as in lack of movement). Neither could I manage hypnotherapy or self-hypnosis, because there were always too many things going through my mind and I'd forget to focus on whatever I was supposed to be focusing on, whether that was the hypotherapist's voice or assigned imagery or my breathing or whatever.
Some years after the car accident, a pain specialist gave me a checklist for "post concussive syndrome" of which I checked off most of the items, especially things like trouble concentrating and following conversations and short-term memory issues, but he had no interest in following up on it -- it seemed his angle was labeling me as a stubborn and difficult patient who didn't know what was good for me (especially when I rejected his proposal of getting nerve block injections every week for the rest of my life, especially when I have a phobia of injections -- which he mocked me for until I cried. No, never went back to him. Asshat.)
Also I was usually in the habit of having 4 to 6 different books on the go as a child and teenager. I thought this was relatively normal for avid readers, as I did not actually know many other avid readers. And I always had trouble "shutting down my brain" for the night to sleep, which was always attributed to anxiety when I mentioned it to doctors or therapists, no matter how I protested that I wasn't anxious or worried at night, I just had so many things left to think at the end of the day!
I have also always said that I don't learn well by audio only, whether a lecture or talk radio or whatever. I like to have something to read at my own pace -- which is usually quite fast... which does give me time to go back and re-read if I realize my eyes were "reading" but my brain was elsewhere. But lately I've been thinking of trying some kind of podcast to see if that will help diffuse the "should be doing something else now" I get often when knitting, even when finishing a piece of knitting is my short-term goal for the day, and even though documenting an original knitting project (because I always hack and tweak patterns so much that I sometimes prefer to just make up my own thing from scratch) and publishing it online as a free pattern is my current goal for the month.
I know you've mentioned using podcasts while housecleaning; where do you recommend I look for something (free) to try that would make me feel I'm learning about something cool but which won't become incomprehensible if I zone out for parts of it?
And again, thanks so much for letting me ramble here.
(I got the laundry in the washer, hooray! Kitchen still needs attention...)
Dunno if you use iTunes, but that's where I get most of my podcasts from. I'll list some good ones here, and if you don't use iTunes, you can do a quick Google and see if they've got a non-iTunes version (many do). I'll distinguish between the ones I listen to for learning-free fun and the ones I listen to for learning-related fun. :)
I'll also put in a blanket recommendation for looking at BBC Radio 4 online and seeing what you like - they put a number of their shows up as podcasts, or have Listen Again segments where you can play that week's episode of whatever it is again during that week. They used to have them up indefinitely, but I think realized the cost of bandwidth and dropped it to just one week's worth. But they do a lot of interesting science and history programs of a few episodes' duration, so well worth dropping in each week to see what's new.
Fun
Anything Ghost <- people write in with their ghost stories and paranormal experiences, and the host reads them. I have chosen to consider his frequent name mispronunciations charming.
Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 <- two different shows that alternate very 6 weeks or so, the News Quiz and The Now Show. The News Quiz is basically comics riffing on the week's news in the form of a quiz show, and The Now Show is comics riffing on the week's news more in the form of a short sketch-based show. I tend to like the News Quiz better, but they're both amusing.
NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me <- American news quiz show
History
BBC History Magazine <- Podcast put out to supplement the physical magazine, usually features an interview or a short segment about a subject appearing in this month's magazine. Used to put out 2 per month, recently dropped to 1 per month.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History <- Dude actually made me interested in the Cold War. He's also got a political podcast called Common Sense, in which he becomes a raving moderate (he hates everyone), but I rarely listen to that. His history stuff is, for the most part, quite interesting. There's one recent one on colonialization that seems to skirt the edge of faily, but I'd have to listen again to quantify exactly where it made me feel uneasy, and I'd rather not, so. :)
Stuff You Missed in History Class <-- One of a fleet of podcasts put out by HowStuffWorks.com, this one focusing on history.
BrainStuff <- One of a fleet of podcasts put out by HowStuffWorks.com, this one focusing loosely on natural sciences. Loosely being the key word. These are very short, 3-7 minutes or so. Others in the HowStuffWorks family are longer, up to half an hour or so.
Freakonomics Radio <- The Freakonomics guys, who study human behavior from an economic point of view and who may have kicked off the current wave of pop-sci books in behavioral economics, neuromarketing, and all those areas where anthropology meets economics. They tend to alternate 15-minute podcasts with shorter 3-4 minute teasers.
Skeptoid <- Short podcasts where the host, Brian Dunning, focuses on individual topics and explains what we really know about them (The Virgin of Guadeloupe, the Marfa Lights, Bigfoot, the Philadelphia Experiment, etc.)
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe <- Longer podcast (1 hour 20 min) with a group of skeptics. It's actually a science podcast with a skeptical point of view.
WNYC's Radiolab <- Public radio show released as podcasts, punctuated by shorter podcasts that are snippets of additions to the longer versions. Interesting sound editing - can't describe it any more than that. :D
Hard To Quantify
KERA's Anything You Ever Wanted to Know <- A local public radio show that's distributed via iTunes nationally. People call and write in to ask questions ranging from "where in Dallas can I find a good tortilla?" to "please explain nuclear physics?" (Well, usually not that broad. :) Others call or write in and answer. Deceptively fascinating.
KERA's Think <- Another local show that's gone national, that features one of the best interviewers I've ever heard, Krys Boyd. She interviews all sorts of people from the sciences to the arts. Note: it's spring pledge season so the most recent eps of this and the above are periodically interrupted by 8-minute segments where the hosts repeat "please give us money" over and over. That's not typical. :)
Stuff Mom Never Told You Stuff You Should Know <- Two more HowStuffWorks.com podcasts. The Mom one focuses on women and women's issues, the other one on whatever they can find.
This American Life <- Another public radio show, this one picks a topic each week and brings stories, fiction and nonfiction, that center on that week's theme.
Wow, thanks so much for all of that! (Now if only LJ would cough up a comment notifcation so I can mark it in gmail as well as bookmark this post to increase my chances of finding this again as I work through the list.)
Most of these definitely sound interesting, so it should be fun to experiment with focus and multitasking with them. :)
You know, I think the Lyrica is giving me ADHD symptoms. I was always a little like that (tons of browser windows open, distractable, able to hyperfocus or be distracted, but not normal focus). But the Lyrica.... I started carrying a purse so that I wouldn't lose my keys, my phone, and my wallet. :( It's not a med I can let go of, and this kind of thing is a known side effect, but if you have suggestions of books with coping tools, I'd love some suggestions. I'd like to actually finish a project and not just get bogged down in shiny, shiny oops I forgot that, pick it up and forget it two seconds later world. Arrrrrrrgh.
I haven't found any particular *books* that have been a great help ... I think you recommended Find Your Focus Zone to me, which I still intend to finish any day now. And I'm only partway through the ARC of Taking Charge of Adult ADHDm which I think holds promise. Not out yet, but as you're a librarian you can sign up on netgalley.com and request an electronic review copy to read. You'll need to install Adobe Digital Editions to read it, but that's free and easy to do so.
Fidget to Focus: Outwit Your Boredom: Sensory Strategies for Living with ADD was good, but I can save you $14.95 by repeating the book's philosophy here: physical movements occupy the part of your brain that's distractable and which makes you lose track of what you're doing. Incorporate those as you're trying to focus on something: doodling, wiggling, tapping your foot, playing video games as you're listening to audiobooks, standing up instead of sitting, whatever occupies your body physically and which leaves the rest of your brain free to concentrate on whatever it is you're watching or listening to. That's the main focus of the book, and the rest of it is case studies that prove that thesis. :)
10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD: How to Overcome Chronic Distraction & Accomplish Your Goals is a thin book (144 pages) with a lot of good reviews on Amazon; I'm debating buying the Kindle edition.
Edward Hallowell's Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction seem to be the most highly-regarded books out there. I read them, but it was quite some time ago, so I can't remember what they contained that helped. XD
That's the name of that book! I had forgotten, and I lost it in the flood; I felt guilty about replacing it. I think I'll replace it or ILL it, because it did have some practical helpful suggestions. The Taking Charge sounds helpful, too. I'll try to do that from work on Monday.
I'm thrilled to hear about the fidgeting. I've developed a coping mechanism where I listen to audiobooks and knit, or think and knit, or alternate writing and knitting, or (I'm really embarrassed to admit) working and knitting. It seems to calm me in a way that nothing else does. I don't even care if I get the knitting project done, it's enough that it cools down my brain. I suspect that I'm using that principle. Maybe I can try some other similar techniques and see if they work, especially at work (since whipping out the sock yarn and needles isn't really a great idea). I try not tap my toes anymore (I used to, but then the knee happened), but maybe I can doodle or tap my fingers.
I'm on Lyrica now as well. The first week and a half (at 75mg per day) were very flaily-groggy-don't go out unchaperoned, but for me it was a very groggy-sleepy inability to focus rather than too many thoughts and ooh shiny. I eventually figured that taking it in the evening so that the groggy happened closer to bedtime and I slept through most of it helped me regain some functionality, although it's sometimes a struggle to wake up in the morning, but I'm still on a relatively low dose (currently 150mg per day). Had a horrible achy brainless cranky day after missing one evening's dose last week, though!
I generally hate winter, except for it forcing me to wear the same coat every day for months so I can just leave wallet, keys, transit pass, etc in its pocketses and not worry about leaving home without them. I've had to dig out the man-purse earlier this week, it finally being warm enough that I didn't need the spring coat on my trip to the dentist half a block away. (I had one cavity, boo, which I got filled yesterday (and needed to wear spring coat again to get there, summer weather being temporary yet). I was so brave! Go me! ... but I did not get a sticker. :(
All that stuff about it not causing withdrawl is total malarky, ime. I know several people on it, and they all suffer if they miss a dose (I get very cranky and very confused). I was more groggy on 150, but now that I'm on 300, it's "Goodbye Mister Brain Cell, Hello Mr Aphasiiiiiiia!" *does a little dance number like Heat Miser* It's kind of hard to describe. Fortunately, some of the side effects are gone (or I'm used to them), but the ADHD oooooh, shiny distractability remains.
It works great on the pain, though, which is its job, so I heart it still.
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- Read partway through thread.
- Remember that we have Stuff To Do, self. We made a list.
- Examine list. Recite first part of list out loud: "get dressed, get laundry together, take laundry downstairs, get food, get Ritalin, feed neighbor cat, vacuum, do laundry."
- Open closet.
- Decide I must have some kind of Amusing Shirt since I will be cleaning (Amusing Socks are right out because the vacuuming is due to dogs shedding like crazy, and I do not want to cake my new Amusing Socks with dog hair right off the bat).
- Cannot find Amusing Shirts, but do note that closet is Slightly Out Of Order OMG.
- Begin rearranging closet.
- Stop self and remind self that we have Things To Do.
- Find Amusing Shirts hanging right in front of me, sheesh.
- Get dressed.
- Pile laundry into laundry basket, after nearly getting re-captured by computer and fretting over cluttery shelves.
- Take laundry downstairs and put by laundry room.
- Obtain food (single string cheese stick) and take Ritalin, good job!
- Go to neighbor's house and open blinds for cat.
- Shake cat off of foot.
- Return home; take out vacuum. Herd dog into laundry room after brief debate about whether vacuuming or laundry should come first.
- Vacuum carpet downstairs.
- Realize vacuum bag is entirely full, and vacuum contents are backing up into hose. Ew.
- Endure one moment of intense temptation to use the above as an excuse to not vacuum.
- Persevere and change the vacuum bag, grumbling all the while.
- Realize the Ritalin is kicking in!
- Finish vacuuming downstairs, then go on to do the stairs as well, sort the laundry, start the first load.
- Retreat to LiveJournal and pray that it won't catch me for too long because the floor up here really needs help too... but there's so much to do in here! Floor! Shelves! Clutter! Oh god!
- Distract self by writing comment.
Yay?
edit: Pedantically realize the above list as originally posted is not grammatically parallel, get twitchy about it, return, repair. Send help.
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*goes to read thread* Oh my god these people are me. Exactly. Eerily. I am going to print out some of these to give to therapist.
My own most recent analogy: pop rocks in the brain. Thoughts fizzing up and popping all the time, a carbonated chorus of still images and video clips and snatches of dialogue and music and colors and textures and memories. And it won't shut up and let me sleep. :)
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This time, I opened the link, read about 1/4 to 1/3 of the answers, found a lot of them to have familiar aspects but kept reminding myself it couldn't possibly apply to me because I did well in school and I don't lose my keys very often and when I walk into a room and forget why I can quite often retrace my steps and figure it out... even if I find it incredibly difficult to stick to one task at a time and to focus on conversations (but that's the social anxiety, right? even though I don't have seem to have social anxiety in short encounters or dealing with strangers or such where roles are clearly defined... just in following conversations with multiple people or where roles aren't clear to me or if there's background noise or... etc. But a shrink diagnosed it as social anxiety soo that's what it must be because it's not like they ever make mistakes :P)
Where was I? O right, could only read about a quarter of the responses before the feeling of "I should be doing something else right now" and all that talk of housework meant that I suddenly felt motivated to clean the bathroom sink -- which has been overdue for a while but is not as urgent as the laundry I intended to do today or the kitchen counters and dishes which are rather dire due to spontaneous banana bread baking yesterday.
But the motivation was for the bathroom sink, and so the bathroom sink must be cleaned first. And actively cleaning allowed me to think more clearly through some of the familiar and not familiar ADD symptoms I'd been reading about, so I kept going and wiped down the top edges of the light switch and the socket where the towel lint had collected, and the edge of the tub, and then I nearly fell and brained myself and *did* possibly mildly pull a muscle to climb up on the back of the toilet to reach up and finally wipe off that smudge high up on the wall where a moth got swatted last summer and it hadn't ever previously been worth the effort to clean it off before but I was busy THINKING dammit and therefore the smudge must go.
I'm still off work and probably will be for a couple of months yet, due to the fibro being so bad after a year of near-fulltime high-stress work, and as I've told the doctor on my last visit, I could work through the pain better than I can through the chronic fatigue and I would like to treat the fatigue too, not just the pain, and he got my back up by saying the fatigue might be psychological and caused by depression and I am so tired of everything potentially psychological defaulting to "must be depression" because I have been depressed in the past -- but because I have been I know this isn't it this time and no I don't want another prescription for another course of anti-depressants because I know from experience they don't help with this not-depression and also maybe what had been diagnosed as anxiety disorder in the past as well as the depression were largely due to feeling overwhelmed and being too hard on myself about feeling overwhelmed by things that other people can manage fine, and maybe that overwhelm is due to some other underlying thing that never gets investigated.
[ARGH hit comment limit, continued below, so sorry for teal deer]
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There's more I could say, I think, but I am feeling a strong need to go do something else again and I have rambled on long enough in your journal (I could try to copy and paste to post this in my own journal but that seems overwhelmingly complicated right at the moment.)
And now cue the "must have done something wrong, somehow, somewhere" as I find myself reluctant to hit the "post comment" button. [ESPECIALLY after discovering I overran the comment size limit.] Argh. Sorry?
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(Upped my medication today, which seems to be having the effect of making me *more* distractable ... hopefully it'll settle in sooooon.)
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I think a lot of it is since childhood -- which I don't remember a whole lot of, but I do remember learning by grade 6 or so how to turn an escaped giggle (at my own thoughts or something I was hiding reading during class) into a weird cough-like or sneeze-like sound so I wouldn't get in trouble, and I was first diagnosed with depression at age 13 although I know it was nothing new at that point, just drowning under the pressure I put on myself and the guilt trips my parents would apply whenever I dropped one of those balls I was juggling. Treatment at the time didn't help, I just learned to hide it better because my parents REALLY couldn't cope with it and laid on more guilt trips about my failure to maintain proper and acceptable mental health.
I never got anything out of "so, tell me what's bothering you" or "tell me what's on your mind" talk therapy, because I could never narrow down "what was on my mind" to one thing, and being put on the spot about it caused a static-like effect (snow on the TV screen type of static, not static as in lack of movement). Neither could I manage hypnotherapy or self-hypnosis, because there were always too many things going through my mind and I'd forget to focus on whatever I was supposed to be focusing on, whether that was the hypotherapist's voice or assigned imagery or my breathing or whatever.
Some years after the car accident, a pain specialist gave me a checklist for "post concussive syndrome" of which I checked off most of the items, especially things like trouble concentrating and following conversations and short-term memory issues, but he had no interest in following up on it -- it seemed his angle was labeling me as a stubborn and difficult patient who didn't know what was good for me (especially when I rejected his proposal of getting nerve block injections every week for the rest of my life, especially when I have a phobia of injections -- which he mocked me for until I cried. No, never went back to him. Asshat.)
Also I was usually in the habit of having 4 to 6 different books on the go as a child and teenager. I thought this was relatively normal for avid readers, as I did not actually know many other avid readers. And I always had trouble "shutting down my brain" for the night to sleep, which was always attributed to anxiety when I mentioned it to doctors or therapists, no matter how I protested that I wasn't anxious or worried at night, I just had so many things left to think at the end of the day!
I have also always said that I don't learn well by audio only, whether a lecture or talk radio or whatever. I like to have something to read at my own pace -- which is usually quite fast... which does give me time to go back and re-read if I realize my eyes were "reading" but my brain was elsewhere. But lately I've been thinking of trying some kind of podcast to see if that will help diffuse the "should be doing something else now" I get often when knitting, even when finishing a piece of knitting is my short-term goal for the day, and even though documenting an original knitting project (because I always hack and tweak patterns so much that I sometimes prefer to just make up my own thing from scratch) and publishing it online as a free pattern is my current goal for the month.
I know you've mentioned using podcasts while housecleaning; where do you recommend I look for something (free) to try that would make me feel I'm learning about something cool but which won't become incomprehensible if I zone out for parts of it?
And again, thanks so much for letting me ramble here.
(I got the laundry in the washer, hooray! Kitchen still needs attention...)
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I'll also put in a blanket recommendation for looking at BBC Radio 4 online and seeing what you like - they put a number of their shows up as podcasts, or have Listen Again segments where you can play that week's episode of whatever it is again during that week. They used to have them up indefinitely, but I think realized the cost of bandwidth and dropped it to just one week's worth. But they do a lot of interesting science and history programs of a few episodes' duration, so well worth dropping in each week to see what's new.
Fun
Anything Ghost <- people write in with their ghost stories and paranormal experiences, and the host reads them. I have chosen to consider his frequent name mispronunciations charming.
Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 <- two different shows that alternate very 6 weeks or so, the News Quiz and The Now Show. The News Quiz is basically comics riffing on the week's news in the form of a quiz show, and The Now Show is comics riffing on the week's news more in the form of a short sketch-based show. I tend to like the News Quiz better, but they're both amusing.
NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me <- American news quiz show
History
BBC History Magazine <- Podcast put out to supplement the physical magazine, usually features an interview or a short segment about a subject appearing in this month's magazine. Used to put out 2 per month, recently dropped to 1 per month.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History <- Dude actually made me interested in the Cold War. He's also got a political podcast called Common Sense, in which he becomes a raving moderate (he hates everyone), but I rarely listen to that. His history stuff is, for the most part, quite interesting. There's one recent one on colonialization that seems to skirt the edge of faily, but I'd have to listen again to quantify exactly where it made me feel uneasy, and I'd rather not, so. :)
Stuff You Missed in History Class <-- One of a fleet of podcasts put out by HowStuffWorks.com, this one focusing on history.
part 2
BrainStuff <- One of a fleet of podcasts put out by HowStuffWorks.com, this one focusing loosely on natural sciences. Loosely being the key word. These are very short, 3-7 minutes or so. Others in the HowStuffWorks family are longer, up to half an hour or so.
Freakonomics Radio <- The Freakonomics guys, who study human behavior from an economic point of view and who may have kicked off the current wave of pop-sci books in behavioral economics, neuromarketing, and all those areas where anthropology meets economics. They tend to alternate 15-minute podcasts with shorter 3-4 minute teasers.
Skeptoid <- Short podcasts where the host, Brian Dunning, focuses on individual topics and explains what we really know about them (The Virgin of Guadeloupe, the Marfa Lights, Bigfoot, the Philadelphia Experiment, etc.)
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe <- Longer podcast (1 hour 20 min) with a group of skeptics. It's actually a science podcast with a skeptical point of view.
WNYC's Radiolab <- Public radio show released as podcasts, punctuated by shorter podcasts that are snippets of additions to the longer versions. Interesting sound editing - can't describe it any more than that. :D
Hard To Quantify
KERA's Anything You Ever Wanted to Know <- A local public radio show that's distributed via iTunes nationally. People call and write in to ask questions ranging from "where in Dallas can I find a good tortilla?" to "please explain nuclear physics?" (Well, usually not that broad. :) Others call or write in and answer. Deceptively fascinating.
KERA's Think <- Another local show that's gone national, that features one of the best interviewers I've ever heard, Krys Boyd. She interviews all sorts of people from the sciences to the arts. Note: it's spring pledge season so the most recent eps of this and the above are periodically interrupted by 8-minute segments where the hosts repeat "please give us money" over and over. That's not typical. :)
Stuff Mom Never Told You
Stuff You Should Know <- Two more HowStuffWorks.com podcasts. The Mom one focuses on women and women's issues, the other one on whatever they can find.
This American Life <- Another public radio show, this one picks a topic each week and brings stories, fiction and nonfiction, that center on that week's theme.
Re: part 2
Most of these definitely sound interesting, so it should be fun to experiment with focus and multitasking with them. :)
Re: part 2
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Fidget to Focus: Outwit Your Boredom: Sensory Strategies for Living with ADD was good, but I can save you $14.95 by repeating the book's philosophy here: physical movements occupy the part of your brain that's distractable and which makes you lose track of what you're doing. Incorporate those as you're trying to focus on something: doodling, wiggling, tapping your foot, playing video games as you're listening to audiobooks, standing up instead of sitting, whatever occupies your body physically and which leaves the rest of your brain free to concentrate on whatever it is you're watching or listening to. That's the main focus of the book, and the rest of it is case studies that prove that thesis. :)
10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD: How to Overcome Chronic Distraction & Accomplish Your Goals is a thin book (144 pages) with a lot of good reviews on Amazon; I'm debating buying the Kindle edition.
Edward Hallowell's Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction seem to be the most highly-regarded books out there. I read them, but it was quite some time ago, so I can't remember what they contained that helped. XD
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I'm thrilled to hear about the fidgeting. I've developed a coping mechanism where I listen to audiobooks and knit, or think and knit, or alternate writing and knitting, or (I'm really embarrassed to admit) working and knitting. It seems to calm me in a way that nothing else does. I don't even care if I get the knitting project done, it's enough that it cools down my brain. I suspect that I'm using that principle. Maybe I can try some other similar techniques and see if they work, especially at work (since whipping out the sock yarn and needles isn't really a great idea). I try not tap my toes anymore (I used to, but then the knee happened), but maybe I can doodle or tap my fingers.
Thanks for all the great ideas!!
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I generally hate winter, except for it forcing me to wear the same coat every day for months so I can just leave wallet, keys, transit pass, etc in its pocketses and not worry about leaving home without them. I've had to dig out the man-purse earlier this week, it finally being warm enough that I didn't need the spring coat on my trip to the dentist half a block away. (I had one cavity, boo, which I got filled yesterday (and needed to wear spring coat again to get there, summer weather being temporary yet). I was so brave! Go me! ... but I did not get a sticker. :(
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It works great on the pain, though, which is its job, so I heart it still.
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