What is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach
about relationships, communication parenting and in this video, we're going to be talking about ADHD.
I am assuming that you maybe have found out that somebody you know
has ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and you're wondering what is this? How can I be
prepared for it? What am I seeing? Is it true? And so in this video, what I'm going to do is I'm going to
tell you some of the characteristics of a person that has ADHD. So, ADHD is super commonly diagnosed,
you need to know that, and that's because some of the qualities of a person with ADHD are also
qualities of just regular people sometimes. So, people can be misdiagnosed, you need to know that.
In fact depending on the age of a child sometimes, they are easily misdiagnosed so the younger a
child is, the more common it is for a person to be misdiagnosed. So, we need to think about like
7-year-old boys. 7-year-old boys are super active, they have a hard time paying attention,
stuff like that. Well, they are oftentimes diagnosed with ADHD, sometimes maybe mistakenly so. I'm
gonna be going through a pretty large list of descriptions to hopefully give you a really full
understanding of what ADHD is like and at the end of this video, I have a surprise for you. I would
like to share with you things that you can do to help the person with ADHD in your life whether
it's you or your children have a better chance of having self-mastery or self-government. People
with ADHD are oftentimes classified as people who don't reach their full potential because they have
a hard time paying attention. So, think of that though, that could be literally almost any small
child. So, we do need to be careful. So, when you have ADHD, people are saying things and your brain is
going somewhere, you're analyzing something else, something has caught your attention and because
of that, you end up trapping yourself and sometimes not accomplishing what you want to academically
or with some of your other goals because you seem to get sidetracked even when you didn't want to be.
People with ADHD are oftentimes very self-focused. So, they have a hard time getting out of the world
of them and what they are thinking, what they are feeling. So, people who have ADHD oftentimes
interrupt other people. They have a hard time having patience and focusing in and listening
to what other people have to say because their thoughts are going crazy inside their own heads
and they know they must be important because they're really finding their own aha's right now
and so they want to share those aha's with other people. People who have ADHD are not dumb, this is
really important. In fact, oftentimes they're very, very smart but what happens is they have a hard
time knowing when to tell themselves to turn off thought and to listen and then how to bring that
thought back if they turned it off when a small child has ADHD, they have a hard time waiting their
turn so they don't like waiting in lines, this gives them lots of frustration and oftentimes if
they see somebody else doing something fun, they'll just run over and insert themselves in the middle
of it. Now, here's the deal, almost any toddler or small child could do this. In fact, now that I think
about it, adolescents do this a lot too but that does not mean that they all have ADHD. So, let's
remember that, that's just something that commonly happens when a person is very self-focused and
they aren't in the habit of waiting and being patient. Before I share more qualities about
ADHD, click the subscribe link so that you can get more information on behaviors communication and
self-government. Part of the term ADHD is the "H," right? Hyperactivity. So, people who have ADHD
oftentimes are more hyper, they're fidgety, they sometimes make noises to seek attention.
So, do you know what attention seeking looks like? Lots of times people who truly have ADHD
will do a lot of attention seeking behaviors and they're not even fully aware that they are
doing it. Now, anyone can do attention seeking too though, you see what I mean? Like a child could do
it, a parent could do it, somebody who just wants to be the life of the party could do attention
seeking behaviors, that does not mean they have ADHD, this is just something that we often see
with a person who does have ADHD. Another quality of a person who has ADHD is they ignore danger
and they often are quite impulsive. They lack some of that impulse control that could keep them safe,
so they may do something like maybe they're walking on a wall and they fall down, they scrape
themselves they get hurt, for some reason they go right back a little later to walking on the wall
and possibly having the same mistake occur. So, they aren't very cautious and it seems like that they
don't learn from some of those mistakes oftentimes. So, this can be difficult for them because it can
cause bodily harm. Another quality of people with ADHD is procrastination or forgetting things like
forgetting their schedule and what types of things they want to do that day. Now, again, have you ever
procrastinated? I mean I have. Have you ever forgot something on your schedule? I have. I could think
I have ADHD but like at the end of the day, I could just have a normal person moment where I'm
overwhelmed, I've got a lot going on so we need to be really careful with all of these qualities not
to just label somebody with ADHD because you know, really a person would have to have pretty much
all of these qualities, a large period of the time to know that they truly have ADHD and not just
stress, overwhelm or lack of connection. Another thing that people with ADHD oftentimes have and
I'm saying oftentimes here, I should probably say sometimes. Oftentimes might even be a little much
because really it's 30 to 40%. 30 to 40% of people with ADHD say that they also
feel anxious so, they have anxiety. Now, right now, I don't even know the percentage of people who say
they have anxiety but it's a lot. It's going up all the time and I do think there are multiple reasons
for that, this isn't the video for me to discuss that, but it's definitely becoming its own kind
of epidemic really and I know it's something that people are really dealing with and on a real deep
level. But people with ADHD experience anxiety oftentimes because they have a fear of forgetting
stuff. So, if you truly have ADHD, you're afraid of forgetting the stuff on your schedule and so what
happens is you develop stress, you overthink it and overthink it again and again just so
that you don't forget and that's usually the type of anxiety that a person would experience if they
have ADHD. This one you might not have thought of but many people who have ADHD say that they have a
lack of appetite. They're just not very hungry. Well, if you think of it, if you're stressing, if you have
anxiety, if you worry because you're forgetting things or you're constantly beating yourself
up because you procrastinated something and now you're worried about it again, then yeah you might
not eat. In fact, I would think that also you could probably overeat just because you're worried too.
Additionally people with ADHD can struggle with anger control problems so they have outbursts
and this is usually a result of again, frustration. Where does the frustration come from? Well, let's
see. If I get distracted and I have a hard time paying attention so then I forgot to do something
which means I was procrastinating, I didn't work out my schedule right that means my anxiety and
stress level is going up, well then what happens? I lose it, I snap at people, I start thinking of
people as objects especially because I'm really concerned with what's going on inside my own
head. So, when a person has ADHD, it leads to all of these things that they can deal with just because
they're having a struggle with paying attention. ADHD can seem like a catch-all. It's so complex and
there's so many different things that a person could experience. If a person truly has ADHD,
there is hope and you know what? If they just have some of these symptoms, there is hope too.
So, I promised you a bonus, remember? Well, here's the bonus. The bonus is self-government. When a
person learns self-government then they can master some of the lack of attention or they can master
keeping to that schedule a little bit better. There are skills and principles of self-government that
help a person stay focused. For years, I took in treatment children, foster children and many of
them had ADHD as well as other things like OCD's because those go together actually. Oftentimes a
person with ADHD also has OCD's, what that really means is a lot of stress, okay? So, those types of
children, people who also had RAD, ODD, all kinds of things came to my home for treatment so what did
I do for them? Because we were highly successful in our home, in fact because of that, people have
asked me to speak about parenting and family communication and self-government all over the
world. So, what we did is we taught them how to give themselves "no" answers, how to instruct themselves.
We taught them how to hold themselves accountable, how to plan for success, how to pre-teach
themselves and correct themselves when things went wrong. We taught them how to be calm so that they
wouldn't let the stress overtake them. I want to share some of this with you but this has already
gone on long enough. There are so many videos on this channel that you could look at to help find
additional help with self-government but right now, I would like to give you a free gift. So, in
the description below this video, there is a link to something called the Calm Parenting toolkit.
I believe it's the top link in that description. If you click on that link to the Calm Parenting
toolkit, then you will get my Calm Parenting toolkit which is a course for free. This is the
perfect start to you learning self-government and for your child to learn self-government too if you
happen to be a parent of a child who is struggling with ADHD. ADHD is something you can live with.
ADHD is something you can manage so don't let yourself get overly concerned, just develop the
skills, get the tools that you need for success and your life will be much more optimistic
than it may seem at this time when you're a little concerned about what this diagnosis might mean.