Head Injuries – Acquired ADD?

Head Injuries Affect Attention & Focus
whether the injury was mild or severe

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Brain-based Coaching Series

Boing-oing-oing-oing . . . OUCH!

© Phillip Martin, artist/educator

As long as there have been humans, there have been hits to the head. Some of them were a actually caused by those humans!

Much attention has been paid to sports-concussions and severe forms of traumatic brain injury (TBI), especially those resulting in concussions and coma.

The milder impacts, such as those from falling off a bicycle or a ladder, the jolt from a low-speed car accident or taking a weak punch in a fistfight are far more common.

These milder injuries may not entail losing consciousness — more likely to result in a slightly dazed feeling or a brief lack in responsiveness before recovering — have gotten the attention they deserve only relatively recently

They ALL damage the brain, however.

“New data suggests blows to the head are on the rise among U.S. adults and kids, but definitive diagnosis remains elusive.” ~ Scientific American Mind

Questions remain as to how long it takes to recover, to what degree and how quickly each piece of the cognitive puzzle comes back on line reliably, as well as how to identify which brain injuries are likely to recover and why some never do.

Part of the challenge in understanding these injuries is how varied they can be.  But it is no small problem.

classroomclipart.com

Making things worse still, suffering even one concussion elevates the risk of suffering another and may make it all the more challenging to recover from future damage.

Here’s a scary statistic: According to an article found on the Scientific American blogsite, the average a 10-year old can experience as many as 240 hits to the head in a single football season.

Related Post: How Do Brains Get Damaged?  Is YOURS?

Troubles Often Persist

Even when a brain-scan cannot pinpoint specific areas of damage, months after a concussion patients may still have lingering symptoms, including an inability to concentrate as well as headaches — even when initial brain scans reveal nothing amiss.

Dr. Jennifer Marin, a Pediatric emergency physician at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh says, “Explaining the concept of cognitive rest [for recovering from injury] is difficult when you can’t show an image of how the brain has been injured.”

At the hospital, she says, “we stabilize patients but then they go home and a lot of them will experience complications down the line.”

What KIND of “complications?”

Attentional deficits and reduced speed of information processing have been found consistently, in even mild head injuries, despite lack of gross deficits in intelligence or memory (Bohnen, Jolles, Twijnstra, Mellink, & Wijnen, 1995).

These deficits are frequently the most persisting cognitive complaints (Chan, 2001).

From an article on ScienceDirect from the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology (Volume 21, Issue 4, May 2006, Pages 293-296):

Head injury typically results in diffuse damage (not in one specific spot) that produces a reduction in information processing capacity.

This processing capacity has been broadly described as the number of operations the brain can carry out at the same time.

Individuals with mild head injury demonstrate problems when they are required to analyze or process more information than they can handle simultaneously (Gronwall, 1989).

Decreased information processing has been posited to be primarily due to problems with attention (Kay, Newman, Cavallo, Ezrachi, & Resnick, 1992; Szymanski & Linn, 1992)

In addition, fatigue and/or stress, common following head injuries, have been shown to further compromise the processing speed of those who have incurred even a mild head injury (Ewing, McCarthy, Gronwall, & Wrightson, 1980; Wood, Novack, & Long, 1984).

Related Post: ABOUT Processing Speed

Or perhaps it’s because of slowed processing speed?

Research conducted by Ponsford and Kinsella (1992) demonstrated that the difficulty in performing a sustained attention task experienced by individuals who have suffered even a mild head injury may result more from a slowed speed of processing than from attentional deficits.

Fortunately, even though the speed of performance is reduced for head-injured participants, no significant reduction exists in terms of accuracy of performance (Stuss et al., 1985).

Related Posts:
Processing slower or more to think about?
Processing Efficiency is all about Juggling

REGARDLESS of the underlying problem, the effects on behavior are very much the same as the struggles of those with a particular Executive Functioning Disorder known as Attention Deficit Disorder.

Let’s take a look at what that means.

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Brain Damage from Head Injury

Click HERE for great SciAm Infographic on head injury – the source of this graphic

Resulting Attentional Problems

As I began in an earlier article, Attentional struggles? Not ME! (wanna’ bet?)

MANY people – not just those diagnosed with ADD/EFD (or anything else) –
report ongoing, more frequent than “average” challenges with any or all of the following items.

How many of these do YOU experience?  How often?

• procrastination and spotty follow-through
• time, transition and energy management
• recalling directions, names or what you said you would do
• keeping the bills paid on time (or, for students, keeping on top of assignments)
• beating back the clutter
• keeping on top of the laundry or the filing or the mail, or
• effectively handling any number of pile-ups of work, school,
  house, garage and lawn chores.

More than a few people with Attentional issues struggle to have much of a life beyond the all-too-familiar “mess it up, clean it up” cycle — in any one of a host of arenas.

DID YOU KNOW that fluctuations in the ability to manage the Attending system
are at the root of every single one of them?

Diagnostic ADDers have been struggling with several to many of these problems since childhood, and we ALL struggle with a few of them from time to time. However, many individuals find themselves really struggling for possibly the first time following a brain injury.

Symptoms and Manifestations of Attentional Struggles

• Easily overwhelmed by the tasks of daily living

• Trouble maintaining an organized living and/or work space
• Drowning in paperwork
• Missing appointments (or chronically late for them)
• Difficulty sequencing and/or prioritizing
• Getting lost easily or frequently back-tracking

• Trouble directing focus and concentration

• Easily dragged off the point
• Losing the thread of your own conversation when speaking
• Difficulty recapturing the moment after an interruption
• Life as a protracted scavenger hunt (continually looking for misplaced objects due to lack of focus leading to impaired registration)
• “Clumsy” – knocking things over, spilling, bumping into things
• Difficulty completing projects

• Activation struggles

• Difficulties initiating  (high “action motivation” threshold)
• Tough to get started again after a break
• Lengthy awakening process
• Sluggish with follow up

• Apparent or actual slowed processing speed

• Difficulties making decisions (especially when required “out of the blue,”
  or when a sudden need for a rapid response follows a waiting period)
• Lengthy deliberation (agonizing over detail)
• Procrastinating to avoid decision anxiety

• Uneven performance

• Work performance inconsistent
• Waivering attention to details and fine points
  (lack of attention at some times, excessive attention at others)
• Intolerance for some mundane tasks, captured by others
• Frequently falling behind and scrambling to catch up

• Easily stuck in hyperfocus

• Playing a virtual game for hours
• Web-browsing until surprised by daylight
• TV hypnosis
• Looking up “a minute later” to find an hour or more has passed

• Seemingly altered response to social reinforcement

• Overlooking rules and regulations – misreading expectations
• Appearing oblivious to consequences
  (likelihood of punishment or fines has no direct effect on actions)
• Immediate & consistent positive reinforcement needed to overcome attentional difficulties
• Tendency to lose interest or motivation with negative reinforcement
  (including “helpful suggestions” as well as correction or criticism)

• Delay intolerance

• Motor anxiety (pacing, squirming, etc.)
• Road rage — especially with slow moving traffic
• Depressed moods during periods of inactivity

• Difficulties reading

• Problematic attentiveness – losing concentration, missing key modifiers,
  skipping sentences or paragraphs,
• Words “jump” out of context
• Retention struggles (by the time you come to the end of a long sentence or a paragraph
  you’ve lost the beginning )

Looking through The ADD Lens™

For anyone who is struggling with any or all of the characteristics above, I have found the idea of looking at things through The ADD Lens™ extremely helpful.

In other words, look at your functional challenges as if they were a result of bona-fide, diagnostic Attention Deficit Disorder.

If Challenges like any of those above (or their kissing cousins) keep you from getting things done, pretend you actually do have ADD/EFD and start to utilize a few of the techniques that I initially developed to work with people who have been diagnosed with ADD.

I’d like to invite anyone who is struggling — as the result of a mild head injury or a more pervasive TBI, PTSD, garden-variety age-related cognitive decline, or anything else — to allow yourselves to learn about and use the principles and coping techniques that have empowered ADD/EFD and “vanilla” communities for the past 25+ years.

For the benefit of anyone struggling with finances — needing a little coaching to get to the point where they can afford to hire a brain-based coach — as I write this particular post, I have already published a great deal of no-charge help in over 600 posts and pages here on ADDandSoMuchMORE.com.

• Click the links included above and below (and in all of my posts), or
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And don’t forget, you don’t have to have ADD to hire me for
personalized, you-specific Brain-based Coaching.

Click HERE to get in touch!

Life doesn’t have to be so difficult to manage!

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You might also be interested in some of the following articles
available right now – on this site and elsewhere.

For links in context: run your cursor over the article above and the dark grey links will turn dark red;
(subtle, so they don’t pull focus while you read, but you can find them to click when you’re ready for them)
— and check out the links to other Related Content in each of the articles themselves —

Related articles right here on ADDandSoMuchMore.com
(in case you missed them above or below)

• Brain-based Coaching with Madelyn Griffith-Haynie
• Group Coaching Information LinkList
• Private Coaching Formats & Fees

• The Wisdom of Compensating for Deficits
• Lessons from the TBI Community
• Gathering the Tribe: TBI-2
• LinkList: PTSD & “TBI help too”

A Few OTHER LinkLists by Category
(to articles here on ADDandSoMuchMore.com)

• The Optimal Functioning (Challenges) Series of articles
  (about the Inventory & articles from each category)
• When you are NEW to ADD (or this blog/Attentional Struggles/ADD Coaching)
• Variations on ADD-ADHD

Related Articles ’round the net

• Traumatic Brain Injury Linked to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Study Suggests
• PTSD from TBI – Like being trapped in an abusive household
• Existing Diabetes Medication May Ease Damage Caused By Traumatic Brain Injury
• How Barbara Arrowsmith-Young rebuilt her own brain

BY THE WAY: Since ADDandSoMuchMore.com is an Evergreen site, I revisit all my content periodically to update links — when you link back, like, follow or comment, you STAY on the page. When you do not, you run a high risk of getting replaced by a site with a more generous come-from.