Keep up the Pressure for Net Neutrality

Don’t let Congress pretend
they did not KNOW
And make it CLEAR that they will lose their seats
if they don’t REPRESENT the people they were elected to represent

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the What Kind of World do YOU Want Series

Graphic above from What you need to know about net neutrality (before it gets taken away)

Net Neutrality Ends on December 14th?

Have YOU contacted your Political Representatives
urging them to SAVE Net Neutrality?

If I wanted to slip something hateful by the American Public
I’d do it at a time when they are busiest: Christmas Time

DON’T LET THIS TACTIC WORK FOR THEM!
Take a minute, send a message

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the What Kind of World do YOU Want? Series

Important to ANYONE who blogs

The FCC is about to vote on its plan to kill net neutrality – Congress can still stop this travesty.  They need to hear from internet users like you — RIGHT NOW.

We have just DAYS to stop the potential for bandwidth throttling — and to sing out to make sure that additional online fees can’t be levied to give preference to certain companies and certain idealogies.

NOTHING we usually do online or in December is more important
than letting our political representatives know our thoughts:
STOP THIS!

My 2017 Christmas present to all of you

Although this is NOT a political blog, I am not going to be posting anything festive, fun or informational until this deadline has passed – and I’m going to remind you to ring in every day until December 14th.

• Depending on whether we are willing to, collectively, stop this, my days of being willing to continue to support this brain-based, self-help, neurodiversity blog with many non-billable hours of my life may be numbered.
• So nothing is more important to me than nudging each of you to make another call, send another tweet or email, and encourage YOUR readership to step up to stop this.

Think YOUR voice doesn’t really matter much?

So did well over 200 million eligible voters (231,556,622) who couldn’t be bothered to vote last November (the majority registered Democrats).

Political cronyism feeds on collective apathy — that’s what allows them to make deals, close ranks and do what’s easy.

If we won’t stand up for our own needs and desires,
why should we expect THEM to?

You have a voice ONLY if you use it

CONTACT U.S. Senate: Senators of the 115th Congress.

 

If you missed my first post about this issue and are scratching your head, PLEASE take the time to get informed.

Click the link immediately below to read about it and watch the extremely amusing 13 minute video included.

We need EVERY American voice to save Net Neutrality

Or click to watch that video currently at the top of my sidebar.
Or scroll down to the list of Related Links
(always found below my articles.)

You can also learn more about what’s going on and how to ring in at links below:

• https://www.battleforthenet.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/resistbot/
• Gronda Morin article on Net Neutrality & the Republican FCC majority
• What you need to know about net neutrality (before it gets taken away)
• Battle for the ‘net and how we won the FIRST time

We need EVERY American voice to save Net Neutrality

We have until December 14th
to save net neutrality
Unless, of course, you LIKE paywalls, fast and slow lanes,
internet service provider monopolies & potential for censorship,
and increased internet fees

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the What Kind of World do YOU Want? Series

You have a voice ONLY if you use it

We have just DAYS to stop censorship, bandwidth throttling and extra fees online.

The FCC is about to vote on its plan to kill net neutrality – only Congress can still stop this travesty.  They need to hear from internet users like you — RIGHT NOW.

SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/resistbot/

CONTACT U.S. Senate: Senators of the 115th Congress.

DO YOU TWEET?

Where do your members of Congress stand? Find out, and tweet them!

To win, we need to bring more members of Congress onto “Team Internet”— especially Republicans.

Republican members of Congress face massive pressure from party leadership to oppose Net Neutrality, partly because of lobbying by Team Cable, and partly because they see it as “Obama era” policy.

• Net Neutrality predates Obama
• It has always been a design principle of the Internet.
• It does NOT need to be a partisan issue.

Some Republicans are open to the need for rules — but they won’t break ranks from party leaders unless they hear from constituents.

Tweets are surprisingly effective.

Time is short to stop both the tax cuts for the rich and the end of net neutrality.  USE your voice or LOSE your voice!

Climbing your Mountains YOUR way

Success Strategies
Different Strokes for Different Folks

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

MY way is not the only highway

Hopping around the ‘net hoping to find the beginning markers of the yellow-brick-road to massive success, life-satisfaction and ultimate happiness?

How many of the gurus below have YOU tripped across?

If you are not meeting with much success by following any of them, maybe what I have to say in the second half of the article below might make some sense.

Found HERE

YouTube Gurus spill their guts

I’ve been arguing with YouTube again — this time with the so-called “Success” Gurus.

I’ve been listening to their lectures, TED talks, keynote speeches, and all kinds of interviews with an impressive line-up of fabulously successful guests — and it ALL sounded good at the time.

• Locate your motivation for massive action.
• Never give up — Do it NOW.
• A belief is a story you tell yourself repeatedly.
• Argue for your limitations and they’re yours.
• Focus on your goal and grind it out!
• Connect with your passion to move into JOY.

I listen to the stories of huge successes coming after repeated failures – the tales of leaders who now experience massive wealth and large communities of followers because they kept their eyes on what they wanted for many years and didn’t allow themselves to be stopped by mental or physical challenges.

Who wouldn’t want what they have?
They seem happy, they’re making a difference — and they’re RICH!
So what did they DO?

They refused to take no for an answer.  They uncovered the fundamental reasons underlying their goals – and motivated themselves by connecting to their dreams every day.  They doubled their efforts with practically single-minded focus.  They went more than the extra mile.

They set increasingly larger goals for themselves until the picture was large enough to pull them into taking the actions that ultimately led to their eventual success.

And it all sounds wonderful!

Found HERE

But then along comes . . . Harry ?

Moments later another video cycles through. Now I’m hearing something that sounds confusingly different, from a totally other paradigm.

• Stop tilting at windmills. Think it through first – you can’t reach your destination without your map.
• Stop pushing on locked doors – perhaps you’re being guided in another direction.
• Figure out what you are meant to do and do that.
• One baby step at a time – slow and steady wins the race.
• Money is an inadequate metric for success.
• The most satisfying life is a balanced life.
• Follow your bliss.

This time I’m watching shining faces as I listen to statements of gratitude like the following:

“Getting fired and having to live in my parent’s basement for two years, working nights at the local convenience store for minimum wage, was the best thing that ever happened to me!

“It was only after my spouse threatened to take the kids and leave me that I realized that my priorities were totally out of whack.”

“I would never have found my true calling – or the guts to do what I really wanted to do – if my older paths had not been blocked.”

Sure, that makes perfect sense –
as long as we keep taking action toward an eventual balanced outcome
we’ll eventually connect with our source of power.

Found HERE

 

Think again, Grasshopper

Watch for just a moment longer and you will run across still other videos with another point of view entirely — telling you that focusing on action is doing it the hard way.  It’s like pushing a rope – lots of side-to-side movement but no forward momentum – and certainly no successful results.

• You are a spiritual being having a physical experience.
• The universe knows what you want the moment you experience what you don’t want.
• You can’t attract what you desire unless you are in vibrational alignment.
• Affirmations don’t manifest – you can’t get to having from a vibration of have-not.
• Meditate every day so you can become congruent with your goals.

Again, I’m seeing a room full of exuberance, hearing tales of lives that are unfolding perfectly after years of pushing rocks up hills in vain.  BOY does that sound appealing!

I know how hard so many of us have worked for years as we wondered what we could possibly be doing wrong that we continued to struggle in some fundamental ways.  SURE!  We need to meditate our way into havingness. We can do that, right?

Trust the universe –
Let go and let God!

Found HERE

ADD Poster Girl Day today!

November 29th is
a VERY important day!
Okay, so it’s my birthday —
but it’s a good day to remind everyone that I don’t write these posts
from a lofty perch in some well-appointed ivory tower.

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC

©Phillip Martin, artist/educator

Happy Birthday to ME

The older I get, the more important it becomes to take time OFF to honor the reality that I have been granted another year on this earth.

So I am taking the rest of today t-totally OFF – and may well not return to respond to comments until Monday.

WOW! – an entire long weekend away
from my computer!

HOWEVER, I would like to leave you with a little present (besides the links to Related Content I always give you at the bottom of my posts, and this December’s Awareness Calendar, already set to autopost on Friday).

Below you will be able to listen to and watch a TED Talk I found recently – the totally serious commentary from a relatively young Canadian mother, Guidance Counselor and education advocate who it RIGHT ON about everything she says.

For my Birthday

If anybody would like to give me a present, what I would like most in the whole world is that each of you would take the entire 15 minutes and 25 seconds it will take to listen ALL the way through — with an open mind — ESPECIALLY if you are a parent or an educator.

Pay CLOSE attention to her brief comments about

• medication
• misdiagnosis, and
• the dearth of physician education
  (not just true in Canada, I promise you!)

AND PASS IT ON!

Chrono-Crazy: N-24 vs. DSPS

Found HERE

November 24th is
N-24 Awareness Day
Let’s take a closer look at
Sleep TIMING

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Sleep Series

Happy Belated Thanksgiving!
I hope everybody was awake for it.

Even as I typed the words above, I figured that many of you would think I was kidding – while others of you, sadly, weren’t “on phase” enough to be awake and alert for a joyful celebration.

Classroom Clipart – Found HERE

Some of you may even have snoozed-on well past the time you were supposed to arrive for that Thanksgiving luncheon. And I’ll bet at least one of you reading slept the day away.

And I ALSO bet you catch a lot of flak from your “sleep normal” friends and loved ones about your screwy sleep schedule — even if you have been formerly diagnosed with one of the Chronorhythm Sleep Disorders and have attempted to explain your challenges with sleep a number of times.

At least that’s been true for me for most of my life.

What’s going on here?  (Sleep TIMING glitches!)

I’ve written quite a few prior articles about sleep timing, some linked in the Related Content section at the bottom of this article, with links to all of the articles available from my Sleep Linklist: Everything you ever wanted to know about Sleep.

As I previously explained in articles about CRSD (ChronoRhythm Sleep Disorders) and N-24 (Non-24 Hour Sleep/Wake Syndrome), there is a part of everybody’s brain that regulates body rhythms, especially sleep – the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

SEE: When Your Sleep Clock is Broken

That’s what makes some people Morning Larks and some people Night Owls – most of them only slightly skewed to one end or the other.

Even though many can adapt to the sleep timing expectations of their circumstances, they are only sharpest when their body clock tells them they are supposed to be awake and alert and when they are supposed to be drowsy.

And that’s why many of us struggle to fall asleep at “standard” hours — early enough to be fully rested before we have to get up to start the next day. Many of those strugglers suspect insomnia, but it has never been troubling enough to pursue a formal diagnosis.

Then there are those whom others consider “extreme larks” and “extreme owls” – most of whom, whether they realize it or not, are probably diagnostic for one of the disorders of sleep TIMING.

Some of those individuals have been MIS-diagnosed with insomnia when what’s really going on is that their brain’s clock isn’t set to support standard sleep timing!

Disorders of Sleep TIMING

Even though today is N-24 Awareness Day, this particular article is going to distinguish between N-24 (where a person’s body clock insists that the day is longer than the 24 hours that is relatively standard here on earth) and another disorder that is frequently confused with it: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome [DSPS] or Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder [DSPD].

What happens when we’re hungry?

Hunger can affect more than our mood
It can also influence our willingness to engage in risky behavior

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC

Hunger and the Brain

You have probably noticed that being hungry can affect your overall mood and feelings of well-being — and that hungry people are often difficult to deal with.

Memes all over the internet frequently
describe that feeling as “hangry.”

But did you know that hunger can also influence the way you respond and make decisions, encouraging you to engage in risky behavior? This reaction can be seen in a wide range of species in the animal kingdom.

Experiments conducted on the fruit fly, Drosophila, by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have shown that hunger not only modifies behavior, but also changes the use of neural pathways, revealing that hunger affects decision making and risk perception.

For those who don’t understand why scientists bother studying fruit flies:

1. the fruit fly is a wonderful genetic model organism for circuit neuroscience (studying connections) and gene/behavior influences.  (Model organisms that are especially valuable when similar early-stage research simply could not be carried out in humans);
2. their extremely short life-cycle allows research labs to observe effects over many generations quickly – in an extremely cost-effective manner;
3. their small size means that the equivalent of the entire population of a city like New York could be kept on a measly stack of trays in a single laboratory
4. scientists and labs usually don’t have to overcome a public perception problem.  Except for incredibly ignorant comments like the ones made by Sarah Palin when she complained loudly about “totally wasted research funds” during the 2008 Presidential campaign, very few educated people rally to object to research on fruit flies.

Related posts:
A Lesson for Sarah Palin on Fruit Fly Research – YouTube
Mapping behavior in the fruit fly brain — ScienceDaily

Source: Science Daily, found HERE

DID YOU KNOW THAT, among other things . . .

…they can be used to study sleep — that coffee keeps them awake, and that old fruit flies sleep less than young ones?

…the first “jet lag genes” were found in these flies, which aided in their discovery in humans?

…the first learning genes were discovered in fruit flies and operate in the same manner in humans?

…in fact, about 75% of human disease genes have a recognizable match in fruit flies? (i.e., “Homologous” – having the same or a similar correspondence, as in relative position, structure and/or function)

…since they can get drunk and addicted to alcohol, they have been immensely helpful in addiction research?

…they have advanced our understanding of cancer, epilepsy & Alzheimer’s enormously and can be used to help develop future medicines for these conditions?

…they have functionally similar stem cells and have taught us a great deal about their behavior and regulation?

…they lead the way in dietary research, helping science discover what to eat for healthy ageing?

…Drosophila is the insect behind 10 Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine?

Source: Why the fly? | Manchester Fly Facility

And NOW they are helping scientists study the effect of hunger and nutrition on behavior.

Field observations and studies of other lab animals have shown us that the willingness of many animals to take risks increases or decreases depending on whether or not the animal is hungry. (For example, a predator in the wild only hunts more dangerous prey when it is close to starvation.)

In recent years, this behavior has even been documented in humans: one study showed that hungry subjects took significantly more financial risks than their colleagues who had eaten their fill.

In addition, it seems that the fruit fly, Drosophila, changes its behavior depending on its nutritional state.

But how does that work in the brain,
and what can we learn from it?

Habit Formation BASICS

Understanding the HABIT habit
How your BRAIN wants you to do it

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Habits, Decisions, Attention Series

Your Brain is Habit-Building Friendly

© Creative Commons on Wikipedia from Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator

Habits are patterns – and the human brain has evolved to be a pattern-recognition machine.

As we learned in an earlier post in the Habit Series, Brain-based Habit Formation, a part of our brain called the basal ganglia keeps track of those links that are built through repetition.

It’s important to know and remember that pathways remain available for reactivation as long as the basal ganglia are intact.

That can be BOTH good news and bad.

• It’s good news if we drop out the activities that lead to the development of a behavior we want in our lives and decide we want to try again.
• It’s bad news when we stop paying attention to building our new habit and backslide into the non-productive ones before we know it.

In an MIT report of a 2005 study, Dana Alliance member Ann Graybiel wrote encouragingly,

“We knew that neurons can change their firing patterns when habits are learned, but it is startling to find that these patterns reverse when the habit is lost, only to recur again as soon as something kicks off the habit again.”

To underscore what we covered in Part-1 of the entire Habit Series,
Habits, Decisions and Attention . . .

Found HERE

In a 2011 Associated Press article, Dr. Nora Volkow explained that most individuals assign more value to an immediate reward than a long-term goal, based on what science reports about the preferences and behaviors of study participants.

Those study subjects probably represent most human beings fairly closely.

——————–
Dr. Volkow is a Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives [Dana Foundation] member,
and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA]

She goes on to say that the pleasure our brain gets from repeatedly reinforcing the immediate reward is transformed over time into a habit through the processes modulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine (which long-time readers may remember from Brain-based Habit Formation: the Dopamine Pleasure/Reward System).

Volkow explains that the dopamine-rich part of the brain named the striatum (the major input station of the basal ganglia system), “memorizes rituals and routines that are linked to getting a particular reward. Eventually, those environmental cues trigger the striatum to make some behaviors almost automatic.”

Hold that thought!

Especially for ADD/EFD readers

Many of you already know that one of the reasons why stimulant medication is effective is that it increases the bioavailability of dopamine, the amount available for your brain to use.

Impaired dopamine metabolism in many of the citizens of Alphabet City almost approaches reward-deficiency syndrome [RDS] — which is the main reason why consistent and immediate positive feedback is frequently required to reward our ongoing efforts and keep us on task.

Related Post: Virtue is NOT its own Reward

Volkow’s research is great news for us, however – it means that we can learn to manipulate our own dopamine production, even without medication!

Releasing more dopamine through the brain’s automatic response to performing positive habitual activities allows our brains to feel increasingly more pleasure.

That serves as wind beneath our wings as we develop even MORE new habits – as long as we keep it up. The additional dopamine will help with intentional focus overall, too!

No need for the rest of you reading to feel left out, however.

Creating habits that get us where we want to go eventually becomes its own reinforcement no matter how our brains were originally wired — as long as we don’t continually reactivate our bad habits.

Like attracts like

As explained in Habits, Decisions & Attention, Keystone Habits are habitual behaviors that have what is sometimes termed “a multiplier effect,” serving as a CUE for additional habits in harmony with the original set of actions.

Found HERE

By taking advantage of the multiplier effect of Keystone Habits, attracting the formation of positive changes congruent with the original habits, less productive habits will be naturally “pushed aside” by the new pathways created by the new habits — unless we continue to reactivate the old pathways.

That’s the reason why I gave you the final assignment in the previous habits post: “identify what you want to create instead.”  That will be step-one in determining which habits will be congruent with your keystone habits.

Why you might have problems reading longer articles

What you “see” is not simply up to your eyes
The sensory input must be interpreted correctly by the brain

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
Another Sensory Integration post

“What if you’re receiving the same sensory information as everyone else, but your brain is interpreting it differently?“

Found HERE

“Then your experience of the world around you will be radically different from everyone else, maybe even painfully so.” ~ Temple Grandin, Autistic Brain

And sometimes not

In my last article on Sensory Sensitivies, [Turtlenecks and Wool – Yea or Nay?] I explained a bit about temperature and tactile sensitivites that most of us probably believe are simply our own little quirks and preferences.

With examples and stories, I hoped to illustrate that sensory integration issues are not nearly as rare as you might believe, even though we hear most about them in the Autism Spectrum population.

“Studies of nonautistic children have shown that more than half have a sensory symptom, that one in six has a sensory problem significant enough to affect his daily life; and that one in twenty should be formally diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, meaning that the sensory problems are chronic and disruptive.” ~ Temple Grandin, Autistic Brain

Sensory Scrambling at the far end

Most people “can’t imagine a world where scratchy clothes make you feel like you’re on fire or where a siren sounds ‘like someone drilling a hole in [their] skull.’ ” ~ Temple Grandin. Autistic Brain

“The world isn’t coming in right. So autistic children end up looking wild.”
~ Temple Grandin. Animals in Transition, p. 192

But most people never dream that struggles with concentration or reading could possibly be the result of a sensory integration issue.

Phillip Martin, artist/educator

The Paul Revere of Sensory Integration

Dr. Temple Grandin was born in Boston in 1947, diagnosed autistic in 1950. She was four years old before she began to speak. Her mother, advised to institutionalize Temple as a child, fought instead to educate her.

Despite the fact that Temple was misunderstood and bullied for most of her life, and despite the fact that she was dismissed as “impossible to educate,” she went on to receive a Ph.D. in Animal Husbandry.  Her ideas and designs have revolutionized that particular industry.

Autism understanding and awareness took off, thanks in no small part to her books and speaking engagements. She is now a leading expert on Autistic Spectrum disorders and Sensory Integration issues [SI].

As the result of a wonderful movie about her life, more people are aware of Temple and her story than ever, able to understand that scrambled sensory processing is a huge problem for individuals on the autistic spectrum.

Few people are aware, however, that scrambled sensory processing affects many people who are otherwise considered “neurotypical” (i.e., brain “normal”) – to various degrees and in various sensory modalities. More than a few have been misdiagnosed with “learning disabilities” or other cognitive problems.

Even fewer people are aware of Helen Irlen, who has been working successfully with VISUAL scrambles for decades now – in many of those different population samples otherwise considered “neurotypical.”

I’ve been ringing the Irlen bell since I included Irlen Syndrome/scotopic sensitivity in the Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions module in my manual for the world’s first ADD-specific coach training (the only one for eight years) – over 20 years ago now.

Her method is still considered somewhat controversial, despite the fact that we now have functional brain scans that could be used to underscore her claims “scientifically,” and despite the fact that it is supported by experts in the fields of education, psychology, medicine, ophthalmology, and neuroscience around the world.

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.

D.G. Kaye on growing self-esteem

Working through the past
to live powerfully in the present

Guest Blogger:  © Debby Gies (author D.G. Kaye)

©Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC

Returning the favor

©Michel Scott | Found HERE

In mid-August I was honored by a request to write an article for blogger Debby Gies, (author D.G. Kaye), so that she could spend her time getting her latest book ready for publication.

I chose to focus on the brain-based benefits to those of us who take frequent vacations between the pages of a book.

(CLICK HERE to read the entire article on her site)

I had a wonderful time putting something together for the writing/reading followers of Debby’s blog.  However, I made her promise that she would write something suitable for the readers of ADDandSoMuchMORE.com — as soon as she had a bit of that illusive free-time that seems to be in short supply for most of us.

And so she deliberately set aside time in her super-busy life to return the favor. I was thrilled when I discovered that she decided to feature self-esteem, one of the topics she covers in “Words We Carry,” a wonderfully heartfelt book I devoured on my Kindle and recently reviewed.

Because so many of us in Alphabet City have heard so many times that “we’re not doing it right,” we frequently develop low self-esteem as a result. A few of us struggle with it still.  I’ll let Debby explain a bit about how she battled that particular demon below.

Developing those habits

How are you coming
with your new habits?
Did you take my advice to take advantage of
the context change of September?

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Habits, Decision, Attention Series

Autumn Attempts tend to stick

©Phillip Martin, artist/educator

In my last Habits article I talked about taking advantage of context change to jump start the habit-change and habit-building process.

I also disclosed that September is one of the best times to begin the year anew.

Since most of us have 12 to 18 years of school-starts in our background, we are primed for change and growth as the leaves begin to turn.

By understanding the process of habit formation, it is possible to develop systems in your life BEFORE you reach the point where you flake out on yourself, jettison the attempt to build a new habit or three, and conclude that nothing you try will ever work for you.

• I hope you took the time to answer the questions at the end of the prior post (repeated below for those of you who did not) because that information will be helpful as we move forward.
• If you follow along as the Series continues to develop — and actually DO the exercises suggested — by next September you just might have a brand new life.

©Phillip Martin, artist/educator

October is not too late!

It’s still fall, and the crisp weather will still promote the ease of change if you start now — before winter arrives, signaling your brain that you blew it again, making change more difficult than it needs to be.

Since science now believes they know why habits develop, how they change, and how to build and rebuild them to our exact specifications, we can use that information to change just about anything we want.

We can, that is, as long as we understand what they know about how it all works — how patterns and pattern-recognition impact the the human brain.

If we work WITH our brain instead of against it, it is possible for any one of us to transform our entire lives through the power of brain-based habit formation.

• What might be possible in YOUR life if you understood the neurology as well as the psychology of habits and the way patterns work within our lives, businesses, and social groups?
• What if you understood how to apply the brain-based information you’ve read here on ADDandSoMuchMore.com (to counter some of the old-school, out of date, “standard” advice about motivation and habit formation that’s been around for decades) — so that you could tweak the information that dominates the info-market to make it all work for YOU?

Take a moment to really think about it:

What might your life look like one short year from now if you actually applied what you learned here, step by step?

• Would you be healthier?  Wealthier?  Happier with your marriage and family life?
• Would you finally find the time to write that novel, or start that new business, or to take the necessary steps to move into that lakeside house you’ve always dreamed about?
• What WOULD you do, tweaking the old expression slightly, if you understood how to set it up so that you could not fail?

HELP needed and offered #Flash4Storms

Every Little Bit Helps
Why do we discount our efforts when we can’t make a larger splash?

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the What Kind of World do YOU Want Series

A human tendency?

I am often daunted as much as impressed by the generous offers of help that follow in the wake of a tragedy:

• sending their personal planes to Puerto Rico to bring those who need chemotherapy to hospitals where they can be taken care of, like Rapper Pitbull;
• delivering multiple cartons of food and flying down to prepare 8,000 meals a day to those in need, like Chef José Andrés;
• over-the-top donations that amount to more than I make in a decade donated by more than a few celebrities.

What help could I possibly be?

It seems endemic

I have a similar reaction when a friend is ill and needs some cheering up.  If I can’t give them an entire afternoon, I am reluctant to make even a ten minute phone call.

Never mind why, I even feel guilty when I can’t take my puppy on the l-o-n-g walk I know he prefers on rain-threatening days when I waited too long to get him outside and have to rush him along to get us both safely inside while we’re still relatively dry!

And I KNOW I’m not the only one with that kind of limited-thinking reaction.  I even see it in the more than generous blogging community.

What about taking a few moments each to read the posts of our virtual friends, letting them know our reaction in a comment, when time itself is in short supply for all of us?

How many of us simply “like” them all from the Reader when we we lack the minutes that turn to hours to read and comment on more than one or two – instead of doing whatever little we can and giving ourselves a pat on the back for doing at least that much?

I almost did it again

Reading a post by D. Wallace Peach,  Help: Flash Fiction #Flash4Storms, I learned that another writer, Sarah Brentyn is donating $1 for every flash fiction story written around the theme of Help.

Diana [Myths of the Mirror] has pledged to match that amount.

Before I give you the details of the challenge, I have to ‘fess up to my first reaction:

• I don’t write fiction.  And my second:
• Even if I did, I’m sure I could never be brief enough to write flash fiction with a limited word count. (Regular readers will be happy to second that thought, I’m sure!)

I’m patting myself on the back that I decided that there was, after all, some little something I could do anyway.  I could help spread the word to all the writers who follow ADDandSoMuchMORE.com in a post explaining WHY we tend to do nothing when we can only do less than we’d like to be able to do.

But FIRST, the details of the challenge . . .

If music be the food of health, play ON!

How is music processed?
How might we use it to support memory & brain health?

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
Source: MedicalNewsToday

Music and Physical Health

© Phillip Martin, artist/educator

In last week’s post, an original Tallis Steelyard tale from author Jim Webster, we saw how music awakened the soul of a woman who was struggling with dementia, barely alert until called by the song.

As I noted at the end:
Music has been well documented to remain in the minds of Alzheimer’s patients long after other memories and much of their Executive Functioning capabilities have faded.

Patients often retain memories of well-loved songs, which gives them a great deal of pleasure, and some can still play instruments. The description of life flooding back into formerly vacant eyes in response to music has been reported repeatedly.

Medical researchers have long noted that listening to or playing music can result in changes in our bodies, regardless of our age or current state of mental alertness, however.

For example, lowered levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been observed in the presence of music. Better sleep and a lowered heart rate are associated with listening to music as well.

Even when you are a bit out of sorts, don’t you feel better immediately when a song comes on that reminds you of a particularly happy memory?

Science rings in

Dr. Charles Limb is a musician and surgeon who specializes in cochlear implants at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He has been researching how our brain makes that happen. He and his team analyzed neurological responses to a variety of music, especially jazz and hip-hop.

In studies with magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], they have been particularly interested in finding out which areas of the brain “light up” when jazz musicians are improvising or rappers are “freestyling.”

The Universal Language?

They observed that the areas of the brain activated when jazz players are improvising are actually the language centers of the brain (the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior superior temporal gyrus).

When rappers were freestyling with their eyes closed within the MRI scanner, the researchers observed major activity in the visual and motor coordination areas of the brain.

• Connection to movement centers certainly makes sense, if you think about it. Since rappers are usually moving when they rap, those areas are likely to be brain-linked.
• But the visual areas?  Hmmmmmm . . . neurolinked to a video perhaps, or choreography?

© Phillip Martin, artist/educator

Seeing when you listen

Haven’t you noticed that when you listen to music your brain sends you visual information as well — a flash of the club where you first danced to the tune, or the face of your partner when it came on the radio, right before you kissed for the first time?

Some people imagine scenes of their own private movie as they hear certain orchestral arrangements. Others report seeing abstract colors and shapes that flow and change with any music they hear. Maybe you see a few moments of a particular marketing video?

I challenge anyone who’s ever watched one of Michael Jackson’s music videos to listen to that track on the radio without at least a flash or two of a moving image!

Even in a Scanner

The brain seems to call upon its language, visual and motor coordination mechanisms when imagining and responding creatively to music both, even when the participants are lying still, eyes closed, and within a scanner.

In fact, Dr. Limb’s team found that the areas of the brain that were formerly associated with interpreting music – the angular gyrus and the supra marginal gyrus, which process semantic information (meaning, vocabulary, etc.) – are deactivated while musicians are improvising.

So what does that indicate about memory and healthy brain aging?

September is the BEST time for what activity?

Forming or Changing a HABIT
and setting new goals!
Don’t wait for New Years Resolutions

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Habits, Decisions & Attention Series

New year, new goals

©Phillip Martin, artist/educator

Somebody needs to write a new anthem: The kids are back in school!!  (My brain wants to sing it to the tune of The Boys are Back in Town)

Except for our under-appreciated, overworked teachers, most parents begin yearning for September long before July is in their rear view mirrors.

As much as they look forward to more family time during the school year, most have forgotten how having the youngsters at home all day tends to make a shambles of their schedules.

But the teachers are aware of something that the rest of us tend to overlook . . .

September really begins the New Year

I don’t care how old you are, unless you were home schooled or spent your younger years in full-time boarding school, most of us feel a fresh gust of wind beneath our wings at the start of every school year.  That tends to be the case even for those of us who don’t have kids at home anymore – or never had kids at home (old habits die hard).

• Few of us complain about the early appearance of new notebooks and school supplies in the stores nearly as much as we kvetch about shelves of early Jack-o-Lanterns, Pilgrims, Turkeys and Christmas sparklies.
• Many of us are as pleased by wandering the aisles to replenish our supplies of journals and pens as the kiddies who are excited to see the latest in backpacks.
• And many folks fill the first few pages of those brand new journals with brand new goals for the brand new “school year” – an old habit reactivated.

Those folks and the teachers are aware of something
that the rest of us would do well to keep in mind . . .

Of Kings and Kindness

A Tallis Steelyard Tale
Written especially for us by a popular & prolific author

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
Story: © Jim Webster, all rights reserved

Mental Health and Fantasy?

In a blog conversation about his newest Tallis Steelyard tales, The Monster of Bell-Wether Gardens and other stories, author Jim Webster disclosed that he was about to launch a blog tour, sharing stories from and about his protagonist, Tallis Steelyard.

I commented that if he had anything mental health related I’d be happy to participate.

His response was, “I was wondering if anybody else had ever introduced mental health issues into Fantasy Comedy of Manners!”

Quick as a flash, he penned the story that debuts below!
I am honored to be able to host it here.

A little background

This episode picks up our hero following his previous adventure, which those of you who are curious will be able to find on Sue Vincent’s blog (Part I) and Chris Graham’s blog (Part II) — although everything you need to enjoy this story is complete right here, on the page below.

1. Guest poet and raconteur: Tallis Steelyard – A Family Saga
2. Playing the Game – Guest Post by, Tallis Steelyard…

I added a bit of formatting to the third part of the story here — for neurodiverse readers who find it difficult to stay focused on longer strings of similarly formatted text, but the author’s words are unchanged (British spellings included).

Let’s not quibble over American and English spellings as we sit back to read this delightful tale.

Moving Past PTSD triggers

Do we ever really heal from trauma?
What does “healing” really mean?

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
adding to the Habits, Memory, EF, and PTSD Series

Responding to a comment

Right after I published the second part of one of my PTSD Awareness articles, author and blogger Chuck Jackson posted a comment that asked a question I couldn’t  answer at length in the comment format.

Do you ever recover fully from PTSD?

Chuck went on to add some context to his question:

Looking at your list of symptoms (mental and physical), if I was honest with myself, I would still mark yes to over fifty percent.

The majority of the time, I live a happy and enjoyable life. It is only during periods of anxiety or prolonged depression, do these symptoms raise their dirty head.

They are not debilitating, just very annoying.

So, for the most part, I suppose we could say that Chuck is essentially “healed.”

He has moved well beyond some pretty nasty stuff in his childhood (his healing journey shared in his stunning book about child abuse, “What Did I Do?).”

But I believe he is asking another, broader question with a much broader application:

Why am I not beyond all of my symptoms all of the time?

Real questions have real answers, so lets take a look at a couple of questions I’m sure we have all entertained at some point in our lives:

• How come the bad stuff sticks and the good stuff fades?
• Are we hardwired to focus on bad news?

I’ll begin with a segment of my comment in answer to his question.

Forgetting is part of the process of memory too

“Forgetting” is still quite the mystery to scientists, even as they learn more about “remembering” – and that is really at the heart of Chuck’s question.

Most of us would prefer to have a way of “erasing” disturbing tracks laid down as the result of earlier experiences so that we can focus on and recall more positive/supportive reactions, thoughts and behaviors instead of disturbing reactions to PTSD triggers.

From an article I posted 3 years ago now,
Brain-Based Habit Formation:
~~~~~~

Any golf pro will tell you that eradicating their clients’ bad habits is the toughest challenge they face.

It’s much easier and quicker to coach someone to play par golf if they’ve never picked up a club than if they’ve been a bogey golfer for years.

Only the best golf pros understand why that is so and what to do to overcome it more quickly, however!

Brain-Based Habit Formation also explains that old pathways never actually get “deleted” — so unless the bogey golfer practices the new habits EVERY SINGLE TIME he picks up a club, he is likely to slip back into his old habits.

And every single time he “rehearses the old,” he deepens the “brain-grooves” of the habit he wants to eradicate.  In the same manner:

If you focus on your triggers and allow them to control you,
you are likely to find yourself back-sliding quickly.

What is needed is to link a new action to an old cue – to pull yourself gently but intentionally away from the old fears and other manifestations (symptoms) the moment you realize that you are “rehearsing the pain.”

So, in that sense only, I will tell you that,
at present, “PTSD” never really goes away.

NOW, let’s unpack that a bit – because that does NOT mean that you are going to have to suffer for the rest of your life. After all, as I said to Chuck, who cares whether “PTSD” goes away or not if it never troubles you!

Back to Boundaries

Different Categories – Different Strategies
They’re all still Boundaries

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Boundaries & Coaching Series

Moving on with the Boundary Series

Found HERE

In the prior post, The Benefits of Boundaries, I likened setting Personal Boundaries to having a moat with a drawbridge around your castle.

Raising and lowering the drawbridge helps to ensure (enforce) the kinds of behavior that you will and will not permit yourself to experience in your environment.

The “moat and drawbridge” of Personal Boundaries acts as a filter to permit only those people who are up to where you are in life to come into your castle and join the party.

Setting your boundaries defines the actions and behaviors that are unacceptable from those you do allow inside your metaphorical castle — in coordination with your Standards, which also determine how you will interact with them.

Different types of Boundaries

Dolly, the author of the wonderful koolkosherkitchen blog, left a comment under the prior Boundary post that led me to decide that, before I continue, I need to further define what I mean by the terms I will be using in the ongoing Boundary conversation.

In addition to Boundaries we set around behaviors of others, there are boundaries we need to have in place that determine our personal behaviors, sometimes referred to as “self-control.”

Boundaries can be further divided into several “domains” —
physical, intellectual, social and emotional.

While there is certainly overlap in some of these categories, let’s take a look at distinguishing these “types” from one another.

Moving Past Task Anxiety to stop “procrastinating”

Procrastination vs. Task Anxiety
Executive Functioning struggles redux

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Time & Task Management Series

Poor Organization & Task Completion

Found HERE

Most of us with Executive Functioning struggles have difficulty “putting it all together.”

Our cognitive deck of cards gets shuffled in the process of recording “awarenesses” into short term memory and consolidating for long-term storage.

That makes it harder to figure out which cards to pull when it comes time to play the game — making it difficult to respond appropriately, or to correctly evaluate consequences, outcomes and timing.

As a result, projects tend to be abandoned unfinished in our dissatisfaction with our lack of ability to play at a level that makes the game interesting rather than an exercise in frustration.  Before we know it, we’ve labeled ourselves chronic procrastinators — and so have most of our associates and loved ones.

It certainly may look like chronic procrastination to anyone looking on. And boy howdy do those onlookers love to sling that label around — as if they believed that merely pointing it out would launch us into activation!

I would like to suggest that what’s really going on here is Task Anxiety.

Task anxiety, just what it sounds like, is what science used to call a “limbic system” activator — where your brain and body are primed to fight, flight or freeze, NOT to get things done!

EVEN those who push through and force themselves to tackle the tasks on their To-Do lists are, according to the latest studies, up to 50% less effective than they would be if they handled the task anxiety FIRST.

• According to scientific studies conducted in the past few years by Dr. David Rock and his team, and Emotional Regulation Research founder, Stanford’s Dr. James J. Gross:

The degree to which your “limbic system” is aroused is
the degree to which your PFC [prefrontal cortex] is deactivated.

• Task completion is decision-dependent — and deciding depends on prefrontal cortex activation.

• The PFC of “the ADD/EFD brain-style,” which includes all of us with Executive Functioning struggles, is already under-performing, relative to the neurotypical population — and the research above was NOT carried out using the ADD/EFD population!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Madelyn’s 3-point Procrastination Primer

1. The greater the number of items to accomplish on the way to completing any particular task, the higher the likelihood of so-called “procrastination.”

2. The higher the number of decisions to be made on the way to completing any particular task, the lower the probability that it will begin or end in a timely manner.

3. The more each item or decision depends on the completion of a prior step, the more likely it is to result in shut-down — and the greater the likelihood that the project will be tabled for another time.

Related Post: Procrastination — Activation vs. Motivation

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here’s the GOOD news:

Found HERE

Simply identifying what’s going on, whether you actually DO anything about it or not, helps to bring the PFC back online somewhat.  And there is SO much more you can do!

Identifying these areas and naming the steps involved will go a long way toward intentionality.

Awareness is always the first step, and “naming” it is the second.

Chunking TIME to get you going

Getting Started
Getting the GUI Things Done – Part 2

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
in the Time & Task Management Series

Getting back to GUI!
Looking at Good, Urgent, and Important

Found HERE

In Part 1 of this article, Getting off the couch & getting going, I began by suggesting a down-and-dirty way to tackle a number of different kinds of tasks by throwing them into a few metaphorical “task bins.”

In this way of moving through malaise to activation, I suggested that you separate your tasks into 3 metaphorical piles, and I began to explore the distinction between them:

1. Tasks that would be Good to get done
2. Tasks that are Urgent
3. Tasks that are Important

In the way I look at productivity, any forward motion is good forward motion!

Making a dent in a task sure works better than giving in to those “mood fixers” we employ attempting to recenter from a serious bout of task anxiety — those bouts of back and forth texting or endless games of Words with Friends™ — and all sorts of things that actually take us in the opposite direction from the one we really want to travel.

Dent Making-101

Anyone who is struggling with activation can make behavior changes and kick themselves into getting into action by breaking down the task until it feels DO-able in any number of ways, such as:

1. Picking something tiny to begin with, like putting away only the clean forks in the dishwasher – or just the glasses, or just the plates – or hanging up the outfit you tossed on a chair when you changed into pajamas and fell into bed last night, or picking out only one type of clothing from the laundry basket to fold and put away;
2. Focusing on a smaller portion of a task, as in the closet example in the prior post;
3. Chunking Time — setting a specific time limit and allowing yourself to STOP when the time is up.

Now let’s take a look at that last one.

Standing FOR High Standards

Indications of who you really are
Creating your Reality

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

Higher or Lower?

Several years ago I posted a couple of coaching articles written to open your paradigms on the way to breaking loose from the habit of perfectionism and black and white thinking:

The Virtues of Lowering your Standards
and
Getting to Good Enough

And now it may seem as if I am encouraging you to do the exact opposite. Sheesh!

It’s a trick of language – two different meanings for the same word

When I speak of “lowering your standards” (small “s”) I am using the meaning most similar to, “an idea or thing used as a measure, norm, or model in comparative evaluations.” ~ Google Dictionary

Using that meaning of the word, I am referring primarily to getting beyond that crazy idea that “any task worth doing is worth doing well.”

Many folks continue to intone that meme as if it were a universal truth, without stopping to notice that it’s a great big black and white SHOULD.

It always seemed to me that if the task’s worth doing at all, any forward progress is good forward progress, right?

Aren’t these “Do it WELL” folks the same ones who swear
that “slow and steady wins the race?”

Think AGAIN

JUST because a task is worth doing, doesn’t mean that it is
automatically deserving of top-of-the-line priority focus.  Duh!

A job worth doing is worth doing adequately, too.

There is not enough time in anybody’s life to do every single thing in an A+ manner.  Good enough really IS good enough for many of life’s to-dos and activities.

Embracing that idea leaves a great deal more time for working at the top of your game where it really matters – like honoring your very own Personal Standards.  It makes for a much happier and more satisfying experience of living.

Friend and colleague Tom Nardone came up with a nifty chart to underscore that idea.

Found HERE

Raising Personal Standards is a different animal altogether.

When I speak of raising your Standards (capital “S”), I am using a meaning closer to (but not really the same as) “principles of conduct informed by notions of honor and decency.” ~ Google Dictionary

August 2017 Mental Health Awareness

 Special days & weeks in August

Along with Advocacy & Awareness
for mental health related issues
(and a calendar for the month!)

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
Part of the ADD/ADHD Cormidities series

WE are the cure. Found HERE

 

Online Marketing Gurus extol the effectiveness of piggy-backing posts onto particular events – how about one or several of the ones below?
They make GREAT, positive writing prompts!

Mark your blogging calendars!

Many days of the year have been set aside every month to promote awareness or advocacy of an issue, illness, disability, or special-needs related cause.

In addition to a calendar for the current month, each Awareness post attempts to offer a list highlighting important days and weeks that impact and intersect with mental health challenges — reminders for health problems that intersect, exacerbate or create additional problems with cognition, mood, memory, follow-through and attention management.

If I’ve missed anything, please let me know in a comment so that I can add it to the list below.

I pray that 2017 is the year
when EVERYONE becomes aware of
the crying need for upgraded mental health Awareness —
and FUNDING – so that things begin to change rapidly.

Found HERE

Stay tuned for more articles about Executive Functioning struggles and management throughout the year (and check out the Related Posts for a great many already published).

Benefits of Boundaries – and how to set them – Part 1

Boundaries safeguard your personal rights
. . . and so much MORE

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

Does YOUR Castle need a Moat?

Found HERE

Think of a Boundary like a moat around your castle.  It’s actual purpose was to keep scoundrels, bandits and warlords out and the people inside the walls safe to go about their lives and pursue their interests in peace.  That works!

During times of danger and conflict other friends and neighbors around the countryside could come inside the castle for protection.  A drawbridge spanning the moat provided a way for the keeper of the castle to let people in or keep people out.

So it is with happy, successful lives.

It is important to find a way to establish and maintain a safe distance from needs of other people that are not in alignment with our own best Self-interest.

Some people are not particularly evolved at the time they interact with you.  They tend to take advantage of the kindness of others — particularly the ones who don’t know how to raise the drawbridge to protect their own castles (like saying NO or leaving a situation before it starts causing trouble they repeatedly look to you to fix).

Related Post: 12 Tips to help you Take Back your TIME

Bounderies make you YOU

As my personal coaching mentor Thomas J. Leonard used to say,
“Boundaries help define who you are and who you are not.”

Found HERE

Emotionally healthy people set Boundaries that attract certain people and protect them from others. Learning to set and enforce Boundaries in a loving and appropriate manner are, in fact, two essential life skills most of us need to develop on the way to becoming healthy adults.

• Setting personal Boundaries acts as a filter to permit those people who are up to where you are in life to come in and join the party.
• Personal Boundaries also allow you to stop those who are not yet ready for you by raising your metaphorical drawbridge – as well as defining what actions are appropriate inside your metaphorical castle.

That, in turn, is reflected your experience of living – which frequently sets its tone – the tune to which you call yourself to dance.

Ideally, of course, we wouldn’t attract certain types of people and behaviors to begin with, but while we are working on that particular skill wouldn’t it be great to have a way to immediately course-correct?

Effective Boundary management is a great way.

Time management tips for better Executive Functioning

EF Management Tips and Tricks – Part IV
Time Management Systems to Develop into Habits

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
PART FOUR: In support of The Executive Functioning Series

Quick Review:

In the introduction to this part of the article, I went over some of the concepts underlying the systems approach and why it works.

Basically, systems and habits help us conserve cognitive resources for when they are really needed. I added the caveat that nothing works for everyone any more than one size fits ALL very well.

For those of you who have the motivation and time to figure out how to make an “off the rack” outfit fit you perfectly, be sure to read for the sense of the underlying principles and tweak from there to fit your very own life.

If you can’t “sew” and are disinclined to take the time to learn (since most of us have trouble keeping up with what we are already trying to squeeze into our days), remember that I offer systems development coaching, and would love to turn my attention to your life.

I am going to warn everyone one last time that few of my clients ever really hear me the first dozen times, so don’t be too surprised when the importance of some of these Basics float right past you too.

The sooner you make friends with the basic concepts – and put them into place – the sooner life gets a lot easier, more intentional, and a whole lot more fun.

FIVE Underlying System Basics

Found in Part-2
1. Feed Your Head
2. Structure is your FRIEND
3. Nothing takes a minute

Found in Part-3
4. Write it down (any “it”)

In this section:
5. PAD your schedule
— PAD-ing: Planning Aware of Details™

Don’t forget, as you read the final principle:

Each of you will, most likely, need to tweak to fit.  However, some version of all five underlying concepts need to be incorporated into your life (with systems and work-arounds in place and habitual) before challenges recede and strengths have more room to present themselves in your lives.

No pressure — let ’em simmer in your brain’s slow-cooker.

As long as you don’t actively resist you will be one step closer to getting a handle on that systematizing to follow-through thing.

So let’s get TO it!

Executive Functioning Systems

EF Management Tips and Tricks – Part III
Time, Memory & Organization Systems
to Develop into Habits

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
PART THREE: In support of The Executive Functioning Series

The Quick Review:

In the introduction to this 4-part article, I went over some of the concepts underlying the systems approach and why it works.

Essentially, systems and habits help us conserve cognitive resources for when they are really needed.

I added the caveat that nothing works for everyone any more than ONE SIZE FITS ALL very well.  For those of you who have the motivation and time to figure out how to make an “off the rack” outfit fit you perfectly, be sure to skip past the literal interpretation to read for the sense of the underlying principles.

For the REST of you: if you can’t “sew” and are disinclined to take the time to learn (since most of us have trouble keeping up with what we are already trying to squeeze into our days), remember that I offer systems development coaching, and would love to put my shoulder to your wheel.

The quick warning:

I want to warn everyone yet again that few of my clients ever really hear me the first dozen times, so don’t be too surprised when the importance of some of these Basics float past you a time or two as well.

The sooner you make friends with the concepts I’m sharing – and put them into place in a way that works for you – the sooner life gets easier, more intentional, and a lot more fun.

FIVE Underlying System Basics

Found in Part-2:
1. Feed Your Head
2. Structure is your FRIEND
3. Nothing takes a minute

In this section:
4. Write it down (any “it”)

Concluding in Part-4 with:
5. PAD your schedule
— PAD-ing: Planning Aware of Details™

Remember to remember as you read the principles to come:

MOST of you will probably need to tweak to fit as you incorporate the principles into your life (and/or take a second look at systems and work-arounds you already have in place that have now become habitual). If you really want to begin to experience the level of personal effectiveness you say you want, take a close and open-minded look at principles that have a 25-year track record of helping.

If you start to feel resistance,
let ’em simmer in your brain’s slow-cooker for a while.

As long as you don’t actively resist (as if YOU are the exception, fighting the ideas or ruminating over the thoughts that yet another person simply doesn’t get it), you will be one step closer to getting a handle on that systematizing to follow-through thing.

So let’s get right back to it!

 

EF Management Tips and Tricks

5 Tips for better Executive Functioning
Part II – Systems to Develop into Habits

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
PART TWO: In support of The Executive Functioning Series

Found HERE

Quick Review:

In the introduction to this 4-part article, I went over some of the concepts underlying “the systems approach” and why it works.

I explained how systems and habits help us conserve cognitive resources for when they are really needed.

I went on to add that despite my dislike of articles and books that offer seemingly fix-it-ALL tips and tricks, I still share online tips myself from time to time — and that I was about to share five of them, despite the fact that  I strongly prefer sharing underlying principles, so that anyone reading might be able to figure out how to tweak to fit. 

• I appended the caveat that nothing works for everyone any more than one size fits all very well, despite what the merchants would like you to believe.
• I’m sharing the “tips” for those of you who have the motivation (and time to dedicate) to figure out how to make an “off the rack” outfit fit you perfectly.

Since most of us have trouble keeping up with what we are already trying to shoehorn into our days, if you can’t “sew” and are disinclined to take the time to learn, remember that I offer systems development coaching, and would love to put my shoulder to your wheel.

For the rest of you, I’m about to gift you some foundational principles I work on with my private clients, right along with whatever it is they came to “fix” – what I call my 5 System Basics.

I have to warn you again, however, that few of my clients have ever really embraced them the first couple dozen times I brought them up, so don’t be too surprised when the importance of some of these Basics float right past you a few times too.

The sooner you make friends with the concepts I’m about to share – and put some systems into place around them – the sooner life gets easier, less frustrating, and a LOT more fun!

 

5 Tips for better Executive Functioning – Part 1

EF Management Tips and Tricks
Systems vs. Solutions

by Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
PART ONE: In support of The Executive Functioning Series

© Phillip Martin, artist/educator

Introduced in an older article, ADD/ADHD and TIME: will ANYthing work?, this is what I remind my students and private clients:

Even though they are not exactly the same thing, most people with Executive Functioning challenges have quite a bit in common with people who have been diagnosed with ADD.

In addition to short-term memory glitches, the things that seem to negatively impact effectiveness most often are problems with activation and follow through.

When I work backwards to figure out what’s going on, I almost always discover foundational problems with time management and/or troubles with transitions.

Both of these struggles are exacerbated when few of life’s details are systematized, which means that very little can be put on auto-pilot.  Every action requires a conscious decision – which not only requires a greater number of transitions (that eat up time), it burns up cognitive resources.

• “Processing space” in the conscious portion of our brains is not unlimited, at least not in the bottomless well meaning of unlimited. Consciousness is a resource-intensive process – your brain REALLY doesn’t want to burn up those resources making the same decisions over and over again.
• DECISIONS are prefrontal cortex intensive – using the conscious pathways in your reaction/response mechanism – whether you are making a major decision or one as seemingly inconsequential as to what kind of ice cream you want in your cone.
• The greater number of day-to-day to-dos you can relegate to unconscious processing, the more cognitive bandwidth you make available for tasks that truly require you to think about them consciously.
• That means “standardizing” the timing and the steps – developing systems – so that they become HABITS.

Caveat: there are no one-size solutions

Despite my dislike of articles and books that offer seemingly fix-it-ALL tips and tricks, from time to time I still share online tips myself. 

• I usually add the qualification that nothing works for everyone any more than one size really fits all – at least not very well.
• I prefer to share the underlying principles, so that readers might be able to figure out how to tweak to fit – kinda’ like some of those fashion sites that tell you how to use a sewing machine to take a nip here and a tuck there.

But many people can’t sew, not everyone wants to take the time to learn, and most of us have trouble keeping up with what we are already trying to squeeze into our days.

That’s why some people make a living doing alterations –
or, in my case, coaching change.

 

Found HERE

HOWEVER, for those of you who have the time and motivation, I’m about to share again what many of my private clients hire me to help them put into place (no matter what “problem” we are working on at the time) – what I call my 5 System Basics.

I have to warn you, however, that few of my clients have ever really heard me the first few dozen times, so don’t be too surprised when the importance of some of these basics float right past you too.

Even when you’re desperate, change is flat-out HARD!

Try to remember as you read:

These aren’t merely a collection of five simple “suggestions.” If you have already noticed a few functioning struggles, try to hold them in your mind as practically absolutes – but lightly.

Found HERE

The five underlying concepts I’m about to share really do need to be accommodated in some fashion — with systems and work-arounds in place — before most of us are able to manage our energy toward follow through that doesn’t leave us endlessly chasing our own tails.

Lack of structure is really not the direction we want to travel if our goal is a life of ease and accomplishment.

Let ’em simmer in your brain’s slow-cooker.

As long as you don’t actively resist the ideas, (nit-picking the concepts or ruminating over the thoughts that yet another person simply doesn’t get it), you will be one step closer to having a handle on that follow-through thing, regardless of your current struggles with Executive Functioning.

Think of the underlying concepts, collectively, as a lever that will allow you to adjust your expectations appropriately, and to help you to figure out where you need to concentrate your time and effort ASAP (accent on the “P”ossible).

Trying to systematize a life without the basics
is like trying to start a car that’s out of gas.

• Agonizing isn’t going to make a bit of difference.
• Neither will “voting” – you may hate the idea, they may hate the idea. Sorry Charlie, it is simply what’s so
• Hearing what a doofus you’ve been for not focusing on that little gas detail (especially hearing it internally) will shut you down and delay you further.
• Go for the gas.

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS WARNING!

The upcoming five concepts that will begin to put some gas in your car are simply that: FUEL.

Until you make sure your “car” has fuel, you can’t do much about checking to see if the starter is going bad. You may also learn you need to adjust the steering mechanism. Oh yeah, and you certainly won’t get very far on lousy tires.

• You don’t expect your car to magically transform with a little gas, do you?
• How about a whole tank full of gas?
• How about gas and four new tires?

Yeah, right!

Try to remember that the next time the self-flagellation begins, as well as when you feel defensive and become offensive.

You can’t eat an elephant in a day —
EVEN if you take one tiny bite at a time.

Sleep Awareness and Health

The importance of  Sleep
to health, cognition and longevity

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Sleep & Sleep Disorders Series

Sleep and Sleep Disorders

My Pinterest Board: Sleep, Sleep Disorders & EFD

A quick gander at June’s Awareness Calendar tells you that the  first week in June is Sleep Disorders Awareness Week.

I have already written a great deal about sleep and sleep disorders, but I couldn’t let the month pass without adding an Awareness post to that Series.

According NSART, the National Sleep Awareness Roundtable, promoting the awareness of the importance of sleep is an extremely worthwhile endeavor.

About SLEEP

NOT the passive state once believed, sleep is a highly active state essential for both physical health and BRAIN health.

Although we all do it, few of us know very much about it – and fewer still make sure we get enough of it to drive our brains and bodies effectively, limping along with chronic sleep debt.

Many of us would LOVE to get more sleep, but struggle falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping in sync with norms that allow us to coordinate with the timing demands of our chronically busy 21st Century lives.

NIH, the National Institutes of Health estimates that sleep-related problems affect 50 to 70 million Americans alone, common in both men and women and people of all ethnic groups.

According to the authors of the website Talk About Sleep:

“At least 40 million Americans suffer from chronic, long-term sleep disorders each year, and an additional 20 million experience occasional sleeping problems.

These disorders and the resulting sleep deprivation interfere with work, driving, and social activities.

They also account for an estimated $16 BILLION in medical costs each year, while the indirect costs due to lost productivity and other factors are probably much greater.”

They go on to say that “the most common sleep disorders include insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and narcolepsy,” which is an indication of how LITTLE research has been done on the chronorhythm disorders – disorders of sleep timing.

But you don’t have to have a diagnostic sleep disorder of any kind to experience the negative effects of sleep debt. In fact, most of us in industrialized societies are chronically under-slept, which means that most of us have racked up sleep debt to a significant degree

Insufficient Sleep is a BIG Problem

The cumulative effects of sleep loss and sleep disorders represent a significantly under-recognized public health concern.

It is associated with a wide range of long-range health problems – all of which represent long-term targets of public health agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS):

• hypertension (abnormally high blood pressure)
• diabetes
• obesity
• depression
• heart attack
• stroke, and
• impulsive, at-risk behaviors

In 2008, an organization called Healthy People 2020 met to begin the process of determining 10-year national objectives for promoting health and preventing disease.

They ultimately targeted four main objectives:

1. Increase the proportion of persons with symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea who seek medical evaluation (only ONE of two types of sleep apnea, btw)
2. Reduce the rate of vehicular crashes per 100 million miles traveled that are due to drowsy driving
3. Increase the proportion of students in grades 9 through 12 who get sufficient sleep
4. Increase the proportion of adults who get sufficient sleep

And it all begins with awareness.

Executive Functions & YOU

Executive Functioning
for Optimal Functioning™
What’s involved and what can go wrong?

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
another part of the Executive Functioning Series

MORE folks on Team EFD than folks with ADD/ADHD

The executive system is a carefully orchestrated combination of processes that, together, merge and mingle to make us human and to make us, well, us!

These functions continually work together to help us manage hundreds of cognitive and practical tasks of life, day in and day out.

Not only that, they do it in the blink of an eye, and primarily below the level of our conscious awareness. At least, they do it that way when everything is on board and working “normally.”

New here? Read What ARE Executive Functions? for more description & detail.

Found HERE

The area of the brain that makes possible many of the wonderful cognitive abilities differentiating humans from the rest of the mammals is the frontal third of the outer layer of the human brain, referred to as the pre-frontal cortex [PFC], right behind the forehead:

• the last part of our brains to evolve,
• the last part of our brains to develop in the womb,
• and the last part of our brains to mature as we grow up

And it’s fragile

The PFC is especially vulnerable to damage — both before and after birth.

The living brain is soft, floating around inside a fluid filled environment keeping it from bumping up against the inside of a hard skull that, in turn, is protecting the fragile brain itself.

Your PFC can be injured very easily bumping up against that bony skull, even when no direct hit to the head was involved in the original incident.

Anything that makes the brain “slosh around” in the fluid in a manner that causes it to come in contact with the skull results in at least minor brain damage, and the PFC is often involved.

Read: How Do Brains Get Damaged?  Is YOURS?

THAT means that in addition to individuals with disorders, stroke or some type of substance-promoted damage affecting the PFC, anyone who’s been involved in almost any sort of accident is likely to experience brain-based executive functioning challenges of one sort or another.

It also means that most adults have at least a few EF issues, not only individuals with:

• mood disorders (anxiety & depression included)
• autistic and attentional spectrum disorders
• TBI/ABI,
• Parkinson’s
• dyslexia & dyscalculia
• more than a few neurological conditions such as
  sensory integration disorders  —

in fact, almost all of what I refer to as the alphabet disorders — as well as, currently, MOST of us over 45, as the memory centers begin to age.

So what does THAT mean?

Reaching the Boiling Point

We still have some time
but we have to act – NOW

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
Reflections from the Executive Functioning Series

The content I am revisiting is an edited & condensed version of
probably the most important information I have ever shared
(in over 500 information-dense articles).
It applies to every single person living.
I hope those of you who missed it on Monday will
take the time to read it all this weekend – and tell your friends.

ABOUT Boiling Frog Syndrome

In a recently posted article from the Executive Functioning Series [How well do you REALLY function?], I explored the tendency to accommodate an accumulation of difficulties until we are struggling to cope and practically desperate — whenever things decline gradually.

Found HERE

UNFORTUNATELY …

The water temperature is perilously close to reaching the boiling point where global health is concerned.

We are ALL likely to be cooked to death if we don’t act together to turn down the heat – no matter how young or old we are currently.

Found HERE

According to U.S. statistics, in 1960 5% of the GDP** was spent on health care.

By 2010, that figure had increased to 18%
—  over three and a half times higher —
and continues to increase.

It is projected that by the year 2040 — unless things change significantly — over 40% of the gross GDP** of the US alone will go into health care.

~~~~~~~~~~
**GDP [Gross Domestic Product] is the total value of everything produced by all the
individuals, companies and corporations in a country, citizen and foreign-owned alike.
It is considered to be the best way to measure the state of a country’s economy.

This is obviously a problem we cannot possibly afford

An unusually large portion of our health expenditures come as a result of the chronic, progressive “diseases of old age” — that become exponentially more prevalent the longer we live, and that become increasingly more expensive to manage (vs. cure, since we currently don’t have ways to cure them).

Yet we currently dedicate only a fraction of 1% of our biomedical research budget to the basic biology of aging — and millions of dollars of budget cuts are currently in the planning stages in the US alone.

DAUNTING Statistics Already

100,000 people die of old age-related illnesses every single day.  That’s over THIRTY World Trade Towers, by the way, just to put it in context.

Every single day.

Frailty alone kills 6-7% of the population and leads to many of the other debilitating diseases which increase dramatically in the over-45 population (yes, forty-five!)

Found HERE

The bad news is that if we live long enough — without a drastic change in how we approach health-science research — most of us WILL be challenged by one or more of the debilitating and costly degenerative illnesses.

Getting rapidly worse

According to the UN, the population of elderly human beings is the fastest growing around the world, and the number of elderly people by 2050 will be close to 2 BILLION.

MOST of us reading will be among them – any of us who have not already succumbed to one of the diseases of aging, that is.

We need to turn things around – NOW!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By the year 2020 – in the entire world – there will be more people over 65 than under 5 years of age. As the 5 year olds enter the workforce, those who are now 65 become 75 and 85 and begin to become terminally ill.

We won’t have enough people on the planet
to afford this ailing and aging population.

By overcoming the diseases of aging, we can literally save trillions of dollars
— along with millions of lives that are now doomed to suffer as they die.

~ ‪Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva Sciences USA – Human of the Future‬ (video)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Found HERE

Most of us are suffering from Boiling Frog Syndrome over the issue of healthy aging, refusing to give it the consideration it merits.

That manifests in our lack of willingness to advocate aggressively for resources to address the many challenges of aging that the clear majority of us WILL face before we die.

Our most important health-related goal needs to be applying our resources to solve the global challenge of remaining as healthy as possible for as long as possible – for as many people as possible.

“One of the biggest frustrations for me in my work is that old people don’t complain enough about how GRIM it is to be old — and if they did, maybe something more would be done about it.” ~ biomedical gerontologist ‪Dr. Aubrey de Grey‬.