Update on the "ADD thing"
Jan. 29th, 2005 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beandelphikiEveryone has good days and bad days. For example, I have good days where I can read fairly well, and days where I struggle to focus on a page or computer screen at all. (Someone in a community I read had a good description of it, something about trying to read through a tube that jumps all over the page at random.)
A few months ago, I came up with the idea of trying to track my eating habits and sleep patterns to see if some food helped or made things worse and so on. My diet has ranged widely over my lifetime - everything from sit-down meals at least twice a day with a range of nutritious foods, to eating nothing but TV dinners when everyone was too busy to cook.
I don't remember my diet ever having a really profound effect on my behaviour, but for all I know, it does. How would I know if I've never kept track?
So I came up with this idea to write down what I eat every day and try to evaluate if it's a "good" or a "bad" day, and see if any patterns emerge. Unfortunately, I only managed to do this for...um...a day. Then I forgot about it.
Right now, I think my diet is somewhere in the middle of the scale I implied up above. I don't really eat as well as I should be, and neither are my mother and sister. We've noted this, and tried to come up with better ways to get a full nutritional range crammed into our lives. I think I've been doing better with that this past week - eating more vegetables and less processed food.
One of the biggest obstacles to this is that I'm such a picky eater. Food textures and tastes have always bothered me, sometimes in the extreme. I have, unfortunately, the most trouble with vegetables and the least trouble with processed food. If that sounds "convenient" - it's not. I'm not a child begging for more dessert than peas, and the fact that eating well is actually unpleasant is frustrating as hell.
Also frustrating is reading that severe sleep-deprivation can look like ADD, but that sleep disorders are common in ADDers. Well shit, how does anyone tell the difference? I know that I don't always sleep as well as I should, due to:
-Forgetting to go to bed, or getting wrapped up in something and not being able to drag myself from it to go to bed, even when I know I really need to. (I feel about six, like I'm screaming and kicking my feet saying, "I want to stay up LATER!")
-My brain won't shut up long enough to go to sleep - i.e. I'm insomniac.
-Restless Leg Syndrome. I haven't been diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I have it. Onset age 15 - to me, it feels like bugs are crawling everywhere under my skin, including my face, and I have to move my legs (scrape them on the sheet, actually), scrape my face on the pillow, or scratch vigorously to make the bugs go away. Naturally, that can keep me up.
(Interestingly enough, "One cause for RLS is probably a defect in brain mechanisms that rely on the signaling chemical, dopamine." Age 15 is also the age I noticed that I seemed to develop verbal dyslexia. Connection?)
That makes it sound like I never sleep, though, which isn't true. I just don't have a steady, regular sleep pattern, and I never have. My "natural" sleep pattern moves back and back and back until I'm up until 7 am and sleeping in the daytime.
Anyway. It drives me nuts that ADD-like symptoms, such as lack of focus, might actually be caused by a poor diet and poor sleep, when other ADD-like traits - hypersensitivity, zoom-brain at night - helps to cause a poor diet and poor sleeping habits.
It seems like I just can't win.
A few months ago, I came up with the idea of trying to track my eating habits and sleep patterns to see if some food helped or made things worse and so on. My diet has ranged widely over my lifetime - everything from sit-down meals at least twice a day with a range of nutritious foods, to eating nothing but TV dinners when everyone was too busy to cook.
I don't remember my diet ever having a really profound effect on my behaviour, but for all I know, it does. How would I know if I've never kept track?
So I came up with this idea to write down what I eat every day and try to evaluate if it's a "good" or a "bad" day, and see if any patterns emerge. Unfortunately, I only managed to do this for...um...a day. Then I forgot about it.
Right now, I think my diet is somewhere in the middle of the scale I implied up above. I don't really eat as well as I should be, and neither are my mother and sister. We've noted this, and tried to come up with better ways to get a full nutritional range crammed into our lives. I think I've been doing better with that this past week - eating more vegetables and less processed food.
One of the biggest obstacles to this is that I'm such a picky eater. Food textures and tastes have always bothered me, sometimes in the extreme. I have, unfortunately, the most trouble with vegetables and the least trouble with processed food. If that sounds "convenient" - it's not. I'm not a child begging for more dessert than peas, and the fact that eating well is actually unpleasant is frustrating as hell.
Also frustrating is reading that severe sleep-deprivation can look like ADD, but that sleep disorders are common in ADDers. Well shit, how does anyone tell the difference? I know that I don't always sleep as well as I should, due to:
-Forgetting to go to bed, or getting wrapped up in something and not being able to drag myself from it to go to bed, even when I know I really need to. (I feel about six, like I'm screaming and kicking my feet saying, "I want to stay up LATER!")
-My brain won't shut up long enough to go to sleep - i.e. I'm insomniac.
-Restless Leg Syndrome. I haven't been diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I have it. Onset age 15 - to me, it feels like bugs are crawling everywhere under my skin, including my face, and I have to move my legs (scrape them on the sheet, actually), scrape my face on the pillow, or scratch vigorously to make the bugs go away. Naturally, that can keep me up.
(Interestingly enough, "One cause for RLS is probably a defect in brain mechanisms that rely on the signaling chemical, dopamine." Age 15 is also the age I noticed that I seemed to develop verbal dyslexia. Connection?)
That makes it sound like I never sleep, though, which isn't true. I just don't have a steady, regular sleep pattern, and I never have. My "natural" sleep pattern moves back and back and back until I'm up until 7 am and sleeping in the daytime.
Anyway. It drives me nuts that ADD-like symptoms, such as lack of focus, might actually be caused by a poor diet and poor sleep, when other ADD-like traits - hypersensitivity, zoom-brain at night - helps to cause a poor diet and poor sleeping habits.
It seems like I just can't win.
