Authors Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman report in their book, The Stressed Sex. Uncovering the Truth about Men, Women, And Mental Health, (Oxford Press, 2013), that when it comes to attention, men on average or more likely to have a problem with it than are women.
If you didn’t get that the first time, let me repeat. WHEN IT COMES TO ATTENTION, MEN ON AVERAGE ARE MORE LIKELY TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT THAN ARE WOMAN.
If you are continuing to have trouble focusing on what this article is about and are near a source of strong coffee, have some of that before trying to read further.
I just paused from writing this to take a sip of my own strong coffee. If not for that I wouldn’t be able to write what I wanted to write next, which is that I was once diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
From here on I am going to refer to attention deficit disorder by the letters ADD. If I didn’t and instead wrote out attention deficit disorder each time, you might get bored and stop attending to some point I was trying to make. Please note that I will not use ADD at the beginning of a sentence, as my editor at The Goodmen Project wouldn’t go for that.
ADD typically comes in two flavors. Oh no, where’s my coffee? I meant to write, “Attention Deficit Disorder typically comes in two flavors.” These are with or without hyperkinesis, sometimes called hyperactivity. Some men have trouble sitting still while they are having trouble paying attention. Other men do just fine sitting while having difficulty. We will refer to the first flavor has ADHD
One thing that can help both the sitting and the attending is stimulant medication. There are various formulations of speed that can be had by prescription. Coffee sometimes words just as well. Problem is some men don’t like the taste of coffee. This is quite often the case with boys.
As a boy, I escaped being diagnosed as having ADD as the diagnosis didn’t exist and then existed, but wasn’t popular. I compensated for my attention troubles by working harder at paying attention in class then did my friends. In high school, my friends often would laugh at me because of the big stack of textbooks under my arm that I took home for homework. This was before backpacks were used for other than camping.
I stayed out of the principles office by not having ADHD. In those days boys with ADHD were known as “bad boys”.
I felt bad that I was such a lazy daydreamer with school work and that I often had to read the same sentence over and over again when trying to keep up with assigned readings. I was opposed to skimming, reading the Classic Comic book version of the book or resorting to Cliff Notes, because that was cheating and I might miss something that would be on the test. For readers not familiar with Cliff Notes, today they are known as CliffsNotes. Those not familiar with Cliff Notes, Mandela effect, might want to Google that, but then get right back to this article. This may be difficult, but come on you can do it.
I learned about other people having ADD and ADHD when I studied my psychology textbooks in college. I didn’t relate to it personally. I understood I did better staying sometimes if I took caffeine pills, such as the popular brand, NoDoz while studying, but I thought this was because I was a “slow learner.” Being a slower learner meant that it was a challenge to fit college level partying and academics into a 24 hour day.
When I first learned of the use of stimulants to treat ADD and ADHD, it was taught that stimulant medications had a “paradoxical” effect on the taker. That is where stimulants would hype up normal children they slowed down ADD, ADHD kids. In fact, this was the main way that you could confirm that a child had a correct ADD or ADHD diagnosis.
I understand this today, as being circular reasoning pushed by pharmaceutical companies to make money. Much money also has been made selling books, seminars and college courses on how to identify and treat ADD/ADHD in males.
It was watching children diagnosed with ADD and ADHD sitting still and being riveted to video games, that did much to bring into question this paradoxical effect business. New thinking was that if the activity these children wanted to attend to was stimulating enough, they would. Therefore stimulant medications were seen as adding stimulant value to activities that these children found too boring to pay attention to. Now you can take a hit of coffee when you need it. However, the prescription medications kick in quickly but can take their time losing their stimulant effect. This sometimes results in anxiety and then depression. No worry though because there are plenty of medications to take care of anxiety and repression.
It is the same reason why many adults are thankful for the easy access to coffee during boring meetings called by their bosses.
Attention Deficit Disorders used to go undiagnosed in adults. This was primarily due to adults not being identified as a market for stimulant medications yet. This is how ADD finally caught up with me.
I would have spent a good deal more on Adderall if it weren’t for my health insurance coverage. I gave it a good try at various doses, before concluding that coffee both worked and tasted better.
Treatments for ADD include making schools and workplaces more interesting. Effective treatment for ADHD is to add opportunity for some physical exercise into the mix.
Most effective perhaps is doing away with the diagnoses of ADD and ADHD and think as these traits as being talents greater than the norm. Why think of that ability you have to pay a little attention to this, then that and then some other things, while maintaining an adequate ability to look focused on your job when your supervisor walks by, as anything other than a gift?
Men who are concerned about their attending skills are suckers for spending money on things that go beep to remind them to do something important. Reliance on attention “crutches” can be like relaying on braces to compensate for weak muscles when exercising those muscles now and again being a better solution.
A little meditation practice can go along way to strengthen a man’s metaphorical “attending muscles.” Complaining that having ADD makes meditation practice grossly unpleasant is akin to complaining that physical exercise is intolerable due to the result that the lack of physical exercise has on actual muscles.
A simple shift in attitude can also work attention ability wonders. Pay attention as to how well you do shift your focus from the stimulating to the important. Remind yourself that you are quite good at this then notice how such self-talk makes you even better at it.
Particularly pay attention as to how you, by being good at jumping from one thing to another, can make interesting and helpful connections to information that most people you know have trouble seeing. If you do this prepare yourself for a promotion at work or being labeled a “conspiracy theory nut, wise ass.”
There are many that argue that such things as school curricula, television, the internet, and smartphones were all designed and devised, as a way to keep human beings from paying enough attention to being able to make the connections necessary to understand how this is going on. Much can be done to rob a man of his soul while he is being distracted.
Life can be conceived as consisting of what you pay attention to in a universe of infinite stimuli and what connections you make between stimuli on your way to feeling deeply connected to everything else.
In the process, it is easy to get distracted by finding dark things that you were certain didn’t exist actually do and miss out noticing some wondrous things that come along with that territory. We can wish that this wasn’t how things work, but apparently, they do.
As a man pays more attention to more things, there can be a frightening feeling of losing one’s ability to keep up with the important stuff. One way out of this is to not hold any passing attraction too tightly. This will allow you to better let go of attending to the wrong thing at the wrong moment.
I hope you had fun skimming and randomly sampling this article. Every thought I tried to express has been done so much better by others. I could provide references, but thought it more likely with this type of article, you would be better at deciding what to attend to next and what to make connections with.
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