Friday Jul 15, 2022

Beyond ADHD A Physicians Perspective: Time Blindness

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: Most people with ADHD. Totally understand. When I say time blindness the thing with this time blindness is that it can be perceived in different things. It can be perceived as not keeping track of time in awareness of being able to create a time sequence.

Hi, welcome to Beyond ADHD, A Physician's Perspective podcast. I am your host, Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh. I'm a Family Medicine doc, with ADHD, practicing in a rural setting in Texas. I am a mother to two very energetic toddlers who are three and four years of age.

And in the past year, I have undergone radical transformation after discovering ADHD coaching, and life-coaching. For the past decade, my typical day consisted of having 300 charts backlog, a graveyard of unfinished projects, and a lack of time awareness. I didn't realize that I was not filling my own cup. I was running on fumes. The last year I figured out the secret; learn to stay in your lane. So now my mission is to help others develop systems that tap into their zone of genius. So they too can reclaim their personal lives back like I have.

Well, hello. Hello. I'm so excited. Today's topic is about time blindness, you know, most people with ADHD. Totally understand. When I say time blindness, it's inability to sense the passing of time. and it just makes it hard, for the person who is experiencing this, because it affects all levels of their life.

And so when you think of time, blindness. Think about it kind of like a sensory issue. Like it's not intentional. Like nobody wants to just on purpose, look bad or mislead people one way or another, and there's different reasons. And I'll give you examples of how we can get in trouble with time blindness.

Usually things that people with ADHD really enjoy doing, we can tend to hyper focus on things and we underestimate how long it's gonna take us. You know, things we enjoy, maybe we're seeing a patient and the encounter runs way over past it. It might be that we were really, you know, enjoying the encounter we were having.

Or it could be that maybe, you know, we were gonna go and hang out with friends and we thought it was gonna take so long and it took a lot longer. So things that we enjoy, we tend to underestimate how long it's gonna take. And then things that we don't necessarily enjoy, like washing the dishes. I don't like washing dishes or maybe cleaning things around the house.

We way overestimate how long it's gonna take and we don't even wanna start. And so what happens with time blindness? Is that sometimes it can make us look like there is a character defect or a character flaw, and we end up beating our self up for something like that. Right? When we think about ADHD, I want you to think about the fact that, you know, it's not that we can't focus all the time.

It's sometimes we can't inhibit certain things. Like we can't inhibit certain perceptions or like this sensory stimula that I was just talking to you. And sometimes we can't inhibit certain actions and we are driven to do things over and over almost like, you know, because it's important to us.

And so the thing with this timeline is, is that it can be perceived in different things. It can be perceived as not keeping track of time in awareness of being able to create a time sequence, like, you know, how long each task is gonna take. So then we can spit out an appropriate estimate, or it could be that we don't know how something happened, and we feel like we don't have any control over time reproduction.

Making sure that we can redo that over again. So this is important because once you have realized that there's a term, you know, now you are at least aware of the problem. And from there, you can seek to accept it and realize that, okay, well, this is me now. I don't have to make it mean anything. Now I can seek, take action, right?

Form, uh, solutions for it. So to change the system, you first have to change yourself and to change selves. We first have to gain some awareness of where we're at, right? And so with that being said, there's certain things that you can do to help you be aware of what you need to do. So if you think of, of using techniques like a timer, a timer is gonna create that shortcut or that buffer to be able to consciously track how long something is taking you.

And so it can help decrease that drive to start something, because most of us don't wanna jump onto something that seems like it's impossible to accomplish, but if we at least tell ourselves, okay, I'm not gonna get sucked into like cleaning the house for like eight hours. I'm only gonna commit to like 20 minutes.

Then you have a start and end time, and it's more likely that you're gonna give yourself that time to do it. And so with that being said, You can increase that dopamine energy and decrease those timeliness by keeping track. I use timers all the time, so that I have an awareness of how long it's taking me to walk into the room.

And then I have my nurses knock at a certain time. And that way they ask me if I need anything. And sometimes I do, you know, I might need a shot or a tetanus shot, or I might need wound culture or some sort of something, right? And so they can help me by doing that. And it's enhancing the care that I'm giving my patient and it's keeping me in line.

With ADHD. One of the things with the time blindness is that we just don't know that we have to give ourselves some buffer time. Like most of us just wanna tell you how long it's gonna take, tell us to do up certain things, but we don't give ourselves the buffer time. Like we don't on purpose count in that, you know, there might be a flat tire somewhere on your drive or that, you know, you might be, you're almost outta gas and you have to stop.

If we don't give ourselves some buffer time, then we might not be aware, right? And, I think the other thing with timeblindness is that sometimes we're not intentional with the things that we're doing. Like sometimes we don't say, okay, I just need to do this one thing. And then off I go, we try to put in another and another and another.

So. That's why we always seem to be chronically late to places. So even the things that are important to you, like sometimes we might show up late and it's not like we're doing it on purpose, but you can see how, if we're not creating a safety net for ourselves, either a reminder, like the day before to give you a heads up that you need to show up at a certain place an hour before or 40 minutes before it could get us into trouble.

So you seen timers. And alarms and, maybe creating your journal can be ways for you to add some buffer time into whatever task that you're trying to complete. And so, you know, this is an important topic. I would just wanted to bring up this time blindness so that you could know that it's one of many things that we talk about in my course.

If you're interested in learning tools, please, please. Definitely. Look into, getting an ADHD coach, if not with me, with anybody else or even just bringing the topics like attitude.Mag is an amazing website where you can learn a lot of tools because you know, if you have ADHD or you have a kid that has ADHD, You can have now some insight about this time blindness, and then you can create a better system to help them instead of just labeling them that they're having a character issue.

And so this way you can support yourself or support your loved one. Anyways. I wanted to just talk about time blindness. So the actionable steps is get yourself a timer. If you don't have one, use it to decrease the initiation task, that it is the initiation force to jump onto a project and then use it to stop, you know, use it to stop so that you can move on.

And you know, most of us when we have so many choices, We spend way too much time looking at stuff, right? Like I love planning vacations, but before you know it, if I'm not careful, like I can literally spend two hours just looking at all these hotels. And then I had so many choices that I didn't even make a decision.

So now I've learned to use the timer to help me to just give myself 20, 30 minutes to search the area and to make a decision. Anyways, I hope this tips continue to save your time so that you can invest the time in the things that you love. Have a blessed one, take care.

As someone who understands that time is our most valuable asset. I am so honored that you have shared your time with me. Please click the subscribe button and join my Facebook group: Beyond ADHD, A Physician's Perspective so that you never missed an opportunity to create time at will. Do share this podcast with your friends they too can can learn to live life and stay in their own lane.

Beyond ADHD A Physicians Perspective: Time Blindness

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