Who Are You Kidding, When You Have ADHD and Tell Yourself, “This Time Will Be Different”?

by Cynthia Hammer, MSW

 A friend recommended a book I would enjoy reading. I don’t write down the title, thinking I will remember it. The title is a single word, Horse by Ann Patchett. For Pete’s sake, I can remember that! Then, my conscience, which acts as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of my behavior, pipes up, “You won’t remember it. You need to write it down.” Then I tell Elsie, my pet name for my conscience, “This time will be different. There’s no need for you to nag me.”

I am so foolish! I know my ADHD strategies. I need to write everything down because my mind is like a sieve. Why, in the moment, do I say, “This time will be different”?

 I make a apple pie and put it in the oven to bake for an hour. I go upstairs to my home office., telling myself, “ I will know when an hour has passed by looking at my watch or seeing the time on the computer.” Then I fail to notice the one-hour mark.

 My carelessness in not monitoring the time undermines my good effort to make the pie. By telling myself, “This time will be different.” I ignored the previous times when I baked something too long and ruined it.

 I need to set an alarm on my phone and bring it with me.

 I use an electric pruner to trim a boxwood hedge. Some driplines from the sprinkler system run close to the hedge. I don’t’ stop and trim the hedge near the driplines by hand. Instead, I tell myself, “This time will be different. I won’t cut the drip line with the electric pruner.” And then I do.

 I order items from Amazon that may or may not fit. I need to return the items within a window to get a refund. I know there were past instances when I neglected to return unwanted items on time, but I tell myself when purchasing the new items, “This time will be different.”

 Saying, “This time will be different without new putting strategies in place is futile. To make a difference you need to do something, or maybe many things, differently.

Whenever we fail to meet our expectations, when the next time is the same as the last time, we need to stop and figure out a way to make this time actually different. 

I have a friend with ADHD who proudly exclaims “Whenever I confront a problem, I study it until I come up with a workable solution.”

Whenever you are tempted to say, “This time will be different,” challenge yourself.  “Will it really be different? Have I done anything to ensure a different result?” Use your out-of-the-box thinking and creativity to devise ways that work for you. Then, when you say, "This time will be different, “ you know it truly will be.