TL;DR for my fellow ADHDers, the prefrontal cortex of our brains is in charge of many complex tasks, including memory, attention, judgement, behaviour and decision making. All of this affects the way we perceive time and how long something will take us to do,we can’t pay enough attention and remember well our surroundings making it easier to get lost, and when not making spur-of-the-moment decisions we can get stuck with decision paralysis.
Just like with emotional dysregulation, there’s a few more things that get accentuated with ADHD, and these particular 3 exist because of our biology, more specifically in the prefrontal cortex of our brains.
Here we can see three issues; problems with perception of time, sense of direction and choice making.
What’s the prefrontal cortex?
Our brains are divided in different parts, and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the brain cortex covering the frontal lobe, which is closest to our foreheads.
This part of the brain is, in short, a very complex and intricate machine in our heads that is responsible for monitoring memory, perception, judgment, behaviour, and other cognitive processes.
And, according to studies in imaging systems, on ADHD brains this part has a weaker activation than in neurotypical brains. This means it doesn’t work as nicely as it would for others, and that leaves us with some issues.
So, about time perception...
Have you ever heard of something called time blindness? As people get older, they develop a sense of time, so if they go out to fill out a tub it probably won’t overflow because they know how long it takes to do that. But for people with ADHD this is not true.
I’m sure some of you have seen a task that takes a week to complete and thought “yeah, there’s 3 days left, I got this!”, or have gotten overwhelmed because there’s no way you have enough time to finish up that one task… that it may take you only 3 hours.
This is not only because of how we experience time, but also a judgement issue, and as we know both of them are a responsibility of the PFC. This means we struggle to monitor how long we take to do something, and also struggle to predict how long will take us to do something.
Our emotions also play a role in this since it’s also regulated by the PFC, for example when we’re used to being late because we can’t sense time passing by, we become anxious about meetings, getting to places up to 3 hours early. When this happens, for our brains there are two thoughts, the time that will take us to get there and the negative emotions that will come if we get late. And sadly the last message is the strongest.
What about my sense of direction?
YES! This also gets affected by ADHD, why? You may ask. This happens because of poor working memory AND attention.
We all know that with ADHD we struggle controlling our attention, this is also one of the PFC’s tasks, alongside with memory. These two are important because our sense of direction completely depends on our memories of the place we’re at, and if we don’t pay enough attention to our surroundings it’s hard to form a memory of the place.
I have a personal example, when I was in school I took the subway and bus on my way back home, it took all I had to pay enough attention to the streets through the window to learn the way so I could stop using my GPS to know where my stop was. After some months of practice, I finally managed to remember the streets. A win for me! … Or so I thought, because next year the store that was my reference to get up and press the button to get off changed their design and I completely missed it.
Luckily I got off the bus only 2 stops after mine (luckily because… it has been worse).
It’s important to make a distinction here though. When it’s only ADHD, we get lost for not paying attention and not remembering places, but there’s other conditions that could impair our sense of direction, like dyslexia (makes you confuse left and right) or dyspraxia (affects physical coordination).
And finally! Indecisiveness
We’re almost there! I commend you for getting this far!
Our last point to cover now is indecisiveness, as we said before, the PFC is in charge of judgement, behaviour and decision-making, and when they don’t work well, it’s hard to make decisions.
Just as we can impulsively make decisions or choose something without much thinking (thanks to our PFC not regulating well our behaviour), we can go the other way around and get stuck trying to choose something.
Will the chocolate milk be better for this cookie than plain milk? But what if I get chocochip cookies instead of vanilla cookies? But is this brand better than that brand? When we find there’s a lot of options and there’s not really enough pressure to get high on adrenaline while making a fast choice, sometimes we get “decision paralysis”. We keep on thinking and never make a choice because of the overflowing information.
You did it! Thank you for reading! And remember, I’m not a medical professional, I just have ADHD and love to read on it.
Sources
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894421/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738354/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830363/ https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-brain-prefrontal-cortex-attention-emotions/ https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/livingwithadultadhd/2017/10/is-your-poor-sense-of-direction-a-symptom-of-adhd