Want focus tips for ADHD and Anxiety.? Well, I’ve got them for you. For most kids, ADHD and anxiety symptoms are better during the summer months of a more relaxed schedule. With more relaxed schedules and less pressure to perform, their brains can let up a bit and ease off.
At Leigh Brain & Spine, my husband, Dr. Cosmas Leigh, sees this directly in kids’ brain performance patterns. On their brain graphs, distraction and stress go down. Let’s dissect this just a bit to get started.
Why Use Focus Tips for ADHD and Anxiety?
Two reasons. The below tips include Neurofeedabck therapy and 3 tips you can do yourself. Neurofeedback will do all the work for you. You visit your practitioner’s office and you brain will perform better. Then, when you go home you can keep up the work for yourself to feel and perform better, faster. Wahhh Lahhh.
How to Use Focus Tips for ADHD and Anxiety?
First, you need to know what causes ADHD and anxiety. This way you can understand how using the tips will benefit you. Keep reading for easy to understand explanations that will inspire to make these easy changes a reality.
What causes ADHD?
ADHD is caused by a brain that is performing too slow. It is using slow processing speed and creates distraction and lack of focus as a by-product. Slow processing makes it so that information cannot be processed in real-time. It gets hiccups, if you will. Therefore, people with ADHD may have sensory processing issues, motor challenges, or other learning challenges. The speed within the brain needs to be sped up just a bit for information to come and go freely. ADHD diagnoses are sky-rocketing in the busy life we all lead these days.
Our world is faster than ever and if your brain is processing slowly, it can be very difficult to keep up.
What Causes Anxiety?
Anxiety is caused by a brain that is running much too fast. It creates over-thinking, anxious feelings, and an overdrive type of personality. This makes it difficult to focus well too. When your brain is running extra fast, information is not processed well. It is like try to take in the scenery while traveling on a train that is going 150 MPH. It can’t be done, well at least. People with an anxiety brain pattern may suffer with OCD types of symptoms, worry, tics, social anxiety, and more. What is needed is for the brain to be slowed down just a bit
Many times, ADHD and anxiety exist together. This is called being co-morbid.
How Can Neurofeedback Brain Training Be Used to Get Rid of ADHD and Anxiety?
Neurofeedback teaches your brain to make more medium processing speed, in the middle that is, for calm-focus. Simultaneously, it reduces production of the slow and fast speeds to help the brain perform at the just right speed to create feelings of a calm mind and body as well as improve performance. It really is that simple, yet totally scientific.
I know that many people just don’t get how a computer can do that. It is through visual and auditory feedback. If you just think about it logically for a minute, you will realize that is how all learning takes place. In most cases you must use your mind and body to receive the feedback. Like if you are learning to play piano. If you hit the wrong key, you hear it. Then you look and realize it was the wrong key and determine the proper one. This is auditory and visual feedback for learning. It is called operant conditioning.
How Does Neurofeedback Work?
Once your brain is taught to make less fast and slow speeds and more medium speeds for better processing, your life will get better. You’ll feel better, you will perform better, quality of life increases. What this does is creates an automatic feedback loop in your life for continual positive change. It is called a positive feedback loop. This will replace the negative feedback loop you were once in due to your ADHD and anxiety symptoms.
Want to know more about how it works, check out this post.
Need Help Finding a Neurofeedback Expert Provider.
Look no further. If you’d like help finding a Neurofeedback Expert near you, just contact me and I would be happy to help. Also, at Leigh Brain & Spine, my awesome team offers Home Neurofeedback that can help you get your brain performing better so you feel better from your own home. Totally awesome and super effective. Just let me know if you’d like more information about Home Neurofeedback and I can help you out there too.
3 Focus Tips for ADHD and Anxiety
Scaffolding:
This is one of the most powerful therapeutic strategies that you can use with your child, or yourself for that matter. It is built on the premise of erecting a tall building. You cannot just build floor number 28. First, floor number one, the foundation, must be created. Scaffolding must be constructed to continue to build each floor after that so the architects can reach from where they are to where they want to go. Thus, floor number is built second. Then the third, fourth, and fifth floors, and so on.
What this means for our discussion is this. If you are trying to have your child complete the 2 hours of his homework, but he is completely unable to sit there and produce anything for even 5 minutes, then that is where you start, 5 minutes. After five minutes he gets to take a break. Once he has successfully completed homework in five minute increments for a week, then it is time to build the second floor, 10 minute intervals. This continues until you have successfully built the 28th floor, which would be 2 hours for our purposes. Scaffolding works. Try it today.
Frequent Breaks:
Frequent breaks are inherently built into scaffolding procedures, however, when scaffolding has been completed, frequent breaks remain. Within a 2 hour homework session there should be at least one “brain break”. Just a quick refresher in which you get up from your work and walk around for a few minutes.
Refreshers are actually Neurointegration time. Just chilling away from your work for a few minutes can really help bring the slow and fast speeds back down. Yep you guessed it, they go up as you focus and concentrate. For most people anyway. As you work, they will try to go up because your brain will fatigue and lose focus and will work harder to stay focused through anxiety mode. Power naps are
We live in a world that insists on “pushing through”. I am totally guilty of it myself sometimes. But… I am completely aware of it when I do “push through” fatigue and anxiety. So, I mostly make the choice to refresh and not just keep going and push my brain into a less focused and more stressed out mode. I know better. Now you do too.
Find Your Meditation:
Don’t freak out because I used the word “meditation”, even though we all could use more of skilled meditation. The way I am using the word reflects an activity that you love that you are using your brain within. For example, my hubs loves to golf. He focuses, concentrates and is tries while he is golfing. Apparently, he always tells everyone else he is golfing with how to golf, but that is a conversation for another post. I run/power walk (yes that is a thing, it is high intensity interval training in my world), read, and do yoga. Ahhh, my brain feels calmed just thinking of those activities.
What do you love to do? Knit, play billiards, ride motorcycles, construct puzzles, do cross-fit? The list goes on and on. Think about it right now. Find your meditation. When you do this activity, you are getting your brain into the perfect processing speed for calm focus. It is like giving your brain a workout every day.
#controlyourbrainoritwillcontrolyou
For Neurofeedback Experts
Clinical Effectiveness of Neurofeedback for ADHD
Hey there expert. Let me share just a bit of science with you. The below study reflects the power of Neurofeedback to help people with ADHD. This study shows that frequency up front (just like we do it in the Neurofeedback Expert program) is the most efficient way to help people improve their symptoms.
Clinical Effectiveness of Neurofeedback for Anxiety
A recent study shows that Neurofeedback is significantly more successful at treating PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and depression than no treatment at all or treatment as usual with talk therapies. Adding Neurofeedback can be the difference maker in a person’s success. That is why I like to shout it from the mountain tops!
With confidence we can help people get their brains into a calm and focused mode and get back to life.
