Recently I was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) and I felt like I was cheated out of so many years that could have been productive ones. So I decided that for my conditioning project I would test how much medication I should use that would keep my body stable enough to begin a sort of healing and moving on process, kind of like a second chance.
After I finished my conditioning I realized that I was a lot different then when I started. My parents noticed that once I started the project, I was paying attention a lot more to what they were saying to me. My mother was worried though that I was going to hurt myself by taking a lot of the medication, but I told her that people have experimented on themselves before and look at the results. I also had calmed down with my dorm mates. I felt a lot more comfortable around them and I had begun to trust them a lot more. I now felt like I had accomplished something to make my physical body and my mental body better. In the areas of school I felt like I had accomplished a lot. I was handing in reports and I understood things I was learning.
In high school I had trouble in most of my classes and my grades were up and down. I felt like I finally overcame something that bothered me more than anything. As a person interacting with other people from another ethnic background, I never had problems with other people from different races. I was always known to be a person who gets along with others. I’m pretty much friends with anyone from any type of race.
I don’t think that I have been in forcing other people’s behavior. I do think that I have been enforcing habits on other people though. My smoking cigarettes has giving me a lot of problems. Whenever I used to play sports I would never ever run out of breath but when I started smoking my body began to slow down a little and would run out of breath. I don’t think that there is anyway I will be able to get rid of this problem anytime soon. I have always been a smoker and I think that once I am a father, I will cut down a lot. But till then I will continue to smoke.
Now that I feel I have been given a second chance there are a couple bad habits I would like to get rid of in the future. The first one is my laziness. I would really like to get rid of this curse. I call it a curse because it has been a problem since I started high school. It has now followed me into college and I hope that with some type of concentration I will be able to conquer this problem.
My second habit is my constantly being distracted when I am learning. Whenever I am in class, I constantly go into another world and I phase out. But this problem is due to my ADHD and it took doctors a while to come up with this answer. Now that I have been taking my medication I’m able to concentrate a little bit more on what I do.
The one habit I concentrated on in this project was my concentration. I have decided that I will begin to take certain doses of medication a day and the next day I will see what the outcome is. I have also decided that I will give a precise record on my experiment by typing a journal. This way, I will be able to record my progress and I will be able to determine how well I am progressing throughout the treatment.
Each day I will type out how I felt and what I was feeling at that time. Then I will use that data to determine my next move. Three ways I will reinforce my using the medication is by leaving it out at night so when I wake up in the morning, getting my friends to encourage me to take the pills, and by having faith in the whole process. Ways I can shape my behavior by watching what I do when I study, when I do home work and what I do in class.
I can also schedule things out for school so I will be a lot more organized. Once I have achieved what I have set out to do, I will begin a process of scheduling. I found out that one I organize what I am doing; it is a lot easier to do. Each day I am planning to take my medication and I am planning to study a lot and concentrate more on what I am doing. This project has helped me to learn how to cope with a problem that people make a big deal about and I am glad that it has been easier than I thought it was.
