The article I'm blogging about this time is almost a year old but it's new to me.  And so is the term ADT, which stands for Attention Deficit Trait. 

We're all pretty familiar with the term ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) as it's been the topic of so many news stories, magazine articles and TV news magazine broadcasts.  But ADT differs from ADD in that ADT is not a condition.  In other words, it goes away when you relax or are outside of overstimulating environments.  True ADD does not go away no matter where you are. 

In the article, Dr. Edward Hallowell, describes ADT in this way:

It's sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it's a condition induced by modern life, in which you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you're doing so much or trying to do so much, it's as if you're juggling one more ball than you possibly can. 

According to the article, you know you are expericing ADT when you are functioning on a surface level and you are not experiencing "the fulfillment that comes from creative activity".  This is when we're so overstimulated that we're doing more, yet being less productive.  Our attention is split in so many ways: e-mail, blackberries, cell phones, blinking signs, highway billboards and scrolling news feeds on the bottom of our TV screen.  These things capture every drop of our attention and we're unable to give our full focus to one task.  We're spread so thin that, as the article also puts it: we're treading water.   We're swimming to keep from drowning, but we're not going anywhere.

I totally get that.  I regularly find myself going through motions without experiencing anything deeper.  And always honest with you JobSchmobbers, I am obliged to admit I checked for new messages 4 times already during the course of reading the ADT article and blogging about it.  That's pathetic!  And I promise I'll stop doing that now and focus on this blog.

But I'm overstimulated.  It's a sad, maddening game from which I must pull myself out.  I am writing about this topic today because I imagine (no, I KNOW) that I'm not alone.  And also because I hope to bring it to a heightened level of consciousness within myself so that I can do something about it.  Or at least start to!

It's such a vicious circle isn't it?  But who's to blame?  Society?  Us?  The media?  I think it's a chicken and an egg type scenario and it's all to blame.  Technology started to make communication and advertising more advanced. And we wanted more connectivity, we wanted more stimulation we were ready for it.  We demanded more of it.  Technology answered the call.  The media answered the call.  Corporations answered the call.  Blackberries arrived, CNN started scrolling shit on the bottom of your screen, billboards became more like TV screens and began swirling images and words mixed with flashing lights.  Starbucks arrived to fill us with caffeine.  And we got in line with our dollars hanging out of our pockets and our mouths salivating!

And now we're so hyped up, distracted and overstimulated that OF COURSE we have ADT.  I certainly can't preach on how to stop being overstimulated and I absolutely can't preach on how to promote a change.  But I can attest to the fact that my environment did this to me and then I willingly and regularly perpetuated---and even craved---the environment.  That said, I'll leave you with one last quote from the article: 

If you don't allow yourself to stop and think, you're not getting the best of your brain. What your brain is best equipped to do is to think, to analyze, to dissect and create. And if you're simply responding to bits of stimulation, you won't ever go deep.