Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life

The memory of that conversation about the space program and her interest in it gave me the language needed to help frame the solution for Jill.

“So, I have a thought about how to start your day tomorrow,” I say. “As we’ve been talking about, we are working on bringing order into your life, changing old patterns that don’t work with new ones that do.”

“Right, that sounds good,” she says attentively. “What’s your idea?”

“You need a launch pad for your keys.”

Her eyebrows raise quizzically.

“A launch pad,” I repeat. “A place where you always put your keys and maybe your ID and glasses, too. That way, you’ll know that’s the place they’re always going to be…and every morning, that’s where you’ll launch your day.”

Slowly, as if an unseen hand was drawing it methodically, a smile etches itself across her face.

“A launch pad,” Jill says, starry-eyed “Yes, a launch pad. What do I have to use? A box…a hook…a basket…a tray?”

I smile back. “It’s your launch pad. You can use whatever you like. You just need to make sure you know where it is and keep it in the same place…so that the moment you enter your friend’s house, you’ll leave your keys there and then every morning that’s where they’ll be. On the launch pad, ready to lift off.”

This seemed to really resonate with Jill. First of all, it was an action-oriented solution, something she could do right away and without great difficulty. But more importantly, and Jill appreciated this, the launch pad served as an image, a reminder of how one’s day can begin, not in confusion and distraction but with precision and predictability.

The next week, Jill arrived for her appointment on time. And she entered the room not in a huff but with a smile.

“Go ahead,” she says, “ask me about my forgetfulness this week. I’m ready to answer.”

“Okay,” I respond. “So tell me, did you forget any items, appointments, things like that this past week?”

“Nope,” she said triumphantly, “and here’s why.” She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a small, uncovered trinket box, one, she explained, that she hadn’t used in years. “My launch pad,” she says, proudly. “I have a spot for it right by the kitchen door.” Moreover, Jill went on to tell me, she had not neglected the area around the launch pad. In fact, you could say that a major redevelopment project had been undertaken in the area: the table cleared and the space near the door rearranged so that her launch pad had its own…well, space. That wasn’t all, she reported. She built a launch pad at her office, too—but this one was project oriented for critical tasks to distribute to others. This, too, was accompanied by a cleaning and rearranging of her workspace.

That week, you might say, all systems were go for Jill. Is this an ADHD “cure”? No, but it’s a small success to build upon. And she has. You could see the impact on her organization and on her self-esteem; she began to regain confidence, as she could now trust herself that her mornings would be a little less frantic and a little more consistent. I’m happy to add that since she “launched” her launch pad, she has not missed a morning meeting again because of time spent looking for her keys.

My experience with Jill illustrates a few important points about organization. First, individual moments of forgetfulness and disorganization can have major consequences.

Second, just as one episode of forgetfulness triggered a series of negative events, so can one small step lead to giant leaps of improvement in the organization of one’s life. The launch pad is a simple solution, but it has effects that go far beyond knowing where your keys are. You begin to think about other things you can organize. You have more time. You are less stressed before you leave the house in the morning. You enter a new environment more relaxed and thinking more clearly. And so on and so on.

Third, and this might not be something readily apparent from hearing the conversation with Jill, the simple remedy that I suggested is rooted in an understanding of the workings of the most complex organ known: the human brain.

THE ORGANIZED BRAIN: TAKE A LOOK

You may have heard about how neuroimaging—our ability to look at the structures and functions of the working brain through advanced imaging technologies—is giving us incredible insights into our understanding of how the mind works. That’s true, and nowhere more so than in our ability to see how the brain is structured to help it function optimally—in other words, its organization.

So just how is the brain organized? Well, at first glance, its complexity seems almost beyond comprehension. The human brain is composed of neural cells—an estimated 100 billion neurons!—that are connected into groups or circuits, communicating with chemicals called neurotransmitters. These groups form larger macrocircuits. The scale of it all is mind-boggling. But here’s a good way to visualize it: Think about looking at your house on Google Earth. You can zoom in and see where you live and your neighbors’ houses—each of them like a single neuron. Toggle back on your computer, and you can see a whole block. Go back further, and the blocks form a neighborhood, a community. Even further, and you’re at jet-plane level, looking at clusters of communities forming a metropolitan area. The brain is structured in a similar way. Put all those individual “houses” (neurons) together, and you go from something relatively simple into something enormously large and complex.

Now imagine it’s a hot summer day in your neighborhood, and you and everybody on the block cranks up the air conditioning. Folks on the adjoining blocks are doing the same. If the whole community and the adjacent communities are doing it, too—responding to the hot weather—what do we have? An overload, maybe at the local level, but more likely—if enough blocks or neighborhoods are involved—a grid failure, a blackout, an entire community powerless.

What happened is that the system got overloaded. But it probably could have been avoided. Chances are, there were warnings signs: The lights dimmed at one point. Or the local power authority issued alerts throughout that day, warning customers to cut back on their power usage during peak hours.

A brain bombarded with too much stimulus, as many of us are these days, is similar to the community on the brink of a power outage on a hot summer’s day. Too much drain, too much strain. Losing those keys, forgetting a scheduled meeting, “blanking out” something you needed to do: each of these episodes are like a momentary dimming of your cognitive lights, a warning message from the brain. Indeed, you may have already experienced some of these signs, which is why you picked up this book.

That’s a great first step. But here’s where the electrical blackout analogy falters. There is only so much power available from the grid and when it goes down, it goes down. Fortunately, the brain is more adaptable, so we reach for a different metaphor:

You may get irked and frustrated by what goes on in Washington, D.C., but one thing that continually works and works well is the balance of power in our American system of government. The Executive Branch, Congress, the Supreme Court—sure, they may bicker and they may even work against each other at times, but the truth is that in the complex array of checks and balances that is the genius of the Constitution, none can ever get the “upper hand” over the long haul. The human brain, too, is in and of itself a remarkable system of checks and balances of “on” and “off” switches. What’s really remarkable is how, despite this delicately engineered balance, the entire structure stands strong and stable, even when being battered by the storms of stimuli that assail us in modern life.

A NEW APPROACH TO NEUROSCIENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH?

A provocative new way of thinking about neuroscience and mental health comes from the folks at the National Institute of Mental Health, who suggest that many cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems—e.g., ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders—can be thought of as problems in the brain’s circuitry, problems that may have existed and been ignored for years. If we can identify them early, we may be able to intervene in very specific ways to prevent and even reverse the problem; much the way a physician will prescribe a low-fat diet and exercise to a patient with slightly elevated cholesterol which, if left on its own, can lead to very serious heart and blood vessel problems or failure.

As neuroscience shows us the intricate details of these circuits, we see the brain’s checks and balances in action. One example of particular importance at the “macro” circuit level can be seen in the brain’s balance of emotions and cognitions. Remember the brain-imaging study that we mentioned in the introduction, the one where subjects viewed pleasant, unpleasant and neutral pictures while attempting to keep in check their emotional reactions? Through the use of imaging techniques, researchers at the University of Colorado were able to observe the “thinking”-brain regions of these subjects (including areas called the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex) actually regulating the emotion-generating regions. If you can manage your emotions, harmonize and focus the various “thinking” parts of your brain, then a whole new world opens up before you. You’ve got a more organized, less stressful, more productive and, in many ways, more rewarding life—not to mention one where you can always find your car keys.

Yes, this is the good news about your brain. While you may be disorganized, your brain isn’t. Inherently, it’s a jewel of organization and structure, of different components working harmoniously together. And here’s the exciting part—the features in this magnificent self-regulation system that come “pre-loaded” in every functioning human mind can be accessed, initialized and used to become better organized and to feel more on top of things.

You just have to know how to do it.

That is the purpose of this book: to help you do for yourself what I did for Jill; to help you understand just what your brain can do to help maintain order and to keep you focused and then to show you how you can do that for yourself. We’ll talk big picture and sharp-focus details. We’ll talk about day-to-day details, but we’ll also talk about life in general. We’ll talk descriptive and prescriptive. We’ll talk “neuroscience”—the science of cognition, the science of ADHD and the science of a properly functioning brain. And we’ll talk “solution”—how you can learn to harness those amazing organizational abilities embedded in our minds. My colleague and coauthor Margaret Moore will also employ an exciting new discipline, the science of change, to help you make these modifications in your life (more about that in the next chapter).

What we will not do, sorry to say, is eliminate distractions. The bad news on that front is that they’re here to stay. And some of the things that distract us are very odd indeed.

The Brain Bone’s Connected to the Ham Bone…

The issue of distracted driving has been in the news over the past few years. First cell phones and now texting have been shown to be contributing factors in many incidents of distracted or inattentive driving. But you can’t just blame technology here. The Record, a newspaper covering the Waterloo region of Ontario, Canada, analyzed more than four hundred local highway reports of distracted-driving collisions to see what was causing drivers to take their eyes off the road. Here’s what the reporters on The Record found:

About 20 percent of drivers were distracted by something inside their vehicle—fiddling with the radio or talking to other passengers.

One driver told police he was driving with his knees while trying to roll up his window. He slid onto the shoulder and smashed into the concrete median.

A passenger told police she was having a heated argument with her boyfriend, the driver. Neither noticed their car had slid onto the shoulder until she grabbed the wheel, causing them to lose control.

Six drivers were distracted by food. One driver admitted she was cleaning melted candy off her steering wheel when she lost control of her car. Another started choking on coffee, and another let go of the steering wheel after spilling hot chocolate.

But in almost half the cases, drivers were distracted by something outside the vehicle, most often other drivers, accidents, construction crews or road signs.

One driver became so transfixed by pigs being transported in the next lane that she crashed her car into the truck.

“As I was in the turn, I looked off to my right at a transport truck in the right-hand lane,” she told police in her driver statement. “It looked like he was transporting pigs, so I focused on the animals. As I did, I started to head toward the truck… I remember slamming on the brakes. Everything went white and then I heard the crash.”

Disclaimer to readers of this book: If you are someone who becomes transfixed by the sight of farm animals in trucks while driving, nothing we can say will help you.

THE RULES OF ORDER

Through years of working with patients, through the growing body of clinical literature and through insights gleaned from advances in neurosciences, we have learned much about what ADHD patients and the general public struggle with. From that, we can better understand what we should do in order to stop being forgetful, start getting focused and stop allowing distractions and a lack of focus to mess up our lives. In Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life we boil down many essential “brain functions” to six principles—what we call the Rules of Order. Consider these “brain skills” or abilities that you can develop and master. In the chapters ahead, Coach Meg and I explain these Rules of Order and then show you how to learn these skills to give yourself more focus and your life greater order. We will start with three “simple” principles and build upon these more complex organizational abilities and strategies.

1. Tame the Frenzy: Before we can engage the mind, we must control, or at least have a handle on, the emotions. It’s hard to be thoughtful or efficient when you’re irritated, frustrated and distraught. First, it’s necessary to calm down and stabilize the frustrations, anger or disappointments that we may be feeling at that particular moment.

A wonderful example of this quality comes from, of all places, a well-known cable television program. There is no one better at taming frenzy than Cesar Millan from Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. And just as Cesar teaches dogs and owners how to more happily coexist, so, too, can he teach us something about the necessary approach to thinking and organization. When he deals with dogs (and their often-distraught owners), Cesar’s tenet is to be “calm, yet assertive.” In order to have a healthy, responsive canine, you have to find your “calm-assertive” energy. As described on his website (www.cesarsway.com), this is “the energy you project to show your dog you are the calm and assertive pack leader.” Assertive, he adds, “does not mean angry or aggressive. Calm-assertive means always compassionate, but quietly in control.”

Quietly in control. That’s a nice phrase. How does this apply to your life and to your abilities to better organize yourself? Here’s how: before you attack that mound of work piled up on your desk or computer inbox, you can’t be angry over the fact that it’s there, annoyed with your boss, fearful of what’s ahead or full of self-criticism for letting it get this way again. First, you need to get yourself together, get ready to mobilize your cognitive resources—then you can tame the wild pile, like Cesar tames the unruly canine. Organized, efficient people are able to acknowledge their emotions. But unlike many who let their emotions get the better of them, these folks have the ability to put the frustrations and anger aside, almost literally, and get focused on work. The sooner the emotional frenzy welling within you is tamed, the sooner the work is done and the better you feel.

Like Cesar says: quiet confidence.

2. Sustain Attention: Sustained focus or attention is a fundamental building block of organized behavior. You need to be able to maintain your focus and successfully ignore the many distractions around you in order to plan and coordinate behaviors, to be organized and to accomplish something.

In the process of sustaining attention, your brain scans the environment, directing your attention on a certain stimulus, while it continues to process other auditory and visual information. So while your attention rests on one thing (the speaker at the head of the conference table, for example, talking about an important new development at your company), your brain continues to evaluate new information (the rustle of papers to your left, the whispered comment to your right). This extraneous information (or “noise”) is competing for your attention, but the organized brain is able to instantly evaluate and screen out what is not worthy of your attention—to identify the signal through the noise. The sound of the papers and the side conversations are deemed unworthy of greater cognitive effort, but the person who rushes into the meeting saying, “Our CEO has just been led out of the building in handcuffs!” would go right to the top of the “Pay Attention!” list.

The ability to properly handle all the noise from the environment—and to evaluate and prioritize it while not being pulled off the main task at hand—is another basic and important sign of the organized brain.

3. Apply the Brakes: The organized brain must be able to inhibit or stop an action or a thought, just as surely as a good pair of brakes brings your car to a halt at a stop light or when someone cuts suddenly into your lane. People who don’t do this well struggle with suppressing what has turned out to be the wrong response or action. Often, it is very difficult at times to stop yourself in the middle of something. Here’s an example:

You’re working diligently on one task—say, your taxes. You’re sustaining your focus as you itemize your deductions and carefully read the forms. Meanwhile you’ve been subjected to an ongoing stream of distractions. Your spouse wants to know where you left the television remote. Your child has a homework problem. A coworker texts you with a question. Then, the phone rings. It’s your accountant, calling to ask for a meeting to go over your taxes. Your instinct is to forge ahead, because you really want to finish this tonight so you can watch your favorite television show, which is on tomorrow.

The organized brain says, “Stop now and schedule the meeting!” Yes, it would be easier and more convenient for you to just get it done now. But the organized brain has weighed the options. The organized brain remembers that last year you made a mistake on your tax forms and ended up paying $1,000 (not to mention $500 to your accountant, who had to redo everything). So the organized brain decides to put on the brakes. The function is called “inhibitory control,” and you could also think of it as a compassionate hand on the shoulder, or a sort of impulse control that keeps the efficient organized brain from getting off task and helps put you into a position for the next Rule of Order.

However you look at it—traffic cop holding up a raised hand or guidance counselor gently steering you away from an ill-advised task—you need to heed the message of the organized brain and stop in order to get to the next step.

4. Mold Information: Your brain has the remarkable ability to hold information it has focused upon, analyze this information, process it and use it to guide future behavior—even after the information is completely out of sight. This form of brain work involves something called representational thinking.

Efficient and organized people have the ability to retain and manipulate information or ideas. Like a computer-generated image suspended in space or a hologram in a sci-fi movie, information is “held up” to scrutiny, slowly turned around and considered from different perspectives, almost as if it were a three-dimensional object. You can consider representational thinking to be reflective—not gut-reacting, seat-of-the-pants thinking, as valuable as that can be in certain cases. This is the mind that takes information, steps back, considers and reflects—often looking at things in new and different ways.

Some people are more comfortable molding visual, verbal or spatial information. Martha Stewart is probably far better at solving a problem of how to decorate a certain-sized room for a holiday party than, say, Albert Einstein might have been. And vice versa if the information that needed to be molded involved theoretical physics. But both illustrate the same principle. No matter how it’s done, or in what context, the ability to “turn over” the information after the stimulus is gone and do something with it—this is a skill to know, embrace, develop.

5. Shift Sets: People with superior muscle flexibility can touch their toes, demonstrating what exercise physiologists call “range of motion.” In football, quarterbacks come up to the line of scrimmage and observe how the opposing team is arrayed to stop them. In the seconds before the play begins, a quick-thinking quarterback will call what’s known as an “audible”—a last-minute change in what he is about to do, based on the quarterback’s instant reading of the way in which the defensive team is positioned against him. This athlete’s brain flexibility has equal importance to his physical flexibility.

The organized brain is ever ready for the change in the defense; the new game in town; the news flash; the timely opportunity or last-minute change in plans. You need to be focused but also able to process and weigh the relative importance of competing stimuli and to be flexible, nimble and ready to move from one task to another or from one thought to another.

In other words, you need mental range of motion and the ability to call an “audible” at your own “line of scrimmage.” Because this is the way life presents itself, isn’t it? To illustrate this cognitive flexibility and adaptability—the ability to shift sets—again consider the particular deficits of persons with ADHD. While those with ADHD are often considered to have a deficit in attention (as if he or she can’t pay attention at all), the better description is that they cannot regulate attention. The mental switch is set to “on” or “off,” and it’s hard for them to change it back; sometimes they can’t pay attention, but sometimes they can’t stop paying attention, even when more important or salient stimuli are at hand.

6. Connect the Dots: The organized and efficient individual pulls together the things we’ve already talked about—the ability to quiet the inner frenzy, to develop consistent and sustained focus, to develop cognitive control, to mold mental/virtual information and to flexibly adapt to new stimuli. The organized and efficient individual synthesizes these qualities, much as the various parts of the brain are often brought together to perform tasks or help solve problems, and brings these abilities to bear on the problem or situation at hand.

The disorganized, unfocused individual may do none of this. We all know people whose lives seem to be out of control—and at the moment, you may feel like you’re one of them. At times like these, it seems as if nothing ever gets done. You feel as if you’re in a losing race with the clock and the calendar. You seem to have no ability to influence or manage events and “things just keep happening” to you. It seems as if there is no time to accomplish the important things.

You see where we’re going here, right? Connect the dots: Thinking…feeling…acting…living. Following a logical path, from emotional control through the different cognitive building blocks, you are ready to put it all together. Here, the organized brain orchestrates all the other functions. The end result: a cognitive harmony that allows you to function more effectively, productively and enjoyably in every aspect of life.

One last time, let’s go back to our example of Jill and her keys. In suggesting the idea of the launch pad to this patient, I was actually addressing two of the Rules of Order.