Mastering Your Adult ADHD: A Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment Program, Therapist Guide by Steven A. Safren & Susan E. Sprich & Michael W. Otto & Carol A. Perlman

Author:Steven A. Safren & Susan E. Sprich & Michael W. Otto & Carol A. Perlman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Clinical Psychology, Psychology
ISBN: 9780190235581
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

Skill: Distractibility Delay

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When you are working on a boring task, it is inevitable that distractions will pop into your head from time to time and serve as big temptations. Many times the distractions appear to grow in terms of how important they seem to be.

The difficult problem here is this: Is it really that these distractions are important or is it that they become more important because 1. They are not the task you had set out to do.

2. The task you set out to do is now not attractive.

Is it important or just more attractive? A good example came from one of our patients who was working on his master’s thesis. He told us that whenever he sat down to do his work, he would feel the need to clean his apartment. He did not like cleaning but would have the urge to clean whenever he needed to write. In fact, he got to the point where he felt that he just could not work unless everything in his apartment was cleaned and in order! Over the years, we have found that other patients who were in school reported similar stories. We now believe that the cleanest apartments in the world belong to graduate students who need to do their theses! In these cases, cleaning becomes a distraction that grows in importance. Even though it is typically not an attractive or important task, it becomes much more attractive than the task at hand, which feels overwhelming.

The distractibility delay is an exercise that can be done in addition to what we described earlier. The distractibility delay technique was inspired by a similar technique used in treatment of generalized anxiety disorder, articulated by Craske, Barlow, and O’Leary (1992).

Once you have determined the length of time you can maintain your attention and you have broken down tasks into steps that take about that amount of time, we recommend that you try to build skills in delaying distractions when you are working.

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