Ni Bernafas Ke Tak???

Translation: Are you even breathing right now???.

This was the most repeated sentence my personal trainer at the gym used  during our sessions. Simply because I would  literally stop breathing while exercising as I was too distracted trying to do 10 things at once. The title is in my native language of Malay and I’m from Malaysia;  an awesome island/peninsula in South East Asia (pardon the shameless tourism promotion in the midst of quarantine).

Before you go thinking, wow…someone goes to the gym and has a trainer, please be informed that it expectedly lasted only 2 months before I gave up and abandoned ship. Just like every other interest I’ve ever had. It never lasted.

So, back to my personal training sessions, I used to do circuits that were supervised by my lovely trainer. She would in real time give me feedback on my form and posture to correct anything I may have been doing wrongly. So in between me trying to focus on doing squats; trying not to grind my patella on my knee joint, trying to keep my shoulders square, engage my core, tilt my pelvis posteriorly, all while trying very hard not to look like I’m on the verge of collapsing…I would just stop breathing.

And the person who noticed it wasn’t even me. If she handn’t pointed it out, I would have probably gone blue and pass out.

When we talk about inattention in ADHD, it’s not that we play with our phones when people are talking to us. It’s not that we get distracted at work and end up scrolling social media for hours or losing keys or glasses (okay…maybe, sometimes). You end up not doing something, that your life depends on, at literally the worse possible moment. Like when your body is metabolizing actively and is screaming for more oxygen. Stress hormones be damned! If my brain says it wants to focus on tilting my pelvis posteriorly, screw my aerobic metabolism! Take a number, and get in line!

If you think about how inattentiveness fits into ADHD, it makes no sense. When you consider how it’s treated, it makes even less sense. Inattentiveness makes us look “slow”.

Forgetting things and slow responses? Not exactly what you’d usually associate with ADHD right? The word hyperactive is in the name right? How can you be slow? And if you’re saying my brain is hyperactive why the devil would you put me on stimulants? Do you want my brain to explode??

I found the answer to this from one of Dr Russel Barkley’s lectures on the neuroanatomy of ADHD. The problem with ADHD is, our brains being bombarded with millions of stimulus while not having enough dopamine in our filters to power it. The result is that we perceive every single signal that passes through and it utterly overwhelms us. This causes our brain to literally grab on to the nearest thing that passes through, at that given moment, as the thing it chooses to focus on.

Our lives may be threatened but if the stimulus our brain decides to pick up is that trivial thing happening on the side, that’s just that. The life threatening situation will just drown in the crowd amidst the rush hour traffic going on in our head.

You’d be surprised that most people with ADHD are not the kind of people who play with their phones while hanging out with you. They look you dead in the eyes and nod enthusiastically while thinking of why the room is so cold or how you got your hair to look so good. Probably not listening to a single word you are saying, but certainly appearing to do so. We have been conditioned by our guilt to mask and cover up our flaws. We know it’s happening and as much as we’d rather not listen to your story, we respect and love you enough to pretend to be.

So every time a naysayer tells me that everyone loses their keys, everyone forgets anniversaries, everyone gets a little distracted sometimes, I just smile in my head and remind myself that I forget to breathe when I need to the most. That’s what defines the inattentiveness in ADHD. We are not just being complacent or lazy. We can’t just try harder when we need to. It’s something completely out of our control. And knowing that takes away the self doubt and self hate that plagued me for years before my diagnosis.