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- The Ferrari who crashed and then found its brakes.
The Ferrari who crashed and then found its brakes.
Slow down to speed up
Ian Tenenbaum
August 06, 2023 • Read Time: 6 minutes
Imagine simultaneously going through life present, alert, focused, calm, relaxed, and excited, all at the same time.
This was an impossible concept for me for most of my life.
It was a binary decision whether to be one or the other.
That all changed when I went deep into understanding the ways ADHD has shaped my world.
A few years ago I got seriously committed to getting to the root cause of how I was wired.
I’ve had so much success in my life so I had tremendous confidence. But in between every success, there was predictably a turbulent period that you could track with precision.
I began asking myself soul-searching and introspective questions.
Why was this?
Where do I continuously “go off track” to sabotage the success I had just built?
Why do I constantly feel “in a rush” “behind schedule” or “frenetic” energy?
Where can I learn more about my ADHD?
Who is the expert on all of this?
That’s when I discovered Dr. Hallowell.
He wrote “Driven to Distraction” in 1994 and since then has been a pioneer in the study of ADHD and effective treatments.
Dr. Hallowell
Edward (Ned) Hallowell, M.D. is a board-certified child and adult psychiatrist and world authority on ADHD. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Tulane Medical School, and was a Harvard Medical School faculty member for 21 years. He is the Founder of The Hallowell ADHD Centers in Boston MetroWest, New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Seattle.
He has spent the past four decades helping thousands of adults and children live happy and productive lives through his strength-based approach to neurodiversity, and has ADHD and dyslexia himself.
Dr Hallowell is a New York Times bestselling author and has written 20 books on multiple psychological topics. The groundbreaking Distraction series, which began with Driven to Distraction, co-authored with Dr John Ratey in 1994, sparked a revolution in understanding of ADHD.
Dr Hallowell has been featured on 20/20, 60 Minutes, Oprah, PBS, CNN, The Today Show, Dateline, Good Morning America, The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and many more. He is a regular columnist for ADDitude Magazine.
I ravenously consumed as much of his content as I could find. Including listening to several of his books, watching countless youtube videos, listening to him on podcasts, and more.
This information, insight, and explanation of ADHD was REVOLUTIONARY for me!
I discovered that he was still practicing medicine and had a national clinic.
I had to see him!
I was able to get in and I began treatment with him for my ADHD. Dr. Hallowell became my personal Psychiatrist for the treatment of my ADHD.
“Holy SH*T!”
I just knew my entire life was about to change.
We did a combination of medication and talk therapy. I will go more into the countless invaluable lessons I learned from him but today I’d like to focus on the foundational concept that shifted everything for me.
Dr. Hallowell has a brilliant analogy between the ADHD brain and a Ferrari.
The following is Dr. Hallowell’s explanation of this concept from an article he wrote for ADDitude Magazine:
Jeremy, age 12, sits in my office flanked by his mother and father….
…Jeremy and his parents seem tense. Jeremy, his baseball cap on backward, stares at a spot on the floor, as if he wants to be somewhere else….
I get to the point. “I have great news for you. We’ve learned a lot about you, Jeremy, and guess what? You have an amazing brain. Your brain is incredible.”
Jeremy looks up, and Mom and Dad lean back a bit. “Your brain is like a Ferrari…..
“Well, your brain is like a Ferrari race-car engine. It is very powerful. With the right care, you will win many races in your life.”
“But there is one problem.”
“You have bicycle brakes. Your brakes are not strong enough to control the powerful brain you’ve got.
So, sometimes, you race past places where you mean to stop, or you ignore instructions you mean to hear.
But don’t worry. I am a brake specialist. I will help you strengthen your brakes, so you can become the champion you are.”
This simple-to-understand concept created such a powerful shift in me!
For my entire life until then, brakes used to mean a “prohibitive force” dampening the speed and ability to go fast.
That couldn't be farther from the truth. It took crashing and burning in a massive way to learn this invaluable lesson.
Working with Dr. Hallowell helped me discover the simple concept that has changed my life:
The brakes help you go faster!
They allow you to take turns and steer away from trouble.
They allow you to avoid crashing into others and navigating the terrain in order to keep going.
I had so many emotions going through me upon discovering this knowledge.
“Where was this information the past 40 years?”
“Why am I just learning this now!?”
“How can I apply this to my day-to-day?”
and on and on and on…..
Today, I encourage you to embrace this idea and reflect on where it may be true in your life.
A good place to start is being honest about where you could “slow down to speed up”. When we start to slow down and create small pockets of space to think clearly, we can gradually shift the paradigm we’ve known our entire lives that there is “not enough time in the day”.
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