Piano Guidance
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What is a ADHD spiral?

You do something impulsive, or under stress. Instantly, you feel ashamed and embarrassed, which turns into frustration, anger, despair, or anxiety. The more you feed intense feelings with negative thoughts, the more emotional distress you inflict on your ADHD brain. Break that unhealthy spiral with these strategies.

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Break out of your fear or making mistakes or driving people away. Learn how to stay calm under pressure, reset and re-center after a snafu using the strategies in this video.

How to Stop Those Negativity Spirals

You do something impulsive, or under stress. Instantly, you feel ashamed and embarrassed, which turns into frustration, anger, despair, or anxiety.

Break that unhealthy spiral with these strategies.

1. Re-Center Yourself

When feeling under pressure, stop to meditate for 1 to 3 minutes.

Breathe in so deeply that your stomach pushes out. Then, exhale until your stomach sinks in. Repeat.

2. Create a Mental Sanctuary

Link soothing thoughts to a real-world reminder, like a special tree you walk past daily. Think calm thoughts whenever you see it. Imagine the tree whenever you need to feel calm.

3. Surround Yourself with Calm

Hang artwork that helps you connect with your purpose.

Decorate with items that give you feelings of well-being, which help balance feelings of distress.

4. Slow Down By 25%

Reduce your pace. Pause and reflect. Notice the birds singing or the wind blowing through your hair.

This lets your mind and emotions stay at ease.

5. Post Reminders

Write down your strategies. Put them in places you see every day – like the middle of your steering wheel. Create a folder of quotes or images that inspire you. Leaf through it when you feel yourself spiraling downward.

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How can I make 2 years go by faster?

"Activities like listening to music, reading books, and seeking new experiences will help reduce anxiety and make the time seem to pass faster," says Bozeman. "These activities address general mood and well-being. Interacting with others and physical activity fall into this category as well."

Although standard measurements of time like minutes, hours, and days exist, the way you perceive these temporal units can change, depending on what you're doing and how you're feeling. "What's so fascinating about time is that it's both objective and subjective," psychologist Logan Jones, Psy.D., tells mbg. "It's a measurable unit and metric, in which seconds and minutes tick by with predictable, meticulous precision, yet our experience of time can be expansive or constricted depending on our neurological and emotional state." Throughout a typical day or week, the way we perceive time usually roughly matches up with the objective time of clocks and calendars. But when routine is broken in some way—whether it's a novel experience, an intense emotion, or lack of activity—how we perceive the passage of time is affected. Michael Flaherty, Ph.D., a sociologist at Eckhert College who has studied the perceived passage of time for the last 30 years, has one theory for why this happens. The way we experience time depends on what he calls "the density of human experience," which measures the volume of both objective and subjective information. The density of human experience is high when a lot is happening. But paradoxically, the density of experience is also high when seemingly nothing is going on. This "empty" period of time is actually filled with subjective experience. You're turning inward and concentrating on your own actions and surroundings. When you experience an intense psychological reaction, whether it's boredom, shock, fear, or anxiety, the density of human experience is high, and time seems to pass more slowly.

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