I’ve been reading the first book of the Percy Jackson series with my daughter. You can imagine my amusement when I started reading a book with my daughter where the protagonist turns out to be the half blood son of Poseidon. The part that is actually amusing is the fact that the characteristics of this “special child” is that he has ADHD. Without giving too much of the book away, Percy’s ADHD symptoms are brought on because his mind is tuned for battle. Now, while I get a good chuckle out of the idea that I might be a half-blood child of a Greek God, I can’t help but smile at the correlation between my personal experience with being more able to focus during “battle”.

As the old sports adage goes, sometimes it takes a good pop to the head to get yourself into the game. This is very true for me not only in sports, but in many things in life. Take, for example, my earlier post about liking it when I have that feeling of my hair on fire. When going through the day to day of work, or whatever it is, focus is harder to achieve for me when things feeling as though they are unmanageably busy. In the thick of “battle”, I have a much better ability to focus. Time seems to slow a tick. If you want to go all geeky about it, picture the imagery of the stop motion camera work from “The Matrix”. Everything becomes clear and decisions on the next move is easier to see.

This all fits with the Hartmann Hunter Theory. If behavior is adaptive from our collective history, and those with ADHD are descendent of hunters or warriors, it is possible that this ability to focus during moments of intensity is because my ancestors were from the hunter/warrior thread of human evolution.

So, what now? How do I take this and adapt it to my current life? Can medication help level out the slow periods to make them more productive? Do I need to work at having my life more scheduled, or keep pushing the needle towards red? Or maybe I just need to realize that I’m getting along just fine and I need to keep on keeping on.