Excessive movement common among children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is actually vital to how they remember information and work out complex cognitive tasks, a new study shows. The findings show the longtime prevailing methods for helping children with ADHD may be misguided...“What we’ve found is that when they’re moving the most, the majority of them perform better,” Rapport said. “They have to move to maintain alertness.”
By contrast, the children in the study without ADHD also moved more during the cognitive tests, but it had the opposite effect: They performed worse.
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It seems like something body movement may calm down racing thoughts in ADHD patients, which helps with focusing. Movement of controls may be a sign of anxiety or distraction, which explains why they performed worse.
It’s not rare for such studies to get cause-effect links completely wrong.
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It is an old post, but I’ll share my thoughts regardless.
I always learned that people with ADHD have too much energy, their inner world moves faster than the outer world. I think their energy just needs to get out. If someone without ADHD gets nervous or stressed, the person starts moving. Walking around, shaking, anything to lose the stress on the mind. If they wouldn’t, the stress would consume them and put them in a burn-out. ADHD would be similar to a permanent stress, someone with ADHD has to lose the stress to prevent a burn-out (often called a melt-down with kids, stress builds up and suddenly explodes in anger).
I can’t really speak from an ADHD point of view though, so please correct me if my thought is wrong! All I got to work with is my literature and my own ADD ^^
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I’m not sure stress has anything to do with it - it’s a very dodgy word in general. ADHD is known for proneness to boredom. This seems to be enough to explain the responsive behaviour.
ADHD would be similar to a permanent stress, someone with ADHD has to lose the stress to prevent a burn-out (often called a melt-down with kids, stress builds up and suddenly explodes in anger).But anger isn't involved in the types of movement examined in the article. It's probably the absence of sufficient stimulation as opposed to irritation.
Firstly, I said it is similar to stress, not the same. I don’t know how to call it. The drive to just need to do something, that energy need to be lost. You could also see that as decreasing the amount of boredom. With both stress and boredom, one needs to do something to lose the energy build-up.
I also said that if it builds up for too long, anger comes out. I never said the article refers to that. Please don’t fill in blanks.
I actually read “without ADHD” there as “with ADHD” and that changed the whole thing. Too bad you can’t delete posts.
If you want to delete a post, send me a message with a link to the exact post and instructions on what to delete, and I could remove or edit it for you.
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