ADHD Predominantly Inattentive Treatment with Cognitive Therapy and Training

Cognitive training and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) sound similar and they are both helpful for ADHD Predominantly Inattentive treatment but they are not the same thing. The easiest way to explain the difference is to think of ADHD as if it were a football game where the symptoms of ADHD are what is to be defeated and the ADHD treatments are what we are going to use to prepare us to win this game.

In any football game there are barriers to winning. In this ADHD football game the barriers to defeating the ADHD Predominantly Inattentive symptoms are a set of trait that could be thought of as weaknesses in our brains.

 These weaknesses causing our ADHD symptoms included deficits in working memory, deficits in our divided attention skills and deficits in our ability to improve our mood. People with symptoms of ADHD Predominantly Inattentive have symptoms related to an inability to filter out distraction and an inability to hold one thing in mind while attending to another. To make matters worse, people with ADHD Inattentive also have an increased incidence of mood problems such as anxiety and depression and these mood problems worsen our working memory and divided attention problems.

So to win this ADHD game, we are going to need ADHD treatments that strengthen our mood and a treatment that strengthens our working memory and divided attention deficits. Luckily we have, at our disposal, the ADHD treatment tools to shore up all of these weaknesses in the form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Training which is also known as Brain Training. These ADHD treatment tools have been shown in repeated studies to help ADHD Inattentive symptoms though they have not been found to be quite as effective for the treatment of the other subtypes of ADHD.

The mood strengthener is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It acts as the cheerleader in our brain and urges us to push our negative thoughts out of our brain. This CBT cheerleader tells our brain to take our negative and destructive thoughts and, "Push in back, push in back, waaaay back. Push in back, Push in back waaaay back!!"

Cognitive training, on the other hand, is to ADHD treatment, like the extra laps and the extra weight training and scrimmage practice that the coach is making us do to get our bodies stronger so that we can win our game. Cognitive training exercises consist of brain activities, proven to help ADHD Inattentive symptoms.  These activities, when done for 20 minutes a day, strengthen our divided attention skills and our working memory and the benefits last for years.

We can better defeat Inattentive ADHD symptoms with the use of ADHD treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Training. These two ADHD treatment tools sound the same and are both helpful in the treatment of ADHD but they address different brain weaknesses suffered by people with Inattentive ADHD.

You can find free Cognitive Behavioral therapy tools here and tomorrow I will post about the tools that are free or almost free that we can use for Cognitive Training.