Get your eyes checked!
...and your hearing too.
Some background…
Since my diagnosis in 2022, I've done many, many things to manage my ADHD. If you are interested, I'd be happy to share that list. They all seem to help but, lately, I’ve realized my brain was a bit sluggish. This sluggish and foggy feeling started when I got Lyme Disease from a tick bite in July of 2023. If you've had COVID, you may have experienced some brain fog. The Lyme Disease brain fog is similar but more significant and longer lasting. I had been attributing my sluggish brain feeling to that 2023 infection. I had accepted that was just my new normal. Strangely, however, I wasn’t really conscious that my brain was still behaving sluggishly or in a fog until very recently.
In mid January I went for an eye exam for the first time in about 5 years. The doctor told me that I've been doing myself a disservice by wearing 2.5 magnification, drug store reading glasses. To my surprise, my vision had deteriorated to the point of needing 3.75 magnification in my left eye and 3.25 in my right eye. And just as important to note, my distance vision also needs correction, now! This was a new development! I got my new prescription glasses about a week after the eye exam. One pair for distance and reading and another for computer and reading. I got 2 pairs of progressive lenses because my girlfriend told me she wasn’t going to help me keep track of THREE pairs of glasses.
After just a couple of days of wearing my new specs, I felt sharper, mentally. I was able to be more on task without any extra effort. I mentioned this to my boss and we both wondered aloud why things had changed. Having an ADHD brain means that I couldn't just leave it at “I wonder why.” I had to figure out why I felt sharper and more on-task. It was a couple days later, as I was shaving, that I recognized that the thing that had changed was the new glasses.
But, how could new glasses make me mentally sharper?
Later that afternoon, I remembered a recent study that was getting some attention on the internet last summer. The study concluded that people with un-managed hearing loss suffered quicker cognitive decline than those who used hearing aids. Apparently, if you have hearing loss, your brain spends a significant amount of cognitive bandwidth trying to make sense of what you just heard. That bandwidth is stolen from the parts of your brain that are normally used for things like higher thinking! Surely there is a similar correlation to vision loss and vision aids (glasses)?! Sure enough, there are plenty of studies pointing to the same thing for vision. I’ve had my new glasses for several months, and I still feel more engaged and sharper. Better still, my ADHD symptoms are significantly reduced.
Don’t take my word for it! Here’s some links that back me up!
Hearing aids slow cognitive decline