Due to the Fact That Due to “temporary Blindness” You Are Chronically Late?
Are you constantly running late despite your best intentions and efforts? Do you regularly lose track of time? A condition known as temporary blindness can be the cause, but there are ways to deal with it and keep yourself on schedule.
What is temporary blindness?
Temporary blindness does not mean that you are disorganized. “There are people whose sense of time is slippery and fuzzy,” said Ari Tuckman, a Pennsylvania psychologist specializing in ADHD. These people may actually suffer from an inability to properly sense the passage of time. People with temporary blindness have a faulty internal clock. Sometimes they underestimate how long a task will take; in other cases, they overestimate it. People with temporary blindness are often late, while some unnecessarily compensate for this with chronic early age. In either case, the root cause is the same, although the resulting problems may differ.
“In life, time is everything,” said Stephanie Sarkis, a Florida-based psychotherapist. “When you miss the timing, it can be disastrous.” Chronic lateness can lead to a variety of negative consequences, from missed flights to broken relationships and being fired from work. For those arriving too early, the result is a waste of time as well as significant concerns about being late.
Temporary blindness can be congenital or situational.
Temporary blindness is a common symptom associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, temporary blindness isn’t unique to people with ADHD. “Some people tend to be bad at timing, even if they don’t have ADHD,” Tuckman said, noting that human ability exists continuously: some people are naturally very good at timing, and some are really bad at that time. like most of them are in the middle.
Temporary blindness can also be situational. For example, if you are so relaxed while on vacation that you cannot remember what day of the week it is, this is a brief temporary example of temporary blindness that will go away when you return to your normal life. Temporary blindness can also be caused by stress, anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, or substance abuse. “Time is a cognitive ability,” Tuckman said. “Anything that affects your cognitive ability can affect your sense of timing.”
Strategies for dealing with temporary blindness
Typical advice for those who need to get somewhere on time is to just wake up an hour early! – based on the assumption that a person is able to accurately determine the time. For people with temporary blindness, this advice will not work. Even when they do their best to estimate how long something can take, their estimates are often wrong, and there is no set of templates to the extent that they are wrong. “This is a wrong assessment, but sometimes it’s too late and sometimes it’s too early,” Sarkis said. “There is a discrepancy in this.”
If you think your timing is a little out of order, whether due to a disorder like ADHD or a situational stressor, there are strategies to help you cope:
Determine the root cause
Getting somewhere on time involves many different components that most people don’t need to think about, such as anticipating the necessary preparations, timing correctly, and planning for contingencies (such as heavy traffic or a late bus). … People who are chronically late due to temporary blindness may have problems with some or all of these steps.
“It’s important to understand exactly why something is happening in order to know how to target your intervention,” Tuckman said. Some people can only calculate times based on the best scenarios, without considering, for example, the fact that traffic can be during rush hour. Other people may forget all the preparations needed to walk out the door, while others may constantly struggle with losing important items, such as keys or wallet, causing a frantic search every time they need to leave. All of this can add up.
“[Identifying] where something is failing is the first step before proposing general solutions to the problem,” Tuckman said.
Visual cues like an analog clock can help
One way to keep track of time is to keep your analog clock visible wherever you are, be it a stand-alone wall clock or a wristwatch. The advantage of an analog display over a digital display is that the hands of the hours and minutes give a clear indication of how time is passing and how much time is left.
For example, if you need to leave at 2:00 pm and the clock shows 1:30, there is a clear visual representation of the remaining 30 minutes, while the digital clock is a little more abstract. “[Analog clock] is more tangible; you can see the passage of time, ”Tuckman said.
Generally speaking, these visual cues help make the time more specific.
Find an accountability partner
For deadlines that are really important, like showing up for interviews on time, an accountability partner helps. It can be as simple as asking a friend to write you a reminder when you need to start preparing to leave. “When your friend [writes to you], you will look at him because we always watch text messages,” Sarkis said.
Other examples might be getting someone to help you with the planning needed to complete a large project on time, or reminding you of an important task.
Make it a habit to actively manage your time.
People with temporary blindness often find it difficult to determine how they are spending their time. Whether they spend more time on social media than they think, underestimating how long a task will take, or overlooking certain elements of a task, it all adds up. Takman advises developing awareness and awareness of where you are spending your time.
“Time management often starts with managing distractions or managing temptations,” Tuckman said. Whether it means installing an internet blocker on your computer or actively tracking how much time you spend on certain tasks, it is important to have an accurate idea of what you are doing and how long it takes. This is useful for anyone with a busy schedule, but even more important for those with temporary blindness who may have a hard time coping with everyday tasks.
There is no simple solution for congenital temporary blindness, which requires coping strategies to compensate. For those with ADHD-related temporary blindness, medications can be of great value, as the condition may result from inadequate levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. “It’s a neurobiological disease,” Sarkis said. “You wouldn’t blame someone with diabetes for having an insulin problem.”