ADHD and Feeling Lucky

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in a big way in Montreal.

It has one of the biggest St Patrick’s Day parades in the world. The 3 hour parade has floats, costumes, music and of course a large replica of St Patrick.

It was known as ‘the parade that was never cancelled’ because since 1824 there has always been a parade.

That streak was broken in 2020 and 2021 because of Covid 19 ,but there are still fun and safe ways to celebrate.

St Patrick’s Day is great for many reasons including conversations about shamrocks ☘️☘️☘️ and Good Luck.

Do you think of yourself as a lucky person?

We tend to think of luck as something that is out of our control and we either have or we don’t.

However, psychologist Richard Wiseman studies the science of luck and discovered that lucky people have certain traits.

The really cool thing is, some of those traits are traits that ADHDers have.

Observant.

In one study Richard Wiseman asked participants to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside.

The participants who considered themselves lucky, performed this task in a few seconds,while the participants who consider themselves unlucky took 2 minutes.

How did they lucky people do it so much faster? They noticed the large message on the second page that said ‘Stop counting, there are 43 photos in this newspaper’.

ADHDers are incredibly observant and I am confident that you would have noticed that text!

Resilience

Resilience means the ability to recover quickly from a difficult situation or life experience. Wiseman found that lucky people are resilient.

ADHDers are too.

ADHD researchers have found that this is a quality ADHDers naturally have. No matter what happens you are able to dust yourself off, and feel optimistic and hopeful for the future.

So even if you haven’t thought of yourself as a lucky person before, perhaps you can start to shift that belief.