As Psychologists we keep talking about self-monitoring and we often use reflective questions. Why? What do we even mean by that? Why is it important?

I think just about everyone has heard of an IQ test or the idea of IQ – that is our Intellectual Quotient or, the thing that measures how ‘smart you are’. I remember several years ago there was a ‘play along at home’ quiz show on TV that would help you estimate your IQ. In truth, understanding intelligence is not that simple. Cognition, learning and performance are complicated components of an individual’s psychology and assessing and making meaning of results is a highly scientific process. And, when explored in the context of clinical, academic or performance dilemmas, the results can be extremely meaningful and can lead to helpful clinical, educational and occupational interventions.

Mindfulness and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder might seem like an impossible pairing and this assumption is understandable. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that makes it really hard to use executive skills like planning, concentrating, being focused, organising, decision making, managing impulses and time management. In the face of these challenges, engaging in an exercise that requires sustained attention and concentration might seem paradoxical and a strategy that just isn’t accessible for people with ADHD. But it is actually for this very reason that mindfulness is such a great tool to support the challenges associated with ADHD. Excitingly, evidence is suggesting that regular and consistent mindfulness practice helps to strengthen executive skills for people with ADHD. Plus, there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness-based practice is associated with a reduction in stress, anxiety and worry, all of which are highly comorbid with ADHD and definitely make using executive skills even harder. Given this, learning to be more mindful and using a framework such as mindfulness to build the capacity to focus when needed makes sense.

It is said that we make on average 35,000 decisions every single day. Of course not all of them are conscious decisions. It’s no wonder that by the end of the day we can experience what’s called decision fatigue. Decision fatigue not only kills motivation, but it can lead to avoiding decision making altogether, or an increase in impulsive behaviour. So what do we do about it? Before we launch into that, let’s explore a little more about how it comes about and how it impacts our behaviours.

Last week when the cases started to rise in Melbourne, the very first thing I noticed was that conversationally people around me seemed to be emotionally preparing themselves for another lockdown. Over the course of that one day, speculation about lockdown was the major topic of conversation in all conversations I had. I noticed that many were starting to think about how they were going to manage should a lockdown be announced and given our experiences last year and the circuit breaker lockdown in February this year, this is unsurprising. This is what we humans do as a way of emotionally protecting ourselves from hard news; we imagine difficult situations and how we’ll handle it so that we feel prepared should that imagined scenario come true.

At Melbourne Wellbeing Group we work with a lot of people with obsessive compulsive disorder, and predominantly the treatment that people are looking for is individual exposure response prevention (ERP), therapy that specifically targets their OCD. This is fantastic because as most people know ERP is considered the gold standard treatment for OCD. However, OCD doesn’t just impact the person with OCD. Often loved ones and family members have been pulled into the rituals and compulsions, accommodating OCD, and when this is occurring it is much harder for the individual engaging in treatment to effectively treat their OCD. Research into family accommodation and OCD effectiveness has clearly demonstrated that the presence of family accommodation is correlated with more severe OCD symptoms and a greater impact of these symptoms. As such, family accommodation is an important aspect of OCD that needs attending to.