Profs & Pints Richmond: Life Hacks for Distracted Brains

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Life Hacks for Distracted Brains,” a look at how we all could benefit from research-based strategies for managing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, with Laura E. Knouse, professor of psychology at the University of Richmond, licensed clinical psychologist, and author of Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-hacks-for-distracted-brains .]

Technology has altered our environments in ways that challenge our capacity to stay focused and complete tasks. Netflix beckons us away from doing the dishes. We doom scroll instead of undertaking planned projects. In bumping up against deadlines for completing important tasks we realize that we’ve been doing just about anything else.

Fortunately, the science of psychology offers insights into what we can do to take back our attention and bridge the gap between our intentions and our actions.

Learn new strategies for staying focused with Dr. Laura Knouse, a clinical psychologist who studies ADHD in adults and is an expert in using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat it.

In a talk geared toward a general audience but sure to also benefit those with ADHD diagnoses, she’ll discuss evidence-based approaches to helping people gain new self-regulation strategies and manage thoughts and feelings that reduce motivation.

To help you become better at starting and completing meaningful tasks, she’ll teach you how to recognize and change emotional states that reduce motivation, and also how to notice and respond to sneaky thoughts that can derail task-completion efforts.

You’ll learn hacks for staying focused and the basic psychological principles that explain why they work. These include the principle of negative reinforcement and also the Premack Principle, which holds that we’ll perform a less-preferred activity for the sake of being able to perform a more-preferred one.

Audience members will have the opportunity to develop personal action plans for using these hacks to progress toward one of their important (but avoided) goals. To offer more in-depth guidance after the talk, Professor Knouse will have copies of Living Well with Adult ADHD available for sale. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Pixabay.