Managing and Thriving with ADHD

Once the symptoms of ADHD are managed, we can start exploring the ways your unique brain serves and benefits you and those around you. Individuals with ADHD are often highly creative and work in unconventional ways, frequently as entrepreneurs.

Living with ADHD can feel like a double-edged sword. While there are many unique strengths that come with it, in a world that caters to neurotypical brains, we also face a lot of challenges. Therefore, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and understanding the structures and routines you need to manage your ADHD symptoms are critical. Although receiving an ADHD diagnosis can be jarring, it does not have to be bad news. Instead, it can lead to self-discovery and understanding. Learning to channel the ways that ADHD makes you unique can be empowering.

An Example

Maybe this story, fictionalized from a compilation of symptoms we see in patients, will resonate with you…

Francine wakes up to her morning alarm. She immediately hits the snooze button. As she lies in bed, she starts running through the list of everything she needs to remember to do before work: pack her lunch, grab the library books to return, and pack her gym clothes. While running through this mental to-do list, her alarm sounds again, and she hits the snooze button once more. She calculates how long everything will take and compares it to the time left before she needs to leave to catch the bus. Worried she can’t remember the bus schedule, she pulls it up on her phone. The notifications distract her, and while she is looking through them, her alarm sounds a third time, and she hits snooze again. A news article catches her attention, and before she knows it, she has spent ten minutes reading. At this point, she has been awake for almost 45 minutes but has not moved. Suddenly, she remembers the time, realizes she only has 15 minutes to get out of the house, and jumps out of bed. She runs around frantically, getting dressed by grabbing clothes from the pile of clean laundry on the floor she has yet to put away, and trying to collect everything on her mental to-do list. She dashes out the door just in time to see the bus drive by, chasing it down. Gasping for air, she realizes she forgot her gym clothes, the library books, and to put on deodorant. She will have to buy lunch because there was no time to throw anything together…there goes her budget for the week. “Why am I such a mess?” she thinks, shaking her head in embarrassment.

While we all have mornings that don’t go well, for folks with ADHD, these mornings happen more often than not. Without recognizing that these experiences have a reason, it is easy to believe the lies your brain tells you—that you are lazy, disorganized, and a failure of an adult who will never amount to anything successful.

Practical Tips and Advice

Once we accept that ADHD makes organizing our lives more challenging, we can start building systems and routines to support ourselves and also have compassion for those days when everything seems to fall apart. Requesting a later start time at work, asking for remote work, having designated places in our homes for items to minimize time spent looking for them, or meal prepping lunches in advance could all have helped Francine have a smoother morning.

The practical strategies you implement will be unique to you, and there is no one-size-fits-all plan. However, collaborating with a therapist or bouncing ideas off people who also have ADHD to hear what works for them can help you move in the right direction. Implementing and prioritizing self-care strategies, like maintaining a consistent bedtime to get enough sleep or silencing phone notifications to minimize distractions, are great places to start.

Embracing Your ADHD Journey

If you are currently in a space where the challenges of living with an ADHD brain outweigh the benefits, like creativity or out-of-the-box thinking, working with a clinician who specializes in ADHD support could be a huge help. Someone who will listen to you with compassion, help you foster self-compassion and acceptance instead of criticism, and empathize with the ways your brain can be frustrating to manage will go a long way towards helping you identify what works best for you. If you’re wondering how this might work for you, we would love to chat and see how we might be able to support you! Please reach out - we look forward to hearing your story.