How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It)

by Jessica McCabe

My policy is to use the language that an individual person prefers: “brain-holder’s choice,” I call it.

Ultimately, my hope is to combat the underlying stigma surrounding ADHD through education and understanding, and normalize the experience of having ADHD enough that the meaning can, eventually, be assumed to be respectful regardless of the particular language used.

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), “disability” means you have a “mental or physical impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”—which can include focusing, working, or communicating.

We are here to learn. We make space for differences. And we allow all voices a chance to be heard.

My whole life, I felt like I was failing to be the person I was supposed to be.

I’ve never been great at meeting basic expectations. I could, however, exceed them. In school, I took standardized tests every year. These tests measured my performance in each subject by grade level. In third grade, my reading comprehension came back “PHS.” I asked my teacher what it meant.

The teacher gave me the same feedback that I had heard throughout my entire life: “You have so much potential!”

The fact that I could sometimes exceed expectations made it even more frustrating for me—and everyone around me—when I failed to meet the basic ones.

When my parents struggled with their marriage, I tried playing therapist. When my little brother experienced significant mental health issues, I tried to mediate between him and my parents. Sometimes, I parented him myself. After quite a bit of therapy, I now understand that this was not healthy, but I so desperately wanted to be a good daughter and make my disabled mom’s life easier that I did whatever I could, especially because I felt like such a “difficult” child.

By middle school, when I was responsible for motivating myself to do my work, bringing the right books to the right class, and managing assignments on my own, my academic life fell apart.

Around twelve, I was struggling so much that my mom brought me to a doctor, who diagnosed me with attention deficit disorder (ADD).[*1] I was prescribed daily stimulant medication, and it helped me focus.

As a gifted student, I was supposed to graduate college.

Be Successful I couldn’t reach my potential as a student, so I tried to reach it in my career.

pursued acting the same way I pursued everything—with total enthusiasm! Unless I got distracted…or

wasn’t just acting I struggled with. In the ten years after I left college, I quit, or was fired from, fifteen jobs and abandoned several careers.

WHAT I LEARNED I knew I wasn’t the person I was supposed to be, at least not consistently, and in lieu of other explanations, I accepted and internalized the ones given to me.

“Irresponsible” “Responsible people follow through,” I thought. “They don’t bail, procrastinate, or avoid things they are supposed to do.”

I’m “Careless” My teachers were the first to point out how “careless” I was. I’d neglect to turn in my homework, miss deadlines, and forget my lunch. My tests came back marked up in red with “careless mistakes” scribbled in the margin.

still say these negative things to myself sometimes, even though I know better now. These judgments—even once I learned how inaccurate they are, even now that I understand the biology behind the invisible obstacles I kept tripping over and blaming myself for—are long solidified by decades of neural pathways wiring together and firing together.

When you boil it down, there were five strategies that I used to use. Constantly. I’ve compiled them here for your convenience.

1. DENY Very few people ever knew how much I was struggling because I became a master of pretending everything was fine.

2. APOLOGIZE If people had to know I couldn’t meet basic expectations, at least I could feel properly bad about it.

3. BEG I begged. For forgiveness, for a loan, for another chance, for an extension on a deadline.

TRY TO DO BETTER NEXT TIME If I couldn’t meet expectations, I could try to exceed them. I could overgive, overwork, overplan. Forgot to buy someone a $30 birthday gift?

5. TRY HARDER I never forgot the line I saw on so many report cards right after “so much potential”: “needs to try harder.”

I wasn’t trying hard enough morphed into a more insidious belief. I’m “Not Doing Enough” I constantly felt like I was supposed to be doing more. My meds allowed me to do that.

After watching me struggle ineffectively with some task, one of my friends asked me, “Have you ever asked yourself if there’s an easier way to do this?” “I’m just used to things being hard.” I looked at him. “No. I’m just used to things being hard.”

I was trying so hard to force myself to fit the stencil cutout of who others expected me to be that I never got to know the person I was. I thought I was working to “meet my potential” and “be my best self,” but what I was actually doing was trying my hardest to be someone I’m not.

She responded, “You don’t need to be smaller. You need to be bigger.” I was confused. “You think you need to be small, so you’re making yourself small. And maybe it made sense ten years ago, when you were trying to play a teenager, but you’re a woman now. You’re allowed to take up space.”

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that she was the first person to tell me I didn’t have to keep struggling to accomplish something that I couldn’t achieve despite my best efforts.

Instead, I realized, I needed to put my effort into figuring out why it wasn’t working when everyone around me kept telling me that it should.

Alison’s advice worked so well for me, I’ve included a permission slip in the back of this book (this page) for you to do the same. Whenever the efforts you’re putting in aren’t working, you have permission to just, for a little while, stop.

Spending time with people whose brains work the way yours does is an incredible experience. The shame begins to fall away, and we begin to see ourselves through one another’s eyes—as the funny or talented or curious or ambitious humans we are, with struggles that are perfectly normal—because while they might not make sense to those who are neurotypical, they are normal when you have ADHD.

Whenever you experience that gear-grinding feeling that tells you something isn’t working, don’t try harder. Try different.

Here’s what working with my brain looks like for me: Focusing on what does work for me rather than what “should.” Building a toolbox of strategies I can use for tasks with which I struggle. Doing my most challenging work at times when my brain works best. When possible, choosing ADHD-friendly products and services.

Asking for the tools/accommodations I need—or providing them myself. Approaching tasks as a negotiation. What do I need to get The Thing done? What does my brain need for that to be able to happen?

didn’t know that was an option. I expected them to tell me it was okay to do something else now. What I got was permission to keep going.

My community’s encouragement inspired me to make a video about how success isn’t about avoiding failure—it’s about continuing despite it.

Failing doesn’t make you a failure.

I can’t blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I’ve spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. —COLSON WHITEHEAD

When I’m focused or starting to find my focus, I often don’t look as if I’m doing it at all.

was grateful to have found a “potion” that worked for me and one that I had access to most of the time. But I didn’t like feeling so powerless without it. Trouble with focus was an ongoing, lifelong battle I was incredibly tired of fighting. So when I started digging into ADHD research, my first focus was on focus.

Wrong. The reality is, we have plenty of attention. What we lack is the ability to regulate our attention.

The ability to control our focus—also called top-down attentional control—relies on the prefrontal cortex. It is the last part of the brain to develop, and it develops even more slowly in those with ADHD. And even once it is fully developed, it’s still impaired.

the first video I ever watched about ADHD, a woman posting under the name “Just Jen” described her doctor’s explanation of attention as a door that was always open. Other people could close their door and focus, but in ADHD brains, the door lets everything in. We can’t ignore the things other people might be able to tune out.

It isn’t just external distractions that are hard to tune out, either. Our brains also have a harder time “shutting the door” on our anxieties, negative thoughts, or brilliant new ideas.

The flip side of the open-door-distractibility is hyperfocus—the experience of being so engaged we don’t notice anything outside our hyperfocus-tunnel and often can’t pull our attention away.

But hyperfocus is a function of the wonky attention regulation typical of ADHD brains.

Sometimes, hyperfocus works out great for us—and sometimes it doesn’t.[*1]

Still, it’s important to remember that any focus comes at a cost. The time may have flown by, but if our brains were working for ten hours straight, we’re going to feel it the next day—and probably have a harder time focusing.