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

by Jessica McCabe

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.

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

Take a break from self-reg. Many people with ADHD feel like they’re “bad at relaxing” because while they’re TRYING to relax, they end up doing something else. What I have learned is that, for us, taking a break from self-regulating IS a break. Sometimes, letting your brain do what it wants—even if that’s starting a new project—is more restful than asking it to focus on a relaxing activity.

limiting my to-do list so I don’t get overwhelmed and avoid it entirely,

While it’s great to focus, there’s value in getting distracted.

Our brains are incredible at divergent thinking, coming up with lots of ideas, new ways to combine things, and innovative ways to solve problems. This is why many of us are inventors, early tech adopters, industry leaders, and disrupters. And in the relentless pursuit of improving our ability to focus, we might forget to allow space for that.

I’m currently learning to build in “palate cleansers” when I can’t focus. These palate cleansers are activities I can do for a short period of time to unstick from one task so I can move on to the next.

Delegating individual tasks often requires more cognitive resources than it saves for those of us with ADHD. Delegating entire areas of responsibility, however, can be more executive function efficient because it allows someone else to take over both the doing of a task and the management of it. Handing your partner a grocery list will save you one trip to the store, but mutually deciding that your partner is the one in charge of making sure there is food in the house frees up a ton of brain bandwidth.

Keep systems simple. While it might be fun to set up an elaborate organizational system when we’re hyperfocusing on it (see: issues with response inhibition), being able to maintain that system when we need to turn our attention to other things is another story. Simplifying your systems so they’re easier to maintain can make it more likely to be—and stay—functional in the long term. An example of this is “books go on the bookshelf” as opposed to “books need to be put on the correct bookshelf, sorted by color and size.”

Beverages that have gone flat or missing

An ADHD coach once pointed out that play has three parts: setup, the play itself, and cleanup. The same is true for pretty much everything we do, from making dinner to attending a meeting.[*5] But those of us with ADHD often forget about the “setup” and “cleanup” part, and only account for the time we think it’ll take us to do the thing.

Take time away. Only give yourself the amount of time you think you need to work, but set a timer; allow yourself to hit pause on the timer to that time and step away to stretch, do some push-ups, or think; and resume the timer again when you’re ready to come back to the task. This gives you the urgency of having a limited amount of time, while also offering a chance to reset your focus, unstick from a problem, or get a quick dopamine boost to help push through without eating into the time you’ve allotted.[*10]

If you know there’s somewhere you need to be, you can’t let yourself go too deep. For those who can’t control how deep they go, that often means not doing anything at all.

Set aside “flexible” days. If you can, decide on a couple of days when it doesn’t matter if you start working or come home late. This gives you built-in buffer time to catch up on stuff you missed, which can make it easier to stick to your schedule the rest of the week.

“As a teacher, I reserved one day a week where I told my family not to expect me home. Instead, I stayed at school until all the planning, paperwork, and other nagging tasks were done. Whether I was done at five or worked until security kicked me out, I always knew I had that time available.”

One off day shouldn’t ruin your week, let alone throw off the next three months.

One off day shouldn’t ruin your week, let alone throw off the next three months. Time management shouldn’t take the spontaneity out of your life or the joy out of your work. The truth is, if you have to optimize to that extent, you have too much on your plate. You’re going to burn out. Or, like me, rebel.

I need time to wander. Time when time doesn’t matter. If I don’t give that to myself, I have learned my brain will take it anyway.

7 Trying to stick to a schedule we made with the same brain that has no concept of how long things take is an exercise in immediate failure, as many of us have long ago discovered. Interestingly, we’re usually better at making a schedule for someone else, maybe because it taps into cool executive function; we’re not being influenced by how fun or horrible the task sounds because we aren’t the ones who have to do it.

Barkley argues that taking “time away” from a task for those with ADHD is a better way of accommodating time management issues on assignments—because extra time alone is meaningless for those with no sense of time.

When we do a “simple” task—say, making a phone call—we’re not just dealing with that task. We’re also dealing with an emotional barrier that has been built from past failures with the task. Brendan Mahan, ADHD coach and founder of ADHD Essentials, calls this barrier a “Wall of Awful.” The more we’ve struggled with a task in the past, the more failure, disappointment, rejection, and worry we’ve experienced as a result. The more of these negative experiences we have endured, the higher that wall. We don’t just need enough motivation to complete the task. We also need enough motivation—and often time—to climb the emotional wall in front of it.

What I didn’t know then but understand now is that we don’t need motivation to take action. In fact, it often happens in reverse: action can generate motivation. Here are some examples: Picking up our phone often motivates us to check our email, text messages, or social media. Sitting on the couch motivates us to pick up the remote. Planning a road trip motivates us to make music playlists.

Think of motivation as a bridge that helps us go from wanting to do a thing to actually getting it done. Those with ADHD often don’t have as many “motivational planks” to get across. You can hop over little gaps with willpower, but if half the bridge is missing, you’ll need to add some planks.

If it’s daunting, take it down a notch—and if you’re having a bad brain day, take it down a couple more notches.

resparklize.

While cued recall and serial recall aren’t impaired in ADHD brains, studies done on ADHD children and teens suggest that free recall is. Free recall, also referred to as uncued recall, is the ability to spontaneously remember something without a cue to prompt us. For example, we know we brought a jacket to school, and maybe even remember where we put it, but we’ll probably forget to grab it on our way out the door unless something (or someone) reminds us.

Give yourself a hook to hang new info on. Those with “great” memory are those who can chunk data together more effectively. Giving yourself a “hook” to hang it on can help. Ask for questions or topics in advance, get an overview of what a meeting will cover, ask what a story is about (so you understand how the details relate), or quickly review new material before trying to intentionally learn it.

Forgetfulness has given me experiences and an entire career that I wouldn’t otherwise have. The differences in my memory have helped me learn useful compensatory skills. Because I have trouble remembering where I put things, I’m now a pro at using search functions on webpages and computer programs. Because I don’t assume anyone remembers anything, I’ve become a good science communicator. I’m motivated to collect and share what I’ve learned because I know that I will forget if I don’t.

Throughout the day, I hear that I am wrong about what I’m feeling, or that I shouldn’t be feeling it.

people with ADHD are often misdiagnosed with mood disorders,

And because we also “base our interpretations on the most recently supplied social information”—if the current message we’re getting is negative (like, they haven’t responded to our text messages saying we had a good time) we assume the status of the relationship is negative.