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

by Jessica McCabe

Use cues to remind you of your intentions. While we want to be careful with to-do cues and where we introduce them, we can plaster intention-related cues all over the place. ADHD coach Caroline Maguire suggests we craft cues that remind us of the person we want to be and choose locations where we will find them throughout our day or week. These cues will help us connect our daily tasks to our greater goals and values, helping us remember why we wanted to do them in the first place.

After years of struggling with the fallout from our too-big, too-loud, too-unregulated feelings, it’s common for us to go to great lengths to avoid and/or suppress our emotions: We avoid situations that might bring up difficult emotions. We distract ourselves from them. We “reframe” or intellectualize our emotions. We try to make the situation more tolerable, often with food or substances, such as alcohol or drugs. We mask our feelings and pretend we’re fine.

Even adaptive coping strategies can become maladaptive, as is the case when an occasional “I’m just gonna escape into this book for a bit” turns into “I have spent my entire year in a book or, more accurately, six hundred books.” Research finds that cognitive avoidance—a set of coping mechanisms in which a person uses cognitive techniques like avoidance, suppression, or rumination to escape mental and emotional distress—is particularly common among those with ADHD. When mindful coping crosses the line into unhealthy avoidance, we can end up avoiding or repressing emotions we need to face.

CHRONICALLY AVOIDING EMOTIONS IS PROBLEMATIC Emotions can’t be avoided or suppressed forever, and ignoring them comes with many negative consequences.

Suppressed feelings don’t stay suppressed. While some emotions can naturally come and go, the ones we push down on a regular basis don’t phase out of existence. Often, they intensify, especially if the situation that initially caused them isn’t resolved.

Physical symptoms like sleeplessness, chronic pain, gastrointestinal problems, and even sexual dysfunction can result when you persistently suppress intense emotions.

many people with ADHD experience psychological symptoms that create distance between them and their feelings, including: Dissociation: The feeling of being disconnected or detached from your surroundings, or even from yourself. Anhedonia: The impaired ability to experience pleasure, even when doing something you usually enjoy. Alexithymia: The inability or impaired ability to recognize and describe your feelings. We might know something’s wrong but not what.

“When experiencing intense emotions, I might appear catatonic. Something major could be happening and I’m either super calm or don’t have any reaction at all. Sometimes it makes me look like I don’t care, but it’s the opposite: I care so much that I can only process the major emotion one small piece at a time.”

WAIT before taking action. Immediately “fixing” (or even “reframing”) the situation that made you feel an emotion can reinforce the idea that our emotions aren’t allowed to exist.

Sit with your feelings. As my therapist taught me, even our biggest feelings can’t last forever; in most cases, the body can only sustain an intense emotion for about twenty minutes. It can often be less emotionally distressing to sit with your feelings and watch them fade than to dodge them and have them hang around waiting for you to notice them.

Take time to explore your emotions. This can mean drawing, painting, or talking them out—with a journal or a third party who may be able to help us process and figure out what, if anything, we want to do next.

Use them as (motivational) fuel. ADHDers often push past challenges and take on projects that no one else would because of the passion driving us. We can also use our strong emotions and passion to motivate others, which can help us be effective leaders. Successful problem-solving relies on emotion and motivation; when extrinsic motivation is lacking, i.e., we’re not getting the results we want quickly enough, we can tap into our emotions to get the engine revved back up. Use them as a compass. Sometimes our gut knows something is off before our brain does. If something comes up on your emotional radar as danger, it might be worth checking out.

When possible, go into difficult situations with a plan, especially one you’ve worked through with a trusted friend or mental health professional. And if you need to, step away. While you don’t want to avoid emotions chronically, that doesn’t mean you have to constantly force yourself to feel them, either. Put your effort into things you can control. One of my favorite ways to be okay when things are not okay for an extended period of time is to redirect my efforts to stuff I can directly control.

Sometimes our emotions will swallow us regardless of how many coping skills we have because life is hard and ADHD makes it harder. Grief happens. So does trauma. And opening up these doors to big feelings can let in an absolute flood. I’m grateful I opened them, though. Understanding the sheer vastness of the pain and that there is no magical point at which it goes away made me decide not to add to the ocean I and others drown in. It helped me realize I needed a boat. Someplace safe and warm I could mentally escape to when I needed a break.

While those with ADHD tend to be sensitive and may even pick up on others’ emotions thanks to our higher likelihood to be hypervigilant, we might misunderstand other people’s perspectives and emotions. These misunderstandings can happen either because we miss crucial details about a situation, or because we’re so caught up in our own stories and emotions that we can’t see past them.[*3] Even those who are highly empathic can have a difficult time applying their empathy effectively. Feeling overly sad or distressed when someone else is suffering can make it hard to give them effective support. We might have a hard time regulating our empathy, just like we have a hard time regulating our emotions and our attention.

We often have this “I’ll take anyone” or “I’ll do anything” approach to relationships. We underestimate our worth to the point that we feel we’re lucky to have anyone in our lives. As a result, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to maintain relationships with people who are a bad fit. Thinking we’re unlovable: Because we have fewer people to lean on, we can seem “high maintenance.” Those closest to us sometimes get frustrated or need a break from our need for support, which can trigger our rejection sensitivity (see sidebar below) and reinforce the idea that we’re too much, not worth it, or even unlovable.

When it comes to rejection sensitivity, we quite naturally adjust our behavior to avoid it: we people-please; we suppress our ADHD and cut off pieces of ourselves trying to fit in; we avoid risky social situations entirely. We’ve been experiencing rejection since before we had metacognition—the ability to think about our thoughts. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned that we’re often rejected for our behavior, so it makes sense that our go-to strategy for avoiding the pain of rejection is adjusting our behavior.

When we like someone and are excited about the possibility of a new friendship, that feeling (like all our feelings) can be very intense. Sometimes we respond to that feeling by acting as if a secure connection already exists: we share intimate details about our lives, make elaborate future plans, hyperfocus on them to the detriment of other relationships and obligations, or blow up their phone or social media to a cringe-inducing extent. Sometimes this behavior scares people off. Other times the person responds well but is disappointed later when we can’t keep up that level of intensity. In the worst cases, we find ourselves deeply attached to people who take advantage of us or treat us poorly. In the best cases, these relationships settle into a more balanced rhythm, ultimately becoming the kind of friendship we so badly wanted to already have.

friends are not something we find. This is good news! Really—it takes a lot of pressure off ourselves. If we can’t just make friends, we can start to focus on something more approachable and low stakes: doing activities we find meaningful with people who agree.

We’re not going to click with everyone, but meeting new people is the best way to find the ones with whom we will. This can keep us from getting stuck trying to be friends with people who aren’t a great fit or who treat us badly. It can also help us avoid overrelying on any one person for support, making our relationships more sustainable.

Ask for what you want, but respect their limits. As Betty Martin and Robyn Dalzen share in The Art of Giving and Receiving: when receiving, it’s your job to ask for what you want, communicate expectations, and respect the limits of the giver. When you’re the one giving, respect your limits. In the excitement of “I have something to offer! That somebody wants!” we can forget to ask ourselves if this is okay for us.

There are two types of empathy: cognitive empathy, which relies on the ability to take someone else’s perspective, and affective empathy, which relies on the ability to understand and identify emotions. It’s possible to be great at one type of empathy while struggling with the other.

a lot of my impulsive actions resulted from my intolerance for uncertainty. This, it turns out, is common among those who, like me, also have anxiety disorders.

My partner had an ex who once asked, point blank, “Why can’t you just be normal?” We can’t be “normal.” We can only be ourselves. We wonder if we can ever be enough.

Yes, just because we could take care of something yesterday doesn’t mean that we can today.

There is a limit to how many of these tools we can use at any given time.

Those with ADHD turn to extensive and elaborate systems to help them be consistently productive, manage their time, and keep their house relatively livable, not because it’s fun but because we don’t have a choice. We can’t opt out of trying to manage our ADHD, no matter the cost, because the whole world is telling us we have to figure it out. We aren’t good enough if we don’t. We’re not acceptable if we don’t. We’re going to get fired if we don’t. The cost is even higher if we don’t.

enjoy my life and care for the people I love in the ways I already could. I needed to accept who I am, where I am, and what I had to give, and find joy and satisfaction in myself and my journey “as is.” Even as I’m pursuing “more.” Even as I’m trying to grow. If my sense of worth hinged on being someone I’m not, or somewhere I’m not, I might spend my whole life chasing those things before I allow myself to actually live. I might (and did) lose the life I wanted. Even as I tried to make it to the starting line of being “good/capable enough” to live it.

You already are the person you’re supposed to be. You’re already reaching the range of potential you have with the tools and skills and resources available to you. That range may change over time, but this is how our brains work. We’ll work better on some days than others and our level of focus will depend on how engaging a task is. We’ll get distracted. We’ll need things written down so we don’t have to hold so much in our head. We’ll lose track of time and underestimate how long things will take. We’ll be impressively good at some things and epically bad at others. We’ll have a lot to give, and have trouble consistently giving it. And we are acceptable humans as is, not once we stop having ADHD. You do not need to be fixed because you are not a broken version of normal.

You don’t have to be who or where you want to be to begin enjoying yourself, accepting yourself, respecting yourself, caring for yourself. To begin leading a life in line with your values. And you don’t have to be capable of all of the things to be valuable. That’s a lie we were taught. You already are the person you’re supposed to be. And you, as you are, have plenty to give. It doesn’t mean you can’t grow or that you can’t pursue goals. But it does mean you don’t have to earn the right to enjoy your life, care for yourself, contribute your talents, or take breaks, or do whatever else you’ve put on hold. You can do all that now. Or just a little part of it. Even if it’s a smaller part than you’d like.

The most successful people aren’t the ones who get good at what they’re bad at; they’re the ones who lean into their strengths.

You can start leaning into your strengths by doing the stuff that comes easily to you. “What do I find easy or effortless? What do people say they admire that I can do? What do people turn to me for help with? When given the opportunity to do it however I want, how do I approach a hard task?”