Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain

by Peter Shankman

Clutter is just distractions waiting to happen.

Take a half hour now and clean up your work environment. It’s the easiest, most foolproof way to instantly improve your focus and work at a frighteningly higher level than you’re used to.

So while it seems like this book is made up of “common sense,” in fact, it’s not—it’s made up of tried-and-true rituals and solutions that work not only for me, but for tons of people around the world—as long as they’re actually put into play. In the end, it doesn’t matter how logical this or any advice you get is—if you’re not doing anything with it, it won’t help you at all.

So I encourage you: Figure out what works for you from the advice here, augment it to benefit you more, change what needs to be changed, adjust what helps you the most. But do something. Much like a gym membership, all the tools, tricks, and hacks in the world won’t help you if you don’t choose to use them.

We have rules for a reason. You want freedom? You want to be faster than everybody else? You want to let your ADHD take you to places you never thought possible? It can, beyond your wildest dreams. But it’s not free. It comes with a price. That freedom looks at you and says, “You want me? Fine. Here’s what it’s going to take to get me.” Sounds trite, but it’s true.

To truly thrive with ADHD, you simply have to have rules.

To truly thrive with ADHD, you simply have to have rules, whatever they may be.

ADHD is tricky. As free as we can be, as much as we can come up with ideas that work on the fly, we can occasionally start to get cocky. We can forget that it takes only one bad decision to start a cycle that doesn’t end until we do.

SQUIRREL!: The benefits of ADHD have a cost. They’re not free. Want to enjoy your faster than normal brain? You’ve got to pay for it, and that payment comes in the form of following some rules.

In other words, when you have ADHD, there’s a lot of free will that isn’t exactly free. For us, free will works up to a point, then something else happens. I don’t know whether it’s the dopamine (it probably is) or if it’s just the fact that ADHD people tend to have much higher instances of addictive personality than non-ADHD people, but the logic gland that told us we’d have only two slices of pizza is promptly shut off, and eight slices later, we’re sitting there, grease coming out of our pores, unable to move, wondering if this is truly the way we’re going to die.

So when you’re blessed with ADHD, but you’re also blessed with free will, you simply have to employ some systems for handling the two, otherwise you’ll never tap your full potential. And that’s how we get back to our undeniable life rules.

SQUIRREL!: A few well-chosen life rules make it much easier to live life by design instead of by default. They streamline our options, so that we can perform at our best no matter what comes our way.

Rule One: Eliminate Choice Whenever Possible

The elimination of choice is just what it sounds like. There are certain parts of my life that I simply don’t need to think about. I don’t need to expend energy on them, either because they’re not worth it or because I already know what the outcome is going to be.

Hands-down the number one most important way to get your day off to a great start is the removal of choices, whenever possible, from the mo...

SQUIRREL!: Creating an easy-to-care-for and consistent wardrobe eliminates my need to think about getting dressed. Instead I can focus on things that really matter to me.

Identify anything in your day that you can eliminate or minimize. What minor decisions do you agonize over? How can you eliminate them? Simplify. Create rituals,

When you simplify and create rituals, you automatically reduce choices.

What are the distraction points for you in any part of your life?

Eliminate as much choice as possible, and life becomes much simpler. You can focus on using your brain for what matters.

Moderation: We don’t have it.

I finished my 5K and immediately went home and signed up for a full marathon. It’s simply what we do.

I’m not a nutritionist. All I know is this: what I eat plays a pretty huge role in how I’m able to manage my ADHD, and is a big determining factor in whether or not I can use my ADHD to my advantage. Again: this is info that works for me, and the majority of people

FACT: Eating processed food more often than not results in my feeling less than optimal, and doesn’t allow me to operate at my best.

FACT: Having to think too much about what I’m eating is as bad as eating processed food. It winds up taking up a lot of my time, and prevents me from focusing on important things in my life that matter much more.

FACT: What I eat is obviously related to my physical appearance as well, and that’s tied into my well-being and everyday happiness. Eat crap, look like crap, think like crap. Eat healthy, look healthy, think healthy.

The one thing that every single guest on my podcast has in common is that they all, in some capacity or another, eat “clean.”

It’s not that hard, really. Up your veggie intake, up your water intake, drop your intake of most everything that has a commercial. Think about it: You rarely see a commercial for broccoli or for apples. But you always see commercials for fast food, soda, and junk food.

I like to think that Grandma Betty, who passed away in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight, is keeping an eye on me, helping me do that.

Let’s face it, ADHD makes planning harder to begin with, right? So it would make sense that focusing on eliminating the crap we eat, and instead making a concerted effort to eat foods that nourish our faster brains, would be in our best interest. Dropping junk food, sugary snacks, soda, et cetera, would seem to be a good first step.

Edward Hallowell, M.D., advises all of his ADHD patients to fill half their dinner plate with fruits or vegetables, one fourth with a protein, and one fourth with carbohydrates. He also advocates eating several servings of whole grains, which are rich in fiber, each day to prevent blood sugar levels from spiking and then plummeting. Simple, basic stuff—yet things that in the frenetic, hectic world in which we live are often forgotten, or put aside in favor of “convenience.” But that convenience comes with a cost, as we’re learning.

“I know who I am when I don’t get enough sleep, and it’s not the person I want to be. My ADHD is magnified, and not in a good way. When I don’t sleep enough, I feel like I’m in a fog for the day, one that I usually can’t shake until I make up my sleep deficit.

Studies show that ADHD is magnified by a lack of sleep, sometimes dramatically so. Sleep deprivation makes it very difficult to focus; it affects your mood and your concentration.

When you’re tired, you’re more likely to make bad choices and uninformed decisions. Impulsivity increases, as does the propensity to anger quickly.

ADHD works 24/7 to distract, delay, and disorder your ability to get restorative sleep. It’s not easy to just flip the switch.

I’ve accepted that in order for me to perform at my best, good quality sleep is mandatory. I simply must have it; there’s no middle ground. This means making some tough choices, but choices that I believe are beneficial for me.

Rule Four: Exercise, and Do It Outside as Much as Possible

kids with ADHD showed an improvement in the negative expressions of the condition after playing outside in a natural environment.

Nature deficit can even change human behavior. Long-standing studies show that the absence or inaccessibility of parks and open spaces is associated with high crime rates, depression, and other urban troubles.

Depression, anxiety, agitation, and impulsivity can increase in the ADHD person if he or she is not able to get outside and breathe the fresh air.

ANY kind of exercise physically and greatly alters the chemistry of your brain.

movement changes you. It changes you for the better. For those who have discovered this, there’s rarely any going back. And if for some reason you do get led astray, and abandon exercise and the benefits it can give you, you’re left longing for those endorphins again, and you’ll do anything you can to get them.

We don’t do things in moderation.

You can’t be at your best until you’re willing to put yourself first, and make yourself the priority you need and deserve to be. It took my daughter and a hard look in the mirror to help me learn that. But it was worth it.

When you have ADHD, it’s so easy to go down a road of bad decisions. One drink becomes seven. One grilled cheese becomes five. And one week of not exercising becomes two years. It happens really, really fast. Be alert to the signs, and be hyperfocused on sticking to those rules. In the end, the rules exist to keep us alive, as well as letting us work to our best.

Once you find the rules that work for you, do not deviate from them. I speak from experience here. Remember what I said earlier about ADHD being tricky? Your job is to keep ADHD working for you, rather than against you. The best way to do that? Come up wi...

In an ADHD environment, the same thing can happen. Something occurs out of nowhere and throws you off your entire game. For those with ADHD, triggers can ruin days, weeks, relationships, even special events or otherwise wonderful nights. Triggers can pop up anywhere, at any time.

It doesn’t matter which (any, all) of these triggers apply to you. The key is to understand how triggers materialize, and how to put practices into place to avoid them in the first place. Once you’re able to start doing that, you’ll start noticing triggers before they occur. You’ll learn to notice certain situations, behaviors, workplace events, heck, even foods, drinks, or places that can lead to triggers. When you’re able to make course corrections on the fly, the chance of walking into a trigger zone becomes almost nonexistent. That’s what we’re going for here.

SQUIRREL!: Regardless of what the situation is, the following main rule applies: Once you know what your triggers are in each aspect of your life, you can go out of your way to avoid them in the first place.

The goal for you in this chapter is to figure out what all of your triggers have in common.