ADHD 2.0 Quotes

“there is another now proven way to motivate yourself to stick with your exercise: Imagine or recall how good it feels after you’re finished.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“From depression to anxiety as well as for ADHD and VAST symptoms, exercise is just what the doctor should order.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“one of the most fascinating and beneficial effects of exercise is that it prepares the brain to expand, learn, and change better than any other human activity. It improves mood and motivation, reduces anxiety, regulates emotions, and maintains focus.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“one of the most fascinating and beneficial effects of exercise is that it prepares the brain to expand, learn, and change better than any other human activity.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“For getting and staying on track, exercise is one of the most powerful non-medical tools we have and an important first line of defense.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Here’s a pro tip: Take a run around the block, go up and down the stairs in your house, just do something to get yourself moving. You’ll definitely notice the difference in your ability to focus and settle into the needed zone. Better yet, make it a regular habit and consider it a necessary dose of medicine to keep you functioning as your best self.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“How much sleep is enough? The amount of sleep it takes for you to wake up without an alarm clock. That’s your physiological requirement for sleep. Try to get that much and your brain will repay you; your body will as well.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“But taken to the extreme, this is counterproductive. Rejecting help can sabotage a person’s education, career, health, and relationships. As we’ve stated earlier, it’s not uncommon for a young person or adult to say, “I’d rather fail doing it my way than succeed with help.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“But as we’ve said, a challenge undertaken just for the sake of a challenge can be counterproductive at best, self-defeating at worst.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“you ought to spend the majority of your working hours at the intersection of three circles: the circle of all the things you really like to do, the circle of all the things you’re really good at doing, and the circle of things that someone will pay you to do.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“One proactive way to pinpoint your right difficult is to develop a practical inventory of your strengths—what you are good at.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“digging a hole and filling it up is a challenge—but to find the right challenge. We call that the right difficult. One”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry at him.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“You say to yourself, He was a son of a bitch, but I am not going to waste one more second of my precious life being angry”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Shame is the most disabling learning disability.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“strength-based model. Lily explained to Samuel that he had a race car for a brain, but with bicycle brakes. I told her it was key for him to understand that his race car brain was a great asset of which he should feel proud. He just needed to work on his brakes, so that then he could win races and become a champion. Human connection”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Don’t feed the Demon. Shut off its oxygen by denying it your attention. Do something else that engages your mind. Stay in action!”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“We shoot ourselves in the foot, only, on the spot, to devise a painless method to remove the bullet. The great mathematician Alan Turing summed us up when he said, “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” That sums us up perfectly.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction - from Childhood through Adulthood

“we take a strength-based approach to treating people in our practices. As we like to say, we do not treat disabilities, we help people unwrap their gifts. More exuberantly: We help identify superpowers!”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Those of us with ADHD are usually pretty sensitive, so we begin to put up defenses, and before you know it we’re loners, being teased, put off, or, if we’re adults, not climbing the ladder, and people are wondering why, and not in a helpful way.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“perfectly describe how many children with ADHD feel in classrooms and adults with ADHD feel in the adult world. Misunderstood, alienated, left out, on the outside looking in.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Creating comfortable, positively connected environments is the most important step in helping people of all ages get the most out of life in general; the lack of connection particularly hurts people who have ADHD.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Focus on anything external to yourself. Activating the TPN will shut down the DMN.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you once started with enthusiasm, make careless mistakes, or, worse, fall into a state of misery and despair, for no good reason whatsoever.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“The connectome that lights up when you’re engaged in a task is called the task-positive network, or TPN. Aptly named, the TPN gets you down to work. You’re deliberately doing something and you are intent on it, unaware of much beyond the bounds of what you’re doing. In this state, you don’t consciously know whether you’re happy or not, which is just as good as being happy, if not better, because you’re not wasting any energy in self-assessment. You may become frustrated with what you’re doing and have moments of anger or dismay, but if you stay in the task, in the TPN, those moments will pass, and the TPN, buoyant connectome that it is, will carry you along. When you’re thinking with the TPN, you’re in the Angel mindset. But you can also get trapped in the TPN, doing a task from which you cannot disengage. This is the hyperfocused state that people with ADHD can fall into. Far from being helpful, it can keep you stuck in one task, unable to shut down the screen, turn off the TV, or move from one paragraph to the next. This is the often unrecognized downside of focus.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“ADHD” is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“We also know that ADHD can crop up for the first time in adulthood. This often happens when the demands of life exceed the person’s ability to deal with them. Classic examples are when a woman has her first baby or when a student starts medical school. In both instances the organizational demands of daily life skyrocket and the person shows the symptoms of ADHD that he or she had been able to compensate for in the past. It is then that ADHD can and should be diagnosed. Indeed, adult-onset ADHD is a recognized condition in the big book of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5).”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Forgiveness does not mean that you condone the deed, just that you renounce the hold that anger has over you.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood

“Creativity is impulsivity gone right.”
― Edward M. Hallowell, ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood