The Basics of Managing ADHD
Managing ADHD and its chaos is, for most, a holistic thing. An entire system of psychiatry, therapy, and lifestyle changes, sometimes working with an ADHD life coach, are needed to manage it. It will take time, and it may be overwhelming at first, but if you take your time and do your best, you won’t just be living with ADHD, you’ll be thriving with ADHD.
Working With a Psychiatrist
The first step is to get diagnosed. This is important because not only do we have to understand what kind of ADHD you have, a psychiatrist can also work with you to discover if there are other comorbidities that are often found with people with ADHD, such as:
PTSD
Anxiety (Social and General)
Depression
and other neurodevelopmental issues like Autism.
ADHD medications, such as stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, and non-stimulants such as Strattera and Guanfacine, have an 70-80% success rate at giving people with ADHD relief from the constant chatter, the overwhelming feelings, and many of the most debilitating parts of ADHD.
Something to be aware of, however; some medications for ADHD can cause symptoms of other comorbidities to get significantly worse. For example, a stimulant such as Adderall or Ritalin can negatively affect bi-polar symptoms and anxiety symptoms, and is almost useless when dealing with Autism.
Working with a psychiatrist will allow you to monitor these issues, determine what other issues you are dealing with and find the medication/treatment regimen that will best help you. One last thing to be aware of, it may take some time for medications to get to where they are effectively treating your brand of ADHD. This may be frustrating, but it’s important to do your best to be patient with the process.
Working With a Therapist
Therapy, more than anything, is the biggest tool in managing Adult ADHD. There are several things in our lives that trauma has touched and for us to process them, then we need to be working with therapists to come to terms with them.
Most times, cognitive-behavioral therapy is incredibly helpful with ADHD. CBT works with the assumption that our interpretation of life’s events and traumas affects how people behave and feel. This is important, as many of our biggest issues with emotional dysregulation with ADHD are based on how we perceive our world, how our memory works, and how stress and frustration can cause emotional outbursts.
Another version of CBT is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This therapy focuses on not changing negative thoughts, but instead observing them, working to process their origin, and coming to accept them. Some thoughts and traumas are too ingrained into our sense of selves, and may not respond well to just simply working to reframe them as they do in basic CBT. Acceptance is often the key to moving forward and starting the healing process.
Therapists help us develop coping mechanisms for the trauma that we have dealt with all of our lives and understand our triggers that can cause us to fall into depression or act out in our frustrations. We also have to learn how to channel our emotions and frustrations into constructive methods and help us learn how to reduce our overall stress. This may come from mindfulness techniques, meditation, creative outlets, and exercise. All things that a good therapist should go into depth with you about.
Working With an ADHD Life Coach
If psychiatrists are the medical, and therapists are the emotional, ADHD Life Coaches are the practical aspect of managing ADHD.
Many people over the age of 30, and quite a few between 25 and 30, never learned the basics of how to manage their ADHD. They never learned how to use their strengths and values to organize their lives.
This is where a coach comes in. A coach works with you on:
Learning about how ADHD affects you.
Discovering your Values, Strengths and Weaknesses.
Eating better, exercise, supplements, and getting good sleep.
Spending time outside and being in nature is really beneficial.
Eliminating unnecessary stress and abuse, etc.
Creating new habits to replace bad habits.
Learning how to organize your life to provide the structure that you need to maintain realistic expectations of productivity.
Putting in place boundaries that support the accommodations you need.
Developing strong relationships with family, friends, and spouses.
Understanding the need for emotional support and positive encouragement from those around you.
These latter ones are important because, after therapy, a strong support system around you is the next most important thing you will need in your life. Friends, family, spouses, peers, and support groups who actively work to support you give a lot more long-term benefits for managing your ADHD than being on your own. Many people with ADHD do not have a lot of objective self-awareness, and we need help with external tools and support to manage our situations.
Word of warning here: Sometimes in our desire to be accepted, or have people who make us feel they care about us; we find ourselves in relationships that are abusive in many different ways. If you find yourself with people around you who minimize your struggles with ADHD, this is abuse. You deserve to find happiness with people who love you, who actively support you, and give you positive encouragement and accountability. Remove those people from your life who refuse to understand how your ADHD affects you or refuse to support you.
It’s OK to ask for help, no matter how we may feel about it, but we have to start the process. Working with a Psychiatrist, a Therapist, and an ADHD Life Coach is an effective way to build the system that you need to manage your ADHD for the rest of your life. We have to live very intentionally due to our inherent system is chaos and we need help to guide us through our chaos.
Shane Thrapp is a Certified ADHD Life, Relationship, and Career Coach.Through his business, Creating Order From Chaos, he has helped hundreds of people find their paths through the chaos of life with ADHD and find their order and purpose.
He is also the Operations Director for our nonprofit Men’s ADHD Support Group, a board member for the Inattentive ADHD Coalition, and a public speaker who works to be a voice in advocacy for adult ADHD awareness.
If you want to help support our efforts, then please consider donating so that that we can keep Inspiring, Educating, and Empowering men to thrive with their ADHD.
