Coping mechanism for ADHD brains

There are five areas of your environment that you should focus on for yourself: daily structure, nutrition, sleep, populating your world with positivity, and accepting and finding the right help.

Structure §

• A structure is more likely something that an ADHDer might resist. Being free and a nonconformist is, after all, in their bones.
• Having a clear chain of command at work, for instance, is both orienting and especially helpful to the employee with ADHD.

Rewards §

• Rewards work much better for the ADHD mind than do consequences. So whether you’re an adult working on the structure for yourself or a parent maintaining it for a child, build little rewards into the systems you contrive.

Food §

• In general, it’s best to stick to whole foods. Whole grains are better than processed grains; fresh foods are better than commercially preserved and packaged ones.
• Avoid processed foods, junk foods, and any foods that contain additives, preservatives, and colourings.
• The more veggies and fruits the better. Healthy oils and fats = good. Trans fats = bad.
• Steer clear of fruit juices, because they’re mainly sugar (see below) and empty calories.
• Your body also needs good protein like unprocessed meats, fish, nuts, and eggs.
• Drink lots of water. Or tea.
• We also love coffee, as caffeine is the best over-the-counter focus medication that there is.
  • Just drink it in moderation and watch for side effects: elevated heart rate, irregular heartbeat, lots of trips to the bathroom (it’s a laxative and a diuretic), insomnia, agitation, and irritability. These are all signs you’ve drunk too much coffee!
• The reason fatty acids are good for your brain, and hence for ADHD, is that the myelin sheaths that wrap around your neurons like rubber coating around electric wires are made of fat. Maintaining that fatty composition requires essential fatty acids.
  • “Essential” means your body can’t synthesise them; you have to ingest them. Unless you eat a ton of salmon, mackerel, anchovies, and sardines, you do not get enough essential fatty acids in your diet.

Exercise §

• When you exercise, the clunky connectomes in the default mode network become smoother, allowing for easier and more complete transitions into the task-positive network, where we access our frontal cortex.
• While obviously less aerobically challenging than yoga, meditation has shown powerful results, and it is particularly helpful when wrestling with the pesky default mode network of our brains.
  • Remember, this is the area where we can slip into endless destructive rumination, or find our minds wandering and pinging from thought to thought, which is often colourfully referred to in the meditation community as “monkey mind.”
  • An important part of meditation is a focus on breath. Becoming aware of your breathing, through breath counting and other techniques, requires targeted attention, which will naturally strengthen those connections to your task-positive network.

Environment §

• What you want to avoid is people who drain you of all your positive energy.
  • Notice how you feel when you leave a person. That’s a good indicator of whether it’s worth spending more time with that person.