What does living successfully with ADHD mean to you? Perhaps you think success is focusing more easily or following-through on projects. Perhaps it’s getting organized or finding a job more suited to your creative personality.
Fortunately, as an ADHD Coach, my clients show me first hand how targeted guidance and hard work make success possible. You can live a satisfying and successful ADHD friendly life!
9 Tips for Living Successfully with ADHD
1. Improve Your Self-Talk
How do you talk to yourself? Do you call yourself names like stupid or lazy? Negative self-talk undermines your self-esteem and limits your success. As the saying goes, ‘What I Say To Myself is My Reality.’ Talk nicer to yourself. ADHD Success starts from within.
2. Increase Your Personal Awareness
Awareness is a challenging, yet essential, ADHD Success skill. We tend to careen through life like pinballs, impulsively chasing whatever grabs our attention. To be truly successful gain awareness of your thoughts and actions. This doesn’t mean you won’t occasionally ‘pinball’. However, it’s essential you frequently check in with what you’re doing so you can catch yourself and get back on track.
3. Create Systems and Structure to Make Your Life Run More Easily
Many ADHD adults avoid systems and structures, thinking of them as boring; limiting flexibility and creativity. In reality the structures and systems will make your world more ADD-friendly. Cleverly set routines in your personal and business life allow you to stay on an even course so you can accomplish essential everyday tasks while still expressing your individuality and creativity.
4. Exercise Regularly
Medical research shows that regular aerobic exercise helps to regulate the chemicals in the brain at the root of ADHD, allowing for better focus and less impulsivity. For ADHD adults with hyperactivity, exercise will also help burn off extra energy.
5. Eat a Healthy Diet
I often compare the ADHD brain to a high-performance race car. Like a race car, people with ADHD need excellent, regular fuel to function optimally. That means well-balanced meals of lean proteins, hearty grains, fruits and vegetables. Easier said than done. It’s common for ADHD adults to forget to eat or buy groceries. How can you change your habits and create structure so you will eat an ADD-friendly diet to give your brain the fuel it needs?
6. Learn How Much You Can Handle
Every ADHD adult I’ve met has an optimal number of activities he or she can juggle at any one time. Stimulation helps us focus and having multiple things to choose from provides that stimulation. However, having too many things to do shuts us down with overwhelm. You’re looking for the balance between being bored with not enough to do and overwhelmed with too much to do.
7. Get Enough Sleep
Exhaustion makes ADHD brain-fog and concentration worse. Do you know how much sleep you need each night to function at your best? What’s keeping you from getting enough sleep and what can you do about it?
8. Play to Your Strengths
When you focus your world around improving your weaknesses you will struggle. Building your life around the things you’re good at naturally leads to more effortless ADHD success. Sure, you need to manage your weaknesses; there are things in life you just have to do. But, a strength-focused, weakness managed, life makes the difference between success and struggle.
9. Get the Best Treatment for Your ADHD
Sadly, many people think that once they start taking medication their ADHD will magically disappear, only to find this isn’t so. Studies show that a three tiered approach including medication, counseling, and ADHD coaching provides the most effective ADHD management. Working with ADHD is a highly specialized niche. Make sure the professionals you select are highly ADHD trained.
Success often seems like a far away dream to ADHD adults. Living successfully with ADHD is possible!
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