Antidepressants Blog

Q: What about self-help? Aren’t there things I can do for myself now that I know I have ADHD?
A: Yes. First, educate yourself about ADHD by reading books and discussing the disorder with your specialist. The more you understand about how this underlying disorder has affected each area of your life, the better you will be at improving your situation.
Next, educate the significant others in your life. This may include family, friends, and work colleagues. The more they understand about your difficulties, the more they will be able to help you.
Then it is time to structure and organize your life. While an ADHD specialist can be a valuable advisor or coach in this task, there are steps that you can follow on your own.
Define the problem. You should start by defining
your problem areas. Write them down. One at a time,
break each problem down into its components. It may
help to ask yourself just what aspect of the task or
situation makes it difficult for you.
For example, the problem of being perpetually late may have several typical causes. It may be that you don’t plan activities ahead of time and have no real idea how long it takes you to do things. Or the problem may be with your distractibility. While you may plan to do something and have adequate time to get to it and do it, you may be repeatedly distracted from the task.
Brainstorm solutions to each component of your problem. Use paper and pen to write down all solutions and alternative ways of doing things that come to mind.
Mentally test your solutions. Here you begin to use your critical faculty and, in your imagination, go through the solutions and assess the likely outcome.
Critically plan your solution. Here you can discard
the ideas that clearly won’t work and begin to plan
your new strategies for coping with certain situations.
For example, after defining the problem of lateness, you have come up with some solutions: “Run or drive faster. Just get more done in a day! Wear three wristwatches; set three alarms. Begin by estimating the time for each activity you plan to do in a day, write it down, and as you actually do the activity, record the length of time it took. Compare the estimate with the actual time.” Well, you will soon see that some solutions, like the last, are better than others, like the first three. You can discard the ideas that clearly come from your impatience, impulsiveness, and self-punitive feelings, and begin to see that if you allow yourself to tackle problem-solving in this way, you can actually come up with some good solutions.
Add organization and structure to your life. This change could benefit all aspects of your life. You can start with external structure. This may include ordering your possessions; organizing your time with lists and schedules; using filing systems, notebooks, and lists as external memory banks and reminders; and minimizing distractions in your workplace. Such external structure can also help internally: the more information you structure and record externally, the less you have to be trying to remember and deal with in your mind. In other words, you can minimize the clutter and distractions in your mind by making some of your tasks, reminders, and organizing needs external and concrete. Then you can better focus on what is essential.
Define tasks more clearly. This may include breaking down tasks into smaller components, prioritizing them, and taking into account your own attention span and need for variation, breaks, and physical activity. Perhaps you work best in forty-five-minute chunks, or perhaps you work best with a long expanse of uninterrupted time, in order to better focus your attention. Then plan your work accordingly.
Use time-out strategies to deal with intense emotions. If a major part of your difficulty stems from impulsive actions and heated emotional outbursts, then you can begin to train yourself to deliberately take time out when emotionally aroused. This may mean counting to ten, or it may mean actually going somewhere to cool out. During this cool-out period, follow several mental steps: Define the problem. What upset you and why? What is your impulsive solution, and is that really the best way to react? What would be an alternative way of handling the situation? What is the outcome of that reaction or action likely to be? Is there an even better way of handling the situation? This process allows you to delay impulsive action and to practice bringing your inner reflective skills to bear on the situation. This is often very difficult for ADHD sufferers. As I have explained in Chapter 6, psychotherapy is often necessary in order to strengthen these inner reflective skills. However, setting up a disciplined time-out strategy can be an enormous help in gradually making this reflectiveness become more automatic and in making intense emotional states more tolerable.
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