Managing Adult ADHD: A Holistic Framework
As you are probably well aware, ADHD touches every part of your life.
Think about ADHD as a set of traits and characteristics, some helpful and some not so helpful. These traits and characteristics are so interwoven into the fabric of who you are.
So knowing yourself really well and understanding ADHD and what it looks like for you are essential for you to be able to create lasting changes in your life.
When you want to change behavior or create new habits, you want to look at the whole picture from a wider lens. Taking a holistic approach to managing ADHD is important.
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Start by taking a look at your lifestyle as a whole. Think of managing ADHD like you would a chronic health problem like diabetes. You have to create an ADHD-friendly lifestyle and find some sort of balance over time.
So let’s talk about what an ADHD-friendly lifestyle looks like so that we minimize the chances of life with ADHD from getting in the way of you achieving your goals. I’m not suggesting that you work on making changes to all of these at once. I just want to encourage you to begin to take a holistic approach to managing ADHD and seeking balance.
Managing life with ADHD can feel like a big job. I always tell my clients that before you can work on your ADHD challenges you have to start with the basics and go back to the foundational strategies for taking care of yourself.
You have to take care of yourself and you have to create an ADHD-friendly lifestyle.
This includes:
Good sleep patterns
Proper diet & nutrition
Frequent exercise
Controlled substance use
Tolerable stress levels
Appropriate stimulation (not overstimulated and overwhelmed or understimulated and bored)
Supportive relationships
Career choices that cater to strengths without playing on too many weaknesses
Once there’s some balance with your lifestyle, then you can work on those ADHD-specific stressors and challenges. So how do you do that?
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Here’s how I conceptualize ADHD management. I take a holistic approach to ADHD and consider the whole person: mind, body, heart, and soul.
MIND
Working with the mind looks like working with cognition (thinking), how your thoughts affect your emotions and behaviors, strengthening attention and concentration, memory, etc.
BODY
We want to look at how ADHD shows up in the body. This is often where we feel emotions and get signals that we need something like water, food, or to go to the bathroom. It’s important to pay attention to the mind-body connection and to do your best to keep your body healthy.
HEART
The heart in this framework represents emotions. Emotional dysregulation is a big challenge for a lot of people with ADHD and increasing emotional intelligence and the ability to identify what you’re feeling and what to do with that plays a big part in regulating emotions and decreasing emotional reactivity.
SOUL
The soul in this framework means the real you. The authentic you, your dreams, desires, experiences that make you who you are. It’s the deep connection to your true self. The part of you that is compassionate and forgiving without agenda. It’s important for you to know who you really are without the masks and labels, to know what lights you up and what you love and find meaningful.
All of these make up the whole person. You can’t separate any of them out. So that’s why you can’t just work on ADHD. That’s impossible. Your ADHD is the part of you that’s wired for creativity and empathy, generosity, getting excited about life. It’s all woven together to make you, YOU.
Okay, so that’s a framework for looking at Adult ADHD. We’ll look at how to manage it in part two.