Understanding, Accepting and Embracing your ADD

Understanding your ADD

Pretty easy to understand ADHD, just badly behaved kids, no it's hyperactive kids, no it's hyperactive and inattentive boys, no girls too, oh yeah adults as well, they are also impulsive and inattentive and they also have problems with focus, procrastination, emotions, planning, organisation - they also seem more at risk of addiction, depression, anxiety, divorce, being jailed. It's the parents' fault, society's fault, too many video games, just lazy, indulgent. Drug them, don't drug them, they are hunters not farmers, disordered, failures, even indigo coloured!

I have read a lot, talked to many ADHD adults, have it myself and I am still pretty confused. But however you see ADHD, it is certainly complex, involves neuro-chemistry, neurology and genetics. If you wish to gain control of your ADD, you have to first understand it as much as possible. So read books, web sites, magazines; observe yourself and others at support groups, listen to and debate with the professionals - your psychiatrists (be gentle with them they are quite sensitive!) and coaches, figure out how it affects you. Everyone with ADHD has different challenges and strengths, so become an expert in your own ADHD. 

Understanding means mending low self esteem after years of criticism, understanding means gaining new insights into what may finally work for you and most importantly understanding means new hope.

Accepting your ADD

There seem to me are two sensible decisions to make about our ADD/ADHD challenges and issues. We can:

1. Accept that we have a problem and find an ADD-friendly approach or strategy to overcome or manage it
2. Accept we struggle with something and decide to live with it and stop worrying/beating ourselves over it

A third option - of struggling with an issue, doing nothing about it and constantly feeling frustrated and unhappy with yourself - doesn't make much sense to me. This option leads to lower self-esteem, depression and even self-loathing. I know these bed fellows well but now that I know I am ADHD, I am working on acceptance of my challenges. I finally have an explanation for being late, bored and emotional - it's due to a lack of dopamine based stimulation and an impacted future-sense, so I can start to devise strategies to overcome my challenges and accept myself.

The best strategies focus on taking action and maintaining routines. There is far too much ADD advice that fits in the "100 simple steps to tidy your bedroom" category. Most ADHD adults do not lack for knowledge in how to tidy or organise, they don't even always lack the motivation to make changes but they struggle with doing things, or activating themselves to tasks. So focus on how to make things more interesting, how to develop and exploit existing habits, how to avoid overwhelm, how to reward yourself, how to find easier ways to start tasks and activate yourself, and then find the routines and habits  to keep doing them! Grasp the basic rules and then apply then to your unique situation to create your own approach, and avoid those annoying lists!

Embracing your ADD

The business of medicine is to identify and define "illness" and to offer solutions, usually in the form of medications and therapies. ADHD brings many traits, some make living in today's world difficult and bring along co-morbidities such as depression, school/work issues or addictions. Consequently medicine has defined ADD as a disorder and only those with ADHD traits that "severely impact" their day to day life are considered ADHD. All the research is focused on these negative ADD traits.


The science is pretty clear that ADD is a genetic difference, nearly as inherited as height. ADHD minds are at one end of a spectrum of several mental traits, so let's draw a parallel with the end of the spectrum of height. Being very tall can bring some problems:  bad backs and difficulty finding clothes to fit - but some benefits too such as seeing over people's heads and being good at basketball.  If height was invisible (please bear with me on this!) the medical profession would probably focus on the tall people with bad backs and determine that being tall is a disorder, all the science and all the attention would be on the back pain and the comorbidities of not finding shoes that fit and banging your head on doorways, medicine would ignore the advantages of reaching higher shelves and clear views at the cinema. So it is with ADHD.

With the "disorder of ADHD" we have minds that are constantly seeking stimulation, less constrained by other people's rules, often have great energy and enthusiasm and are always seeing the big picture as details are boring. If you imagine millenia ago, tribes folk hanging out in their valley, it looks obvious that is was the bored, rule-breaking, big-picture seeking ADD ones who decided to check out the valley over the hills.  It also appears that in ADD we spend more time in theta waves and that the "right" brain hemisphere, responsible for pattern recognition, intuition and creativity is more dominant.  The overwhelming anecdotal evidence is that ADHD features exceptionally highly in creative, funny, inventive, intuitive and passionate people. The signs are everywhere: in the celebrities we see on films and TV,  in the histories of scientists who made radical inventions, in the profiles of entrepreneurs, carers, explorers and artists too.

But whether you have special ADD traits or simply talents that have been buried under your ADD problems, life is infinitely more enjoyable engaged in our passions and purpose. So stop banging your head against the wall in trying to overcome your neurology but rather figure out what stimulates you, what you enjoy, where you feel rewarded. Shift your life away from the difficulties and towards your unique strengths and talents. Live a life aligned to who you really are. Consider yourself a work in progress that needs constant tweaking, re-aligning, re-examining and re-purposing, and so live a ADHD life of wellbeing, health and happiness:  Understanding, Accepting and Embracing your ADD.