50 Tips for ADD Adults.

03:28 AM 02/06/02Please print out.50 Tips for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder
1. Be shure of the diagnosis.2. Educate yourself on yourself, the diagnosis, your direction, and your personality/life.3. Coaching for yourself. Inform your family, your friends, and those that are close.4. Encouragement. Encourage others to discuss you with you. As well encourage others in their life.5. External Structure. Form your own external structure if you don't already have one.6. Colour Coding. Colour code your life, and your work/school etc.7. Use spice and pizzazz. Be creative with yourself and with your problem solving. Keep the excitement of yourself.8. Make a good/supportive choice of a significant other. They must offset your creative mind.9. Have structured "blow out time". Time when you can expend energy that is not used and needs to be exausted.10. Recharge you batteries time. To meditate, form structure, think and form plans.11. Make your eviornment what works for you, and suits your style/thinking/organizing.12. Choose good helpfull addictions such as exercise, not chemical addictions.13. Use mood changes to your advantage rather than diadvantage. Try to plan these if possible.14. Try to avoid startling things...these will likely follow mini-panics, with obsessing, and ruminating.15. Constantly educate and involve others in your life, and form supportive networks for yourself.16. Give up any guilt you have for highly active sports, or stimulating behaviour.17. Learn to joke about your condition with others, and try to mix in some explaination as well.18. Plan senarios to deal with small depressions in the day, and maintain some activity.19. After success, expect some depression, this is because the goal has been reached. There is no longer any need to work at something.20. Learn shorthand ways of labeling, and use them for organizing your life.21. Acknowledge and anticipate the obvious collapse of a certin percentage of projects.22. Embrace the challanges that you encounter, and do not avoid difficulties, by burying them.23. Make deadlines, timelines, plans, calanders of things to do, and be very colourful with them.24. Break down large projects into small ones. Like long term plans into short term plans.25. Listen to the trusted feedback of other family members, and special ones.26. Avoid procrastination, and delayed reactions so that things can happen and do happen.27. Schedule activities with friends, and co-workers, etc.28. Use time outes as with children. You need some times where you can just think meditate and relax, between.29. Learn how to advocate for yourself, and get the help that you need from the community, and support systems.30. Avoid premature closure...do not kill the project before it has a chance to start.31. Find and join groups where you are liked appreciated, and understood, and nuture them.32. Don't stay too long where you are not welcomed/understood/appreciated.33. Accept the fear of things that going too well, and ignore it unless someone else says something to confirm this.34. Try to let successfull moments last and be remembered. So that they will encourage you in your low times.35. Remember that ADD usually includes a tendency to overfocus, and so time yourself at these activities.36. Pay compliments, and appreciate others fully, as they support you as well.37. Set social guidelines, and maintain them, as you need to maintain boundries, etc.38. Set social deadlines with friends, relitives, and aquaintences. This prevents being late, etc.39. Notice how long, and where you work best, and work with this knowledge.40. Know that it is OK to do many things at once if you have the energy to. This is good for speeding things up.41. Do what you are good at, use your aces, and make these known to others so that you can help them.42. Leave time between appointments to gather up your thoughts, and organize your activities.43. Consider starting, or joining an ADD group, for support and edification. 44. Try to dispel negitive energy in physical ways that are non-destructive.45. Don't feel chained to the, "usual ways" of dealing with stress or coping. Create your own, and observe their effects.46. Exercise regularly and vigorously, and schedule your recreation so that this can be so.47. Keep notes of your feelings with a journal/notepad/thoughts.48. Read with pen in hand, this really helps for focusing.49. Pay attention to eliminating harmfull addictions, and encourage positive addictions.50. Talk to others w/ ADD and maintain these contacts, and nurture them.

Insight and education:
Be shure of the diagnosis. Make sure that you are working with a professional who really understands ADD and has excluded related orsimmilar conditions such as anxiety states, agitated depression, hyperthyroidism, manic-depressive illness, or OCD.
Educate yourself:
Educate yourself and others about your condition. Read/Read/Read, and discuss with many people about their own treatments.You'll be able to design a your own treatment, and maintain your own health responsibilites.
Coaching:
It is usefull to have a coach, and for someone to keep after you. but always with humor and a positive nature.Your coach can help you with getting organized, and staying on task, as well as give you encouragement or remind you to get backto task. A friend/colleague/thearpist(it is possible but risky for your coach to be your spouse). A couch is someone to stay onyou to get things done, and to avoid procrasatination. A coach can be very helpfull in assisting with ADD. Encouragement. ADD adults need lots of encouragement. This is in part due to their having many self-doubts that have accumulated over theyears. But it goes far beyond that. More than the average person, the ADD adult withers without encouragement and poitively lights up like aChristmas Tree when given it. They will often work for another person in a way that they won't work for themselves. This is not "bad" it justis. It should be recognized and taken advantage of.
Realize that the're many myths of ADD, and be aware of them.
There is a tremendous value to others and the person with ADD for communication to be active on the subject rather than passive.The reason for this is that many people/ADD adults need to discuss the problem with others to feel that they are accepted by them in the first place.
There are many ADD adults who have a high energy level, and this can be very distracting when the energy is not burnt off.This is why exercise is neccessary and required for ADD adults to mantain a certin burnt out non-distractible energy level when dealing withjobs/tasks that are low energy requirement.
Remember that what you have is a neropsyciatric condition; it is geniticly transmitted. It is caused by biology, by how your brain is wired.It is not a disease of the will, nor a moral failing. It is not caused by weakness in character, nor by a failure to mature. It's cure is not to be foundin the power of the will, nor in punishment, nor is sacrifice, nor in pain. ALWAYS REMEMBER THIS>Try as they might, many people with ADD have great troubleaccepting the syndrome as being rooted in biology rather than a weakness of character.
Try to help others with ADD as this will assist you to know what ADD is and is not in your mind and in others minds.You'll learn lots about the condition from others, as well as feel suported, which is a two way street.
Performance Management
External Structure. Structure is the hallmark of the non-pharmacological treatment of the ADD child.It can be equally usefull with adults, and very good for an organized mind. Tedious to set up, once in place and is a habbit and routine structure works like the walls of the bobsled ride. Keeping the speedball sled from careening off the track that it rides on.It focuses energies which is what we are looking for in our daily life. Make frequent use of lists, colour coding reminders, notes to self, and rituals, routines as well as files.Colour coding. Deserves Emphasis as many people with ADD are visually orientated. Take advantage of this by making things visual, and easy to see (with colour).Make colour you middle name, and put is central in your organization system.Make something boring spicy and exciting with colour. With colour be you can be creative in your organization, and this again is an ADD trait.Set up the environment to be exciting, and stimmulating, and radical with colour, and to reward rather than deflate.
Acknowledge that some of the activities that you perform will fail, but even more that these downs will happen and do happen to everyone not just you.
Embrace challanges, and conisder them chalanges, this is positive and this is encouraging. People with ADD thrive on challanges and as long as you know that they won't all "pan out". Avoid perfectionism, and fussiness. You'll get alot more done be able to keep postive about deadlines.
Plan senarios preparing for the inevable blaghs and depressing factors. Keep a list of friends to call, and keep calling them...this is important to your support network. Videos are great for this, as they take you out of the blaghs, and depressing things.
People with ADD always complain about feeling down after a big high...since the high has been reached, and no more challange is there anymore.
Learn shorthand for sayings, and slogans, and ways of speaking that are to the point and concise. Also learn ways of labeling and quickly putting things into perspectivesso that you may organize much more effectivly. Also, try to label your moods in positve ways, so that others won't percieve you to be complaining. This makes it easier tosay what you want to say concisely.
Try to get of the defensive bandwagon, as this gives others a bad impression of you, and therefore they may not give you the same support if they feel this.
Avoid premature closure and stopping before starting, this needs no explaination.
Attempt to let the successfull moment be glued to your mind rather than the unsuccessfull. This prevents dwelling on the negitive rather than the positive.
Remember that ADD ususally includes a tendency to overfocus, and hyperfocus at time, so use a timer for these occasions so that you may keep track of the time. Avoid rumination, or obsessing on things that should not be paid so much attention to, as this will be a negitive output.
Exercise regularly, and vigioursly, you should schedule your recreation into your life, and stick with it. These things should be easy to remember since they are things that you are interested in.
Make a good choice in a signifigant other, since you can offset your personality with someone else's lifestyle/personality. This creates balance and a constructive workable relationship.
Learn to joke with yourself, and with others about your various ails/symptoms from forgetfullness, to getting lost, to being tactless/blunt/foot in your mouth, etc.
Schedule your activities with friends, and adhere to these faithfully, they are important for your well being, and support, and your continued success.
Find and join groups where you are liked, and are percieved as positive, etc. This will give you a support network of people to be with and enjoy as well as be there when times come by when times are tougher.
Obviously, don't stay long where your not liked/enjoyed...and learn to read these signs.
Notice how and where you work best...noisy room, quiet room, on the train, listening to music, whatever. Children and Adults do best under rather strange conditions, for different reasons.