Healthy Happy ADHD

Healthy Happy ADHD

1

Change How You See ADHD

Break the cycle and create a new story.

While ADHD affects every woman differently, one thing remains true for us all: An unhealthy lifestyle can make the negative parts of ADHD more intense. And let’s face it, when these negative parts include distractibility, disorganization, emotional dysregulation, anxiety, and executive dysfunction, life as an adult in this world is inevitably going to be more challenging and less enjoyable.

You deserve to live a life of joy, fulfillment, health, vibrancy, and happiness. You deserve to feel healthy and happy. There are practices you can bring into your life to improve how you feel, and these practices will help protect you from future overwhelm and burnout.

ADHD Traps You in a Vicious Cycle

There are many reasons why our ADHD struggles get in the way of leading a healthy lifestyle. Here are the most common ways that they can keep us from maintaining good habits like regular exercise. You’re probably already familiar with some of them.

• Boredom intolerance: Traditional workouts might not hold your attention for long, and repetitive exercises can feel tedious. You get bored with workout routines easily and think there’s no point in making one if you can’t stick to it. When you do start a new routine, you eventually stop, give up, and call it another failure.

• Difficulties with time management: You feel like you have all the time in the world and that you can just do it later, but “later” never comes. Or you feel you have no time to do anything because you have an appointment at 3:00 p.m. and therefore can only sit and wait for said appointment so you won’t miss it.

• Executive dysfunction: “Executive dysfunction” is a term that describes having difficulties with organizing, planning, initiating, completing, and switching between tasks. For example, you might have trouble sticking to a plan and prioritizing a goal. You want to go to the gym, but on your drive there, you feel sleepy, so you stop at a café to grab a coffee. You realize you need to pee, and this reminds you that you need to pick up toilet paper at the store. You stop by the store to get it, and suddenly, before you know it, you’re doing a full grocery shopping run, only to see the time and realize three hours have passed and you can’t go to the gym because you need to be home in time to take an important work call.

• Emotional dysregulation: When you have ADHD, you don’t feel just a little bit; you feel everything a lot. Emotional dysregulation means you have trouble calming down once you’re upset or you have massive reactions to objectively small issues. Someone cutting in front of you in traffic could be the last straw to bring you to tears. You know you’re not crying over the person cutting in front of you. As your body floods with emotion, you might not be able to process how you’re feeling or you react impulsively. Fluctuating emotions can drain energy and motivation, making it hard to find the drive to maintain a healthful habit, even if you intellectually understand its benefits.

• Overwhelm: When stress and the demands of everyday life pile up, your brain has trouble filtering and sorting all the incoming data from the world around you. There are looming deadlines, unfinished projects, dirty clothes scattered everywhere, unread emails building up, and late payment reminders. Eventually, if you’re at full capacity, you might enter a state of shutdown. You might find it hard to speak or move, let alone sign up for a yoga class or prepare a healthy meal. You might feel a sense of powerlessness over your body and your life.

• Anxiety: If you’re always late to class or work, forgetting important tasks, feeling disorganized and leaving projects until the last minute, and afraid of getting in trouble, of course you’re feeling anxious! Anxiety-driven perfectionism can make you hesitant to try something new, such as starting to exercise or a new workout, if you fear not being able to achieve your goals perfectly. Over time, it can affect your confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth, and eventually lead to burnout and health problems.

• Negative self-image: You see yourself as lazy, a hot mess who can never stick to anything and isn’t able to change. You would never bother going to the gym because, why? As far as you can tell, this “lazy mess” is who you are and nothing will ever change that. Your negative self-concept is so embedded in you after years of reinforcement that it’s become your identity, making change difficult. (We’ll discuss why the way we see ourselves is so important in chapter 3.)

• Unhelpful coping mechanisms: When faced with painful emotions or stress, you might turn to coping mechanisms to self-soothe. You might self-medicate with substances like alcohol, procrastinate on a task to avoid the discomfort associated with it (yes, procrastination is a coping mechanism!), or turn to sugary foods for comfort. These coping mechanisms provide a quick escape from pain and the pressures of daily life, but they can exacerbate ADHD symptoms, worsen mood swings, and breed more unhealthy habits.

Because you have ADHD, it’s hard to have a healthy lifestyle, but not having a healthy lifestyle makes ADHD worse. This creates a vicious cycle that leaves many of us with ADHD feeling helpless and prevents us from experiencing true health and happiness.

This cycle can continue into infinity. As it repeats, we can begin believing that we’re stuck in a world where nothing seems to change for the better. We might find ourselves feeling powerless. We repeatedly tell ourselves that there’s nothing we can do to break the cycle, that the world just wasn’t built for us and because of that, we’re doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness. If we live too many days looking through this lens, it can become our outlook on life. Resigning ourselves to thinking this is just how it is can lead us to feel hopeless and to neglect self-care and self-love. We can end up deeply depressed and sliding down a slope of blame, pain, and shame. I’ve argued for my limitations and held tightly to problems, using them as evidence of my helplessness. It felt comforting for a while to buy into the myth that I had no control and that the world was against me, because then I didn’t have to confront any of my challenges head-on and make changes.

Living with ADHD can be hard and debilitating, and life can get so overwhelming that you just want to give up entirely, hide under the covers, and settle for the swamp of sadness, but that doesn’t have to be your entire story. It doesn’t have to say anything about what you’re capable of or what you get to do, behave like, or feel in the future. You can buy into the idea that ADHD means you’re doomed to feel like crap forever, or you can buy into the idea that ADHD means that your body and mind operate differently.

Why Are Many Women with ADHD Diagnosed Later in Life?

According to national data collected by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2016 to 2019, boys are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as girls are.

One of the main reasons girls are underdiagnosed is that ADHD often presents differently in females. Rather than being the stereotypical hyperactive kid bouncing around the classroom as many boys are, a lot of girls with ADHD tend to experience their symptoms more internally. While the boy in the classroom was literally running around, it might have been your mind that was doing the racing.

In addition, many women learn how to mask their ADHD and find coping mechanisms to help them manage their symptoms and responsibilities. Sometimes, we might fly under the radar as ambitious high achievers who seem to love a deadline. In reality, though, we might be struggling to stay afloat beneath the surface. As more responsibilities are piled on us in adulthood, there might come a point when our ADHD becomes so unbearable that we realize something is not right and seek answers. We might resort to unhealthy strategies to relieve the internal hyperactivity or look for something to take the pain or stress away. Other diagnoses might start to enter the picture: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self-harm, addiction. In fact, many women with undiagnosed ADHD are diagnosed with anxiety instead because it’s the experience that can be reported on and seen, even though the anxiety is often the result of unmanaged ADHD.

If you suspect you have ADHD, getting a diagnosis will be life-changing. An ADHD diagnosis can bring so much relief because you finally have an answer to why you are the way you are and why you struggle with so many things that other women don’t seem to struggle with. Once you realize that there is a reason for your struggles, you can alter your life to work differently.