By the way, I can’t honestly recall if I have blogged about this aspect of mindfulness before or not. I’m sorry if this is redundant, but happy if it is a needed refresher. I never thought that I could meditate. My dad, the completely neurotypical one in the house, was a TM guy. He still meditates for 20-30 minutes a day. He tried to get me to do it when I was a kid. A squirmy, hyper, easily bored kid. Even medicated, I couldn’t do it.  But the “can’t” really comes down to the definition of the “it.” I looked at my dad and thought, I have to do this like him. I need to do it for a long time. Five minutes felt long to me at that point in my life. There’s no way I could do it for longer.  I was also limited by my expectations. My dad does it for a minimum of 20 minutes. Even if I could do it for five minutes, what could I possibly get out of it? Perfectionism. Black and white thinking. Negative thought patterns. I pulled out all the ADHD stops. To be fair to myself, I don’t know if I could have meditated then, even medicated. But I know that I wasn’t able to with the limiting ideas I had in my head.  For many years exercise was my meditation. And, I very much do consider my exercise practice an integral part of my ADHD and depression and anxiety management. I really do consider it, at the lever I do it, mindfulness. But it isn’t really meditation. I only got into meditation in my late 30’s when my son did a study at MGH for ADHD kids under 6-12 using the kids’ calm meditation on the HeadSpace App. I…

What is mindfulness can be a difficult enough question for anyone to answer. For an ADHDer, it can be even harder. We tend to think of a super zen person, maybe even a Buddhist monk meditating for hours while completely clearing their mind of all distractions. But that is a very limited and typically ADHD/black and white way of looking at it. Honestly, that’s how I thought about it when I was younger until my eyes were opened. Now with a broader understanding of meditation and mindfulness as a whole, I realize how essential they are to managing our ADHD. First, meditation is great. I’ll come back to that. But meditation is not the only way to “do” mindfulness. For those of you who cringe at the mere mention of the term mindfulness, like the teenage client who inspired this post, I give you permission to insert the work intentional-ness every time I use the word mindfulness from now on. Because that is really all it is. In my experience mindfulness can be as simple as being intentional about something that you have never been intentional about before.  I’ll give you one example. Dr. David Nowell @davidnowell on Twitter gave me a deck of his mindfulness cards when we got together to network many years ago. I loved them and still have them. As with any group of things, I responded to some more than others. One of my favorites was, and I’m paraphrasing so I don’t have to look through the deck this is still on my desk these many years later, “listen to one of your favorite songs but concentrate only one one of the instruments.”  I was not a musician and other than jamming to a particular guitar hook, or that sweet drum fill from “in the air…

I was going to write about something else this week, until this article came across my desk. Thanks for sending it via snail mail dad. Food for thought when we know our ADHD kids are prone to addiction of all kind. Sex addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction. My twelve year old boy still looks away and says, “eeeew” when there is a kiss in a movie. But he also has my wife’s old laptop in his room most of the time. I think it’s time for “The Talk.” And, porn clearly needs to be part of it. A reminder: Almost all addictive and risky behavior by ADHD kids starts earlier than we think it should. As parents, we should almost always err on the side of bringing those sensitive topics up on the early side, rather than the late side.

My mid-week post… post dated as my post for last week, which got away from me ended up being longer than expected. So I’m going to try to make this one more concise. We’ll see… I may expand on this more later.  The core idea is that in life we have certain moments that need to be triggers for action. Often as ADHDers, when something goes wrong we go into triage mode and deal with the immediate ramifications but don’t account for the lack of planning, organization, time, attention, or whatever we needed to spend to avoid having the same thing happen again. Thus, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.  I’m going to give you one example from my professional life to chew on. And I may expand in a future post on how this has helped me run a more efficient business. (And, this concept came up this week with a client who runs a business that is not too dissimilar to mine.) When I book a new client, like I did today, (Yay!) that automatically triggers…  ? I send a welcome packet to that client with 5 standard documents, one of which is personalized. Now there is a certain percentage of people who ghost me at this point for whatever reason. So I wait until I get billing info which triggers a new set of tasks automatically. ? Put client in my google address book under “clients,” (Check list while I’m in there.) ? Put client in my master schedule so I don’t promise a spot that’s not open ? Put client on my google calendar so I don’t double book  ? Make a folder for the new client with a name label These steps are annoying and tedious, ADHD kryptonite, if…

Here’s a quick one mid week (backdated to last week,) and I’ll give you a more substantial post on Friday… hopefully.  I have lots of clients who really stress out about meal planning and shopping. I know I’ve posted about that before. But I think sometimes I make it sound harder than it is. Really, you have some starch in your house. Roasting and baking potatoes, regular and pearled couscous, fries, wild, arborio, spanish and jasmine rice, nice bread to grill, hot dog/sausage and sandwich rolls, baked and black beans, tortillas and a both short and long pastas are what we usually have on hand. You keep those in stock as your “par.”  Then you think about how many days you want to cook, how many days you want to pull something out of the freezer, and how many days you want to do take out or eat leftovers. I generally figure look at the nights we will all be home and think about 7 dinners that need to happen. 1. Right now, I’m doing 5 Guys one night a week while my wife works late and the kids have practice. 2. We’ve got tons of Matzo Ball Soup in the Freezer. Add a roll and a salad/some veggies = a meal. Might be potato leek, chile, Fejoada, Kale soup, etc.  3 & 4. There’s always a pasta in here somewhere, maybe two. I’ve got several I rotate through. I’ve got pesto in the freeze, cacciatore, meatballs, amatriciana, and artichoke pasta when Michelle is out like this Friday.  5 & 6 are usually a piece of meat, a veggie, and one of those starches. I generally have chicken breast and thighs, sausages, pork tenderloins or chops, 80% lean burger, and eye round steak hanging out in the freezer. 7. I…

Here’s the schedule from Friday of vacation week. Having gotten my big work project done for the week, I could focus mostly on home/personal stuff. You will note that I already realized I misordered things while making the list and just gave them new numbers and accurate times. Errands in the afternoon. Probably my most accurate execution of the week. But no more or less productive. Just stuck to the plan ’cause there was no reason not too.

Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gardening. I woke up with a fire under me to finish the copy for my new website. And I pretty much pushed everything else aside and banged that out… except I play a game with E and did his schedule with him. But again, the framework made for a productive day, despite it being changed quite a bit. I was in control. I decided what to work on. I was efficient and productive. WIN! Though you might not be able to tell that from first look at the schedule…

Wednesday I had some clients and some appointments. So I was less aggressive with the schedule and ended up sticking more to it. Still a good day.

Amended: wrote about the wrong day… Tuesday was was supposed to be the nicest day of the week. So I planned to spend a lot of the day doing the garden stuff that was on my agenda for the week. MOst of my morning was taken up in the garden. I did hit my two major daily goals of playing a game with my oldest for 45 minutes and doing / teaching his schedule with him. But a lot of the rest of my schedule was ad hoc as I was making good progress on my website redo. So I rolled with lots of changes.

If you are a regular reader you know that I post schedules from time to time to show how I think of time and tasks and how they interact. I don’t use the schedule that often anymore since most of my days are filled with clients. But, when I am suffering from a very, very full plate and big chunks of free time, I use my tried and true scheduling techniques to maximize my productivity. Last week was a vacation week for my kids. I had both of them home on on Monday and My oldest home for the whole week but I had a tremendous amount to do. So I made schedules every day.  Actually, first I made a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish every day which included eating well, not drinking too much, playing a game with my son for at least 45 minutes, meditating, and some other stuff. And, I narrowed down some of the work projects I’d been saving for my off week into manageable chunks and looked at where they fit on my calendar. Then I went day by day with my schedule. I Think I’m going to try to post daily this week with my daily schedules from last week so you san see in real time (a week delayed) what I did to maximize my productivity.  As you can see from Monday’s schedule, I got up late, got into my day late, and was behind from the the get go. I also made many a daily change to my schedule based on how I was feeling, what the weather was like, how priorities changed, etc. I didn’t get everything done. But I got sooooo much more done and lowered my anxiety level so much compared to if I had rolled without a schedule. …

Here’s a bonus mid-week quickie. I often need some Ativan (lorazepam) to sleep. Sometimes I wake up with my brain on overdrive or one of my kids needs me and I can’t get back to sleep and need to take some in the dark of my room in haze of not-sleep. I stick or glue something on to the top of my pill container so that I can easily find it in the dark. I used several things over time that have eventually fallen off. Currently I have this sweet googly eye that I can feel in the dark and/or see easily amongst my other pill bottles in my nightstand. 

Progress is not a straight line. If that is your expectation, you will disappoint yourself. And, likely you will eventually stop trying to make progress. Setbacks, backsliding, and “relapses” are part of the progress. Three steps forward and two steps back exist as an aphorism for a reason. It is part of the human condition. We, as ADHDers, are no exception to that. In fact, we are double vulnerable because we crave and often expect instant gratification. But progress is a process. It does not happen in a day. It is rarely a smooth and rutt-free road.  This is triply true of ADHD humans who struggle with depression and anxiety. As a setback can trigger all the negative thoughts and feelings in our heads that send us deeper into a shame spiral and take us further away from the process of progress. I have learned over the years to judge my progress in many areas not by whether or not I fall off the proverbial horse, but by how quickly I get back on it.A bad week is better than a bad month.  A bad day is better than a bad week. A bad morning when you can recover and have a good afternoon… well, that’s just not so bad at all.  So, be kind to yourself when you fall. Dust yourself off. And get right back up. Eventually, it’s worth considering why and how you fell, especially if it is a pattern. (Maybe talk to your coach about it.) But in that moment getting back to the process of progress is the biggest victory you can achieve.  Standard Disclaimer:  In an effort to foil my own perfectionist tendencies, I do not edit my posts much… if at all. Please excuse and typos, mistakes, grammatical errors, or awkward phrasing. I…