I may have had an epiphany of my own when working with a client last week. He and I got very specific about how he was feeling and differentiated his anxiety from his shame. And, what I realized is that they have different behavioral levers and can cripple in different ways. I’m still exploring this. But I figured I’d share what I’m working on with my 24 devoted readers and you hundreds of bots that Google keeps telling me are real people trafficking my site every month.  Anxiety is a sinister and crippling problem. I deal with it in a myriad of ways. Pharmacologically with my antidepressant and with benzodiazepines. I also use exercise, self talk, mindfulness, meditation, generally self care, and other ways. I’d estimate that about 80% of my clients also deal with anxiety. Over the years I think that has made me somewhat of a lay expert… if that’s not an oxymoron. I’ve also done some training in CBT which I have incorporated into my coaching for many years now.  What I know about anxiety, particularly in how it affects ADHDers, is that we put things off because they make us anxious (and because of the ADHD reasons that we put them off.) But there are two competing anxieties at any given time. There is the anxiety of doing Thing A and the anxiety of not doing Thing A. Because our time sense is wonky, we aren’t good at the concept of “later.” So the anxiety of not getting Thing A done is relatively low as we put it off for a period of time. Meanwhile the anxiety of not doing Thing A slowly builds based on our theoretical knowledge that we should do it, that we might not have time (whatever that means,) there will be…

If you are a regular, you know that I semi-regularly post one of my daily schedules. I don’t often make them anymore. They are an example of a skill that I have drilled for so long that I have internalized it for all but the most intense days. This week is intense; not many clients/meeting, but soooo much to do. I need to maximize my productivity, which means making good decisions about how I spend my time and on what. So, I fall back on my tried and true scheduling. This is a skill that I work on with MANY of my clients. And I always remind them that the metric of success is comparing your productivity to not having a schedule at all. I often post schedules that went pretty well. I’m taking this opportunity to post one that involves: My having done some things the night before Dealing with two serous tantrums by my six-year-old that were “unscheduled” An hour long meeting that I didn’t think I was going to have to attend… that I was wrong about Some important revelations about priorities that caused me reevaluate why I had put certain things on this schedule in the first place This schedule was for Tuesday the 30th of March 2021. My overall experience was this: I got the number one personal thing done on my list Once I reevaluated, I got a good hour and a half of work done on my number one work priority.  Around three-and-a-half hours of meetings and two hours of parenting that feels really successful. The only thing I really missed was not working out because my workout was gardening that got cancelled. But that was also an active choice later in the day.  Of course I didn’t make all these notes during…

Accountability is a very important part of coaching. In large part is my job to figure out how much accountability to offer I think I’ve lost several potential clients lately because I’m very upfront in my consultations about not providing too much active accountability. My goal is for you to not need me. How can we get there if you are depending on me for accountability? It is always my goal to teach you to be accountable to yourself. Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t that what we are all looking for? Not to say we don’t have people we rely on in many aspects of our lives. I think of it like a WWII bomber crew. (See a great, if schmaltzy movie, Memphis Belle.) We can’t “put those bombs in the pickle barrel” on our own. But don’t we want to be the pilot, the officer, running the show? Of course we use experts and we outsource and we create a team if we can. That’s life in a highly specialized world. You might take a cooking class. I’ve taken classes in small business accounting, woodworking, Microsoft Excel. I have a gardening consultant because I can’t learn everything from books. I outsource my bookkeeping because that small business accounting class only served to educate me to the fact that that is not how my brain works. I have a tax attorney who does my taxes every year. Pre-pandemic I outsourced some of our laundry.  On the other hand, I grow most of my own produce in the summer. I do a lot of my own butchering, I do a lot of plumbing, some small carpentry, painting, and a little bit of electric. The point being that I run the show. I make the decisions about what I do and what…

Self care is a buzzwork in our society these days. But some of us have been talking about self care for years, especially in the context of ADHD. I can’t speak to neurotypical folks. I’ve only been inside an ADHD guy’s brain. But I can tell you that ADHD people seem to have a particularly hard time with self care. I think there are many reasons that this is the case. We tend to have fewer hours in the day to be productive. (If you are familiar with ADHD, you know what I mean and I don’t have to go on a six paragraph tangent about it!) We also suffer from low self esteem due to the way that our ADHD negatively affects our day to day and big picture success. And, our struggles with the skills and executive functions of time management, initiation, follow through, consistency, and delaying gratification all make it harder for us to practice good self care. And fundamentally, self care might be not-so-stimulation and repetitive sometimes.  But I had a really interesting session with a client about a month ago during which I challenged him to even question the concept of self care. He was going through a really difficult time in his life. He’s in the healthcare field and directly works with patients, but is not higher end of the healthcare pay/stability scale. So, work is very stressful for him. And, he is going through a tremendously stressful time with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. So, he came into a session and wanted to talk about his failures in the self care arena. He felt like he wasn’t living up to his own expectations (and his almost-ex-wife’s expectations) of how he was keeping the house. He wasn’t making the choice to spend the energy to make and…

When I started my ADHD blog I swore that I was going to be the person who posted on it weekly. I didn’t want to be the ADHD guy with all the ideas and none of the follow through. I have to say that I lived up to my own expectations. I practiced what I preached in my coaching practice and put structures in place to have topics to write about and behaviours to get it done. I’ve always been very proud of that. And, then I got really, really sick in Nov. of 2019. And, was just in the process of bouncing back around March on 2020, when… Well, we all know what happened in March of 2020. And, with two kids, the youngest being a five-year-old kindergartener with significant mental health issues at the time, much of normal life, and business as usual ground to a halt.  Then I believe in early December I promised you, the few but beloved reader of my blog that I was officially back on the horse. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans. The aforementioned now six-year-old was in crisis and needed to be hospitalized for an extended period of time over the holidays and into February. And, the emotional, psychological, and logistical toll that took on our family and on me was/is hard to quantify except to say that it was enormous.  I don’t want to go into that too much. I’m happy to share anything about me. But, someday that child will be an adult and this post may still exist in the “datasphere.” I want to respect my son’s future privacy. Just know that this has been a difficult time for me. And, as the pieces seem to be coming back together for him and…

There was a good, not great, but good article in ADDitude this week about nutrition and ADHD.  https://www.additudemag.com/proper-nutrition-adhd-relationship-with-food/?utm_source=eletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=best_december_2020&utm_content=121120&goal=0_d9446392d6-d261212532-287561789 It made some really good points that are pretty well established. The ADHD brain does better with high protein and low simple carbs. Though there is some good evidence that that is good for most humans. It is also good for those of us who are prone to depression and anxiety.  There are some other claims in the article that seem a bit extra-science to me. And, I noted there there didn’t seem to be any studies cited. Let’s me honest. The field of nutrition is one offers a new best think pretty often. But I do think that the carb / protein has enough research behind it.  Omega 3’s are also good for humans. But, there are different kinds. They are not without environmental impact. And, the benefits for ADHD are not statistically significant for those who are effectively medicated already. At least according to what I’ve read… though I will admit that was a while ago.  So, if you want to go beyond eating lots of healthy veggies and a moderate amount of naturally raised earth sustaining protein, and a lower carb diet, I would do your research in PARTICULARLY REPUTABLE sources.  I should also say, that I recognize that the previous proposal is made by a white middle class guy who used to be a professional chef. I figure it is on you to try to acquire the skills to cook healthy. But, it is on us a a society to make sure that everyone has financial and logistical access to the healthy food the need to thrive. And, frankly we do not do a good enough job at that. (Wow. It’s hard not to let at least a…

I was the classic hyperactive boy. This was fully on display in my late teens and twenties when I was a young driver. Luckily I am an athlete with exceptional spatial abilities and hand eye coordination. So, despite being, at one point, one point away from losing my licence from speeding tickets, I was never in an accident that was my fault.  There was an incident when I was at an all day concert in North Hampton with a girl. We originally were going to camp out and come home in the morning. But it had rained that day and we couldn’t find any good places to stay… and I was still wired at 1am. I was about 19 at the time, pretty much straight edge. So when I got pulled over on the Mass Pike at 1am going 95 mph I was totally sober. I should probably note now, for those of you who don’t know me personally or haven’t seen my pictures on the other pages of my site, that I am about as white as you get. Not in the sense that I’m Mayflower white. I’m 3rd generation American in three directions and am a total mutt. But, I am a white (partly) Anglo-Saxon (raised) Protestant, who grew up (solidly middle class) in a rich Boston suburb.  So, when I got pulled over I was scared… about losing my license, about having my car towed and how I was going to get home, about having to tell my parents, about what it was going to do to my insurance rates. But not for one second was I scared about the interaction I was about to have with the state police officer that was about to come to my car door. Because, fundamentally, I grew up with a respectful relationship with cops…

I’ve been thinking about how to make my triumphant return to my blog. How can I possibly come back with the consistency that I had always had pre-pandemic? Should I stockpile entries? Should I try to write in the middle of the night after the kids were in bed? Should I only do short, pithy posts that are less substantive but can be churned out? Should I take longer posts and make them into long series? Should I…??? The answer is no, no, and no. I can’t expect myself to know what the future holds. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t even have a magic 8 ball. I can’t guarantee that I can post weekly like I have in the past. But I can guarantee that I’m currently posting today. And that is a victory. That is an ADHD victory. That is a human victory. That is an anxiety victory. That is a pandemic victory. I haven’t posted since early August. If I start posting at all, even if it’s not every week, that will continue to be a victory.  And I think we all need victories right now. So whatever you are struggling with, working out, eating well, meditation, getting work done, homework, job searching, keeping the house tidy, whatever… remember that it is not all or nothing. YOU CAN MAKE PROGRESS WITHOUT BEING PERFECT. Change is not a light switch, it is an iterative process.  I have had so, so many things on hold as I’ve been in survive, not thrive mode through the last 8 months. And that was the right thing to do. Now I’m struggling with how to approach those things knowing that I’m still in survive mode but that I want or need to get back in the game somehow. I think…

ADDitude has a great article on Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria today. It is part of the emotional dysregulation that comes with ADHD for many. “New Insights Into Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.” It’s a great article. But if you weren’t reading super carefully, you might have missed something really important. “It’s widely understood that the diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the DSM-V only fit well with elementary school age children (6-12) and have never been validated in a group of people over the age of 16.1 They are based on only observational or behavioral criteria that can be seen and counted. The traditional diagnostic criteria intentionally avoid symptoms associated with emotion, thinking styles, relationships, sleeping, etc. because these features are hard to quantify. For clinicians who work with later adolescents and adults, the DSM-V criteria are almost useless because they ignore so much which is vital to understanding how people with an ADHD nervous system experience their lives.” This is one of the main reasons we have so many incompetent clinicians in America, when it comes to ADHD. If you are truly “in the know.” there is a wealth of information on ADHD, diagnosis, treatment, medication, etc. But, if you are going by the book, the one book that you are supposed to go by to diagnose and treat all mental disease and disorders… well, then you’re shit out of luck in terms of knowing what you are doing. It is really shameful. 

Quite a while ago I posted about a checklist I’d made for my son for his morning routine. This is an update, re-exploration of that topic.  My son is 11. He is the most wonderful, empathetic, smart, and sensitive kid you will ever meet. But, he’s on his own planet much of the time. This is hard for me because his flavor of ADHD is so different from mine. I am over sensitive to my environment. I notice everything. As a kid I may not have cared to address what I noticed because it seemed like too much effort, but I knew it was there. I struggle with gett my 11 year old to even notice. So, a few years ago, I made him a checklist and printed it on bright yellow paper and posted it next to the door in his room. I worked for a few weeks and then faded into his background. I know that ADHDers tend to do a new thing while it is the “bright, shiny object” and then tune it out. I know that visual reminders need to be refreshed often to work for ADHDers. Yet, somehow I expected that the posted checklist would work indefinitely. Or maybe I just wanted it to.  Needless to say, it did not work forever. Not even close. He didn’t slide back to square one but much of the progress was lost. I guess it wasn’t super high on my list to follow up and enough of the progress was retained. Then the zombie apocalypse happened and we’re all stuck in the house together, and I have more on my plate than ever. And having to chase my son around to do pretty basic stuff like clearing his plate after meals was really grinding my gears.  And before you…

Hey everyone. It has been almost two months since I posted last. I believe one of my last posts was about being in “survive” mode as opposed to “thrive” mode. I’ve definitely been surviving. The past few months at home have been tough, as I’m sure they have for most of you too. In many ways I’ve been forced to cut down to the bare minimum in order to survive. My self care is not quite where I would like it to be. I don’t get to play the drums as much as I’d like.. hardly at all. But I only skipped one lesson. I’m still trying to progress. I haven’t had as much time as I would like to work in the garden. But my wife took the kids for three hours on Sunday and I more or less caught up. So far everything looks good. I’ve made a concerted effort to start meditating on my own again over the last few weeks… with varied success.  Work is also a challenge. I have done zero marketing and basically only made time for my clients. Other than that… I’m not keeping up on my ADHD reading and webinars. And, as you know, I’m not posting here. I was very insistent when I started this blog that I didn’t want to do the ADHD thing of posting for two months and then forgetting about the blog altogether. I’m proud to say that I’ve been very consistent over the years. But things change. With this unprecedented situation, I’ve had to adjust my expectations.  I think the key to my success (if you want to call it that,) is that I’m just not expecting to thrive. I’m more willing to let things go now than I ever have been before, which is nice. Years ago…

My daughter found this picture nail in my office. It has been my go to fidget toy this week during many a remote session. Sometimes simple is best… and cheapest.