ADHD: Discovering Why Your Life Is Chaos
If your life has always felt chaotic, undiagnosed ADHD may be why. Learn how to get a diagnosis and what support helps adults with ADHD move forward.
Just diagnosed, or wondering
Maybe you just got the diagnosis, or maybe you saw a video and recognized your whole life in it. Either way there's relief, because it finally has a name, and there's grief right behind it, for all the years you spent thinking you were lazy or broken. Then the question nobody answered at the appointment: okay, now what? Adult diagnoses have climbed in recent years, so you're asking it alongside a lot of people who got missed as kids.
A diagnosis explains what's going on. It doesn't hand you a way to live with it, and medication, if you take it, opens the door without teaching you the skills. Coaching works on the now-what part. If you don't have a diagnosis yet and want one, I can point you to someone who does assessments, and we can work on the patterns you're living with in the meantime.
Start with these
Free resource
Get the free Pills Don't Teach Skills worksheet
Medication can open the door, but your kid still has to learn the skills. This free worksheet covers starting ADHD medication for your child: which changes to expect and when, which side effects level out and which are red flags, why sensory issues can show up, and what to track for the doctor.
For more, check out these Resources!
Book
Driven to Distraction
Edward M. Hallowell, John J. Ratey
Driven to Distraction started the adult ADHD conversation. Now you can explore where we are going with ADHD 2.0.
For a lot of adults, this is the book where somebody finally said the words out loud. Edward Hallowell and John Ratey fill it with case after case of people whose lives look like yours, and what they did about each one. The original came out in 1994, and they revised it in 2011 with updated medical information, so get the revised edition. Even revised, it predates the DSM-5, and the thinking has moved on since. Read it for the recognition. For the same two authors working from the current science, that's ADHD 2.0.
Podcast
ADHD Aha! (Understood.org)
Laura Key
Each episode is one person describing the moment they realized they, or their kid, had ADHD. Laura Key hosts, has ADHD herself, and lets guests tell it their way. It's stories, not instruction. If you're late-diagnosed, newly diagnosed, or still sitting with the question, hearing other people's version of your own moment does something a symptom list doesn't.
YouTube channel
I'm Autistic, Now What?
Meg
Meg is late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD, in the UK, and her channel is the practical part of the weeks after a diagnosis: now what. She's open about working it out alongside her viewers, about 284,000 of them. She isn't a professional. For newly and late-diagnosed autistic and AuDHD adults who have the label and no instructions.