Managing ADHD: The Power of Setting Boundaries, Exercise, and Sleep
How boundaries, exercise, sleep, therapy, and self-compassion help adults manage ADHD, and why these basics are easier said than done even for a coach.
Time and planning
You planned the day. By ten it was gone. Something you swore would take twenty minutes took two hours, and something you've been putting off "until this weekend" has been in that bucket since spring. You've bought the planner and the app, and every one of them worked for about two weeks. Bring that up in any ADHD support group and half the room has the same drawer of abandoned planners.
Planners assume you feel time passing. A lot of ADHD brains don't. There's now, and there's not now, and everything in not now sits the same distance away, whether it's due Friday or in March.
A lot of Autistic brains hit it from the other side: the plan was fine until the dentist moved your appointment, and then the whole day came apart. If you're AuDHD, you can get both: a plan you can't feel moving that also falls apart the moment anything in it changes. That's why the fourth planner fails the same way the first three did. Time and change have to live somewhere you can see them, outside your head, with room built in for whatever moves.
Start with these
Free resource
Get the free Values and Strengths Workbook
The workbook I start coaching with. You figure out what actually matters to you and what you're actually good at, so you can build your life around both instead of around who you think you should be. For adults with ADHD, autism, or AuDHD, diagnosed or wondering.
For more, check out these Resources!
Book
The ADHD Field Guide for Adults
Cate Osborn, Erik Gude, Rennie Dyball
Cate Osborn, Erik Gude, and Rennie Dyball wrote the broad adult ADHD guide from the inside: executive dysfunction, time blindness, building systems, hormones, rejection sensitivity, intimacy, and dealing with healthcare. It makes room for BIPOC, trans, and nonbinary experiences that most ADHD books skip. The authors are educators and advocates with ADHD, not clinicians. For adults with ADHD who want one book that covers the actual life and not just the attention part.
Podcast
Hacking Your ADHD
William Curb
Short, practical episodes you can actually finish.
William Curb keeps his episodes short and aimed at one thing at a time: getting started, time, habits, focus. He has ADHD and tests the techniques on himself, and brings in clinicians now and then to check the reasoning. His credentials aren't stated. For adults who want something they can try this week without sitting through an hour of backstory.
YouTube channel
Russell Barkley, PHD: Dedicated to ADHD Science+
Russell A. Barkley
The science backbone. If you want to know why willpower isn't the problem, start here.
Russell Barkley is one of the most cited ADHD researchers there is, and this channel is where he lectures, at length, on the science. Executive function, medication, and what ADHD actually is underneath the symptom list. It's dense. Some of his positions, like the life-expectancy estimates, are debated, so take them as his views. For clinicians, coaches, parents, and adults willing to sit through the material to get the primary source.