Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental health conditions, affecting over 8 million adults in the United States alone.
The core symptoms of ADHD include difficulty paying attention, struggling with organization, being easily distracted, having poor impulse control, and constant restlessness or hyperactivity.
If you are living with ADHD, chances are high that you feel chronically overwhelmed and disorganized. Despite your best efforts at organizing, planning ahead, and trying to keep everything under control, your life often feels chaotic and out of control.
You likely spend excessive time and effort attempting to keep up with day-to-day tasks that seem simple for others, yet constantly slip through the cracks for you.
The good news is that with the right strategies, you can break free of the “curse” of ADHD and unlock your full potential. The key is to deeply understand how your brain works differently, and then make positive adaptations to work with your natural strengths.
What Is the Real Curse of ADHD?
Contrary to popular belief, the real curse of ADHD is not simply that parts of your brain function atypically. All brains have their strengths and weaknesses.
The deeper issue is that due to the coping strategies you developed over the years, you have failed to properly utilize intact parts of your impressive ADHD brain.
From a young age, you quickly realized your brain worked differently than other kids. Activities, schoolwork, and social interactions that seemed easy for your peers were exceedingly difficult for you.
Despite pouring all your effort into trying your very best, you experienced relentless struggles. Things often fell apart, no matter how hard you tried. Over time, this led to a deep sense of shame, low self-esteem, and feeling inherently defective.
Subconsciously, an interesting coping mechanism emerged. You started to deeply fear, anticipate, and try to avoid failure in all areas of life.
Unfortunately, this excessive focus on avoiding failure had the opposite of the intended effect. The more your thoughts became saturated with inner warnings like “Don’t screw up. You’re going to mess this up. Don’t fail again.”, the harder it became to actually focus on the task at hand.
Think of it like trying too hard to force yourself to fall asleep. The more desperate you are to sleep, the more your mind races and keeps you awake.
After experiencing repeated failures and mishaps in childhood and adolescence despite your best efforts, a deeper belief started to take hold: “No matter how hard I try, I’m going to end up failing anyway.”
This belief created a fork in the road. On one hand, you could:
1. Continue trying against all odds to “do it right”, yet fail anyway time and time again. Or on the other hand, you could:
2. Fail right off the bat, get it over with quickly, and thereby relieve yourself of the agonizing stress of trying so hard.
When failure started feeling inevitable no matter what, you made an understandable choice. Why put yourself through the wringer struggling so hard when you’re just going to fail in the end regardless? Far easier to just fail quickly, rip the band aid right off, and minimize the suffering.
Surprisingly, once failure was taken off the table as the worst case scenario outcome, parts of your brain actually started working better for you.
While neurotypical brains tend to feel quickly overwhelmed by chaos, distraction, unpredictability and too many competing stimuli, ADHD brains adapt well to such environments.
In fact, numerous studies have shown that when placed in stimulating, fast-paced, chaotic environments with lots of pressures, distractors and external stimuli forcing you to react, people with ADHD can enter a state of “flow” where they actually perform at their peak.
The reason behind this phenomenon is that such environments provide the constant urgings and stimulation your frontal lobes need to avoid feeling bored and under activated.
Chaos forces you to react in the present moment and improvise creatively on the fly. This allows you to circumvent your brain’s impairment with sustained attention, organization, and planning.
Most people with ADHD unconsciously end up leaning into creating chaos and stimulation in their daily lives. If failure is inevitable anyway, why not stop caring and prevent the anxiety of anticipating failure?
By constantly seeking novelty, stimulation, procrastination, and chaos, you can essentially trick your brain into engagement and experiencing a state of flow.
Why This Coping Mechanism Backfires
At first glance, this common ADHD coping strategy appears highly effective. By shortcutting directly to a chaotic state where your brain works best, you relieve stress and feel more motivated.
But the tragedy is that while chaos and stimulation may function as a shortcut to motivation and spurts of hyperfocus for your ADHD brain, this strategy simultaneously disables your ability to develop solid, healthy habits and routines.
And here’s why habits are so crucial…The Frontal Lobes vs. The Basal Ganglia
Let’s take a quick look under the hood at what’s going on in your brain.
The root of attentional and inhibitory challenges with ADHD is impairment in the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes govern executive functions like:
– Sustained attention span
– Organization
– Planning
– Managing emotions
– Delaying gratification
– Controlling impulses
Your medication and most ADHD interventions target boosting activity in the frontal lobes directly to improve these functions.
But a completely different part of your brain controls habits: the basal ganglia.
The basal ganglia operate on a different neurotransmitter system than the frontal lobes. Habits are processed in the basal ganglia as automatic behaviors requiring no effort, attention, or decision making.
Because they completely bypass the underactive parts of your ADHD brain, solid habits and routines are your savior. They essentially serve as your autopilot.
The problem is that constantly seeking novelty, stimulation, and chaos short circuits your brain’s ability to solidify habits. What worked yesterday is boring today. And if you’re constantly failing quickly just to get it over with, you never repeat tasks enough for them to become automatic.
Without consistent habits and routines functioning as your autopilot, you float through life constantly distracted, searching for your misplaced keys or phone, and trying to remember what you were just about to do.
The powerful impact of optimizing your habits and environment cannot be overstated. Research shows that people with ADHD who form habits and effective environmental adaptations outperform those with initially higher IQs who don’t focus on habits.
Reframing Your Beliefs is the First Step
If you want to break out of the curse of chronic disorganization, underachievement, and stress, the first step is addressing the unhelpful core beliefs causing you to underutilize the amazing potential of your ADHD brain. The most crucial belief to reframe is that failure and underperformance are inevitable no matter what you try.
This destructive belief that “I’m just going to fail anyway, so why bother trying?” paralyzes you from putting in the effort required to succeed. It’s also what keeps you stuck in a constant state of chaos seeking and quick failures to relieve the anxiety.
Here is a simple but powerful reframe that will change your life:
Instead of trying to completely eliminate failures right away, which likely feels impossible, just focus on delaying failures as long as humanly possible. Commit to sticking with tasks for just a bit longer than feels comfortable. Say to yourself:
“Yes, I may end up failing eventually. But for now, I will try my very best and delay failure or giving up for as long as I can, even if I really want to quit.”
This reframed mindset accomplishes two powerful things right off the bat:
1. You stop catastrophizing failure as the end of the world. This immediately reduces anxiety and frees up mental bandwidth.
2. You buy yourself more time to start forming the small habits and progress that eventually snowball into success.
Here’s an example of how effective this process is in action:
There was a professional video game team notorious for “choking” under pressure. During high stakes games, they would make mistakes, lose confidence, and then tilt into giving up too early.
A new coach came in and completely reframed the way they approached competitions. Instead of playing to win every single game, their new goal became: “Play your heart out focusing on nothing but the current moment. If you start losing, don’t give up. See just how long you can stick it out before eventually succumbing. Get creative and just have fun surviving!”
By simply trying to delay failure for 5 more minutes instead of immediately tilting, their late game comebacks increased over 20%. Games they would have surrendered at 20 minutes, they suddenly pushed out to 45 minutes. And a decent number of those delayed failure games they ended up winning!
This simple reframing also enabled them to start building their mental toughness and late game teamwork. Progress compounded until they became champions.
Rewire Your Habits
Once you have reframed self-defeating beliefs and prepared your mindset, it’s time to start laying down positive habits and routines that will act as your autopilot. Habit formation takes a bit of trial and error, but thankfully gets easier the more you practice it. Here are some proven strategies:
Start extremely small – Initially build habits that take just 1-5 minutes, then gradually increase the scope from there. Trying to totally overhaul your life overnight will be too overwhelming.
Attach new habits to existing habits – Piggyback your new habit onto something you already do consistently like making your morning coffee or brushing your teeth.
Use external reinforcement – Set phone alarms and visual reminders to prompt you to practice new habits. Create checklists and habit trackers.
Build accountability – Share your new habit goals with a friend, family member or ADHD coach who will hold you accountable. Review progress regularly.
Design an optimal environment – Declutter your physical space and digital workflow to minimize visual distraction. Listen to music/white noise if it helps you focus.
Reward progress – Praise yourself for sticking with new behaviors, not just the end outcome. With ADHD, progress compounds slowly, so celebrate small wins.
Over time, these efforts will rebuild your habit circuitry. Once your new routines are solidified after a month or two of daily consistency, they will start to feel natural and automatic.
You will notice your keys and phone magically not getting lost as often. Your paperwork and bills are more organized without constant effort. Healthy patterns like regular doctor visits happen on autopilot.
Thanks to your reframed mindset and flourishing habits, you are finally able to reliably do what neurotypical brains do subconsciously. This relieves a massive burden and frees up your mental resources.
Unlocking the Gifts of Your Unique ADHD Brain
While parts of your brain may struggle with certain tasks, there are many cognitive strengths and advantages that come along with your neurotype as well.
Studies show ADHD brains tend to excel in areas like:
– Hyper focus – When deeply interested in something, ADHD minds can enter a state of intense sustained focus where hours can fly by.
– Divergent thinking – You make connections between ideas that people without ADHD miss. This fuels creativity and problem solving.
– Improvisation – You adapt well on the fly in dynamic environments with lots of stimuli to react to.
– Entrepreneurial traits – Impulsiveness paired with a high risk tolerance drives an appetite for bold ventures and new challenges.
– Perceptual speed – You notice details others miss and rapidly take action on opportunities.
– Resilience – Rebounding quickly from setbacks with renewed determination comes easier to the ADHD brain.
The key is to stop fighting against the tide of your unique neurology. Instead, start learning to understand your brain’s natural rhythms and flow. Reframe unhelpful beliefs, build up new habits to make progress you can rely on, and play to your cognitive strengths whenever possible.
By working with your brain rather than against it, avoiding quick failures, and expanding your mental blind spots, you will discover capacities you never knew you had. ADHD and Disorder will turn into ADHD and Discovery of your superpowers. You’ve got this!
