this is your gentle reminder to stop fighting against your adhd and instead structure your life around it

buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell

leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist

put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.

when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!

plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.

if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge

if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.

its not stupid if it works! our brains literally have a chemical deficiency. you are allowed to accommodate yourself. go forth and stop making your life more difficult than it has to be because "this shouldn't be this hard". it is hard, so make it easier.

Every room in my house has at least two pairs of scissors in them

Phone calender reminders can be set to remind days, hours AND minutes in advance - for an unusual appointment I often set one 3 days in advance, one day, that morning, and then the usual 2, 1 and half an hour before I need to leave. The days in advance warning kinda pull things up into my awareness so I don't make plans and then suddenly discover everything needs to change because the thing I'd forgotten about is TODAY

people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.

"Don't you feel satisfied that your windows are so clean now?" It sucked and it sucked and now I don't care. I just remember the sucking.

Executive Dysfunction is Fun (Not)

I’ve been in such a funk since the concert. I’m not even sure I enjoyed myself that much. maybe I did. I don’t know

Hey hi hello! I got a potential answer for you.

After ANY thrilling and/or happy experience, it's very possible for your brain to quite literally run out of the proteins and vitamins you need to make more happy chemical. People get dopamine crashes anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks after abormal but exciting events - whether it's a really good day, they did a lot of socializing, had a lot of fun hyperfocusing on a project, had an intense sexy time experience, a huge performance they were excited for, a date, a day at a theme part, etc etc etc.

Your brain goes into overdrive coming up with !!!!!!!! chemicals to keep up with your environment, then -especially if that was an abnormal experience or if you don't have the !!!!!! chemicals in excess very often- then you just run out for a while.

You can remedy this by finding other things that will be good, but not expect the !!!!! along with it. Instead of something you really really like doing, find something simple and calm and comforting. Snuggle with a friend and watch a movie, pet a cat, write a letter, etc.

Definitely get some vitamin d, chocolate if you can / like it, and take a multivitamin. Protein is important for regrowth and restocking, so get plenty of that too to bounce back quickly!

Love you much, I hope this passes very soon 🫂

WAIT WAIT THATS A THING???

LIKE….

THATS WHY AFTER THE EXCITEMENT WEARS OFF FROM ME DOING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT MAGKES ME “!!!!” I JUST FEEL BLEH AND IMMEDIATELY CRAVE *THING* AGAIN

SO IM NOT JUST BROKEN

ME AFTER MY FRICKING GAY BOOKCLUB WHERE I SEE ALL MY FRIENDS ONCE A MONTH

OR AFTER WATCHING AN EPISODE OF THE SHOW IM HYPERFIXATED ON

WHAT

Yes!! It can also be extra bad for different types of neurospicy bitches. My adhd brain has directly proportional drops every day. If I had a meh morning I’ll have a good evening (if no other factors interfere). If I have a FANTASTIC morning I’m sure to have a mental breakdown that night. I don’t regulate those chemicals well at ALL, and have extremely predictable emotional crashes as a result of that.

I see and experience this phenomenon often when I actually do things. First hear about it in a LARP group - they called it drop, and I hear that term in theatre sometimes too. (This is why everyone goes to eat at a restaurant right after the event is over.) Point is, I'm glad there's like Science Reason backing up that emotional dead zone after an event. And now I'm gonna start meal planning for events.

There's a fandom term called Post-Con Depression for the emotional slump (and sometimes physical exhaustion) you feel after getting home from a fun convention. After squeezing out all the happiness you can produce for several days straight, you run out of happiness for a few days. This is a known phenomenon!

This is why you people get the post concert sadness

Everyone always talks abt the ways ADHD makes you forgetful or hyperactive, but one thing I dunno if I’ve seen anyone talk about is the self-gaslighting that can happen, how you get so used to having forgotten/missed something that if you hear a piece of information that contradicts what you’ve heard before, you have this instinct to accept the newer info as the right one because maybe you just forgot about something. You get so used to people seeing you as stupid that you’re tempted to not speak up or ask about or argue against something that’s incorrect out of fear of looking like an idiot.

UH WHAT

UH...... WHAT.........

This entire article is eye-opening, even as someone who has ADHD and has read a lot about it already. There's so much more there than just the bit about the glucose-craving brain. SO. MUCH.

This might have been the bit that hit me hardest, actually:

I feel SEEN. OTZ

Seriously, though. Read the whole thing. It's a good one.

Add to this that it's not just that your brain says "I don't want to"- the prefrontal cortex literally shuts OFF.

friendly reminder to my AFAB folks with ADHD:

your medication does not work properly when you’re on your period

because of lazy, misogynistic research practices in the testing of ADHD medications, it has only been discovered recently that hormone imbalances during your menstrual period essentially cancel out the effect of your medication.

(if you want to know about the aforementioned lazy research practices, the scientists doing the testing for adderall and vyvanse only used male mice and AMAB humans to test them on because the hormonal cycles of female/AFAB test subjects “affected test results, causing data to be inconsistent”.)

so yeah, if you feel horrible and sad and like you can’t get going while you’re on your period, that’s why :)

Source for people who need it, article posted May 24, 2022

And double reblogging to get by the “links don’t show up in the reblogs section.” If you’re looking for a source, click here.

ADHD is a disability. I know this. Nobody else around me does. When I say I can't do something, I don't need tips, I don't need encouragement, I need you to believe me. I need just one person to believe that I'm not lying when I say I am unable to do something because of my literal developmental disability. No more "just push through", no more "try harder", no more "I did it and you can too", because I am absolutely sure that in this moment I am unable to fucking do it! Please believe me for once. Please.

4 signs you could be "masking" your ADHD🎭:

1. Staying too quiet and being overly careful about what you say

2. Obsessively checking your belongings... to make sure you don't lose things

3. React as you are expected... to instead of what you feel inside

4. Hiding your hyperactivity through calmness

Wait op what do mean exactly by "hiding your hyperactivity trough calmess" ?

ADHD Symbol!

So I just found out that ADHD has it’s very own symbol! It’s similar to and was inspired by the autism infinity symbol, but designed specifically for those of us with ADHD by someone with ADHD! It’s apparently been around for a while now and I just had no idea about it at all? So I’m making this post to spread it around so other people know about it! It’s super sweet and cute and I’m absolutely going to be using it from now on! It looks like this! 

ALSO! The original designer/artist can be found HERE! In the link she explains why she made it, what inspired her, and has more options for higher resolution images, black and white versions, variations both with and without the antennae, and more!

Here’s more of what she’s stated about the design on her page as well:

She also offers different resolutions and formats, AND has outright stated that the symbols is completely COPYRIGHT FREE! Anyone can use it however they want, wherever they want! I still wanted to bring attention to her though, since she is the designer! She also has some links for if you wanted to support her, like her zazzle store!   

So yeah! Feel free to use and go nuts with this symbol my fellow ADHD pals! And anyone else, please share this post so others like me can know about it too!

(Source 1) / (Source 2)

I would really like to see this symbol take off the way the infinity one has, so please share it around! Keep being awesome everyone! 

Dealing With Executive Dysfunction - A Masterpost

its really weird to see all these articles about how people who have ADHD have sleeping problems but the issue I have is that if you look at it as a matter of your circadian rythym being out of sync? of COURSE you’re not going to be able to sleep. we don’t say people who can’t fall asleep at 4 pm and sleep 8 hours have insomnia, because that’s not a normally agreed upon time to sleep and its not your bodies time to sleep. if you tell someone to go to bed at 10 and they can’t sleep till 3 am sometimes in just not insomnia. people with ADHD are often wired to sleep from 4 am to 12 pm ish because of the delayed onset of melatonin but if you let us go to bed at the time we need? most of us actually sleep pretty well and consistently.

wAIT THIS IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS

“For most adults the onset of melatonin is around 9.30 pm; in ADHD children compared to controls this occurs at least 45 minutes later, and in adults with ADHD even 90 minutes (van der Heijden ea, 2005; van Veen ea 2010). After melatonin onset, it normally takes 2 hours to fall asleep, but in adults with ADHD it takes at least 3 hours (Bijlenga et al, 2013).”

Look at me awake at 1:47 am and reblogging this post.

So I’m actually trained in therapy for addressing insomnia and one of the things we learned is that a good chunk of sleep problems are societal disorders - as in they WOULDN’T EXIST as problems if society didn’t assume everyone was on the same circadian rhythm and that being up and working 9-5 was mandatory/normal. Blew my mind and made so much sense. You are not the problem, society is literally the problem.

If an autistic person overexplains something to you they probably don't think you're dumb they just think THEY would appreciate those details if they were the ones being explained to

A lot of things that seem obviously implicit in speech AREN'T obvious to autistic people. So we inherently think it's necessary to specify things that might seem transparent to neurotypical people because usually WE'RE the ones who need those explanations

Not an autistic person here but I have ADHD and experience this. And I would like to add : sometime I make leap of logic and see implication in things that are obvious to me but are not to other. As a result I don't know have 0 references to know if something is actually obvious to most people or if I need to make precision. So I overexplain everything, just in case. Plus I can't know if the one I'm talking to has comprehension difficulty in a subject, so again I overexplain just to be sure.

just curious, does anyone else like to pace around their room as a stim? apparently to neurotypicals it means nervousness but i do it cause im happy and have energy!

My most common stim is to run around the room !