Emotional Self-Care for People with ADHD

People with ADHD need to be especially mindful of their emotional needs as they navigate through the journey of managing their symptoms. Due to emotional dysregulation, you struggle with feelings that seem bigger, more intense, and harder to control. This is why self-care—the actions you take to connect with your emotions and process them in a healthy way—is so vital.

 

Responding to your emotional needs may not come naturally at first, but it becomes easier and more fulfilling as you learn to integrate it into your life. By regularly engaging in emotional self-care and employing self-compassion, you can develop healthy coping mechanisms that greatly enhance your joy and sense of well-being. Here are a couple of simple and actionable practices can be incorporated into a routine as you progress forward.

 

You don’t have to get out magazines and posterboard and glitter, but you may benefit from a creative expression of displaying your goals visually. This may seem like a childish practice to you. But it’s not about the end product. This is meant to be a process in mindfulness where you are assessing what is truly important to you.

 

People whose brains function more linearly may not understand the labyrinthine mental associations that take the ADHD brain from thought A to thought B. This is part of why a vision board can be so fun. It sparks diverse neural connections, and it is a creative way to organize your goals and dreams.

 

This is a little different from “manifesting what you want.” Just because you put pictures together doesn’t mean that the universe is going to align to give you those things. You can have thoughts and dreams, but it is up to you to put them into action. As the Cheshire Cat said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Don’t let that creepy cat be right. Visualize and actionize your plans.

 

One of the hardest things about being diagnosed later in life is the feeling that you have lost time. ADHD is commonly “skipped” or misdiagnosed because it is hard to diagnose intelligent adults who have developed coping skills to mask their deficits. Or maybe some of the delay is because you were told your entire life that you weren’t living up to expectations, and now there is some trepidation about seeking treatment that validates that your brain is “broken.”

 

Whatever the reason, you finally take the first step. You work hard to advocate for yourself after years of failing to be heard. You get diagnosed, you get treated, and things finally feel like they should.

 

And now the grief sets in. Why didn’t I do this sooner? I wasted so much time before treatment! Imagine what life could have been like.

 

Don’t let yesterday’s grief make you miss today’s opportunity. Mourning the loss of time can be appropriate, but it often gets in the way of celebrating the opportunity of facing the world in a new way. It is entirely possible that in the time before adequately managing your ADHD, you were building coping skills that now you can utilize fully. It was not lost time; it was just a different time.