I have now been diagnosed with ADHD for a week, and yesterday was the definite and final diagnosis result interview. If I am going into medication, more coaching, psycho education or whatever it will be, I don’t know as of now. But I know one thing for sure:

I will be trying to find different methods to interconnect methods of dealing with my sobriety and my anxiety disorder as well as my depressive states. And, if I’m right and I follow the lead of motivation through meaningful and sustainable habits, why not untilizing them to get some sort of benefit out of neurodiversity? A friend of mine recently wrote me: “Welcome to the neurodiverse elite” – well, I know for sure this is part ironic, part in earnest, but the one thing he wrote below was something that made me think: “It’s a feature, not a bug”.

Well, life and reality is what you make out of the experience and how you deal with your perception and – most importantly – how you frame it. There’s nothing like a powerful narrative to fuel a mindset.

So, I have developed a spectrum of methods to deal with (re-)framing negative emotional settings and experience:

1. visualisation
2. deconstructing situations
3. taking small steps
4. reflection
5. emotion surfing
6. analysing and building/omitting/changing habit (loops)

only to name a few. I will not discuss them anymore, because I have dealt and will deal with that in other posts.

Additionally, the following aspects, which I have touched upon and explained, but never taken too much into consideration for a powerful and positive tool are the following:

1. Hyperfocus
2. The RAS
3. Flow

I will – in a sec – explain how I want to interconnect these aspects (or think of how it could be used) to make a good tool out of it. But first the why: ADHD can be seen as a disorder. Well, this is something I will discuss in another post; in short: As long as you don’t suffer disadvantages, there is no need to see it as a disease, disorder or stigma. On the contrary: “It’s a feature and not a bug” gave me the impetus to find not only a reason not to stigmatize myself, but also to search for advantages. And here it goes:

If I want to make something a success, it needs to be meaningful and (at best) it should be fun.

These two prerequisites are very important to establish a good, and, at best, sustainable motivation to deal with things. So, if I can find means to make things motivating and worth pursuing instead of running away from them an procrastinate, I might get this thing I initially wanted to run away from into something that pushes me into a hyperfocus and thus generate a Flow effect, which sparks positive motivation and habit loops.

The strategy I am thinking of works as follows:

1. I need a sustainable and meaningful goal to work on. This goal isn’t fixed or final, it can be a step on the way forward.
2. If I framed the goal satisfactory enough, through, say, deconstructing negative underlying feelings, visualizing steps to do so and surgically make incisions to have small steps that are easy enough to handle to make it a small success, I let it be fed into my RAS.
3. My RAS will help me as a sort of probe or beacon in the storm of perceptions and thoughts in the mindstorm of ADHD. The better the intermitting goals and small steps seem reachable, the stronger this beacon will be.
4. The RAS – beacon will help me find motivating measures to pursue a habit or activity to reach the intermitting goal.
5. Once the intermitting goal is reached, experiencing the success and dopamine will feedback positively. I can take the next step, just enough to keep me motivated, interested, energetic and challenged enough to want to achieve the next goal. Let’s make it playful and interesting.
6. If it isn’t, take a step back and analyze what went wrong: RAS helps. Visualisation, deconstructing and all that jazz, rinse and repeat.
7. Let it be interesting enough to bring me into a Flow state.
8. Rinse and repeat.
9. Let hyper focus take over.

Well, I need to be vigilant of not getting into the chaos of toxic habit loops. That is a different post, but I have experience with that.

Why I think it may actually work? Well, without bragging to much, I am confident about it because there are a lot of things I worked out for myself without being a psychology expert but I have a lot of experience and I can make sensible conclusions about my own psychological landscape.

And, maybe, I will be bold enough to try and incorporate AI into this process. This, however, is another story as well.

All in all, I embrace the fact that I was diagnosed with ADHD, because the clarity I have now, the conclusions I can draw about my problems in my biography and my alcohol consumption and the productive conclusions I can draw for the future make for a good feeling. The horizon gets brighter.

Until next time, keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time (maybe it helps you to get into a Flow 🙂