COPING WITH ADULT ADHD WITHOUT MEDICATION: TOOLS AND TRICKS
When you have adult ADHD, your life is a continuous barrage of surprises and your home is a massive pile of unfinished products. I know, because I unwittingly suffered from ADHD for my entire life. It wasn’t until my son was diagnosed that my wife read over the symptoms, looked at me, and said, “These…describe you, too.”
Unfortunately, I was also an undiagnosed diabetic, and years of high blood sugar had taken their toll on my heart — which meant all of the standard ADHD medications were off limits to me. So I’ve had to learn to take control of my life back from ADHD, without medications. It hasn’t been easy, and I still struggle every day — but I know it can be done. Over the next couple of posts, I’ll tell you how.
Trick 1: Stop Getting Surprised By Things You Knew Were Coming
You’ll Need:
- A few white boards.
- A few dry-erase markers.
- A calendar app that can sync with someone else’s calendar.
- A corkboard
- Some tacks and alligator clips.
One of those whiteboards is hanging to my right as I type, and it’s a big (2×3) one, filled entirely with a calendar drawn on in dry-erase marker. Every day shows the date, what appointments I have that day, what work tasks I have to do that day, why my wife and son are doing that day, what bills are due that day, and any other special notes — each in its own color of dry erase marker.
The same calendar also appears in my tablet, on my app, and on my wife’s phone, on her calendar app. We’ve realized that if we don’t have all three, we will still manage to miss something somewhere. The wall calendar is there to remind us if we don’t have our tablets handy, and our tablets are there to remind us with gentle pings if we’re out and about. It’s the core of our newfound ability to function without constantly feeling unprepared and caught off-guard by appointments we had totally forgotten about.
Any paperwork we’re going to need for any appointment we have goes up on the corkboard, in an alligator clip that hangs from a tack.
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