 A lot of you have asked me to make more videos about living with ADHD so I brought over a very special guest to talk about it. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. Typically what I do is pull different topics from the YouTube community to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well being. But something I'm extremely passionate about is increasing awareness about various forms of mental illness as well as just awareness about taking care of your mental health. So if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Why did I screw up that word almost? Anyway, yeah, so I have brought over a very special guest. Her name is Haley. She has the channel Haley's Comment and I would love if you went over there and checked out her channel, subscribe. She talks about mental health, ADHD, other things I'm gonna introduce you to her in a second. But kind of the main focus of Haley's video is increasing awareness about ADHD because there's a lot, a lot of misconceptions as well as a lack of awareness and ADHD is something that many children get diagnosed with as well as misdiagnosed with, right? But if you have somebody in your life who is struggling with ADHD and you don't quite understand it, like I just cannot stress enough during this week where I'm doing a bunch of collabs, I really want all of you to like understand various forms of mental health. Like I always tell you guys that we are like very selfish and self-centered by nature. Like if we want to provide more people with help and if we want to receive that help, we need to understand what other people are going through. So I myself have never been diagnosed with ADHD. So I love learning about these things. I've done a little research recently, read some books on it and things like that. But Haley does a great job in this video. So let me shut my mouth and pass it along over to Haley. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for clicking on this video, expressing interest and learning more about ADHD. My name is Haley. I have a YouTube channel called Haley's Comment. And today I'm going to be sharing with you why ADHD needs to be taken more seriously. I'm so thankful that the Rewired Soul sees the importance of getting this message out there because I feel like a lot of times ADHD is the disorder that people overlook and I just want to share with you my experience with it and maybe give you a little bit of insight of what it's actually like. So if this wasn't obvious already, I have ADHD. I also have depression and anxiety, which is a big part of my YouTube channel. Before I was diagnosed, my life was a struggle, like just an ongoing struggle. I was diagnosed the end of my freshman year of high school. So basically my entire childhood growing up, I was undiagnosed. It caused a lot of problems for me. Just overall, I was always getting bad grades. I was always in trouble for this, that or whatever, even though I was like an overall pretty good kid. I just couldn't do anything right. And so I internalized the idea that I'm just horrible. I do everything wrong. I'm stupid. And so I kind of grew up believing that and that's a very common thing for people with ADHD to just grow up believing that they're an issue, that they're a problem. It causes really low self-esteem. And so whenever I was diagnosed with ADHD, like everything made sense. I was like, this explains all of my issues in life that I have that no one else seems to be having. Everything clicked. I was like, wow, I have this. It just kind of explained a lot of my behavior that I couldn't explain. That being said, people seem to think that it's just a learning disability. It does affect you a lot in school. Like I'm not going to lie, the biggest area of my life that has been impacted by my ADHD has definitely been school, school, something that I have an intense anxiety and hatred for. It impacts every other area of my entire life as well. Like it's not just school, it's never just been school. Everyday life is just as much of a struggle with ADHD. Now, as I said, I have depression and anxiety. And let me tell you that my ADHD affects me so much more than my depression and anxiety ever have. Even though I've been in depressions where I've just laid in bed for a very, very, very long time and did absolutely nothing or the bare minimum. Even though I've been so anxious that I like locked myself in my house and didn't leave unless I absolutely had to. Like I've had the bad end of that, but my ADHD still affects me more. Now I'm not saying that's necessarily true for everybody with ADHD. I do think I have kind of like more intense ADHD. It's hard to gauge like how bad your ADHD is. But regardless, I'm just saying that, you know, it does impact my life. And when people hear that someone has depression, it's like, oh, I'm so sorry, I'll be here for you. What can I do? Same thing with anxiety. People are like, oh, we can, you know, modify our plans to make it work for you, all that. When it comes to ADHD, they're like, oh, yeah, I have trouble focusing too. People are just like, oh, yeah, whatever. Like everybody has ADHD or it's so common. Even if it's common, it still impacts your life. You know, depression and anxiety are fairly common. People understand how much your life can be impacted by something like that. But when it comes to ADHD, people are just like, oh, yeah, you have trouble focusing. It's whatever. It really is so much more than that. And I think if people understood how much a person could be affected by ADHD and how that could translate into all areas of their life and all decisions that they make and all the mistakes that they make, we'd be able to help people with ADHD overcome those challenges. So just to give you guys kind of like an overview of how ADHD affects my life, I could go on and on and on about this. And I know the rewired soul just wanted to have like a, you know, five to 10 minute video. So I'm going to try not to get into too much detail. But just as an adult, as someone who's not in school anymore, how does it affect my life? I'm always running late to everything. I can't remember when I'm supposed to do what. I'm forgetting necessary documents that I need for appointments. I'm constantly trying very hard to keep my house clean. But somehow it just always ends up a giant disaster. Everything's always messy. It impacts my relationship. I live with my boyfriend and our place is always in a state of chaos. I'm always running late. People with ADHD are very blunt a lot of times. So I'll just kind of say things, not really think it through. And then there's the repercussion of there's someone else on the other end of that. I can impact other people in that way. It can also get you into a lot of trouble. The other day I was watching YouTube and I watched how to ADHDs, ADHD tax video. And I absolutely love this video because it explains that people with ADHD are always going to be paying more because of our ADHD. For example, we're getting to pay things on time. So you have like a late fee, which is very true for me with rent. I have the money. I just forget to pay it or leaving returns around that you need to do and forgetting to ever actually do them. Just very minor things constantly in your life that cause you to spend a lot more money. Something that not everyone knows about ADHD is that it makes you very emotional. When I'm sad, I'm extremely sad. When I'm angry, I'm extremely angry. When I'm happy, I'm extremely happy. Regulating your emotions in the adult world is super important. You need to be able to have a rough day at work and not have it be visible on your face. And just the list goes on and on and on. I could be sitting here for hours telling you about all the ways that my ADHD impacts my life. Let me just show you the big picture. The statistics aren't great. OK, people with ADHD are more likely to get into car accidents. I've actually been in numerous car accidents. All of them, except the last one I was in, have been my fault because we can't pay attention because we're more likely to speed because our impulses are not easily able to be controlled. The prefrontal cortex is not as developed. We're more likely to make those teenager type impulse decisions of speeding down the highway 20 miles an hour over, which I've definitely done and I got a very hefty ticket for. We're more likely to not finish school. I dropped out of college. I'm not saying that that's necessarily a good or a bad thing. It was the right decision for me. But if you're wanting to go into a career field that requires a degree, such as like teaching, it's going to be very hard for them to actually accomplish those goals. It's harder for us to hold down jobs because we're more likely to blow up on our bosses. We're also less likely to be able to meet deadlines. We're more likely to show up on time late. We're more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Now, I know a crap ton of people who have ADHD. Somehow I've just naturally gravitated toward people with it. And I'm also in like ADHD groups on Facebook and whatnot. And I can tell you that this is so incredibly true. It's been true in my life. It's been true in every single person that I know who has ADHD's life. We're just more likely to go out and get blackout drunk. We're more likely to smoke weed every single day to become addicted to harder drugs. We're also more likely to get divorced, which is sucks, you know, but it makes sense. If ADHD impacts every ounce of our life and we bring someone into that life, they're going to be impacted by our ADHD. And I cannot tell you how many posts on these Facebook groups that I'm a part of that people say, oh, my spouse is so annoyed with me for this. Or vice versa, the person who's posting their spouse has ADHD and they're like, ah, I just I'm so annoyed because they keep doing this, this and this. They really just put a strain on relationships. One of the scariest statistics is that incarceration rates are higher among those with ADHD. It makes sense, you know, you're unable to control your impulses. A lot of people with ADHD are very, very angry. You're blackout drunk, you know, someone says something, you get angry, you punch him in the face, bam, assault. Obviously also doing drugs. We're more likely to get arrested because of that. Speeding, like everything that I just talked about could contribute besides like marital issues to incarceration rates going up, which sucks because if those people had been properly treated, then maybe they wouldn't have ended up in that situation to begin with. I'm not saying everyone should be medicated. I'm not medicated and I actually love that. I chose that for myself. That's my own personal decision. So I'm not saying everyone needs to go out and get medicated, but treatment can look like cognitive behavioral therapy, support from those around you. It can just look like internal discovery. Once I learned I had ADHD, I started doing all sorts of research on it and I just realized things about myself. And now that I know so much about myself, I'm able to adapt my life in order to better myself. So it's just like properly treating it in any way can help with those things. But when ADHD is seen as a disorder that only children have or that only affects you in school, then people with ADHD are not going to get that treatment that they actually do need. All right, before I end this, I wanted to say that I love my ADHD. Even though it is the biggest obstacle in my life, I absolutely love it. I would not be the same person without it. It has a lot of benefits. Like there's a lot of great parts of having ADHD. So many successful people in history had ADHD, have ADHD. It's not all bad. I'm not trying to make it sound all gloomy, but it definitely needs to be taken more seriously. Thank you so much for watching. It truly means a lot to me if you're taking an interest in this. I feel like it's one of those ignored disorders for some reason in the mental health world. I'm just hoping that we'll be able to kind of shed a light on it a little bit more and be like, hey, pay attention to this. Yeah, don't know how to close up this video because it's not my own, but okay, bye. All right, thank you so much, Haley, for coming over and doing this guest video. And again, I am going to be providing links to her channel and all that up in the info card description and screen, all that stuff. But anyways, I learned a lot about just kind of like these day-to-day struggles. And she referenced the channel How To ADHD, which is like one of the biggest channels on YouTube about ADHD, but like, it makes sense. Like what she was talking about with that ADHD tax, I'm like, dang, like, wow, like just forgetting things. Like there's these daily struggles, right? But I like how she also talked about the struggles, you know, like with her relationship and keeping her house clean and you know, all these other things. But because Haley is a rewired soldier staying in the solution, like she talks about how, you know, this can be a strength and all that. One of the biggest takeaways too, that I want all of you to realize is, you know, you have the option. You have the option when it comes to medication. And like Haley said, like Haley and I were on the same page with that, right? Like she doesn't take medication. She's not against medication, but for her own treatment, like and her own recovery, like that is her choice, right? So like sometimes people think that I'm anti-medications and I'm not. If you're an addict and alcoholic and recovery like myself, you gotta be very careful about the medications you take. Like for example, I am on an anti-anxiety medication called Lexapro, which also helps with depression, but it is a non-narcotic. So for my anxiety, I could never take a medication like Xanax or Valium or anything like that. But also if I was ever diagnosed with ADHD, I could never take an amphetamine, all right? But this is your choice and your option. So just know that there's no right way or wrong way to do this. Let me take that back. As I've made clear on my channel, there's a lot of wrong ways to take care of your mental health. But when it comes to your mental health, like research all the different options, like some people have a bad reaction to medications that doesn't mean that you just give up on taking care of your mental health. It means that you need to go out and research and discover new options that can help you out, all right? And again, go check out Haley's channel. And if you have questions about managing your ADHD or how to deal with a loved one who's struggling with ADHD, go for an ask her. Haley is a very kind person. I can attest to that, all right? But anyways, if any of you struggle with ADHD or have a loved one with ADHD, let me know down in the comments below because I'm trying to learn more. I know others are too. Give us your tips, your advice, all right? Anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You are all amazing. And be sure that you go check out Haley's channel and make sure you subscribe. You can click or tap right there on that icon, all right? So thanks again, Haley, for doing this guest video and I'll see y'all next time.