 Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Hi, everybody, and welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today we're going to be talking about living with ADHD. So the first thing we're going to do is kind of define what ADHD looks like and some of the problems it might cause, and then we're going to move into things that you can do. People with ADHD often have difficulty getting organized. So if you've got ADHD, you probably know this already. You know, it's hard to remember all the little things to get organized, to remember what you've got to bring to work today, to know what you need to put in your backpack to take to school, et cetera. So difficulty getting organized is one thing. Now people can have this without having ADHD. So you know, we want to look at a bunch of symptoms together. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started. Now this can be caused in people because they've got low self-esteem, they don't believe they can do it, they don't have any confidence in themselves, but it can also be caused by ADHD. Because people with ADHD, number one, often have difficulty following through with tasks because they get distracted once they get started, which can lead to feelings of ineffectiveness. So then they don't even want to get started because they know it's going to end up poorly. They may have many projects going simultaneously. A lot of times people with ADHD are kind of craving different stimulation and they see this over here, ooh, that sounds like fun. And they see this over here, ooh, that sounds like fun. And they may have six different things going. They may have trouble with follow-through oftentimes because they've got so many different things going simultaneously and they get distracted. They have difficulty staying focused and seeing something through all the way to the end. And one of the things that I will point out here is with people with ADHD, one of the ways you can help them with follow-through or help yourself if you've got ADHD is to break bigger tasks down into smaller ones. So as far as follow-through goes, you can get this particular chunk of the task done today. And then tomorrow you can get another chunk of the task done. The key or the challenge, I guess, when you start doing that is staying motivated to get all the chunks done. And we'll talk about a way of visualizing the final product to help you maintain your motivation later in today's podcast. They may have a tendency to say whatever comes to mind without considering timing or appropriateness. This is one of the things that my son struggles with. He just will, what comes to his mind comes out his mouth. There is no filter. There is no thinking about whether it's appropriate to say or not. And he's gotten better over the years, but it took a lot of practice. They may have a frequent search for high stimulation and an intolerance of boredom. They may easily get distracted and have trouble focusing attention, a tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation. Now again, this can be something that happens when you're tired, when you've got a lot of stuff going on, when you're under a lot of stress, or it can be something that happens as a result of ADHD. One of the things that we look at when we're making an ADHD diagnosis is, are these symptoms sporadic or do they occur pretty much all the time in multiple situations? If they occur pretty much all the time in multiple situations, then we're probably looking at ADHD. People with ADHD may have trouble going through established channels and following proper procedures because they want whatever it is done, resolved now. So instead of doing, you know, asking your supervisor and then going to your supervisor, supervisor, people with ADHD may tend to leapfrog over people and just go to the head person right away. So they need to learn interpersonal skills if they don't have those and learn to delay gratification. Yes, you know, if you ask your boss this question, you might not get an answer right away. You know, maybe you ask your boss for a raise. Sometimes bosses don't have the ability to say, sure, you know, if you get such and such score on your evaluation, we can look at giving you a raise. The boss may have to go to his boss or the CEO to get clearance to give you a raise. So, you know, some people with ADHD might kind of know that. And instead of going to their boss and then waiting for their boss to talk to the CEO, they just go straight to the CEO. There's a lot of problems with that. So we need to focus on making sure we go through proper channels. People with ADHD may be impatient and have a low tolerance of frustration. So when things get stressful, when they get impatient, when they feel like they're being thwarted in some way, they may lose their stuffing. And we call this emotional dysregulation. They go from zero to 250 in no time flat. One of the things people with ADHD need to learn how to do is regulate their emotions and talk and learn how to tolerate frustration. They may be impulsive, either verbally or in action. So impulsive verbally, we already talked about where you just kind of blurt things out without thinking about it or interrupt having difficulty waiting your turn in conversations. They also may be impulsive when they're playing games with other people, you know, thinking about children. But even adults, I mean, sometimes we'll play board games. And people with ADHD have difficulty waiting their turn to play. But they also may be impulsive in action in terms of spending money. They see something they want and they get it. Instead of thinking, okay, now let me wait here and think, I want this right now, but do I really have the money to spend on it and still pay all my other bills? They may have a sense of insecurity. A lot of the characteristics that we've talked about so far can cause problems at work, at school, and in interpersonal relationships, which can take its toll on the self-esteem of somebody with ADHD. They may have mood swings, especially when disengaged from a person or a project. If they're not focused on something, their mood may be all over the place. They may be happy one minute and irritable the next minute and agitated or restless the next minute. So their mood varies based on their stimulation. They may have physical or cognitive restlessness, which means either their mind is going constantly and they have to have something keeping their mind going, or their body is going constantly. They're up walking around, they're pacing, they're doing something physical. With children, especially when you see children in stores that are just kind of going around, touching things, climbing on things, that could be ADHD. That also could just be a bored child. But you want to pay attention if your level of activity and restlessness seems to be a lot greater than the people you work with or the people you live with. They may have a tendency toward addictive behavior. Not only are people with addictions, do they tend to have some impulsive issues? You know, they want to feel better, they want to feel better now. But people with ADHD often tend to seek out substances that will help them calm and focus and feel more, quote, normal. There's chronic problems with self-esteem, inaccurate self-observation. A lot of times people with ADHD, when they blurt things out and it's inappropriate, they don't really realize. They don't understand their impact on other people and they don't understand other people's perception of them. So it's important that a person with ADHD starts understanding how other people might perceive them and what their behaviors look like. You know, for example, blurting in conversations seems disrespectful. Now, the person with ADHD may not even kind of recognize this. So it's important to become more aware of what people without ADHD perceive. The other thing that seems to be a little different with ADHD and people tend to think of having ADHD as being all over the place, not able to focus ever. And that's not true. People with ADHD can get excessively involved in goal-directed activities if it's something that really interests them. Whether it's video games or a project they're working on, they can get completely immersed in it and it's really hard to break them away from it, which sounds contradictory to everything else. One of the things that if you are living with ADHD that you can try to do in order to, if you want to look at it this way, embrace your diagnosis, is try to figure out how to make the things you need to do really enthralling, really interesting. So you can get immersed in them. What is it that you can do? And it helps if you choose a career, if you haven't already chosen one, that also helps you get completely immersed in something that you just absolutely love, whether it is running statistical analyses or doing landscaping or whatever it is that you really enjoy. So as a little side note, boys are often diagnosed with ADHD three times more often than girls, but it's likely that this is because girls typically present as inattentive or dreamy. So boys may be running as if they're on a motor, whereas girls may be sitting there and they just kind of drift off and check out for a little bit. So it's important to recognize that you can have an inattentive type or a hyperactive type, or you can have both together. But it's important to recognize that not everybody is going to be hyperactive. And so thanks to do if you have ADHD or ADD, get adequate quality sleep. This is really important to helping your brain balance the neurotransmitters to give you the best shot at having a good day. When you're sleepy, when you're overtired, a lot of times it's more difficult to deal with life on life's terms. So you're going to be more prone to those emotional outbursts and that dysregulation. When you're tired, it's more difficult to concentrate. Well, people with ADHD already have difficulty concentrating. So add exhaustion on top of that and it's going to be a double whammy. So sleep is important to your recovery in order to help you regulate your moods and have the best shot at good focus that you can have. Train yourself to become more organized. And this is difficult. Don't try to do everything at once. Don't say, I'm going to be more organized in every aspect of my life right now. Pick something specific. I am going to be more organized in terms of when I go shopping or I'm going to be more organized in terms of getting ready for work and getting out the door. So set small chunks that you can look at getting more organized with if you're going to organize your house, for example. Pick a particular area that you want to start keeping more organized, that small area. Focus on that for right now before you start trying to do everything all at once. But train yourself to become more organized. One of the things you can do for organization is start every morning out by making a to-do list. These are the things that I have to do. People with ADHD have difficulty holding things in their brain because there is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. So if you make a list of the things that you have to do and you keep that list with you, then it will be easier to go through and check those things off when you go to the grocery store. And this is true for anybody, not just people with ADHD. Make a list. That way you remember what you need to get when you get to the grocery store. It'll save you a lot of time and a lot of hassle so you don't have to go back three times. Becoming more organized is important to your recovery because it will help reduce conflict between you and other people. When you're disorganized, a lot of times you forget things and you may let people down or you may not complete tasks as well as you could have. So organization is really important. I mean, think about school kids who have difficulty with organization. They don't get their homework turned in. They may show up to gym class and they've got their shoes and their socks and their shorts, but they don't have their gym shirt. There are a lot of ways that disorganization can negatively impact what you're doing. Think about if you're a working person, you're going to a meeting and you've got to give a presentation and you get dressed and you get there and you remember to eat breakfast and everything else and you open your briefcase and you forgot to put the presentation in there. Okay, that's a problem. So organization is really important. One of the things that we ask my son to do is before he gets ready to do something, he needs to think to himself, what are the, quote, mission critical items? He loves military stuff. So we've always talked about mission critical stuff. If you're going to grandma's, what are your mission critical items that you have to pack? And underwear needs to be on the list. When he was little, he would always forget his underwear. He'll kill me for saying that, but whatever. So it's important to take time out and ask yourself if it's something really important. Take the time. It usually only takes like five minutes to think about what you need. If you need to, write it down. And I really encourage people with ADHD to write a lot of things down. You don't have to write it down on paper. You can type it on a notepad app on your mobile device, you know, whatever it is, your iPad, your phone, whatever. So you're not wasting trees and all that kind of stuff. If that makes you happy, but if you write it down, then you're seeing it and you can go back and check it. People with ADHD have difficulty holding things in their brain. So write it down. Prioritize. You're going to have multiple things going on. If you're a child or an adult, you probably have multiple things going on. But as adults, we tend to have more things going on. So you need to sit back and really take time. And this doesn't take forever. You know, take one hour, one day. And identify what things are most important for you to have in order to have a rich and meaningful life. So a good relationship with your kids, a good relationship with your spouse, success at work, whatever it is, define those things. And then that is your vision. That's what you're working towards. That's your rich and meaningful life. So then you make your list of things that you've got to do that day and you look at each one of them and you say, is this going to help me move toward what's important to me to have an rich and meaningful life? Or is this just something that sounded cool that is gonna be a distraction? We can't do everything all the time. So you have to kind of whittle out things. And people with ADHD want to do everything. So you've got to figure out how to whittle it down to what you want to do. Now remember, in a rich and meaningful life, you're gonna have hobbies and you're gonna have interests. So you don't want to not include those. But you need to pay attention to what's going on. For example, I do animal rescue and I love animal rescue. And I crochet, love crocheting. That's one of my main hobbies. I have a farm and I have a half acre garden. I work, I own my own business and I homeschool my kids. So I've got a lot going on. But I was online the other day and I used to have an Angora rabbit that I used his fur in order to make yarn and they shed just like cats do. So it doesn't hurt them to get their fur out at all. It actually, just like brushing a cat helps the bunny because he doesn't want to hold all that fur. But anyway, I saw this video of Angora bunnies. I'm like, oh, I want to have bunnies again. And I started thinking about it. And then I had to sit back and I had to look at my priority list and go, do I have time for this in my life right now? Based on what is important in my life right now, do I have time for this? So prioritizing is important. Learning how to, before you say yes to anything, say, let me think about it. That is a hard step. You need to control impulsive behavior because it makes it more difficult to interact with other people. It makes it more difficult to get a quality work product if you're being impulsive. If you want to build a dog house and instead of looking at plans online or going to the library and getting a book about how to build a dog house, you just buy a bunch of wood and you say, well, I'll figure it out. It's probably not gonna turn out, for most people, very well. And that's the impulsive behavior. So you need to be able to be willing to go through all the steps necessary instead of just trying to rush through to the end. Develop social skills. Remembering not to interrupt, not to blurt and to be able to pay attention and actually listen to what other people are saying. And sometimes it's hard. I totally get it when someone's talking and they seem like they're going on and on and on and you're like, okay, really, I've got the point already to restrain yourself and continue to listen instead of interrupting them, blurting or just drifting off into Never Never Land until they're finished talking. So social skills are really important both what you say as well as how you listen. One strategy to stop blurting, make a list of the inappropriate situations in which you're most likely to behave impulsively. Sometimes it's okay. If you're hanging out with your friends and you tend to be a little bit less guarded about what you say, that may be okay. But if you're talking to your boss or if you're at a business meeting or you're in church or wherever it is, sometimes it's not appropriate to just blurt things out. So make a list of the situations which are probably going to be the most detrimental if you are blurting things out. When you're about to enter one of those situations, try the following actions. Before you, well, first before you enter it go, okay, this is one of those situations I have to have my filter on and at home we talk about having the filter and it's just this screen that goes between the brain and the mouth that filters out what should and shouldn't be said in particular situations. But once you get into that situation before you answer somebody, inhale slowly, exhale slowly, and then say to that person, let me think about that for a second. Now, if they haven't asked you a question or whatever that may not be the most appropriate response. So something else you could do is inhale slowly, exhale slowly and say and paraphrase what they just said. So what I heard you say or so what you're trying to tell me is and that will give you a chance to make sure that you heard them correctly as well as to get out of that fast forward and start thinking about the appropriate response. Another thing you can do, and this is much more basic, but sometimes just imagine locking your mouth with a key to prevent yourself from speaking. I remember meetings that I used to go to, one place I used to work, they would drone on, literally six, seven hours for a meeting. We were in there all day and I was about ready to crawl out of my skin. But sometimes people would get up there and say things that I knew were wrong. I knew were completely inaccurate and it would just kind of grade at me and every fiber of my being wanted to blur it out. You know that's not right, but that would be inappropriate. So before going into those situations, I had to remind myself that people are going to distort the facts a little bit because this was a monthly meeting where we would report our departmental progress to our CEO and we'd go in there and I would know that people were going to paint the best possible picture even if it meant stretching the facts some and I had to bite my tongue and it was just that important to me. Now thankfully, my boss was kind of used to me by then. I had worked for him for about 10 years. So after the meetings, I'd go to his office and I'd just have to vent it. I'd have to be like, Richard, do you understand? And he's like, yeah, I know. It's not about what they said. It's about how are we gonna actually make that happen now? And I'm like, really? But I would hold on to it and I would hold on to it until we got out of the meeting and then I would have a place to blurt, so to speak. And if your boss isn't necessarily the safest place to blurt, call a friend, call a significant other. Somebody that you can safely let that stuff out if you've been holding things in. Minimize distractions. It is really important for people with ADHD to minimize all of the types of distractions. When my son, well, he's homeschooled and when he works, he needs to sit in an environment where he's not looking out the window because he likes birds and he notices every bird that flies by where he doesn't have the TV on, where he doesn't have people walking around him because he gets distracted really easily by visual stimuli, more so than auditory. So it's important with him to make sure that he has a small space that he can keep organized so there's not a bunch of other stuff on his desk or whatever that might catch his attention. And it's away from other visual stimulus. So when he used to do his homeschool work when he was younger, we had a room and the room had very plain walls. He had a computer that he would work at. And there was very little in the room that could attract his attention. He was always one and still is one for books. So that was one thing we learned we couldn't put in there because any book we put in there would catch his attention and he would start reading it instead of doing his own homework. So figuring out what kind of environment you need to have in order to best focus. And this is important to your recovery or to your happiness because it'll help you get things done. It will help you follow through. It will help you achieve your goals if you're not getting distracted every five minutes. Find constructive outlets for excess energy. People with the hyperactivity component of ADHD have difficulty sitting still. And so in order to do that, you need to look at what are some ways that you have managed your hyperactivity before? And what are some things that are important? Avoiding stimulants, for example. Not your medication. If you're on medication for ADHD, obviously take that. But if you drink coffee or other stimulants like monsters or whatever, any of those drinks, and they rev you up, that's not what you want. If it helps calm you down, that's something else. But if you eat or drink something that tends to rev you up, you wanna try to minimize those. Other things that you can do is exercise. Get rid of some of that excess energy. That can help you feel like you're less driven by a motor. That's one of the things that I dislike most about adult church. Whenever church I'm involved in, I always try to volunteer as a Sunday school teacher because then I can be moving and doing things. I cannot happily sit still for an entire hour and just listen. It's one of the things I like about Catholic church is we're always standing, sitting, kneeling, talking. It breaks it up. But for me to sit still for an entire hour and it is really, really difficult. And that's true even for movies. I have difficulty going to the movie theater because I can't easily sustain focus unless the movie is really good, really, really good. I can't sustain focus for that long. I'm more the cartoon type attention span, 15, 20 minutes, and I'm done. I'm out of there. So it's important to recognize what your attention span is and how you can help yourself focus. When I go to longer meetings now or conferences, and I have to, I have to adult, sometimes I will bring things to do, whether I bring paper that I can make lists on or write or take notes. I may bring my mobile device. If it's not something I have to concentrate on, I just have to be present. And I can read things, so I'm not being disruptive. Or I'll bring, if it's an appropriate situation, I may bring my crochet with me. And I can sit there and crochet and listen and everything's grand, but I have to be, I feel like I have to be doing some kind of movement pretty much all the time. And that's important to recognize. It's just how I am and it's just how you are. So whatever you need to handle your energy is important to know. Plan ahead. Adults with ADHD have difficulty drawing on past experiences to guide their actions. So when they start having a situation come up, they don't think, you know, the last time I went into this situation, it didn't go too well when I did this, they don't check in with their memory banks to see what happened. So it's really important to figure out how to tap into those memory banks and learn from them. One strategy you can use is to picture a TV. You know, when you're getting ready to go into a situation or when you're in a situation and you're trying to figure out what to do, imagine a TV and imagine on that TV is a show playing that's the last time you were in a situation like that. And you're just kind of watching that television show. Think about what you learned from that experience and what some of the details were about that situation that made it similar to your current situation. But also, what about that situation is different than this one? Yes, you're consulting memories, but if you think of it in terms of a video or a movie, sometimes it's easier to recall it and sometimes it's easier to see it. Train your brain. There is a program on the desktop or you can get the app on the iPhone. It's not available on Android devices, unfortunately. It's called Luminosity. And it's free, but it does have a lot of activities that can help you train yourself to concentrate a little bit better. Some people swear by this. They say it helps them a lot to get more organized and to focus better and to learn how to calm their, what we call monkey mind, the mind that's just kind of going all over the place. Other people find it exceedingly frustrating. So it's something you can try. And if it works for you, fabulous. If it doesn't, don't beat yourself up over it. Move on. Another thing you need to do or you can do is see the goal. A lot of times people with ADHD forget the purpose of their tasks. So they're uninspired to finish them. If nobody is standing there dangling a carrot in front of them, they may need some convincing to keep moving forward. When my son was studying for his ACT exam, or ACT, that was something that I kept having to do is dangle that carrot in front of them. And for people with ADHD, imagining the negative consequences of not doing something is really not a potent motivator. So for him saying, you're not gonna score well on your test if you don't study, he heard me and it meant something, but it didn't mean a lot. It was really hard to get motivated to continue to study. On the other hand, when I switched gears and I said, imagine how awesome it'll be if you get a 29 or above and you get this extra scholarship and you have your schooling complete, your college completely paid for. How amazing will that be to feel like you've accomplished that just from taking this test? And that worked a little bit better. Now, for people that, when you have goals, and we all have goals, we all have things that we need to get accomplished. One thing that I found that works for most people with ADHD and without is creative visualization. Starting the morning out, just while you're drinking your coffee or whatever the case may be, imagining what it'll look like when you achieve your goal. So for my son, imagining what it was gonna look like when he was finally in college and not having to do high school work anymore and having more independence and whatever it was that he imagined, that helped him. People with ADHD often forget to do things. So in order to remember to do these daily creative visualizations, it's really helpful to put a medication reminder app on your phone or mobile device. Now, why that and not just an alarm? Because medication reminder apps are gonna bug the crap out of you until you do it. Whereas an alarm I can hear and I can turn off and I can ignore. If I have an SMS message sent to myself, I'm really likely to ignore it. I'll see it and I'll be busy doing something else and then I'll forget about it. But the medication reminder, I can snooze it and if I'm busy doing something else and then 10 minutes later, it's gonna yell at me again and I can snooze it again. But eventually I'm going to do it and it's a lot harder to ignore the medication app. So just set the medication app for whatever time, six o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock, whatever time you get up to remind you to do the creative visualization. That way you do it every single day. So in the next few slides, we're just gonna kind of wrap this up with what we call a strength-based approach. I'm going to have you think about how you've experienced each symptom and identify two things that you've either done in the past that have helped prevent the issue or address the issue. Some things we do, like getting enough sleep, can prevent a lot of problems. But then there are also some techniques that you may have used that helped you stay more organized or do better in social situations. And you may need to think way back. If you don't have any history of ever being able to manage that symptom really well, think about people you know who are able to manage that symptom. What do they do? Or envision yourself in the future. What do you think you could do in order to manage that symptom? So chronic lateness is one symptom or one issue with people with ADHD. So what can you do to address chronic lateness? And that can be late for work. There are a lot of people with ADHD again, especially because they have very poor sense of time. So they'll get immersed in something. My son did this just last week. He was supposed to go to his internship at eight o'clock. And 7.15, I went upstairs and he was still in his pajamas on the computer. And like son, you gotta leave at eight o'clock for your internship. And it befuddled him because he was like, well, I already ate breakfast. I'm like, yeah, but you need to get dressed and you need to brush your teeth and remember to put on deodorant and all that stuff. And then if you have time left, you can get back on the computer. But if you get sucked into computer world, you're gonna run late. Because that's the way it always has been. So he has to train himself. And he's still working on it to get the must do's done in the morning before he gets on the computer. That way he gets out the door on time. We've also learned to tell him when it's time to go. If we're planning on leaving at eight o'clock, we tell him we're planning on leaving at 7.45. He runs late. He doesn't anticipate how long it's gonna take to do everything that he needs to do. So those are things you can do in order to help avoid chronic lateness. And plan on, you know, what time do you actually need to leave and then back it up 15 or 30 minutes. The other thing you can do is make sure that you get whatever you have to get done, done before you start doing something else. When I get up in the morning, I will read the news. And what time I get to work is kind of loosey-goosey since I work for myself, so that's fine. But if I still worked for somebody else, it would be important for me to either set a timer before I started reading the news or to get dressed and ready for work before I started reading the news. That way I wouldn't suddenly look up and go, oh my gosh, I've got 10 minutes to get ready. Forgetfulness, one of the easiest things to deal with forgetfulness is to write things down. So thinking about how do you remember things that are really important, people's anniversaries, people's birthdays, what you need to bring to work when you have a meeting, how can you remember to do that? And setting alarms on your phone is not always the best answer. I know for me, I tend to do what's called habituating to alarms that come through. The first week or so, I'll pay attention to them. And then after that, I just ignore them. So it doesn't do me any good. So how have you dealt with forgetfulness in the past? And are there things that make your forgetfulness worse? Anxiety, what do you do to deal with anxiety about social situations or projects that are coming up? How do you handle your anxiety instead of worrying about what's gonna happen? How do you help yourself stay focused in the present and in the here and now? What do you do to develop your self-esteem? Why is it, if you don't feel like you're all that in a bag of chips, why is it that you feel that way? And what do you want to work on in order to feel better about yourself? And how can you feel better about yourself? If you have problems at your job, make a list of the types of problems you have and see if you can identify one or two themes, especially related to your ADHD, whether it's blurting or forgetfulness or lack of follow through on projects. Those are a couple of the big ones that I see a lot. And figure out how you're gonna start addressing those. If you have difficulty controlling your anger, I suggest minimizing any types of foods or drinks that may rev you up and make you more prone to be aggressive or wound up. Working on your time management, people who have anger issues, often feel overstressed and overburdened already. And then also, again, look back how you've handled your anger in the past. What do you do? What strategies work for you? If you're impulsive, we talked about several things that you can do. And I'm sure there have been times where you've sat through a meeting without being impulsive. I'm sure there have been times where you've gone to an interview or had a date or whatever it is where you were less impulsive. What was different about those times? How were you able to be less impulsive? What can you do to improve your organization? When you see yourself procrastinating, what can you do to get started? And one of the things that my committee chair told me when I was working on my dissertation was to do 15. Force yourself to start something for 15 minutes. And if you're still miserable after 15 minutes, you can stop. But most of the time just doing it, just getting started is the worst part. When I went on my run this morning, I really didn't feel like doing it. But I told myself, let me run for a mile. And if I'm still miserable after a mile, then I will do something else. And I finished my full run without any problem. And low frustration tolerance. Think about what happens or what's going on when you're able to deal with life on life's terms versus what's different when you feel like you just can't tolerate any sort of frustration. You have to have it your way. You have to be in control. Again, a lot of times when people have low frustration tolerance, if you look, they're not sleeping well. They may not be eating a great diet. They probably feel overwhelmed with other things. And just one more thing coming their direction or one more thing that they feel is out of their control can make them feel very frustrated and become upset very easily. So ADHD and ADD can negatively impact relationships, work and addiction recovery if not addressed. One of the things to think about and I firmly believe is that it's more important to identify and address symptoms than worrying about fitting a particular diagnosis. So if you have four out of the eight necessary symptoms or whatever, fine. But you still have four symptoms. So to have your highest quality of life, you want to figure out how to address those four symptoms. If you went to the doctor and in order to get diagnosed with the flu, he said you had to have these six symptoms, but you only had four of them. You had a sinus infection, a high fever, were coughing and throwing up. Okay, we'll just pick those. But you didn't meet all the criteria for the flu, for example. You wouldn't want to walk out of the doctor's office going, well, I don't have the flu, so there's nothing that can be done. You still want to address those four symptoms because it's not pleasant to be throwing up and having a fever and whatever else I said. Same thing with our mental health. Don't worry about whether you meet the criteria for a diagnosis. If there's a symptom that's causing you problems, figure out what makes it worse and try to figure out how to not do that and figure out what makes it better and do that more often. Figure out how you've handled it in the past and do that more often. Think about in the past when it hasn't been a big issue, what's been different and see if you can create more of that situation now. Once you've identified the symptoms that are causing you problems, pick one, identify which symptom is most problematic for you and address that one first. Once you get that one under control, then you can start addressing any symptoms that are remaining one at a time. All right, thank you for tuning in and I will talk to you next time. Do your clients need a little help staying on track between sessions? Are you looking for a great aftercare resource? Look no further than docsnipes.com. For as little as $15 per week, Dr. Snipes provides concierge coaching services to clients through online weekly groups, chat availability seven days a week and members-only resources. Learn more at docsnipes.com.