“I Can't ‘Just Give It A Go’”: 30 Pieces Of Advice That Fall Flat For People With ADHD

While often associated with children, there are many adults who do at least exhibit symptoms of ADHD, even if they have not been diagnosed with it. The real numbers may remain vague, as studies show that many adults who were diagnosed with ADHD in their forties were identified as having it between the ages of 11 and 15.

In North America and Europe, where researchers have more data to work with, the estimates range from three to five percent of the population, of which less than ten percent were formally diagnosed at a young age. If this proportion holds for the rest of the world, then perhaps five percent of the human population has ADHD, of which the majority would be male. 

One of the rarer cases where “general advice” and “advice for folks with ADHD” intersect is when it comes to physical activity. Aerobics in particular has been found to be an effective add-on to ADHD medication in children and also it can help adults focus for longer periods of time. 

For children, the effects are even more visible. Besides simply being healthy for the body, kids that aerobic exercise alongside other treatments were found to have a host of improvements, from increased behavior and motor abilities to faster information processing speed, and better memory, which is pretty important for people with ADHD, as they can tell you themselves. 

As the aforementioned late-diagnosis statistics show, most people simply assume that what works broadly will work for people with ADHD, even if more people have it than one would think. This means that most folks who have ADHD will need to test tips and advice themselves, as this thread shows. So it can be helpful to look online and see what works for others. 

On the positive side, the increasing awareness of ADHD does bring some more research on the topic. Recent studies show that there might be a stronger link between creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and ADHD than previously thought. This same study suggested that Leonarda Da Vinci’s self-described procrastination and strange time management may have been an indicator that he had ADHD as well.