A Guide To (Mostly) Thriving With ADHD

I recently finished reading ADHD is Awesome by Penn and Kim Holderness

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 4.25/5 stars

"Hi, friend! Welcome to the ADHD club.

You're here because, like me, you've been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—which, by the way, just might be the worst name for a condition ever—and you're trying to figure out how to make your life a little more manageable. Or because, like my wife, Kim, you love, teach, or work with someone who has ADHD, and you're trying to figure out how to best support them.

The world isn't built for ADHDers, and navigating it can wear us down. But we'll let you in on a little secret: having ADHD doesn't have to be a burden. It can actually be a superpower that propels you to creative heights and allows you to achieve more than you ever thought possible.

We want to give you a new perspective on ADHD, whether it's your own brain or a friend or family member's that you're trying to understand. We hope you come away with strategies you can employ to make things a little easier. (We also hope you laugh out loud, at least once or twice.)

Most of all, we want you to silence that voice that whispers that you're broken or a mess or a failure. None of that is true. You have ADHD—and that makes you awesome."

ADHD is Awesome is the sort of book I sit down with feeling as though I learned a lot and found quite a large amount of it useful but am also cognizant of how very personalized the story is due to the numerous personal experiences highlighted on by the authors.

Suffice to say, I think that this entire book is very useful. I think there is a lot of information that can be gleaned from it and it was certainly far more of an entertaining read than your typical ADHD support book. That said, there are also sections that feel as though they contain more fluff than is really necessary. And ultimately, I think it’s important to take the authors at their word: this is not the end all be all of ADHD books. It’s a tips and tricks sort of book with a side of personal stories with the hope that readers may find pieces of the advice useful in their day to day. It’s a positive hype up to support those who have negative feelings about their diagnosis or life struggles.

And there’s a lot of merit in that.

But if you’re reading this because you’re hoping this will be the one and only book you have to read about ADHD, it’s probably not going to do what you want it to.

As an therapist who works daily with a large variety of clients, many who have very similar struggles, a lot of the information in this book rang true for how we should treat children. In fact, much of what I do as an educator to encourage and support fell in line with a lot of what Holderness said about how we should be treating our ADHD adults. It’s such a wonderful thing to see and a truly interesting topic of conversation to have.

Why is it we talk so much about encouragement and positive reinforcement with children and not adults? I think it has generally been proven over and over again that this approach is the best possible one you could have. It’s across the board with children, with adults, with dogs, with everyone. If nothing else, I think that is the most important takeaway to leave this book with.

Check out ADHD Is Awesome, and discover a guide to mostly thriving with ADHD.

Happy Reading :)