How You Can Use Lifestyle Medicine to Master Your ADHD — Top 5 Tips
Focus your attention on these areas of wellness to achieve better health and happiness with ADHD.
According to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, there are SIX primary pillars of optimal health: Nutrition, Physical Activity, Stress Management, Restorative Sleep, Social Connection, and Avoidance of Risky Substances.
Today I’m going to focus on the first 5 pillars of Lifestyle Medicine. The topic of substance avoidance is a much deeper discussion that would require us to diverge from the healthy foundations of human health to explore and explain why individuals with ADHD tend to be more vulnerable to addiction, addictive substances, and obsessive tendencies, which I will touch on at the end of today’s story.
If you’re ready to learn how lifestyle medicine can be used as a practical tool in treating ADHD and developed into daily habits that help people absolutely master and make the most out of their ADHD, let’s dive in!
Food and Nutrition
Eat healthy foods. Eating healthy foods can help you feel better and have more energy. Try to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Evidence supports the use of a whole food, plant-predominant diet to prevent, treat and reverse chronic illness.
Personally, I highly recommend people focus on consistent intake of high-quality protein and healthy fats. Refined carbohydrates can be a challenge for people with ADHD, and I’m especially talking about ultraprocessed foods, refined grains, concentrated sweeteners, sugary sweets, and snack foods literally designed by food scientists to drive signals in the brain linked with addiction and overconsumption.
I highly recommend you go read my story about dopamine dependency in food and drink. I thoroughly believe every person with ADHD deserves to learn more about their biochemistry and understand just how maleficent their environment has been designed to disrupt their design for healthy homeostasis.
Doritos were not designed to promote healthy digestion or good health overall.
Mountain Dew was not brewed to benefit your blood sugar or your brain.
Cheese can be a challenge as well due to the rich presence of casomorphins. The same is true with high gluten breads and gluten containing foods such as pasta, pizza, and tortillas, which contain gluteomorphins. These are opioid peptides derived from digestion of milk protein casein and gliadin components of the gluten protein commonly found in wheat, barley, rye, and other foods.
If you want more tips on Nutrition, check out my in depth story on the topic with a focus on nutrition for ADHD.
Physical Activity
Exercise regularly. Exercise is a great way to relieve stress and improve your mood. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise most days of the week. Regular, consistent physical activity is an important part of overall health, vitality, and resilience.
This is especially important in children, teens, and adolescents. Kids need to play in order to learn. They need to play early, play often, and play until the sun goes down when they are young. Play based learning is one of the most effective learning strategies we have available to us.
Especially important for children with ADHD and any neurological consideration is the fully functional prefrontal cortex of the brain, the center for planning, preparing, goal orientation, and much more.
In particular, layering the multiple effective benefits of play-based as compared to say a stereotypical cold, static, monotone college lecture experience, play-based learning profoundly outperforms.
These areas of executive functioning are inherent to the actions of natural play — anticipating your opponent’s running path, planning a route of escape, using strategy and timing, knowing when to speak and when to patiently wait your turn.
For the ADHD brain, boredom is our enemy and exercise is our ally.
If we apply these concepts to the ideas around physical activity, we can confidently say that “any movement makes a difference,” so fall in love with any and all forms of movement that feel meaningful to you. Swimming is a great option. Aerobic exercise as it promotes neural growth and cognitive development. Sign up with your best friend to go to a dance class, a spin class, water aerobics, yoga, or go play pickle-ball.
A 2020 review study examined a growing body of literature that suggests a potential role for physical exercise in the treatment of ADHD as it may reduce ADHD core symptoms as well as improve executive functions.
Table tennis, basketball, and other organized sports that incorporate cross lateral movements can also be very helpful for people with ADHD as it promotes cross-connection of left and right hemispheres in the brain.
Lastly, strength training can be really helpful too. This form of exercise can help with regulation of dopamine, serotonin, promoting protein synthesis and more.
Aim for 2–3 sessions of at least 30–45 minutes of strength training per week to form a habit around exercise. A review of strength training research published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine found that it is associated with numerous mental health benefits, including reduced anxiety symptoms, improved cognition, reduced symptoms of depression, improved self-esteem, and better sleep.
Sleep Quality + Quantity
Sleep is essential for good health and can help you focus and concentrate better. Aim for 8–10 hours of sleep each night. Improving sleep quality can improve attention span, mood, insulin resistance and can reduce hunger, sluggishness and more.
During sleep, we heal and repair, we actually regenerate our cells and tissues. If we can’t sleep, we can’t heal. If we can’t heal, we never give ourselves the chance to look and feel or think at our best.
Feeling at our best can give us an extra glow around our smile and glistening in our eyes. And who doesn’t feel more courageous, confident, and capable after a good night’s rest!
It’s amazing what the body can do when we give it the chance to heal itself.
If you didn’t already know, the gut, brain, skin, and immune system are all connected. They’re all wired together like a superhuman circuit board and they all get the chance to restore and repair through sleep.
Surprisingly, there IS an ideal temperature where we seem to sleep at our best as humans. I’m sure you know that when it is hot and humid it can be incredibly difficult to sleep at all. I’ve been there and you have too perhaps.
Waking up hot and sweaty stinks. Even worse though is the problem of not being able to sleep at all due to the temps being too hot to begin with.
The average optimal sleeping temperature in your bedroom at night tends to be between 65° — 68° F or 18° — 20° C.
Ideally, you would go outside and glean some early morning sunshine with exercise and healthy food in the morning routine. Then in the evening routine strive to avoid bright white lights, blue light exposure and consider a mindful cool down routine.
Stress Management
Stress can make ADHD symptoms worse. Find healthy ways to manage stress, such as exercise, relaxation techniques, or spending time with loved ones. Managing negative stress can lessen anxiety, depression and immune dysfunction and leads to improved well-being.
Stress management can look very different for different people. Along with a healthy dose of exercise, people with ADHD tend to have innate creative potential that can be tapped into to help with self-expression and emotional regulation. Whether you want to use doodle, paint, sculpt, or splatter, really any form of creative expression can help.
Making beats on your computer, playing or listening to music, singing or dancing, making fun videos with your friends, writing, cooking, and many other creative activities can be therapeutic tools to help cope through challenging times and promote resiliency when unexpected stressors show up.
There are also many other formal means of stress management such as meditation, mindfulness, prayer, and various forms of counseling and therapy that can help.
Feel free to explore the benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, rapid Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brain Training & Neurofeedback (NFB), or even adult ADHD Coaching or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.
Like I’ve mentioned above, everyone is different so different forms of stress management will help in different ways for different people in different stages of one’s journey. For some of us, we maybe just need to go for a long evening run to release the energy locked inside from a busy day and others of us would prefer to phone a friend and chill out with binaural beats listening to brown noise.
Whatever works for you, use it. The last thing we want to do is neglect our needs for stress management. People with ADHD often have sensory processing disorders and oppositional defiance disorders layered into their journey. It is very important to have healthy outlets for stress, anxiety, anger, frustration, worry, and depression.
If you feel like you’ve yet to start your journey with stress management and are interested in therapy, I highly recommend you reach out to a highly-qualified mental health professional who can help you make sense of your options and what potential benefits you may stand to gain.
Last but not least, remember you’re not alone in this.
Social Connections
Connect with others. Social support is important for everyone, but it’s especially important for people with ADHD. Make time for activities that you enjoy and that allow you to connect with others. Positive social connections have beneficial effects on physical, mental and emotional health.
It’s amazing to see what community support has been built around the ADHD community in places like popular Instagram accounts and friendly Facebook groups as well as insightful highlights on Twitter and professional ADHD coaches standing in the spotlight on LinkedIn.
It’s likely you know people in your life who are considering whether they may have ADHD themselves or may often poke fun at ADHD-like tendencies. It’s important to know that we all have times when we think and behave similar to that of someone with ADHD but there is a vast spectrum of symptoms of ADHD associated with different brain types of ADHD.
Not every person needs to be led to believe they need to be assessed or diagnosed with ADHD, but it can help give context to some individual’s lifelong journey with lifestyle difficulties associated with ADHD.
Some people have great success with ADHD and find a way to use it to their advantage.
Remember, we are all humans striving for better health and higher happiness at the end of the day. People with or without ADHD are no different in that regard. We all need human connection in order to thrive on this planet.
From psychological theories to recent research, there is significant evidence that social support and feeling connected can help people maintain a healthy body mass index, control blood sugars, improve cancer survival, decrease cardiovascular mortality, decrease depressive symptoms, mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, and improve overall mental health. — American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine,2017.
Incorporating social support and connections in everyday health and how we strive for healthier communities is critical for overall health and for healthy habits to be sustainable. Countless research has shown us the powerful benefits of social connectedness for predictive measures on longevity, cardiovascular health, mental health and emotional wellbeing, higher quality of life, improved happiness scores and so much more.
And as you’ve probably heard before, “you are the average of the top 5 people you spend the most time with,” so pick your social connections wisely. They matter more than what you may think.
Avoid Risky Substances
Before I let you go I would be remiss to not circle back on the considerations to avoid risky substances. This is incredibly important for those with ADHD. As you likely know, people with ADHD have obsessive tendencies and can be vulnerable to addictive behaviors. When I use the term substances here within the context of ADHD I would like to include substances found in food, triggering stimuli with technology, screen time, environmental exposures, etc.
It’s safe to say that anyone with ADHD must be diligent with themselves to apply appropriate boundaries, roadblocks of accountability and recurring check-ins with themselves in a lifestyle designed for their success to prevent getting lost in a nasty cycle of addiction or obsession.
These common tendencies could be as playful as video game addiction to obsessions with exercise or much more complex addictions like their relationship to pornography, certain social settings, shopping via mobile apps, and hard substances.
Lifestyle medicine is a medical specialty that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to prevent, treat, and reverse health conditions that hold people back from living their life to the fullest.
If you focus on these primary pillars of lifestyle medicine that foster a healthy lifestyle you can support yourself for the rest of your life and create healthy habits that last.
Once you master these habits as part of your everyday routine you’ll be well on your way to mastering your ADHD too.
Summary:
Eat Healthy Foods.
Enjoy Exercise Regularly.
Get Enough Good Sleep.
Manage Stress Successfully.
Connect with Others.
Avoid Risky Substances