Your Future ADHD Self: An ADHD-Friendly Guide to Planning and Goal Setting

By Jeffrey Rice

 People with ADHD struggle with planning and goal setting. The concepts are understandable and the strategies we are taught make sense. Yet, we can't seem to make ourselves do it consistently-if at all. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. And you are not the problem! Using a script not designed to work with your ADHD brain, it is al

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts, LLC
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889265375

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Copyright © 2023 Jeffrey Rice

All rights reserved.

Your Future ADHD Self

An ADHD-Friendly Guide to Planning and Goal Setting

ISBN 979-8-88926-536-8 Paperback

ISBN 979-8-88926-537-5 Digital Ebook

Dedication

To Laura—Fourteen years ago, I could not have predicted how important you would be to my Future Self.

Now, I cannot imagine my Future Self without you.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1. Getting to Know Your ADHD Brain

Chapter 1. What Is ADHD?

Chapter 2. How Your Brain Is Structured and How It Works

Chapter 3. Neurochemistry 101

Chapter 4. How the ADHD Brain Differs from the Non-ADHD Brain

Chapter 5. Habits and ADHD Brains

Part 2. Planning and Goal Setting

Chapter 6. Introduction to Part 2

Chapter 7. My Approach to Planning

Chapter 8. Planning Your Tomorrow, Today

Chapter 9. Create a Plan for Tomorrow

Chapter 10. Strategies for Habituating Planning

Chapter 11. Stimulating the Planning Habit

Chapter 12. The Hierarchy of Goals

Chapter 13. Your Future Self: The Ultimate Superordinate Goal

Chapter 14. Creating Your Future Self

Chapter 15. Intermediate Goals

Chapter 16. Shifting Focus to Evaluate Intermediate Goals

Chapter 17. Keeping Your Intermediate Goals Out of the Not Now Bucket

Chapter 18. Strategies for Keeping Goals in the Now

Part 3. Winning the Battle in Your Brain

Chapter 19. Introduction to Part 3

Chapter 20. The Battle in Your ADHD Brain

Chapter 21. The Three Legs of the ADHD Table

Chapter 22. Leg 1 of the Table: Exercise

Chapter 23. Leg 2 of the Table: Nutrition

Chapter 24. Leg 3 of the Table: Sleep

Chapter 25. Staying Motivated

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

From as early in my life as I can remember, I have struggled with planning for the future. For my brain, as with most young attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) brains, planning and goal setting was always a challenge. According to researchers Kathleen D’Alessio and Manju Banerjee, No two individuals with ADHD are alike, but difficulty with executive function and self-regulation is the hallmark of an ADHD diagnosis. Deficits in executive function affect one’s ability to set goals and take self-directed action to achieve these goals (D’Alessio and Manju 2016).

Similarly, research done by Margaret Sibley and colleagues that looked at motivation and goal-setting strategies of high school students observed students with ADHD were less likely to use goal setting than their non-ADHD colleagues (Sibley et al. 2019).

To be clear, as a child, I didn’t know I had ADHD. Frankly, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, neither I nor my parents had ever even heard of ADHD, or ADD as it was known back then. I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was thirty-three years old.

Looking back, my behaviors and symptoms clearly reflected that diagnosis.

Rarely, if ever, was planning or goal setting part of my childhood. I didn’t go beyond What am I going to do this afternoon? or Who do I want to hang out with tomorrow? A fundamental disconnect between how any current action connected to a future consequence or who I would become was present. Sure, I could intellectually understand that if I skipped math class today—more on this later—passing a test the following week would be harder.

But now, looking back, I can see that at a deeper level, I was completely disconnected from any concept of me in the future. The embarrassed person staring blankly at a test, feeling like a failure, was somebody else. The only thing that was real to me was the here and now.

My life was a little boat floating downstream.

As I grew toward adulthood, the importance of planning and goal setting became clear to me, especially as college approached, but my childhood patterns continued. For me, I was much more attentive to—and fortunately successful with—the immediate: What is due tomorrow? I guess I’d better get started on that now! I was a very typical ADHD-last-minute-miracle-worker. And I worked a lot of miracles. I graduated in the top ten of my high school class of around six hundred students.

In college, I was surrounded by friends, who, from as early as freshman year, were making plans for their post-college careers. I majored in Engineering Science at Penn State University because my brother did. I thought if he could, it was good enough for me. In 1984, I graduated from Penn State with a degree, a fiancée, and no idea what to do next.

My boat in life continued to float along, with life happening to me.

In retrospect, I was lucky my little boat was well made. Academics came easily to me, and I landed a well-paying job at General Electric. I got married and earned a master’s degree in mathematics. I struggled with many graduate classes but made it through. I taught computer programming to myself and eventually to others in the US, Japan, and Australia. For ten years, without any real long-term plan or goal, I managed to do well in life.

Then it all fell apart. My wife at the time couldn’t understand me and vice versa. Through a stroke of luck or divine intervention, one of my siblings suggested I read a couple articles about ADHD in adults. They suspected they had it and wanted my opinion. Much to my surprise, what I read felt incredibly familiar, and seemed to make many disparate pieces of my life fit together. I made an appointment for myself with a local psychiatrist who put me through a battery of tests. The diagnosis I received confirmed my suspicion.

I had ADHD.

The diagnosis inspired me to dig deeper so I could develop new skills and create adaptive behaviors that would resolve the friction between my wife and me. Despite this, the marriage ended in divorce. I felt a profound sense of loss and failure. But at the same time, I also felt a huge sense of relief. I finally understood myself and felt I could avoid the mistakes my ADHD had allowed me to make in my first marriage.

In 2009, I met my (non-ADHD) wife, Laura. In 2010, we opened a CrossFit gym together. We dated for three years, and in 2012, we got married. Since then, I started woodworking, sports photography, and coaching other adults with ADHD, and taught myself to build electric guitars. I’ve had lots of accomplishments and lots of successes.

But I still had no five- or ten-year plan. The current swept my boat along, and I rowed furiously to keep up. Perhaps I was lucky or blessed, but my life seemed to go in a positive direction without any long-term intention on my part.

Until 2020 when everything stopped.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the New York CrossFit gym my wife and I owned was shut down. As a sole proprietor-style business, we were faced with the prospect of no income for an undetermined amount of time. Not to mention potentially losing the business that we’d poured heart and soul into for ten years.

I had to get a handle on long-term planning fast. I needed to be more rigorous with goal setting and determine the direction of my boat in life. The resources I found frustrated me. My initial search on Amazon for books to read using the phrase goal setting turned up around twelve hundred results!

To make matters worse, it seemed every resource was designed to work for a different brain than mine. With S.M.A.R.T. goals for instance—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound—I understood the concept but couldn’t make it work for me (Reference.com 2020). My ADHD brain looked at that complex framework and said, No thanks.

Sometimes, the advice for goal setting seemed to conflict. Should I set near-term goals only, and trust everything will turn out okay long term? I’d done that my whole life already, but a pandemic put an end to that approach. Should I just keep an idea in mind of a long-term goal or an idea of who I wanted to be in the future? My ADHD brain is great at conjuring up images of exciting future goals: graphic artist, actor, rock guitarist, luthier. I’d only done well at becoming one of these in my life. Nothing ever came of the rest of those ideas, and so many others.

What was missing?

The more I researched, I realized I needed both: a long-term vision of who and where I wanted to be, and short-term goals to give me meaningful steps to get there. And I needed to plan and adjust to keep it all aligned. It had to keep my ADHD brain focused and interested in bringing the plans to life.

This book is the result.

In this book, you’ll discover ADHD-friendly ways to develop a habit of consistent planning. It will show you how to approach setting long-term goals and why the way most people with ADHD approach creating long-term goals is completely wrong. Once you learn how to consistently plan and set long-term goals, this book will help you define intermediate goals to keep you aligned with your new, clear long-term vision for your life. Finally, this book will present a holistic approach to winning what often feels like a battle in your brain between your intentions and your ADHD.

I have worked with dozens of ADHD adults: from CEOs to people struggling to find jobs, to doctors, lawyers, grad students, and stay-at-home parents. I’ve worked with people from all age groups as well, from twenties to seventies. This book is written for those people with ADHD brains, like me.

If you are married to, work with, coach, or care for someone who has ADHD, this book will be a great resource for you as well. It can be particularly difficult to put yourself in another person’s shoes when your brain doesn’t work the way theirs does at some fundamental level. This book can serve as your guide to navigate those situations.

As you work your way through this book, I will explain the science behind how the ADHD brain works, with research and experiences from top neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and entrepreneurs. If you have an ADHD brain and have struggled with any or all of the processes of planning, goal setting, and plan execution, you are not alone!

I hope to instill in you that if you have an ADHD brain, contrary to the common—and literal—interpretation of the label, you are not disordered. You are not broken. You are not in some way defective.

This book consists of three parts.

In Part One of the book, I go over some of the basics of how an ADHD brain works, to make working with it easier. If you don’t understand how your ADHD brain is wired, some of this information may be unfamiliar.

In Part Two, I dive into the nuts and bolts of planning and goal setting. The objective is to turn you into a consistent planner with a system that takes less than five minutes a day to do. If you find yourself stumped by questions like What do you want to do with your life? Part Two can help give you some clarity.

Finally, in Part Three, I explain one of the fundamental challenges for people with ADHD: the battle between your impulse and emotion-driven lower brain, and the goal-oriented and cognitive higher brain.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, my little boat needed a new course. I needed an ADHD brain-specific resource to give me guidance and couldn’t find one.

So, I decided to write it myself.

And I needed strategies to help me pick up the pieces and forge ahead if a process faltered or needed an adjustment.

This book is that guide, and I hope it serves you well, whether your brain is on the ADHD side of the fence or not.

Part 1.

Getting to Know Your ADHD Brain

Chapter 1.

What Is ADHD?

In the spring of 1975, I was sitting at the desk in the bedroom I shared with my two brothers, staring at an unopened math textbook. In less than twenty-four hours, I, along with fifty other nervous thirteen-year-olds, would be opening an exam booklet. We would be face to face with a barrage of questions testing our knowledge of eighth grade algebra.

A subject that, thanks to ADHD, I knew almost nothing about.

I skipped most of my algebra classes that year. On the rare occasion when I did attend, I would stare out the window, or doodle in my notebook. My algebra teacher was an older woman. To my thirteen-year-old self, she seemed ancient. As a teacher, I found her completely uninspiring. She taught mostly by reading what was in our textbook out loud to the class, or by copying examples from the text onto the chalkboard at the front of the classroom. It didn’t take many weeks into the school year for me to check out mentally and eventually physically. My desire to escape the torture of sitting still and pretending to pay attention to something holding no interest for me far outweighed any thoughts of consequences that would eventually come from skipping class.

In 1975, neither I nor my parents had ever heard of ADHD. In fact, in 1975, what we now call ADHD was called Hyperkinetic Reaction of Children (Centers for Disease Control 2022). Back then, I was just a kid who seemed to hate algebra. I had no idea how much what I was going through would impact the rest of my life.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common mental disorders affecting children. Symptoms of ADHD include inattention (not being able to keep focus), hyperactivity (excess movement that does not fit the setting), and impulsivity (hasty acts that occur in the moment without thought) (Elmaghraby and Garayalde 2022). And while commonly thought of as a condition associated with children, it continues into adulthood.

According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, in 2005, 4.4 percent of the adult population in the United States was diagnosed with ADHD (National Institute of Mental Health n.d.). Based on 2005 US Census data, there were over 217 million adults, aged eighteen and older, in the United States in 2005 (United States Census Bureau 2007). This means in 2005, there were approximately 9.5 million adults in the US diagnosed with ADHD. And according to numerous studies since 2005, that number is on the rise.

ADHD is a rather individualized condition. It manifests through a wide range of behaviors, each of which may or may not be present from one adult to another. For example, one of my own most dominant ADHD behaviors is creating clutter. If I am not vigilant about cleaning up after myself, any area I occupy for more than a few minutes will become cluttered and messy. And ironically, the more cluttered my environment becomes, the less I can focus. This makes me seem even more ADHD-y. I once told my wife, It is my curse in life that I automatically create the environment I can’t stand to be in. I have had to dedicate a huge amount of time, energy, and effort to compensate for this ADHD-driven behavior.

While creating clutter has been a constant in my life since my childhood, I have coached many ADHD adults for whom this has never been a problem. In fact, some of my clients have been, for their whole lives, so meticulous about keeping things neat and orderly, they appear almost obsessive about it.

The diagnosis and characterization of ADHD have evolved over the years. What was once viewed as a singular condition is now understood to have multiple presentations. Currently, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) identifies three general types of ADHD (American Psychiatric Association 2013).

1.ADHD Inattentive

2.ADHD Hyperactive/Impulsive

3.ADHD Combined

Prior to the release of the DSM-V in 2013, the ADHD Inattentive diagnosis was simply called ADD. It is not uncommon to still hear the inattentive form of ADHD referred to by the old label. The ADHD label—emphasis on the H—was previously only associated with a diagnosis that included hyperactive symptoms. Ten years since the official diagnosis was changed, this still seems to cause confusion.

Throughout this book, I will use the term ADHD as a blanket term to refer to any or all of these diagnoses. But before I do so, let’s first review how each of these three diagnoses are characterized.

ADHD Inattentive

People with an ADHD inattentive diagnosis are primarily exhibiting behaviors associated with distractibility and lack of focus. Some of the general characteristics are:

•Failing to pay attention to details

•Making careless mistakes

•Having difficulty paying attention to conversations

•Having trouble focusing on and finishing tasks

•Getting sidetracked when doing tasks

•Having trouble organizing and prioritizing tasks

•Avoiding tasks that take sustained focus

•Frequently losing things

•Being easily distracted

•Forgetting things

If this sounds familiar to you, it does not necessarily mean you have ADHD. In fact, all of these characteristics are part of being human. I have yet to meet anyone who can say they never exhibit any of these behaviors. The difference between people with ADHD and those who do not have ADHD is, in a person with ADHD, these characteristics occur frequently. In fact, to receive an official diagnosis as ADHD Inattentive, at least five of these characteristics must occur chronically.

ADHD Hyperactive/Impulsive

People with an ADHD Hyperactive/Impulsive diagnosis primarily exhibit behaviors associated with an inability to remain still and/or an inability to control impulsive actions. Some of the