ADHD can be troublesome enough when you are a child if you can't seem to get all your homework done in time with your mother watching over you.
What must it feel like to be all grown up with a job, a marriage, a child of your own to take care of, and to still not be able to get a handle on anything?
Adult ADHD, surprisingly, is a problem that still hasn't received the kind of attention it deserves. Two out of three children with ADHD grow up to have that disease as adults. Adults who have ADHD today often don't realize that they do. About the first time that they ever realize that they might have a mental illness is when their own child gets diagnosed, and they begin to put two and two together.
Adult ADHD is often something that people have been fighting their entire adult lives and their childhoods as well. These are the people who as children had a great deal of trouble setting themselves up for a task at school and completing it - getting distracted, disorganized and losing concentration along the way.
Some adults with ADHD, even if they've never actually found out that they have the disease, have managed to figure out some kind of a system for themselves to get by on. They might be very bright and they might manage to somehow get by through life. But they just aren't achieving their potential. If they didn't have ADHD, they would be so much better off.
One way that people with adult ADHD deal with their problem is that they hire a life coach at about $100 an hour to help them figure out what they are doing wrong and how to correct things. While it does sound kind of expensive, most people don't need to see their life coach more than four or five times. But the biggest problem that an adult with ADHD has is that he can't usually figure out a system that will work for him keep to it. Most of his time is spent worrying excessively about how his day is slipping through his hands with nothing to show for it.
Is a life coach an alternative to taking medication?
Not really so.
A life coach is totally different and hiring one is something you do to just help yourself. The first thing a life coach will do for you is to help you not start any new projects. The more a person with organizational problems has to do, the more difficult it becomes for him to organize things. Whatever new ideas one gets for projects to start, one certainly needs to write them down for a future date. But one can't get started on them and overburden oneself.
With help from the life coach, the person with ADHD chooses just a couple of goals to achieve, and then gets on the job. With enough discipline and with the consultant looking in to check one's progress, one learns the skills one needs to become a proper functioning adult. The life coach isn't a therapist. He doesn't give you advice on what is going on in your head and how you can control your thoughts. He just tells you what exactly you are doing wrong on a practical level, and tells you that you need to stop doing that.
How you stop doing it is entirely up to you.
It works very well with people who have accepted that they have a problem and just wish to do whatever it takes. With people who might be in a certain amount of denial, or who just want to throw money at the problem and have the life coach set everything right for them, such a system may not really work.
Basically, if you have adult ADHD, you do need the coaching, of course. But you also need medication and therapy. Pretty soon, you should be able to set up a few healthy habits and become an adult who is in control of his life.
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