Treating Adult ADD Without Medication

When you get first diagnoses with Adult ADD, your doctor may offer to medicate you to control your Adult ADD, but there are a bunch of reasons that you might want to decline medication and control your ADD with alternate methods. For instance, you may not want to deal with the side effects of the medication, or you may not want to pay for the medication. Whatever your reason, you should know that controlling your ADD without medication is completely doable. It may take a bit of work and practice, but you should be able to get as much done as someone without Adult ADD.

Understanding Your Mind

The first thing you must do is to learn about how your ADD brain works. There is a common misconception that the ADD brain can't focus without the help of medication, but this is in fact not true. What is true is that the ADD brain can't focus on things where there is not genuine interest or motivation to focus. To prove this, check out the game World of Warcraft. This game is played by millions of people, many of which have Adult ADD. These people will spend hours glued to their computer, focusing intently on the game. There is no focus problem there.

For those of you who don't play Warcraft or another online role-playing game, try to think of something that you do focus well on now that needs active participation to do (tv doesn't count). For example, do you read novels or do crosswords? Do you like sudoku? Can you sit for hours working on a craft? If you do, I bet you can focus well on these tasks.

How To Focus

The key to focusing without medication is to try to shape your real work to have some of the same motivation factors as these games or activities. These include:

Make each work session consist of short well-defined tasks. Breaking down tasks can make them more approachable.Give yourself rewards for completing your tasksMake sure that you track your tasks. It can be very powerful to keep a bar graph of percent complete.Be sure that you have your work well planned out. This reduces the barrier to entry of starting on a taskMake sure you are actually motivated to complete the task. If you really have zero motivation to do something you are going to have a really hard time completing it.

Using tips like these and a little bit of practice, you can control your Adult ADD without the hassle and potential side-effects that come along with medication.

Hailey has been controlling her ADD without medication since before High School. She has since graduated with a 3.8 GPA from a top tier University and has started her own business.

To learn more about how she is able to accomplish so much despite having a pretty bad case of Adult ADD, get a copy of her FREE ebook on Adult ADD and learn how you too can be successful despite your ADD.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Hailey_Hinson

View the original article here