Rewards work much better for the ADHD mind than do consequences.

You might say that stimulants stimulate the brain’s brakes, thus giving you more control.

An increase in dopamine helps our nerve cells pass on information more “cleanly” from one to another. It helps to reduce the noise, quiet the chatterbox, and tune your brain to the right channel. If the signals aren’t clear, it’s easy to fall into confusion and

“Ha” breathing technique. It’s simple but takes some focus and concentration. To begin, inhale through your nose to a count of three or four. Next, exhale through your mouth to a count of six or eight making a soft haaaa sound as you do so. The inhale/exhale relationship is always at a 1:2 ratio. Using this kind of forced breath technique as you

There are some supplements everyone can agree to recommend: a multivitamin; vitamin D; magnesium; B complex; vitamin C (ascorbic acid, as well as Connect!); calcium; zinc.

ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with

Strong will, stubbornness, refusal of help. It can seem stunningly stupid, but many people with ADHD, especially men, state outright, “I’d rather fail doing it my way than succeed with help.”

A wandering mind. You’ll get frequent comments from teachers, or, in an adult, supervisors or spouse, that the individual’s mind wanders, that he or she has trouble focusing and staying on task, that performance is inconsistent, good days and bad days, good moments and terrible ones, all of which usually lead the teacher, supervisor, or spouse to

“If there is one takeaway in distilling down the complexity of the DMN and the TPN, it boils down to the fact that the toggle switches between them are off in those with ADHD.”

In other words, in most people the DMN does not slip so easily into the TPN; the gears mesh well and are not glitchy. But in people who have ADHD, the gears get stripped, so

To compound the problem, people with ADHD or VAST tendencies usually reject help. Of course, there is an upside to this trait—it’s called nonconformity. Another, less polite way of saying it: People with attention issues tend to have acute bullshit detectors. We hate hypocrisy maybe more than any other human failing, and we can spot it a mile away.