A New Approach to ADHD "Alternative Treatment"

I spent my first year in college taking every psychology class I could, those were the only classes that I passed. Psychology was my intended major but I spent most of my time reading about ADHD and wrote all of my papers on the subject. Reflecting on that year of college now I believe that I was really trying to understand what was wrong with me. My medicine was not doing much of anything positive for me, but I was accustomed to it so I took it most of the time. Then my life changed. I got married, yes very young (19) and I moved from Southern Minnesota to Eastern Tennessee so she could pursue her career at college that offered her major.

We have very little money, no health care, and in five months my prescription for Adderall ran out. I knew this was going to happen so I had stopped taking my medication in advance I also took this opportunity to stop smoking cigarettes. I had been smoking a half pack to a pack a day of cigarettes since the age of 15, and you rarely saw me without coffee or an energy drink. When I moved to Tennessee I knew my addiction was not to cigarettes but to stimulants in general. Simply being poor and knowing my prescription was about to run out was enough to get me to stop cold turkey.

I was aware of alternative treatments to ADHD but had never considered them seriously. My mother had tried to get me to do the whole “exercise and eat right” thing in high school with no success. That just was not going to happen between working at a Burger King and receiving a whopping fifty percent discount and that half pack a day I wasn’t planning on changing my lifestyle much at all. My wife however is a runner and we had moved into an area that was not necessarily the best part of town and was absolutely devoid of sidewalks. I started running (another great motivator to quit smoking) with her safety in mind and in a few weeks I was seeing and feeling the results. The other change that was imposed on me by my wife and our financial situation was a diet of sorts. She is a healthy eater, and she cooks the majority of the meals which makes me a healthy eater as well. I was beginning to feel more energetic and was definitely more focused than when I was on my medication.

This made me take a careful look at my life, the changes I had made and the results I am experiencing. It opened my eyes to a new way of treatment, one that made me feel better physically and even gave me more self confidence in the academic environments. I also began to feel lazy and naïve for how I had approached my ADHD in the past and the way that I used and sometimes abused my medication. In future posts I plan to explain more specifically how things like diet, exercise, drug use, media consumption and time management have affected me and even some friends and acquaintances of mine.