Psychiatric conditions like ADHD don’t take vacations, long weekends, or even lunch breaks. The challenge of the neurodiverse brain goes on 24/7.
Your dreams are individual and your goals in life are unique for you. Also, hormones influence everything from how women feel and function in their everyday lives to the effect their medication. By keeping track of, and following your individual data, you can tailor effective self-care and advocate for your unique needs in contact with health care.
ADHD 24/7 is model aiming to create a common language for the individual, clinicians and neuroscientists, and healthcare. Always with the aim of everyday balance and quality of life. By using the ADHD 24/7 model you can create your unique functional map for increased self-awareness and self-efficacy, regardless of if you are neurodivergent or not.
All humans have certain basic needs that must be met for us to live a rich and dignified life:
COMMUNITY: A social context where there are people who know you, and where you feel safe expressing what you think, feel, and wish without judgment.
CALLING: A sense of being part of something larger than yourself, where you contribute to the community and what you do has meaning. And where you have tools to face life’s various challenges.
Your brain constantly handles information from the world around you and from your own body. All brains have different strengths and vulnerable sides when it comes to:
OVERVIEW: Planning, organizing, structuring, and prioritizing everything that needs to be done in a day. Getting started with tasks and estimating how much time is needed to complete them on time.
REGULATE: Finding a “just right” level for energy levels, sleep, attention, appetite, and emotions.
FILTER: Sorting and filtering out information from the world around you and your own body.
SHIFT: Changing focus, trying something new when what you’re doing no longer works, and interrupting negative, ruminating thought loops.
ADHD might make it unreasonably difficult to create and maintain healthy routines for lifestyle factors, even though you know how important they are. Research shows that the increased risk of morbidity in ADHD is associated to difficulties in establishing routines and moderation around 7 important areas of life:
DIET: Difficulty sensing the body’s signals for hunger and satiety, establishing regular and healthy routines, insatiable cravings for sweets, difficulty eating with moderation once started, or eating too fast.
EXERCISE: Difficulty getting started, setting your goals too high, losing interest, or becoming compulsive to the point of self-harm.
SLEEP: Difficulty winding down, getting to bed, getting up in the morning, restless sleep, or using sleep as an escape and procrastinator.
STRESS: Difficulty finding “work-life balance.” “Workaholic” with recurring burnout? Constant internal stress and difficulty getting recovered despite free time.
Map yourself according to 24/7, start connecting the dots, and create a functional map for how different things in your life fits together. Don’t forget that women with ADHD often are especially sensitivity to hormonal fluctuations and that it may be more difficult to find the right contraception. PMS-treatment or hormone substitution the years around menopause. Its more common for women with ADHD to struggle with severe PMS (PMDD), experience mood symptoms or extreme fatigue during puberty, and have both physical and mental challenges during pregnancy, postpartum, and in perimenopause.
When you understand why you feel and behave the way you do, you can make better decisions and take more responsibility for your own health! You become less dependent on healthcare and can advocate more effectively for your personal needs if you do need it.
