Overcoming a bad habit can be daunting. The problem is twofold: we make sweeping changes which upset our equilibrium and that stern inner critic makes us feel like failures playing havoc with our resolve. However, there is a way to make small easy changes and feel good about ourselves.
Your bad habits might actually be good for you! This is derived from Zen philosophy where everything bad has something good in it. Accentuate and strengthen the good within that bad habit and you are good to move forward.
Let’s look at some typical bad habits to see how to accentuate the positive:
- Messiness: You are creative in your chaos. You know where things are and have an associative mind. You delight in your creativity. When you feel like focusing on one aspect of your creativity, clean out the clutter. My desk tends to have various piles of works in progress, but I’m multi-faceted; it makes sense. When I want to move on to other things or simply to feel good, I organize my desk.
- Tardiness: You get immersed in a project, work or fun. You know how to carve out time for yourself to reclaim your stolen moments. The goal in stress-management is to shed that enormous to-do list. Your lateness means that you were not concerned about doing for others, but were self-involved and totally present to what you were doing. You will be on time when you consider it important.
- Adult ADHD: Adult ADHD as a self-description, not the clinical diagnosis, means that you are a scanner and are good at many things. You will find what makes your heart sing.
- Perfectionism: You have integrity and care when others do their work carelessly. The danger of perfectionism is when you do it to impress others. However, when you do it for your own accomplishment, that’s great!
- Procrastination: You like to collect your energy and thoughts, letting them percolate. You function best with a deadline which gives you an adrenalin surge. Acute stress is good for you, helping you to wake up and perform better. When you meet your deadline, you decompress and raise your stress threshold for next time.
Now that you see how profoundly good your bad habits may be, tweak them and make small changes that don’t even feel like change. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, do you?
For More Info on personal empowerment and changing for the better: read my book, Addicted to Stress (Wiley, 2008).
Comments
Hmmm, a Yale study says adults with ADHD make less money than their peers, are fired more frequently resulting in loss of income, have higher rates of traffic accidents, higher rates of divorce, higher rates of substance abuse, etc. After promptin from my wife, I went to a psychologist who specialized in working with adults with attention problems. Doing much better now. I'm also working at home on a program called Play Attention. I don't think my wife wants to leave me anymore! That's a step in the right direction.
So what you are saying is that with ADHD these individuals go with and are more aware of that which makes them happy, even to their detriment at times. We used to call them artists.
Adult ADHD as a clinical diagnosis can also have many positives. Here's a few from a blog post i did called the top 10 advantages of having ADHD in a high tech career. To find it just google top ten advantages
The ability to hyperfocus like a laser on a task IF you find it interesting,
rapid fire mind, great at multitasking, great in a crisis, highly creative, not afraid of taking risks etc.
ADHD has many challenges and many strengths, if you learn to manage it effectively, you can spend more time focusing on the strengths.
Many adults with ADHD do have more problems than non ADDers in terms of higher rates of divorce, job hopping, substance abuse etc. But a lot of that is from people that aren't properly managing ADHD. Some just use medication which can be useful but they're don't teach skills, they just put you in a better position to learn them.
The best way to manage ADHD is multiple methods, there's no one silver bullet.
There are also billionaires that attribute their success to having ADHD and a MENSA ADHD special interest group of 500+ people. Also a lot of artists, entrepreneurs, sales and marketing people with ADHD.
Quite often our weaknesses are just our strengths over applied or misapplied in the wrong situation.
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