How I 'cured' my ADHD with zero meds
A Primer
I’ve written various versions of this post and shared it with different people at various stages in the past year. I think it’s in a form now where I can write a single post that doesn’t go too far into the drama of my life. So here goes.
Did I “cure” my ADHD?
8 years ago, I spent a lot of money to get an official diagnosis of “Sluggish Cognitive Tempo”. Some people call it “Inattentive ADHD” or “ADD” and some others say it’s a completely distinct condition from ADHD. Whatever. I had inattention, forgetfulness, anxiety, depression, and emotional dysregulation, and it was debilitating enough that multiple professionals said I was “severely impaired”.
I managed by throwing time and energy at my work. Once I had a child that was no longer possible, and I had to really get my life in order. Therapy wasn’t enough, and I was worried about meds causing other impairments that would make me a bad or unavailable parent.
I worked on myself for a year and a half, while working on a novel. When I started, I could barely do 1000 words a day, and I’d always find reasons to go off my novel for weeks on end. I once did 7000 words in one day, which… amazing, wasn’t it? But I couldn’t summon that kind of attention on demand.
Now, I can consistently do 1200 words an hour, and I’ve done so 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week for the past month.
I have some other milestones to determine I’m well and truly cured, so I’m holding off on that judgment. But I do feel quite different, and if the catchy title helps me spread the word that ADHD isn’t a lifelong, debilitating condition that needs regular medication for life, so be it.
The beginning of my ADHD ‘cure’ journey
I’ve had mental health struggles all through my 20s. I attributed it all to various causes and sought professional help when I could. One by one, I fixed all the major issues in my life (or they got solved as life went on). I still struggled with paying attention.
Someone suggested ADHD as a possible cause, so I looked a little for a professional, and eventually got a diagnosis of Sluggish Cognitive Tempo as I’d mentioned earlier.
I was told a few things:
My ‘processing speed’ was slow. But other cognitive skills were high. This led to a ‘frustration profile’
I did much worse on tasks that were under time constraints than without.
I had to give myself more time to get things done and I’d be fine.
My self-esteem was “all over the place”.
I had to be around people who hyped me up and didn’t criticize me too much.
I did change my environment to be relaxed and not too deadline-oriented or stressful. But I wasn’t really thriving. I was making do, but that’s the most charitable way to put it.
Then a baby came along and disrupted this whole delicate balance I had set up for myself where I’d throw in long hours at work to ‘give myself extra time’. I couldn’t work 10 hours a day and weekends with a child in the mix and several other things going insane in my life.
I decided to take some long-overdue time to work on myself because this version of myself was doing no one any good.
Just when I decided to do so, I came across the book Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate.
This book suggested that ADHD was not something biological but something wired into you at an early age when your brain is still getting wired. Wow isn’t that insane?! I couldn’t put the book down till I finished.
So It’s Not Genetic? And it isn’t a lifelong issue you need to medicate forever?
Dr. Gabor Mate says some kids are born with ‘sensitivity’ which could be genetic. And if this sensitivity is not nurtured right with strong attunement by a caregiver, children either become hyperactive to get the attention they need, or they dissociate to avoid the pain of rejection from a caregiver. Enough doses of this leads to symptoms which we call ADHD.
I found myself quite convinced because he went into depth about ADHD symptoms and characteristics that most ADHD books simply don’t. He approached it all with so much empathy it was hard to disregard. I had to accept there might be some truth to it.
When I saw my family interact with my child, it instantly became clear to me that there were attunement issues with those who raised me. Very subtle things, like if a caregiver is always busy, and any time a child in their care feels engaged in some activity, they go away, so they associate focus with their caregiver disappearing, and hence don’t focus at all and instead look around anxiously every now and then. Then there’s not being able to read emotions displayed by a pre-verbal child, which manifests as interruption, not letting kids take the lead, and several other ways.
Further, I realized my family was terrible with certain skills. They couldn’t accurately estimate how long a task is going to take. No one made plans or tried to follow plans. The smallest thing would be a cause for a lot of anxiety. And some of us masked our anxiety with anger, so no one caught on for very very long.
With this experience, I had to accept that a lot of my issues did come from nurture and not nature.
Further, I was reading a lot of books on raising children. One of those that I picked up as a short entertaining read was The Myth Of The Spoiled Child by Alfie Kohn. It’s this book about how meeting your children’s needs isn’t spoiling them, and there isn’t actually a commonly agreed-upon definition of ‘spoiled’ anyway. I’m a pretty chill parent, but the book was too much even for me, and the author backed it all up with stats and such. One chapter about self-esteem really gave me a big missing piece of the puzzle.
Apparently, it doesn’t matter if your self-esteem is high or low. All that matters is it is stable. If your self-esteem is ‘all over the place’, it’s called conditional self-esteem. If you feel good in some situations, and not in others, that’s conditional self-esteem. Now mind, it isn’t that you just feel good or bad. It’s if your self-esteem is good or bad based on the situation that’s an issue.
Turns out, that was my issue! I felt very very good when I got things done. But I felt terrible otherwise. Most people feel the same whether or not they get stuff done. They don’t think of themselves as bad people just for not getting something done. For instance, my self-esteem is pretty stable with my appearance. I am not affected by a bad hair day. But a bad to-do-list day was unforgivable.
At this point, it seemed like I had to do a lot of work on myself in therapy, and fixing these things little by little might help me figure out attention.
Alongside this, I was talking to a support group of people with SCT, and they were discussing diet a lot. Lots of people claimed to be helped by keto, or a carnivore diet, or cutting out sugar or gluten or seed oils. I supplemented with zinc in the aftermath of covid, and realized I suddenly was like an energizer bunny. I also found a paper and a talk by Prof. Julia Rucklidge of the University of Canterbury, where she said micronutrients help alleviate symptoms of ADHD. I took micronutrient supplements, and what do you know, I suddenly found a dramatic improvement in every aspect of life.
Several months later, I came across Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Christopher Palmer’s book called Brain Energy, which said most if not all mental health issues were metabolical issues that led to damaged mitochondria, and could be fixed by diet, exercise, sleep, and all that boring stuff. I realized from this book that sensitivities to stimuli could be worsened by damaged mitochondria, which makes this a precursor to what Gabor Mate calls ‘sensitivity’.
I couldn’t in good faith believe in the genetic theory of ADHD anymore.
So what worked?
I found there are four aspects to ADHD symptoms. Should I call this the Fourfold Path? The Four Agreements? The Sign Of Four?
Physical issues: Something’s wrong with the brain and body that leaves no energy or nutrients for things like focusing or feeling good. Could be gut issues that lead to low absorption of nutrients. Could be a bad diet. Could be stress that takes away a lot of nutrition to achieve homeostasis. Could be other health issues that cause a lot of pain or damage to the body and take away nutrients for urgent stuff like repair. For me, just adding a raw salad to my diet with a variety of vegetables every day suffices. I can literally feel the difference when I don’t eat salad for 2-3 days - I’m significantly more anxious, more distracted, and beset with more negative thoughts. I made other dietary changes like intermittent fasting, only cooking with dairy fat, and cutting out all processed food (for nutrient reasons). I feel significantly more physically energetic. Previously, a lot of my slowness was because I felt I was low on energy and had to sit down and ration my energy so it would last. Now I had none of that worry. There was plenty of energy to go around. Also, being low energy made it hard for me to sit down and focus. This was no longer the issue.
Was it just a coincidence or correlation that my most distracted years were also my least nourished years? I can’t honestly say that.Emotional issues: The conditional self-esteem and the disrupted attunement were a start, and I worked on those things. It wasn’t easy work. I read a lot, did regular sessions of very focused cognitive behavioral therapy, and tried being observant in my day-to-day work about how I felt. Just the conditional self-esteem work had great returns - it improved how I socialized, how I handled failure, and how I interacted with family. Turns out, if you’re hard on yourself consciously or unconsciously, you’re also hard on others unnecessarily. Conditional self-esteem is the difference between “this isn’t good work” and “you’re a terrible person for turning in this work”. Love the sinner, hate the sin. I didn’t realize this was how I viewed the world. I was inadvertently disrespecting people and myself if things didn’t go to plan.
Once this cloud lifted, I realized a big part of my procrastination was having to deal with shame. If I found a bug in my code, that meant I was a terrible programmer. If someone else found a bug in my code before I did, that meant I was a really stupid person. So why code when coding is the process of adding bugs to code? And feel like a stupid person? Why bother doing anything when you’ll receive criticism at the end of it? Shame was paralyzing me and stopping me from doing anything worth it. If I did start something, I’d give up at the first sign of failure.
I worked on this shame. I would have really loved to tap into Brene Brown’s work on shame, but I found her voice too annoying to listen to her audiobooks. But Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was good enough. I still have issues, but being able to identify, label, and talk about these things with myself makes it more of a minor inconvenience than a debilitating emotion.
This is easily the biggest thing to work on and it’s not straightforward to do so. I had been in therapy off and on for 10-15 years prior to this and no one had caught on, remember. They found my self-esteem was ‘all over the place’ but no one did much about it.
There was also the issue of ‘sense of self’. It was described to me as “you know where you end and where the rest of the world begins”. It is quite literally that - a lot of people wiht ADHD and related issues have a very poor sense of their physical self and can’t balance or do other spatial tasks well because they don’t know where they end and the world begins. If your sense of self is delicate, you don’t allow external influence on it because you’re afraid of losing who you are, no matter who you may be. But bullet journaling my thoughts and feelings for 6-8 months improved the sense of that. I could more easily prioritize tasks, identify goals, and most importantly, reject things that wouldn’t work for me.Environmental issues: A lot of my issues were from the environment I grew up in. The environment I am currently in is one where I endeavor that everyone is connected and empathetic. I also place a great priority on being able to modify my environment to suit my needs instead of suppressing my needs to suit my environment. And no, that doesn’t make you a tougher person. I can’t control work environments too much, but just being proactive and aware of my needs puts me miles ahead of where I was before.
And sure, I had previously been advised to just be around those who were building me up instead of tearing me down. Which is nice. But I have a strong enough set of boundaries now that I am less affected by what other people say, and I voice my needs enough to get them met usually.Skills gap: I didn’t know how to estimate how long tasks took. I didn’t know how most people planned their week or thought about all the things they needed to do. I didn’t know how to break tasks down. I didn’t know how people understood what self-care was and how they made time to do it. Previously, shame stopped me from asking people, and also when I saw someone do something, I’d wonder “How on earth did they know to do that?”
Quelling my physical inattention symptoms and dealing with shame meant I could observe people better and understand without asking, and also I could ask in a better way if I didn’t understand their thought process.
The biggest change for me was starting a planner. I used bullet journaling to organize my life. It took about 6-8 months for it to really catch on. I’d make plans for the day, and then I’d make sure that if it was time to switch to task2 and task1 wasn’t yet done, I’d switch anyway and I’d plan better the next day. I was horrified when my therapist asked me to do work like this, but it actually helped a lot. Doing this was what uncovered my shame issues and thus I could work on them.
Having dealt with shame and self-esteem, and having a 6-8 month experience with planning my day and realizing there wasn’t much to it meant now I could use goal-setting techniques. I used Eat That Frog for the first time in a way that I really felt it be useful because I was no longer in denial about my priorities.
Plus now, learning wasn’t hard. So if I struggled with writing, I’d use beat sheets. If I struggled with programming, I’d take an online course.
One last piece of the puzzle was raw focus. I could do chores or outdoor tasks without being distracted. But I couldn’t sit down at my desk and focus. It needed two hours of dicking around for me to focus on anything that happened at my desk and even then I was constantly getting distracted.
At this point, I was doing the couch-to-5k program, and I realized I just needed interval training for the brain. I adapted the couch-to-5k schedule and used it to focus instead of run. 30 minute intervals where I had to focus (run) even if I didn’t feel like it, and take regular short breaks if I was too tired. It’s basically like a pomodoro, but you’re constantly bringing focus back to work like with mindfulness meditation, and if you get tired, you take a break and breathe for not more than a minute or two.
This was what really took things to the next level. I tripled my output basically, and it was quite amazing to see it happen consistently over a whole month.
The goal though is to use this so I can train myself to keep my focus for longer and longer hours without exhaustion.
Given all that, what is ADHD?
Dr. Chris Palmer in Brain Energy has this critique of the DSM (the manual used to diagnose all mental health issues) where he doesn’t believe the labels are actually useful. Having one diagnosis increases the probability of having more, and every mental health diagnosis correlates with every other mental health diagnosis.
Taylor Tomlinson in her latest special has this bit about how her psychiatrist tried various meds with her until they found a combination that worked. Then she googled all those meds together, and turns out, that combination is prescribed for bipolar disorder. When she brought it up with the psych, she said “I’m glad we could figure that out”, and Taylor’s joke is “I’m sorry, WE?”
I’ve been on an SCT/ADHD support group for a while where everyone is literally trying to figure out what our symptoms are. “Anyone else enters a room and forget what you came in for?” sort of stuff, near-constantly. “Does anyone else have gut issues?” “Has going gluten-free helped anyone?” “Anyone else gets drowsy when faced with math?” And so on.
SCT is not in the DSM yet, though they are trying very hard to define it well enough to put it in. But ADHD is. Great, but is it a useful label? ADHD seems to describe an extremely wide variety of symptoms and they don’t really know what causes these issues or how exactly meds help. Sure, they say dopamine shortage, etc., but you can supplement with L-Dopa or take external dopamine, and while it works for a while, homeostasis kicks in at some point and it’s not of much use anymore.
I feel like breaking down what was called ‘ADHD’ into its constituent symptoms that were debilitating is what helped me deal with it, whereas looking at it as one condition that arises from mysterious genes makes it look like an intractable unsolvable problem. Some people have inattention and forgetfulness that is debilitating. Some others have impulsivity and hyperactivity. Yet others have emotional dysregulation. Everyone somehow seems to be quite inattentive, that seems to be the core of it.
At the root of a lot of mental health issues is one thing - a strong lack of a general feeling of well-being. At baseline, you don’t feel like all is right with the world.
Would this be a dopamine deficiency? Maybe. But why would someone not have much dopamine in the first place? It could be because they feel their life sucks, or feel like they aren’t worth very much. Couldn’t it be possible that in the first three years of life, not paying a child as much attention, engaging with them as much as they want to, or giving them positive reinforcement just wires people into feeling less than all their life?
I didn’t used to have that feeling of well-being until I dealt with all the issues I discussed above.
Could it be that you’re training a child’s attention when you play with them in their early ages, and if you aren’t good with attention, because of mental health or you’re otherwise preoccupied, your child’s attention doesn’t develop great either?
In any case, this isn’t medical advice and I’m not even citing sources or anything here, all of this is my opinion based on my lived experience.
But it feels like a lot more goes on in early life than we realize, and there are many ways in which we can inadvertently cause our children’s attention and self-regulation skills to be badly developed. When I read books on attachment, it feels like all the answers are there. A lot of what they describe as symptoms of a bad attachment feel like they are ADHD symptoms too.
I feel like the Fourfold Path points to the possible multiplicity of causes that would result in a condition that can be labeled as ADHD. Each individual is different, I suppose, in how they have emotional traumas that prevent them from feeling emotionally enough. And in how their physical body needs more nourishment than they are currently getting in order to focus.
We can deal with all that using the ways I described, as well as others that come from a first-principles understanding of how to deal better with emotional pain, physical discomfort, shitty environments, and insufficient upbringings.
Whatever you think about ADHD, taking a symptomatic treatment perspective helps way more than thinking of it as an unchangeable, unshakeable genetic thing that’s going to plague you for generations.
Miscellaneous ADHD Tips In Context
Not long after my diagnosis, I came across a book titled ADD-Friendly Ways To Organize Your Life. It was a pretty good book that had very actionable tips on how to run your life while still having ADHD.
But in hindsight, everything in that well-written, well-researched book seemed to fall just short of the point. As with many things people say about their ADHD symptoms or methods they use to cope. Here’s some I’m trying to analyze.
Body-doubling. Basically, this is a technique where you do the things you don’t like with other people present. That’s supposed to help you get things done that you wouldn’t get done by yourself. Now this would only work for me upto a point. Since I lacked a general feeling of well-being, I was always looking for cues from other people on whether what I was doing was the right thing to do at that moment. If someone else was doing the same thing as me, that affirmed me, and I no longer felt the need to scan my environment for other cues, for other things I needed to be doing. It would stop working when I felt shame about not doing things as well as the other person was doing haha. BUT now that I’ve developed a stronger sense of self, I don’t need others’ affirmations on what I’m doing other than when I plan the task or before I start it.
Capsule wardrobes, minimalism, and other extremely strict techniques to reduce clutter. You know the genre. Have only five shirts, two of which are white. Have only three pairs of jeans and two jackets, one black and one colorful. If you haven’t used something in 2 months, discard it. The root of the clutter is not having a strong sense of self where you look at something and immediately know “Does this fit into my life or not?”. One way around this is to have a flowchart for when to discard things, and strict number-based techniques take the ambiguity out of it all. BUT. I find these number-based techniques hard to follow and they cause frustration because it feels like I’m a toddler being told no to everything. Instead, I found the Konmari technique quite freeing. You know, the one where you look at something, ask yourself if it ‘sparks joy’ and keep it or not. By doing this over and over again with all your clothes, you hone this sense of who you are and who you’re not. So when you are looking to shop for some more clutter, you don’t do it as much because you know who you are, what stuff you have, and if the crap you’re buying will fit into your life.
Rewards for unpleasant tasks. I’ve never got this, but it seems to work for some people. However, making it an ‘ADHD technique’ is basically externalizing the motivation. There’s only so much you can reward yourself to get everyday tasks done. Instead, planning your goals, organizing your life, and knowing why each task matters, what you don’t like about it, and how you can reconcile the two are important conversations to have with yourself. Externalizing motivation is a shortcut and like all shortcuts, it stops working beyond a point.
Complex systems for handling interruptions. This was something that sounded very good in theory. Whenever you go off-task, just write down where you were so when you come back, you can pick up exactly where you left off. The issue is interruptions are more impulsive and happen subconsciously/unconsciously, and you’re not going to be able to write down where you were each time, especially when you’re doing complex tasks that trigger pain. I never managed to write things down in a way that made sense when I resumed the task if at all I wrote things down. This only works with a planned and organized schedule for me with real interruptions which are chill enough that I can write things down before I leave.
A lot more techniques only really work when you’re already self-aware and organized. Writing down notes for things you might forget only works when you also assign time to go through all the notes and act on them. Apps to manage your life are often just one more thing on your to-do list and another set of annoying notifications on your phone. Keeping things front and center on your desk to remind you of unfinished tasks only works if you don’t just ignore them because you have more pressing things to attend to. Pomodoro just never worked for me until I did all this other work in my life so that I was not triggered by work constantly.
I’m a little uncomfortable with techniques that are ‘accommodations’. Like using a fidget toy. Or asking for everything in writing. Or following impulses to get things done. I started writing this on impulse… but I am not comfortable with doing it that way, and instead thought through it and decided this is indeed the best use of my time. I’m quite uncomfortable with anything that draws attention to me and my quirks instead of to my work. If it works, it works, I guess… but these things somehow don’t work for me either, so I don’t try doing these things.
Conclusion
I’m not a doctor of any sort. None of this is medical advice, though if on reading this you decide BY YOURSELF to throw all your meds away and live your life of self-discovery through a significant other, do send me a montage of you doing so because I love those scenes in movies and wonder how they pan out.
I honestly don’t know if I’m doing amazing or if I just have to wait for the other shoe to drop, but in the past 6-9 months, my circumstances have largely remained the same, but how I deal with them has changed. My family has investigated the changes in my approach in various states of disbelief and hope, and they are more or less just happy with me, so something must have changed for the better. I just have to see if this lasts with new stresses and environments.
While what I’ve done is just things that have addressed my own symptoms, I’m curious to see if this helps anyone else with perspective, tips, or approaches to their own mental health, so do get in touch with me in case any of this helps you. If it doesn’t work, I’m curious about that too. I’ve tried a lot of things that didn’t work for me and it’s helped me refine my approach, and I want to fine-tune this so it can help as many people as it can.