ADHD: What To Do if you think you might have it?
This text is the fourth and final part of a series on ADHD. The earlier articles looked at how the diagnosis is constructed, what it illuminates, and what it risks leaving in the dark (read part 1, part 2, and part 3).
In this last piece, I ask: what do people who identify with ADHD say truly helps them? And how can psychoanalysis offer not just strategies for managing symptoms, but a way of listening to what these symptoms may be revealing?
What Do People With ADHD Say Truly Helps?
Beyond theory or diagnosis, what actually makes a difference in everyday life?
Not in theory, but in life.
This reflection grows out of sustained reading and listening — clinical encounters, psychological literature, online forums, and countless conversations, both in professional settings and in informal exchanges.
From this, a set of recurring themes emerges: six simple, concrete practices that many people with ADHD-related difficulties find genuinely useful in their everyday lives..
In this article, I outline those six — and then share what, in my view, truly makes a difference.
First: Don’t Rush the Diagnosis
You suspect you have ADHD — maybe because a friend suggested it, or you watched someone talk about it on social media.
Maybe you took an online test, or a doctor mentioned it after a brief consultation.
Or perhaps you even tried medication for ADHD, and it seemed to help.
Pause for a moment.
None of these things, by themselves, mean that you have ADHD. Even a positive response to medication does not retroactively prove the diagnosis; it only means that you respond to those substances.
ADHD describes behaviors, not what cause them. Behind the same surface symptoms, the underlying problem can be very different. What matters is to understand what lies beneath — the actual problem, which is never self-evident.
I have met many people who suspected they had ADHD based on certain behaviors or difficulties. Yet for each of them, the story underneath was different — the inner conflict, the personal history, and the causes of the symptoms were unique.
A diagnosis should never be a point of arrival — at most, it is a point of departure.
Behind every diagnostic label there is a person with a singular history, and it is from that personal history that difficulties and symptoms unfold. That is also the place where understanding must begin. Therefore, even the importance of the diagnosis needs some contextualization.
The first question is: what is the problem actually about?
- Which symptoms are present?
- When did they begin?
- What do they make impossible?
- And what does one truly want to achieve through therapy?
These are not trivial questions. They are the foundation of any therapeutic process — and they must be explored together with a therapist or analyst who truly listens.
In a place like Hong Kong — fast, dense, constantly connected — many people feel that their attention is being pulled apart all day long. It is easy to think: “Maybe I have ADHD.” Sometimes that may be true; often, the reality is more complex.
Six Simple Foundations Many People Find Essential
These are not ‘guidelines’ in a behavioral sense, but everyday practices that many adults who identify with ADHD — not textbooks — point to as genuinely helpful in holding daily life together.
They are not magic solutions or substitutes for deeper work, but external conditions that give thought a place to breathe.
It is striking how simple they are — one might think they are obvious. And yet, many neglect or struggle to maintain these basic aspects, though they are often fundamental.
1 · Sleep and rest: Good sleep radically transforms attention; chronic fatigue multiplies distraction. Rest is not laziness but a psychic reset. Even a small, stable ritual around sleep — a regular time, less screen exposure before bed — can shift the quality of the whole following day.
2 · Movement: Regular physical activity — walking, dancing, cycling, anything with breath and rhythm — helps re‑activate both body and mind. For many, especially those facing depression or borderline states, movement is essential: it gets one out of home, brings the body back into sensation, and restores a feeling of being alive. It’s not about performance or fitness; it’s about re‑entering life through the body, creating small moments of structure and agency.
3 · Writing: Many find that journaling or note‑taking provides continuity: it turns fleeting impressions into traces and helps one remember, plan, and think. Writing gives thought a body and a shape — something you can see, hold, and return to. A notebook, a notes app, or even a simple list can create a pause between impulse and action: something can be written, seen, and thought before it is done.
4 · Food and focus: Balanced meals, steady energy, and hydration — small acts that stabilize the body and make attention possible. Care for attention begins with care for the body. Skipping meals, relying only on caffeine, or staying in a state of constant agitation make it far harder to focus, whatever one’s diagnosis may be.
5 · Simplifying the environment: Clutter, noise, and excess stimuli exhaust mental energy. Minimalism and order are not merely aesthetic choices — they protect the capacity to think. For some, this may mean clearing a desk; for others, using headphones or reducing notifications. Simplifying the environment is a way of respecting one’s own limits.
6 · Kindness and limits: Self‑reproach worsens everything. Gentleness, patience, and the courage to do enough — not everything — let desire and vitality re‑emerge. Speaking to oneself only in terms of failure (“I should”, “I never”, “I can’t”) tightens the knot. A kinder internal voice does not mean indulgence; it means recognizing struggle without turning it into a permanent identity.
Routines, Schedules, and What Gives Them Life
Many people highly value finding routines, schedules, and timetables. However, routines may also be difficult to follow and may ultimately reinforce frustration and self‑devaluation. Finding a rhythm or defining a schedule can be beneficial, but structure alone is sterile unless it connects to what is meaningful for the person. Attention follows significance, not instruction: the psyche directs energy toward what feels alive. A schedule gains vitality when its tasks express something internally significant — even something very small — rather than only an external demand.
A Note on Medication
Medication can help some people at certain times or for specific functions, but it is not necessarily the most important element — according to many. For some, the effects are minimal; for others, side effects can be significant; for others still, the initial impact may feel almost “miraculous,” only to diminish over time, requiring adjustments.
Some suggest that if the effects are minimal, it means the issue is not ADHD. But even when the effects are clear, this does not in itself confirm the diagnosis.
As with many psychiatric medications, what the drug can offer is a condition that makes it easier — by temporarily alleviating symptoms — for the person to work on themselves, their relationships, and their environment. But medications themselves do not cure, and they should not be imagined as “the cure”. I think it’s safe to say that most psychiatrists would agree on this. Medications can, at times, open a window, but what transforms the room is the work a person does in exploring the personal meanings, aspirations, conflicts, and relational positions that shape their experience.
The conversation is more complex, of course, and this is not the place to unpack all its nuances.
What I Think Truly Makes a Difference: Psychoanalysis
My first recommendation is often to consider starting a psychoanalytic process.
In my view, it is one of the few experiences that can genuinely reshape understanding — not by providing techniques or motivational formulas, but by helping a person learn something about themselves.
ADHD is a mosaic of various symptoms, with different configurations for different people.
A symptom is not merely a flaw to be fixed; it is a signal, a fragment of truth asking to be heard.
Through analysis, one can begin to understand the logic of a symptom:
- what underlying assumptions it manifests
- what tension it covers
- what loss it signals
- what position it defends
“Reading” and understanding a symptom means making its logic intelligible; this often allows life to reorganize around new meanings.
As these meanings take shape, the symptom itself may lose its necessity, soften, or even dissolve.
Behavioral therapies, self‑help tools, medication, and lifestyle adjustments all have their place.
But analysis offers something distinct: the possibility of speaking freely, of listening to the unconscious, and transforming what repeats into something that means.
Final Considerations: When Reflection Turns Outward
In today’s world, what is often missing is not reflection itself, but the capacity to be included in one’s own reflection.
Thought proliferates — opinions, judgments, analyses — yet it all flows outward, toward “what is wrong in the world”, in others, in the system. This outward orientation may be the root of other common difficulties: outrage, chronic anger, and what many call ‘overthinking’ — which is not thinking too much, but thinking always in relation to others, never about what genuinely concerns oneself.
One thinks about everything, but seldom from within what one thinks.
When this inner orientation weakens, a person becomes disconnected from what truly moves them. Life turns reactive: demands, messages, and stimuli take over, and the external world must supply the order that is missing inside — schedules, apps, reminders. Without an inner axis, it becomes difficult to choose rather than simply respond.
The practical strategies people find helpful — pausing, slowing down, resting, creating routines — all point to the same need: to restore intervals and rediscover a stable point of reference.
In ADHD, the challenge often lies in the absence of that interval between impulse and action. Yet psychic change begins exactly there: in opening a brief pause where something can be written, spoken, or thought before it becomes an act.
Writing offers one such pause. It gives thought a body, holds it still long enough to be seen and felt, and echoes, in miniature, the gesture of analysis: suspending action in order to listen.
Speaking Instead of Managing
A diagnostic label has value only if it opens meaning rather than closing it. The essential question is rarely “Do I have ADHD?” — as if a Yes or No answer could solve anything — but rather: What in me finds shelter in this name? What does this symptom say about me?
When the goal shifts from managing symptoms to understanding them, something changes. “Managing” (for example with medication) often means silencing the symptom; speaking allows it to transform — the shift Freud described from acting to remembering, from repetition to thought.
Psychoanalysis offers a space to rediscover that inner ground: to transform restless action into thought, and management into meaning. It does not aim at control but at understanding — making experience thinkable and sayable, questioning inherited meanings, and perhaps finding new ones. When life regains personal significance — not just productivity — attention follows naturally.