9 underrated life hacks for ADHD brains

ADHD life hacks yeah I know that this is quite well-worn territory on the internet so the list that you're about to see will have none of the following gamery hard tasks exercise meds getting enough sleep setting alarms for small tasks having Drop Zones in your house for objects to go in install a blue light filter on your phone and say things out loud when you do them so you'll remember them I have locked the door I have turned off the stove those are my nine favorite cliches but my aim with this video is to add

something to the ADHD hack Cannon so this next list is my list huge thanks to day one for sponsoring this one big disclaimer everyone's different there is no one ADHD and this is just what works for me my top nine neuro Divergent notes I don't know man this is end in my alphabet super sad let's go number one get a library card I'm a big believer that a lot of traits if you don't use them they'll find a way to use you and that has definitely been the case for me when it comes to impulsivity

physical impulsivity was straightforward enough physical activity but mental impulsivity here's my hack get a library card I am serious man this gets at a handful of ADHD traits at once so you've got impulsivity but you also have that tendency to have these short bursts of obsession like oh this month I'm really into 1970s pulp sci-fi art whatever it happens to be the point is the library facilitates this and it does it all without breaking the bank I think that's the big thing for me impulsivity has been one of those ones that has hurt me financially

so much over the years and also has just got me on a lot of trouble library cards the opposite plus it also gets me out of my phone and it makes me feel happy to be at the the third place the most accessible source of knowledge and wisdom available to all should be the public library act two turn your rules into taglines as still work in advertising and a big thing when you're writing taglines is you want them to be memorable with memory when it comes to ADHD there is that big out of sight out

of mind thing going on but this is also a challenge that you have in advertising once the ad's over you want it to stick in people's heads even though they can't say it and a big way to do this is get ready drum roll make your rules Rhyme or make them whatever works for you take this tagline right's the two big challenges that the writer faces are they have very little time to say their message and nobody wants to hear it in other words Their audience is attention deficit so I found that the principles that

make this line [Music] memorable work pretty well for me for new habits and ideas for example Andrew hubman has this one that I like which is sunlight before screen light you know when you get up get natural light before you are staring at your phone I like that it's easy to remember the idea is that you are creating your own soundbit that can live in your memory just a little bit longer than the thought of whatever it is others that I have for myself are when in doubt sweat it out baby easy choices hard life

hard choices easy life for whenever I need to make a decision and a job worth doing is worth doing well which I know is like one of those 950s motivational posters but it's also one of those phrases that helps me finish the dishes as opposed to finish 90% of the dishes next hack I know not everybody is is pro AI but oh my God AI writing your admin emails Game Changer especially if you want to refund or to fight some faceless bureaucratic brick wall of a machine chat jpt is really level the playing field for

me there it's taken out so much of the stress I also did this with subscriptions when I wanted to cancel them I couldn't really keep track of how many I was doing I used chat jpt to figure out how many I had signed up for and if it was one of those annoying ones where you have to send an email to cancel I used it to write those emails part of me feels weird about AI but a much bigger part of me truly despises admin so that's what I do next hack meet the meds halfway

so recently my cousin joined us she is now one of us yeah she got diagnosed with ADHD and she is now getting medicated and I'm stok for her anyway her mom my auntie asked me if there's anything gamechanging that she should know about meds before my cousin starts taking them and I thought about it and I was like actually yeah meet the meds halfway the meds will make you focus on a task they'll keep you on the task but it's up to you to choose that task is how I put it for example if you

take your meds and then look at Reddit you are going to look at Reddit better than you ever have before but if you take meds and then do your tax return you will also do that better than ever before this next metaphor will sound dumb because it is dumb but sometimes I like to think of meds the way the Fast and the Furious characters think of NOS it'll definitely make the cargo faster but you still have to steer next hack Don't Wear Bedrock clothes at the start of the year I got this comment from somebody

telling me to read big Magic by Elizabeth with Gil bit so I did I can't find the comment again so whoever wrote that thank you so much I didn't write back to it but I read the book I really liked it I really like the way she turns phrases and I like her choice of stories anyway there's this one part where she's talking about if her creativity isn't showing up she will dress up she'll dress up to the nines as if to make the creativity be like you know what let's hang out Liz and I

thought about this particularly as somebody who works from home because I can definitely get away with wearing whatever the hell I want but I have also noticed that when I do put a bit of effort even though nobody's going to see me into being presentable I do tend to work better so I have since shifted my bed rot to presentable ratio much more to this end of things and it's had a great impact on my creativity but I've also noticed it to be really ADHD friendly obviously I'm not wearing a tux around the house I

am still comfy as hell but I found the less I look like this Tony Soprano the better my days tend to be next hack minimalist phone launcher I am so freaking distractable and phones are so freaking good at distracting all of us even the most attentive of people so I know that I don't stand a chance which is why I use this my phone is all the way over there I'm not going to get it because then I'll get distracted I'll put in some b roll here it is this's my phone baby I really don't

like the idea of seeing the visual icons of apps I just think it's really invasive I think it really hijacks your attention and whatever it is that you're unlocking your phone for so I much prefer this on the topic of phones this next one is a hack and it is also the sponsor full disclosure but this is the app that I use to journal and also take notes and I have found it to to be very ADHD friendly day one so at its core it's a journaling app I use it for daily journaling but it

has all these cool features that allow it to be so much more and not in a way that's bloated for example you can save templates so I've got this to-do template I've ever got like a big day or if I ever need to prioritize or figure out what the main thing is I got a reflection template there we go three things that's kind of nice and if you prefer audio notes you can do that too in addition to the journaling you've also got these folders where you can do other stuff so I've got places where

I take notes places where I put ideas that will probably distract me places where I put links places where I put screen shots that I know I want to explore later you can hook it up to if this then that if that's your thing which I quite like for Reddit saves try day one Journal today go to day one app.com struthless and use the code struthless to unlock a limited time offer of a 2-month free trial of Day One Premium baby that's d y nea.com struthless but mostly I'm just kind of stoked that a product

I use every day wants to be a sponsor on this channel next hack get your Bloods done I am not a doctor so please take this with a grain of salt and ask somebody who actually knows what they're talking about but I'm including this because it had a profound impact on my life so on the off chance it'll help somebody here it is get your Bloods done oh my god dude cut this turns out I've been living with severe anemia for like a very long time and I had no idea a couple of months ago

I came back from this trip and my mom took one look at me and she goes Campbell you are blue and falling asleep you should get your Bloods done so I did and then I yeah was shocked by the result and I'm like oh wow that explains the brain fog the fainting the fatigue I genuinely just thought I was lazy and any of the concentration issues I just rode off to ADHD turns out they were a bit gnarlier and uh yeah I've since that an Iron Infusion and holy moly dude I've been playing on hard

mode wow my life is so much better now but it blew my tiny distractable mind just how many people must be out there thinking that they are lazy or broken or defective and maybe it's just that they have a very fixable VI deficiency again I'm not a doctor but I put it in this video because there was a bit of a symptom crossover between my ADHD and my anemia and I wish i' had been told earlier go get a blood test question the way school made you feel about learning dude I hated reading when it

was prescribed to me in school so freaking much I really liked books I loved reading but if ever a teacher was like now you have to read this I just had this allergic reaction I'm like well guess what I'm going to read none of that none 0% nothing but one of the disadvantages that comes from from that attitude is I stopped thinking of myself as a reader for a very long time which meant that I sort of got this idea that maybe I don't like books which slowly mored into the more Sinister version of that

thought I'll never be smart enough educated enough or knowledgeable enough to matter cuz I don't like books right nah dude prank turns out I love books turns out I just much prefer to listen to the books real good with audio terrible with reading what I thought was an incompatibility with information was actually just a mismatch in the way that I was consuming it and of also found I don't know if anybody else finds this but the information goes best into my head when I have my hands busy so I can listen to every word of

a book if I'm drawing and I just find that really Pleasant I get a better relationship with books despite whatever I learned in school and I end up with a cool drawing but this is something that I have been consistently told off for from school to UNI to work oh yeah I saw this quote the other day that was like what got you in trouble in school will get you ahead in life and what got you ahead in school will get you in trouble in life and I think there are plenty of extreme exceptions that

we can think of and I think it's referring to those things like absolute obedience in school was rewarded absolute obedience in life punished for me I got in trouble a lot for drawing now it's my job bonus one before we get to the last one you can be on the couch or you can use your phone you can't do both at the same time it's the combination that puts me in the vortex not one or the other account for short bursts of intense Obsession I noticed that a lot of hack lists say things like ADHD

is a superpower structure your work around your ADHD strengths the bad ones never tell you how the good ones I found tend to focus on the micro tactics you know the daily scale stuff like listen to instrumental music put your phone in a drawer stuff that I love fully endorse but I did find that there was a bit of a gap when it came to talking about the macro picture of structuring work how ADHD and your work might fit together on a monthly or yearly scale so this is how I think about that basically the

hack goes like this assume that you will have two to 6 weeks of being obsessed with one thing and at the end of that phase you will completely abandon it and find a new thing now in many contexts this would be a weakness having these isolated obsessions but there are contexts where these things can string together and form a bit of compound interest like these little unrelated Investments of focus can actually work for you not just be scattered for example when I was working at advertising you know you just get really into one product for

a tiny bit just for the campaign then you let it go uh when I was freelancing you just keep going until the end of the project was great and now YouTube I get to research the hell out of something make something I like and then do it all over again anyway those are my workarounds for having this silly little brain of mine if you're watching this there is a very high chance that you have a lot of hacks of your own and if you feel like commenting I'd love to read the ones that fall into

that obscure but practical area you know what I mean like get N9 phone charges but not that anyway have a beautiful day catch you