The Weekly Five

Tips, Resources & Inspiration

1. Embracing the Positives of ADHD

Not only should everyone with ADHD watch the 2022 feature-length documentary The Disruptors, directed by Stephanie Soechtig, they should share it with the people in their lives who don’t understand or who discount the reality and the impact of living with ADHD. Interviews with numerous leading experts offer an excellent myth-busting overview of the symptoms and their consequences, while vignettes of the daily struggles and triumphs of families affected add the personal perspective of people with lived experience. Although the content is somewhat skewed toward the experience of children and parents, it’s pertinent for all ages. As a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, it gave me an entirely new way of understanding my childhood along with clarity about how different my life might have been had I known from a young age the source of my traits. But the film doesn’t look only at the challenges; it equally highlights and celebrates the positive, creative aspects of neurodivergence. Comments from public figures such astronaut turned senator Mark Kelly, Olympic gold medalist Michelle Carter, and rapper and entrepreneur will.i.am, who credit ADHD for their success, inspire viewers to embrace their differences rather than view them as flaws and to achieve on their own terms by making the most of their unique strengths. As psychiatrist Ned Hallowell says, for each of the core symptoms of ADHD, there’s a beneficial flip side—“tremendous inborn assets.”

2. An Inspired Life

The Isolation Journals is a massive and vibrant community created during the pandemic by writer Suleika Jaouad to cultivate creativity and connection in even the darkest of times. Its tagline—transforming life’s interruptions into creative grist—describes what’s become Jaouad’s life mission after her own life was interrupted by acute myeloid leukemia. Diagnosed at 22, she spent several years in hospitals undergoing vicious treatments while facing a poor prognosis, much of which she shared in a column in the New York Times, Her first book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, traces her post-cure 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip in a Volkswagen bus with her dog Oscar, to meet people who’d written to her during her hospitalization in response to her column—people who’d been transformed by illness or proximity to illness. Through remissions and relapses, Jaouad found creative pursuits to be a lifeline and shared her explorations of painting and writing to inspire others. Her effort to cope with a relapse at the same time her husband, musician Jon Batiste, was composing his first symphony and their extraordinary relationship were captured in the 2023 Oscar-nominated documentary An American Symphony. Not surprisingly, such pursuits are the subject of her forthcoming book, due out April 22, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. The Isolation Journals offers free weekly journal prompts from writers, artists, and others, while paid subscribers can join the Hatch, a monthly hour of virtual writing, and enjoy Studio Visits—a conversation series. Spend a little time with Jaouad and you’ll quickly see that her gift for uniting and inspiring is both life-affirming and life-enriching.

3. Ten Minutes of Self-Care

When I first learned about tapping, also called the Emotional Freedom Technique, a method of relieving physical distress and negative emotions, I was skeptical. The energy balancing practice—which involves tapping on the 12 meridian points on the body while listening to or reciting a script tailored to a particular desired effect—struck me as too simplistic to be useful and, honestly, maybe just a little bit scammy. But a dive into the peer-reviewed research led me to a significant evidence base demonstrating tapping’s ability to relieve pain and stress and persuaded me to give it a try. Much like acupuncture, it’s based on principles of Chinese medicine. The practice has gone through several incarnations and is now best known through the efforts of siblings Nick, Jessica, and Alex Ortner and their educational program called The Tapping Solution. An app of the same name offers both free and premium content tailored to a variety of goals such as improving sleep or calming anxiety. I’ve found one of the free programs, “Motivate Me to Have a Productive Day,” to be both calming and grounding. In just under eight minutes, this tapping meditation delivers the powerful message that productivity isn’t synonymous with perfection—a lesson that’s especially important for people with ADHD. After doing this meditation regularly each morning, my days began with a different, more gentle, vibe. I can’t tell you that I was consistently productive or that I fully beat back the beast of perfectionism, but I was able to routinely set more realistic intentions and give myself grace when I didn’t fully meet my goals.

4. Chipping Away at Self-Doubt

“The Fear of Failure” is an episode of the ADHD And… podcast, one of several shows under the umbrella of Misunderstood: ADHD in Women, a channel made by and for women with ADHD. Fear of failure isn’t unique to people with ADHD, or to women, but, as host Monica Johnson, PsyD, a clinical psychologist, explains, it’s experienced differently and more acutely in neurodivergent individuals and women are especially vulnerable. A perfect storm of issues such as procrastination, lack of focus, poor time management, and task avoidance interact in a complex and cyclical way in people with ADHD to trigger an emotional cascade and an overwhelming fear of failure. That, in turn, can give rise to emotional dysregulation, perfectionism, burnout, imposter syndrome, and a crushing and chronic sense of being deficient. To help listeners “break free from the paralyzing grip of fear,” Johnson offers strategies for reframing failure and disrupting the toxic cycle.

5. On the Nature of Creativity

When poet Maggie Smith began tweeting daily affirmations to encourage herself after going through a divorce, her life lessons in miniature—about finding the hope to move through grief and treating oneself with kindness—struck a chord. She found followers hungry for her message of optimism and resilience, and those tweets became the start of a book: Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Smith brings that same compassionate voice to her latest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practice Advice for the Creative Life. Here, she explores the transformative power of creativity and the fundamentals of the creative process, organizing them around the top ten of what she calls the ingredients in the “secret sauce”—attention, wonder, vision, surprise, play, vulnerability, restlessness, connection, tenacity, and hope. Although she’s addressing writers, Smith’s musings on the creative process and her tips and pep talks make fascinating and provocative reading for artists of all kinds and, in fact, all humans. As she writes, “…anything that applies to writing also applies to life. Problem-solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creativity. Falling in love, leaving your job, changing your mind—all are creative acts. Creativity isn’t just about making art. Making your life is the ultimate creative act.”