From self-help to self-loathing: improving ourselves out of having ADHD

Hyperfixation with self help is a canon event

It’s late 2020. I’ve recently freed myself from an abusive relationship, freshly out of lockdown, and feeling the need to do everything in my power to become a new person.

I’ve already moved out, changed jobs, overhauled my style, and got a couple of new tattoos. I’d been physically running away from the person who got into that relationship. Now it was time to mentally shift.

In comes the 2 year long fixation with self help.

You’d find me in the “Smart Thinking” or “Self Help” section of any bookshop I could get to. At this point, I’d recently discovered bookshop.org which helped me collection but perhaps not the bank account that was already burdened under the weight of my recent life overhaul.

I didn’t know I had ADHD

At this stage in my life, ADHD wasn’t a thing that had even occurred to me. I was aware of its existence but assumed it had nothing to do with me. I always performed well academically, especially at uni where I was in control of what I researched and wrote about. I was just a shitty person who couldn’t arrive on time to work, remember to buy all the things I needed from the shops, keep track of appointments and meet ups with friends, shower on a regular basis, or keep anything I own even remotely organised.

There wasn’t something different about my brain. There was something wrong with me.

Enter the self help fixation

Not long after this, I also started going to the gym. Well, once they were open again. So by April 2021, I was 6 months deep in my self help fixation, reading everything from the marvelled classic Atomic Habits by James Clear to the “edgier” stuff like The Life Changing Magic Of Not Giving A Fuck.

I got swallowed into James Smith’s books about diet, business, and general life improvement (this is before I realised he’s a fucking transphobe and, of course, a grifter). I started going to the gym 3-5 times per week, working with a personal trainer, and made self improvement my entire personality.

I was learning how to set boundaries for the first time in my life, taking care of my body (well, that’s what I told myself. I was actually slipping straight back into my teenage ED), and reclaiming agency over every part of me that had been stripped away in previous years.

Anyone else notice that white men seem to dominate this space?

And then I discovered ADHD

While I was on my reading, researching, and watching rampage, I came across books and content about ADHD. One of the more eye opening ones for me was a video essay by Rowan Ellis called How I Got Diagnosed with ADHD at 29. Now one of my favourite YouTubers (Rowan creates incredibly well researched videos about queer history, futures, representation, authors, media, etc.), Ellis explained in the video about her late diagnosis and how she had never considered it.

I was sat in my new living room watching someone naturally academic with hyperfixation cycles that become in depth literary and otherwise academic research. Queer, in her late 20s. I’d found someone I really connected with. I could see myself in Rowan’s discovery.

There were, of course, many books, research papers, academic journals, videos, and social media spirals that led to the realisation that I could, in fact, also have ADHD. But this video, in November 2021, finally helped me accept that that was my reality.

The self help obsession to shame spiral pipeline

So, I finally had an explanation for why I was so unreliable. Why I was always late for the first decade of my working life. Why I always missed trains, forgot to charge my phone, struggled with basic self care tasks, forgot to feed myself, and spent all of my money as soon as I got paid. I wasn’t, in fact, a terrible faulty person. I was a person with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD.

So the fixation went from “why am I a terrible person? Let’s override all of my basic functioning to become a fully optimised human” to “I have ADHD, but I bet I can find systems and ways to make that not the case”.

Enter the years long shame spiral of never ending self help books.

The years of self help books that would rid me of my ADHD

In 2020-2023, I wasn’t a huge reader. I’d graduated from my MA in 2019, the aforementioned ex was a bookseller and huge reader so in a kind of “I refuse to have anything to do with my former life” kinda thing, my reading slowed right down. What I did still pick up though, were self help books.

According to my StoryGraph data, I read 18 self help & business related books between late 2021 and 2023:

• Hyperfocus: How to be more productive in a world of distraction by Chris Bailey (the irony is not lost on me)

• When: The scientific secrets of perfect timing by Daniel H Pink

• Good Habits, Bad Habits: The science of making positive changes that stick by Wendy Wood

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Not a Life Coach: Push your boundaries, unlock your potential, redefine your life by James Smith (could this be the ultimate cliche in self help book titles?)

• Untamed by Glennon Doyle (listened to this 3 times in 6 months)

• Self-care for the real world by Nadia Narain and Katia Narain Phillips

• How To Be Confident by James Smith

• Unmasking Autism: Discovering the new face of neurodiversity by Dr Devon Price

• Obsessed by Emily Heyward

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

• The Trust Manifesto by Damian Bradfield

• Start With Why by Simon Sinek

• Neurodivergent Mind: Thriving in a world that wasn’t designed for you by Jenara Nerenberg

• The Plant Based Power Plan by T J Waterfall

• This Book Will Make You Kinder by Henry James Garrett

• The Joy of Being Selfish by Michelle Elman

• Surrounded by Psychopaths: How to protect yourself from being manipulated in business (and in life) by Thomas Erikson

• Failosophy: A handbook for when things go wrong by Elizabeth Day

The books in bold are the ones that actually had a positive impact on my life.

It is worth noting that Glennon Doyle uses a lot of religious and goddish imagery in her book. My tip is to ignore that because the rest of the book is a phenomenal listen. And whether she knows it or not, highly relatable to the autistic experience.

This doesn’t even begin to mention the academic articles I read, the YouTube essays I watched, the documentaries I inhaled.

Self help proved to me that I was broken

I followed all the guidelines, set up all the systems, and attempted to implement all the life philosophies. And none of it worked. All that did was prove to me that I was fundamentally and categorically unfixable.

Self improvement can be a real trap for neurodivergent people, especially those of us with ADHD who experience a significantly higher rate of criticism from care givers and loved ones than the neurotypical population.

Especially growing up undiagnosed, we are told that there is something wrong with us. My childhood and adolescence was a constant stream of:

• Losing my keys

• Breaking or losing phones

• Not doing homework

• Missing deadlines

• Never revising

• Being late to doctors appointments

• Being late for work

• Forgetting friend’s birthdays

• Struggling to maintain friendships

• Having an absolute bombsite of a bedroom

• Struggling with basic hygiene tasks

• Getting grounded

But I got good grades and am naturally very good in an exam environment. I worked incredibly hard in the subjects I actually cared about (drama, english, physics, and history). So no one considered I might have ADHD. I was just lazy, unreliable, and needed to try harder.

Getting out of the self-help to self-hatred spiral

I’m doing much better now. Still no medication, although I am considering it. But one of the first steps I took to be kinder to myself was to move the fuck away from self help. I realised that these books, essays, videos, and documentaries weren’t made for me. They were made for neurotypical people who don’t struggle to an existential degree with executive functioning, working memory, and time blindness.

In fact the four best things I did for my ADHD brain were:

• Quit formal employment and go freelance

• Fire my former therapist who was an absolute dick about the ADHD/ASD side of things. 2 years later I started working with a new therapist and she is fucking wonderful

• Stop consuming any self-help related media that isn’t specifically created by and for neurodivergent people

• Accept that sometimes surviving is enough. My life doesn’t need to be optimised and new routines can be established slowly.

Accommodating myself with full knowledge of how this all works and having a super supportive partner make for a great combo in managing to live a managable life with ADHD.

Our obsession with optimisation

This is a topic I want to cover separately, but it’s worth mentioning here for a moment. As a society, we are obsessed with optimisation. The internet is full of content about “how to do X better” and “how to improve X in X easy steps”.

Late-stage capitalism has convinced us that efficiency is the only way. Maximum output, maximum money, maximum visibility, maximum profit, maximum possessions, maximum effort is the only way to make life worth living. But by prioritising stuff, achievements, and metrics over people, memories, and actions, we are increasingly becoming one with the capitalist machine. We lose ourselves along the way.

Something that does fascinate me is the wellness/gym bro to alt-right pipeline but that’s definitely a story for another time.

For now, I’ll leave you with a quote from a marvellous book I read last month called Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine by Derren Brown:

We might someday realise that a large part of improving the ‘self’ is to shift the focus from ‘self’ to ‘other’…the heart of true self-improvement surely lies in becoming kinder.

(Before you come at me for still reading self help books, this is more a book about philosophy than it is self improvement)