From Overwhelmed to Empowered: Managing ADHD as an Entrepreneur

If you are an entrepreneur with ADHD, no doubt you experience overwhelm on a pretty regular basis.

If you feel any of the following apply to you, then tackling overwhelm is a key priority for you:

• You are not being adequately financially rewarded for the amount of effort you are making.

• You feel like running your business is a battle.

• You are constantly overwhelmed.

• You have experienced burnout more than once.

• You procrastinate a lot.

I would argue that if you are experiencing any of the above, tackling overwhelm should be your number one business priority right now. If you are an entrepreneur, your business' most important asset is you and when you are overwhelmed you can’t perform at your best and when you are overwhelmed, everything else is much more difficult.

Pre-diagnosis, I lived my life in semi-permanent state of overwhelm, ranging from slightly to extremely overwhelmed.

I still experience overwhelm, but much less often, and when I do, the fact I know what is happening, means I can take steps to reduce the overwhelm. When I am overwhelmed, I am tearful, irritable, can’t think straight, communicating is difficult, I find it hard to make food, startle easily, can only eat very simple food and feel nauseous. They are all the symptoms that resulted in me being treated for Generalised Anxiety Disorder for 17 years.

I didn’t have an anxiety disorder, I had unmanaged ADHD. I didn’t need the various anxiety medications I was prescribed, I needed to find ways to manage my life differently. I do also now take ADHD medication, which definitely makes things easier, but I started taking the meds before making all the changes, and still experienced overwhelm on a far more regular basis.

On the face of it, I should be more overwhelmed than ever before. I have a reasonably successful business, which requires me to manage lots of clients, two young children, all the grown-up stuff, like a house etc etc, but I have never felt calmer.

What is happening in your brain when you are experiencing overwhelm

You only need to have a very basic understanding of ADHD brain wiring as it is not really that important that we understand all the different chemicals, areas of the brain, differences in wiring etc. What is important is what we do with the information.

Basically, we experience overwhelm because our brain is trying to process more information than it is capable of processing at that moment. It is a little bit like when you open too many programmes on your computer and your computer can’t cope with them all so it starts to slow down. The computer is slowing down to give itself more time to process all the information. If you keep opening programmes, eventually the system will crash.

When your brain is having to process too much information, it will slow down to try to process everything, making doing everything more difficult and eventually when you get too overloaded, your brain will “crash”, i.e. you will have an ‘ADHD meltdown’.

People with ADHD find many cognitive processes far more taxing than their neurotypical peers due to a deficit in executive function.

What is Executive Function?

Executive functions (EF) are the components of our brains that work together to allow us to do complex stuff. There are multiple areas of the brain, various chemicals and numerous interactions between different areas of the brain involved in executive function.

I find this model by Dr Thomas E. Brown very helpful in understanding what executive function is responsible for.

Image of Dr Thomas brown's model of Executive Function

Pretty much all non-automatic behaviour that we do from the moment we wake up in the morning requires us to use executive function. The issue for those of us with ADHD, is that according to Dr. Russell Barkley, a prominent ADHD researcher, individuals with ADHD have a developmental lag in executive functions, equating to about 30% compared to their peers without ADHD.

So from the moment you wake up, you are using executive function. Planning what to take for lunch requires activation, focus, effort, memory and action, popping into Asda to pick up some bread and milk after dropping the kids of requires activation, focus, effort, managing emotion, memory and action, choosing your clothes for the day requires activation, focus, effort, managing emotion, memory and action. You get the picture, most of the things we do on a daily basis require executive function.

Having more executive function than is required to complete the tasks you need to complete is essential if you do not want to start feeling cognitively overloaded and overwhelmed.

So, if you are someone who has a deficit in executive function, then you need to treat your executive function like gold dust and be very mindful of how you “spend” your EF throughout the day.

I no longer pop into Asda for bread and milk. If I am desperate I will go into a small local shop as this requires a lot less executive function, but now I do my food shopping online. On work days I don’t take parcels back to the post office, as that is a HUGE drain on executive function. I take them on the weekend or after work, if I am still feeling EF-abundant at the end of the day.

You kind of have to treat EF like sensible people treat money, you should make sure you have enough for the essentials in life, like being with your family and friends, looking after your children and running your business etc, before you start frivolously spending executive function on tasks like returning parcels, supermarket shopping or organising a drawer. Yes those things are important, but you need to be strategic about when you carry them out.

Also, when you are working really hard in your business, you need to consider how much EF you are going to have for other responsibilities you may have, for example, being a parent's carer, laundry, childcare etc

My girls are EF bandits when together, as they fight constantly and have very different needs and preferences. If I have been working more than usual, I do not look after them both together, as I can guarantee that will lead to me having a meltdown before the day is over. I am fortunate that I have family members close by who can help me and can also pay for childcare on the days I may be required to look after them both alone. But that is because I prioritise avoiding EF overload over new shoes, holidays and clothes. Avoiding getting into EF overload is much easier than getting out of overwhelm.

Living in overwhelm is very expensive in terms of lost revenue and lost enjoyment of entrepreneurship and life, so it is a business expense you cannot ignore.

If you are overwhelmed, you need to think about what you are doing now and how you can reduce the load on your executive function.

• What can you get rid of?

• What can you outsource?

• What can you automate?

• What can you do in a different way?

• What can you batch together?