Dr. K. (Healthy Gamer GG): The thing is, ADHD content tends to go viral by showing the problem, not the fix; this means the people who actually changed their patterns never get the same reach. (same source)

Public figures who have been diagnosed with ADHD include Richard Branson, Dan Martell, and, in the past, Steve Jobs. Additionally, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Alexander the Great might have had ADHD.

I know I might sound like an arrogant person, but I am pretty confident that I “fixed” my ADHD or, better said, learned how to use it to my advantage.

And by the way, that’s what I have been teaching, writing, and creating content for the last 2 years.

If I were to reverse-engineer my experience, I would follow these 7 principles to fix my ADHD again.

1) Fix your gut, sleep, and watch your insulin spikes

1.1) Gut

A lot of ADHD symptoms, like lack of focus, not the ADHD itself (there is a difference), come from an inflamed gut. There are people experiencing “ADHD” like symptoms (like a TikTok brain) because their gut lining is leaky; they eat too much sugar, sweeteners, and fried food; and they don’t eat nutritious food.

→ Foods like fiber, sauerkraut, homemade kefir, and homemade kimchi bring good bacteria into your gut and help to “balance” the bad bacteria.

After 2 months in Bali, even though I ate healthy, high-quality food, my gut wasn’t doing well because Bali, in general, has a lot of harmful bacteria in its food. It took me 2-3 weeks in Germany, with clean eating, fiber, kefir, and sauerkraut, to “recover”.

1.2) Sleep

Sleep is another thing most people can’t really consistently stick to. I don’t understand why.

I also don’t like to sleep. I think it’s boring, and I would greatly benefit from being a vampire because I could do even more things during the day.

→ But the moment you go to bed on time, you improve your deep sleep through exercise, sunlight, and reducing blue light at night; you actually sleep fewer hours and feel more energized.

Even though I don’t like to sleep because my hyperactive brain likes to run long distances:

I go to bed on time and follow my routines and habits because it allows me to sleep only 6-7 hours but still have the energy to run marathons and triathlons.

1.3) Insulin Spikes

Most people are tired not because of a lack of sleep, but because of the rise and associated drop in their insulin levels.

When you eat carbohydrates, your insulin levels rise and then fall. The bigger the spike, the bigger the fall. And if it falls below a certain threshold, you get tired and moody.

→ To prevent this, watch what you eat, when you eat it, and how to reduce spikes.

The simplest way is to cut refined sugar; don’t take sweeteners, because they trigger your ADHD brain (what most people don’t know) and wreck your gut lining; and move after you eat. Ideally, activate the core muscles with walking, cycling, or other slow-moving activities.

Oh, by the way, if you are an entrepreneur, creator, or career-focused person with ADHD and you don’t want to do all the hundreds of hours of research and experimentation to understand how to have healthy performance with your ADHD for your demanding career. So you can sleep deeply at night, have more energy during the day, and never feel tired again.

I run data-driven 90-day cycles where I don’t teach you ADHD, but we implement my methods and track them with data. All you need to do is track your sleep with an Apple Watch, Whoop, or Oura ring, and send me screenshots of your meals each day. I will optimize your habits and routines, and we will meet once a week to discuss what to implement for the next week, so you can stay top of mind in a demanding career/business.

It’s $3000 for 90 days. (website in the making)

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2) Eat More, Move More.

ADHD people are hunters and gatherers.

Your brain functions better in nature, both while moving and while being “stimulated” by it.

That’s why ADHD brains get so addicted to gaming, social media, or sweet food. It gives your brain “stimulation”, but in a negative way. When you go into nature, you also get “stimulated” by the whispering birds, by the trees moving with the wind, and by the random encounters with deer, snakes, or insects.

Your brain is highly alert, and hundreds of thousands of years ago it was well suited.

Now, your hypersensitivity in this fast-paced, overstimulating world is torture. Instead of listening to the voice of birds and nature, we hear loud cars, violating rap music, and videos that change emotions every 3 seconds.

→ By moving your body more, you become more intelligent, happier, and better regulated. This increases caloric expenditure, which leads to increased caloric intake.

3) Use Flow As Your Compass (Focus)

And I would go so far as to say that if you are not in a flow state, you can’t work.

Yes, you can do the annoying thing of watching on your phone 50% of the time, but it won’t lead to a good outcome. For example, I write every newsletter in a flow state. If I am not in a flow, I can’t write properly; nothing comes out of my brain. So I learned how to trigger flow on command every single morning. (That’s a part of the new Weekly Bonfire)

Flow is your compass. You are being present, alert, and focused. This can happen at work, in training, while playing video games, or while spending time with your partner.

If you ruminate, if you think about different things while talking to someone, if you pick up your phone while playing video games, you are not in the zone, not in flow.

It is a singular focus.

Flow is the state where logic and creativity combine. It is when you use the full capacity of both brain hemispheres, emerging as one. It is the unity of yin and yang in your brain. It is hyperfocus that people with ADHD need to do their best work.

4) Neurotypical Advice doesn’t work. (A High Flow Lifestyle)

Most advice online is for the majority of individuals, and the majority of individuals are neurotypical, that’s why the word.

Above 80% of the population is neurotypical, so most advice online doesn’t really work for you.

• How long did it take you to stop using the Notion templates you bought? A few weeks, maybe a few months?
• Also, the business advice of “just pushing harder” doesn’t work. Your brain is built differently. Think about how neurotypical people can spend 40 years doing a job they hate. You probably quit the job 2-4 weeks later. (I often did)
• You also can’t just “chill.” You are restless. You need flow, focus, and something that excites you and absorbs you. Fast-paced things relax you because they absorb your mind. For example, if I engage with people in the evening and get into a social flow, I am happier, more stimulated, and have lower stress levels, so I sleep better afterward. Same with video games: if you are immersed in playing video games for 12 hours, you actually have lower stress levels. It’s just not healthy to sit all day and stare at a screen. But the flow relaxes you.

The best advice for a “perfect” day, on my current knowledge, is to split your day into 3 flow blocks:

1. Work
2. Health
3. Relationships

You can combine health and relationships, but I recommend working alone for at least 2-3 hours because you tend to get easily distracted.

And you don’t take breaks.

Sounds crazy, I know, but the advice of taking breaks to “recover” doesn’t work and is kryptonite for ADHD because it puts you out of a flow state, and getting back in is much harder instead of maintaining momentum.

Instead of taking breaks, you switch “tasks” or activities to maintain your flow state.

So you transition from work right into training (prepare your meals the night before), and from training, whether alone or with friends, right into dinner and evening activities with friends, your partner, family, etc.

Ideally, having high-flow activities can help.

Writing, coding, designing, painting, running, cycling, surfing, talking, etc.

5) Organize Your Mind By Building External Systems.

The biggest change for my ADHD mind was after I built a system for my mind.

First, you build physical memory systems. By keeping items in one fixed spot, you never have to search for them again.

But you can also do this digitally, which is much harder.

If you follow me for longer, this system is called “Chaos To Clarity”.

See an example here:

1. Life Mastery
2. Business Mastery
3. Productivity Mastery
4. Mind Mastery

This is how I organize all my information and knowledge hierarchically and interconnectedly in Notion.

Being able to observe your own thoughts (metacognition) and having mental architecture might be the most important skill to develop. Writing with curation is the best habit to build this skill.

Read both things again and ideally save these two paragraphs somewhere until it’s fully integrated, it is that important.

If you want to learn how I organized my entire life and business inside Notion (Chaos To Clarity) and use this system to build a Creatorpreneur Business, consider joining The Weekly Bonfire, starting 10th October.

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6) Gamify Your Life & Mind By Building A (Personal) Brand

(I wrote a whole newsletter about this topic last week)

See example here:

1. The Human Adventure (same as Life Mastery)
2. The Creatorpreneur (same as Business Mastery)
3. The Brand-Universe (same as Productivity Mastery)
4. Chaos To Clarity (Same as Mind Mastery)

The best way to do this is to build a personal brand around your interests like a big open world with lore & legends and invite “new players” to play.

You are the creator of this world and place yourself as a guide inside this world and explain to the new heroes (your customers) how to play and achieve level 100 to beat the final boss.

7) The Principle of Polarity. (ADHD People Are Terrible Employees.)

I need to admit:

I can’t do things I don’t want to do.

The moment I need to do something against my values and ideas feels like a betrayal. Working for someone else’s schedule, vision, and money doesn’t work for me.

But neurotypical people are amazing employees. They do things for their boss that go entirely against their inner integrity and values, just for money, status and power.

As mentioned above:

“Neurotypical people stay at a job for 40 years, even though they hate it.”

Why?

Most neurotypical people think less creatively and emotionally, and more “logically”.

That’s why they do accounting, paperwork, legal work, and spreadsheets in Excel…

Just writing about this gives me the ick.

Neurotypical people are amazing at pushing away their emotions and creativity. And the opposite is that people with ADHD are really bad at that because they are oversensitive, highly emotional, and highly creative.

Both extremes have their cost; that’s why I called it polarity.

This “dynamic” exists because the two brain hemispheres are out of sync in modern life.

Even Arthur Brooks (Harvard Professor) said it:

The idea here is that neither “states” is ideal.

The term “neurotypical” might sound like that’s how the majority of people are or “should be.”

But I think it’s misleading.

The goal is not to be neurotypical or ADHD; it’s not black or white, it’s somewhere in the grey area.

The goal is balance: operating in both polarities without depending on their extremes. You need to become logically creative.

The neurotypical person needs to become more emotionally connected and creative; otherwise, their life feels boring and dull. The ADHD person needs to learn structure, order, and hierarchical thinking like a neurotypical person; otherwise, their life is chaotic and emotionally dysregulated. Only when both sides of the coin do what is necessary and work on their weaknesses can they create inner balance and equilibrium.

See the image here as an example of a pendulum:

Short summary:

Yang:

• Neurotypical
• Logical & Structured
• Entrepreneur

→ You are the curator of your life

Yin:

• Neurodivergent/ADHD
• Creative & Emotional
• Creator

→ You are the author of your life

Combining both gives you inner equilibrium, inner balance, Yin and Yang, and eventually turns you into a Creatorpreneur (my philosophy):

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

P.S. If you want to turn this into a more practical lesson, consider joining “The Weekly Bonfire”. A tribe of ADHD Creatorpreneurs. Where I teach my frameworks and systems (For example, my Chaos To Clarity Notion System) every week for managing a life & business around ADHD.

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If you are a career- or business-focused person with ADHD and want to improve your health & performance, consider booking a 1:1 90-day sprint, where we work on your habits and routines using data-driven approaches.

👉 Reply if this is in your interest

(Only reply if this is something you really consider)

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