ADHD Coaching

ADHD Coaching for Youth

ADHD Coaching for Adults

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impairs executive functioning to various extents. If not addressed, it can have a real impact on the quality of your life. Both men and women of all ages can develop this condition. The deviation from a healthy neurological development almost always begins in the earliest stages of one’s life. So when it comes to ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders, prevention is our most powerful tool. Most of these disorders are almost always the result of negative impact of external factors. Nutrient deficiencies, sensory overload, emotional and psychological stresses, exposure to toxins and various hormonal disruptors, etc., all can play the main role or contribute to disrupting and altering the healthy function of the brain during the crucial and vulnerable stages of its development.

There is a lot that can be done to prevent neurodevelopmental disorders. And likewise, there is a lot that can be done to damper down or even rid of most, if not all of the ADHD symptoms.

Here at Mind.Set, we do not only help you with your ADHD by helping you understand and improve your executive functions, we dig much deeper. We care to look at all the potential underlying disruptors present in your life, and your family history, and step-by-step, by changing your mindset and habitual behaviours, lifestyle habits an even your diet, strive to establish the much needed balance in your life - and your mind.

What are executive functions and why are they important?

All these skills are crucial to our day-to-day functioning. Need to prepare a presentation? You need all of them. Need to get the kids ready for school? You need all of them. Need to tie your shoe lace? Yes, you need all of them!

It is these skills that set us apart from animals, and it is also these skills that tend to start malfunctioning during the most vulnerable stages of brain development - the period that begins around 8 weeks after conception and ends at around 3-5 years of age. This period is marked by the most fascinating and intricate brain growth and transformation. But allow this extremely vulnerable brain to do its magical growth in a wrong, unhealthy environment - an environment that falls short of what it has evolved to develop in - and the resulting deformations are not a matter of ‘if’, they are only a matter of ‘when’.

We consider metacognition to be the crowning executive function. Without metacognition, change and progress are not possible. Lack of metacognition inhibits the rest of the executive functioning skills and prevents their progress. And whether you do family, life, or ADHD coaching with us, we follow our Mindset Shift Model and our first focus is on improving/enabling this crucial skill.

Nutrition & Executive Functions

Why are we incorporating nutrition & lifestyle intervention into our services?

The answer is simple: your brain needs the right nutrients in the right amounts to function. In fact, the vast majority of your bodily functions are regulated by hormones, and various neurotransmitters and these hormones rely on a stable supply of nutrients that come almost solely from your diet. Many decades of misinformation driven by food manufacturing corporations about what a healthy diet should look like, lead our population to a nutrition and health crisis. With our Nutrition & Lifestyle coaching incorporated into your ADHD coaching, we are here to help you regain much needed understanding of this delicate, yet crucial relationship that your brain and its executive functions have with the food you eat and the lifestyle you lead.

Things to remember about ADHD

  • It is a complex condition that affects individuals in many different ways.

  • The Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder label does not adequately cover the complexity of this condition nor does it describe it accurately.

  • It is still not a fully understood disorder; neuroscientists continue to research it and new findings are continually emerging.

  • It is often confused with high functioning autism, for they share many symptoms.

  • It is often misdiagnosed because the symptoms are often misinterpreted and confused with symptoms of other physiological disorders such as food intolerances/allergies, hormonal imbalances stemming from poor diet and lifestyle, etc. that can masquerade as ADHD.

  • The official ADHD screening and testing looks only at the symptoms: how much of your day-to-day life differs from the typical one; the diagnosis and the following treatments are based on how many of the puzzle pieces are out of place or missing. It does not investigate nor consider why those pieces are misplaced or missing, and whether this could possibly be attributed to other underlying issues.

  • The most typical and almost always the only resolution following your diagnosis is getting you on ADHD medication(s), which is a solution leading to a life-long, brain altering drug dependency.

Do I have ADHD?

    • You get easily overwhelmed: multi-tasking brings on too much stress and you feel paralysed, often wanting to hide or run away from the situation;

    • It’s hard to get on with your tasks: you procrastinate a lot with initiating tasks and once you do get started, it’s hard to complete them;

    • You have many great ideas, even start on most of them, yet hardly ever finish any of them;

    • These ideas tend to occupy your mind when it’s least convenient or relevant to the current situation;

    • You find yourself ‘zoned out’ and fatigued in the middle of the day or multiple times a day:

    • You go through ‘foggy’ moments during the day: your cognitive thinking gets temporarily ‘disabled’;

    • Contrary to the above, you also have spells of energy outbursts: you feel very productive, overachieving, ‘pumped up’;

    • You often miss deadlines or complete projects/tasks the last minute with a lot stress and chaos;

    • Clean and tidy house/room seems difficult to keep up with on a daily basis, clutter and disorder creep in fast and you just let it go from bad to worse, feeling paralysed and overwhelmed;

    • If you make yourself to clean or tidy, you often do an immaculate job, but this happens only once in a blue moon;

    • Your personal finances and book-keeping is a tedious or impossible task;

    • you tend to be an impulse buyer;

    • You have moments during the day, when you find it harder to regulate your emotions: you are prone to anger outbursts, anxiety attacks, etc. and moments later you feel indifferent, emotionally blunt;

    • You often go to bed late and have a hard time falling asleep;

    • You may feel and appear fidgety, you speak too fast, jumping from subject to subject, without realising it;

    • You often cut off someone else when they are talking as you have to share your response you just formed mentally immediately, because you know that by the end of their speech you will forget what you wanted to say;

    • You are prone to spend excessive amounts of time on devices of all kinds and find it difficult to ‘peel your eyes off’;

    • You easily loose track of time;

Whether you come to us without an official diagnosis or you already have one and are hoping to explore more healthier and natural ways to deal with your or your child’s ADHD, we will be there to look into the causes of symptoms and support and guide you from day one. Official diagnosis or not, our wholesome approach to helping you will remain the same because we want to give you the best chance to ease off or overcome these symptoms and live a better quality life without having to resolve to life-long dependancy on medications. If you do not have an official diagnosis yet, we will encourage you to undergo a full neuropsychological screening, but the official diagnosis is mostly there for you, should you need it for practical purposes such as applying for an Individualised Education Plan (IEP or 504) for your child or similar.