How to Control Your Strong Emotions When You Have ADHD

A guest post by Liz Adams, Ph.D., Minnesota Neuropsychology

ADHD is usually considered a disorder of attention, but it is better understood as a disorder of regulation, and regulation of emotions is a key challenge for people with ADHD.  The limbic system of the brain is where emotions start. It gives and receives messages from all parts of the brain. The frontal lobes help to regulate emotions generated from this tiny but powerful center. The communications between brain regions happen so quickly, the emotional response often feels like a reflex.

 But we have within us a powerful resource to lengthen the nanosecond, between our emotion….and….response.

 Individuals with ADHD can have difficulty managing their emotional responses because of inefficiencies in these brain circuits of communication.

 Here are some tips to help:

 1.       Bring awareness and acceptance to your emotion regulation struggles by thinking of your behaviors in terms of brain biology

 2.       Realize that people with ADHD have a more pronounced internal experience of emotion and more difficulty moderating their responses to emotion

 3.       Learn strategies to recognize and accept emotions as normal human responses

 4.       Develop vocabulary to describe your emotions

 5.       Practice self-calming techniques such as meditation and movement

 6.       Connect with breath to create that nanosecond of time to choose your response to emotion

Try this exercise to practice for handling the big emotions, sometimes called The Big Feels:

 1.       Feel the feeling 2. Name the feeling 3. Take 1-2 slow breaths 4. Decide on a response

 “In between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” - Viktor Frankl