Occupational Therapy is a mental health profession concerned with all of the things that you need and want to be doing in your life.
1. What areas of your life are impacted upon because of your ADHD diagnosis- OTs love routine and we will explore yours in great details from the moment you get up in the morning until when you go to bed. You might notice that perhaps you delaying certain aspects of your routine, procrastinating things that you need or want to do. You also may notice that you get distracted and forget to do important things or manage your time efficiently. To help you with this we might use schedules or fine tune the do lists you’re already trying to use. We might offer new ways of doing things but making sure that these changes are always realistic and sustainable for you. E.g., your goal might be to go to bed 15 mins earlier every night because this is important for your energy the next day. We talk about how you might achieve this in a step-by-step approach.
2. Specific areas that you’d like to focus on: When working with young people we might have focus sessions helping them perform better at school or in college. With adults we often look their work performance and also their ability to balance this with their home life demands. We can explore what elements of work/ school/ college are affecting your performance and enjoyment? Things that often come up in conversation include managing deadlines and high workloads, concentrating to get things done, being distracted working from home, managing expectations to sit in school all day. We can also help you to access work and college opportunities if you are stuck taking the next steps to get there.
3. Compassion: OT use compassion focused therapy approaches to help you acknowledge the impact that ADHD has had on your story, your life. We can explore how to practice being a little kinder to yourself and activating what we might call our soothing system. We might help you to do this through breathwork, mindfulness of different self-care approaches. We can also chat to you about shame and guilt and how this can often present in people who have a diagnosis of ADHD.
Check out our video for more information!
If you have any questions or would like to know more about OT and how it might help you please don’t hesitate to call or email us here at Anchor Therapy.