For women, having ADHD can come with many obstacles and in mid-life, major life transitions can either make them or break them. Biologically, at a certain stage in a woman’s life, she goes through pre-menopause and enters menopause. Interpersonally, family responsibilities are typically decreasing, the house is becoming quieter, and the empty nesting begins.
However, women with ADHD may face a particularly difficult challenge when they try to stop focusing on the expectations of others and focus more on their own needs and desires.
This time couldn’t be more crucial, and according to The Chesapeake ADHD Center, women in their fifties can have a new set of choices before them. Perhaps this is a time to pursue a long-neglected dream, to return to school, to develop a dormant talent, to establish a different lifestyle that is more compatible with their needs women with ADHD?
Here are 7 tips for women with ADHD to find balance during their mid-life transitions:
Biological Transitions: Pre-Menopause and Menopause
It is critical for a woman with ADHD to be aware of the powerful interaction of ADHD symptoms and declining estrogen levels. Many women whose ADHD symptoms have been successfully treated with psychostimulants report that their stimulants are less effective during pre-menopause and menopause.
Because there is little dialogue between physicians who treat adults with ADHD and
those who treat women in menopause, the interactions of ADHD symptoms with estrogen levels are not yet widely known or appreciated. It is not unusual for a physician treating ADHD to have little information on this stimulant-hormone interaction. As a result, it may be necessary for a woman with ADHD to help educate her physician about these interactions in order to receive effective medical treatment.
Interpersonal Transitions: Renegotiating Relationships in Mid-Life
A woman in mid-life may feel entrapped by the expectations of others. You may be the primary caretaker of an aging parent, oversee your young adult children, a new entrepreneur or a career woman whose workplace demands tend to take over your personal life.
Because people with ADHD tend to be “reactive” to their environment, women with ADHD may face a particularly difficult challenge when they try to stop focusing on the expectations of others and focus more on their own needs and desires.
Lower your daily stress level by changing your expectations and those of others.
Finding A New Balance
The challenge for you is to slow down the merry-go-round you’ve been on for so long. The primary mid-life goal for a woman with ADHD is to create a new sense of balance in your life, balance within yourself and between significant others. Slow down so that you can
go for a walk in the woods, for a soak in the hot tub, or spend a calm moment in meditation or yoga.
Finding New Directions
During child-raising years, a woman with ADHD may have felt unable to pursue her own dreams. But now, as time and opportunity open up, she may be overwhelmed and directionless. How do I get started? Where should I begin?
Like other women, many women with ADHD have put hopes or ambitions on hold while raising a family, planning to put more energy into their own projects when they have more time. But when a woman has ADHD, she faces an extra challenge in pursuing a new direction. The skills a woman needs to follow through on her hopes and dreams are often the very skills that are most challenging.
Take time to follow that lifelong goal or dream. Revisit initial plans before children. Write that book you’ve always dreamed of, or apply for the graduate program you’ve postponed for years. Slowly but surely rescind yourself from responding to the needs, requests, or ideas of others.
Support and Structure To Make Changes
To make your dreams come true, you need support and structure. Structure can come in the form of a partner, someone to share the dream, to be accountable to, someone to plan with, someone to brainstorm with. Structure can also come in the form of a job. For example, if a woman’s ultimate dream is to start her own enterprise, she may begin by working for someone from whom she can learn the skills she needs to strike out on her own.
Groups can also be important sources of structure and support. You can join a group of women with similar goals, stay-at-home moms returning to the workplace, women who hope to
become artists or writers, women training for the same profession, women starting their own enterprises such groups can provide support, encouragement, advice, and contacts.
Enrolling in a class can provide both structure and support. The regularly scheduled class can help you keep on track, while contact with the teacher and with fellow students can provide you with emotional support and encouragement as she develops or enhances the skills you need to follow your dream.
Counseling or Psychotherapy
Working with a professional in counseling or psychotherapy may be very useful to help mid-life women with ADHD take stock in their life, to rekindle old dreams or develop new ones better-suited to the self that they have become. “The way it’s always been” no longer needs to be. Yet habit and expectations can have a powerful pull.
If you’re married or a mother, work toward creating a different balance in your relationship with your husband or young adult children. Psychotherapy may help you stay on track as you learn to give yourself permission to take care of yourself and to renegotiate long-standing patterns with your spouse.
ADHD Coaching
Psychotherapy is often the best approach for understanding the emotional and interpersonal issues that are getting in your way. However, when a woman is clear about what she wants to do, but can’t seem to mobilize herself to do it, coaching may prove very helpful. For example, if you have decided to return to school to earn a degree, a coach can help you get on track and stay on track, teaching you to set realistic goals, to break large goals into do-able steps, and to remain focused and motivated as you work toward your goal.
Mid-life can be a time of possibility and change for a woman with ADHD, a time to reassess, to find more time for yourself, and to set your sights on new goals. With structure, strategies, and supports in place, you can reassess your ADHD and add opportunities into your life to reduce chronic stress, become more balanced, and to accomplish things you only dreamed of in earlier your years.
Find out more about ADHD here, on BlackDoctor.org.
SOURCES: Chesapeake ADHD Center, Mid-Life Transitions for Women with ADHD, May, 17, 2018
By subscribing, you consent to receive emails from BlackDoctor.com. You may unsubscribe at any time. Privacy Policy & Terms of Service.
