In this post, Jessica McCabe, creator of the popular YouTube channel How to ADHD, discusses ways to align your life to your values. As she points out, our capacity to do things is limited by our values. Managing our capacity always involves a tradeoff – doing more of thing means there is less time for something else.
All to often we take away time from the things we enjoy for things we think are more important. Understanding our values can help us be better at giving time to those things that are meaningful to us and make the quality of our life better.
In her video, she talks about how to honor the things we value in our life.
Let’s Talk About Working Too Much – Jessica McCabe, How to ADHD
Jessica Lauren McCabe is an American actress, writer, and YouTube personality. She is best known as the host for the YouTube channel How to ADHD as well as for roles in several independent films and television shows including the show American Dreams and the short film Lure.
Simone Silvestri
Today I discovered Jessica Lauren McCabe’s work going through the edgefoundation newsletter. I am so glad she dedicates some of her time to this very important topic of aligning our work with our values. Especially for people with HDAD that often find it hard to fit into narrowly defined professional roles.
I am female, soon 60 years old, a medical doctor with a PhD in the fields of neurology/psychiatry and an individual with pronounced hyperactive attention deficit disorder since early childhood.
I receive the edgefoundation newsletter for many years. As a subscriber I’ve gained many new insights about my condition that are not taught to doctors in their training or continuous training. I’ve implemented many recommendations over time and found them to be of very good for me. It is one of my favorite newsletters!
This newsletter not only gave me many new insights but has also been very important in encouraging me to stick consistently to crucial non-medication therapies such as for example exercising vigorously (was was a semi-professional athlete in my youth) and continued jogging for at least 1 hour for 5-7 days a week until today. This also applies to white noise. My dad told me that when I was a toddler he discovered that he could what he called gently “switch me off” with white noise when necessary. He loved me dearly but he said that I could become taxing to everybody because I had the habit of talking non-stop. Even if nobody was listening. He accidentally found out that tuning the radio so that one could only listen to static I would fall asleep within minutes. So this is also a therapy I learned to use myself since early childhood. The sound of machines or static from TV/radio works better for me for fall asleep than any medication I tried. Playing a soothing, repetitive music in the background helps me to stop procrastinating on tasks I dislike such as doing my tax declaration. After listening to it for say an hour I feel calming down. Inner thoughts of resistance against this task subside and I can work for hours on a row on such to me otherwise very boring and unpleasant tasks.
Only at the age of 40 I learned that aligning my professional work to my core values was the key to leading a much more self-directed and happier life. From working as a medical doctor in academia and private practice which required me to follow many treatment guidelines for liability reasons and that I opposed for scientific and clinical reasons I decided to become coach. Coaching is not regulated and allowed me to work according to what I believed was right. I concentrate on behavioral approaches for most individuals experiencing a depression, anxiety disorders of all sub-types, addictions, ADD and HDAD and even many cases of psychosis among many other less prevalent mental health issues. Without the use of any meds in most cases while at the same time achieving more lasting results without the oftentimes impairing, tolerance & dependence generating and even braindamaging side effects of some of the drugs used in psychiatry. I’m not against using meds. They are quite useful in some severe cases when given short-time and at the lowest clinically effective dose. But when there is a way of using behavioral approaches that I regard as clinically more appropriate I can do the as a coach.
Realigning my professional life also opened the doors for many more improvements of my HDAD symptoms, especially executive functions. I could go on and on about the positive developments that came about in my life after realizing the importance of the goal of working according to our core values. Let me share just the most two most important ones. Almost every morning I’ve been waking waking up in a positive state of mind. I can’t wait to start my work day with all the different and exiting new tasks! As a very good “side effect” of that new found happiness that continues until today I also was able to generate a higher income than before and was able to retire 5 years ago.
Keep up your wonderful work, Jessica!
Best regards from a new fan of your work and an old fan of the edgefoundation newsletter.