ADHD: A Unique Brain Wiring in a Neuro-Diverse World

ADHD Education

If you have been living your life based on what others tell you are the ways you must learn, and those ways haven’t been working for you, you may be apt to believe that you are incapable of learning, or somehow broken.

But it’s not true. The standardized and required ways of learning, processing information, and performing may not work for you.

Understanding your unique brain wiring can help you facilitate home, school and workplace environments that honor and serve your unique brain wiring.


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There are approximately 7.3 billion people in the world. It is estimated that about 4 percent of the world’s population has ADHD. Research also indicates that 85 percent of those who might have it don’t know it because they are undiagnosed. That is a whole lot of people — some 300million — who may not know what is getting in the way of their ability to live a better life.

We humans are diverse and unique beings with trillions of options available to us in terms of the way we think, behave, achieve goals, form relationships and everything else we do. As individuals, we can’t learn what all these options are, but we do need to identify the strengths we already possess.


Trillions of Ways to Process

A world that prizes singular performance metrics and one-size-fits-all standards for individuals who literally have trillions of ways to do things does not support the utilization of our unique brains. The world we live in tends more often than not to punish those who think or perform differently than the mainstream. Those of us with ADHD — at its core, just one of humanity’s many unique brain wirings — can suffer disproportionately.

As an adult, your brain reaches a level of physical maturity and development where it has created 100 billion neurons. Each one of these neurons represents a chemical factory that manufactures important neurotransmitters that support your ability to perform a variety of different functions. Each one of your 100 billion neurons is connected to between 10,000 and 15,000 bridges that facilitate each neuron’s ability to communicate with others.

When you do the math, you discover that your brain has an apparently infinite number of ways to learn, process information and make sense of the world around you.


Limits of Standardized Ways of Learning and Performing

If you have trillions of different ways to learn and understand ideas, process environmental stimuli and handle the many other necessary pieces of information you use to survive and thrive daily, then how can you be expected to limit yourself to a few standardized and required ways of learning and performing in the classroom, the workplace or even the home?

Here you are, born with an infinite set of processing options, and the rest of the world says, ‘We will choose them for you, and if they don’t work because that is not the way your brain works, well, that is just too bad.”


Understanding Your ADHD Brain Wiring

If you have been living your life based on what others tell you are the ways you must learn, and those ways haven’t been working for you, you may be apt to believe that you are incapable of learning.

From there, it’s a short mental trip to believing that you are broken — a terrible, destructive belief that many of us with ADHD have felt at some point in our lives. But it’s not true. The standardized and required ways of learning, processing information and performing may not work for you. But there are unique and individual methods that will.


Learn What Works For You

For those of you with ADHD, your job is to discover the options that naturally work for you, integrate them into your daily life and inform everyone else that, from now on, you will dictate what ways you learn, work and live best — not the other way around!

Understanding your unique brain wiring, and educating others in your life about what works best for you, can help you facilitate home, school and workplace environments that honor and serve individuals, each as unique as you are.

* Updated and excerpted from Permission to Proceed: The Keys to Creating a Life of Passion, Purpose and Possibility for Adults with ADHD by David Giwerc, Founder/President, ADD Coach Academy, ADDCA, www. ADDCA.com Master Certified ADHD Coach