How Exercise Helps ADHDers Focus
Do our minds just seem to work better while walking?
There’s no shortage of studies showing that regular exercise improves brain performance, most likely by increasing oxygenation of that organ. For most of our 52 years of marriage, Louise and I take long walks to discuss important things or to brainstorm articles, books, business issues, and things with regard to our family. Our minds just seem to work better while walking.
Others have noticed similar experiences, and shared them with me:
From Dave in Sacramento:
I’ve known since I was a kid that there was something weird about my metabolism, because I was always a sugar junkie and I’d get so bored in class that I’d fall asleep. The doctors tested me for diabetes and hypoglycemia, and the tests turned out negative, but I knew something was odd.
I should have figured it out my first year of high school. I tried out for football that year, and got on the team, and all that year I had to exercise after school and on weekends with the team. We’d do warm-up exercises, and then work pretty hard at practice and scrimmage. And that was my best year ever, academically. I should have realized there was a connection.
Now I’m in my mid-thirties, and my wife was hassling me about my gut and that I should start to exercise so I don’t drop dead of a heart attack. So first, true to my normal style, I went out and spent about eight hundred dollars on exercise equipment for the house. That lasted about two weeks, and then it became boring.
So I spent a thousand bucks to join a health club. But, after the first few weeks, I didn’t go back. It was boring, it was a huge hassle to get undressed and dressed and all that, and I frankly didn’t much care for the guys who were regulars there.
Then one night my wife said, “Let’s go for a walk.” We live in a suburban neighborhood, and so we went out and walked for about twenty minutes. It seemed like no big deal. We had an interesting conversation, probably more of a conversation than we’d had in the past month, because we were alone for twenty minutes with nothing else to do but talk.
Anyhow, she liked that so much that she wanted to do it the next night. And the night after that. It became our regular after-dinner ritual, and we gradually raised the twenty minutes to about a half-hour walk, which I clocked with my car at just under two miles.
The point of this as a success story, though, is what resulted at work and in the rest of my life. I found that I could concentrate more easily. I wasn’t so burned out and tired by midday, and I could endure boring meetings without going ballistic!
I’m convinced that there’s something that ADHD people need that’s satisfied by exercise. I don’t know what it is; maybe it has something to do with that Hunter idea you have.
Whatever it is, I know that when we walk four or five times a week, my weeks are a hundred percent better, in all respects.
It even seems to have improved my sex life, although that may just be because my wife and I are spending more time together talking, which I never liked before because after a few minutes I’d want to jump up and pace around. Now I’m pacing around for the full thirty minutes.
Anyhow, it works. And the exercise doesn’t need to be at a gym or even difficult. Just enough to get me a bit out of breath (we walk fast) makes a huge difference.
Similarly, Paul Elliott, MD, a physician in Ft. Worth, Texas who specializes in ADHD reports:
I have a patient, himself a Ph.D. psychologist, who had referred patients to me for several months before he, himself, realized he had ADHD as well.
As we were discussing his history, he reported a typical pattern of irregular and ineffective attempts at college, followed by a determined effort beginning in his mid-thirties.
He commented, casually, that the only way he was able to get through college, including his Ph.D. program, was to exercise one hour at a time, three times a day! To do this, he had to separate his major courses and would jog around the campus, arriving in the classroom slightly out of breath.
He said he could perform very well on tests, do very well at taking notes, and follow the conversation of the professor for about 1 to 1.5 hours. After this time, he would once again be in his “ADHD fog.”
Even he had not seen the significance of this. The 60-90 minute period is the amount of time it takes the newly produced endorphins (resulting from the exercise) to undergo their natural, biological degradation and cease their activity.
This is another reason that students can often come home from their athletic practice and sit down for an hour or so focusing very well on their homework.