ADHD: Pick “positive addictions” like exercise

Dopamine and endorphins seem to be the Hunter’s favorite “drugs,” and are at the base of many addictions and addictive behaviors.

Image by Mircea Iancu from Pixabay

Dopamine and endorphins seem to be the Hunter’s favorite “drugs,” and are at the base of many addictions and addictive behaviors. People with ADHD often struggle with moderation around everything from drugs and alcohol to sex and risk-taking.

I remember twenty or so years ago one of the authors of Driven to Distraction, Harvard’s Dr. John Ratey, told me when he was visiting us in Vermont how whenever he takes on a new patient he always asks them to try out a regular exercise program. John was a runner, too.

One person who shared her story with me for publication says she thinks she’s figured out John’s solution to her own neurochemistry all by herself.

Susan in Boston looks for endorphins:

Like a lot of the ADHD people I know, I have what some people would call an addiction prone personality. I get hooked on things really easily. When I was a teenager, it was pot. Then I got into alcohol and pills. That lasted a few years until I ended up in a hospital at the ripe old age of twenty-two. I think during most of that time I was also addicted to sex, and maybe even to love.

Two years ago, a friend who was reading this book about how the brain works told me about endorphins. She said that they’re chemicals that float around in the brain and make us feel happy. Some drugs, and sex, and even being in love, increase the amount of these endorphins in our brain, and make us feel good. She said that even chocolate does this, somehow.

My friend also said that exercise will cause the brain to manufacture or release more of these endorphins. You can get high from it, she said, just like with other things that aren’t as good for you.

Well, I was about twenty pounds overweight at that time, and she wasn’t exactly Miss America either. We decided that it would be a good excuse to try to get some regular exercise, so we joined this aerobics class.

At first it was hard work for me. I’d get out of breath, and I hurt. If Sheila wasn’t hassling me to go along with her and stick with the program, I’m sure I wouldn’t have continued. But she did, and I followed through.

After about three weeks of going to this class four times a week, I stopped hurting and noticed how good I was feeling after the exercise.

Before I started exercising, I was always walking around feeling this undercurrent of “I need.” I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was that I needed, but there was that needy feeling, and I could shut it up for a while with booze or sex or whatever, but that wasn’t such a good idea.

Now, I exercise every day. I do it at home in the mornings after I wake up (I jog for about 3 miles), and play tennis on the weekends, and Sheila and I still go to the club, now three times a week.

The change, for me, has been incredible. I’m addicted to the exer­cise, I have to tell you, but I think that’s an OK thing to be addicted to, so long as I don’t overdo it and injure myself. But in the rest of my life, I don’t feel that “I need” feeling anymore, or at least with nothing like the intensity I used to. I can take or leave things like drinks, men, or whatever, far more easily.

I don’t mean that exercise is some instant answer to all of life’s problems. But it has been very, very helpful to me. I find that I’m far less impulsive than I was before, and even my short attention span has improved.

I don’t get fidgety after a half-hour or so of reading anymore. Sometimes I’ll read for hours at a time on the weekends or at home in the evenings, which is something I could never before in my life do.

My appetite is under control, and I think I look better than I have since high school.