How to ADHD

An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It)

De: Jessica McCabe

Narrado por: Jessica McCabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this honest, friendly, and shame-free guide, the creator of the award-winning YouTube channel How to ADHD shares the hard-won insights and practical strategies that have helped her survive, even thrive, in a world not built for her brain.

“The world of ADHD has been waiting for this book with bated breath for many years. If there’s a fairy godmother of our lot, it’s Jessica McCabe.”—Edward Hallowell, MD, coauthor of Driven to Distraction and ADHD 2.0

Forget “try harder.” When your brain works differently, you need to try different.

Diagnosed with ADHD at age twelve, Jessica struggled with a brain that she didn’t understand. She lost things constantly, couldn’t finish projects, and felt like she was putting more effort in than everyone around her while falling further and further behind. At thirty-two years old—broke, divorced, and living with her mom—Jessica decided to look more deeply into her ADHD challenges. She reached out to experts, devoured articles, and shared her discoveries on YouTube.

In How to ADHD, Jessica reveals the tools that have changed her life while offering an unflinching look at the realities of living with ADHD. The key to navigating a world not built for the neurodivergent brain, she discovered, isn’t to fix or fight against its natural tendencies but to understand and work with them. She explains how ADHD affects everyday life, covering executive function impairments, rejection sensitivity, difficulties with attention regulation, and more. You’ll also find ADHD-specific strategies for adapting your environment, routines, and systems, including:

• Boost the signal and decrease the noise. Facilitate focus by putting your goals where you can see them and fighting distractions with distractions.
• Have less stuff to manage. Learn why you have trouble planning and prioritizing, and why doing more starts with doing less.
• Build your “time wisdom.” Work backward when you plan, and track how long it actually takes you to do something.
• Learn about your emotions. Understand how naming your emotions and letting yourself experience them can make them easier to regulate.

With quotes from Jessica’s online community, chapter summaries, and reading shortcuts designed for the neurodivergent reader, How to ADHD will help you recognize your strengths and challenges, tackle “bad brain days,” and be kinder to yourself in the process.

A genuinely beautiful book

As someone who binged nearly every single one of Jessica’s YouTube videos when I got my diagnosis, I was worried that this book would simply be a repeat of everything I “already knew”. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong. This book is beautiful—it’s validating, informative, entertaining, and genuine. It’s the perfect balance of autobiography and “self-help”—though it doesn’t feel like the average self-help book. Despite reading most of the book alone in my house with my two cats, the ADHD community was always with me. Jessica was always with me. Her stories, and the delightful quotes from Brains and Hearts, kept me glued to my headphones. I’d laugh one moment, and cry the next (“You do not need to be fixed because you are not a broken version of normal.” I mean, COME ON). It’s books like this that make me glad I have ADHD and a less than stellar memory… because I’ll likely forget most of what I read, and be able to read it again in a year and enjoy it all over again.

An instant ADHD classic

This book is incredibly well researched and well put together with the ADHD user in mind. It showcases the very best of her Youtube channel and builds on the very best qualities found there. This book is an amalgamation of her personal experiences and the latest in ADHD research. It’s both witty and incredibly informative. Also, as we come to expect from Jessica’s work, it is also deeply compassionate and human. It’s clear that Jessica knows the struggle those of us with ADHD face and went to great length to create a book that speaks to that. She highlights tools we can use to navigate a world not built for our brains while also creating space for us to accept ourselves for who we are right now. This book stirred up a lot of emotions for me, but I am better for having read it. Like the best of Jessica’s media, this book makes me feel seen and supported as I navigate the realities of ADHD. This is an instant ADHD classic that will likely remain in our ADHD circles for generations to come

very interesting and insightful

I loved every second of this book. I cried, I laughed, I understood. I'm definitely buying a physical copy so that I can reference it easier.

An amazing book

A great book! well written, relatable and useful. I hope it will be translated into other languages.

This a great jumping off book for ADHD

Now I found “How to ADH” from the old Ted talk years ago. I watched all the videos on YouTube and found the introduction of the “Wall off Aweful” 2 parter to be one of the most useful concepts to learn and understand how to handle. So I was down when she said a book was coming but wasn’t sure what it would add….

This book had a flow and context to different big ideas/adhd challenges. It’s not a deliberate how to ADHD human manual like ADHD was to organize you life but instead a way to structure hard big things. The book is organized in a way easy to understand like I organize boxes. Broadway topics that are clear but not to restrictive. And the addition of community feedback was a nice touch.

She also did a great job reading the book. Here reading the book helped add context to topics I might have missed in a read through.

This will be a multi listen book for the brains (ADHDers like me) or the hearts (those who care and want to learn) . It is a helpful beginner guide and a help remembering guide for those who forget something that executive distinction is me : )

Great book. Highly recommend