Not everyone with ADHD will experience the sweeping effect of exercise that Jackson did. Once I made this huge life change, and committed to exercise, it was very clear to me that things started to change in my life.” “There’s never been any question in my mind that exercise is related to concentration. “When I started exercising, I suddenly was able to concentrate on things that were important to me,” he says. He knows how it makes him feel, and that knowledge itself keeps him going. If he falls off his exercise regimen, his concentration wavers. Jackson is clearly tuned in to his own state of mind. In his first semester at the junior college, he earned a 3.9 GPA, and, after a year, he was accepted as a transfer student at the college he had originally wanted to attend. At first, the running didn’t make a dent in his physique (thanks to pizza and beer), but he stuck with it because it helped him focus. Jackson’s story appeals to me, partly because he got into exercise for his body image but stuck with it for the therapeutic effect. Walking around shirtless on the beach, with all the “Spanish dudes,” he was inspired to do something about his Buddha belly. The real turning point of the summer happened in Spain, on a trip with his girlfriend. (Needless to say, I wasn’t in the loop at the time.) “I noticed that a lot of small things that bothered me went away,” he reports. In fact, he felt so good that summer that he decided to go off his medication-all of it. The triumph of completing school, along with the comfort of having a destination the next fall, put him on top of the world. A small junior college accepted him, though, and that was just fine. Jackson squeaked through with a 1.8 GPA, far too low to go to the college he hoped to attend, despite family connections. At one point, I had him taking Adderall, Paxil, and clonazepam, a long-acting anxiety drug. He began taking Ritalin and stayed on some form of stimulant throughout his school years.Īs a day student at a top-ranked private academy, he simply had more work than he could get through. Jackson was diagnosed with ADHD early on, after his third-grade teacher picked up on his disruptive behavior and inability to complete class work. Because I figured out that, while I’m exercising, I don’t have trouble concentrating on anything.”
“I feel like I’ve missed something in my day, and I want to go do it. “If I don’t do it, it’s not like I feel guilty,” he says. Jackson, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD or ADD), runs nearly every day - three miles on days that he also does resistance training, six miles on the others.
What stands out about him isn’t so much where he is today, but how far he has come to get here and how he did it with an alternative ADHD treatment. If you were to run into Jackson, my former patient, you would meet a compact 21-year-old in jeans and an untucked shirt, who speaks articulately about his plans for the future - a typical American college kid, if not a little smarter.
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