What are symptoms? •Disorganization •Procrastination •Easily distracted •Poor time management •Forgetful •Difficulty multi-tasking

Some of these symptoms may be more pronounced than others. If you are trying to cope with many things in your daily life (such as bringing up children with ADD as well as working) these symptoms may become worse. Just because your house is messy or your desk isn’t always clear, it doesn’t mean that you have ADD.

If my children have ADD are they doomed to under achieving? In fact high achievers can also have ADD. They will just have to work harder than others to get same results. You can help them by removing distractions from around them, especially when they are doing homework.

I think I may have ADD or ADHD -- What do I do? Find a therapist, a psychologist or a psychiatrist who has expertise in this area; try http://www.chadd.org for a list of these. A combination of counseling, coaching and drugs can help you learn to cope with this condition.

Agony Aunt http://www.myagonyaunt.co.uk

Think of it like learning to drive a car. Initially, skills required to control vehicle needed conscious thought. It seemed really difficult didn’t it? But once we’ve performed them for sufficient periods, we drive on auto-pilot. We’ve mastered required skills by repetition.

Here’s key: if we eat healthy food, take regular exercise, cut out harmful behaviors such as smoking and drinking, we improve our health and drastically reduce risk of heart disease, cancer and strokes. We are repeating good habits, habits that will give our physical well being a huge boost.

It’s exactly same for stress. What’s important to understand is that not everyone becomes stressed or depressed – even when tragic and traumatic circumstances happen to them. Just like people who lead a healthy lifestyle and avoid harmful habits and behaviors, people don’t become stressed or depressed because they have learned effective habits and behaviors that prevent stress from arising.

This is very good news if you suffer from these illnesses. Because just as we can learn habits and behaviors which cause us to become highly-stressed, depressed or anxious, we can learn habits and behaviors which stop these terrible illnesses in their tracks. And more often we make use of them, we’ll soon begin to perform them automatically and our mental health will benefit enormously.

No more feeling stressed out. No more feeling unable to cope. No more anxiety and no more depression. EVER.

I’m living proof of this. For 5 years, a series of traumatic events sent me spiralling into an anxiety-induced depression nightmare. I came out of it by learning natural skills that starve these illnesses. The more I used them, less anxious I became. They’re now as natural to me as driving a car, and I’ve completely eradicated anxiety and depression from my life.

You can do it too.