People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often struggle with everyday tasks and getting things done in a timely manner. For instance, a task that would be otherwise easy to complete in an hour takes 3 days instead.

Do you often find yourself distracted until time is wasted? The challenges of ADHD and attention deficit disorder (ADD) are very real. But there is hope. When you understand how ADHD has been affecting all areas of your life, you can learn to minimize its impact and live successfully with ADD /ADHD.

Here are some steps to help you build confidence, clarify and prioritize your goals, minimize your ADHD challenges, and get you past being stuck to actually following through with your plans.

“You have to decide… Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?”

That’s one of the questions Randy Pausch, famous deceased Carnegie Mellon professor, asked in his presentation “The Last Lecture.” It went viral, landing him on Oprah and a host of other afternoon and late-night shows.

I loved every other part of his lecture but that.

Because I think the world needs its share of Eeyores: solemn, stoic, realistic, pensive creatures. And I don’t think I’m saying that because I unapologetically claim to be an Eeyore.

I mean, imagine a world of hyperactive, happy Tiggers. How long can you stay with that image before you want to throw something at the striped orange guy?

When I was fresh out of college and deciding what to do with the rest of my life, I worked front-desk in a business center. We had interesting clients who rented offices: Social workers and lawyers, mediators and therapists, and quite a few credit counselors. Much to my dismay, we even rented an office to an exterminator. There is nothing quite like answering the phone and listening to someone screech about the rats that hide behind their stoves.

It was a healthy mix of educated and eccentric people and it was an interesting place to work. The three years I spent there gave me a curious perspective on office etiquette.

I shook a lot of hands during these years. Trust me when I tell you it becomes tiresome stating your name and offering your hand (dousing it in Lysol afterwards) many times a day.  The lawyers had strong handshakes (the criminal lawyers had a hard time letting go); the mediators less so.

Therapists seem to smile more or, on a bad day, grimace while photocopying or drinking the awful coffee I had made.

For many people, work is a pressure cooker. Even if your job is less demanding, there’s still an element of stress. Work is still work, after all. And it comes with high expectations and tough tasks, and requires good results.

As mindfulness teacher Ed Halliwell said, “We’re expected to meet deadlines, make quick and often complex decisions, and manage relationships with others effectively, all the while achieving results in the face of constraints, which aren’t always of our own making.”

Practicing mindfulness on the job offers a bounty of benefits, according to Halliwell. It soothes and calms our bodies and minds. It improves our ability to work and produce great work. Even when stress strikes, instead of getting overwhelmed, it helps us confront challenges head-on, he said.

How? Mindfulness trains us to stay in the present. “It trains us to become more aware of what’s going on in and around us, giving us the capacity to see things clearly and act from a wider perspective.”

Low salaries, lack of opportunity for advancement and heavy workloads have more than one-third of Americans reporting feeling chronic work stress.

And women are feeling it more acutely than ever.  After decades of making progress in the work force, many women are feeling less valued than men, according to a recent APA survey on Stress in the Workplace.  They’re feeling they don’t receive adequate monetary compensation for their work and feel that employers offer them fewer opportunities for internal career advancement than men.

Why are women feeling less appreciated than men, when it comes to compensation and why are they stressed by lack of opportunity?

Possibly because they are.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s quote — and others’ psychological research — suggest that we are designed to interact with each other. In fact, our interactions with others come second to our interaction with ourselves.

If interactions with others are so important, why do we struggle to initiate and maintain relationships?

A search on the Internet for articles on interaction/relationships reveals what appears to be innumerable research papers on verbal and nonverbal communication. However, many who highlight relationship-building skills ignore a crucial factor.

To rephrase Descartes (who famously said “I think, therefore I am”), “we think, therefore we interact” confirms that we first have some thought about the person we intend to interact with. If our cognitive processes set the tone for our interaction then highlighting errors in cognition is useful.

Sometimes traits that we think do not go together actually do. Perfectionism and procrastination are one of those unlikely duos.

Most people picture procrastinators as lazy folks who don’t care about doing things in a timely manner. If you’re a perfectionist, however, you know that’s not you. You care. You have high standards. You expect a lot, maybe too much, from yourself.

Then how come you have a tendency to put things off? It doesn’t make sense. But in a twisted kind of way, it does. Here’s why: The same attribute that is your strength — your desire to do things perfectly — also is your nemesis.

Being a highly sensitive person (HSP) can feel overwhelming.

Being an HSP in a big, boisterous city can feel utterly unbearable. That’s because HSPs have a hard time screening out stimuli. Specifically, the problem lies in artificial stimulation, according to Ted Zeff, Ph.D, a psychologist and author of three books on HSPs, including The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide and his newest book Raise an Emotionally Healthy Boy.

All sights, sounds and smells aren’t created equal. Compare a big city’s bright lights, big crowds, honking horns, pollution and bumper-to-bumper traffic with a smaller town’s hiking trails, chirping birds, ocean waves and scents of freshly cut grass.

It’s very hard to function when grating stimuli assault your senses, and you’re in a constant state of overwhelm. One of Zeff’s students told him that at times she felt like she was “walking around with no skin, like a sponge absorbing everything that comes her way.” Over time, this can affect your emotional and physical health, such as spiking your blood pressure, Zeff said.

Like the flu, work stress has become epidemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that up to 40 percent of Americans rate their job stress as extremely high. The damage isn’t just emotional, however. Chronic stress debilitates the body and lowers resistance to disease. Fortunately, you can take simple steps to relax and beat the grind.

When Stress Works Overtime

Physiologically, working under constant stress is like racing your car’s engine with the parking brake on. Parts start wearing out. Integrative medicine expert Dr. Andrew Weil notes that while our minds have embraced modern life, our bodies haven’t changed much in ten thousand years. They are not designed for long, sedentary hours facing chronic anxiety.

A major culprit is the hormone cortisol. Cortisol plays a crucial role in the fight-or-flight response, arming us with short-term energy, enhanced memory and pain tolerance. However, extended stress triggers chronically elevated levels that lead to health problems. Common effects are insomnia, depression, poor memory, and lowered immunity. Longer term, cortisol overload contributes to heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disorders.

Connecting with other people is vital if you’re looking to enter the job market or are out of a job, insecure about your job’s stability, want to make a career change or are looking for advancement.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, 12.3 million workers were unemployed as of January 2013.  Among those who are employed, many — such as the 66 percent of mothers who work full- or part-time and struggle with the conflicting needs of work and family — continually strive to find careers that are the best fit for their families and their financial needs.

Good networking skills also can make a difference in whether you get hired.  One study found that people rated medical performance higher for medical residents they knew, suggesting that even the slightest of personal knowledge can give you an edge.

Other studies suggesting that even knowing a political candidate’s name can sway a voter, supporting the concept that having some connection with potential employers might give you a boost (Monitor on Psychology, July/August 2012).

So what can you do, to make that all important first connection?

I have done terrible things during manic and mixed episodes.

I have hurt those who love me, squandered my savings, lost jobs, behaved very poorly, and even attempted suicide.

As episodes ended, the knowledge of what I had done made me feel so alone, so separate from those close to me. Isolated even from strangers. The worse I felt I behaved, the more I felt undesirable. Immoral acts left me feeling as if I had no one.

Mental illness and its associated behaviors can make one feel wrong without equal. A sense that only a very sick person would commit such transgressions can drive one inward and away from those who can help. We often push those who want to help away. Fear of hurting or disappointing others leads to strained and severed relationships.

If you’re a photographer, your most important environment might be the great outdoors. If you’re a writer, you might prefer coffee shops or libraries for weaving your stories. If you’re an artist, you might have an entire garage dedicated to painting or sculpting.

Or maybe you don’t have a hub but several spaces where your creativity blossoms.

Your environment is a precious resource — among many — for cultivating creativity. What you surround yourself with and consume can ignite your imagination (or stifle it).

We asked several writers and artists who regularly nurture their creativity to share what environments inspire them and others.