How to Make Tour Life Easier When You’ve Got ADHD
If you’ve got ADHD and you’re touring, you already know it’s not just about keeping up with the job — it’s about keeping up with yourself.
Long days, fast decisions, social pressure, physical exhaustion, and barely enough time to figure out why you feel terrible before you’re onto the next venue. You’re not lazy, and you’re not broken — but without the right support, your coping mechanisms can turn on you.
This blog is about spotting the things that make it worse, understanding why they seem to help, and replacing them with tools that actually do. This blog isn’t here to preach or hand out rules. It’s here to make touring with ADHD just a little bit easier — so you can do the job without losing yourself in the process.
A Quick and Honest Take on ADHD (Finally)
ADHD isn’t about being forgetful or disorganised — it’s about having a brain that works differently. At the core of it, your brain handles motivation, focus, emotions, and effort in a different way than most people’s. And that difference can hit hard when you’re working long hours, changing cities, and living out of a suitcase.
One of the main things affected is how your brain uses dopamine. Dopamine is often called the “feel-good chemical,” but that’s only part of the story. It’s what helps you stay motivated, feel reward from doing things, keep your attention on something, and know when to switch tasks. It also plays a part in sleep, appetite, and emotional balance.
In a typical brain, dopamine gets released steadily in response to a task, especially one with a clear goal or reward. In ADHD brains, that process is broken. You either don’t get enough dopamine when you need it — or you burn through it too fast. That makes boring or repetitive jobs feel unbearable, even if you want to care. It's also why you might chase excitement or stimulation — your brain is trying to balance out the chemistry.
But it’s not just about dopamine. ADHD also affects the brain’s ability to:
Hold things in mind (working memory)
Filter distractions (attention regulation)
Control emotional responses (impulse regulation)
Manage time and planning (executive function)
That’s why tasks that seem simple to others — like packing the right tool, remembering a cue, or getting ready on time — can feel way harder for you. It’s not a matter of trying harder. It’s about learning how your brain works differently and finding ways to work with it.
Self-Medicating with Alcohol: Why It Works, Until It Doesn’t
If you’re looking to relax and wind down — drinking on tour makes sense. Alcohol helps you switch off. It lowers the noise in your head, it helps you connect with people faster, and it gives your nervous system a break from the constant stimulation. For someone with ADHD, who often struggles to relax, slow down, or feel present in social settings, alcohol works. It really works.
Touring can be a lonely, overstimulating, high-pressure blur — and alcohol gives you a shortcut to feeling relaxed, normal, social. It’s built into the culture too. Hanging out after load-out, bonding over a beer, blowing off steam — that’s part of what keeps the wheels turning for a lot of people.
And truthfully, we shouldn’t ignore that. Young people drinking less isn’t always the win it’s made out to be — some of what they’re missing is genuine connection and the ability to decompress. So no, this isn’t a call to give it up completely. That’s not realistic, and frankly, it’s not always necessary.
But here’s the catch: if you’ve got ADHD, you already live on a wider emotional spectrum than most people. Your highs are higher — and your lows are lower. So when alcohol brings you up… it’s also going to drop you hard. You’re not just riding the same hangover as everyone else. You’re dropping into a deeper, longer crash. One that messes with your mood, your motivation, your focus — and sometimes your place on the tour.
Worse still, that down hits when you’re alone. After the fun. After the laughter. After the crew’s gone to bed. And the crash doesn’t care that the next day’s a show day.
If alcohol has become your tool for switching off, you don’t need to throw it away entirely — but you do need to think about what it's doing for you. Is it helping you sleep? Is it helping you connect? Is it giving you a break from the internal noise? Once you figure out why you reach for it, you can start experimenting with other ways to get that same benefit — without the same long-term cost.
Some people on tour switch to non-alcoholic beer. Others change the setting — go for the pub chat, skip the extra round. You might find that certain kinds of physical activity, breathwork, or even supplements (like magnesium or L-theanine) help you wind down too. None of it needs to be saintly. It just needs to be useful.
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It’s Not That Easy, Harry:
If someone had a liver transplant and said they couldn’t drink, no one would argue with that. Same if they were in recovery — you'd never pressure them. In both cases, people recognise it's medical, and the social expectation is to support that. ADHD might not be visible, but it’s not just a personality trait or a modern media label — it’s a genuine medical difference. And not a minor one, either. If it were, people with ADHD wouldn’t be excluded from things like military service. So this isn’t about preaching sobriety. It’s about noticing if alcohol makes you feel worse than it helps — and deciding, without guilt, to take care of yourself like anyone else would if they had a condition that alcohol made harder.
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The Fast Food Trap (and Why It’s Probably Dragging You Down)
You already know that what you eat affects how you feel. This isn’t about telling you to cut out junk food or start bringing salad boxes to the venue — it’s about admitting the reality of touring: you’re trapped in a fast food loop most of the time.
On tour, the choices you get aren’t really choices. You’re in a hotel. You’re tired. You want to stay in your room and order something quick. What’s available? Greasy stuff. Doughy stuff. Overpriced, overprocessed menus with too much salt, too much sugar, and not much else. Even the so-called “healthy” options are either rubbish or double the price — and when you’re doing a physical job and burning calories all day, you end up eating whatever gives you the fastest hit of energy.
Sometimes, you’re not even hungry — but you order something anyway because it’s all that’s available and you need to eat something. Add in the culture of using food as a reward on the rare day off, and suddenly the whole tour becomes a cycle of indulgence that you didn’t fully sign up for.
The problem? That food does exactly what it’s built to do. It spikes your blood sugar, it fills you up, and then it flattens you. You feel sluggish, heavy, low-energy. And over time — even if the tour is going well, even if you’re sleeping alright, getting along with the crew, and talking to people back home — you still feel like your mood is gradually sinking. This could be a big part of it.
I’m not here to preach clean eating or tell you how to overhaul your diet. I haven’t figured that out either — I’m writing this from a hotel in Germany with a Chinese takeaway next to me, because it was the only option that wasn’t worse. But this is worth thinking about. Not because you need a perfect solution — but because the food you’re stuck eating might be doing more damage than you think.
We can’t always change the situation, but we can be honest about it. And if you’ve found a way around it — something that works for you — share it with other roadies. Because right now, a lot of us are trying to outrun a mood crash that isn’t just in our heads. It’s also on our plates.
Sugar: Your Pocket-Sized Dopamine Hit (Just Try Not to Drown in It)
Sugar is everywhere on tour. It’s in catering, in drinks, in your backpack, in your bunk — always free, always easy, always good. Especially if you’ve got ADHD, sugar can feel like the perfect fix: it gives you a fast, reliable dopamine bump that hits almost instantly. Chocolate, sweets, fizzy drinks — it’s dopamine in a packet. It’s a little moment of relief when your brain is screaming for something to latch onto.
And honestly, it works. It’s great. It can pull you out of a low, get you through a load-in, or stop your body from crashing when it’s hot and you’re totally depleted. You don’t need to give it up. You just need to stop pretending it’s a meal or a solution.
What happens is this: we stop using sugar intentionally and start using it constantly. You feel flat, so you grab a Coke. You’re tired, so you grab another one. You’re not even hungry, but there’s a bag of sweets in your pocket, so why not? It becomes your go-to — not a treat, not a tool. Just background noise. And the more of it you have, the more you need to feel anything from it.
That’s where the problems start. You crash harder. You stay low longer. You get sluggish, irritated, bloated, tired — and all that extra sugar, especially alongside the fast food you’re already stuck with, becomes one of the reasons why halfway through a tour everything starts to feel harder, heavier, more miserable. People get sick, people burn out, and no one really stops to question why they feel so rough when they’re doing all the same things they were doing at the start.
So here’s the mindset shift: use sugar. Don’t let it use you. If you’ve had a massive load-in and it’s 38 degrees outside and you’re struggling to stay upright — sure, have a Coke. Let it help. But don’t mistake it for hydration. Drink water too. If you’ve had a hell of a load-out and your body’s screaming, maybe a bit of chocolate gives you just the push you need to get through. That’s fine. That’s useful.
Personally, I only let myself have sweets or chocolate on particularly hard days — and only in small amounts. If I did it every day, it’d stop working. It wouldn’t be a pick-me-up, it’d just be another reason I felt slow, irritable, or down. You don’t need to cut sugar out. But if you’re serious about getting through a tour without mentally or physically falling apart, it’s worth thinking about when and why you reach for it — and whether it’s still helping.
Drugs: Self-Medicating isn’t the solution, it’s the end of solutions
If you were genuinely happy — grounded, calm, and connected to your world — you probably wouldn’t be reaching for something that changes your experience of that world. You wouldn’t want to mute it, escape it, or blur it. You’d want to feel it. You’d want to be in it.
When drugs start creeping into your daily life, it usually means something in your world is causing you unbearable pain. Whether it’s the job, your emotions, your experiences, or just your headspace — using drugs starts to make sense when nothing else does. And that’s not irrational. It’s actually a pretty logical survival move: numb what hurts. And anyway, your world is terrible and other people aren’t helping, so why suffer more than you need to.
But here’s the turning point — knowing you’re self-medicating gives you the option to figure out what you’re medicating for. What are you escaping from? What do you need protection from? And what part of your day-to-day life is so damn awful that this is your only option?
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In an experiment in the 70’s. When rats were kept alone in cages in a terrible environment, they were given two options for drinking water, one was just water and the other was laced with a drug. The rats would consume the drug laced water until they overdosed.
But when another batch of rats were put into a spacious, social, enriched environment — with toys, other rats, and room to roam — they ignored the drugged water almost entirely.
Self medicating isn’t just about the substance. It’s about your environment, your emotional state, and your access to connection and comfort.
If you’re on tour, feeling low, isolated, or overstimulated, drugs might feel like a relief — but the real solution might be fixing the cage, not doubling down on what’s in the bottle.
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Tools, Habits & Ideas That Make Touring Easier with ADHD
Question Your Negative Interpretations:
People with ADHD often misread social cues or assume the worst. If you find yourself thinking someone doesn't like you or that you’ve messed something up, pause. Most of the time, those assumptions are wrong — they’re just thoughts, not facts.
Train yourself to recognise that your brain is firing off warnings that might not be true. Once you know that, you can start to build a bit of distance between your feelings and reality.
Solve Repeat Problems with Systems:
Every time something makes you stressed or anxious, that’s usually your brain pointing at a problem that could be solved. Hate forgetting names? Start writing them down. Struggle to remember instructions? Type them into your phone immediately. Every issue you ignore is a choice to keep experiencing it.
Write everything down. Even if you don’t check it again, the act of writing helps commit it to memory.
Use Mirrors and Whiteboard Markers:
Sometimes your thoughts get loud, scrambled, or emotional. When you have some free time, write them down on a bathroom mirror or window with a whiteboard marker. It’ll wipe off, but while it’s up, you can see your thoughts clearly. Use it to process emotions, track goals, or remind yourself what’s real.
Touring doesn’t leave much space for reflection — this creates a tiny one.
Learn to Spot Emotional Absorption:
You can walk into a venue feeling fine and be miserable by the end of the day — not because of anything that happened to you, but because someone else is radiating tension and your brain picks it up. ADHD brains are highly sensitive to mood in a room. If your day crashes for no reason, stop and ask: “Is this mine? Or am I picking up someone else’s storm?”
Stay Fed, Hydrated and Rested:
Hungry, thirsty, and tired brains don’t function well — but ADHD brains spiral quickly when one of those needs is unmet. Eat properly, drink enough water, and rest when you can. An uninterrupted 90-minute nap can be more restorative than you think. These basics sound obvious, but they’re more important than you think.
Consider Medication (If It's Right for You):
If you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, you’re probably entitled to medication. Some people need one type, others a combination — often something for focus (like a stimulant) and something to take the edge off when adrenaline surges (like a beta blocker). Tour life can be intense. Managing your chemistry doesn’t make you weak; it gives you more control.
Supplement Smartly
Low vitamin D and other deficiencies can mess with your mood and dopamine. Touring means lots of indoor time, so a basic multivitamin plus vitamin D can make a noticeable difference. Don’t expect miracles, but think of it as giving your body the baseline it needs to not make things worse.
Touring with ADHD is a constant uphill battle. You have struggles that others don’t have — your brain runs on a different operating system. But, when you understand it better, you can work with it, not against it. None of this is about being perfect. It’s about making things easier, so you can actually enjoy the parts of tour that make it worth doing in the first place.
