Hacking Your ADHD: Recent Episodes
William Curb
ADHD can be a struggle, but it doesn't always have to be. Every Monday, join William Curb, as he explores ways that you can work with your ADHD brain to do more of the things you want to do. If you have ADHD or someone in your life does and you want to get organized, get focused and get motivated then this podcast is for you. Part of the ADHD reWired Podcast Network.
Hey Team!
This week I’m talking with Kara Cruz, a licensed marriage and family therapist and Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional with over 15 years of experience supporting women through life transitions. Kara’s work focuses on the intersection of ADHD and reproductive mental health—helping women navigate the complex terrain of hormones, identity, and self-trust.
In our conversation, Kara and I dig into how ADHD symptoms can change and intensify across different hormonal stages - puberty, pregnancy, postpartum, and perimenopause - and what that means for real-life functioning. We also get into how ADHD in women often goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as anxiety or bipolar disorder, and how learning to track your cycle, protect your energy, and build realistic routines can make a world of difference in your adhd management.
And I want to emphasize that even if you don’t have a cycle there is still a lot to get out of this episode, when I was working on the top tips for this episode I had to cut a few because there was just so much good stuff. I had a great time talking with Kara and learned a ton, I think you’ll love this episode too.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/249
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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- ADHD symptoms don’t exist in a vacuum and hormones can crank them up or turn them down. And this can be greatly impacted depending on your stage of life or if you have a cycle, and then where you are in that cycle.
- Burnout is often a side effect of saying “yes” too many times when your brain and body are already maxed out. Protecting your energy starts with noticing when your capacity dips and giving yourself permission to scale back. It’s important to create these boundaries so that you are protecting the version of you that you that you still want to be at the end of the week.
- A big takeaway from Kara’s work is that your body will tell you what’s up, tight shoulders, clenched jaw, fatigue, restlessness are all early warnings that your system’s running on fumes. Building quick body check-ins into your day can help you catch burnout at a “three” instead of waiting for it to hit “ten.”
- Managing ADHD isn’t only about planners and meds; it’s also about repairing your relationship with yourself and the shame that has built up from ADHD struggles. That means recognizing how years of undiagnosed or misunderstood ADHD may have shaped your self-esteem through shame and self-blame and learning to separate your symptoms from your worth.
- And with that last tip, I just want to remind everyone, yes, you are enough.
Hey team!
Today I’m talking with Nick Jonsson, a best-selling author, executive coach, and co-founder of Executives’ Global Network. Nick is the author of Executive Loneliness: The 5 Pathways to Overcoming Isolation, Stress, Anxiety & Depression in the Modern Business World. His work focuses on helping leaders tackle isolation, burnout, and addiction while finding healthier, more sustainable ways to succeed.
Now I realize that doesn’t seem particularly ADHD focused, but I thought that this would be a good interview to take because adults with ADHD have a substantially increased risk of substance use disorders. And so while Nick’s work doesn’t specifically cover ADHD, there is still a lot that you can glean from it.
In our conversation, Nick shares his own journey through loneliness, denial, and alcohol addiction, and how vulnerability and connection became essential tools for his recovery. We dig into practical strategies for opening up in safe spaces, replacing harmful coping mechanisms with meaningful activities, and creating accountability systems that support long-term well-being. We also touch on how social media and other modern habits can quietly feed into loneliness, and what it takes to build resilience against them.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/248
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
- Frame recovery as replacement, not deprivation. When looking to break out of unhealthy coping mechanisms, be they alcohol, social media, or some other addiction, deliberately plan what will give you that same connection without the negative costs. Having planned positive alternatives like exercise, hobbies, or group activities can make all the difference in following through with your intentions.
- Watch out for the “gray zone” of addiction; you don’t need to wait until hitting rock bottom to start changing habits. If you are questioning your relationship with alcohol, social media, or other damaging habits, take the time to reflect on what is really driving those habits. Remember, you don’t have to make something worse before making it better.
- When you can, volunteering in support groups or mentoring others not only helps them, but it can also reinforce your own sense of belonging and purpose.
Welcome to hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD Brain. And today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, although today we're going to be looking at two and so it's a little something different.
What we do is we try to see how the papers were conducted, try to find any practical takeaways and discuss what's going on in these papers. So the two papers we're gonna discuss today are Boredom, Proneness, and its correlation with internet addiction and internet activities and adolescence with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And our second paper then is boredom, proneness and Inattention in Children With and Without ADHD, the mediating rule of delay aversion.
So lots in there, lots to discuss. And we'll get all into that. And as this is a new series, I do wanna make sure that people know that. I would love to hear what your thoughts about it. Feel free to go to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and leave me a note about what you think about this series.
I'd love to hear about this and I've really appreciated all the feedback I've already gotten for this series. So I'd love to hear more and make sure that I'm doing this in ways that you guys really like. Now, new episodes of Research Recap will be coming out every other Friday.
And with that, let's get into this.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/247
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey Team!
This week, I’m talking with Emmy-winning composers Kat Raio Rende and JP Rende, a husband and wife team who’ve written music for everyone from Elmo to the Jonas Brothers. But today we’re talking about their project Aidee, a collection of songs designed to help kids with ADHD build everyday tools through music.
I got a chance to listen through the album before the interview and it’s honestly really great. Since having my own kids I’ve had the opportunity to listen to a lot of children’s music, so I was pleasantly surprised with how good the songs actually are and how quickly the messages got into my head.
Which leads right into what we Kat, JP and I talked about in the interview - how we can use music as a tool for memory and routines, why silly songs can be powerful ADHD strategies, and how turning everyday frustrations into sticky little tunes can lower shame and raise confidence. We also get into working with ADHD but also how to navigate working with a partner who has ADHD. We also touch on breathing exercises, dealing with shame, and the parenting tightrope of empathy and boundaries.
AIDEE - Nothing Rhymes with Orange Full Album - https://www.youtube.com/@AIDEEHD Kat & JP website - https://www.earwormny.com/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/246
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
For our tips today, let’s go through all those songs on the album, each of which is a tool in itself:
- Anything Else - Reminding us to check if there is anything else we need when we leave the house.
- Mad Mad (Jelly Belly) - which asks us to check in with ourselves when we’re feeling dysregulated and seeing if maybe we just need to take a second to take care of our basic needs
- Put it Away - I think this one is pretty clear cut, don’t put it down, put it away.
- Control - While one of the symptoms of ADHD is that we tend to be quite impulsive, we still have control over our actions - when you feel that impulse you can take a breath and decide if that’s what you really want to do
- Learning More Everyday - We’re a work in progress and while we’ll have mistakes along the way, that’s okay
- Breathe - when we’re feeling overwhelmed it’s important for us to slow down and take a second to breathe and get ourselves recenter
And remember to hear all those songs just check out the Aidee Youtube channel - link in the show notes
t for a few months now and it’s definitely one that I’m always on the look out for new episodes. Rae does a great job with her interviews, asking both the basic questions to help ground the conversation, but also getting into the more nuanced issues that come with neurodivergence.
Today, I’m going to share an episode with you where Rae talks with Dr. Christine Hargrove, a Marriage & Family Therapist with a focus on neurodiversity and financial therapy that she uses to help individuals and couples understand how their symptoms affect their financial behavior.
And honestly, this is a great episode - I know so many people who struggle with their finances, but more specifically, struggle directly because of their ADHD.
Be sure to subscribe to Hyperfocus with Rea Jacobson in your podcast player!
Welcome to Hacking your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try to find any key practical takeaways—stuff that you can actually use. In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called Do Executive Dysfunction, Delay Aversion and Time Perception Deficits Predict ADHD Symptoms and Early Academic Performance in Preschoolers.
And yeah, there's a lot in there, but don’t worry, we’ll be getting into all of it. Before we get started, I want to mention that this is still a new series, so we’re going to be figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and I’d love to hear what you all think of it. So if you have thoughts, head on over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know. I appreciate all the feedback I’ve already gotten, and we’re definitely going to be working on organizing the episodes a little bit more to help you get the most out of every one. New episodes of Research Recap will be coming out every other Friday. And with that, let’s get into it.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/245
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey Team!
This week I’m chatting with Beverly Atkins, founder of Pauseture, an audio-based mindful movement platform grounded in the Feldenkrais Method. It’s actually kind of funny, despite Feldenkrais not being particularly well known, this isn’t the first time I’ve discussed it on a podcast, although the last time was on my old ultimate frisbee podcast nearly a decade ago.
Anyway, in our conversation today, we discuss how Beverly spent decades unknowingly managing her ADHD by overachieving at work and ignoring her body. But we all know this story and how we all eventually hit a breaking point. Fortunately for Beverly, she stumbled her way into the Feldenkrais method.
In the podcast, we dive into how these seemingly simple movements helped Beverly calm her nervous system, get better sleep, regulate her sound sensitivity, and develop an entirely new relationship with her attention. We get into how movement can rewire attention, why novelty is so important for ADHD regulation, and how she took her training and built an app that looks to specifically accommodate neurodivergent needs. I loved this episode; there's a lot of wisdom here about self-awareness, regulation, and finding what works for your unique ADHD flavor.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/244
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Novelty can help drive engagement and attention, especially when it comes to something repetitive like a daily practice. It's not about needing something stimulating in the flashy sense, but rather something that’s engaging. Engagement can come in many forms, such as unpredictability, exploration, and just enough challenge to keep us curious.
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That ability to move your attention on purpose is a skill, one that’s often underdeveloped in ADHD brains. While it’s easy to think of movement-based practices as purely physical, it’s how you’re paying attention during the movements that matters; strengthening your ability to shift and direct your attention.
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Many mindfulness practices involve some level of stillness that doesn’t always sit right with some ADHD brains. It’s important to listen to what actually works for your body, rather than just what “should” work. If you find the stillness aspect of mindfulness makes you too agitated and restless, try something that has some kind of active aspect to it.
Hey Team!
This week, I’m talking with Rita Ramakrishnan, a seasoned strategic executive and leadership coach with over 15 years of experience. Diagnosed with both ADHD and Autism Spectrum during her undergrad years, Rita reframed what could have been limitations into strengths and now looks to uplift other neurodivergent women in leadership roles.
Currently, she is pursuing a master's degree in neurodivergent leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, intensifying her expertise in coaching and organizational strategy tailored to neurodivergent individuals.
In our conversation, we cover everything from identifying when you’re dysregulated (and what to do about it) to designing teams that play to everyone’s strengths. Rita walks us through practical tools like outsourcing strategically, tracking your energy to uncover strengths, and building a leadership charter so teams can work more effectively together. It’s a conversation about leading authentically, creating systems that work for your brain, and how to advocate for your needs without falling into people-pleasing traps.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/243
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Try creating a Minimum Viable Routine - your baseline routine that consists of the bare minimum you need in place to function. The point of an MVR is to take those non-negotiables and lock them in, either with automation, outsourcing, or simple systems. That way, when ADHD throws a curveball, you still have the essentials covered.
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Instead of only measuring productivity by what gets checked off a to-do list, try looking at how you feel after activities. Track when you walk away from a meeting or task feeling energized, and when you walk away feeling drained. 3. Rejection sensitivity hits hard for many folks with ADHD. A short email reply, a period at the end of a text, or even a coworker sounding rushed can feel like a personal rejection. Rita’s advice is to deliberately separate yourself from the situation and try to depersonalize feedback. This reframing can help shift from identity-based thinking (like “I’m the problem”) to more situation-based thinking (“this may be tough, but it’s fixable”).
Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD Brain.
Today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called Effects of Physical Exercise on Anxiety, depression and Emotion Regulation in Children with ADHD, a systematic Review and meta analysis.
Yep. Lot, lots in there, but we're gonna get into all of it, so don't worry.
Now before we get started, I do wanna mention that this is still a new series, so we're going to be figuring out what works and what doesn't, and I'd love to hear what you think of it all. So if you have any thoughts, head on over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know.
I appreciate all the feedback I've already gotten and we've definitely got to work on some things to make sure they're a little bit more organized and so we'll see how that goes. We've been already implementing some of that and I am sure you're gonna love it. New episodes of Research Recap come out every other Friday.
All right, let's get into it.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/242
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Today I’m talking with Danielle Elliot, a health and science journalist, documentarian, and host of Climbing the Walls, an investigative podcast from Understood.org digging into the surge in ADHD diagnoses among women—especially since the pandemic. If that sounds familiar, it’s cause I did a number of ads for her show a few months back, and I just wanted to make sure that I mention that, since while I’m not getting paid for this episode, I have done work with Understood before and probably will be promoting more of their stuff in the future.
Anyway, in our conversation today, we cover a lot of ground, from debunking the idea that no one knew women could have ADHD until recently, to how social media has reshaped the conversation, to why research on hormones and ADHD is still way behind. We also get into the everyday realities of living with ADHD, the default mode network, and why we need far more research into how ADHD shows up in women. It’s a mix of science, lived experience, and the kind of practical reflection that can help you rethink how ADHD fits into your life.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at http://hackingyouradhd.com/241
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Instead of guessing when you’ve overbooked yourself, start tracking it like an experiment. For a few weeks, note each day you have social, professional, or mentally demanding activities beyond your baseline, then try and figure out how many consecutive “on” days it takes before you feel fried.
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Downtime doesn’t magically appear and needs to be scheduled on the calendar, or it often just gets eaten by other people’s needs or whatever’s loudest in the moment. If someone asks you to do something during that block, you can truthfully say you already have something scheduled. Treating self-care time as a legit appointment protects it from getting deprioritized just because it’s “only for you.”
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A common ADHD trap is overestimating how awful or time-consuming a task will be, which makes it easier to avoid it. Try timing your tasks to give yourself actual data to challenge your brain’s “this will take forever” narrative and can turn a dreaded job into something you knock out in a couple of minutes.
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Consider hormonal factors when tracking ADHD symptoms, as hormones have a big influence on your ADHD symptoms, yet are often overlooked. Hormonal changes can affect focus, energy, mood, and even how well ADHD medication works. Tracking your symptoms alongside your cycle or other hormonal shifts can help you spot patterns and adjust strategies accordingly.
Hey team!
My guest this week is Dr. Ute Liersch, a Chartered Counselling and Coaching Psychologist with over a decade of clinical experience and author of A Minimalist’s Guide to Becoming Resilient. Dr. Ute specializes in helping adults navigate anxiety, ADHD, and burnout.
Her therapeutic approach is integrative, drawing from modalities such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and mindfulness-based therapies. Beyond her clinical practice, Dr. Ute is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and holds a Fellowship in Higher Education.
In our conversation, we explore the nervous system beyond the textbook fight-flight-freeze model, including how our nervous system shapes our mood, motivation, and even the way we see the world. Dr. Ute explains why so many of us with ADHD find that our sympathetic nervous system is permanently on edge and how we can work on rewiring that response. We also talk about perfectionism, attention types, and what resilience looks like in real life, breaking it down into actionable steps that fit into our schedules and ADHD brains.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at http://hackingyouradhd.com/240
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Our parasympathetic nervous system can get stuck in a permanent state of “go time.” To help move our PNS back to a relaxed state, Dr. Ute suggests progressive muscle relaxation, where you are tensing and then releasing muscle groups one at a time so you can physically feel the shift from tension to ease.
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Many of us have internalized the idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we work, think, or exist. Dr. Ute suggests replacing this assumption of personal defect with curiosity: “If I weren’t wrong, what would I need to feel safe?” This slight shift can open up room to problem-solve and tailor strategies to your actual needs.
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We often talk about resilience like it’s a fixed trait—you either “have it” or you don’t. But Dr. Ute points out that resilience is about what you do, not what you are. It’s built in small, repeatable actions that teach your nervous system and your mind how to recover from stressors. Resilience isn’t about holding it together forever; it’s about giving yourself enough space and recovery so you can keep going when you need it the most.
Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host William Curb and I have ADHD. On this podcast I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain.
And today I’m joined by Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In these episodes, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
Today we’re going to be discussing a paper called Time after time: Failure to identify and support females with ADHD – a Swedish population register study
As this is a new series, we’re going to be figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and I’d love to hear what y’all think of it, so if you have thoughts, head on over to Hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know.
I appreciate all the feedback I’ve already gotten and we’re definitely going to work on making sure to get these episodes a little more organized and help you get the most out of every one.
New episodes of research recap will be coming out every other Friday.
All right, let’s get on with the show.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/239
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey Team!
My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Dall, a grief-informed neurodivergence specialist, ADHD coach, and educator with more than 25 years of experience. She’s the founder of ADHD Holistically, and blends her expertise in education, yoga, and grief work to build a focus on the whole person to create personalized, sustainable approaches for neurodivergent brains.
In our conversation today, we dig into how societal expectations and outdated research have kept so many women from being recognized as having ADHD. We explore the ways ADHD symptoms often present differently in women, the impact of masking, and the hidden toll of trying to “just keep up.” Dr. Dall also shares quick, real-world strategies for tackling the everyday hurdles that come with ADHD, from taming your to-do list to breaking free of shame around getting help.
adhdholistically.com
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/238
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Low-interest tasks like laundry, dishes, or paying bills often aren’t just one thing. They’re a series of micro-steps that might require you to switch gears, remember where you were, and re-engage. Each step is a potential stall point for an ADHD brain, especially if the task is competing with something more engaging.
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Watch out for overstimulation shutdowns; ADHD brains can have trouble filtering out sensory input and mental noise. If we can learn to recognize when we’re starting to hit sensory or mental overload, it makes it easier for us to take care of ourselves without burning out.
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Tasks like keeping track of everyone’s schedules, making sure the pantry’s stocked, or managing the emotional climate of a household often go unnoticed, but these tasks are still real work and they’re important. If we can give this work the weight it deserves, it can help us start seeing ourselves (or someone else in our household) as productive even when the results aren’t as visible or tangible as other tasks.
This week, we’ve got the return of my friend Saman Kesh, an award-winning music video director and all-around creative force of nature, to talk about the wild and untamed internal landscape of ADHD productivity.
Saman is known for his work with bands such as Kygo, Basement Jaxx, and Placebo. And most recently, his work directing Ed Sheeran’s Azizam music video - if you haven’t seen it, check it out, it’s real cool.
We get into the weeds of what makes a tool “sticky,” how to lower both the hurdle and the stakes when you’re stuck, and the role of friction in derailing our systems. Saman also shares how he uses routines, gamification, and a lot of self-reparenting to manage the inevitable paralysis that comes with big projects, tiny tasks, and everything in between.
This one’s much more of a chill conversation with friends about what works and what doesn’t in their ADHD worlds.
Azizam (Official Music Video) - Written and Directed by Saman Kesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9ZpIKgyf0
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/237
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Try reducing friction on your most important tools. Move your organizational tools (like whiteboards or to-do lists) somewhere visible and easy to access. Out of sight, really is out of mind with ADHD.
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Lower the Stakes when a task feels overwhelming. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect or done all at once; if we can reduce the emotional weight of a task, it often also reduces the paralysis.
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When feeling stuck, try spicing things up by using things like dice, tactile tools, or creative mini-games (like drawing a doodle or rolling a task die) to inject novelty and dopamine into your routine.
Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host William Curb and I have ADHD. On this podcast I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain.
In this episode we’re going to be continuing our Research Recap series with Skye Waterson. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we’re going to be discussing a paper called Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) improves hot and cold executive functions in children with attention deficit‑hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57920-3
Now if that sounds like a complete mouthful don’t worry, we’ll be getting into whatever in thing in there means.
As this is a new series, we’re going to be figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and I’d love to hear what y’all think of it, so if you have thoughts, head on over to http://Hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know.
I appreciate all the feedback I’ve already gotten and we’re definitely going to work on making sure to get these episodes a little more organized and help you get the most out of every one.
New episodes of research recap will be coming out every other Friday.
All right, let’s get on with the show.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/236
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey team!
Today I’m talking with Katie Friedman and Alex Campbell, the brains and heart behind Gold Mind Academy, an ICF-accredited, ADHD-friendly training program, crafted to support ADHDers on their journey to success. And their new book, “ADHD… Now What?”, aims to give you the tools you need to find a coach that is right for you and how to advocate for your needs. And honestly, I love this approach to the book because while there are a lot of ADHD coaches out there, it’s important to find someone who is going to work best with you.
So who are these people?
Katie is a long time educator turned ICF-accredited ADHD coach and also a TEDx speaker.
Alex is also an ICF-accredited ADHD coach, but also a psychotherapist and one of the first children in the UK to be diagnosed with ADHD back in 1990.
In our conversation today, we explore what coaching really looks like beyond surface-level goal setting. Alex and Katie break down how understanding your strengths can lead to better self-advocacy and less burnout. We also talk about survival mode, how internalized ableism and societal “shoulds” trip us up, and why connection, with ourselves and with others, is essential for building sustainable strategies.
I had a great time with this conversation and it gave me a lot to think about, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Gold Mind Academy: https://goldmindacademy.com/
ADHD… Now What?: https://goldmindacademy.com/adhd-book
Katie Friedman Tedx: https://youtu.be/_G91NFmKpF8
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/235
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
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Work on shifting from a deficit lens to a strengths lens. We want to understand not just what we’re good at but what we need in place to express those strengths effectively.
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It’s important that we integrate identity first and strategy second. For real change to happen, we need to understand and accept who we are before trying to layer on productivity tools.
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ADHD isn’t easy to manage in isolation. With teamwork and support systems, we can drastically reduce burnout and overwhelm, so it’s incredibly important that we work on building connection and community.
Hey Team!
This week I’m talking with Britt Piper, a somatic experiencing practitioner, trauma educator, and author of Body First Healing. Britt’s work focuses on understanding how trauma impacts the nervous system and brings both professional expertise and a deeply personal understanding of what it means to heal.
In our conversation, we start with Britt's story and then we dive into what somatic therapy actually looks like, how trauma can live in the body long after the mind “knows” we’re safe, and why the nervous system often gets stuck in survival mode. We also get into the science behind stress responses, intergenerational trauma, and practical ways to start listening to your body’s signals instead of fighting against them.
Also, just as a quick note before we get into it, today’s episode includes discussion of trauma, including mentions of sexual violence, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts. If these topics are sensitive for you, please take care while listening - feel free to skip ahead or pause when needed.
Books
Body First Healing by Britt Piper
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn
Therapy & Practitioner Resource
Somatic Experiencing International - https://traumahealing.org/
The Embody Lab - https://www.theembodylab.com/
Britt’s Body First Healing Program - https://www.bodyfirsthealing.com/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/234
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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Somatic practices are body-based approaches to healing that focus on how trauma and stress are held in the nervous system rather than just the mind. They employ gentle techniques, such as tracking body sensations, subtle movements, and breath, to help the body complete its stress response cycles.
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SI-BAM is a tool from Somatic Experiencing that helps track your internal state when emotions feel vague or difficult to name. It stands for Sensation, Image, Behavior, Affect (emotion), and Meaning. It begins by noticing physical sensations (such as tightness, warmth, or buzzing), and then observing if any mental images arise. It is followed by observing your body’s behavior or impulses (fidgeting, leaning forward) and from there checking for any identifiable emotions, and noticing what meaning or story you attach to the experience.
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If you feel stuck in the same emotional patterns and if stress, anxiety, or trauma seem to “live” in your body, showing up as chronic tension, pain, or fatigue, somatic therapy could be an option for you. Somatic work can give you tools to gently release that “stuck” survival energy and restore a sense of calm.
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When dealing with trauma, you don’t have to go it alone, but it is also important to work with a practitioner who understands what they are doing. And understand that somatic therapy is just one of many options that you can use to help you get the help you need.
Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host William Curb and I have ADHD. On this podcast I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. In this episode we’re going to be continuing our Research Recaps with Skye Waterson series
In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the Default Mode Network
As this is a new series, we’re going to be figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and I’d love to hear what y’all think of it, so if you have thoughts, head on over to Hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know.
New episodes of research recap will be coming out every other Friday.
All right, let’s get on with the show.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cns.14900 - Interference of default mode on attention networks in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and its association with genetic variants and treatment outcomes
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/233
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey team!
Our guest today is Dr. Otito Iwuchukwu, who is here to talk about the emotional and psychological aspects of belonging and how it impacts our day-to-day lives. Dr. Iwuchukwu has a Master of Arts in Organizational Psychology from the College of Psychology and Counseling, a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, with a specialization in Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, from Temple University, and is currently an Associate Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her scholarly contributions appear in a range of peer-reviewed and indexed publications and have been presented at numerous research meetings and symposia across the world.
Additionally, Dr. Iwuchukwu has recently written The Belonging Paradox, a book that presents a new way to understand belonging as an adaptive journey rather than a static destination.
In this episode, we talk about why belonging is a dynamic, ongoing process, not a fixed state, and how we can create more inclusive environments for ourselves and others. We’ll also discuss how masking impacts our sense of belonging, the role boundaries play in maintaining our authenticity, and the importance of giving ourselves and others grace. If you’ve ever struggled with finding your place, especially in social settings or work environments, you’ll find practical tools in this conversation for navigating those tough moments.
The Belonging Paradox - https://www.otitoiwuchukwu.com/new-book/
Dr. Otito Iwuchukwu on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/otitoiwuchukwu/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/232
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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Belonging isn’t a fixed state, but an ongoing process that changes with both your internal state and the external environment. Recognizing this can help you manage expectations and frustrations when your sense of belonging fluctuates.
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Recognize that you don’t have to belong to every group, and not all groups are meant for a deep, personal connection. Don’t force yourself to belong in every situation; if a group or environment doesn’t feel right, it’s okay to step back.
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You don’t have to be liked by everyone. Instead, it’s important for us to focus on finding spaces where we can truly belong. It’s about finding authentic connections, not chasing superficial acceptance.
Hey team!
In today’s episode, I’m chatting with Valerie McIntyre, a Licensed Professional Counselor, an ADHD-Certified Clinical Services Provider, and the author of A Journey to a Valiant Mind, a book that dives into navigating ADHD with resilience and self-compassion.
In our conversation, we dive into how ADHD isn’t just about task management, but how, more often than not, it's also about emotional regulation. Valerie talks about the complex emotions that come with ADHD, especially for late-diagnosed individuals, and how those feelings often get tangled up with shame and self-judgment. We also touch on how perfectionism, rejection sensitivity, and even seemingly small tasks can build up into emotional barriers. Valerie’s approach emphasizes compassion, and this episode is filled with tools to help you break free from self-doubt and cultivate a more positive, empowered relationship with your ADHD.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/231
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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It’s important to recognize that emotional struggles are often rooted in our internalized beliefs about our ADHD symptoms. These beliefs shape how we perceive ourselves and what we’re able to accomplish, and our emotional responses.
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Often, there can be a struggle when shifting from one task to another. If we can acknowledge that there may be a delay in how your brain transitions between tasks and give ourselves time to adapt, we can make those transitions easier.
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We can use reflective exercises, like journaling or discussion questions, to gain insight into our emotional triggers. This can help us identify better coping mechanisms that actually address the underlying issues we’re trying to overcome.
Hey team welcome to another episode of Hacking Your ADHD
Im your host, William Curb and this week we’re starting a new series on the show, Research Recaps with Skye Waterson. In this series we’re going to be taking a look at a single research paper and diving into what the paper says, how it was conducted and any practical take aways.
In this first episode of the series we’re going to be exploring a paper called Emotional regulation as a core symptom of ADHD.
As this is a new series we’re going to be figuring out what works and what doesn’t and I’d love to hear what y’all think of it, so if you have thoughts head on over to Hackingyouradhd.com/contact and let me know.
New episodes of research recap will be coming out every other Friday.
All right, let’s get on with the show.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/230
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
Hey team!
This week we’ve got a returning guest - Skye Waterson, founder of Unconventional Organisation and host of the ADHD Skills Lab podcast. Skye’s background includes studies in Psychology, Sociology, and Public Health, and she’s spent over seven years helping late-diagnosed adults create sustainable ADHD strategies.
And one of the exciting things that has come from this episode is that Skye and I are going to be doing a spin-off series of the show that focuses exclusively on the research side of ADHD. In these new episodes, we’ll be taking a look at a single research paper and discussing the ins and outs of what the paper says and how it was conducted, as well as trying to give any practical takeaways that will can drum up. Episode lengths are going right back to the origins of this podcast, so we’re aiming for something 15-20 minutes long, but packed with information.
Right now, we’re just going with the name Research Recap with Skye, so we’ll see if we come up with anything a bit more clever than that. Now, if that sounds like something you’re interested in, good news, you don’t have to do anything; these episodes are going to be coming out on the Hacking Your ADHD feed, so they’ll come up right along with all your other podcast downloads. These episodes are going to be coming out every other Friday starting this Friday, July 11th - and as a little preview we're gonna be talking about a paper called “Evidence of Emotion Dysregulation as a Core Symptom of Adult ADHD: A systematic review” - I know, it sounds riveting, and actually, I think we do a pretty good job with it.
But enough on that, let’s jump into what this episode you’re listening to right now is about. In this episode, we’re talking about dopamine and dopamine transfer deficit theory, and Skye lays out her concept of the dopamine dial. We cover everything from how our brains misfire on rewards to fidget toys, and why doom-scrolling on your third screen might not be giving you the kind of stimulation you think it is. This episode is all about dialing it in instead of shutting it all down.
https://tinyurl.com/4u4av4s4 - An ADHD Academic's Answer to the Dopamine Detox by Skye Waterson
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/229
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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The dopamine dial is a mental model that helps you modulate your level of stimulation, rather than flipping an on/off switch. Instead of quitting stimulating activities all at once (e.g., trying a dopamine detox), you dial down your stimulation in steps.
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Doing the hard thing now and waiting for the reward later often doesn’t land. Instead, we often need to feel a reward during the process, not just at the end. We can use the dopamine dial to reward ourselves with just enough stimulation to stay engaged without pushing our brain into full-blown distraction or burnout mode. It’s not about denying ourselves stimulation, it’s about using it intentionally and dialing it to the right level.
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Try negotiating with your brain when you're feeling emotionally overwhelmed or hyper-focused on a desire, such as feeling like you just need to play a video game right now. Try taking a 10-minute breather to reassess those feelings rather than trying to force or deny that urge outright.
Hey Team!
This week, I’m talking with Dr. Ari Tuckman, a psychologist, certified sex therapist, and one of the most well-known voices in adult ADHD. Ari brings over 25 years of clinical experience to the table, along with his new book, The ADHD Productivity Manual, which takes a honest look at the tools we use, and why they sometimes don’t work the way we want them to. It was actually funny, before the call, we were joking about how it's funny that our orbits hadn’t crossed before - well, I do get into one anecdote about attending a talk he gave in 2019, but that’s basically as close as we’d interacted before this.
In our conversation, we unpack how shame and comparison can hijack our energy, how to set reminders that actually help instead of hinder, and why simple doesn’t always mean easy. We also touch on what it means to communicate your needs assertively (without over-apologizing) and why trying to do everything perfectly is the fastest route to doing nothing at all. There’s a ton of easy-to-access, actionable advice in this episode. I had a ton of fun with it, and I think you’ll love it too.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/228
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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Include contextual details in your reminders. Put the address, building name, or even office location in the event title so you don’t show up on time or in the wrong place.
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Distinguish between “simple” and “easy.” Just because a task is straightforward (like taking out the trash) doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, especially with ADHD.
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Be strategic with your best focus time. Don’t “spend gold on garbage” - use your high-focus hours for harder tasks, not emails or unloading the dishwasher. Do less, but do it on purpose. Sometimes productivity means pulling back and intentionally choosing what not to do, instead of doing everything poorly.
When you’ve got ADHD, it can be hard to navigate relationships, be they with friends, coworkers, your kids, or your significant other.
That’s why I want to introduce you to another show today. It’s called Sorry, I Missed This.
In the show host and sex educator Cate Osborn explores questions like:
How do I know what I want out of a relationship?
How do I remember my friends exist?
What can I do to handle conflict better?
I’ve been recently listening to Sorry I Missed This, and it’s just been so much fun to listen to. Cate, or Cateosaurus as she’s known on the socials, is incredibly charming, and she brings so much real-world experience with her in these episodes that the conversations feel both grounded and enlightening.
The episode I’m about to play for you is about the influence of ADHD on social skills - I got a lot out of this episode, and I think you will too.
Be sure to subscribe to Sorry I Missed This in your podcast player!
Hey Team!
On today’s episode, we’re breaking down one of the most frustratingly simple yet hard ADHD challenges, eating, because come on, we have to do it every day, but also, we have to do it everyday. We’ve got a returning guest, Jackie Silver, a Registered Dietitian with a Masters of Health Science in Nutrition Communications. She’s built her practice, Accessible Wellness, around making food and nourishment doable, even on the days when executive function is nowhere to be found.
In our conversation, we dig into why eating with ADHD can be so difficult, from executive dysfunction to low appetite, forgotten meals, and food aversions. We also explore practical strategies for eating, managing dopamine-seeking snacking, handling picky eating, and finding low-effort meals that still meet at least some of those nutritional requirements. Plus, we talk shame, sensory preferences, and how to stop making mealtimes harder than they need to be.
Website: https://jackiesilvernutrition.com/
Free Download “Neurodivergent Grab & Go Foods List”: https://jackiesilvernutrition.com/grab-and-go-foods-list/
Free 15-minute Discovery Call Bookings: https://l.bttr.to/htZ1u
Blog: https://jackiesilvernutrition.com/blog/
Meal Prep Made Easy Course: https://jackiesilvernutrition.com/meal-prep-made-easy/
If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/227
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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When needed, you can try out mechanical eating, where you are eating on a schedule, regardless of hunger cues, to compensate for poor interoception or appetite suppression from meds.
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Try creating a grab-and-go food list. Having a list of foods that are easy to prep, safe to eat, and require minimal effort (like string cheese, baby carrots, or pre-cooked rice packs) can help reduce friction when deciding what to eat.
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Work on acknowledging emotional and sensory triggers for eating. Sometimes we crave specific foods because of their texture, taste, or comfort, rather than hunger. Recognizing the why behind the urge can help you make more aligned choices, and remember it’s okay to fill those other needs as well.
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Give yourself permission to eat without shame. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with your safe foods when you need them. The idea that adults should eat a certain way can be unhelpful and ableist. Focus on doing what works best for you.
This week, I’m talking with Stephen Tonti and Aaron Smith, co-founders of the ADHD edutainment platform Attention Different. It’s a podcast and resource hub for ADHD adults looking for support, humor, and, most importantly, strategies that actually work.
I got to know Stephen and Aaron at the 2024 ADHD Conference in Anaheim. Stephen’s a filmmaker and longtime ADHD advocate who’s been trying to reframe ADHD as a difference, not a disorder. Aaron’s a licensed therapist and ADHD coach, helping clients bridge the gap between clinical understanding and real-world functionality.
In this episode, we dig into the messy middle of adulting with ADHD. We explore why the strategies that worked before suddenly stop working, the emotional aftermath of small mistakes, and why sometimes the best thing you can do is just… breathe.
I had a lot of fun with this one, it’s a grounded, funny, and deeply practical conversation about living with ADHD, without trying to fix it into something it’s not.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/226
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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You don’t need to finish all the dishes to feel like you’ve succeeded. Sometimes, doing just part of the task can be good enough, and good enough is a win.
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We’re not always going to have high-capacity days, so work on shifting your mindset from “What can’t I do?” to “What can I do with the energy I have?” Reframing these thoughts can help manage low-capacity days with less shame.
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In conflict, slow down. Shut up, breathe, listen, ask questions. This sequence can help de-escalate emotional tension, create space for connection, and avoid falling into defensiveness.
Hey Team!
This week I'm talking with H.H. Rune, a Pacific Northwest-based author whose writing explores neurodivergence, identity, and rediscovering meaning in everyday life. Rune was diagnosed with ADHD at 52 after decades of feeling like she was just "bad at life"—something I know I’ve felt a lot of in my own journey.
In our conversation today, we talk through the emotional processing of a late diagnosis—Rune describes it as going through the five stages of grief—and how she’s reshaped her relationship with herself, her work, and the people around her. Rune also shares the evolution of her long-running book series and how ADHD both challenged and fueled her creative process.
Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast here!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/225
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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Avoid relying on memory, especially for creative ideas, and lean on tools like reminders, email, and structure to back up your attention. Don’t trust your brain to remember and instead trust the systems you’ve set up.
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Try celebrating your ADHD curiosity. Instead of shaming yourself for going down “random” thought paths, reframe your curiosity as a gift and use humor to engage others.
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Getting a late diagnosis can require a lot of emotional processing. Rune describes going through the five stages of grief post-diagnosis, acknowledging that the loss of a "life that could have been" is real and valid.
This week I’m joined again by Cynthia Hammer, founder of ADD Resources, the Inattentive ADHD Coalition, and more recently, FINDtheADHDgirls. Cynthia’s been a driving force in ADHD advocacy since the 90s and continues to be one of the loudest and clearest voices calling for earlier, more accurate diagnoses—especially for girls.
In our chat, we talked about how inattentive ADHD often slips through the cracks, especially in school settings, and how often many of us end up masking so well that even parents and teachers miss the signs. And since inattentive ADHD is predominantly seen in women, this is just another one of those issues that has driven so many women to go undiagnosed.
Cynthia walks us through the new ADHD screening checklist she developed, the importance of identifying co-occurring conditions, and how things like sleep, histamine intolerance, and even stretchy joints can intersect with ADHD in ways that aren’t always obvious.
Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast here!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/224
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Not all hyperactivity is easy to spot. When dealing with combined type, many suppress hyperactivity and find subtle, socially acceptable ways to move around (like volunteering to hand out papers or making frequent trips to sharpen pencils) as a form of masked hyperactivity.
- Masking can often lead to delayed or missed diagnosis, especially for those who are people pleasers or academically high-performing. When a child seems fine at school but crashes emotionally at home, that’s a sign they may be overcompensating or masking symptoms all day.
- Early intervention helps build long-term executive function. Treating ADHD early isn’t just about managing symptoms in the moment; it's about teaching skills like organization, regulation, and focus while the brain is most plastic and ready to learn.
Hey team!
Today I’m talking with Jacob Nordby—author, creative mentor, and founder of the Institute for Creative Living. Jacob’s work blends personal development, creativity, and storytelling to help people live more aligned and authentic lives.
In our conversation, we talk about his late ADHD diagnosis and how that shaped his journey to finding his authentic self. We explore the challenges of masking, the struggle of figuring out who you really are after years of trying to fit in, and how journaling, self-discovery tools, and embracing curiosity can help peel back those layers. We also dive into what it means to live authentically with ADHD and the ways masking can drain us.
Start Freedom today! Use code ADHD40 to get them 40% off a Freedom Yearly premium subscription!
Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast here!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/223
YouTube
Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Use daily journaling with intentional prompts—Jacob recommends asking “How do I feel right now?”, “What do I need right now?”, and “What would I love to create?” to reconnect with your emotions, needs, and creative energy.
- Frame “rest” as active recovery—Instead of shaming yourself for downtime, recognize that pulling back sensory input (like a “pajama day” with blackout curtains) can be a crucial nervous system reset.
- Practice nonjudgmental self-discovery—Approach your exploration of who you are with curiosity instead of criticism, creating a safer internal space for growth.
This week I’m talking with Dr. Maggie Sibley, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Sibley has spent over two decades studying ADHD, and is author or co-author of over 120 research papers on the topic. And she is the author of Parent-Teen Therapy for Executive Function Deficits and ADHD: Building Skills and Motivation.
So recently, when I was working on the newsletter for the show, I came across an article about ADHD titled "Study describes fluctuations, remissions seen with ADHD,” and that felt like it was worth investigating more. While reading through the paper that was linked into the article I got to thinking, “hey, I’d love to ask some more questions about the findings in this paper,” and it occurred to me, hey, I can just reach out to the author of the paper for a conversation on the podcast.
And so that’s what today’s show is all about, we dig into that paper, titled “Characteristics and Predictors of Fluctuating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in the Multimodal Treatment of ADHD (MTA) Study” that looks into symptom fluctuation based on the a review of the Multimodal Treatment of ADHD (MTA) Study. We talk about how ADHD symptoms don’t just disappear but actually tend to fluctuate — a lot more than many researchers expected. We also dive into why having more going on in life might actually make your ADHD symptoms less severe (or how that’s just one interpretation of the results), how motivation works for us, and what it means to find your own “sweet spot” of structure. Plus, we get into the upcoming diagnostic guidelines for adult ADHD from the American Professional Society for ADHD and Related Disorders.
This is definitely an episode you don’t want to miss if you really enjoy the sciency side of things.
Start Freedom today! Use code ADHD40 to get them 40% off a Freedom Yearly premium subscription!
Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast here!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/222
YouTube Channel
My Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- ADHD symptoms don’t always follow a straight decline or improvement. Symptoms can often fluctuate, sometimes improving for years and then intensifying again. Expect waves, not a straight line, and don’t blame yourself when experiencing higher-than-normal symptoms.
- When you’re in a phase where ADHD feels more manageable, that’s a great time to try and take on more meaningful responsibilities — like work, school, or parenting — that can help create external structure and reinforce good patterns.
- While having more life demands (like a busy schedule, work responsibilities, or kids) can improve ADHD functioning by creating natural urgency and external motivators, it’s also important to make sure it doesn’t tip into overload.
- Not all clinicians are trained to recognize ADHD in adults, especially when childhood histories are murky. If your concerns are dismissed, it’s okay — and important — to seek out a more knowledgeable provider. And on that note, look out for updated diagnostic and treatment guidelines for adult ADHD from APSARD (American Professional Society for ADHD and Related Disorders). While these guidelines won’t change any of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM, they will help give clinicians clearer, evidence-based advice on how to apply them when evaluating ADHD in adults.
Hey Team!
This week we’ve got a really fun episode, I’m talking with ANDY J. PIZZA - well that was weird… Let’s try that again - ANDY J. PIZZA - All right, let’s just go with it.
Andy is a podcaster, illustrator, and creative thinker who’s built a career by embracing the parts of himself that used to feel like liabilities. Andy’s the host of Creative Pep Talk, and his Right Side Out podcast series dives into what happens when you stop trying to pass for neurotypical and start living a little more like yourself. Andy was diagnosed in his twenties, and his experience navigating masking, creative burnout, and late-in-life self-acceptance forms the core of what we’re talking about today.
In our conversation, we talk about the costs of masking, the weird middle ground between accommodation and authenticity, and the realization that sometimes we forget who we are because we’ve been trying so hard to be someone else. We also get into creative practice, novelty, and his favorite ADHD-friendly productivity hacks. And of course, we talk about what it means to live “right side out,” and what it really means to show up authentically.
This was definitely one of my favorite episodes I’ve recorded so far this year, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Start Freedom today! Use code ADHD40 to get them 40% off a Freedom Yearly premium subscription!
Listen to the Climbing the Walls podcast here!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/221
YouTube Channel
My Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Masking isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it certainly is when we’re doing it all the time and unconsciously. We want to be intentional about when and why we mask, and aim for authenticity when possible.
- It’s okay to embrace opposing truths. We need structure and flexibility, goals and play. We don’t have to fall into all-or-nothing thinking, and this can help us balance some of these ADHD “contradictions”.
- Celebrate difference, don’t just tolerate it. Safe spaces are good, but celebration spaces—where your uniqueness is actively valued—are better. Look for relationships or communities where people enjoy your way of being, not just what you can do
Hey Team!
Today I’m talking with Jessica Summers, a seasoned hypno-psychotherapist and the mind behind Hypnogenics. Jessica brings a unique blend of hypnotherapy and intuitive coaching, specifically tailored for individuals grappling with ADHD, autism, and high sensitivity. With her dual expertise in hypno-psychotherapy and energy coaching, Jessica has become a beacon for those seeking alternative therapeutic approaches.
Now, I know the idea of hypnotherapy is not for everyone, and while traditional use of hypnotherapy is not specifically targeted for ADHD, it has been used to manage symptoms associated with ADHD, such as anxiety and stress management. So there's less direct research on hypnotherapy solely for ADHD symptom management, but it may help improve focus, reduce impulsivity, and enhance executive function through relaxation and stress reduction techniques - all stuff we’ll get into during the conversation. I just wanted to make sure I was up front about everything and didn’t want anyone to feel like I was being misleading with where there science currently stands.
But really, the episode has a lot of focus on rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD), and while I know there are a lot of people who really resonate with this topic, it is again something that does not have a ton of research behind it yet. In the conversation, we explore this through the lens of the limbic system and how managing this brain region can profoundly impact ADHD symptoms and how we can work on helping deal with those RSD symptoms as well.
I got a lot out of this conversation and felt Jessica’s perspective was enlightening, offering actionable advice and novel therapeutic options that could lead to a bit more balance to your ADHD treatment.
Start Freedom today! Use code ADHD40 to get them 40% off a Freedom Yearly premium subscription!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/220
YouTube Channel
My Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) is an intense emotional reaction to perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure, often experienced as sudden and overwhelming shame, panic, or sadness. It’s not just discomfort with rejection—it’s a limbic-driven response that can feel physically painful and can lead to avoidance, emotional outbursts, or withdrawal.
- We can think of the limbic system as the emotional and threat-processing part of the brain — it’s responsible for detecting danger and activating the fight, flight, or freeze response. But for people with ADHD (and especially those experiencing RSD), that system often gets stuck on high alert.
- When thinking about working on retraining your limbic system understand that it isn’t a quick fix and that it can take dedicated, intense work that isn’t always ADHD friendly. Focus on working using gentle, daily practices to create safety in your body, working on understanding your nervous system, and offering yourself neutral truths instead of judgment (such as “New things can feel uncomfortable sometimes”). The goal isn’t to override the response with willpower — it’s to help your brain feel safe enough to listen.
This week I’m talking with Jaye Lin — ADHD podcaster and community builder — who brings a uniquely grounded perspective on what it actually takes to work with our brains instead of constantly trying to outsmart them. I got to know Jaye at the 2024 ADHD Conference in Anaheim, where we met at a party hosted by the Attention Different crew (that’s an upcoming podcast with them as well). It was great because I had already been introduced to Jaye through her excellent podcast on Understood.org Tips From an ADHD Coach on the MissUnderstood: ADHD in Women channel. And it turns out she’s been a long-time listener of this show, so some great serendipity with us running into each other.
Jaye is a former Google Administrative Business Partner, where she co-founded the ADHD-Women@Google employee resource group and became their first ADHD-trained peer coach. She has recently returned to corporate life but is still coaching, advocating and podcasting on the side.
In our conversation, Jaye walks us through the concept of the Optimization Trap — a sneaky little loop that many ADHDers fall into where we spend so much time planning and perfecting an idea that we burn out before we ever start. We get into why finishing often matters more than perfecting, the cognitive cost of creative over-planning. We also talk about how optimization shows up in everyday life: at work, in relationships, when packing for a trip, or even when choosing a podcast mic.
Start Freedom today! Use code ADHD40 to get them 40% off a Freedom Yearly premium subscription!
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/219
YouTube Channel
My Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Optimize for completion, not perfection. Focus on what will get the task done, not the flashiest or most complex version of it.
- Try setting a timer for the planning phase. If you are having trouble with optimization, try giving yourself a set amount of time, maybe an hour, so you don’t get stuck endlessly researching or brainstorming.
- Be sure to schedule regular reevaluations of your planning. We don’t want to get stuck with an outdated plan that we’re not really using. Make time by putting it in your calendar to reassess whether your current path is still the one you want to be on.
In this episode, we’re doing something a little different. I want to play you an episode of another show that I think you will like. It’s called Climbing the Walls. This 6-part series investigates why women with ADHD have gone undiagnosed for so long… and how that changed dramatically during the pandemic, when the diagnosis of ADHD in women skyrocketed. The show asks: why women? Why now? How has underdiagnosis impacted women’s mental health?
I checked out the first episode, and I know I’m supposed to say something professional here, but honestly, my first thoughts were, “Oh my god, this is so good.”
Understood sent me the first two episodes to listen to and… now I’m just going to have the wait for the rest of the series to come out, because this is definitely something worth listening to and I just can’t wait to get to the next episode. If you’re a woman with ADHD, this is a series you’re going to want to catch, and even if you’re not, it’s still worth it.
Be sure to subscribe to Climbing The Walls wherever you get your podcasts!
Hey Team!
Today's episode is all about navigating ADHD as a late-diagnosed adult—especially for women who have spent years pushing through life without realizing why things felt so much harder. I’m talking with Kate Moryoussef, a UK-based ADHD coach who was diagnosed at 40 and has since made it her mission to help women work with their brains, not against them. She hosts The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast and her upcoming book is The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, where she dives deep into strategies for managing ADHD beyond just productivity hacks.
In this conversation, we get into the realities of late diagnosis, why ADHD in women is often overlooked, and how hormones can throw an extra curveball into the mix. Kate shares her personal journey of discovering ADHD through her daughter’s assessment, and we talk about how self-compassion, nervous system regulation, and finding the right support can make a huge difference. There’s a lot here about understanding ADHD as a whole-body experience—not just something that affects focus or productivity.
This is another one where I had the wrong mic set up, so apologizes for that.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/218
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This Episode's Top Tips
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- Especially for women, work on understanding the role of hormones. ADHD symptoms can intensify during certain phases of the menstrual cycle or perimenopause, and awareness of these fluctuations can help with better self-regulation. And, hey, ADHD men, you also have hormones that can fluctuate.
- Instead of constantly pushing yourself to meet neurotypical expectations, recognizing that ADHD comes with different needs can be a game-changer. Avoid forcing yourself into rigid productivity schedules, and try to recognize your natural rhythms to make work and life feel easier.
- Finding ADHD-friendly ways to approach tasks (instead of just trying to "be more disciplined") leads to better long-term success. You don’t have to overhaul your entire life—focusing on little shifts, like setting boundaries or adjusting your expectations, can create lasting improvements.
Hey Team!
In this episode, I'm sitting down with Kelly Smith, a yoga and meditation teacher who has ADHD herself and has guided over 23 million meditations through her incredibly popular podcast, Mindful In Minutes. Kelly walks us through why meditation is especially beneficial for the ADHD brain, what to realistically expect from starting a meditation practice, and how even just a few minutes a day can sharpen your focus, reduce impulsivity, and make executive functioning a bit less exhausting.
We explore practical advice on how to start meditating, even when you’re convinced it’s not your thing, and break down the misconceptions that keep a lot of us with ADHD from ever even giving meditation a try. Kelly shares her insights on the best meditation styles for ADHD brains and introduces us to practices like yoga nidra that go beyond the mat and offer deep restorative rest—something I’m pretty sure we all could use more of.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/217
YouTube Channel
My Patreon
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Start small and aim for just 5-8 minutes of meditation daily. Research shows even short practices can significantly benefit the ADHD brain. Choose a simple focus, like your breath or a body scan, to help redirect your wandering mind.
- Remember, meditation isn't about silencing thoughts. Accept that distractions will happen, and when you notice them, just gently try to bring your attention back to the practice itself.
- Try performing regular mindful check-ins by simply pausing, taking a breath, and asking yourself honestly, "How am I doing right now?”
Hey team!
Today, we dive deep with Dr. Devon Price, a social psychologist known for his groundbreaking work on neurodiversity and societal expectations. Dr. Price, who identifies as transgender and autistic, brings a wealth of experience and personal insight to our discussion, focusing on the complexities of masking in neurodivergent individuals. Price graduated with a BA in psychology and political science from Ohio State University in 2009, and he obtained his MS and PhD from Loyola University Chicago, where he has been teaching as a clinical assistant professor at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies since 2012. You can find Dr. Price’s research in journals such as the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Dr. Price is also the author of the books Laziness Does Not Exist, Unmasking Autism, and Unlearning Shame. His new book Unmasking for Life is set to be released on March 25th - so if you’re listening to this when it comes out tomorrow.
I imagine with those book titles; you might have a good sense of where this episode is heading - although I will say that despite Dr. Price’s focus on autism, these concepts absolutely apply to ADHD as well, and we definitely get into how they differ. In this episode, we explore the survival strategies behind masking and how these can morph into rigid personas that are hard to shed. We also unpack the nuances of camouflage and compensation in social interactions, the strategic yet often oppressive need to conform, and strategies for managing and minimizing masking in daily life. Dr. Price's expertise is not only academic; his lived experience enriches our understanding of these dynamics, making this episode a must-listen for anyone navigating the intricacies of neurodivergence.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/216
This Episode's Top Tips
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- It’s important to recognize masking as a tool that is not inherently good or bad. With that in mind, we can make conscious choices about how and when we want to be masking.
- While it can be hard to find places to authentically be yourself and unmask, it’s important to find these spaces. These can be with friends and family, or if those are hard to find, there are many online communities to explore.
- For some, consistently masking can make it hard to remember who is under the mask. To help remove that mask, you can gradually work on introducing authentic traits or behaviors in safe spaces to reduce the psychological strain of constant masking.
- Additionally, you can consider professional guidance to help with unmasking, focusing on therapy that respects and understands neurodivergent experiences.
Hey Team!
This week I’m talking with Vanessa Gorelkin, a seasoned occupational therapist and ADHD coach who’s been working in the field for nearly 30 years. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis (Bran-Dice) University and a Master's degree in Occupational Therapy from New York University. She specializes in executive function strategies, emotional regulation, and anxiety management, and she brings a unique perspective to helping adults with ADHD navigate the day-to-day.
In this episode, we talk about why people with ADHD struggle with even the things they want to do, how anxiety and executive dysfunction team up to make life extra frustrating, and why strategies that work for a while inevitably stop working. We also dig into emotional regulation, how to break down tasks so they actually feel doable, and why giving yourself a crisis plan before you need it can make a huge difference.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/215
This Episode's Top Tips
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If something feels overwhelming, try breaking it down into micro-steps. Even something like getting out of bed can be broken into “sit up,” “put feet on the floor,” and “stand up.” In more practical ways, we could think of this as starting out as just opening the document you need to work on, adding the formatting, and starting your first sentence. The idea is you want to build momentum and go with the flow.
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Be mindful of language; words like "just" and "should" can be damaging. Instead of “I should just wash the dishes,” you can reframe it as “I could wash the dishes,” and then also if you need a little bit more asking yourself, “What’s making this difficult, and how can I work with it?”
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It’s important to have a crisis plan ready before you need it. When emotional overwhelm hits, it’s hard to think through what you need. You can pre-plan strategies like a weighted blanket, a favorite show, or calling a friend so you don’t have to figure it out at the moment.
Hey Team!
We’re back for part two of my conversation with Russ Jones, host of the ADHD Big Brother podcast and head of his community-based ADHD coaching of the same name. In this half of the conversation, we get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually get yourself to do the things you know you need to do—whether that’s tackling laundry, setting (and remembering) goals, or just getting yourself unstuck when ADHD inertia takes over.
We talk about how traditional goal-setting can fail for ADHDers (and to try and flip that around), why accountability makes everything more manageable, and how structuring tasks in a fun, interest-driven way makes all the difference. Russ also shares some of his best hacks for dealing with executive dysfunction, including gamifying chores, breaking through mental resistance, and using community as a force multiplier for motivation.
Now, you don’t have to listen the first half of our conversation to get a lot out of this episode, but just know that this is part two.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/214
All right, keep on listening to find out how to build momentum, follow through, and stop getting stuck at the starting line.
This Episode's Top Tips
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- When you’re stuck in a rut, having people who believe in you (even when you don’t believe in yourself) is a game-changer. This is one of the places where having a strong community can really help you flourish.
- Traditional goal-setting doesn’t always work. If you're finding yourself stuck, try a “Reverse Mountain” Approach: Instead of imagining the goal at the top, imagine yourself at the top and let momentum pull you down, guiding your each next step towards your goal.
- If something is “important but boring,” find a way to inject fun, novelty, or urgency to make it engaging. If the task still feels unbearable, set a 10-minute timer and see how far you get. If you still don’t want to do it, try switching things up and find an approach that does work.
Hey team!
Joining me today is Russ Jones, the host of the ADHD Big Brother podcast and founder of an ADHD coaching community that helps adults get out of their heads and into action. Russ is an actor and comedian, a background that shines through into his work giving his content relatability and charisma.
Russ and I really got into our talk and so I’ve ended up splitting this episode into two parts.
In this first half of the conversation, we get into why so many of us struggle to turn knowledge into real-life change and how a strong ADHD community can provide the structure and support we need to actually follow through. Russ also shares insights from his own journey—like how quitting a 20-year nicotine addiction helped him discover the power of daily community support.
If you’ve ever struggled with consistency, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/213
All right, keep on listening to find out how community coaching can provide the structure and support to help you actually follow through.
This Episode's Top Tips
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- ADHDers love collecting information (tips, tricks, hacks), but we can often struggle to implement it—having a community to provide some accountability is a great way to help bridge that gap.
- Having consistent, low-pressure accountability (like daily check-ins) can often work better than big coaching sessions spaced out over weeks, where we’re scrambling to get to that thing we said we’d do right before our session.
- Community support works best when you’re actively engaged. You get out so much when you’re engaging with your community.
Over the last few weeks, it has been increasingly difficult for me to keep myself focused on what I want to be focused on. I don’t think I have to particularly speak to the reasons; we’re all handling the state of the world in our own ways - in many ways, it has a similar feel to the beginning of the pandemic, where I felt like I needed to pay extra attention to the news because so many people around me were ignoring the alarm bells.
Trying to deal with all of this while also having to grapple with the cognitive dissonance of having to go on with real life while all of this is also going on at the same time can be incredibly difficult. It feels like we should be able to press pause on all the other things going on in our life.
But regardless of how we feel, time marches on.
In today’s episode, we’re tackling how to navigate life when focus feels impossible, why we turn to numbing when we’re overwhelmed, and most importantly, how we can break out of that cycle in a way that actually supports us.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/212
The #1 ADHD Coaching app for teens and adults. Use code HACKINGYOURADHD for 30% of your first month!
https://www.shimmer.care/
This Episode's Top Tips
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- More than anything, I want to remind everyone to give themselves grace when they’re going through something. We’re not always going to get it right, but being hard on ourselves is never the right answer.
- Throughout your day, take a moment to check in with how you’re feeling. We tend to ignore our feelings until they become something we have to deal with.
- Forget the "Go big or go home" mentality. Tiny changes—like five minutes of mindful breathing or a short walk—are more effective than drastic, unrealistic plans.
- When everything feels overwhelming, find support. Whether it’s a friend, an online group, or a therapist, you don’t have to handle everything alone.
Hey team!
This episode, we’re doing something a bit different—I want to share an episode of another podcast with you. It’s called ADHD Aha! and it’s hosted by Laura Key.
You may remember that last year I actually had the chance to be a guest on ADHD Aha!
But if you haven’t heard it before, ADHD Aha! is all about those moments when people finally connect the dots on their ADHD—those “oh, that’s why I do that” realizations. Each episode dives into real, candid stories from people with ADHD, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably hear something that makes you go, “Yep, that’s way too relatable.”
Even in the episode I’m about to share with you, I had a number of times I went, “Oh… oh!”
In this episode, Laura talks with Matthew Raghunauth, an artist and UX designer, about his late ADHD diagnosis and how it completely shifted the way he saw himself. They dig into the struggle of prioritizing tasks, the spiral of catastrophizing, and the unique challenges that come with asking for help—especially when you’ve spent years thinking you just needed to try harder. I particularly liked the way Matthew framed how taking care of his ADHD was growing up and the mature thing for him to do.
It’s a great conversation, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.
To listen to more episodes, search for ADHD AHA! in your podcast app or just click here.
Hey Team!
Today, I’m talking with Dr. Ryan Sultan, a distinguished psychiatrist specializing in ADHD, anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders. He serves as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Sultan is a Senior Psychiatrist at Integrative Psych.
And he has also been exploring the evolutionary basis for ADHD. Now, let’s get to a few things up front here because often when I hear about evolution and ADHD, I know I’m about to hear something about ADHD as a superpower.
That’s not what this conversation is about today. While we will be looking at how ADHD traits might have been useful in a pre-industrial world and why natural selection didn’t weed out our distractible, impulsive brains, the focus is more on how those brains thrived within society instead of looking at them in isolation. This means that our conversation mostly focuses on how these ADHD traits work in conjunction within society rather than trying to view them either negatively or positively. And then we also get into how understanding this evolutionary basis for ADHD can help us understand better ways of managing and treating ADHD.
You can check out Dr. Sultan’s work here: https://www.integrative-psych.org/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/211
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This Episode's Top Tips
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- Regarding the evolutionary basis of ADHD, avoid thinking of it in terms of better or worse and instead try to see how ADHD traits can serve the community as a whole.
- With that lens in mind, the impulsivity, novelty-seeking, and hyper-focus of ADHD brains could have been advantages in early human societies, especially for hunting, exploring, and problem-solving in unpredictable environments. With the opposite from the structured, repetitive, sit-still-and-focus world we live in today giving us more difficulties because it wasn’t “designed” with the ADHD brain in mind.
- Neurodiversity can benefit everyone. Societies thrive on diverse thinking styles. ADHD brains bring creativity, spontaneity, and out-of-the-box problem-solving, which can be a huge asset when properly supported. We’re better when we work together.
On today’s episode, we've got a returning guest, Antonia Bowring, an executive coach and author who's reshaping how we think about productivity in the ADHD community. In our pervious conversation we explored her journey writing 'Coach Yourself!' and today we will be diving into how she developed her ADHD Success Planner, and how these tools can help you manage daily tasks more effectively. Antonia breaks down her simple yet powerful three-part planning system designed to transform your weekly grind into a manageable flow.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/210
If you we able to join us for our Live AMA on YouTube, thank you! It was so nice getting to answer some of your questions. If you missed it and would like to watch it, the live recording can be found here. Please subscribe so you can join us for the next one!
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Acknowledge the calendar as the foundation of effective planning; it’s non-negotiable for keeping track of tasks and appointments.
- View planning not just as taking care of a task but as a vital form of self-care that helps manage stress and improves reliability.
- Embrace self-forgiveness and adaptation. Allow yourself the flexibility to change planning methods and forgive missed tasks to maintain motivation and effectiveness.
Hey Team!
In this episode, I’m thrilled to welcome Natalia Aíza, a multilingual counselor and OCD specialist.
Natalia is the founder and executive director of Kairos Wellness Collective, a therapy center that focuses on holistic care for clients experiencing OCD and Anxiety - located in Boulder, Colorado. They offer therapies including Exposure Response Prevention (ERP), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Play Therapy, Art Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Neurofeedback. Obviously, we won’t get into all of that in our conversation today, but we do hit on a few of those.
Also, separately, I wanted to mention that Kairos is the Greek word meaning “the perfect, delicate, crucial moment; the fleeting rightness of time and place that creates the opportune atmosphere for action, words or movement; also weather.” And really, I just wanted to share that because I love words like that - I just find them neat.
Anyway, in our conversation today, we dive into the overlap of ADHD and OCD - how they are similar and how they differ, and also the unique challenges each presents, especially when they are co-occurring. Natalia shares her personal and professional insights on distinguishing between ADHD distractions and OCD compulsions and how to approach treatment for each.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/209
Also before we get started, I wanted to let you know about my AMA on YouTube Live, happening the week this is released on January 31st at 10 AM Pacific - if you’re interested you can find that on the Hacking Your ADHD YouTube page, youtube.com/@hackingyouradhd and subscribe to the channel - or if you want to submit a question ahead of time you can do so at hackingyouradhd.com/ama
The #1 ADHD Coaching app for teens and adults. Use code HACKINGYOURADHD for 30% of your first month!
https://www.shimmer.care/
This Episode's Top Tips
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- It’s important to remember that you need to approach OCD and ADHD treatments differently; techniques beneficial for one may exacerbate the other.
- Try to distinguish between compulsions and simple fidgets or stims—while symptoms can be similar, it’s essential to understand the root causes that characterize compulsions.
- Be proactive in seeking diagnosis and treatment if OCD symptoms appear; early intervention can prevent the condition from worsening.
Hey Team
I was recently thinking about kids being picky eaters and how there is a movement where we’re not supposed to say picky anymore; we’re supposed to say they’re selective eaters.
And you know what, I get that. I grew up as a picky kid, and… let’s be honest, I’m a fairly picky adult as well. Scratch that, selective adult.
And I know it’s semantics, but I often find semantics are important. Because if we’re reframing this idea of being picky into being selective, it loses a lot of that negative connotation, and it gives a lot more power to the idea that what we’re doing is we’re making choices. In this case, making choices about food, but I think this is something we should keep in mind as we’re moving into the new year because a lot of us are going to find that we’re going to need to be more selective with our goals, especially in regard to New Year’s Resolutions.
And this is the idea that we’re going to be exploring in this episode - what are the things that we really want to focus on doing - what are the things that we want to commit ourselves to, and then what are the things that we should be letting go of.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/208
This Episode's Top Tips
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- You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. If something feels draining, unaligned, or no longer serves you, it’s okay to move on.
- Work on reframing quitting as a positive. We’re redirecting our energy toward something more meaningful and prioritizing those things that we really want.
- Focus on sustainability. If a goal feels overwhelming, reassess and try to find a more manageable way to approach it.
Hey team!
Well, it’s 2025…. It doesn’t quite feel real yet; I mean, we’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century, but it feels like we got here fast. I’m not quite sure I’m ready, but regardless, time marches on.
I know a lot of you are working on making plans for the year, so we’re going to be starting this year with Chris Wang, CEO and co-founder of Shimmer, an ADHD coaching platform designed to meet people where they are. I had a lot of fun in this conversation, where we covered a bunch of stuff about goal setting and how to make sure you’re doing the important stuff in your life. Along the way, we discuss the power of community, process-oriented goal setting, and what it means to live in alignment with your values.
Of course we also discuss Chris’s coaching platform, Shimmer, but Chris does a great job bringing a lot of actionable advice to this conversation, so whether you’re looking for coaching or just want some extra tips to help with planning this episode’s got you covered.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/207
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Work on setting process-oriented goals where your focus is on the actions you can control, like “exercise 3 times a week,” rather than outcome-based goals like “lose 10 pounds.”
- Make sure you are specific and write your to-do lists with clear, actionable steps to avoid overwhelm and decision paralysis. You want to know exactly what your next step is when looking at your to-do list.
- Leverage your support systems. You can use community and coaching to provide accountability, remove roadblocks, and refine your systems. Remember there is no gold star for toughing it out by yourself and it’s okay to get help.
This is the second part of the series on how to better manage your smartphone with your ADHD - you don't have to have listened to part 1 to listen to this episode, but if you like this episode I'd definitely recommend going back and listening to last week's episode as well. In that episode, we covered how we can limit the distractions that our smartphone can present and also how to make it easier on our ADHD brains when we're setting up our smartphone.
This week we're going in a bit of a different direction - while smartphones can be easily distracting and endless entertaining, they also provide us with some great tools to help us manage our ADHD. In this episode I'm going to be discussing a number of the apps I use to help me navigate my day - since I use the iPhone that means most of the apps I specifically discuss are going to be iPhone apps; however, I do try and provide alternatives for Android.
Find the Full Show Notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDPhone2 Today's Top Tips 1. Make use of reminder apps on your phone - make sure to use lots of different sounds and to create recurring reminders for things that you need to be reminded of frequently. 2. Use your calendar as a reminder app as well - for important events make sure to have reminders well in advance so that you can plan for them ahead of time. 3. Get a good note-taking app for your phone and create a reminder to also look at the notes that you take throughout the day or week. 4. Take advantage of shortcuts on your phone so that you can do complicated tasks without getting distracted.
I've been carrying around a smartphone in my pocket for more than 10 years - I started off with the first iPhone and have since gone over to Android, dabbled with the Windows Phones for a few years and then ended back up with an iPhone again. Through my years with my phone I've learned that it can be a great asset and help me with a number of my ADHD difficulties; however, I've also felt the dark side of the phone as well. Games, social media, email and all those notifications.
ADHD makes it really easy for us to get off track so we want to be making sure that we're not letting our phones dictate our next actions. Through trial and error phone designers have been making it harder and harder for us to put down our phone. Since we have ADHD this means that it is almost too easy for us to get distracted when we pop open our phone to just check the time. The screen lights up and suddenly we're hit with a hundred different ways our attention should go.
This week we'll be focusing on ways to set up your phone to be less distracting and we're going to work on setting up our phones intentionally to make sure that we're paying attention to what apps we have on our phone and where those apps are located. We'll also be looking at other ways to reduce the constant stream of distractions that our phones can produce. Find the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDPhone This Episode's Top Tips 1. Purge any apps that you don't need on your phone - both unused apps and also apps that pull you in too much. 2. Organize your apps so that your most useful apps are easy to open and your distracting apps are hidden. 3. Turn off most of your notifications and make use of your Do Not Disturb feature. 4. Check out your phone's screentime feature and set some sensible restrictions on how much time you are spending on your phone.
Last week was all about getting there and this week we're focusing on what to do when you get back. Travel disrupts our routines and habits - and we should take those disruptions seriously. One thing that I've had to learn over and over again is that ADHD makes transitions hard - and coming back from a trip is a big transition.
This Episode's Top Tips
- Identify your routines and habits before your trip so that when you get back you know where to pick things back up. Make sure you are paying special attention to your
- While you are traveling try and keep up as many of your habits and routines. If you need to, you can make small tweaks to them to make them easier while you are away.
- Make sure you are planning your days and regularly checking that plan once you get back. You can use a habit tracker to make sure you are follow through with all of your intentions.
Find all the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/RefocusedVacation
Hey Team!
This week we’ve got Skye Waterson of Unconventional Organization back on the show to talk about the book she’s working on, Focused, Balanced Days with ADHD. Skye is an academic and ADHD coach with over seven years of experience in adult education. She has studied various fields, including Psychology, Sociology, and Public Health, and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Population Health. Skye also hosts "The ADHD Skills Lab" podcast, where she discusses research-backed tips and advice to help individuals navigate life with ADHD.
Today, as I mentioned, we’re going to be getting into her serialized book that she’s releasing chapter by chapter as she works through them on Substack. Our discussion today focuses on what’s already been released, regarding Skye’s ADHD story and executive function but we also get into a whole host of other things from systems and calendars to burnout.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at http://hackingyouradhd.com/206
If you’d like to checkout Unconventional Organization or sign up for that newsletter go check out
https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Avoid overcomplicating your organizational tools, and try to rely more on basic principles, such as having a capture space, a prioritization system, and a scheduling system.
- Aim for 80% consistency with your systems and give yourself grace to bounce back after setbacks. No one will ever follow any system perfectly, so work on choosing tools and systems that can adapt to missed days without derailing your progress entirely.
- Don’t forget to prioritize at least a little fun in your planning. Building dopamine into your day through enjoyable activities can help you stay consistent and avoid burnout.
Hey team!
Feels like it’s been a while for me but hopefully I was able to prepare enough material ahead of time so that you didn’t have to notice. And the reason it’s been a bit for me is because of the 2024 International Conference on ADHD which is a collaborative event put on my CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder), ADDA (Attention Deficit Disorder Association), and ACO (ADHD Coaches Organization).
The conference caters to adults with ADHD, educators, coaches, organizers, clinicians, therapists - really anyone who is effect by ADHD either directly on indirectly. There are all kinds of presentations at the conference - workshops, peer-to-peer discussion groups, networking opportunities, and there’s also an exhibit hall.
And this year was my first year presenting at the conference.
So in this episode I’m going to go into some of my reflections of attending this years conference - things I did, things I learned and of course some stuff about my presentation.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/205
Hey Team!
This week I’m joined by Madeline O’Reilly and Jonathan Hassall to talk about their new online program called Decoding Doing that is based on a book they wrote with the same title. And that’s fair, Decoding Doing is a great title when we’re talking about procrastination.
And just a little background, Madeline is a clinical psychologist with a Masters in Clinical Psychology. Additionally, Madeline is a member of the Australian Clinical Psychology Association along with the Australian Professional ADHD Association and the Australian Association for CBT. Jonathan is an ADHD and Executive Function coach and also is a board member of the ADD Association (ADDA USA).
In our conversation today we go through the their five-stage model for working through procrastination. We’ll explore how our perception of motivation can often hold us back, and more importantly, how understanding our emotional and cognitive needs can help us break free from the procrastination cycle.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/204
You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel
This Episode's Top Tips
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- When planning a task visualize the steps. Don’t just think about the goal, picture the process of how you’ll get there. And be prepared for interruptions or barriers. When they come up, pause, analyze the problem, and choose your next step.
- Don’t just rely on time management—factor in your energy and emotional capacity when planning your day. While time plays a factor in what you can get done, your energy levels are an equally important factor to consider.
- Often when you’re procrastinating, it’s a signal that something else—like rest, food, or movement—is needed. When you find yourself in a cycle of procrastination try slowing down and seeing what else might need to be addressed.
Hey Team!
We’ve got another exciting guest teed up for this week. I’m talking with Sean Brock, a neurofeedback expert and the owner of Neuro Colorado. Now I’ll be honest that I had a lot to learn in this interview because I wasn’t terribly well versed on the science behind neurofeedback. In the interview, Sean shares the fascinating history behind neurofeedback and how it’s evolved from training cats to helping humans regulate their brain waves. We get into how neurofeedback works and its longer-term benefits.
Also, we end the interview by taking a turn and talking about EMDR therapy and how it is somewhat similar but distinct from neurofeedback. Then, we get into Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), which I think is just a fascinating form of psychotherapy.
Now, as I just mentioned, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge on neurofeedback going into the interview, and a lot of that stemmed from some of the controversy surrounding its effectiveness in treating ADHD. As Sean is the owner of a neurofeedback facility, it is quite understandable that he is very bullish on the research showing its effectiveness. And based on my conversation with him it seems well warranted, especially with the caveat he gave in the interview that neurofeedback is not a magic process but requires guidance from a qualified practitioner.
That said, while I think the science of neurofeedback looks very promising at this point, take the interview with a grain of salt and be aware that not everyone is convinced of its level of effectiveness. While promising neurofeedback isn’t for everyone and it’s general accessibility still has a ways to go.
Also, this isn’t a case of doing one thing or the other; neurofeedback can work alongside medication and other therapies as well.
https://www.neurocolorado.com
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/203
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Neurofeedback works by teaching you how to regulate your brainwaves, which can help you build focus when you need it.
- Over time, it appears that neurofeedback can lead to long-term changes in brainwave activity, reducing ADHD symptoms and potentially decreasing the need for further interventions.
- It’s important to find the right neurofeedback practitioner who actively engages with you during sessions for the best results. Also, remember that a multi-modal approach is key, combining neurofeedback with medication or therapy to optimize your treatment.
Hey Team!
This week, we’ve got an incredible guest, Dr. Stephen Faraone, one of the world's foremost experts on ADHD.
Let me just give you a quick rundown of just how influential Dr. Faraone is:
- He has authored over 700 journal articles, editorials, chapters, and books
- Listed as the eighth-highest producer of High Impact Papers in Psychiatry from 1990 to 1999 as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).
- In 2005, the ISI listed him as the second-highest cited author in the area of ADHD.
- In 2019 and 2020, his citation metrics placed him in the top 0.01% of scientists across all fields.
- In 2002 he was inducted into the CHADD Hall of Fame
Currently, Dr. Faraone serves as a distinguished professor of psychiatry, physiology, and neuroscience at SUNY Upstate Medical University and president of the World Federation of ADHD.
So yeah, this guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to ADHD and if you only listen to one episode of the podcast this year, I’d suggest this one.
One of the focal points in this conversation is the ADHD Evidence Project, which Dr. Faraone started to help fight misinformation about ADHD and give free access to the information we have about ADHD. On the site - which can be found at ADHDevidence.org - you can find the International Consensus Statement, which provides 208 statements strongly supported by ADHD research. In the episode we get more into what went into the process of making the statement and the standards of research.
In the episode, we also discuss evidence-based treatments, debunk common myths, and discuss what really works when managing ADHD.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/202
This Episode's Top Tips
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- Stick to treatments that have been proven effective through rigorous studies. Large studies and meta-analyses are more reliable than small studies when determining ADHD treatments.
- Not all ADHD treatments you find online are helpful—be cautious of sources that aren't peer-reviewed. Beware of misinformation as well as misleading information that can lead you down the wrong treatment path.
- While some alternative treatments may help, their effects are often significantly smaller compared to standard stimulant medication. When thinking about approaching what we do to help manage our ADHD, we want to think about the magnitude of the effect and do the things that will help the most first.
Hey Team!
This week we’re following up our last episode on misinformation—and this is going to be our last episode in the research saga that I’ve been working on for the last… couple of months? Yeah, I think I’m ready for something new as well although as a preview for next week, I had an amazing researcher as a guest and we do cover a lot of similar topics, but don’t worry, it’s a fantastic episode, great capstone to the series.
But today we're diving into a topic that’s critical for navigating life with ADHD—understanding and protecting ourselves from myths and misinformation. There's a big difference between outdated myths like, 'ADHD is just laziness,' and actual misinformation, which can mislead us into making risky choices about treatment. In this episode, we’re getting into how to spot these traps, why myths stick around, and what makes misinformation so tricky.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/201
This Episode's Top Tips
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- ADHD myths tend to be long-standing cultural beliefs, while misinformation often appears more credible and is linked to misinterpreted research or can be part of a specific agenda.
- There are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for when consuming information about ADHD. Oversimplication, sensational headlines, anecdotal evidence, secret information and even how the information is framed can be indicators that you might have to double check the information.
- Avoid spreading misinformation by verifying where your information comes from, especially if you see it on social media or from non-expert sources.
Hey Team!
We’re kicking off 2024 with the incredible Jessica McCabe - creator, writer, and host of the award-winning YouTube channel How to ADHD. I’m sure a lot of you are already familiar with Jessica’s work as her YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, but for those of you who haven’t, her channel contains a wealth of knowledge about ADHD and is one of the things that kicked me in the pants to start taking my ADHD more seriously.
And now she’s coming out with a book: How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It) - which is coming out on January 2nd - so tomorrow if you’re listening to this when this episode comes out.
In our conversation today, Jessica and I discussed how we want to go from surviving our ADHD to thriving with it, to get past some of our issues with executive function and universal design. We also get into a lot of stuff about her book and how she was able to use a lot of the strategies that she wrote about in the book to also help her write that same book.
Honestly, this episode was a blast to record and I hope you enjoy as much as I did putting it together. Be sure to check out howtoadhdbook.com to find Jessica's book Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/164 This Episode's Top Tips
- When we want to move from surviving to thriving we want to start looking at not just how we can get more things done, but what’s worth doing.
- Even projects we’re interested in can be difficult for us to work on, so it's important for us to keep them exciting with variety.
- When planning out those big projects, work backward from where you want to be to figure out all the steps in between so that we can see that path to done.
- Effort for us is not the problem, so trying harder is not the answer.
Hey team!
This week we’re celebrating a milestone for Hacking Your ADHD - 200 episodes… also 5 years of running the podcast. I honestly don’t know exactly what to say about how far this podcast has come. It’s been an incredible run so far and I have a lot of plans for the future as well, which, honestly is a little scary, but also exciting that even with ADHD I’m sticking with it.
For this episode, I’ve invited Brendan Mahan, the voice behind the ADHD Essentials Podcast, to help mark the occasion by interviewing me on the ins and outs of podcasting with ADHD. We talk about the early days, what has changed, and how past failures have paved the way for success. It’s a bit more of the behind-the-scenes look at the podcast and how I got here.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button Support me on Patreon Ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/200
This Episode's Top Tips
- Allow past failures to become stepping stones to success. Learning from “crappy rough drafts” makes getting started on what you’re currently doing so much easier.
- It’s incredibly important to allow for empathy for yourself when trying to work with your ADHD. Viewing your problem-solving through the lens of “I have ADHD, and I need to account for my ADHD” can make finding that next step so much easier.
- Go check out Brendan’s podcast, ADHD Essentials. While his podcast focuses more on parenting and ADHD, I haven’t listened to an episode without getting something out of it, truly excellent stuff.
Hey Team!
This week we’re talking misinformation which is an interesting topic because it feels like it should be something where its easy to define and identify. We’ve all seen stuff online where we looked at it and felt, “how the heck does anyone fall for this kind of stuff?”
And that’s actually something that plays right into the hands of falling for misinformation. When we think we’re immune to something, we’re not on the lookout for it when it isn’t quite as straightforward. It’s the stuff that rhymes with the truth that is often the easiest for us to get trick by.
While it is easier than ever for us to get access to ADHD information it also means we’re exposed to more misinformation about ADHD than ever as well. But with a little bit of caution I think we can muddle through fairly well. And what I mean is that we just have some rules that we should apply when we’re evaluating the information that we’re presented with.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button Support me on Patreon Ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/199
This Episode's Top Tips
- Always verify the credibility of the information, especially when it relates to health - it’s easy for misinformation to spread, especially when it’s got some aspects of the truth to it.
- Be aware that misinformation often stems from oversimplifications or well-meaning errors, not malice. This doesn’t mean it can’t still cause harm, but it does mean the need to be extra vigilant even when it comes to trusted sources. We all mistakes, I know I do.
- Use the question, “compared to what?” to help you understand the full context and relevance of advice. Try and focus on implementing wins instead of focusing on the minutia.
Hey Team!
We’re diving right back into the world of ADHD research, continuing on from what we were talking about a few episodes back. In this episode, we’re going to be more focused on what goes into making ADHD research reliable. I go in-depth into what you can expect to find when reading a study and then also into what thing to look out for when trying to determine what’s really going on in those studies.
We’ll discuss how to navigate the sometimes confusing world of peer-reviewed journals, why sample sizes matter, and what to watch out for when it comes to conflicts of interest (I mean, everyone is interested in how ADHD research is funded, right?).
This piece was also initially going to cover misinformation, but with how much ended up going into everything else, I’m saving that for next week.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button Support me on Patreon Ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/198 Check out Sunsama
This Episode's Top Tips
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- The first step in examining a research paper’s credibility is to ensure that it is peer-reviewed. The peer-review process will cover many of the other steps that we discussed in this episode. While there is value in some non-peer-reviewed work, it’s important that we approach it with a skeptical lens.
- However, with that first tip, we should also know that we shouldn’t view peer-reviewed journals as a beginner’s source. They are written with the expectation of other experts as the intended audience, and without the prerequisite knowledge, it can be easy to misinterpret what is being said.
- One of the largest concerns about ADHD research comes from worries that pharmaceutical money will introduce bias into many of the studies; however, most research is actually funded through government grants, and the peer-review process is designed to help identify conflicts of interest and eliminate any bias that may be present.
Hey team!
This week, I’m talking with Dr. Judy Ho, a clinical and forensic neuropsychologist with a PhD in clinical psychology. She focuses on mental health, ADHD, and various psychological disorders. She is triple board-certified and is a tenured associate professor at Pepperdine University, where she teaches graduate-level psychology.
In our conversation today, we talk about how ADHD can impact self-esteem, the importance of understanding your brain’s wiring, and practical ways to manage attention and relationships. Dr. Ho shares insights into how cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can help train your attention and how reframing your thoughts can reduce self-sabotage.
In our conversation, Dr. Ho also shares some of her favorite strategies for improving focus, managing emotional regulation, and mindfulness to tackle ADHD challenges. Whether you’re struggling with self-sabotage or finding it hard to keep up with tasks, this episode is packed with tips that will help you thrive with ADHD. If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button Support me on Patreon Ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/197 This Episode's Top Tips
- Train your attention like a muscle. Use a simple task and set a timer for 15 minutes, gradually increasing the time to strengthen focus. You can also work on capturing distracting thoughts by keeping a notepad nearby while working, jotting down distractions without letting them derail your task.
- Try using multimodal mindfulness, which involves engaging multiple senses to stay focused, such as reading or taking notes, and then combining those activities with visual or auditory elements.
- If you’re procrastinating, ask yourself why and address the underlying reasons—whether it's fear of failure or overthinking. Often, procrastination is a sign that you have some need that is being unmet. Addressing that need can often help to get you unstuck.
Hey Team!
This week we’re going to look at what is entailed in ADHD research—what it is, how it works, and what it all means for us.
Before we get going though I wanted to start with a brief explanation of what really drove my thinking about this topic—which now looks like is going to end up as a multi-part series.
So there’s an idea called the illusion of explanatory depth, which occurs when people believe they understand something but, when asked to explain it, realize that they don’t quite understand the underlying mechanism as well as they thought. Classic examples are things like how a computer works, how a bicycle stays upright, or how a toilet functions.
If I were to ask you how any of these things work I expect most people would say they could. But let’s take the toilet example—I know personally, I’d probably start with something about the flush adding water and maybe creating a difference in pressure and… okay maybe I don’t know how a toilet works. And that’s the point here: with the illusion of explanatory depth, we have some understanding of what’s going on, but when pressed for details, we often find those gaps in our knowledge.
And this was something that I was feeling about ADHD research and had me questioning what I really knew. That isn’t to say that I didn’t know anything but we hear all the time that new studies are coming out about ADHD, but what does that really mean? How is this research being conducted? Who’s funding the research? What are ADHD scientists actually studying? Who's doing this research? What kind of research are they even doing? And what even makes one research study better than another?
We all have some semblance of feeling like we know some of the answers to those questions, but this is also where the illusion of explanatory depth comes in because the answers to all of those questions is far more complex than our initial assessment would grant.
In this series, we’ll be examining these questions more closely. And in this particular episode we’ll be focusing on the different types of research, the methods used, and some the challenges that researchers face when studying ADHD.
I also want to emphasize that I will not be able to cover everything in this series, but that’s not the goal. What I’m hoping you get out of this is a better understanding of what goes into the making of the science of ADHD.
Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/196
This Episode's Top Tips
- ADHD research is comprised of three categories: basic research, clinical research, and behavioral research. Basic research seeks to better understand the underlying causes of ADHD through genetic and neuroscience studies. Clinical research tests different treatment options, such as proper medication levels and the effectiveness of non-pharmacological interventions. Behavioral research studies how ADHD impacts daily life through observational and longitudinal studies.
- As a spectrum disorder, ADHD manifests differently for everyone, making it important to recognize that symptoms and challenges vary across individuals. Combined with the high levels of comorbid conditions with ADHD, means that researchers have to be cautious when determining what’s actually a factor in ADHD interventions.
- Because there’s no definitive medical test for ADHD, diagnosis relies on behavioral assessments, which can be influenced by cultural and societal factors, leading to both over- and under-diagnosis in certain populations. This creates challenges in ADHD research as it limits who should be included in studies.
Hey Team!
I’m excited to bring you my conversation with Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright, hosts of "Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast."
If you haven’t checked out their podcast before, Nikki and Pete have been a mainstay in ADHD podcast realm with over six hundred episodes across twenty-nine seasons - if there’s an ADHD topic you’re interested in, they’ve probably covered it. And Nikki and Pete recently released their new book, Unapologetically ADHD, A Step-by-Step Framework For Everyday Planning On Your Terms.
In our conversation, we explore how their personal experiences and professional expertise in managing ADHD shine through in their work, providing both structure and understanding. Whether it’s tackling procrastination, enhancing organizational skills, or simply learning to partner with your ADHD, this episode is packed with practical advice and real-life strategies.
Unapologetically ADHD: A Step-by-Step Framework For Everyday Planning On Your Terms
Checkout Sunsama
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button
Support me on Patreon
Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/195
This Episode's Top Tips
- Embrace your ADHD and plan your day around it to avoid unrealistic expectations and the ensuing shame.
- When looking for a system, we need to recognize that no one-size-fits-all tool exists. Try to avoid the trap of looking for the best options; focus instead on eliminating the worst options to simplify decision-making.
- When we recognize the importance of revisiting and adjusting our systems regularly rather than constantly switching to new tools, it’ll help us acknowledge that every tool or system will have days it fails. With that in mind, we can focus on embracing resilience so we can get back on track when things do go awry.
Hey Team!
It’s that time of year again where I feel like I need a kick in the pants. My kids are back in school and it feels like I have a glut of time available. It feels like I should be knocking things off my todo list left and right.
But I’m not. I’m tired and I’m not getting things done. And it’s frustrating because it feels like now that I have this time, I’m wasting it. It feels like if I take this time for rest that I’m going to look back later and regret that I didn’t push myself harder. But rest is important even when it feels like I don’t have time for it.
Rest can feel like a foreign concept when your brain’s always on the go. It can feel like trying to sit on a treadmill that’s still running.
In this episode, we’re going to explore why our ADHD brains find rest so uncomfortable and how we can use pacing to finally make it part of our day. We're going to explore why our brains resist rest and how we can try and work in those much-needed breaks without feeling guilty.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button
Support me on Patreon
Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/194
Check out Sunsama
This Episode's Top Tips
- It’s important to recognize that rest can feel uncomfortable because we aren’t getting enough stimulation in our restful activities. To solve for this we can seek ways to add low levels of stimulation so that we can better recover during our relaxation time.
- We need to build white space into our calendars and schedule intentional downtime in our day to allow for rest, transitions, and unexpected events.
- Coming up with ideas in the moment can be hard so prepare a go-to list of activities like reading, stretching, or listening to podcasts to help you relax when needed.
- If we can shift our mindset to see rest as part of your productivity routine, it can help us reframe it into something that will better help recharge and avoid burnout without the guilt.
Hey Team!
I was recently thinking about some of the ways that ADHD can manifest in seemingly opposite ways. One moment, we're laser-focused, and the next, we're completely derailed by the tiniest hiccup.
In this episode, we’ll be exploring the idea of the dichotomy of ADHD. How it can feel like even our symptoms are inconsistent. We’ll be looking at how our ADHD brains can take us from hyperfocus to total distraction, from being impulsive to utterly paralyzed, and why sometimes we thrive in chaos but crumble over minor setbacks.
And we’ll also be looking at how while many of these ideas may feel like they are in total opposition, that they may in fact have a similar root cause.
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Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/193
This Episode's Top Tips
- Realize that many of the dichotomies of ADHD actually come from the same source, such as hyperfocus and being unable to focus both stem from a lack of ability to regulate our focus.
- Often, when we encounter one of these dichotomies, we need to work on reframing what’s going on so that we can apply an appropriate strategy.
- Regardless of what you’re doing, but especially when you are over-functioning, it’s important to take care of your needs.
Hey Team!
While AI has become a buzzword that has lost much meaning, there are still many use cases that can help with our ADHD. One of the places that I have been enjoying exploring is how I can outsource some of my executive functions to these applications so that I can save my brain for the important stuff.
In today’s episode, we’ll first examine executive function so that we know what we’re really working with here. Then, we’ll explore a number of tools that we can use—from large language models (LLMs) to tools to help with your calendar, and even smaller tools fit for goblins.
Also, before we get into anything about AI, I do want to make a quick disclaimer about some of the ethics of using these tools and also how they were created. While these tools can be great in assisting with what we create, it’s also important that we’re still doing our own work and not passing off what LLM did as our own work. I have been using some of these tools to help create episodes, and even cite some of the ways I am doing so in this episode. But what I’m not doing is feeding a prompt into an LLM and just using that. That would be lazy, irresponsible and not something that anyone wants. However, just because I’m not doing that doesn’t mean that other people aren’t—this is something to particularly look out for with new books about ADHD that aren’t coming from established authors and creators.
Additionally, there are ethical concerns about how the training data for many of the LLMs was obtained. This is especially a concern in regard to the lack of content used to source this material. This has been seen more in terms of art and how those models are trained without the artist's knowledge, but it also applies to written word. While I still have been using these systems, I think it is important that we encourage more ethical sourcing of training data and only using data with consent.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button
Support me on Patreon
Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/192
This Episode's Top Tips
- We can better understand executive function through the lens of self-regulation. There are three core areas that we can look at here: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
- Tools like LLMs can help us create starting points for our work. By prompting the LLM to ask us questions instead it can help us better think through our problems.
- When looking to add a new tool to your repertoire, think about what problem it is going to be solving for rather than just looking for the new shiny.
While ADHD is described as life on Hard Mode, that phrasing got me thinking about what would life look on easy mode. And more importantly, how can we make our lives feel more like that?
In this episode, we’re going to explore what life on easy mode might look like and discuss actionable strategies to shift the dynamic of living with ADHD so that it doesn’t always feel like an uphill battle. How we can take steps to shift our ADHD from making life a struggle to something more manageable. From simplifying routines to harnessing the power of small changes there are a lot of ways that we can work on dialing down that difficulty.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button
Support me on Patreon
Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/191
This Episode's Top Tips
- We can use the focusing question from the book The One Thing: "What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?" to help us identify not only what would be most impactful for us to do, but what we should prioritizing
- With the focusing question, we can also leverage the Domino Effect. We often don’t need to focus on the big things that we need to do but rather on the small and significant tasks that can set off a chain reaction of success, making other tasks easier or unnecessary.
- Focus on progress, not perfection. Aim for small, consistent improvements rather than drastic changes, and celebrate every small win along the way.
Hey team!
I’ve recently been seeing a lot more stuff around the concept of dopamine fasting.
Now, I’m going to start by saying that I’m entering this conversation with a bit of trepidation because it comes from a side of the internet that… well, they tend to have good intentions, but this basically amounts to bro science despite the backing it does have.
The idea behind dopamine fasting is to reduce or eliminate activities that provide instant gratification and a quick release of dopamine. So, someone going through a dopamine fast might give up using their phone, watching TV, video games, junk food, and alcohol, plus anything else they see as their go-to dopamine activities for, say a 24-hour period. I know, sounds like torture.
The idea here is that because we’ve glutted our brains on all these easy dopamine activities, we want to try to “reset” the process to regain a more sensitive system that isn’t seeking that quick hit all the time.
In today’s episode, we’ll break down this concept and examine whether it works (hint: I already called it bro science) and what, if anything, we can still gain from the ideas.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/190
This Episode's Top Tips
- When dopamine fasting, you are trying to reduce or eliminate activities like watching TV, playing video games, eating junk food, and drinking alcohol that would give you a quick release of dopamine. While there may be some benefits in abstaining from these activities, the idea of doing a dopamine fast to reset your system doesn’t hold much water.
- Instead of trying to use a dopamine fast to create a quick fix, it’s better to examine your habits and daily activities that lead to feeling like you need one and see how you can modulate those.
- With ADHD, we often are understimulated, and by doing something slightly stimulating, like playing with a fidget toy, can help improve our focus and concentration.
Hey team!
This week, we’re diving into another listener question.
“Hi, William. I'm Emily, and I live in Chicago, Illinois. I'm a lifelong gardener and love growing flowers, veggies, houseplants, and more. As someone with ADHD, plant care is something I either hyperfixate on or procrastinate and ignore because of all the things that my plants need to thrive. For some reason, creating routines around plant care has been really challenging for me.”
Hey Emily, I love this question because there are always all these things that we want to do that we find so difficult to get into unless we’re falling into hyperfocus. And really, I think that this addresses a key piece of ADHD: getting started can be the hardest part, even on the things that we want to do. So, I’m going to expand this to talking about more than just gardening, although I’ll try and keep your specifics in mind as I go. There are these things that we love to do yet find ourselves unable to do consistently. For a lot of hobbies, that isn’t always too much of a problem, but with plant care… well, I think we’ve all had a plant or two that we’ve lost because we forgot to water it for a week or two.
Honestly, as I started answering this question, I figured that I’d be adding a couple of other questions into this episode, but as I got going, there were a lot of things that I was able to get into. From the different types of fun, to blocking fun out on our calendars to how we can work on lower the resistance to getting started.
So, while gardening might not be your thing, there is still a lot you can get out of this episode because we cover a lot of ground.
If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button
Support me on Patreon
Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/189
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Block off dedicated time for gardening in your calendar to ensure it's prioritized and protected. Our brains are going to make time for us to take time off regardless, so be proactive and choose how you want to spend that time.
- To balance enjoyment and satisfaction, differentiate between Type 1 (immediate fun) and Type 2 (retrospective fun) activities.
- You can break down tasks into three parts: setup, doing, and clean-up to reduce resistance and ensure a smoother start (and finish).
Hey Team!
I was listening to the radio the other day when My Own Worst Enemy by Lit came on - a fine example of pop-punk from the late 90’s.
And while I enjoyed the song, what stuck with me was thinking about the name of that song, My Own Worst Enemy. This is a feeling I have often felt with my ADHD. I seem to have an endless supply of maladaptive and self-destructive behaviors that stem from the condition.
Poor time management, hyper-focusing on non-priority tasks, overcommitting, and procrastination are just a few examples of how my ADHD can manifest in ways that feel counterproductive.
And what we’re talking about is a view of our worst self.
That self of ours comes out in ways that we may later regret or that seem to work against our interests. And with ADHD, these moments can be frequent and frustrating. There have been many times when I’ve thought about this worst self of mine and how I wish I could undo all the bad inside of me. I mean, looking around online, it isn’t hard to find people who prescribe how you can become your best self. However, many of our worst selves' behaviors do not indicate our value as people; instead, they’re a reflection of our unmet needs and coping mechanisms.
And so in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about this worst self of ours, how it manifested, why perhaps we should have a bit more empathy for these maladaptive behaviors, and also how we can work on moving forward to perhaps not our best self, but at least possibly, a better one.
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Ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/188
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Approach the idea of your worst self with empathy. Focus on the fact that you developed these maladaptive behaviors for a reason.
- Pay attention to the situations and emotions that trigger your worst behaviors to anticipate and manage them more effectively.
- Often, our maladaptive behaviors come out when we’re not doing a good job of meeting our basic needs. If we’re engaging in numbing behaviors, we can look below the symptoms to try and see what’s setting them off.
Hey team,
This week I’m talking with Jackie Silver about nutrition and wellness. Jackie is a Registered Dietitian with a Master of Health Science (MHSc) in Nutrition Communications. She has a firm belief that neurodivergent and disabled people deserve to live a healthy lifestyle but found the opportunities for these communities lacking, so she decided to start her own practice, Accessible Wellness. Her area of expertise is in working with kids, teens, and adults with autism, ADHD, and those with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
In our conversation today, we discuss strategies for making nutrition and wellness more accessible. We talk about some of the common challenges we can face while trying to feed ourselves with ADHD, like irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills. We look at how we want simplified, tailored strategies to help people where they're at, rather than simply overwhelming them. We also go into some of the dangers of diet culture and the need to have compassion for ourselves when trying out new strategies.
The Hunger-Fullness Scale
Neurodivergent-Friendly 30-Minute Meals
Be sure to check out Accessible Wellness
- On their Website
- On Instagram
And these great articles from the blog:
- 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating with a Neurodivergent Twist
- Forget to Eat? A Guide to Mechanical Eating for Neurodivergent Adults
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/158
This Episode's Top Tips
- Common challenges we can face when dealing with ADHD and food are irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills - that is recognizing when we are hungry or full or somewhere in between. To help combat this we can use strategies like eating schedules, snack cheat sheets, batch cooking, and using hunger/fullness scales to help build up that interoception.
- We can work on practicing mindful eating by paying attention to tastes, textures, and fullness cues even when we have distractions around. Remember that we want to focus on meeting ourselves where we’re at and doing things that work with our brains.
- It’s important to be compassionate with ourselves and focus on small, sustainable changes rather than demanding perfection.
With ADHD we get to hear a lot of advice on how to get past our various symptoms. Sometimes that advice isn’t so bad, sometimes it’s pretty good - I mean that’s what I’m trying to do with this podcast. But more often than not the advice we get for how to deal with our ADHD is downright bad.
In this episode we’re going to be exploring some of this unhelpful advice and what makes it bad and hopefully how we might be able to turn it around into something useful.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/142
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Much of the ADHD advice available is not written by people with ADHD and doesn't consider the context and struggles of individuals with executive dysfunction. ADHD is a spectrum disorder with varying symptoms and levels, and advice may not work for everyone; individuals may have preferences or aversions to specific strategies or approaches based on their brain types.
- Common ADHD advice of "just do it" or "if you really wanted to do it, you'd do it" oversimplifies the challenges of ADHD and doesn’t take into account how the symptoms of ADHD are going to prevent you from following through on that advice.
- ADHD is a real and impairing disorder, not an excuse or laziness. ADHD symptoms are chronic and significantly impact daily life.
Hey team,
I’ve recently been thinking about task initiation a lot, but while working on the first draft of this episode, I realized that there were a few ideas that were important to explore first.
So in this episode, we’re going to be exploring some ideas of executive dysfunction, but then we’re also going to be getting into stuff surrounding our mental and physical health and then how we can work on our systems that help keep everything in order.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/145
This Episode's Top Tips
- We need to recognize and respect our physical and mental states - it crucial that we’re kind to ourselves and acknowledge that we’re not always going to be at 100%. We don’t always need to pushing ourselves and it’s important to we’re giving ourselves time to recover.
- It’s important that when we’re build the systems in our lives that we look at making them simple and effective. We want them to be able to work even on our bad days and that means we need to lower the barrier to getting started on them.
- One great way that we can implement systems with our ADHD is through checklists and creating designated places for things to go. Again our systems are there to help make our life simpler and streamline the things we need to get done.
This week I’m talking with Star Hansen, a Certified Professional Organizer (CPO©) and Clutter Whisperer on a mission to help you banish your personal Clutter Monster. Her methodology focuses on helping you take control of your stuff and create a life you’re truly proud of. Star looks at the deeper meaning of your stuff to help you figure out why you feel overwhelmed by your clutter in the first place. Star’s best-selling book, “Why the F*#@ Am I Still Not Organized?”, has inspired countless individuals to tackle their clutter head-on and find lasting solutions.
In our conversation, we discuss the significance of having clutter-free spaces and the impact it has on mental and emotional well-being - how clutter can create stress, affect decision-making, and hinder productivity. We also delve into the emotional attachment people often have to their belongings, how clutter can impact relationships, and how clutter can highlight personal values and emotional struggles.
Check out Star's Freebies (including a copy of her book)
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/148
This Episode's Top Tips
- Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
- We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
- Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
- We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.
Hey Team!
In today's episode, we’re taking a deep dive into the transformative power of automation with Chris Cameron, a workflow efficiency consultant specializing in helping neurodivergent individuals harness the benefits of AI and automated tools. Chris shares his personal journey with ADHD and how technology has played a pivotal role in managing daily challenges.
From practical learning to creating inclusive support systems, Chris discusses how specialized automation can alleviate everyday pressures. We also get into a number of topics about AI and how we can integrate some of the services to help alleviate some of the woes of executive dysfunction.
Whether you're a business owner, content creator, or someone looking for practical solutions, this conversation is packed with actionable insights that promise to simplify and enhance your life.
Check out Chris Cameron at learnwith.cc
or connect with him on Twitter
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/187
This Episode's Top Tips
- Start small with automation, using simple tools and gradually integrating more complex systems as comfort with technology grows. It can be easy to be overwhelmed if we try to start out with too much.
- Easy places to start with automation include using email filters to automatically help reduce inbox clutter and tools like Google Calendar or Calendly to automate scheduling and preventing double bookings.
- Regularly update and maintain automation tools to ensure they continue to serve your needs effectively, much like gardening.
- Use AI tools to break down large tasks into manageable steps, helping overcome task initiation barriers.
Hey team!
I’ve been working on this episode for quite a while now and was kind of worried it would never be finished, but I managed to salvage what was useful and polish it up quite a bit.
Today, we're discussing long-standing goals and how we can create systems that help us achieve them. I’m really interested in exploring this topic at length, so I expect this won’t be the only episode we have discussing systems.
In this episode, we'll be diving into the tools and strategies that make our ADHD work for us, not against us, and I'll share some of my own experiences along the way with developing these systems. We’ll also examine how we create systems and what really goes into making them work the way we want them to.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/186
This Episode's Top Tips
- Plan with your natural habits in mind rather than striving for unrealistic perfection. Work on developing systems that you can rely on, even when you're not at your best.
- Avoid overly complex systems that can create more points of failure. Remember that executive dysfunction affects our ability to follow through with our best intentions. By simplifying our systems, we can lower the bar for entry and make it easier to get started.
- Understand that no system will be perfect, and it is important to adjust and maintain it as needed. No system is going to “fix” our ADHD, and that shouldn’t be our goal when building our systems.
Hey team!
I had a listener write in recently asking about finding purpose and how they just feel like their life is a bit of a mess. They don’t know what they want to do and they feel like everyone else has it together. So in today’s episode we’re going to be exploring these ideas, while at the same time questioning if these are even the right questions that we should be asking. I’m going to dive into a number of ways that I don’t have my own life together and we’ll also be getting into self-determination theory and how we can apply that to looking at what we want to do with our life.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/185
This Episode's Top Tips
- No one always has everything together. Don’t compare your lowlight reel to someone else’s highlights—everyone struggles, even if they aren’t advertising it. It’s unrealistic to think that we need to have everything together all the time; just focus on doing what you can.
- Tasks like managing emails are ongoing processes, not one-time achievements.
- Self-determination theory’s principles are autonomy, competence, and relatedness—all of which are incredibly important for us to cultivate in managing our ADHD.
Hey Team!
This episode we’re doing something a little bit different, I’m going to be sharing an episode from another podcast that I think you’ll enjoy.
It’s called ADHD Aha!, hosted by Laura Key. It features candid stories from people who share the moment when it clicked—their ADHD Aha moment—when everything started to make sense—that they, or someone they know, has ADHD.
I recently checked out a few episodes like the one with Caren Magill where she shares her story of going from dropping out of high school to now managing her own ADHD and working as an ADHD coach. And it’s great listening to this episodes and hearing these stories because of how so many of the experiences and emotions the guests talks about mirror my own.
And I was recently a guest on the show, chatting with Laura about my own ADHD Aha! moment, which is what I’m sharing with you today.
In the episode, you’ll hear about managing emotions, organizing tasks, executive dysfunction, and mastering daily routines.
Be sure to checkout ADHD Aha! on your favorite podcast player.
https://lnk.to/adhdahaPS!hackingyouradhd
One of the questions that I’ve been getting a bit more frequently recently is just trying to understand where to get started with ADHD - and I think this is a question that a lot of us have because there is just so much out there on ADHD and it’s hard to know where even to begin thinking about what you might want to be doing.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring this idea by first looking at some of the areas that ADHD entails, how that knowledge can boost your ability to manage your ADHD, and also take a look another look at the Wall of Awful.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- ADHD is a spectrum disorder, meaning that you are going to have a variety of symptoms to varying degrees. Your ADHD is unique to you, and how you treat your ADHD is going to be a matter of figuring out which symptoms are affecting you the most.
- One of the hardest parts of ADHD is getting past our internalized messaging around who we are - if we haven’t taken the time to work on accepting how our ADHD affects us, then it is easy for us to blame our problems on ourselves as personal failings instead of accepting how our ADHD can hold us back.
- The Wall of Awful is the emotional impact of repeated failure, and it makes activating on tasks even more difficult - there are 5 ways people try to get past the Wall of Awful, two don't work, and one works but is damaging to our relationships and then two that work - the two that don't work are staring at it or trying to go around it - the one that works but is damaging is trying to hulk smash through the wall - the two that work that we want to focus on are climbing the wall and putting a door in our wall.
Hey team!
In today’s episode we’re joined by Dusty Chipura, a passionate advocate and ADHD Coach, to explore the nuanced world of ADHD and pregnancy. With her personal and professional experience we will be looking into the challenges and questions that often come up with this subject.
There is a huge gap in what we know about ADHD and pregnancy and it can be hard to find good information. Dusty is an outstanding coach and a font of knowledge in this area. Even if you aren’t pregnant or planning on a pregnancy soon this episode is well worth listening to.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/184
This Episode's Top Tips
- It’s important to recognize the gap in ADHD research related to women and pregnancy. This means that you need to be aware of what the current research suggests. This also means that you will have to be more of an advocate for your needs during pregnancy because it’s possible that you will be more informed about ADHD and pregnancy than your caregivers.
- With that in mind there is a need to prioritize building a support system, including healthcare providers knowledgeable about ADHD as well as community support for emotional and practical assistance.
- There is a likely impact of ADHD on pregnancy-related executive functions, such as organization and time management, and so it will be important to develop and employ strategies or tools to mitigate these challenges (this is where a support network can come in extra handy).
Hey Team!
Accountability is one of the best ways to help you work through those things on your to do list that you just don’t want to do. But finding accountability isn’t always easy. In my conversation today, I’m talking with Joshua Greene, co-founder of the co-working app Groove.
In our conversation today we’ll be talking of course about how Groove works - and specifically what sets it apart from many of the other co-working and accountability apps. We talk about following our energy flow, especially in regards to nontraditional work, how counterintuitive weak social ties can create a better accountability experience, and accountability also applies to so much more than just productivity.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/183
This Episode's Top Tips
- Coworking can improve our ability to stay on task by utilizing the accountability that comes with just having someone else there with you (even if it’s only virtually).
- One of the strongest forms of accountability actually comes from weak social ties, because weak ties strike a balance of providing enough familiarity to foster accountability without the closeness that might encourage us to just take it easy .
- It’s important to find and follow your personal energy peaks throughout the day and allowing for breaks and social time when you need it to help maintain high levels of engagement in your work.
Hey team, this week we’re talking about our weeks and how we can get more out of them with a weekly review. The idea behind a weekly review is to look back on how things went and use that to help us figure out how we want our next week to go.
In this episode, we’re going to go over the benefits of performing a weekly review, look at some of the ways to make doing it easier, and then get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually perform it.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/122
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
This Episode’s Top Tips
- The point of a weekly review is for us to not only look back at what happened last week, but use that knowledge to help us plan out how we’re going to approach our next week. It allows us to gain clarity over what we’ve done and what we want to do.
- When we’re performing our weekly review it is important to keep ourselves out of judgement - we’re not trying to beat ourselves up over anything we didn’t get to, we’re just looking to make next week better.
- One of the most important things for making sure we complete our weekly review is to actually build in the time to perform it on our schedule. By building in and protecting our time to perform a weekly review we are far more likely to follow through on our intentions.
Hey team!
After last week’s episode on toolkits I got a request to do another episode like it but specifically on sleep tools.
Now before I jump in on the episode I want to talk for a minute about why I typically haven’t been doing so many episodes on specific tools. What it comes down to is that often the specific tools aren’t what’s important - what tends to be more important are the strategies and reasons behind the tools.
I kind of think of like if someone told me that they needed help fixing their bike and I handed them a wrench but they actually had a flat tire. Sure a wrench is great for fixing a bike when it needs something tightened, but without the understanding of what’s actually going on behind the scenes that tool may actually be useless.
A specific tools can make all the difference when implementing strategy, we just need to know the why behind it.
So for this episode we’re going to be skipping a lot of the basics of sleep - I’ll do another episode specifically about all that. What we’re going to be focusing on in this episode is our sleep hygiene, which is just a fancy way of talking about all the good habits we have related to our sleep. And so we will get into the why behind what we’re doing but in each section we’ll spend some time talking about the specific tools - and I’m going to try and include links to everything I talk about in the show notes - and none of these are going to be affiliate links, just either things I use or have used and probably a few other things just as options - so if you want to follow along with the show notes you can find them at hackingyouradhd.com/182
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/182
This Episode's Top Tips
- The four pillars of good sleep include duration, quality, regularity and timing.
- Create a bedtime routine tailored to your preferences and needs to signal your body it's time to wind down. You can limit screen time before bed by utilizing app blocks or screen time features to minimize exposure to overly stimulating content.
- Optimize your sleep environment by ensuring darkness, maintaining a comfortable temperature, and investing in bedding that promotes relaxation, such as weighted blankets or sensory compression blankets.
Hey team!
We're chatting with Maddy De Gabriele, an Australian science communicator who's turned her personal journey with ADHD into a mission to help others. Through her Adult ADHD Starter Kit and corporate workshops, Maddy breaks down ADHD management into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.
In this episode we dive into specific tools that can become part of your everyday toolkit for managing your ADHD. We discuss timers, headphones, pillboxes, blankets and more in this episode. If you’ve been wanting an episode that goes into the actual tools that I and many others use in their day to day ADHD life, then this is the episode - Maddy brings the goods.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/181
This Episode's Top Tips
- When we’re looking at what goes into our tool kit we need to be thinking of both the physical and mental items that can assist us throughout the day.
- It’s important to work on getting past the idea of how we “should” be able to do certain things and look at what tools will let us actually do those things.
- It’s important to work on understanding and accepting ADHD as a chronic condition. We need to recognize ADHD's impact on our daily life and work on employing practical tools and strategies to mitigate those challenges.
Hey team!
This week we’re talking with the host of the ADHD Wise Squirrels podcast, Dave Delaney - as many of us Dave wears many hats — keynote speaker, author, and of course podcast host. Dave has actually been podcasting since 2005, although he only recently started up ADHD Wise Squirrels after his recent diagnosis. With that diagnosis, Dave has been on a mission to support others in the community and break down stereotypes that surround ADHD.
In our conversation today we discuss everything from the impact of ADHD on personal development to the power of storytelling in building connections. Dave brings a blend of professional insights and personal experiences that provide a host of strategies to tackle common ADHD challenges. It’s fun conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/180
This Episode's Top Tips
- Recognize and accept your ADHD, allowing yourself the flexibility to navigate challenges without harsh self-judgment.
- Identify and cultivate personal coping strategies for ADHD-related challenges, such as body doubling for productivity or mindfulness to stay present.
- Many of us with ADHD have a natural inclinations towards entrepreneurship that we can use to funnel our creativity.
Hey Team!
Today on the podcast, we're exploring the lighter side of living with ADHD, featuring the hilariously honest Ellie Hino. A stand-up comic who finds humor in the everyday, Ellie has featured for comics such as Maria Bamford, Laurie Kilmartin, and Atsuko Okatsuka. She recently released her debut album, Soft Bones.
In our conversation today she brings her personal journey with ADHD into the spotlight, sharing stories and strategies that hit home for many of us. We discuss getting a diagnosis later life, getting started on medication, impulsivity and time mismanagement. This episode is packed with relatable stories and actionable tips for tackling the day-to-day hurdles of ADHD. Whether you're newly diagnosed, a seasoned pro, or just curious, you'll find valuable insights and plenty to relate to.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/179
This Episode's Top Tips
- Make living spaces ADHD-friendly with functional organization and storage solutions that work for you. Think of using hooks instead of traditional hangers or bins and baskets for clothes instead of keeping your clothes in a dresser.
- We can channel our impulsivity into creative outlets like comedy or improv that allow us to embrace those sides of ourselves on a regular basis.
- Acknowledge and plan for the real time it takes to do tasks, while it may feel like it only takes a minute for us to get out the door we acknowledge all the steps involved if we want o have an accurate picture of how long things take.
Hey team!
This week we’re going to be discussing the challenges of managing ADHD within a relationship where both partners have ADHD and how that can lead to the amplification of symptoms and the struggle to maintain routines and tools.
We’ll also be diving into the potential difficulties of managing ADHD later in life but also how we can lean into the strengths that we have already developed.
This is another listener questions episode and if you’d like to potentially have your question answered on the show head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click on the orange button.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/178
This Episode's Top Tips
- In relationships, clear communication is key, and it’s important to foster accountability while making sure that you are also staying out of judgment.
- Find a balance between structure and flexibility in daily routines, and make sure you’re creating room for accepting your ADHD (and your partners).
- When examining your previously created coping strategies, be sure to explore how you developed them and figure out if they are still helping you or if they need to be adjusted.
Hey team!
We’ve got another listener question today, this time from my friend Aggie:
Hi, Will, Aggie here. Longtime listener, first time caller. To give listeners context, you and I did admin work together and accountabilitycoaching groups. Then we actually got to meet in person at the Chad conference before COVID hit. I myself have a background as a special education teacher, uh, specializing in severe disabilities and autism specific programs. So behavior is one of my strong skills. Implementing understanding. and executing behavior interventions. My question is this, planning and scheduling and time tracking are all great preventative strategies.Do you have any insight or resources around when you know you're already late, probably rushing, and you're trying to stay calm and collected and still show up the way you want to, Even when you were already late. So I'm trying not to show up flustered and discombobulated. I'm thinking maybe some people have coping strategies or other people can share what they do to, to do what I described and give me a jumping off point on how to reframe that emotional state.In the moment of slight or major panic. Would love to hear your ideas or other listeners ideas in response. And thank you so much for your podcast. You're seriously crushing it.
Thanks for the question; Aggie and I think this is an issue we can all relate to. Being late sucks. So, in this episode, we tackle the struggle of showing up calm and composed when maybe we don’t feel calm and collected. We’ll be looking at a number of tools that we can use to try and get ourselves in the right head space, as well as jumping into what we can do so that we might not be late quite as often.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/177
This Episode's Top Tips
- Practice acceptance of your ADHD and that sometimes lateness will happen. Work on changing the narrative from self-criticism to understanding and try to give yourself some compassion when you’re running late.
- Try reframing "I'm sorry I'm late" to "Thank you for your patience" to create a more positive atmosphere and show your gratitude when someone waits for you.
- Deep breathing can be especially helpful in calming your nervous system - when we’re running late and stressed, our prefrontal cortex is impaired, and that makes rational decision-making harder. By slowing down and activating our parasympathetic nervous system through deep breathing, we can calm ourselves and get into the right headspace.
Hey team!
This week I’m talking with Jamie Cutino, a licensed Occupational Therapist, TEDx Speaker, ADHD Coach and a fervent advocate for the ADHD community. In today's episode, Jamie shares her insightful and empowering journey from discovering their ADHD diagnosis to utilizing skills she learned as an occupational therapist to enhance daily life. Jamie has her own podcast, Outsmart ADHD, where she and her guests go over the latest research, share stories and look to provide you with actionable advice.
In our conversation today we talk about what occupational therapy is and how it can help with ADHD management, how sensory issues can impact our ADHD and get into some of the tips and strategies that can help with these issues. And since Jamie is also a podcaster we get into some stuff about the podcast and things I’m looking to improve.
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Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/176
This Episode's Top Tips
- Occupational therapy can provide strategies for improving executive functioning, task initiation, and completion, as well as transitioning between tasks. It is designed to help you develop and maintain the meaningful activities that are hard for your ADHD brain.
- Since needs can vary daily, having a range of strategies to address different challenges is crucial for effective ADHD management. Tools like noise-canceling headphones and well-lit environments can drastically improve focus and comfort but will work differently for different people.
- Recognizing that you can't do everything alone and leveraging support can lead to more enjoyment and success in both personal and professional life. When you can, it is great to outsource and delegate the things that are hard for you to complete.
Hey Team!
I’ve got an exciting interview today that I’ve been hoping to do for a while now.
Dr. Roberto Olivardia is a clinical psychologist and a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in the treatment of ADHD and within the field of ADHD, he further specializes in comorbid disorders, such as OCD, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and body dysmorphic disorder.
However, in true ADHD, fashion during our pre-interview chat we decided to switch the direction of the podcast to instead deal with sleep. In our conversation we talk about Dr. Olivardia’s own issues with sleep and how sleep is just one of those issues that seems to plague everyone with ADHD. We get into some of what underpins ADHD sleep issues and some of the things that we can do to try and get ourselves a good night’s sleep.
I had a blast recording this and I hope you enjoy just as much as I did.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/175
This Episode's Top Tips
- Establish a pre-sleep routine that signals to your brain that it's time for bed. This might include changing into comfortable sleepwear, dimming the lights, and engaging in a relaxing activity like reading or listening to music. Or, as was the case for Dr. Olivardia, going and getting a workout in. Remember that sometimes to calm your ADHD brain down, you need a bit more stimulation.
- Underpinning that last point again, not everything that is typically recommended for getting a good night's sleep always works for our ADHD. It’s important to experiment with different techniques to see what works and doesn’t work for you.
- If sleep problems persist despite your best efforts it’s always good to consider consulting with a sleep specialist. We often don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to sleep and a specialist can help identify any underlying issues and recommend additional treatments.
Hey Team!
With us today is Mattia Maurée and we’re going to be diving into the experiences of living with both autism and ADHD, also known as AuDHD. I was recently on Mattia’s podcast, AuDHD Flourishing, to talk about subclinical autism (which I was diagnosed with in 2022) so if you want to hear more about that head on over to their show, links in the shownotes.
In our conversation today, Mattia shared their story and the insights they've gained through their journey. Our conversation aimed to shed light on the similarities, differences, and unique challenges faced by individuals navigating both conditions.
And just for a little background on the connection of ADHD and autism, we do see quite a lot of this comorbid condition, with about 50% of people diagnosed with autism also getting an ADHD diagnosis (and just as a note, that percentage doesn’t go the other way because of the difference in population sizes, there are a lot more people with ADHD than those diagnosed with autism). Also interesting to note that before 2013 the DSM didn’t allow for a dual diagnosis of autism and ADHD. And that just gives a little insight into how recently the idea of the two of them being intertwined became and because of that there aren’t a ton of resources out there for AuDHD individuals.
So I hope this episode can help start bridging more of that gap.
Be sure to check out Mattia's Podcast AuDHD Flourishing
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/174
This Episode's Top Tips
- Monotropism is our tendency to narrow our focus and is a characteristic of both ADHD and autism and can lead us to miss things outside of this attention tunnel. By learning about attention tunnels, we can work on creating more effective coping strategies that take into account our narrow band of focus.
- Simplifying one's environment and commitments to minimize overwhelming stimuli and demands can help maintain focus and reduce anxiety.
- Regularly reflecting on what works and what doesn't can help tailor our personal strategies for managing symptoms and challenges, acknowledging that what works may evolve over time.
- When seeking a proper diagnosis, it is important to find a healthcare provider who is knowledgeable about the nuances of ADHD and autism spectrum disorders to make sure that you’re getting an accurate diagnosis. Who is assessing you can make all of the difference.
In today’s episode, we have a listener question dealing with the root cause of ADHD and whether or not ADHD comes from trauma or it's something we're born with.
I’m sure a lot of people have had similar thoughts on what the root cause of ADHD and sometimes it’s hard to find accurate information because so much of it can conflict.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be looking into the issue of whether or not ADHD is an issue of genetics or if it is one of trauma - but I also want to be upfront about this and be clear that this isn’t really a both side issue, all of our best research supports the idea that ADHD is a genetic condition.
Just as a note before we get started, I do talk a good deal about trauma in this episode, so if that’s not your thing, feel free to skip this episode.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/173
This Episode's Top Tips
- Just in case I didn’t make this clear enough in the episode, ADHD is a genetic condition, and while trauma may play a role in the severity of ADHD, it is not a cause of ADHD.
- The mix-up between the conditions comes from the overlap in symptoms between ADHD and trauma, such as difficulty concentrating, disorganization, and inattention, which can complicate diagnosis and management.
- Trauma can exacerbate ADHD symptoms, potentially pushing subclinical ADHD diagnoses into clinical ADHD territory. We also have to acknowledge the validity of individual experiences and perspectives regarding ADHD and trauma, recognizing that different factors may contribute to symptom manifestation and severity.
- If you want to better understand what’s happening with you, it is best to consult with an ADHD specialist or mental health professional who can conduct a comprehensive assessment to untangle the complexities of ADHD and trauma, aiding in accurate diagnosis and tailored treatment plans.
Hey team!
No interview today - getting back to some monologue episodes - and completely off topic here, but I just have this negative connotation to the word monologue, like, in my head it sounds like it’s supposed to be something boring? Maybe that’s just me.
In today’s episode we’re tackling the complex reality of ADHD management. Forget about finding a silver bullet; it's about piecing together a puzzle of habits, routines, and strategies that work for you. We’ll be exploring the mosaic of strategies that can help us navigate our days more effectively and how we can build our own personalized way to help us manage our ADHD.
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Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/172
This Episode's Top Tips
- Embrace small changes and focus on incremental improvements in your daily routines that can collectively impact managing ADHD. We don’t need that silver bullet that is going to fix everything.
- Just because our ADHD management is going to rely on a lot of different strategies it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a plan of action - it’s still important for us to be focusing on those strategies that are going to be giving us our biggest bang for our buck like getting better sleep.
- Adaptability is key; it’s important to understand that not every strategy will work all the time, and be open to adjusting your approach as needed. We’re not always in control of everything going on in our day and we have to work around that as best we can.
Hey team!
Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Saman Kesh - In part one of the conversation we covered a lot of the ground around Saman’s ketamine treatment and how that influenced his ADHD.
And just as a quick reminder, this is not a condemnation nor a defense against ketamine-based treatment, the conversation is simply about what his experience was. And if ketamine treatment is something that has piqued your interest, be sure that you are following up on that under proper medical supervision, this isn’t stuff to play around with.
In this second part of the conversation, we switch gears a bit and talk more about our identities with ADHD and the acceptance of our ADHD. We also get into some other therapy techniques like EMDR and other ways that we can work on supporting our ADHD brains.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/171
This Episode's Top Tips
- Recognizing and accepting ADHD as a part of your identity can be a powerful step toward managing everyday challenges. That acceptance is a huge piece in how we are able to navigate problem-solving and finding solutions that work for our brains.
- Therapy is a great way to help work with our ADHD brains and we there are a lot of options for what we can do - CBT, DBT, EMDR and talk therapy are all ways that we can approach to understand our brains better.
- There are a lot of ways that we can help ourselves work with our ADHD like physical activity, meditation, and other forms of self-care that can help reduce our ADHD symptoms and increase our overall well-being.
Hey Team!
We’ve got a returning guest this week who was a real hit last time, Saman Kesh - Saman is an Iranian-American filmmaker who has worked with artists such as Basement Jaxx, Calvin Harris, Kygo, Placebo, !!! (pronounced Chk Chk Chk)
Anyway, we’re not here to discuss any of that today, instead we’re going to be talking about his recent ketamine treatment. A while ago, Saman reached out to me asking if this was something that I’d like to cover on the show, and yeah, this is absolutely something I think would make for a really interesting show. Now, with that said, I do want to emphasize that we are talking about Saman’s treatment here, and this is neither a defense nor a condemnation of ketamine treatments. I also want to emphasize that this is not something that is for treating ADHD but has been proven to be effective as an off-label treatment for a variety of mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and trauma.
If ketamine treatment is something of interest to you I also strongly advise that you do so with medical supervision. This isn’t stuff to play around with, and we still have a lot to learn despite the fact that ketamine has over 50 years of clinical use and research behind it.
Perhaps at some point, I’ll work on an episode from more of a treatment perspective, but for now, we’re just talking about Saman’s experience. Also to note from this episode is that we talked for quite a long time and so I decided that we could split the episode into two parts.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/170
This Episode's Top Tips
- It’s important for us to understand that the way we treat our ADHD is not one size fits all and that there are a variety of ways that we can treat our ADHD. While medication is an effective step, we also want to be looking at other ways that we can improve our mental functions with things like exercise, diet and stuff like mediation.
- Recognize and celebrate the strengths and perspectives ADHD adds to your life, rather than focusing solely on its challenges. And while there is no question that there are challenges if we can recognize the unique way ADHD brains navigate the world we can celebrate the strengths and perspectives ADHD adds to our life and work.
- Understand the importance of allowing flexibility in routines to accommodate the ADHD brain's need for variation and stimulation.
Hey Team!This week we’re joined by Ying Deng, known as ADHD Asian Girl across social media. I was able to get to know Ying a bit at the recent International ADHD Conference and thought she’d be a great guest for the show. Meditation is something that I’ve wanted to discuss on the show for quite a while now, but it also isn’t something I’m super knowledgeable about so it was great to have a chance for this discussion.In our conversation today we get into what mindfulness and mediation actually is - and some about what it isn’t, since meditation isn’t exactly something we get an accurate picture of from popular media. We talk about some of the reasons that mediation can be beneficial for ADHD as well as some of the strategies to help bring meditation into our lives because ADHD can also make it a hard habit to start.
Be sure to check out all of Ying's Mindfulness Course
or
checkout where she's on the web with her Linktree
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/169
This Episode's Top Tips
- We can engage in mindfulness during daily activities like putting on socks or brewing coffee. By focusing on the sensations we can work on being present in the moment.
- ADHD can make it hard for us to build our practice so we can mix up our routine with guided and unguided meditations, sit outside to connect with nature or engage in mindful movements to cater to how we’re feeling on any given day.
- We don’t need to meditate for long periods and if we find that challenging, start with shorter, more manageable sessions and gradually increase the duration as we build the habit.
- Body doubling can be a great way for us to get into a meditation practice. Partner up with someone or join a community for meditation sessions to make the practice more engaging and accountable.
Hey team!
This week, we have the return of Skye Rapson of Unconventional Organization to discuss an innovative tool she developed, the Planning Funnel, which is designed to help us break down our goals into manageable steps.
This was a really fun conversation, and the planning funnel looks awesome - now, as a note, the planning funnel is part of Unconventional Organisation’s ADHD Academy - but they do have a promotion going now that includes the Planning Funnel and 15% off your first month. So if that’s something you’re interested in be sure to go check out https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/the-adhd-academy
In our conversation today, we talk about the importance of goals and planning, how to break down those goals, and ways that we can use ADHD-friendly strategies to make executing on those goals easier.
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/168
This Episode's Top Tips
- Recognize that planning your goals is crucial, especially for individuals with ADHD, as it helps in managing time blindness and setting realistic expectations.
- Focus on a few select goals or themes to avoid feeling overwhelmed. This approach allows for more in-depth planning and a higher success rate.
- Break your goals into subtasks to make them feel more achievable and to clearly see the progression towards your larger goal.
- Planning can be more emotional than we tend to think of it. We need to be mindful of self-criticism and negative internal dialogues that can arise during the planning process and give ourselves the time it deserves.
Hey Team!
Today we’ve got a real treat, I’m talking to one of my favorite people, Brendan Mahan of the ADHD Essentials Podcast. I last had Brendan on to talk about the Wall of Awful, his model of how everything that we do can be made harder from repeated failure. It’s a great episode and I’ll link that in the show notes if you want to get caught up on that.
I asked Brendan back on the show because while we were at the International ADHD Conference I got talking to him about a different model of his and that’s the 9 parts of a transition. Now I understand that the idea of 9 parts of a transition can seem a bit daunting, but what I think the most salient point of this episode is, is that transitions are far more than what we initially think they are. Because of this we often underestimate what goes into making those transitions. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, in our conversation today, Brendan breaks down this model and we also explore strategies for managing distractions and understanding our emotional states.
Checkout Brendan's podcast ADHD Essentials
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/167
This Episode's Top Tips
- Understand that each transition includes multiple components, not just the physical move from one task to another. We need to consider not just the stopping, moving, and starting components of a transition, but also the physical, cognitive, and emotional aspects as well.
- And just to hammer this piece home, we need to recognize and address the emotional aspects of transitions, as they play a significant role in the process. This is especially important when we’re switching contexts, like going from work to family stuff.
- It’s also important for us to understand that sometimes not all the parts of a transition are going to be all that impactful - some parts of the transition are going to be easy. But when we do struggle with moving onto the next thing it is important that we can step back and try and identify what’s going on and where we’re finding that resistance.
Hey team!
I’ve got a fun episode for you this week - I’m talking with Jesse J. Anderson about his new book, Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD. I actually got to meet Jesse in person last November at the International ADHD conference (and I got to be on a panel with him as well) although we recorded this before then. And if you don’t immediately recognize the name, I’m sure you’ve seen some of his stuff online where he posts as ADHD Jesse.
In our conversation today we delve into his experiences with ADHD, his journey as an author, discussing practical coping strategies, challenges with memory and motivation, and the importance of adapting to individual mental processes.
Be sure to check out Jesse's book Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/165
This Episode's Top Tips
- Avoid relying solely on urgency as a motivation source, as it can lead to negatively reinforcing cycles and increased anxiety. We can embrace a variety of strategies for coping with ADHD, while acknowledging that what works may change over time or depending on the situation.
- Prospective memory is our ability to remember to remember - and so with our ADHD it can be struggle not only to remember what we need to remember, but even that there is something that needs to be remembered. There are a variety of solutions we can try to help with this such as physical reminders, our calendars, and alarms on our phones.
- It’s important that we acknowledge and address the shame often associated with ADHD. ADHD is hard and having difficulties with ADHD is not your fault. However, we still need to take responsibility for finding and implementing coping strategies.
Hey Team!
We’re kicking off 2024 with the incredible Jessica McCabe - creator, writer, and host of the award-winning YouTube channel How to ADHD. I’m sure a lot of you are already familiar with Jessica’s work as her YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, but for those of you who haven’t, her channel contains a wealth of knowledge about ADHD and is one of the things that kicked me in the pants to start taking my ADHD more seriously.
And now she’s coming out with a book: How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It) - which is coming out on January 2nd - so tomorrow if you’re listening to this when this episode comes out.
In our conversation today, Jessica and I discussed how we want to go from surviving our ADHD to thriving with it, to get past some of our issues with executive function and universal design. We also get into a lot of stuff about her book and how she was able to use a lot of the strategies that she wrote about in the book to also help her write that same book.
Honestly, this episode was a blast to record and I hope you enjoy as much as I did putting it together.
Be sure to check out howtoadhdbook.com to find Jessica's book
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/164
This Episode's Top Tips
- When we want to move from surviving to thriving we want to start looking at not just how we can get more things done, but what’s worth doing.
- Even projects we’re interested in can be difficult for us to work on, so it's important for us to keep them exciting with variety.
- When planning out those big projects, work backward from where you want to be to figure out all the steps in between so that we can see that path to done.
- Effort for us is not the problem, so trying harder is not the answer.
In today’s episode, I’m going to be talking about what’s going on with Hacking Your ADHD over this last year and what’s coming up next year.
No real show notes for this episode but feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Hey team!
This week I’m talking with, Jesse Mecham, the founder of the hit budgeting software, You Need A Budget - or as it’s more commonly abbreviated YNAB - now I understand, that the term, “hit budgeting software” does come off as a little strange, but it is honestly something that has quite the cult following. And I know that the idea of budgeting can seem a bit overwhelming so don’t worry we get into that. Also while the software is called You Need A Budget, that isn’t quite the focus of what’s going on. And while this software wasn’t designed for people with ADHD, the underlying tenents have really resonated with a lot of ADHDers.
In our conversation today, Jesse and I discuss YNAB's four key habits for money management, including giving money "jobs", planning for future expenses, building flexibility, and aging money to create financial breathing room. We also talk specifically about how these methods can aid those with ADHD by promoting intentionality and creating helpful friction in spending and saving.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/162
This Episode's Top Tips
- Give every dollar a "job" - Assign your money to different spending categories and priorities when budgeting.
- Plan for irregular and future expenses - Don't just budget for fixed monthly bills. Save for things like car repairs. We need to be flexible with our budgeting to allow for when things come up.
- Add friction before purchases - Don't save card info in browsers. Figure out where the money is going to be coming from before purchasing to make spending more thoughtful.
Hey team!
In today’s episode we are talking with Terry Bartley, the author of Tyranny of the Fey, host of the podcast Most Writers Are Fans, and a full-time English teacher. In our conversation today, Terry shares his journey as a writer, revealing how he channels his creativity while managing ADHD. We also get into Terry’s diagnosis and how learning about the symptoms led to his self-recognition of the condition. We discuss some the misunderstandings of ADHD and how that can lead to some of the stigmas associated with ADHD. We also go into some of the many tool that Terry uses to help keep himself of track when writing and teaching.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/161
This Episode's Top Tips
- Deadlines are great tools to help keep you motivated and keep you on track - espesially in regards to righting. These deadlines are incredibly helpful for those things that don’t have a well defined done state (like writing).
- Accountability can be incredibly helpful for keeping us on task and can come from many sources. In Terry’s case, working with an editor helped keep him on track when he needed to follow through with those intentions of writing.
- The importance of grace and understanding is an critical building block in our ADHD journey - whether it is with ourselves or others we need to allow for room to make mistakes and grow with our ADHD.
Hey team!
This week I’m talking with ADHD coach Shane Thrapp - but specifically, today we’re going to be diving into the service Focus101 - which is a free body-doubling site designed to help you get the most of your work time. Now, funny story, I’m actually working on this while body-doubling through Focus101 right now.
Now in this episode, we’ll be getting into exactly what body-doubling is and how it can be incredibly helpful for completing those tasks that are hard for us to follow through on on our own. We also talk about a number of other tools that can be used in conjunction with body doubling, such as the Pomodoro technique, alarms, using our calendars, and ways to break our tasks into smaller pieces.
Check out Shane's Coaching - Creating Order From Chaos
and
The Men's ADHD Support Group
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/160
This Episode's Top Tips
- Body doubling is a technique where we work in the presence of another person, even virtually, to help provide accountability. I can be effective at keeping us on track, reduce distractions and helps provide the motivation to stay on task.
- We can make body doubling even more effective when we use tools like Pomodoros, alarms, reminders, and breaking our tasks down into smaller pieces. I also personally find the aspect of scheduling a particular time to do a task to be an especially important aspect of body-doubling.
- As we discussed in the episode, Focus 101 is a free online tool for ADHD productivity combining features like body doubling, Pomodoro, and accountability groups.
Hey team!
This week I’m talking with Strengths-Based Learning Expert Caitlin Meister who has made it her life’s work to bring her strengths-based, neurodiversity-affirming, joyful learning approach to other parents and educators.
Caitlin is the Founding Director of The Greer Meister Group, a New York City-based private tutoring and educational consulting practice. She attended Wesleyan Unversity and went on to receive additional training through the Harvard Graduate School of Education and in the Orton-Gillingham approach for teaching students with language-based learning differences.
In our conversation today we discuss strength-based and neurodiversity-affirming approaches in education that foster belonging and engagement for all students. We also explore practical strategies like reframing behaviors, collaborating with teachers, and providing specific praise to support neurodiverse learners. Caitlin shares insights on embracing neurodiversity and creating flexible, inclusive learning environments where children's strengths and differences are valued.
Support me on Patreon
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/159
This Episode's Top Tips
- We can focus on utilizing a child's strengths and interests as starting points for learning and growth to help build confidence and engagement.
- It’s important to work collaboratively with teachers as a team with the shared goal of supporting the child's well-being and success.
- Advocating for neurodiversity to be valued in learning environments can help create flexible spaces that can help everyone thrive.
Hey team,
This week I’m talking with Jackie Silver about nutrition and wellness. Jackie is a Registered Dietitian with a Master of Health Science (MHSc) in Nutrition Communications. She has a firm belief that neurodivergent and disabled people deserve to live a healthy lifestyle but found the opportunities for these communities lacking, so she decided to start her own practice, Accessible Wellness. Her area of expertise is in working with kids, teens, and adults with autism, ADHD, and those with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
In our conversation today, we discuss strategies for making nutrition and wellness more accessible. We talk about some of the common challenges we can face while trying to feed ourselves with ADHD, like irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills. We look at how we want simplified, tailored strategies to help people where they're at, rather than simply overwhelming them. We also go into some of the dangers of diet culture and the need to have compassion for ourselves when trying out new strategies.
The Hunger-Fullness Scale
Neurodivergent-Friendly 30-Minute Meals
Be sure to check out Accessible Wellness
- On their Website
- On Instagram
And these great articles from the blog:
- 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating with a Neurodivergent Twist
- Forget to Eat? A Guide to Mechanical Eating for Neurodivergent Adults
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/158
This Episode's Top Tips
- Common challenges we can face when dealing with ADHD and food are irregular eating, difficulty with meal planning/prep, and poor interoceptive skills - that is recognizing when we are hungry or full or somewhere in between. To help combat this we can use strategies like eating schedules, snack cheat sheets, batch cooking, and using hunger/fullness scales to help build up that interoception.
- We can work on practicing mindful eating by paying attention to tastes, textures, and fullness cues even when we have distractions around. Remember that we want to focus on meeting ourselves where we’re at and doing things that work with our brains.
- It’s important to be compassionate with ourselves and focus on small, sustainable changes rather than demanding perfection.
Hey team!
This week, I’m talking with Neha (name changed for anonymity) - she is a first-generation Indian immigrant who worked in big tech based out of the Bay Area, California. She now works to create awareness about undiagnosed ADHD in South Asians, especially women, and sells ADHD and autism-friendly products on her website pawtistictravel.com.
And just as a quick note, Hacking Your ADHD listeners can get a 15% discount code with Hacking15 on all purchases.
In our conversation today Neha talks about her history of chronic domestic and emotional abuse, and how finally acknowledging and getting help with PTSD revealed her ADHD symptoms and diagnoses. We explore the lasting impacts of childhood trauma, from physical and emotional abuse to neglect, and its connections to ADHD and other mental health issues. We go into the importance of self-validation, diagnosis, and self-compassion in the healing journey. Through our discussion, we try and provide insights into living with and managing ADHD, emphasizing small ways that we can work with our brains instead of against it.
As such, this episode is a bit more intense than some other episodes so if that’s not something you are up for right now, feel free to skip this one or come back to it later. That said, I think this is an incredibly powerful episode and want to thank Neha for the vulnerability of coming on the show and sharing her story.
ACE Test Resources
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean
- https://developingchild.harvard.edu/media-coverage/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean/
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/157
This Episode's Top Tips
- One way to evaluate the impacts of childhood trauma is through the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) test, which can help access what many of us might just think of as a normal childhood. It’s important that when we’re looking at our ADHD we also consider issues like complex trauma which can exacerbate the symptoms.
- Even if it feels like we don’t have big T trauma, it can still play a role in how we manage our ADHD symptoms - we also often have a tendency to try and minimize the impact that trauma can have on us. It’s important to remember that trauma isn’t a competition and everyone is going to respond differently.
- It’s vital for us to recognize that if we were harmed we’re not to blame and that if we’re trying to seek validation from our abusers we will often be met with gaslighting. It doesn’t matter how the abuser feels about the situation, and can instead focus our energy on treating ourselves with compassion and healing.
Hey Team,
This week I’m talking with Chuck Wisner, an expert in effective communication. He was a senior affiliated mediator with the Harvard Mediation Program and is president of Wisner Consulting. And he recently published the book, The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen, and Interact.
In our conversation today, he introduces us to the four archetypal conversations that underlie all our interactions, from storytelling to collaboration and from creativity to commitment. He shares practical tips on navigating these conversations with mindfulness, highlighting the power of questions and the importance of understanding standards in our interactions, whether in business or personal relationships.
While this isn’t a strictly ADHD episode, I think it still is a valuable look at communication and something that many of us with ADHD can struggle with. Through our conversation, I do try and link up many of the ideas with how they present to those of us with ADHD.
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/156
This Episode's Top Tips
- Work to understand the four archetypal conversations—storytelling, collaboration, creative, and commitment. If we can recognize when we are in each type of conversation and learn to navigate them effectively, it can help us avoid many common pitfalls.
- With ADHD it can be hard to resist the urge to rush into decisions or actions. But if we can take the time to slow down, set clear standards, and communicate our expectations, it will help ensure that everyone involved in the conversation understands what is expected and why.
- Questions are a powerful tool in conversations. Ask open and honest questions to foster understanding and open communication. Encourage others to share their perspectives and reasoning. Questions can help uncover new insights and solutions.
Happy ADHD Awareness Month!
This week, I’m talking with Kim Nguyen of Skylight -
Now, real quick, before we jump into the rest of the introduction, I just wanted to mention that Skylight Calendar has sponsored the show in the past, but this this episode itself isn’t sponsored.
With that said, in this episode, we discuss the Skylight Calendar in depth. We delve into how we can use digital tools like the Skylight Calendar to help families create easier coordination and reduce the stress associated with scheduling. Kim shares her insights on distributing the mental load, empowering kids, and fostering confidence through structured scheduling and visual reminders.
Be sure to check out the Skylight Calendar
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/155
This Episode's Top Tips
- Digital calendars can help families stay organized by displaying events, tasks, and reminders.
- Calendar can help empower children to take ownership of their schedules and responsibilities. The Skylight Calendar in particular, allows kids to input their own tasks and check them off, promoting independence and accountability.
- It is important to distribute the mental load of organizing family schedules and tasks among different family members. By having a system that allows multiple inputs, it helps share the responsibility of family scheduling.
Happy ADHD Awareness Month!
This week I’m talking with fellow ADHD podcaster Peter Shankman. Peter is the host of the Podcast Faster Than Normal where he talks with people around the world who have learned how to unlock the gifts ADHD diagnosis, and use it to their personal and professional advantage. He is also the author of Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain and also just recently came out with a new children's book, The Boy with the Faster Brain.
In our conversation today Peter shares the story of his own journey, from feeling "broken" to recognizing how he can harness his ADHD. We also discuss practical strategies for working with our ADHD, owning our decisions, and the importance of things like morning routines and exercise.
Be sure to check out Peter's podcast Faster Than Normal
And his books:
Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain
The Boy with the Faster Brain
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/154
This Episode's Top Tips
- Recognize and value the unique strengths that come with having an ADHD brain. Rather than seeing ADHD as a limitation, we view it as a unique attribute that can drive success if properly harnessed.
- To overcome feeling overwhelm, we can break tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. We can often find ourselves in paralysis when we don’t know where to start and by breaking tasks down we can often find our way.
- We can leverage technology as an aid with tools like ChatGPT to assist with starting projects or tasks. Technology can be a beneficial companion in providing structure and easing the initiation of tasks.
Hey team,
This week, I’m talking with the founder of the Inattentive ADHD Coalition and author of Living with Inattentive ADHD: Climbing the Circular Staircase of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Cynthia Hammer. In our conversation today, we discuss Cynthia’s journey with a late diagnosis of inattentive ADHD and critical lessons that she’s learned along the way. We also explore the challenges of recognizing ADHD, dispel common myths, and emphasize the importance of early diagnosis. From overcoming critical self-talk to self-publishing her memoir, Cynthia shares valuable insights on living with ADHD and creating a brighter future for those of us in neurodivergent community.
Be sure to check out the Inattentive ADHD Coalition
and Cynthia's book: Living with Inattentive ADHD: Climbing the Circular Staircase of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/153
This Episode's Top Tips
- Avoid trying to fix everything at once. Instead, prioritize one thing at a time for improvement. ADHD management is a journey, and gradual progress is key.
- Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram can be valuable sources of information and support for ADHD. However, be discerning in choosing reliable sources to avoid misinformation.
- Focus on becoming aware of your critical self-talk and work replacing negative thoughts with positive self-talk. Self-compassion is crucial for managing ADHD effectively.
Hey team!
This week, we’re talking with the co-founder of the productivity app Tiimo, Helene Nørlem. In our conversation today, we discuss what Tiimo is and how it can help with planning, especially for the neurodivergent community.
The discussion also explores the broader aspirations of Tiimo to advocate for neurodiversity, the potential of integrating AI to enhance user experience, and the importance of creating awareness and resources for the neurodivergent community.
Be sure to check out the Tiimo App
Support me on Patreon
Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/152
This Episode's Top Tips
- While planning can be difficult for those of us with ADHD, having some sort of scaffolding in can help us make the most of our days.
- Tiimo is focused on creating a balanced app that assists you in creating a plan for the day that won’t overwhelm you - this also includes making sure were making time for things like self-care.
- One of best ways to help us get going on our to-do lists is to breakdown our tasks into more manageable subtasks and this breakdown of tasks can be greatly assisted through the use of AI tools that are built into Tiimo (or found in other apps as well).
Hey team!
This week, I’m joined by Antonia Bowring - Antonia holds a B.A. in Political Science, an M. Phil. in Development Economics, and an M.B.A. She is an ICF-certified coach with an Executive Coaching Certificate from NYU. She is a frequent speaker to on topics ranging from mindfulness, ADHD in the workplace, and communication best practices.
In our conversation today, we delve into the challenges and strengths associated with ADHD and how we can work on leveraging those through creativity and intensity. We also talk about embracing ADHD, the importance of self-acceptance, mindfulness practices, strategic collaboration, and get into what it means to receive a late diagnosis.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/151
This Episode's Top Tips
- Recognizing and understanding the specific attributes and challenges of ADHD can help individuals develop strategies to manage their symptoms more effectively and leverage their strengths.
- Just as important as identifying our strengths can be identifying our weaknesses and finding ways to help mitigate those weaknesses, like collaborating with others and outsourcing when we can.
- Incorporating mindfulness, regular exercise, and maintaining good sleep hygiene are essential strategies for managing ADHD. These practices can significantly enhance focus, emotional regulation, and overall well-being.
Hey team,
This week, we’re diving into the innovative world of digital therapeutics with Dr. Scott Kollins, exploring the potential of a unique game-based treatment for ADHD.
Dr. Kollins works for a company called Akili that has been developing a video game that is designed to help treat the symptoms of ADHD. The game EndevorOTC was only available for iOS, but they also just recently launched an Android version.
In our conversation today, we discuss the challenges, successes, and future of this pioneering approach to managing ADHD.
Check out Endeavor OTC
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/150
This Episode's Top Tips
- We should consider EndevorOTC as a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional treatments. While the research does show it’s benefits, we often want to approach our ADHD treatment from multiple angles.
- As with anything we do for our ADHD, consistency is key. Just like exercise or going to the gym, the game's benefits come with regular and consistent use.
- Although designed as a game, this treatment should be approached with the understanding that it's a medical product aiming to assist and that sometimes it’s going to be hard.
Hey team,
This week I’m talking with Rachel Scanlon, a stand-up comedian, actress, writer and co-host to the podcast Two Dykes and a Mic. Seen on Don't Tell Comedy, JFL’s Straight Up Stand Up, and Comedy Central, Rachel is a high-energy comic that buzzes with positivity.
In our conversation, we hear about Rachel’s journey with ADHD and her decisions to manage it. We also explore the intertwining worlds of ADHD and queer identity. From the challenges of school to the joys of podcasting, our conversation ranges and highlights the power of embracing your own unique experiences.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/149
This Episode's Top Tips
- People with ADHD are often labeled with stereotypes like being "scatterbrained" or "lazy." It's essential to challenge these misconceptions and highlight the strengths, such as drive, engagement, and compassion, that many individuals with ADHD possess.
- Recognizing and understanding one's neurodivergence can be liberating. Instead of attempting to fit into a neurotypical mold, individuals with ADHD should embrace and celebrate their unique traits and abilities.
- There can be intersections in the experiences of being queer and being neurodivergence. It's beneficial for people to question and engage in some introspection, even if it leads to the reaffirmation of your own initial understanding.
- With ADHD it’s important to find creative outlets that let you truly be yourself. By tapping into your own self-expression you can lean into your strengths and find fulfillment with what you do.
This week I’m talking with Star Hansen, a Certified Professional Organizer (CPO©) and Clutter Whisperer on a mission to help you banish your personal Clutter Monster. Her methodology focuses on helping you take control of your stuff and create a life you’re truly proud of. Star looks at the deeper meaning of your stuff to help you figure out why you feel overwhelmed by your clutter in the first place. Star’s best-selling book, “Why the F*#@ Am I Still Not Organized?”, has inspired countless individuals to tackle their clutter head-on and find lasting solutions.
In our conversation, we discuss the significance of having clutter-free spaces and the impact it has on mental and emotional well-being - how clutter can create stress, affect decision-making, and hinder productivity. We also delve into the emotional attachment people often have to their belongings, how clutter can impact relationships, and how clutter can highlight personal values and emotional struggles.
Check out Star's Freebies (including a copy of her book)
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/148
This Episode's Top Tips
- Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
- We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
- Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
- We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.
Hey team ,
this week I’m talking with Dr. Jessica Stern about ADHD, mental health, and trauma. Dr. Stern is a licensed clinical psychologist, consultant, and clinical assistant professor at NYU Langone Health. Her areas of specialty are depression, anxiety, ADHD in adults, and trauma, as well as burnout, productivity, and corporate wellness.
In our conversation today we discuss the intersection of ADHD and trauma, the need for routine and structure while still maintaining our need for spontaneity. We also get into the importance of support networks and how we can also check in with ourselves.
Additionally, we also talked about Wondermind, a mental fitness company that Dr. Stern is serving as an advisor. Wondermind was co-founded by Selena Gomez and Mandy Teefey and just launched their own podcast Baggage Drop which features short 10-minute episodes to help with mental health and build habits.
Be sure to check out my interview with Skye Rapson on her podcast The ADHD Skills Lab
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/147
This Episode's Top Tips
- Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
- We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
- Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
- We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.
In just one more month we're going to be coming up on the halfway point of 2021 — I know, I have no idea how it got here either.
But with this mark in time we're starting to see a shift going on - while COVID certainly isn't a thing of the past, the vaccine role out has opened up a lot of possibilities for what we want our future to look like.
At the end of 2020, I did some planning for 2021, but I knew that a lot of it was going to be uncertain so I didn't make too many specific plans. But now that I'm getting a better grasp of what the future might hold — although let's be honest, with ADHD we're always going to have a lot of uncertainty — I felt like it was time to go over those plans again and maybe give myself a fresh start.
In this episode, we're going to be talking about the fresh start effect, go over some stuff on planning, and how we can work on sticking to those plans.
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/76
This Episode's Top Tips
- Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
- We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
- Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
- We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.
As we've been working on goals one place I want us to take a step back on and think about is meeting ourselves where we are.
As we get going with our planning we tend to decide that well we want to do all of the things. And I mean why not, there are a lot of things that I want to do, if I don't start now, when am I going to start? I can't tell you how many ill-fated adventures I've started because of that whole "if not now, when?" line - there are so many things that I should be investing my time in now. I need to be meditating and exercising more and eating healthier and saving money and work on business and building my relationships and learning new skills and on and on and on.
I'm sure everyone listening has that list of things they know that they should be starting on now because the sooner the better results you'll see down the line. But we're not starting on them... or when we do we don't stick with the changes.
Today we're going to be looking at what it means to meet ourselves where we're at and then some of the ways that we can work on making that happen.\
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Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/80
This Episode's Top Tips
- We only have so much time and energy we can put into any given day - giving ourselves the self-compassion to accept this is our first step in meeting ourselves where we're at.
- When we're trying to add things back into our life that we've previously done it can feel like we picked up the wrong puzzle pieces and this is because we often don't think about how our circumstances have changed. Just because we did something before doesn't mean it will be necessarily easy for us to just pick right back up.
- After we approach what we're capable of with self-compassion we need to decide on some of the things that we're not going to do. This gives us the mental space to focus on the things we can do right now.
- Celebrate your small wins because they are the stepping stones to reaching your goals.
Trimethylxanthine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug - for many caffeine is such a ubiquitous substance that calling it a drug seems like a misnomer. How could something so widely used that has so few regulations around it be a drug? But a drug is simply a chemical substance that affects our nervous system function and can result in changes to our perception, mood, cognition, and behavior. I feel like caffeine ticks the box pretty well on all those accounts.
In today's episode, we'll be exploring how caffeine works - some of its benefits and negatives and then we'll be looking at what we know about how caffeine and ADHD mix.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/91
This Episode's Top Tips
- Caffeine is a psychoactive drug whose primary mechanism is binding to adenosine receptors in the brain. The buildup of adenosine in our system is what makes us sleepy, so by binding to these receptors caffeine is able to keep us awake.
- Caffeine has a host of benefits but having too much caffeine near bedtime can affect our slow-wave sleep and reduce our total amount of sleep.
- There is still a lot of research that needs to be done on the interaction between caffeine and ADHD but it is clear that many people with ADHD attempt to self-medicate with caffeine.
Over the last few weeks, I have hit a number of points where it all just felt like too much - now there are a number of things that have contributed to this, but one of the keys always behind when I get overwhelmed is doing too much. This is despite the fact that even when I have too much on my plate it always feels like I should be doing more. That I could squeeze in just a few more things and then… well then I’d probably also still be trying to add more things to do.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring why doing more isn’t usually the best thing for us to pursue and how doing less can actually help us actually accomplish the things we really want to do.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/111
This Episode's Top Tips
- Prioritizing with ADHD can be difficult and that is only made more difficult as we add more and more to what we’re doing. When we’re able to pare down the amount we’re doing we can then better prioritize all the things that actually need to get done.
- We don’t have to do everything that ends up on our to-do lists - it’s okay to cross things out even if we haven’t completed them.
- We only have so much cognitive capacity to focus on any given thing and the more open loops we the more we are going to be drawing on that cognitive capacity. Our best bet for dealing with open loops is to work on simply opening fewer of them by taking less on.
One of the ideas that I’ve been playing with lately is how to go about my planning in a more natural way or perhaps a better phrase would be functional, because while I love the idea of planning it doesn’t always work out how I want to it to.
And to be clear, I don’t mean that my plans don’t work out, what I’ve been grappling with is that often when I do my planning I’ve failing to do it in a way that encompasses both my professional and personal life. I think this is an aspect of layering on my personal planning over my professional planning - but really I should be doing it the other way around. It makes more sense for me to build my planning around things like saying when my kids are in and out of school. It should be based on what’s going on in my life around me.
And so it dawned on me that one of the ways I could adjust this planning was to focus that planning that was seasonal - because with each season there are definite changes in how I go about my life. And so today we’re going to be exploring how we can look at planning with those seasonal changes in mind.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/seasonalplanning
This Episode’s Top Tips
- When we’re writing out our plans we’re not creating some set-in-stone document that we can’t vire from - our plans should be malleable. It’s also important that we’re checking in with our plans as often as we need to so that we can stay on track.
- By planning with the seasons in mind we’re thinking about the way our lives change with the seasons - are we going to be staying indoors or outdoors more? Are there seasonal events we want to keep in mind? What are the things you’re going to be looking forward to in those seasons?
- Once you’ve figured out how you want your season to go you can break it down into what you want each month to look like and then take that information to plan out your coming days and weeks.
Today we’ve got a bit of a different episode coming your way - in this episode, I talk with award-winning director Saman Kesh. Kesh is known for his narrative music video work with artists such as Basement Jaxx, Calvin Harris, and Placebo.
In our broad-ranging conversation, we talk about the creative process and having ADHD, medication, therapy, and a whole host of other topics. This episode is a bit more of the practical side of managing ADHD, and there are great tips littered throughout the episode.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/samankesh
Hey team,
This week I’ve got an awesome conversation for you with Jodi Lasky -
Jodi is a seasoned entrepreneur, coach, and author with extensive knowledge in neuropsychology, accountability, productivity, and introversion. Drawing on her background in Communication, Culture, and Technology, as well as law, Jodi has dedicated her career to understanding leadership and personal tendencies. Her coaching program, 'The Introvert Founder', leverages her understanding to help introverted entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of business success, encouraging them to work in harmony with their natural tendencies rather than battling against them.
In our conversation today, talk about using the ideas from Agile Product Development and implementing them for personal goal setting and planning. But we also explore issues around neurodivergence, particularly focusing on ADHD and introversion.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/146
This Episode's Top Tips
- We can consider using Agile Planning and Scrum for our planning by tracking progress in short cycles, maintaining a to-do list (backlog), and managing priorities. The backlog is especially helpful for keeping yourself on task as new ideas come up.
- Introversion and extroversion are more about how you recharge your energy. Introverts recharge by being alone or with a few close friends, while extroverts gain energy from being in larger groups. Understanding this about yourself can help you better manage your energy throughout the day and avoid burnout.
- Whether it's introversion or ADHD, we can stop fighting against our natural tendencies and instead find ways to work with them. We can work on accepting our neurodivergence and explore ways that it can serve us in our personal and professional life. For many of us, this means avoiding "hustle culture" that promotes working incessantly. We need to prioritize a balanced schedule that allows for rest and personal time.
When it comes to understanding our ADHD it can be a bit of a minefield to navigate - one of our most pernicious problems is that often we're never really educated in what it means to have ADHD. And to top that off, what we learn from pop-culture just reinforces stereotypes that don't really reflect what ADHD is actually about.
One of the most important ways to help manage our ADHD is to accept it, but that can be really hard to do if we don't actually have a good grasp of what having ADHD means. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into the ADHD subtypes (or presentations as it's now being called) → there are the 3 kinds of ADHD that you might be diagnosed with, hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and combined.
Today we're going to be exploring these presentations of ADHD and working on understanding how this can help define our own ADHD.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/subtypes
This Episode’s Top Tips
- ADHD is a spectrum disorder, which means that it includes a wide list of conditions and severity which means that your ADHD is just that, yours. No one is going to have the exact same symptoms that you do, so don't worry about comparing yourself to others even if you do resonate with a lot of the stories you hear in the community.
- The three presentations of ADHD are Hyperactive-Impulsive, Inattentive, and Combined. We can roughly estimate that about 10% of diagnoses are hyperactive-impulsive, 30% are inattentive, and 60% are combined.
- I know this was basically in the first tip, but it bears repeating - we're all going to be ADHDing in our own way - make sure you're not going to struggle with all the same things that everyone else does so focus on what's going to make the biggest difference for you.
Hey team,
I’ve recently been thinking about task initiation a lot, but while working on the first draft of this episode, I realized that there were a few ideas that were important to explore first.
So in this episode, we’re going to be exploring some ideas of executive dysfunction, but then we’re also going to be getting into stuff surrounding our mental and physical health and then how we can work on our systems that help keep everything in order.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- We need to recognize and respect our physical and mental states - it crucial that we’re kind to ourselves and acknowledge that we’re not always going to be at 100%. We don’t always need to pushing ourselves and it’s important to we’re giving ourselves time to recover.
- It’s important that when we’re build the systems in our lives that we look at making them simple and effective. We want them to be able to work even on our bad days and that means we need to lower the barrier to getting started on them.
- One great way that we can implement systems with our ADHD is through checklists and creating designated places for things to go. Again our systems are there to help make our life simpler and streamline the things we need to get done.
Hey team, this week I had a great conversation with leadership coach Leigh Collier. In this episode, we go over the process of how she helps individuals discover the best version of themselves by overcoming limiting beliefs. We also delve into topics such as identifying personal strengths, the importance of seeking support from communities, and get into how we can challenge those self-limiting beliefs. We also go over the value of individuality, working with your own brain, and distinguishing coaching from mentoring or therapy.
Be sure to check out Leigh's Website: https://www.ttncoaching.com/
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/144
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Those of us with ADHD can face a lot of various challenges when trying to take on a leadership role. Because of this, it is crucial for us to embrace self-leadership and find tools and techniques that work for our brains. We need to experiment with different approaches to enhance our performance and productivity to help us overcome the obstacles that can come up due to our ADHD.
- It’s important for us to understand the distinction between coaching and mentoring. While mentoring involves imparting wisdom and advice, coaching focuses on facilitating the individual's self-discovery and helping them find their own solutions. Coaching is meant to empower us to think critically, question self-limiting beliefs, and develop a sense of ownership and build self-accountability.
- We need to be able to recognize the self-limiting beliefs that may be holding us back and preventing us from reaching our full potential. This means that we need to question the thoughts and beliefs we have about ourselves and challenge their validity. We can gain a fresh perspective and develop strategies to help overcome these beliefs by working with a coach or therapist.
- If we can focus on identifying and leveraging our strengths, we can use those to help propel ourselves in the right direction. We can recognize that our strengths are unique to us and that they can help contribute to our success as leaders.
This week I’m talking with Dez Rock, an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience and currently serves as the CEO at SIEMonster - a web security company. But today we’re focusing on her ADHD and how she believes it has made her into an exceptional leader.
In our conversation, we discuss our experiences with ADHD and its impact on our lives. We also talk about the importance of deadlines, the challenges and benefits of ADHD, and also touch on the significance of routine. And we also get into the need for support systems, the detrimental effects of shame, and the value of sharing personal stories within the neurodiverse community.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/143
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Build routines and establish touchstones throughout the day to provide structure and support productivity. While routine can become boring, having a basic framework can help us stay on track and maintain a sense of stability.
- We want to surround ourselves with support systems, including medication, routines, and other strategies tailored to our individual needs. We can also reach out to friends, family and other members of our communities for help in overcoming many of our ADHD challenges.
- We need to understand that neurodiversity is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Each person has unique strengths and challenges, and it's important to avoid comparing ourselves to others. We can celebrate our individuality and focus on personal growth and well-being.
With ADHD we get to hear a lot of advice on how to get past our various symptoms. Sometimes that advice isn’t so bad, sometimes it’s pretty good - I mean that’s what I’m trying to do with this podcast. But more often than not the advice we get for how to deal with our ADHD is downright bad.
In this episode we’re going to be exploring some of this unhelpful advice and what makes it bad and hopefully how we might be able to turn it around into something useful.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/142
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Much of the ADHD advice available is not written by people with ADHD and doesn't consider the context and struggles of individuals with executive dysfunction. ADHD is a spectrum disorder with varying symptoms and levels, and advice may not work for everyone; individuals may have preferences or aversions to specific strategies or approaches based on their brain types.
- Common ADHD advice of "just do it" or "if you really wanted to do it, you'd do it" oversimplifies the challenges of ADHD and doesn’t take into account how the symptoms of ADHD are going to prevent you from following through on that advice.
- ADHD is a real and impairing disorder, not an excuse or laziness. ADHD symptoms are chronic and significantly impact daily life.
Hey team, I’ve got a great conversation for you this week with María-Victoria Albina - she’s a Master Certified Somatic Life Coach, UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner, and Breathwork Meditation Guide. With over 20 years of experience in health and wellness, she brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our conversation today. She holds a Master's degree in Public Health from Boston University School of Public Health and a BA in Latin American Studies from Oberlin College.
In today’s episode, we delve into practical tools and empowering practices to support your journey toward wellness. We get started with some definitions and then navigate through self-care, boundaries, nervous system regulation, and so much more.
I had a great time talking with Maria-Victoria, and I hope you’ll get as much out of this conversation as I did.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/141
This Episode’s Top Tips
- By familiarizing ourselves with our autonomic nervous system, which controls automatic bodily functions, we can work on mapping our nervous system to help keep ourselves regulated by understanding what state we’re in.
- It’s important for us to prepare strategies in advance and create a list of coping strategies and self-care practices that you can refer to when you find yourself in a particular emotional state.
- When you feel revved up, anxious, or worried, take a moment to pause and assess where you are on a scale from zero to ten. This self-awareness can help you recognize when you're in a state of sympathetic activation and need to slow down.
- Recognize that change is possible and that emotional outsourcing and codependency are not fixed states. Engage in practices like somatics, breath work, and thought work to rewire your mind and nervous system. This can help you respond to situations with agency, set healthier boundaries, and cultivate a sense of safety, significance, and belonging in a more authentic way.
All right, I’m back from my little break and we’re just heading right back into the hard stuff - or at least how we can start getting it checked off our to-do list.
Today we’re going to be looking at some more ways that we can adjust our mindset around doing hard things and also looking at some of the reasons we might be choosing to do certain hard things. Then we’ll finish up this series by digging into a few of the more concrete things that you can do so that you can tackle those hard things.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/hardthingspart3
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Part of the reward of doing hard things is actually doing the hard things - this may seem glib, but when we’re building up our habits and routines the only way we actually build them is by doing the hard parts. We can’t skip to the end and expect to have picked up habits needed to maintain that goal.
- We can reshape our mindset around the things that we “have to do” - we often rebel against the have to’s and so changing our mindset into things that we get to do can have a profound impact on how we approach doing those tasks.
- Two of the best ways to get through doing hard things is to know your why behind what you’re doing and then having some accountability to help you follow through.
Last week we began this series on how to do hard things and looked specifically at how we define hard things and ways that we can work through some of our problems so that they can become more manageable.
This week we’re going to be continuing that conversation but with a lens that focuses on why it can be so hard for us to even attempt to do hard things. We’ll be looking at some of the misconceptions we have about doing hard things as well looking at how acknowledging the hard things we’ve done in the past can help us do more hard things in the present.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/hardthingspart2
This Episode's Top Tips
- We often discount our ability to do hard things from a mistaken belief that we’ve never been able to accomplish anything hard.
- When we mistake failing at simple things for failing at doing hard things it can reinforce the idea that we can’t do hard things. Remember, just because something is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t hard.
- Don’t assume the logic in your head is always actually logical. It is easy for us to make logical leaps that don’t hold up to reality - slow down and examine those beliefs. You don’t have to believe everything you think.
One of my favorite sayings from Brendan Mahan of the ADHD Essentials podcast is that ADHD is life on Hard Mode.
The executive dysfunction that comes with ADHD makes everything just a little bit more difficult. From doing the dishes to filling out tax returns we find ourselves needing to put in more effort than our neurotypical peers.
But what’s important for us to remember is that while these things can absolutely be harder for us to do, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Today we’re going to be exploring this idea of doing hard things - what makes something difficult and how we can work on moving ourselves through that process.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/hardthings
This Episode's Top Tips
- It is important for us to define what we find being hard because when we choose to believe something should be easy we tend not to give it the attention that it deserves.
- Our problems can’t be solved until we acknowledge them as problems - but also can’t solve those problems unless we put forward the effort of defining them and acknowledging the underlying issues.
- Define what done looks like for a task and be sure to be mindful of how that can be functional in your life.
Hey team,
Recently when I was talking with my therapist, they mentioned that it seemed like I would frequently go into the fawn response - I was a little taken aback by this because while I felt like I’d heard of the fawn response before, it wasn’t something I was familiar with, or even could even particularly put my finger on what it was.
Fortunately for me, I run a podcast where I can dive into topics and gleam a bit more understanding about things I’m interested in.
While most of us have probably heard of the fear responses of fight, flight and freeze, there is also a forth response known as fawning. In today’s episode we’re going to be looking at all the fear responses as well as looking at how we can start working on better controlling those responses.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/140
This Episode’s Top Tips
- When faced with a threat, our body's automatic response can be fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
- Fawning behavior is a trauma response that involves people-pleasing to avoid abuse. People-pleasing can become a problem when it is done compulsively and to the detriment of one's own self-interest.
- It is important to be mindful of our emotions and identify when we are in a fear response. While fear is a healthy emotion that can help protect us, we don't want it to control our actions. 4. Identifying and acknowledging our emotions can be helpful, and seeking therapy can also be beneficial.
Hey team, this week I had a great conversation with Shell Mendelson, a career counselor who specializes in working with adults with ADHD. We talk about how traditional career advice often doesn’t work as well for ADHD, how we don’t want to dictate success purely on financial outcomes, the importance of deadlines, and whether or not we should consider disclosing our ADHD at work.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/139
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Traditional career advice doesn't always work for people with ADHD. Many of us ADHD often have difficulty finding the right job because we can feel resistance to taking instruction and we often need accommodations to do our best work.
- When considering disclosing your ADHD at work it is often better to consider a self-accommodation process first and then having a win-win conversation with your boss about how you do your best work.
- When considering entrepreneurship and self-employment it is important to way the pros and cons of being your own boss. While we can focus more on what makes us happy we also have to find a balance with prioritizing our most important tasks.
Hey team, this week I’m talking with Kristen Carder, the host of the I Have ADHD podcast - in this episode, we dive into the nitty gritty of ADHD and how advice for neurotypicals often doesn’t work for those of us with ADHD. We often hear about the need to be consistent, but with ADHD, not only is that hard, it can feel downright impossible. Instead, Kristen and I discuss how we can embrace our inconsistency and instead focus on being persistent.
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Executive function is a hot topic around ADHD - and more specifically how we often have a deficit in it.
One of the trickiest parts about executive function is that there isn’t a universally accepted model of executive functions - I know that feels kind of surprising because it seems like something that is talked about as much as executive functions is that we’d have something that is generally agreed upon. So for this episode, we’re going to be focusing on Russell Barkley’s self-regulation model - although I’ll certainly be pulling from other sources as well.
I really like Dr. Barkley’s model of self-regulation, because in many ways we can actually look at ADHD as a disorder of self-regulation itself. And that’s exactly what Dr. Barkley proposes, that executive function and self-regulation are the same thing and that with ADHD we have a deficit in our executive functions and therefore a deficit in our self-regulation.
As such, I’ll be using executive function and self-regulation interchangeably throughout the episode to help emphasize that they are the same thing.
In this episode, I’m going to go into exactly what executive function and self-regulation are, how we use them and how we can get back on track when we find ourselves missing some of that self-regulation.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We can think of executive functions and self-regulation as the same thing.
- Our primary executive functions are working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
- We have a limited resource pool for our executive functions and we use some of it every time we engage in self-regulation. Fortunately, we can help restore some of these resources by doing things like taking a break, having a snack, and getting some exercise.
- One of the best ways to help with executive function is to modify our environment so that we’re reducing the amount of self-regulation we need to do. This means doing things like putting away distractions and making time more visible.
Hey team, this week I’m talking with Dawn Barclay about her book, Traveling Different: Vacation Strategies for Parents of the Anxious, the Inflexible, and the Neurodiverse. Regardless of whether or not you have kids, traveling can be difficult when you have an invisible disability, such as ADHD. There are so many things that we have to keep track of, and even when we get there, there are still a host of things that our ADHD can make even more difficult.
Dawn has spent her career working in the travel industry as well as working as a travel writer. She wrote this book as a guide to what she wished she had 20 years ago. In our conversation today we talk about some of the many difficulties that come from traveling with neurodiverse children (and ourselves) and then what we can work on doing to help alleviate some of those stressors.
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One of the ideas that I was presented with during the pandemic was that of surge capacity - this is the idea that we all have reserves of emotional energy that we can call on when we’re in a crisis situation. And this was an important idea for people to grasp as the pandemic wore on because people were finding themselves depleted. Despite having been able to handle everything they eventually came to a wall where they didn’t have any more to give.
This is an important concept, but not specifically what I want to talk about today because what I want to talk about is what I gleaned from this idea. That we because we have surge capacity, we also have a normal capacity. This seems like a fairly obvious point, but also one I think that a lot of us with ADHD often overlook. Despite everything I know about planning it is still far too easy for me to try and squeeze too much into one day. And this isn’t just in terms of how much time I have or how much energy I have, but just how much I can reasonably take on.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring this idea of capacity and how it can impact our ability to get anything done. We be looking at what we can do on these days and how we can actually use them to help ourselves to recover.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We can hit low capacity when we’ve been pushing too hard for too long. Our capacity differs from our energy levels in that we can think of it as the total amount of energy we have for a day. Having a low capacity means that we’re not recovering and that when we do recover we’re only coming back to a low base rate of energy.
- When we’re at low capacity we need to slow down and focus on the things we can do - this means prioritizing and thinking about ways we can apply “both-and” thinking where we accept reality and how we can function within it.
- A great way to help build back up our capacity is creating some accountability around our self-care tasks so that we actually follow through with those intentions.
Hey team, this week I’m talking with Natalie Lue about her book, The Joy of Saying No. Natalie is the author of the popular relationship and self-esteem blog Baggage Reclaim, as well as the host of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions podcast.
With ADHD, we can often end up as people-pleasers, always putting other people’s needs above our own. And while being helpful is a great trait, we also need to make sure that we’re taking time for ourselves as well.
In our conversation today, Natalie and I discuss how to get out of people pleasing and work on setting up boundaries to help keep us on track with what we really want to be doing.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- People pleasing is about suppressing one's needs, desires, expectations, feelings, and opinions to prioritize others' needs and avoid negative consequences.
- By people pleasing, we create unspoken contracts, and this can lead to frustration when the other party does not fulfill their end. We are often dropping hints instead of being direct about our needs because of our fear of rejection or negative consequences.
- While it can be hard to say no, it is vital that we are using our no to help us set boundaries that will help us curtail our people-pleasing and allow to prioritize our own well-being.
Hey team, this week we’re going to be talking about using our tools but, more specifically, getting back into the habit after we’ve stopped using them.
ADHD has the tendency to make us consistently inconsistent, and that can lead us to finding ourselves having dropped habits, routines, and tactics that had been helping us. Sometimes we need to find new habits, but sometimes we need to look back and figure out why we stopped doing all those things that were helping us get through the day.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- There are a lot of reasons that we might stop using a particular tool, from boredom to forgetfulness to changes in our life circumstances. It’s okay for us to change how we’re using our tools, but it’s also important that we’re making that decision consciously.
- One of the best ways to make sure we’re not losing track of our tools is to create an ADHD toolbox where we’re keeping track of all the tools that we find helpful in our lives.
- When we’re looking to reinstate some of our previous tools, it can be important to look back and figure out what caused us to stop using them in the first place; however, when we’re doing this, it’s important that we stay out of judgment and approach the question with curiosity.
Hey team, this week I’m talking with one of my favorite people Roxie Martin - I got to know Roxie back when I was doing ADDmin work for the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. Since then we’ve become fast friends and frequently check in with each other.
Recently we were talking about Roxie’s decluttering coaching, and I thought this would be an excellent topic for the show because cleaning and decluttering are things that just always seem to come up.
In this episode, we talk about the difference between cleaning, decluttering, and organizing - we get into the specifics of how we can be more effective in our cleaning, how we can better approach declutting, and a whole lot more.
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Be sure to check out https://www.roxiemartincoaching.com/
Hey team, this week we’re going to be talking about the upcoming change to Daylight Saving Time in the US - but don’t worry, if you’re not one of those places that experience a spring time-switch, there is still going to be a lot of great stuff we cover in this episode.
Our natural sleeping and wake times are controlled by our circadian rhythm, so we’re going to be discussing that in some detail and what we can do to help get ready for the time change so that it doesn’t hit us like a ton of bricks.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- When we’re preparing for an upcoming time change, we can start moving our wake and sleep times gradually to match up with the change.
- While it can be tough to adjust our bedtime if we focus on setting a strong bedtime routine, we can use that help us get sleepy and work on adjusting when we’re starting to get ready for bed instead of just when we want to fall asleep.
- Our circadian rhythm dictates our sleep cycle and energy throughout the day - we can influence it with things like morning sunlight, exercise, when we’re eating, and in some cases, melatonin.
Hey team - this week I’m bringing you a conversation I had with Skye Rapson about burnout and boundaries. Skye is the founder of Unconventional Organization - a New Zealand-based coaching group that specializes in online coaching. They focus on providing research-backed and strengths-based ADHD support to help you get unstuck in your life.
You may remember Skye from a previous episode last year, but we had such a fun conversation then that we decided to have another round. In this discussion, we drill into what burnout is, how to work on getting out of burnout, and then also how setting boundaries can help us stay out of burnout in the first place.
And really, this is a fantastic episode to help capstone this series on slowing down.
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Be sure to check out https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com
Hey team, we’re back at it for another episode about slowing down, but this time we’re looking at activation energy, which is the idea we’re going to need to have a certain amount of energy available to get started on a task. When we’re getting ready to get to the next thing on our to-do list, sometimes it can feel like it’s just too much, and getting started is really going to be the hardest part.
Activation energy is that minimum threshold for us to get going on that thing, and some days it just isn’t there, and so today, we’re going to be looking at ways that we make getting started a little bit easier.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Activation energy is what takes us from thinking about doing something to actually doing it. It’s what can keep us on the couch when we feel like we could be doing something else.
- When we rely on urgency being our primary mode of motivation it can make it increasingly hard to work on anything that isn’t urgent.
- Different tasks take different amounts of energy to activate on and we can work on lower that barrier to entry or increasing our amount of available energy. We can do this by making tasks more fun, using accountability, and breaking our tasks into smaller parts.
Hey team, this week we’re going to keep up our discussion of slowing down, but we’re going to be focusing on memory - well, kind of. With ADHD, it can be hard for us to remember all of the things that we need to do, so what comes into play is the good old to-do list.
Because when we’re talking about memory, what we’re really talking about in this context is task management. How we’re going to remember the things we want to do and how we’re going to go about doing those things.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- To-do lists serve as a way for us to externalize our memory - we don’t have to mentally keep track of all the things we write down. But if we don’t properly use and curate our lists, they stop being a trusted source of information.
- We can use our to-do lists to help plan our days, but if we find ourselves constantly not finishing our daily plans, that is a sign that we need to cut back on how much we’re trying to accomplish in a single day. Part of slowing down is accepting that we don’t have to do it all.
- To help keep our to-do lists from becoming overwhelming, it is important we’re saying no more. One of the most important people we need to say to no more, however, is ourselves.
Hey team, this week we’re going to be talking about slowing down. One of the worst parts of ADHD is that we often feel like we have to do all of the things right now. That if we don’t jump from task to task to task, we’re just not going to get anything done. We live a life where we only have two modes, doing nothing and super speed. It’s exhausting, and we often find ourselves missing important things because we can’t keep up that pace.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about how we can work on slowing down and trying to find a more comfortable middle ground between those two modes.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- When we’re talking about slowing down, there are three areas that we need to focus on - time management, task management, and activation energy.
- While the simplest solution seems to just do fewer things, when we’re choosing to do less, it becomes more important for us to be selecting the right tasks.
- We can also feel the need to maintain momentum in our day, which can lead us to overdo it and burn ourselves out. If we can build the belief in ourselves that we will, in fact, make time for all those important but not urgent tasks, it can help us slow down and do only what we really need to do.
I’ve been thinking about the phrase, “I want to hit the ground running,” and how that’s kind of how many of us try and start the year. I know that’s how I felt - and honestly, in that first week of the year, I was doing great… but then I got covid. That really threw a snag into things.
With ADHD we tend to like to go fast with things; we don’t want to wait around. But that’s usually not actually our best strategy. Going from one urgent task to the next can keep us motivated, but it can make it hard to get to anything that isn’t urgent.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring how we use urgency as a drive to get more done but how we also need to learn to make time for all those important but not urgent tasks.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Just because something feels urgent doesn’t mean that it’s actually important that we do it right that instant. We often have
- We often use deadlines to motivate ourselves into doing the important things, but living deadline to deadline only allows us to work on things that at urgent and let’s many things that are important but not urgent fall by the wayside.
- Using accountability is a great way for us to follow through with our plans to complete all of our important but not urgent tasks. We can do this either through creating artificial deadlines or through co-working.
Hey team, this week we have another listener question:
Hi there. I just wanted to say thank you so much. I was riding my bike while listening to your podcast and that really helped my brain to be able to digest the information and I was audibly saying, “Yes. Right. Okay.” And it was like I was talking to you, so I just wanted to say thank you so much. I'm not even sure if I have a question, but today I did Google, “What's it like for people who don't have ADHD?”And in the three years of you having this podcast, forgive me if that's one that maybe I haven't listened to yet and completely ignore this and just take the compliment and the celebratory win of you are really affecting people's lives. I know that you've affected mine, and I know people have asked me, Hey, continue with your podcast, but because of some of the things I'm learning and managing with my own executive functioning, I haven't been as consistent with my own podcast. So it's really inspirational to know that you are out here doing it and honestly had such a wonderful structure and the music, and I'm like, wow, he really understands. He's really someone who actually understands what it's like in the brain and in the mind. So it was just such a pleasant experience to have found this podcast and I'm just so, so grateful. So I just wanted to say that. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the kind words about the podcast and you know what, that isn’t an episode I’ve done - it isn’t even a question I’ve ever thought about that much, but it is an incredibly intriguing one. Often when we’re talking about ADHD we’re talking about what it’s like to have ADHD, but from my standpoint, well I already know what that’s like, so what would it be like if I didn’t have it?
So that is the question we’re going to be looking at in this episode as well as looking into the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent as well as getting into a little bit about masking.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/noadhd
Hey team, Happy New Year!
I’m excited to get going into 2023, but I also don’t want to just be doing everything by the seat of my pants, so it’s time to do a little planning and think about how we want this year to go. In this episode, I will be talking about rest and planning and getting into some of the things I specifically want to do with the podcast in 2023.
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One of the things I never quite got a grasp on is seasons... I mean I grew up in Hawaii and we basically had hot and not quite as hot. But this comes up for me because technically we're still in Spring right now so I guess this could still be a Spring Cleaning episode - officially Summer starts on the Solstice in June on the 20th... so I made in by like a week if you're listening to this when it comes out.
Regardless of if this is Spring Cleaning or not, cleaning can be a great way to signal the start of something new. We all get used to the mess in our space and freshening things up can not only signal the start of something new but also shift our mindset.
Today I'll be exploring the benefits of cleaning, how we can update our space, some tips on accountability, and then get into a few of the specific things that you can do.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- You can help spur your fresh start by rearranging your space - this doesn't have to be a big move, but sprucing up your environment can help it feel new and like you are starting fresh.
- Getting rid of our old stuff can help lift mental burdens and take care of old open loops. Our accumulated stuff often carries more mental weight than we really know.
- To help keep on track during cleaning make sure you create some accountability. It can be a great way to help you follow through with your planning and also in the moment through body doubling.
- Leave yourself notes as to where you left off in your cleaning so when you come back you can pick it back up without having to try and figure out what you were trying to do. While it may seem like we wouldn't forget, it's easy to lose track of where we were at in our plans.
Hey team, this week we’ve got a listener question:
"My name is Mike and I have a question about wrapping things up. I have a really difficult time on the last lap of projects, or sometimes there is like a secret lap after what I thought was the last lap, which, you know, sometimes depending on the project includes like sending thank you notes or thank you emails or a bunch of stuff where I sort of feel like I already spent all of the dopamine and executive function of the rewards of a project. And then once I sort of feel like I reached that finish line, I realized there are a bunch of little loose ends that need tidying and I have a really hard time getting to them cuz it feels like it's over. Okay. Thank you very much."
Hey, Mike, thanks for the question; I’m sure this is something that a lot of people deal with, I know I certainly do. It can feel incredibly disheartening to finish a task and then find out that, oh wait, there’s just a little bit more to do.
In today’s episode, we’ll be looking at how we can clean up some of these loose ends and also how we can avoid getting into some of these situations.
If you're interested, be sure to sign up for the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability Groups at coachingrewired.com
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Hey team, this week I’m talking with Aleta Storch of Wise Heart Nutrition, a small nutrition practice made up of 3 neurodivergent-affirming dietitians. She is a Registered Dietitian, Licensed Therapist, and a Body Trust Provider.
Many of us with ADHD face many issues around eating and feeding ourselves - from things that can arise from choosing what to eat, when to eat, or just not having the executive function to get ourselves to eat.
In our conversation today, Aleta and I talk about some of these issues surrounding ADHD and eating, such as interoception, meal planning, and issues surrounding executive function. We also discuss intuitive eating and how we can modify those ideas to fit in with our ADHD.
If you're interested, be sure to sign up for the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability Groups at coachingrewired.com
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Hey team, as we begin to get ready to roll into the new year, we’re going to be seeing a lot more about New Year’s Resolutions and goal setting - but we’re also going to be getting a lot of pushback articles as well. Articles telling us how setting goals is only setting us up for failure and what we need to do instead. And the question is, who do we believe?
In this episode, we’re going to be examining some of the arguments against setting goals and also looking at what we might want to be doing instead and how we can combine that all into one overall theory.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Regardless if you want to call something a goal or not, breaking down a goal into its component parts and focusing on the process that’s going to get you there is a better way to approach goal setting.
- We don’t want to be striving for arbitrary numbers goal setting needs to have a why behind it to have any meaningful impact.
- We don’t need to always hit our goals to be successful with them. Goals are often just targets we’re aiming for, and we can always learn from our failures.
Hey team, in this week’s episode, we’re going to be diving into energy drinks… well, not literally, that would be sticky… and well, that amount of caffeine would probably be lethal.
Anyways… Our topic for the week is energy drinks, how they affect us and as I just mentioned, that means we’re also going to be talking about caffeine.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- The main concern with energy drinks is how quickly they can provide a high amount of caffeine into your system. Typical energy drinks have 160-250mg of caffeine, compared to about half that for an 8-ounce cup of coffee.
- The biggest concern with large amounts of caffeine is its 3-7 hour half-life, which means that if we’re having multiple energy drinks in a day, we can build up quite a lot in our system.
- With ADHD, it can be easy to view caffeine as a way for us to help manage our ADHD, but with how quickly we develop a tolerance to caffeine, that can easily get out of hand.
Hey team, this week we’re talking about our weeks and how we can get more out of them with a weekly review. The idea behind a weekly review is that we’re looking back on how things went and using that to help us figure out how we want our next week to go.
In this episode we’re going to go over the benefits of performing a weekly review, look at some of the ways to make doing it easier and then get into the nitty gritty of how to actually perform it.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- The point of a weekly review is for us to not only look back at what happened last week, but use that knowledge to help us plan out how we’re going to approach our next week. It allows us to gain clarity over what we’ve done and what we want to do.
- When we’re performing our weekly review it is important to keep ourselves out of judgement - we’re not trying to beat ourselves up over anything we didn’t get to, we’re just looking to make next week better.
- One of the most important things for making sure we complete our weekly review is to actually build in the time to perform it on our schedule. By building in and protecting our time to perform a weekly review we are far more likely to follow through on our intentions.
Hey team, this week we’re getting emotional and talking about the relationship between ADHD and our emotions. While emotional dysregulation isn’t part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, some studies have found that 70% of adults with ADHD exhibit emotional dysregulation.
In this episode, we’ll get into why it isn’t part of the diagnosis, as well as examine what emotional regulation is and what we can do to help ourselves keep our cool a little bit better.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Emotions are short-duration and are often in response to specific situations. Emotional regulation is our ability to control our emotional response to those situations, usually through down-regulation.
- Emotional impulsiveness and deficient emotional self-regulation were both parts of an ADHD diagnosis but were removed from the DSM in the 1970s because we can’t easily measure emotions.
- We can help down-regulate our emotions through mindfulness, being aware of how we are physically feeling, slowing down, and removing ourselves from difficult situations.
Hey team, this week we’re talking about coping - our ability to cope with stressful situations but more specifically, how we can work on coping with our ADHD. When we’re coping with something, we’re trying to figure our way through a tough situation. When we’re trying to cope with our ADHD, it is often less about our emotional response (although that is important too) and how we’re using our problem-solving skills to alleviate some of our ADHD mishaps.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- While ADHD coaching and therapy can seem similar, they are distinct practices, with therapists often focused on healing in the past and present and coaches more focused on future-oriented goal setting.
- When seeking out help in either of these domains, it is important to remember that they do not work like magic, and you are going to have to put in work to see results. Additionally, the individual you see will usually become much more important than their profession.
- Accountability is a tool that we can use to take ownership of our actions, and when used in conjunction with others, it can help create salience and clarity in what we are doing to follow through with our intentions.
All right, back on track with this series on Getting Started with ADHD Management, and this week we’re going to be focusing on some of the more physical areas that can really help us get our ADHD under control, and those are sleep and exercise.
During the monthly ADHD reWired Live Q&A, we frequently get questions about what are the top things that we all do for our ADHD, and inevitably the answers come back as sleep and exercise. It’s just that important. And also, it’s understandably hard for us to follow through on.
So in today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing why these things are so important for our ADHD management, but also, just as importantly, how we better follow through on our intentions of getting better sleep and exercising more.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- While ADHD coaching and therapy can seem similar they are distinct practices with therapists often focused on healing in the past and present and coaches more focused on future-oriented goal setting.
- When seeking out help in either of these domains it is important to remember that they do not work like magic and you are going to have to put in work to see results. Additionally, the individual you see will usually end up being a lot more important than their profession.
- Accountability is a tool that we can use to take ownership of our actions and when used in conjunction with others it can help create salience and clarity in what we are doing to follow through with our intentions.
Hacking Your ADHD just passed the three-year mark, which I’m just amazed at. Amazed with having stuck with it, amazed with how the show has grown and amazed with my wonderful audience. It also feels like I was just doing the 2-year episode not so long go… you know, like 12 months ago or so. That’s the funny thing about time, it just keeps marching on regardless of how well we’re paying attention to it.
For this year's anniversary episode, I decided that I’d take a look back at some of the things I’ve learned about ADHD over the last three years. I’m going to cover some of the a-ha’s and misinformation that I’ve had and seen - as well; I’ll be looking at how my views on trying to be neurotypical have changed and some of the ways I’ve learned to better embrace my ADHD. And, of course, I just want to mention that this episode is just touching on this topic of what I’ve learned because, well, it’s been a lot.
And I also just want to take a quick second to thank everyone who has decided to join me on this ADHD journey. I truly appreciate having you along for the ride.
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Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/threeyears
This Episode's Top Tips
- There are always going to be more a-ha moments when we go “oh, that’s an ADHD thing?” but we’ve got to temper those moments with the understanding that there is also a lot of ADHD misinformation out there and we always have to check our sources.
- While it can feel like we’re just a flavor of neurotypical it is important for us to realize that ADHD has it’s own way of operating the brain and that we need to look for solutions that work with our brains, not someone else’s.
- It’s more than okay for us to do less, in fact a lot of the time is better for us to take something off our plate because we often take on too much. By doing less we’re allowed to focus more on the things that really matter.
As I was finishing up my Getting Started episode I realized that if I had been talking to someone I’d also still have a ton of questions and feel like that episode really didn’t answer anything for me. Or rather I think I’d have felt like it didn’t answer the question I thought I had asked. Now to be fair to past me, while, yes, I kind of did that, but also when we’re talking about where to get started with our ADHD management we really don’t know those things but nonetheless those are really important things for us to hear.
And I still think those are the place we should get started with our ADHD management, but I also know that there are other places that people are going to have questions about, so in this episode, I’m going to try addressing some of those, specifically, therapy, coaching, and accountability. I may even have to slap on part three to address some of the lifestyle changes that can be incredibly helpful for managing your ADHD. Again, as I mentioned in the last episode, ADHD is a spectrum disorder and we’re all going to be starting at our places. We’re all unique ADHD snowflakes and we’re all going to have our areas where our ADHD affects us the most.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- While ADHD coaching and therapy can seem similar they are distinct practices with therapists often focused on healing in the past and present and coaches more focused on future-oriented goal setting.
- When seeking out help in either of these domains it is important to remember that they do not work like magic and you are going to have to put in work to see results. Additionally, the individual you see will usually end up being a lot more important than their profession.
- Accountability is a tool that we can use to take ownership of our actions and when used in conjunction with others it can help create salience and clarity in what we are doing to follow through with our intentions.
One of the questions that I’ve been getting a bit more frequently recently is just trying to understand where to get started with ADHD - and I think this is a question that a lot of us have because there is just so much out there on ADHD and it’s hard to know where even to begin thinking about what you might want to be doing.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring this idea by first looking at some of the areas that ADHD entails, how that knowledge can boost your ability to manage your ADHD, and also take a look another look at the Wall of Awful.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- ADHD is a spectrum disorder meaning that you are going to have a variety of symptoms to varying degrees. Your ADHD is unique to you, and how you treat your ADHD is going to be a matter of figuring out which symptoms are affecting you the most.
- One of the hardest parts of ADHD is getting past our internalized messaging around who we are - if we haven’t taken the time to work on accepting how our ADHD affects us, then it is easy for us to blame our problems on ourselves as personal failings instead of accepting how our ADHD can hold us back.
- The Wall of Awful is the emotional impact of repeated failure, and it makes activating on tasks even more difficult - there are 5 ways people try to get past the Wall of Awful, two don't work, and one works but is damaging to our relationships and then two that work - the two that don't work are staring at it or trying to go around it - the one that works but is damaging is trying to hulk smash through the wall - the two that work that we want to focus on are climbing the wall and putting a door in our wall.
Hey team - thanks for sticking with me during my break and to everyone that filled out my survey a few weeks back. Your input was really incredibly kind and I’m excited to get back into the show.
To get things going we’re going to come back at it with some listener questions - questions that I kind of let build up while I was on break, so I may be doing a few of these episodes to try and catch back up on things, although don’t be shy to drop a new question on me at hackingyouradhd.com/contact
In this week’s Q&A we’re going to be looking at working from home and how to do better with some of our eating habits.
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I know the term spiritual energy is going to throw a lot of people - so let's start off by getting clear on what I mean here. When I'm talking about spiritual energy I'm not talking about anything religious here, I'm simply referring to the idea that you have an energy reserve that you can tap into when you're doing something that matters. And specifically, something that matters to you - this doesn't have to be some higher calling type of idea.
One thing that really illustrates the idea of digging deep into that energy reserve for me is when I'm doing something like weight lifting. As I get to the end of my set I can find myself flagging, I can feel like I'm not going to be able to push the bar the 3 more inches it needs to go to rack my bar - and yet I can have my spotter tell me "you've got this" and my brain hears that and I push just a little bit harder and I finish out. Where did that energy reserve come from? As far as I was concerned I was already pushing as hard as I could and yet, with just a few words I was able to find that motivation to push a little harder.
Access to the human spirit isn't just limited to athletic endeavors. And our motivation to dip into this energy source often comes from doing meaningful work. Many people don’t recognize meaning and purpose as potential sources of energy, but when we're doing work that aligns with our values we are able to accomplish so much more.
Today we're going to be looking at three areas that we can use to access our spiritual energy: living their core values in their daily behaviors, doing the work that we do best and enjoy the most, and allocating time and energy in our lives for the things we deem most important.
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Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/spiritualenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- There are three areas we need to focus on for our spiritual energy: Living our values, working with our passion, and scheduling time for those things that matter to us.
- Spend some time exploring your values by asking yourself what you can't stand - when you define what you won't put up with it is often helps define what we do stand for.
- Work on finding what you are passionate about by defining what you are willing to put up with - further refine your passion by finding your work "sweet-spot" by finding where you are effective, effortlessly absorbed, inspired, and fulfilled.
- Use your calendar to schedule your most important work - follow your energy patterns and try to schedule those most important tasks early in the day.
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Emotional Energy isn't as cut and dry as physical energy - there are no emotional calories that we can track and measure. And while there is no scientific delineation of how to measure emotional energy it’s still something that we can all feel - we're not robots. We know that when we're feeling those positive emotions that sometimes we can barely contain the energy we're feeling - when we're seething with rage it can feel like we're going to burst. When we're sad it can feel like we want to melt into our beds and never be seen again. When we're overstressed it can feel like if we don't do something our skin is going to crawl off but even the idea of attempting that first step still feels like too much
Our emotions play a big role in our energy levels throughout the day. Just because we don't have a good way to measure them doesn't mean that we should write them off.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Our emotions play a big role in our energy management throughout the day - but emotions are complicated. While we can derive energy from both positive and negative emotions, we're better off using the energy from our positive emotions - The energy we draw off of emotions like fear or anger often comes with a price.
- We want to build our emotional intelligence by trying to observe ourselves - check-in with yourself throughout the day and ask, what am I doing? and how is that making me feel? You can also go beyond that by asking how you feel about the emotions you're feeling.
- When scheduling your day make sure that you are giving yourself time to recover after emotionally draining activities.
- If you need a quick fix to calm yourself down, try taking deep belly breaths. Deep breathing creates a physiological response that encourages your body to relax - as your body relaxes, your mind will follow.
- Give yourself some time to let yourself think. With ADHD we spend a lot of our day go from one distraction to the next - but when we let ourselves have the goal of just letting our minds wander it can help us explore how we're feeling and recharge our emotional batteries.
Today we're going to be looking at ways that we can work on cutting down distractions and staying focused. We'll also be looking at ways that we can better schedule our time to focus on when our brain is going to be working best and we'll also be looking at better ways to end our workday.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/mentalenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- Mental energy is about our ability to focus and keep our focus. To effectively do this we need to stop trying to multitask and reduce the number of distractions we have around us. This means limiting notifications and creating a work environment where we won't be easily interrupted.
- We can create smarter time blocks using our ultradian rhythms to guide us - breaking our scheduling into these 90-120 minute cycles allows us to focus on working when we've got the most energy and taking breaks when we're going to need them the most.
- Schedule your most important tasks for early in the day. By completing what's most important first you'll never find yourself at the end of the day having missed those tasks. You can decide if it's best to eat the frog with this task or to ease into it.
- End your workday with a shutdown routine to signal to your brain that you are really done with work. By only working while you are at work you'll make better use of your time and you'll allow yourself real time to relax and recover while you are at home.
Before we get going here, I just want to make sure you know that I'm not a doctor, and while this episode is a lot about your health, it is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice. Just because I say something on this show doesn't necessarily mean it will be the best advice for you - be smart and be safe. And when in doubt always consult your doctor before changing your diet or exercise routine.
Today's episode is a follow up to last week's on Energy Management, but this week we are just going to be going over the area of physical energy.
When we think about our energy levels, our physical energy is what we tend to primarily think about. We think about being tired or just needing a quick pick me up to get through our day. And our physical energy tends to be a basis for all our other types of energy (quick reminder those were: mental, emotional and spiritual along with our physical energy) - when we're physically exhausted it's hard for us to draw on our other wells of energy. Have a bad night's sleep? You might be feeling that brain fog all-day - blood sugar low? You might be more likely to snap at a family member over something not that important.
We need our foundation of physical energy to power our bodies and to let us fully engage with our other energy sources. In today's episode, we're going to be covering the three main areas that we get our physical energy from: sleep, diet, and exercise.
Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/physicalenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- Getting enough sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our energy levels. To help get a good night's sleep make sure you are allowing yourself to get 4-6 sleep cycles of 90 minutes. You can improve your sleep quality with a dark, cool room and by creating a routine to get you ready for sleep by your bedtime.
- Instead of focusing on what foods you should or shouldn't be eating, focus on ways that you can make the habits of eating the right foods easier. By making the lifestyle changes you are more likely to stick to your new dietary plan - making mistakes isn't a set back it's just part of the path to changing your habits.
- Aim to get 20-30 minutes of moderate exercise per day - we're just trying to get our heart rate up here. If you are just starting up, then maybe try starting with a light 10-minute walk and work your way up.
- Along with getting enough exercise during the day, you also are going to want to be moving more throughout the day. During your breaks be sure to get up and stretch a little and don't let you're self stay in one position for too long.
Hey team, in today’s episode, I’m talking with Alma Galvan and Bob Dietrich - Alma is a neural researcher and Certified Brain Gym instructor, Bob Bob Dietrich is an award-winning public speaker, event producer, and entrepreneur, and together they run Brainworx, an educational program that teaches adults and children how to help manage anxiety, behavior, and improve focus through simple, scientifically-proven techniques.
In this conversation, we talked about Alma’s journey with raising two children diagnosed with multiple conditions, including Autism, ADHD, and Sensory Processing Disorder - and how those challenges led her down the road of discovering powerful techniques to help promote brain development. We talk about the pons and midbrain and how their underdevelopment can seriously impact our brain functions. We explore some simple exercises you can do to help restore some of this development and how our beliefs can shape our reality.
Be sure to check out the free Workshop
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/brainworx
Today we’ve got a bit of a different episode coming your way - in this episode, I talk with award-winning director Saman Kesh. Kesh is known for his narrative music video work with artists such as Basement Jaxx, Calvin Harris, and Placebo.
In our broad-ranging conversation, we talk about the creative process and having ADHD, medication, therapy, and a whole host of other topics. This episode is a bit more of the practical side of managing ADHD, and there are great tips littered throughout the episode.
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I want to start this episode off by saying that this is something I'm bad at - and not in the sense that what I do to celebrate is bad or that I'm not celebrating the small wins throughout my day. It's bad in the sense that I almost entirely skip the whole thing.
Recently this podcast tipped past half a million downloads. That's a pretty big milestone and is pretty indicative of how successful this endeavor has been. But it was barely a blip for me. I didn't want to acknowledge the success because it can be hard for me to acknowledge when I do things well.
So this episode is as much for me as it is for all of you and in this episode, we're going to be exploring what it means to have small wins and also how we can celebrate them.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Celebrating our wins is a way to boost our confidence and it will actively encourage us to seek out that same success again.
- We can differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by thinking of intrinsic as what to do because it's interesting and inherently satisfying. Extrinsic motivation comes from rewards or from avoiding punishment. Both can be important parts of how we celebrate our success.
- Start celebrating your wins by acknowledging when they happen and then letting yourself do something fun to celebrate that success.
- Don't get down on yourself when the wins aren't coming - we're not always going to have smooth sailing, but only focusing on what didn't happen tends to make us overlook all the good things that did happen.
In today’s episode, I’m talking with Theresa Lear Levine and we’re going to be talking about the emotional freedom Technique or as it’s more commonly known, tapping.
Now, I think it’s important off the bat to acknowledge that EFT is a little more out there than a number of other topics that I’ve covered on this show. And while there are studies to support EFT, what I think is more important to take away is that we want to be doing things that work - and that isn’t to say that EFT will definitely work for you, we all are going to have different levels of success with anything that we do, but what I’m getting at here is that when listening to this episode I’m going to encourage you to have an open mind and if you’re interested in seeing how it works I did a short 10-minute session demonstrating EFT that you can get access to by emailing Theresa at theresa@theresalearlevine.com with the subject line "Hacking Your ADHD" and she'll send you that private session right away!
So in this episode, Theresa and I discuss what EFT is, how important acceptance is in all areas of our life (and especially in regards to ADHD) and then we get into some of the ways that we can use EFT to try and help manage our ADHD.
More ways to connect with Theresa Lear Levine and Sample her work:
- Theresa's 5 Minutes to Freedom Ebook can be obtained at theresasfreegift.com
- Website theresalearlevine.com
- The Becoming More Me Podcast Becomingmoreme.com
- Instagram @theresalearlevine
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Over the last few weeks, I have hit a number of points where it all just felt like too much - now there are a number of things that have contributed to this, but one of the keys always behind when I get overwhelmed is doing too much. This is despite the fact that even when I have too much on my plate it always feels like I should be doing more. That I could squeeze in just a few more things and then… well then I’d probably also still be trying to add more things to do.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring why doing more isn’t usually the best thing for us to pursue and how doing less can actually help us actually accomplish the things we really want to do.
If you're interested be sure to sign up for the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability Groups at coachingrewired.com
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/toomuch
This Episode's Top Tips
- Prioritizing with ADHD can be difficult and that is only made more difficult as we add more and more to what we’re doing. When we’re able to pare down the amount we’re doing we can then better prioritize all the things that actually need to get done.
- We don’t have to do everything that ends up on our to-do lists - it’s okay to cross things out even if we haven’t completed them.
- We only have so much cognitive capacity to focus on any given thing and the more open loops we the more we are going to be drawing on that cognitive capacity. Our best bet for dealing with open loops is to work on simply opening fewer of them by taking less on.
Hey team, today I’m talking with Skye Rapson of Unconventional Organisation, a New Zealand-based coaching group that specializes in online coaching. They focus on providing research-backed and strengths-based ADHD support to help you get unstuck in your life.
In our conversation, we cover a lot of different areas, including one that I’ve really been interested in recently, systems. We get into what systems are and how important it is to tailor these systems to our own ADHD and then how we can even do that.
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Checkout Unconventional Organisation
- https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
- https://www.facebook.com/UnconventionalOrganisation/
- https://www.instagram.com/unconventionalorganisation/
One of the thoughts I kept coming back to while working on my episode's on multitasking was what it really meant to be multitasking. I settled on using the idea of doing two cognitive tasks at the same time, but that left me with another quandary - what about when I'm doing one thing and just thinking about doing something else. Surely just thinking about something else wouldn't count as multitasking.
But still... There have absolutely been times when I've been thinking about something else and found myself getting engrossed in my thoughts and losing track of conversations or what I was doing. Clearly, my thoughts can play a big role in what I'm doing and if my focus is somewhere else then it certainly isn't here in the present.
Today we're going to explore what our brain is doing here - how our thoughts can kind of run away with us. We'll also be looking at hyperfocus and then bringing together how these things relate.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/wanderingmind
This Episode's Top Tips
- The Default Mode Network is a collection of brain regions that are responsible for daydreaming, mind wandering and are primarily active in our wakeful resting state.
- In neurotypical brains the Default Mode Network disengages when we start working on task-specific work - this relationship doesn't hold up in ADHD brains and is why we can drift off in thought while trying to do complex tasks.
- Hyperfocus is when our concentration engages so much that we kind of just tune out the rest of the world. It can be a double-edged sword, however, because we can also miss cues to eat, use the bathroom and overuse our executive functions, and leave us completely drained when we come out of it.
- We can help both our default mode network and our hyperfocus by taking breaks throughout the day. We can go further by using those breaks for positive constructive daydreaming where we let our minds wander with purpose.
In last week's episode, I talked about the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap and how it can be hard for us to really remember or predict how our state is going to affect our actions - one of the consequences of this is that we often label ourselves as lazy when we didn't do something. Our cold state brain tells us that we should have just done the thing, all the while neglecting how we felt. This disconnect is what leads to a lot of our self-judgment and in particular, those of us with ADHD often find ourselves labeling ourselves as lazy.
Why didn't I walk the dogs?
I was feeling lazy - or maybe I feel overwhelmed with work or maybe I couldn't find the leashes.
When we don't do something it's easy to label it as lazy, but often that doesn't tell us what was really going on.
Today we're going to be exploring the idea of lazy and how what we might want to start looking at it a bit differently.
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Why do we make bad decisions in the moment?
We've all done things that we regret doing right? yeah me, neither - but let's say hypothetically there was something that we regretted doing - something that we said or did that we feel like doesn't really reflect on as a person.
Why is it I can have the best of intentions and still when it comes time I still make the wrong decision?
Today we're going to be exploring the hot-cold empathy gap and why it can be so difficult for us to predict what we're actually going to do in the moment.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- The hot-cold empathy gap occurs when we fail to predict how our emotions are going to affect our decision-making when we're in that state.
- This doesn't only apply to things like being angry or depressed but can also apply to our motivation or energy levels. Our ADHD can easily let us overcommit on projects because we fail to predict that we might have less drive and motivation when it comes time to actually do the task.
- We can work on mitigating some of the effects of the hot-cold empathy gap by making the decisions we want to make easier to make in the moment. We can also use tools like accountability and breaking down our tasks to keep us on track.
Today I’m talking with Rick Webster of Rena-Fi - a psychology-based financial education platform. Rena-Fi provides ADHD-friendly ideas, articles, and materials to help with managing your finances.
Be sure to check out Rena-Fi.com
In our conversation today though, Rick and I cover a lot of ground outside of finances as well. Of course, we do talk about some ADHD financials as well, including that dreaded ADHD tax.
I had a lot of fun during this interview and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/renafi
And be sure to check out Rena-fi
- Rena-fi
- Youtube
This week I had the pleasure of talking with MJ Siemens from the ADHD Diversified Podcast and what a conversation we had. In it, we talk a lot about the imposter syndrome that often accompanies success with ADHD and why we often don’t feel successful despite hitting all those metrics we were supposed to. We also talk a lot about how we can work on reframing our views on success so that we can feel good about all those things we accomplish.
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Be sure to go check out ADHD Diversified on your favorite podcast player!
Self-diagnosis has become a hot-button topic in the mental health world as social media has ramped up many people’s awareness of many of these conditions. But how valid is that self-diagnosis? Some people argue it's dangerous while others argue that self-diagnosis is as valid as a formal diagnosis.
In today’s episode, we’re going to wade into this minefield and see what grains of truth we can pull out and where this tool is useful and where it isn’t.
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This Episode’s Top TipsSo yeah, this is normally where the top tips would go, but I’m not sure that works as well for this episode, so I just wanted to break things down real quick here. What I’m trying to get at with this episode is that self-diagnosis tends to be an issue of equity and the fact that not everyone can easily get assessed for their mental health conditions is a problem. There is still a lot of stigma and misinformation around ADHD so getting that diagnosis can be difficult. What it comes down to though is what that diagnosis is going to do for you - if you need medication and accommodations then, yes absolutely go seek that formal diagnosis, but if you’re just looking for better ways to work with your brain, going with self-diagnosis isn’t a bad option. And to be sure if you do go the route of self-diagnosis, just be sure to be open to other options. As we went over there are a lot of ways that ADHD symptoms can show up in other mental health conditions, so just stay open and stay curious.
And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you’re diagnosed with as long as your doing those things that makes it easier for you to work with your brain.
Executive function is a hot topic around ADHD - and more specifically how we often have a deficit in it.
One of the trickiest parts about executive function is that there isn’t a universally accepted model of executive functions - I know that feels kind of surprising because it seems like something that is talked about as much as executive functions is that we’d have something that is generally agreed upon. So for this episode, we’re going to be focusing on Russell Barkley’s self-regulation model - although I’ll certainly be pulling from other sources as well.
I really like Dr. Barkley’s model of self-regulation, because in many ways we can actually look at ADHD as a disorder of self-regulation itself. And that’s exactly what Dr. Barkley proposes, that executive function and self-regulation are the same thing and that with ADHD we have a deficit in our executive functions and therefore a deficit in our self-regulation.
As such, I’ll be using executive function and self-regulation interchangeably throughout the episode to help emphasize that they are the same thing.
In this episode, I’m going to go into exactly what executive function and self-regulation are, how we use them and how we can get back on track when we find ourselves missing some of that self-regulation.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We can think of executive functions and self-regulation as the same thing.
- Our primary executive functions are working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.
- We have a limited resource pool for our executive functions and we use some of it every time we engage in self-regulation. Fortunately, we can help restore some of these resources by doing things like taking a break, having a snack, and getting some exercise.
- One of the best ways to help with executive function is to modify our environment so that we’re reducing the amount of self-regulation we need to do. This means doing things like putting away distractions and making time more visible.
Today I’m talking with Ben Ahrens the CEO and Co-founder re-origin which is a science-based, self-directed neuroplasticity training program. Ben was a former trainer and semi-professional surfer who became bedridden with Chronic Neurological Lyme Disease for over 3 years. In his search to help heal himself, Ben sought out and consulted with top neuroscientists and cutting-edge doctors from all over the world. His successful recovery led him to working with these same neuroscientists to develop the program that became re-origin.
In my talk with Ben today we discuss how we can start with just one breath, the power of changing our beliefs and how important it is to embrace the process.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/onebreath
My friend and colleague, Bob Dietrich, is interviewing me and over 40 other amazing experts on The ADHD Toolbox LIVE!
This FREE video series is packed with tools and strategies for overcoming overwhelm, anxiety, procrastination, executive function challenges, and much more. This is a must-have for any parent looking for solutions for their child.
Join for FREE here
Hey team, welcome back to another questions and answers episode - today I am going to be giving a follow up to my episode about doom boxes and try and clear a few things up - I’m also going to be answering a question about what some of my favorite apps are for productivity and focus.
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This week I’m coming in with my second episode in the success with ADHD series and I’m talking with Brendan Mahan. Brendan is a dynamic ADHD/Executive Function consultant, coach, and speaker. And he runs the ADHD Essentials Podcast on this network. Brendan is also probably one of the people I quote the most when I’m doing this podcast because he just has so many great ideas about ADHD and how to approach those issues.
You may remember him from when I interviewed him a few years ago about The Wall of Awful - if you haven’t heard that episode go check it out, it’s a concept that’s definitely worth knowing about.
In our conversation today Brendan and I talk about what makes us successful with ADHD and how we can reframe some of those ideas to fit with who we really are and how one of the biggest keys is finding that balance in our life and our work.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDsuccesspart2
To recap from last week we learned that are there are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing.
We also covered how we're more likely to try and multitask with things we're familiar with but how that actually creates more of a cognitive penalty from breaking up our tasks and how we often just don't realize how much concentration we're using to complete a task - as evidenced with how dangerous texting and driving is.
This week we're going to be exploring more of the cognitive and biological costs of multitasking, then get into some specific kinds of multitasking that can really drain us and we'll finish up with some ways we can work on reducing the amount of multitasking we do.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Multitasking has both cognitive and biological costs that accumulate as we do more and more task switching. These costs can be especially hard on those of us with ADHD because they can serve to drain our executive functions.
- Multimedia multitasking is one of the worst ways we can multitask because often we're essentially binge multitasking where we multitask for a sustained period and really drain our systems.
- One of the biggest appeals to multitasking is that we don't have to prioritize what we're doing, we can just choose to do both. To help stave off multitasking work on knowing what your priorities are and create systems where you can focus on just doing those things.
- One of our best defenses against multitasking is mindfulness - if we can be specific about what we want to do and then become aware of what we are doing throughout the day we can help ourselves focus on doing just one thing at a time.
This week we're going to be deep-diving into multitasking - this is one of those topics that I frequently mention in episodes, but I've never featured before. Not because it doesn't deserve its own episode, but because multitasking is actually a fairly complicated issue and is going to take a bit of time to dissect. So this is actually just going to be my first episode in a series on multitasking and we'll really try and dig into the nitty-gritty of it.
In today's episode, we're going to be talking a bit about what multitasking is and what it isn't - then we'll work on some ways to really drive home the time costs of multitasking and well finish up by looking at some of the ways that multitasking can actually put us in harm's way.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- There are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing.
- When we're talking about multitasking we're primarily concerned with doing two cognitive tasks at the same time that require sustained attention. This means something like walking and listening to a podcast is fine to do because neither carries a huge cognitive load.
- We often try to multitask with things that we're already fairly practiced at, but this means that we're going to suffer even more of a penalty as we try to combine doing them with other things.
- Don't text and drive - or even just play with your phone while behind the wheel. When we're mentally juggling all of these different things we're dividing our attention and it takes time for us to refocus on what we need to be doing.
In this week’s episode, I’m talking with Karen Broda, a Personal Trainer & Wellness Coach who helps ADHD-ers look & feel good naked!
Her purpose is to have you thrive in your body, both physically & mentally so you can show up with confidence every day.
The focus of her work is on uncovering & busting past the self-sabotaging beliefs that are causing you to get in your own way.
Karen is a Pro Bikini Athlete, Circus artist & instructor, & lives in a Tiny Home she built herself!
In our conversation today we discuss the importance of mindset, some of the ways we can reframe our views on exercise, and we also get into how we can set up systems that will keep us exercising even on those days when we don’t want to.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We can think of our mindsets like a muscle and like a muscle they need to be exercised. By working on our mindset consistently we can work on overcoming some of our limiting beliefs.
- Reframing exercise as movement and movement that we enjoy doing is a great way to get yourself introduced to doing more activity in your day.
- A great way to find more ways to incorporate movement into your day is to break down the activities you already like doing and figuring out which parts of those you love and where you can find those same aspects in other activities. It’s just about finding things that you can do to move your body consistently.
- The three components you need for building an exercise system and getting results with it are: First is consistency - next is having it challenge you and thirdly crafting a positive mindset around your routine.
- Make sure to first build your mindset and then your systems once you have those set you can build up your tips and tricks. Don’t let yourself get bogged down in the little details before you create your foundation.
This marks my 100th episode of Hacking Your ADHD and I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate this milestone for a while now.
And along with this milestone, I’ve also been thinking about what it means to be successful with ADHD. In my initial ponderings I thought that this would be a fairly easy question to ask, but I also found that I was failing to come up with any easy answers.
So I thought that I’d reach out to my fellow podcasters in the ADHD reWired Podcast network and see what they thought… and then it occurred to me that I run a podcast and I should leverage the format. And in my initial thoughts, this was just going to be one episode where I spliced all the interviews together... but I enjoyed my conversations with everyone else so much that I decided just giving each person a couple of minutes wasn’t going to work and so now this has developed into a series.
Which means that we’ll be starting off this series celebrating a hundred episodes of Hacking Your ADHD with a conversation with Eric Tivers of ADHD reWired.
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One of the ideas that I’ve been playing with lately is how to go about my planning in a more natural way or perhaps a better phrase would be functional, because while I love the idea of planning it doesn’t always work out how I want to it to.
And to be clear, I don’t mean that my plans don’t work out, what I’ve been grappling with is that often when I do my planning I’ve failing to do it in a way that encompasses both my professional and personal life. I think this is an aspect of layering on my personal planning over my professional planning - but really I should be doing it the other way around. It makes more sense for me to build my planning around things like saying when my kids are in and out of school. It should be based on what’s going on in my life around me.
And so it dawned on me that one of the ways I could adjust this planning was to focus that planning that was seasonal - because with each season there are definite changes in how I go about my life. And so today we’re going to be exploring how we can look at planning with those seasonal changes in mind.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- When we’re writing out our plans we’re not creating some set-in-stone document that we can’t vire from - our plans should be malleable. It’s also important that we’re checking in with our plans as often as we need to so that we can stay on track.
- By planning with the seasons in mind we’re thinking about the way our lives change with the seasons - are we going to be staying indoors or outdoors more? Are there seasonal events we want to keep in mind? What are the things you’re going to be looking forward to in those seasons?
- Once you’ve figured out how you want your season to go you can break it down into what you want each month to look like and then take that information to plan out your coming days and weeks.
In this week’s episode we’re going to be diving into a listener question about cleaning and specifically about doom boxes - and if you don’t know what those are don’t worry you’ll find out soon enough... and I’m sure you probably already have some around that house.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Dooms boxes are the collects of odds and ends that all end up in a single location - usually a box or a drawer. Having a doom box isn’t a moral failing.
- When tackling your doom boxes set a schedule for when you’re going to go through them and enlist some accountability to make sure that you actually do it.
- The biggest key to going through your doom box is to sort everything into where those things need to go and to not get up while going through your box. We will get distracted. We will forget what we were supposed to be doing or at least find something else that we’d rather be doing instead.
One of the ideas that I was presented with during the pandemic was that of surge capacity - this is the idea that we all have reserves of emotional energy that we can call on when we’re in a crisis situation. And this was an important idea for people to grasp as the pandemic wore on because people were finding themselves depleted. Despite having been able to handle everything they eventually came to a wall where they didn’t have any more to give.
This is an important concept, but not specifically what I want to talk about today because what I want to talk about is what I gleaned from this idea. That we because we have surge capacity, we also have a normal capacity. This seems like a fairly obvious point, but also one I think that a lot of us with ADHD often overlook. Despite everything I know about planning it is still far too easy for me to try and squeeze too much into one day. And this isn’t just in terms of how much time I have or how much energy I have, but just how much I can reasonably take on.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring this idea of capacity and how it can impact our ability to get anything done. We be looking at what we can do on these days and how we can actually use them to help ourselves to recover.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We can hit low capacity when we’ve been pushing too hard for too long. Our capacity differs from our energy levels in that we can think of it as the total amount of energy we have for a day. Having a low capacity means that we’re not recovering and that when we do recover we’re only coming back to a low base rate of energy.
- When we’re at low capacity we need to slow down and focus on the things we can do - this means prioritizing and thinking about ways we can apply “both-and” thinking where we accept reality and how we can function within it.
- A great way to help build back up our capacity is creating some accountability around our self-care tasks so that we actually follow through with those intentions.
Hey team, I’ve got a real treat for you today - as I mentioned earlier in the year I’m going to try and include a few more interviews on this podcast, and this month I’m bringing you my conversation with Dr. Tamara Rosier. I just had a blast talking with her and so this episode is a bit longer than I normally go simply because I didn’t want to stop the interview.
Dr. Rosier is an ADHD coach and runs the ADHD Center of West Michigan. In this interview, we talk about her book Your Brain’s Not Broken: Strategies for Navigating Your Emotions and Life with ADHD.
There is just so much good stuff in this interview we talk about emotional regulation, energy management, and a lot of the funny quirks of having ADHD.
If you like the stuff I have on this podcast your honestly going to love her book and I think you’ll really enjoy this interview as well.
Be sure to check out the book Your Brain's Not Broken
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All right, I’m back from my little break and we’re just heading right back into the hard stuff - or at least how we can start getting it checked off our to-do list.
Today we’re going to be looking at some more ways that we can adjust our mindset around doing hard things and also looking at some of the reasons we might be choosing to do certain hard things. Then we’ll finish up this series by digging into a few of the more concrete things that you can do so that you can tackle those hard things.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Part of the reward of doing hard things is actually doing the hard things - this may seem glib, but when we’re building up our habits and routines the only way we actually build them is by doing the hard parts. We can’t skip to the end and expect to have picked up habits needed to maintain that goal.
- We can reshape our mindset around the things that we “have to do” - we often rebel against the have to’s and so changing our mindset into things that we get to do can have a profound impact on how we approach doing those tasks.
- Two of the best ways to get through doing hard things is to know your why behind what you’re doing and then having some accountability to help you follow through.
One of the questions that I frequently get is how people can actually apply what they're learning - in this podcast and from all the other things we learn. I know this is a particularly pernicious problem for ADHD because often we see things that we think would really make a difference in our lives, and yet we can't seem to get ourselves to apply these ideas.
Today we're going to explore how we can start working on getting a better understanding of what we're learning, why we might want to start limiting what we're consuming and how to solidify those learnings into our lives.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- When writing notes from books, podcasts or videos create summaries and write them down in your own words to solidify your learnings.
- Be discerning about the media that you're taking in so that you don't overwhelm yourself with too many topics. We can only work on a few ideas at any given time, so you've got to be choosy about what you want to work on.
- Create a plan to follow through with what you're learning and use an accountability system to help you stay on track with your plan.
One of the reasons that many of us have trouble giving ourselves slack is because of our internalized perfectionism - it's something that controls our workflow and prevents us from ever taking a break because in our head we know we could be doing more. Even during the writing of this episode I had to fight off some of this internal perfectionism - this episode wasn't supposed to be entirely about perfectionism, but it was going to take a lot more than just one section to really tackle the topic - so now what was just going to be a two-part episode on giving yourself some slack is a series - and had I come into this knowing it was going to be a series I would have definitely approached it differently, but that's okay, it doesn't have to be perfect.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring the idea of how perfection acts as a coping mechanism - and why that's not a great thing. We'll also be looking at some of the different types of perfectionism and then we'll be exploring some of the ways that we can start to work on conquering our own perfectionism.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Many of us with ADHD have picked up perfectionism as a coping mechanism to try and deal with the mistakes that have come from us having ADHD - however, perfectionism is a maladaptive coping mechanism that often leads to more problems than it solves
- There are three types of perfectionism - self-oriented perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism and socially-prescribed perfectionism.
- The first step in dealing with our perfectionism is understanding that our perfectionist expectations of ourselves are unrealistic and that having those unrealistic expectations is unhealthy - if we can relax those standards we will often save time, effort, and stress.
- Practice Imperfection by choosing small tasks that you can be imperfect at, such as using multiple colors of pens (without a pattern), not correcting typos in texts to friends or even something like wearing mismatched socks (I mean as long as they're the same kind - I just mean two socks with different colors or patterns not like wool socks and cotton socks, I'm not a monster).
- Look for feedback before you're 100% done with a project - try out asking for feedback at 30% and 90% and be sure to be specific about the type of feedback you're looking for at each point.
Last week we began this series on how to do hard things and looked specifically at how we define hard things and ways that we can work through some of our problems so that they can become more manageable.
This week we’re going to be continuing that conversation but with a lens that focuses on why it can be so hard for us to even attempt to do hard things. We’ll be looking at some of the misconceptions we have about doing hard things as well looking at how acknowledging the hard things we’ve done in the past can help us do more hard things in the present.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- We often discount our ability to do hard things from a mistaken belief that we’ve never been able to accomplish anything hard.
- When we mistake failing at simple things for failing at doing hard things it can reinforce the idea that we can’t do hard things. Remember, just because something is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t hard.
- Don’t assume the logic in your head is always actually logical. It is easy for us to make logical leaps that don’t hold up to reality - slow down and examine those beliefs. You don’t have to believe everything you think.
One of my favorite sayings from Brendan Mahan of the ADHD Essentials podcast is that ADHD is life on Hard Mode.
The executive dysfunction that comes with ADHD makes everything just a little bit more difficult. From doing the dishes to filling out tax returns we find ourselves needing to put in more effort than our neurotypical peers.
But what’s important for us to remember is that while these things can absolutely be harder for us to do, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Today we’re going to be exploring this idea of doing hard things - what makes something difficult and how we can work on moving ourselves through that process.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- It is important for us to define what we find being hard because when we choose to believe something should be easy we tend not to give it the attention that it deserves.
- Our problems can’t be solved until we acknowledge them as problems - but also can’t solve those problems unless we put forward the effort of defining them and acknowledging the underlying issues.
- Define what done looks like for a task and be sure to be mindful of how that can be functional in your life.
In this episode I'm talking with the CEO and founder of the company Shelpful, Sharon Pope - we've all had times when we needed a little help getting ourselves to follow a routine and sometimes we don't have the accountability in our lives to make that happen. Shelpful is all about solving that problem of getting that daily accountability. The program works through text messaging but you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself - this is all in the interview.
Be sure to go checkout Shelpful at Shelpful.com
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As I’m getting ready to head into the holidays I thought I’d deliver you something a bit different in your podcast player - a story.
I don’t want to give anything away so get snuggled in and prepare yourself for The Dog and The Dragon by Brandon Sanderson.
Be sure to go check out all of Sanderson's work at BrandonSanderson.com
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Trimethylxanthine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug - for many caffeine is such a ubiquitous substance that calling it a drug seems like a misnomer. How could something so widely used that has so few regulations around it be a drug? But a drug is simply a chemical substance that affects our nervous system function and can result in changes to our perception, mood, cognition, and behavior. I feel like caffeine ticks the box pretty well on all those accounts.
In today's episode, we'll be exploring how caffeine works - some of its benefits and negatives and then we'll be looking at what we know about how caffeine and ADHD mix.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Caffeine is a psychoactive drug whose primary mechanism is binding to adenosine receptors in the brain. The buildup of adenosine in our system is what makes us sleepy, so by binding to these receptors caffeine is able to keep us awake.
- Caffeine has a host of benefits but having too much caffeine near bedtime can affect our slow-wave sleep and reduce our total amount of sleep.
- There is still a lot of research that needs to be done on the interaction between caffeine and ADHD but it is clear that many people with ADHD attempt to self-medicate with caffeine.
Hey team, today's episode is coming in a bit more seriously than some of my others so I just wanted to give you all a head's up.
In today's episode, we have listener questions dealing with depression so we're going to be talking about comorbidity in ADHD and specifically, we're going to be talking about how ADHD interacts with depression.
comorbidity - this is a term that comes up with ADHD frequently enough and really what we're talking about here is two or more disorders or illnesses occurring in the same person at the same time or successively as in one condition that occurs right after the other. often when we're using the term comorbidity there is also the implication that the interaction between the two conditions creates worse outcomes for both. And the worsening outcomes make complete sense - regardless of what you're dealing with, having to manage two conditions is going to be harder than just dealing with one.
Today we'll be looking at which comorbidities can affect ADHD, take a closer look at depression, and then talk about ways that they can interact and we can work on treating them.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- ADHD had a plethora of comorbid conditions and it's important to see know how they interact to properly treat your mental health issues.
- Depression has one of the most common comorbidities with ADHD and it's estimated that 70% of adults with ADHD will at some point be treated for depression.
- When figuring out how we want to approach treating comorbid conditions it's important to figure out who's driving the bus. Symptoms from each condition can exacerbate other symptoms and by figuring out whose driving the bus you can work treating the root cause of your issue.
The ADHD brain has a strange relationship with thinking. One of my biggest gripes is that it often feels like I can't ever turn my brain off. No matter what I'm doing, I'm thinking about something. I could be washing dishes, but I'm thinking about what else I need to do before I go to bed. I could be walking to get the mail, and instead of wondering what's in the mailbox, I'm thinking about a conversation I had three years ago. Even when I'm trying to meditate, I'll often find myself thinking about what it means to be meditating. I'm not really sure that thinking about meditating while meditating is actually meditating - but hey, I'm still putting in the effort, it's called a practice for a reason.
But just because our brains are whirring away doesn't mean that we're producing quality thoughts. Today we're going to take a dive into how we can better direct our brains. We'll be looking at why we should stop multitasking. The value of critical thinking and then explore ways that we can improve that thinking.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Stop trying to multitask. Multitasking reduces the efficiency that we can perform any task and prevents us from really thinking through our problems.
- Critical thinking is valuable because it helps us make hard decisions and it makes us harder to manipulate.
- Ask yourself more questions to improve your critical thinking skills. Always challenge your assumptions.
- Find ways to help facilitate your thinking time such mind mapping or taking a walk.
In a lot of my episodes, I have touted the virtue of asking questions - this is something that is embedded deeply in my philosophy. When we engage ourselves and others with curiosity we are able to solve problems more quickly and with better answers.
One idea that I see pop up frequently is that questions are more valuable than answers - to some extent I agree with that idea, but I think it's a bit too hyperbolic. It feels like it stems from the counter-intuitive branch of self-help whereby saying the opposite of what people think you can get them to engage more. It gets clicks, but it doesn't always produce the best advice. Nonetheless, to get great answers you often need great questions.
Your answer isn't going to matter if you're asking the wrong question, so it's important that we take the time to figure out if we're asking the right question. With ADHD we often want to just jump into the action and start doing - but this means that we need to be even more vigilant that we're asking these questions so that we know we're going in the right direction.
But how do we ask great questions or even good questions? What even makes one question better than the other?
In today's episode, we're going to explore that question as well as looking at the how and when of question-asking.
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Hey team this week I'm jumping on some listener questions - if you'd like to leave your own question for me to answer on the air just head over to HackingYourADHD.com/contact and leave me a message
In today's episode, I'll be answering a question about procrastination and how we can work on getting past issues of low confidence, and then we're going to be dive into some ways we can take breaks when our mobility is a limiting factor.
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Often when I think about productivity I envision something like a well-oiled machine - everything fits together, everything has its place and when it is running smoothly it produces amazing results. But the part that my imagination doesn't usually pick up is a few important words - well-oiled machine... what does it mean to be well oiled - well, for one thing, it means that there is someone maintaining the system. It means, that left to its own devices that the machine would break down - and for a machine like this, it means it's either running at peak capacity or not at all.
As you can imagine this isn't exactly the route we want to be going - we're going to have setbacks in life and we're going to have times where we have to do less - we're not machines.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring this idea of capacity, as well as how we sometimes go above and beyond, and then also how we can work on building some slack into our systems.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Always doing more isn't always our best option - it is easy for us to overreach our capacity and find ourselves doing more than we're able to handle. Once we get past capacity we're more like to drop the ball on everything we're doing. Giving ourselves breathing room isn't being lazy, it's a way for us to focus on what's most important.
- When we're in times of crisis many people with ADHD can thrive by using their surge capacity - however, our surge capacity is limited and we can only access it for so long before we start burning out.
- We can add more capacity to our schedules by adding more slack to our calendars - that is buffer time that allows us to "pick up the slack" when we're running overtime on something unexpected or just need more time to finish something than we thought we would.
We all know that one of the biggest hurdles from ADHD is starting, but paradoxically one of our other hurdles is stopping. Sometimes it feels like we're better off if we just power through until we're done, but if we really want to get the most out of our workdays, we need to have some breaks.
In today's episode, we're going to be looking at the benefits of taking breaks, some different ways that we can take breaks, and also exploring going beyond breaks and actually taking some time off.
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For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/breaks
This Episode's Top Tips
- Taking breaks allows us to separate our work into more manageable chunks. They let us refresh and come to our tasks with more energy.
- We should be scheduling our breaks so that we don't forget to take them. To help out our future selves we should also be planning what we want to be doing on those breaks as well.
- As important as knowing what we are doing on our breaks, we should also know what we shouldn't be doing on our breaks. Avoid things like phone games and social media that are going to be hard to tear yourself away from at the end of your break.
- It's also important to take time off entirely from work to recharge your batteries. While it might be hard to take a traditional vacation right now, we can still work on thinking about other ways that we can take time off, like working on fun projects at home or just taking a few days to catch up on Netflix.
One of the most important aspects of planning is knowing where you've been and this typically comes from some kind of review process. The reason for the review is so that we can plan an accurate course based on where we are now. But that review is also a lot easier said than done. I've sat down for many a review sessions and realized that I don't have a great way to look back. I'll skim through my calendar and wonder what exactly happened over the last few weeks or months and kind of shrug and go... stuff?
And what that means is that we want to look at how we measure our success - so today we're going to be talking about how we set our goals, how we can work on measuring their outcomes and also questioning what actually makes a good measurement.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/indicators
This Episode's Top Tips
- When we're setting goals we should focus on the small changes we can make that we can keep up for the long term.
- When we're thinking about goals we need to see if we're measuring them lagging or leading measures. Lagging measures are the outcomes based on what's happening with our leading measures. The best goals have a mix of the two measurements.
- What we choose to measure matters and influences our future actions. Make sure that what you're measuring is incentivizing the outcomes you actually want.
This week I am talking with Dr. Norrine Russell of Russell Coaching - Dr. Russell has a Pd.D. from Bowling Green State University with a focus on psychology and education and began her ADHD coaching practice in 2009. In our conversation today, we talk about what you can expect to get out of coaching, how we can work on working with our brains, and ways we can help our kids with ADHD.
Today's episode is focused more on children with ADHD, but I've always found that these are lessons that we can translate to our own experience.
Get more information about Russell Coaching at RussellCoaching.com
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/russellcoaching
This Episode's Top Tips
- Learn about your ADHD - if you don't understand it, then they can't work it. Work on learning how your brain works so that you can best work with it.
- Give yourself permission to see what works. Often we get caught up in the idea that if we try something then we are going to have to do it forever - instead, we should be thinking about how we can make progress through trial and error.
- Work with others to Hack your ADHD, because while it's great to see what we can come up with on our own there are tons of resources out there that can also help you.
One of the easiest ways for procrastination to creep into our lives is through the thought that we just need to wait to do something until we feel like doing it. I totally get this. I feel this way all the time - it's super easy to put something off because we don't feel like doing it right then.
But that's not always our best strategy - in fact, for a lot of things we're never really going to feel like doing them and so waiting for that inspiration to come means that we're never going to get to it.
Today we're going to be looking at this idea of inspiration and some of the ways that we can try and get started anyway.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Before you can come up with a solution to your problem you need to know what your problem actually is. Some problems are just symptoms of other problems and if you can solve those root issues it makes everything else easier or unnecessary to fix.
- While gamifying boring tasks might seem like a great way to make your work more interesting it can also backfire and reduce motivation in the long run. It's better to just add in some small aspects of fun like listening to music or doing the task with a friend.
- Creating a warm-up routine can make it easier to get into your workflow, just make sure to make the warmup easy so you don't put it off as well.
This week I'm bringing back an episode from the archives while I'm working on getting some new content put together.
One of the hardest aspects for me with ADHD is that I can quickly become overwhelmed when I can't find a clear path forward - I know I could do the research, but setting aside the time feels like it's going to be too much and so I just procrastinate forever on starting. For me finding a therapist was one of those things that seemed too murky to get started on. There were just so many things to consider and so many things that I don't know. Not only did I not know where to start, but I also didn't even know what questions I should be asking. In my mind, I knew it would be good for me, but the process just seemed too hard to get started on.
Today, we're going to work on clearing a path on how to find a therapist - we'll be looking into a few kinds of therapy and what we can expect to get out of therapy - and of course, we'll also be walking through how we actually find a therapist that is the right fit for us.
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This Episode's Top Tip
- Find out what your insurance will cover and go from there. If you don't have insurance or it isn't covered, there are still a lot of options like University Clinics, Online Therapy, Group Therapy, and therapy offered in your community. For help finding a therapist check out psychologytoday.com/therapists
- The most common type of therapy for ADHD is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses on changing your automatic thoughts. Another common therapy practice for ADHD is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which focuses more on behavior patterns and mindfulness. Talk therapy is another common type of therapy, although it isn't specifically tailored to ADHD.
- When you go to your first session make sure you have a list of questions for your therapist - finding the right therapist is critical for you getting the most out of your therapy sessions.
While working on the last episode on laziness, one of the themes that came up was how we can become paralyzed when we don't know what our next step is - this can often be seen as laziness from other people or even ourselves. We know we should be doing something, we just don't know what. And this is where the importance of planning comes in.
Today we're going to focus on how to plan our day because it's easy to let our days get away from ourselves when we don't plan them. It feels like we shouldn't need to do our planning because that's what we were going to do anyway. But planning lets us look ahead and fix problems before they come up. It lets us choose what we want to do with our time instead of just always putting out fires.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- When we don't know what to do next we can get paralyzed with indecision from a lack of executive function - we can help alleviate some of this paralysis through planning.
- While doing our initial planning it's important that we also set aside time to regularly do our planning. If we don't build planning time into our schedule it's easy for us to skip doing it.
- When planning it's important that we're not just scheduling things on our to-do lists but our breaks and things that bring us joy.
In last week's episode, I talked about the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap and how it can be hard for us to really remember or predict how our state is going to affect our actions - one of the consequences of this is that we often label ourselves as lazy when we didn't do something. Our cold state brain tells us that we should have just done the thing, all the while neglecting how we felt. This disconnect is what leads to a lot of our self-judgment and in particular, those of us with ADHD often find ourselves labeling ourselves as lazy.
Why didn't I walk the dogs?
I was feeling lazy - or maybe I feel overwhelmed with work or maybe I couldn't find the leashes.
When we don't do something it's easy to label it as lazy, but often that doesn't tell us what was really going on.
Today we're going to be exploring the idea of lazy and how what we might want to start looking at it a bit differently.
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Why do we make bad decisions in the moment?
We've all done things that we regret doing right? yeah me, neither - but let's say hypothetically there was something that we regretted doing - something that we said or did that we feel like doesn't really reflect on as a person.
Why is it I can have the best of intentions and still when it comes time I still make the wrong decision?
Today we're going to be exploring the hot-cold empathy gap and why it can be so difficult for us to predict what we're actually going to do in the moment.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- The hot-cold empathy gap occurs when we fail to predict how our emotions are going to affect our decision-making when we're in that state.
- This doesn't only apply to things like being angry or depressed but can also apply to our motivation or energy levels. Our ADHD can easily let us overcommit on projects because we fail to predict that we might have less drive and motivation when it comes time to actually do the task.
- We can work on mitigating some of the effects of the hot-cold empathy gap by making the decisions we want to make easier to make in the moment. We can also use tools like accountability and breaking down our tasks to keep us on track.
Hey team, good news, I am finally over Covid - it took me a bit longer than I would have liked but I'm healthy again and ready to get back at things.
This is an episode that I started working on before I got sick, and one of the areas that we had been looking into was that of planning and goal setting. So I thought it was time to shift a bit onto an area that we often forget about - leisure time.
Now, I want to be clear here, leisure time is not in opposition to goals and planning, in fact, it's just as important to our well-being. There are a myriad of health benefits we get from taking time off work, but not all leisure activities are equal.
In this week's episode, we're going to be looking at how we can work on reframing the ways we look at our free time, how we can be a little more intentional with how we're spending that time, and then look at a few of the things we can do to make that time, time well spent.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- You don't have to earn your time off - denying ourselves real leisure time because we "didn't earn it" is counterproductive only leads to burnout.
- Don't rely on discipline to keep yourself from falling into low-quality leisure time like scrolling social media - use blocks on your phone to divert yourself from the path of least resistance.
- Our five pillars of quality leisure time are:
- Prioritize doing, over consuming
- Prioritize things that take some skill to do
- Think about making something
- Seek activities that foster social interaction
- Prioritize Self-Care
We've all got things that we think we should be able to just do - for example, I've had on my to-do list for weeks to make a phone call to the bank - it won't even take that long, but I keep putting it off. I keep finding reasons not to do it - what I've done is I've created a wall of awful around making this phone call (really most phone calls) and the more I put it off the more it builds it up. Today we've got Brendan Mahan from ADHD Essentials to explain what the Wall of Awful is and some ways that we can work on getting past it.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- The Wall of Awful is the emotional impact of repeated failure and it makes activating on tasks even more difficult
- While our wall starts off being built up with failure bricks, it is also built with things like disappointment, rejection, and shame. It doesn't matter if these bricks are based in reality, it matters how you perceive them.
- There are 5 ways people try to get past the Wall of Awful, two don't work, one works, but is damaging to our relationships, and then two that work - the two that don't work are staring at it or trying to go around it - the one that works but is damaging is trying to hulk smash through the wall - the two that work that we want to focus on are climbing the wall and putting a door in our wall
- Climbing the wall is about sitting with the emotion that built up our wall and understanding what's stopping us - it can often look like staring at the wall, but it's more about gearing yourself up to get over the wall
- Putting a door in the wall is about changing your emotional state so that you can get past the wall - it could be doing things like taking a walk, listening to some energizing music, or watching a funny TV show to brighten your mood. Make sure that when you are trying to put that door in that you aren't actually just trying to go around the wall - it's easy to let that one TV show turn into four because you were just looking for a way to procrastinate.
One of the hottest trends to come out of the self-help world over the last few years is gratitude. And it's no surprise, gratitude has been found to be one of the greatest indicators of overall well-being. I'm usually pretty skeptical about things that get hyped quite as much as gratitude has been - I mean when you see the list of things that a gratitude practice can help with it's pretty easy to roll your eyes. I mean can gratitude really do all those things that people say it can?
Today we'll be exploring the mechanisms that make gratitude work - and also perhaps tempering some of the hype around it - then we'll be looking at ways we can find things to be grateful in our lives as well as looking at some ways that we can start a gratitude practice.
And I'll admit, this episode is a little less ADHD-focused - but gratitude was something that was on my mind, for reasons that I get into during the episode. And so even though this episode is a little less ADHD specific I still think everyone can get a lot out of it.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Gratitude is showing thanks and appreciation and it has a tremendous impact on our brains. Gratitude can help us release build our relationships, regulate stress, improve sleep quality, build self-esteem and make us happier.
- One way we can practice gratitude is through mindfulness and seeing all the things in our lives that are going right. It's easy for us to latch onto the negative things that happen during our day. We'll miss all the things that went right because when things go according to plan they can often become invisible.
- We can also practice gratitude by journaling or writing a letter to someone in our lives that has greatly impacted us.
Sequencing is all about the order in which we do things. Sometimes it seems like it doesn’t matter what comes first, but also try putting your pants on after you put on your shoes.
Sequencing is something I’ve come to realize is a big deal with ADHD. The order in which we do things has a big impact on our overall productivity, but more than that, some of our other issues with ADHD make the sequence in which we do things much more important.
Today we're going to be exploring how the order we do things is important for our ADHD brains and then we'll be looking at some ways that we can use sequencing to our advantage.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Sequencing is order in which we do things and it matters because it can have a big impact on how we remember things and execute our plans.
- Planning can help with our ability to sequence things properly - one technique that can be especially helpful in making sure we don't forget steps is to start our planning from the end and working our way backwards.
- Part of sequencing is making sure that we're paying attention to tasks that will get us off track and making sure we're not putting those right before things we actually want to do.
- Batching tasks is a great way to make sure we're not getting ourselves off track - but remember we don't have to an entire batch at once, we can still break batches into reasonable chunks.
Hey team, I'm going to be taking a little time off in August and I thought that I'd dredge up a few episodes from the archives.
Today we're going to be hitting on an idea that has been a reoccurring theme in the last few episodes and that's personal energy management.
While many of us have realized that we only have so much time in our day, we tend to still believe that we're going to have the same amount of energy from sun up to sundown. But we know this isn't true. Our energy levels vary throughout the day and if we want to be getting the most out of our days we have to try and work with these rhythms of energy.
Today we're going to be discussing how we can work on creating our schedules around when we do have energy instead of just when we've got a free spot on the calendar. We'll be looking at some of the different areas of energy management as well as how our energy levels fluctuate throughout the day. And we'll also spend a little time on how you can make a little more energy.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Energy management is about realizing it's not just about how many hours you have in the day, but also how much energy you've got during the day.
- Your energy levels are going to fluctuate up and down throughout the day, and if you want to get the most out of your schedule try scheduling your most important tasks during your high energy times, preferably early in the day.
- Limit your commitments so that you have enough time to work on the projects that are important to you.
- If you're low on energy try having some water or a healthy snack - you can also try to change your state by listening to some music or going on a short walk.
I want to start this episode off by saying that this is something I'm bad at - and not in the sense that what I do to celebrate is bad or that I'm not celebrating the small wins throughout my day. It's bad in the sense that I almost entirely skip the whole thing.
Recently this podcast tipped past half a million downloads. That's a pretty big milestone and is pretty indicative of how successful this endeavor has been. But it was barely a blip for me. I didn't want to acknowledge the success because it can be hard for me to acknowledge when I do things well.
So this episode is as much for me as it is for all of you and in this episode, we're going to be exploring what it means to have small wins and also how we can celebrate them.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Celebrating our wins is a way to boost our confidence and it will actively encourage us to seek out that same success again.
- We can differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by thinking of intrinsic as what to do because it's interesting and inherently satisfying. Extrinsic motivation comes from rewards or from avoiding punishment. Both can be important parts of how we celebrate our success.
- Start celebrating your wins by acknowledging when they happen and then letting yourself do something fun to celebrate that success.
- Don't get down on yourself when the wins aren't coming - we're not always going to have smooth sailing, but only focusing on what didn't happen tends to make us overlook all the good things that did happen.
As we've been working on goals one place I want us to take a step back on and think about is meeting ourselves where we are.
As we get going with our planning we tend to decide that well we want to do all of the things. And I mean why not, there are a lot of things that I want to do, if I don't start now, when am I going to start? I can't tell you how many ill-fated adventures I've started because of that whole "if not now, when?" line - there are so many things that I should be investing my time in now. I need to be meditating and exercising more and eating healthier and saving money and work on business and building my relationships and learning new skills and on and on and on.
I'm sure everyone listening has that list of things they know that they should be starting on now because the sooner the better results you'll see down the line. But we're not starting on them... or when we do we don't stick with the changes.
Today we're going to be looking at what it means to meet ourselves where we're at and then some of the ways that we can work on making that happen.\
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This Episode's Top Tips
- We only have so much time and energy we can put into any given day - giving ourselves the self-compassion to accept this is our first step in meeting ourselves where we're at.
- When we're trying to add things back into our life that we've previously done it can feel like we picked up the wrong puzzle pieces and this is because we often don't think about how our circumstances have changed. Just because we did something before doesn't mean it will be necessarily easy for us to just pick right back up.
- After we approach what we're capable of with self-compassion we need to decide on some of the things that we're not going to do. This gives us the mental space to focus on the things we can do right now.
- Celebrate your small wins because they are the stepping stones to reaching your goals.
The first thing we've got to understand is that when we ask, when should I quit? We're also asking, when should I persevere? And they often serve as the same answer - I should quit when it doesn't make sense to keep going. I keep going when it doesn't make sense to quit. Unfortunately is really easy to get those messages mixed up and with ADHD we've all got a trail of unfinished projects and ideas that are weighing us down every time we need to make this decision again.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- We've got to give up the notion that winners never quit. Persistence doesn't guarantee success - we can persist at the wrong things forever and never make progress.
- There are two curves we've got to look for when starting something new - the dip and the cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac is a dead end. The dip is the point where things start to get hard - we've got to stop quitting things when they get hard and embrace the dip.
- We'll often stick out things we should quit. There are a lot of reasons that we might stick something out like the sunk cost fallacy or the planning fallacy. Regardless of why we're sticking around, once we realize that we're in a dead-end we've got to accept that we need to quit and try something new.
Last week dove into how goals work and the science behind them - now we're going to be taking all of that and looking at how we can better create our goals through simple frameworks. A lot of these frameworks come from a business setting, but with a little tweaking, we can absolutely make them work for personal use as well.
Today we're going to be looking at a few of the different frameworks we can use for our goal setting as well as hitting the why behind setting those goals.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can make them SMARTER by adding a step to Evaluate our goals and then to Readjust them.
- Using the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework, we're looking for the specific things that we can do every day that will naturally lead us to reaching our goals.
- A big, hairy, audacious goal is something that exists on a large time frame and will push us out of our comfort zone. We can use these big goals to help guide our thinking behind the other goals we're setting.
- Ikigai is the Japanese ideology of finding the joy of life through purpose. We can use this idea to help create the kinds of big goals that are going to have real meaning behind them.
As we continue to think about our fresh start one clear area that we're going to hit is that of, well what should we even be focusing on. That's where goal setting comes into play and while I did touch on this in the original fresh start episode, I think it's worth giving more consideration.
When we think about goals there's a ton of different ways to think about them, but at their basics, a goal is simply a future result that you are directing your effort. Now there are a lot of different ways that we can go about setting those goals and we'll get into that more next week when I go through some of the various frameworks. But before we get into those frameworks it's important to understand how goals actually work and why we even want to set them.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- There are 4 mechanisms we need to keep in mind when trying to complete our goals, those are focus, effort, persistence, and strategy.
- We can think of goals fitting into three broad categories - outcome, performance, and process. Outcome and performance goals focus on things we can measure and process goals focus on the things that we do.
- With an any benefit approach to our goals we're going to end up trying to focus on doing everything - instead, we need to prioritize those things that are most important and do them before we even think about those lower priority goals.
One of the things I never quite got a grasp on is seasons... I mean I grew up in Hawaii and we basically had hot and not quite as hot. But this comes up for me because technically we're still in Spring right now so I guess this could still be a Spring Cleaning episode - officially Summer starts on the Solstice in June on the 20th... so I made in by like a week if you're listening to this when it comes out.
Regardless of if this is Spring Cleaning or not, cleaning can be a great way to signal the start of something new. We all get used to the mess in our space and freshening things up can not only signal the start of something new but also shift our mindset.
Today I'll be exploring the benefits of cleaning, how we can update our space, some tips on accountability, and then get into a few of the specific things that you can do.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- You can help spur your fresh start by rearranging your space - this doesn't have to be a big move, but sprucing up your environment can help it feel new and like you are starting fresh.
- Getting rid of our old stuff can help lift mental burdens and take care of old open loops. Our accumulated stuff often carries more mental weight than we really know.
- To help keep on track during cleaning make sure you create some accountability. It can be a great way to help you follow through with your planning and also in the moment through body doubling.
- Leave yourself notes as to where you left off in your cleaning so when you come back you can pick it back up without having to try and figure out what you were trying to do. While it may seem like we wouldn't forget, it's easy to lose track of where we were at in our plans.
In just one more month we're going to be coming up on the halfway point of 2021 — I know, I have no idea how it got here either.
But with this mark in time we're starting to see a shift going on - while COVID certainly isn't a thing of the past, the vaccine role out has opened up a lot of possibilities for what we want our future to look like.
At the end of 2020, I did some planning for 2021, but I knew that a lot of it was going to be uncertain so I didn't make too many specific plans. But now that I'm getting a better grasp of what the future might hold — although let's be honest, with ADHD we're always going to have a lot of uncertainty — I felt like it was time to go over those plans again and maybe give myself a fresh start.
In this episode, we're going to be talking about the fresh start effect, go over some stuff on planning, and how we can work on sticking to those plans.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
- We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
- Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
- We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.
This week I'm talking with Eric Tivers - the host of the ADHD reWired Podcast and the head of our podcast network. He just opened up a new membership community for something called Adult Study Hall, which is an online accountability program to help you get stuff done. The way it works is that you enter a zoom room with a bunch of other people who are working - you state what you are planning to work on and get to it. It is pretty amazing how effective just having someone else there is even if it's just virtually. I actually use Adult Study Halls fairly frequently when I'm working on this podcast.
In this episode, Eric and I talk about planning for the rest of this year, adult study hall, and his upcoming 25th season of reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. Also, there may be something in there about a book, I really wouldn't give it much thought.
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Register for the upcoming ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups at reWiredCoaching.com
In this week's podcast, I continue my conversation with Will Henshall, CEO of the music service Focus@Will
In this part of the interview we talk about how we can use music to affect our state of being → and to jump on this because I realized I didn't really hit this in the interview, by state of being I mean how you are currently experiencing things - so this encompasses your mood, energy level, and your motivation level - okay, back to our intro - we also discuss a number of various ADHD tips and how Focus@Will is really in the happiness at work business.
And if you're wondering you don't have to have listened to the first part of the interview to enjoy this episode - in this part, we focus a lot more on ADHD and some of the ways that you can work with your ADHD to get more out of your day.
You can check out Focus@Will at https://www.focusatwill.com/
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Whenever I sit down to do some serious writing I always make sure to have something to listen to - music is often a key piece of how I keep myself engaged in the task I'm doing. In today's podcast, I'm going to dig into that idea, by I won't be doing it alone.
Today I'm joined by Will Henshall, CEO of Focus@Will which is kind of like Spotify for concentration music.
In this episode, I talk with Will about how music can be critical in our ability to focus while working, how ADHD brains need a certain level of stimulation to really get engaged, and you'll get a taste of what you might hear on Focus@Will
I had a great time with this interview and I hope you'll enjoy it too.
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Today we’re going to be talking about a chemical that is responsible for countless deaths worldwide every year - a chemical so ubiquitous that it can be found practically everywhere - in the air, in our homes, and even in our bodies.
I’m of course referring to dihydrogen monoxide or its more common nomenclature H2O
Yes, we’re finally going to be talking about water.
One of the tips I go back to over and over again to help manage ADHD is that of making sure you are properly hydrated. It's absolutely something that I have to constantly remind myself of because it seems just a little too easy. I mean just drinking water shouldn't have that big of an effect right? But as something that makes up 45-75% of your body weight and 80% of your brain composition, it is incredibly important.
Today we'll be going over what hydration means, the importance of staying hydrated, and then some ways that we can be better at making sure we don't get dehydrated.
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Today's Top Tips
- There is no set amount of water that you need to be drinking every day because our water needs are going to vary with things like gender, age, activity level, temperature, humidity, diet, and any medications we're taking. Our best bet is to follow our thirst and keep water available to us throughout the day.
- Symptoms of mild dehydration include fatigue, brain fog, headaches, mood swings, and poor decision-making. We can often identify dehydration from dry mouth, chapped skin, or those headaches.
- To help us follow our thirst we can work on setting up a mindfulness practice that helps us identify what proper hydration feels like. Track your water intake throughout the day for a few weeks and journal about how you feel when you've been drinking various amounts. Remember we're not trying to hit any number here, we're just trying to find what the right levels are for us.
With ADHD we often have trouble filtering things out - we can't ignore the hum of the air conditioner, we can't ignore the scratchy tag on the back of our shirt, we can't ignore the fact it seems like the lady standing next to us in line seem to have marinated herself in perfume.
We don't want to pay attention to these things, but we can't get our brains to focus on what we want to in the best of times, so how do we expect them to when something is calling for our attention so urgently.
Many people with ADHD are hypersensitive (sometimes also called being a highly sensitive person) which means they are simply more sensitive to the things that stimulate our senses. So anything from touch, taste, smell, sound, or things we see. We can also find ourselves overwhelmed with emotions or too much information.
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Today's Top Tips
- Many people with ADHD also report being hypersensitive (or being a highly sensitive person), which means that they process certain emotional and/or physical stimuli more intensely or thoroughly than others. It also means that we tend to process more aspects of our environment than other people.
- To help limit all the stimuli we receive we can do things like wearing comfortable tagless clothing, using noise-canceling headphones, and use proper lighting to help reduce the number of distractions we get in a day.
- Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is extreme emotional sensitivity that can be triggered by the perception of rejection or failure. The intense feelings can even manifest as physical pain. RSD isn't easy to deal with but can be worked on with the understanding that the feelings won't last forever and knowing you can get past them.
This week we're going to be exploring the power of habit and how small changes to our routines can have a big impact. One of the easiest ways we can help our ADHD is by working on routines and habits. It's easy to let our default habits run our lives but when we consciously choose what habits we actually want to cultivate we aren't hamstringing ourselves.
In this episode we'll be learning why we don't need to use discipline nearly as much as we think, the importance of sequencing in our habits and how we can make tweaks in those sequences so that we can change our habits to the ones we actually want.
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Today's Top Tips
- Don't rely on discipline, instead use your habits to help you navigate the hard stuff.
- Our habits are so ingrained that we don't always realize what we're doing while we're doing them.
- Our habits follow the path of least resistance - if you want to change a bad habit, add resistance. If you want to form a new habit, reduce the resistance to that habit.
- You can automate processes in your habit sequences so that you aren't relying on discipline.
The ReWired Podcast Network
- ADHD reWired with Eric Tivers
- ADHD Essentials with Brendan Mahan
- ADHD Diversified with MJ
- The ADHD Friendly Lifestyle with Moira Maybin
Resistance is the embodiment of the I don't wanna's - the part of us that keeps us from doing our work - or anything for that matter. And a big part of resistance comes from our ability to rationalize what we're doing - I'll jump into one task and find myself doing something else and then my brain will come up with a reason why I needed to be watching youtube instead of working on this week's episode.
In today's episode we're going to be exploring what rationalization is, some of the ways that we do it, and also some of the ways we can start working on reducing the amount of rationalization that we are doing.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Rationalization is our brains attempting to explain or justify our behavior or an attitude with logical reasons. The difference between reasoning and rationalization is that with reasoning we are trying to apply logic to come to a conclusion, when we're rationalizing, we have a conclusion and we're making up reasons for it.
- One way we use rationalization is through the stories we are telling ourselves - we come up with reasons to explain why someone is acting the way they are (which we have to because we don't have access to their thoughts) but we're not always very accurate in our assessment as to why people act the way they are acting. We can use the phrase, "the story I'm telling myself" to help navigate the reality of a story.
- We also tell stories about ourselves - these are often based in fear and lead us to create more and more rationalizations. Use getting upset as a signal to get curious and explore these stories - and remember that you don't have to do it alone.
- One of the easiest ways to make rationalizing harder is to have a clear goal - this means knowing what the goal is and also knowing the reason why behind the goal. Since we have ADHD we've also got to work on making sure that we are creating reminders about what our goals are - just because a goal feels important when we make it doesn't mean we're going to remember why we're doing it 2 weeks from now.
Making the right choices isn't always easy - we've got so many options of what we can do and when I'm tired I don't want to weigh all my options. It would be great if I could just get a gentle push in the right direction. Something that would make the choice I want to make easier to make.
What I'm talking about here is a nudge and that's what we're going to be talking about today. We'll be learning about what a nudge is, why they work, and when they don't. We'll also be looking at some of the various ways we can nudge ourselves and why it's so important for us to know when someone else might be nudging us.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- At its basics, nudging is an attempt to change someone's behavior by changing the environment or conditions. A nudge shouldn't alter the incentives, it just makes the option we want to pick the easiest option.
- Nudges works because our decision-making isn't rational, in reality, we actually usually just take the path of least resistance.
- We can nudge ourselves in several different ways. One way many of us already use nudges is through reminders. We can also alter our environment (like having a water bottle on our desk to nudge us to drink more water) or we can change our default options (like having our web browsers default to a blank page instead of opening up to countless tabs).
- It's important to be aware of nudges because many companies use them to influence our behavior. When we know that we're being nudged we can decide if that's really the decision we want to be making or if there is actually a better option for us.
One of the thoughts I kept coming back to while working on my episode's on multitasking was what it really meant to be multitasking. I settled on using the idea of doing two cognitive tasks at the same time, but that left me with another quandary - what about when I'm doing one thing and just thinking about doing something else. Surely just thinking about something else wouldn't count as multitasking.
But still... There have absolutely been times when I've been thinking about something else and found myself getting engrossed in my thoughts and losing track of conversations or what I was doing. Clearly, my thoughts can play a big role in what I'm doing and if my focus is somewhere else then it certainly isn't here in the present.
Today we're going to explore what our brain is doing here - how our thoughts can kind of run away with us. We'll also be looking at hyperfocus and then bringing together how these things relate.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/wanderingmind
This Episode's Top Tips
- The Default Mode Network is a collection of brain regions that are responsible for daydreaming, mind wandering and are primarily active in our wakeful resting state.
- In neurotypical brains the Default Mode Network disengages when we start working on task-specific work - this relationship doesn't hold up in ADHD brains and is why we can drift off in thought while trying to do complex tasks.
- Hyperfocus is when our concentration engages so much that we kind of just tune out the rest of the world. It can be a double-edged sword, however, because we can also miss cues to eat, use the bathroom and overuse our executive functions, and leave us completely drained when we come out of it.
- We can help both our default mode network and our hyperfocus by taking breaks throughout the day. We can go further by using those breaks for positive constructive daydreaming where we let our minds wander with purpose.
To recap from last week we learned that are there are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing.
We also covered how we're more likely to try and multitask with things we're familiar with but how that actually creates more of a cognitive penalty from breaking up our tasks and how we often just don't realize how much concentration we're using to complete a task - as evidenced with how dangerous texting and driving is.
This week we're going to be exploring more of the cognitive and biological costs of multitasking, then get into some specific kinds of multitasking that can really drain us and we'll finish up with some ways we can work on reducing the amount of multitasking we do.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/multitaskingpart2
This Episode's Top Tips
- Multitasking has both cognitive and biological costs that accumulate as we do more and more task switching. These costs can be especially hard on those of us with ADHD because they can serve to drain our executive functions.
- Multimedia multitasking is one of the worst ways we can multitask because often we're essentially binge multitasking where we multitask for a sustained period and really drain our systems.
- One of the biggest appeals to multitasking is that we don't have to prioritize what we're doing, we can just choose to do both. To help stave off multitasking work on knowing what your priorities are and create systems where you can focus on just doing those things.
- One of our best defenses against multitasking is mindfulness - if we can be specific about what we want to do and then become aware of what we are doing throughout the day we can help ourselves focus on doing just one thing at a time.
This week we're going to be deep-diving into multitasking - this is one of those topics that I frequently mention in episodes, but I've never featured before. Not because it doesn't deserve its own episode, but because multitasking is actually a fairly complicated issue and is going to take a bit of time to dissect. So this is actually just going to be my first episode in a series on multitasking and we'll really try and dig into the nitty-gritty of it.
In today's episode, we're going to be talking a bit about what multitasking is and what it isn't - then we'll work on some ways to really drive home the time costs of multitasking and well finish up by looking at some of the ways that multitasking can actually put us in harm's way.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- There are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing.
- When we're talking about multitasking we're primarily concerned with doing two cognitive tasks at the same time that require sustained attention. This means something like walking and listening to a podcast is fine to do because neither carries a huge cognitive load.
- We often try to multitask with things that we're already fairly practiced at, but this means that we're going to suffer even more of a penalty as we try to combine doing them with other things.
- Don't text and drive - or even just play with your phone while behind the wheel. When we're mentally juggling all of these different things we're dividing our attention and it takes time for us to refocus on what we need to be doing.
One of the questions that I frequently get is how people can actually apply what they're learning - in this podcast and from all the other things we learn. I know this is a particularly pernicious problem for ADHD because often we see things that we think would really make a difference in our lives, and yet we can't seem to get ourselves to apply these ideas.
Today we're going to exploring how we can start working on getting a better understanding of what we're learning, why we might want to start limiting what we're consuming and how to solidify those learnings into our lives.
Check out the next registration event for ADHD reWired's Coaching and Accountability groups on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30 PM CT - coachingrewired.com
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/learningtoapply
This Episode’s Top Tips
- When writing notes from books, podcasts or videos create summaries and write them down in your own words to solidify your learnings.
- Be discerning about the media that your taking in so that you don't overwhelm yourself with too many topics. We can only work on a few ideas at any given time, so you've got to be choosy about what you want to work on.
- Create a plan to follow through with what you're learning and use an accountability system to help you stay on track with your plan.
When it comes to understanding our ADHD it can be a bit of a minefield to navigate - one of our most pernicious problems is that often we're never really educated in what it means to have ADHD. And to top that off, what we learn from pop-culture just reinforces stereotypes that don't really reflect what ADHD is actually about.
One of the most important ways to help manage our ADHD is to accept it, but that can be really hard to do if we don't actually have a good grasp of what having ADHD means. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into the ADHD subtypes (or presentations as it's now being called) → there are the 3 kinds of ADHD that you might be diagnosed with, hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and combined.
Today we're going to be exploring these presentations of ADHD and working on understanding how this can help define our own ADHD.
Check out the next registration event for ADHD reWired's Coaching and Accountability groups on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30 PM CT - coachingrewired.com
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/subtypes
This Episode’s Top Tips
- ADHD is a spectrum disorder, which means that it includes a wide list of conditions and severity which means that your ADHD is just that, yours. No one is going to have the exact same symptoms that you do, so don't worry about comparing yourself to others even if you do resonate with a lot of the stories you hear in the community.
- The three presentations of ADHD are Hyperactive-Impulsive, Inattentive, and Combined. We can roughly estimate that about 10% of diagnoses are hyperactive-impulsive, 30% are inattentive, and 60% are combined.
- I know this was basically in the first tip, but it bears repeating - we're all going to be ADHDing in our own way - make sure you're not going to struggle with all the same things that everyone else does so focus on what's going to make the biggest difference for you.
All right everyone, we've got another listener Q&A episode coming your way today with questions looking at ways we can declutter our phones, re-establishing our routines when life is in flux, and how to recover after taking on a heavier workload.
Be sure to checkout ADHD Diversified with MJ
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/buildingtouchstones
This Episode’s Top Tips
- A lot of our digital clutter comes from stuff that we just build up over time - one of the easiest ways to reclaim some of that space is to go through and look for those Keepers, Maybes, and Rejects. It's easy to get rid of the keepers in the first step and then go through and decide on the maybes after we've cleared some stuff out.
- Once we've clear out that space it's also important to back our data up - and the name of the game while backing up that data is redundancy. I use Google's Cloud service for my first level and then also have an external hard drive that I keep more of my files.
- Routines can be really helpful for creating structure for our ADHD brains and so when our structure needs to change for things like school or work we need to look for touchstones in our schedule that we can keep the same and then build out our schedule from there.
- Remember that when we're trying to do new things that we're not always going to be 100% successful at implementing our strategies. That doesn't mean that we failed, it's often actually a sign that we're heading off in the right direction. We want to think about iteration and what went well and what didn't and then try and build on that stuff that did work for us.
Did you think I was all done with tabs last week... well I wasn't because there's actually a ton we can still talk about. Tabs are one of those small things in our life that can have a fairly outsized impact. Don't think so? Well, keep listening to find out why.
Today we're going to be talking about how tabs can literally change the way our brain works, some ways we can cull having all those tabs open, and then talk a bit about those precursors to tabs... bookmarks.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Tabs can serve as an easy way to try to multitask - however, multitasking is just task switching. As we switch from task to task to task we're actually decreasing our overall productivity, not increasing it.
- Switching tabs can give a hit of dopamine, which only increases our desire to switch tabs more often. We can work on this by being mindful of what kind of tabs we leave open.
- A great way to limit tabs is to use services like Pocket or Instapaper that allow us to save articles we want to read for later. By storing them in an external system we remove the temptation to just switch to those articles in the middle of other tasks.
- Another alternative to just leaving tabs open is to use your bookmarks for sites that you either visit frequently or just sites that you know you're going to have to come back to eventually. What we don't want to do however is create bookmarks for sites that we just need to keep open temporarily.
A few weeks ago I asked around on Facebook the number of tabs that my friends had open at the time.
Answers I got included:
500 on their phone and 20 on their computer, 50-60 across 5-6 windows, 4-5, 16, 3, 80 across 9 windows, 2, 4, 7, 45, 112 over 17 windows…
and of course, at the time of my asking, I had 70 across 12 windows, although as I mentioned earlier I'm down to just a few right now - oftentimes these episodes are just as much about helping me as they are about helping you.
Clearly, a lot of people use their browsers in a lot of different ways. Now one thing that was fairly apparent to me is that my more neurodiverse friends tended to be those people who had the most tabs open, although to be clear having too many tabs open isn't just a neurodiverse condition, anyone can easily find themselves overwhelmed by tabs.
Today we're going to be looking at why we tend to have so many tabs open and then some of the ways we can work on reducing that number.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- We tend to trying and use tabs as an extension of our working memory, but as we open more and more tabs we stretch our mental resources and it can become overwhelming to figure out what we need to take care of.
- One of the reasons we open so many tabs is that we're afraid of missing something - be it an article to read, a video to watch, or something in your social feed, our brains tell us we want to see it all. Unfortunately, we're never going to see everything so we've got to work on being choosier about what we focus our attention on and be okay missing some things.
- We can install extensions into our browsers to help limit the number of tabs we have open, or install a tab manager to help us keep better track of everything we have open.
We all have an idea of what clutter is - it's just all that stuff. It's that frustrating feeling when you can't find something just because there are too many other things to look through. Clutter is disorder.
While we typically see clutter as a physical thing - the junk on our desk. The pile in the corner of the room. The stuff spread out all over our counters - we can also experience its digital counterpart because we also amass a lot of stuff digitally.
Today we're going to start our journey of working on our decluttering our digital lives - in this episode, I am going to be focusing on email and the files on our computers - next week we'll be continuing this series with an episode on all those tabs we have open in our browsers. I also considered doing an episode on our phones, but for now, I'm just going to direct you to Episodes 17 & 18, How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly - although I'm definitely going to have to update those episodes at some point.
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This Episode's Top Tip
- Digital clutter is just all that stuff that builds upon our devices. It can have a real effect on our mental health and is something to be especially aware of with ADHD because it can create a lot of distractions.
- To help manage our email we want to work on processing our email only a few times a day and then making sure that when we do that we're not treating our email as a task manager → don't leave things in your email to do later, either put them in a real task manager or deal with them right then.
- Work on creating actual organization for your files → by keeping your files in places that are logical for your brain to find them you make accessing your files easier when you need them.
- Back up your files. Seriously, you don't want to lose something you've been working on because your computer crashed. There are a ton of services that make this process easier than ever now.
Adulting
Now there's something a lot of us can relate to - or relate to the idea that adulting is something we sometimes do, but being an adult is not something we are.
ADHD can make us feel like we're not really adults.
An adult would get their bills paid on time.
An adult wouldn't let their house get this messy.
An adult would be eating healthy meals for dinner every night.
Now it would be a stretch to say that I feel like an adult all of the time, but I'm certainly getting there. A big part of the is probably having kids - it can be hard to not feel like the adult when you are literally the adult in the room. Also, there's the whole losing track of what going on with slang - I mean I know what straight fire is and but I still have to look up what a VSCO girl was and I'm only mildly sure I understand what being on fleek means. Although really that's more of a confirmation that I'm old rather than I'm being an adult.
Regardless - today we're going to be exploring those feelings of not being an adult and how that interacts with our ADHD.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- No one has everything in their life together all of the time - instead of focusing on what your missing try giving yourself credit for the things you are doing.
- ADHD can amplify these feelings of not being an adult because we're not neurotypical - there are absolutely things that are going to be harder for us to do, but we can do hard things.
- To help celebrate everything that you do throughout the day try creating a ta-done list → this is just a list of everything that you do throughout the day, from filling up the dishwasher to making a call to a friend to sending those emails you need to send. It's easy for us to forget what we've actually accomplished in a day and a ta-done list can help remind us that, yeah, we actually did somethings today.
- At some point all of us find ourselves doubting our ADHD, it's okay - ADHD is a spectrum and you're never going to have all the symptoms that everyone else has. Be reassured that you're not alone in this feeling and that even if you didn't really have ADHD, you're still doing the right things to help your brain.
When I was in school, I always wanted to be the kind of student who able to finish a project well before it needed to be turned in. I loved the idea that I could write a paper and still have a week left to polish it. Of course, I was never actually that student. For me to get started on a paper, I had to actually be able to feel that pressure from the deadline building up on me. That usually meant that I was mostly working on papers the night before - I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Since I was still able to get good grades with this strategy, I never really changed it - but I always wished that I wasn't always riding by the seat of my pants. Despite having a good track record, there were times that I missed those deadlines.
And a funny thing about it was that I always wanted more time to write my papers. In my brain, if the deadline was pushed farther out I would have had more time to start, and yet experience has taught me that it really didn't matter how much time I was given to complete a paper. Given a week or month, I would still procrastinate until the last minute. When those deadlines were moving in on me, I was able to focus like no other. The time pressure allowed me to block out all those other distracting ideas vying for my attention.
Today we're going to be exploring how we can use this time pressure to complete those nagging tasks that we otherwise might not get done and also those things we want to do but just can't seem to prioritize. We'll also be looking at better ways to set deadlines so that we can follow through with our intentions.
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Today's Top Tips
- Time pressure from deadlines allows us to focus on the tasks in front of us and distill our work down to the most important parts.
- When setting deadlines we want to make sure that they are relevant to either us or the project. A great way to do this is through accountability and getting someone else to check in on your progress.
- Deadlines need to be realistic if we plan on meeting them. Time blindness can make it hard to know how long something is actually going to take, but if we break down our projects into chunks we can work on hitting milestones with mini-deadlines.
In this week's episode, I am going to be going over the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan - I was introduced to this book by Eric Tivers through the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. I can't remember if it was required reading or just strongly encouraged when I took the groups, but the messages in this book were key to getting through the coaching groups.
My first reading of the book was on audiobook and since then I've listened to it three more and read the physical version of the book twice. The subtitle of the book is, "The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results" - and as I've mentioned before, just because something is simple doesn't make it easy. Each reading has helped me understand the concepts a little bit better and I was always able to pick up a few new things.
Today I'm going to be going over the "surprisingly simple truth" in the book and discussing how we can better apply it for our ADHD brains.
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Today's Top Tips
- Use the focusing question to help you determine your one thing - the focusing question again is: "What's the ONE Thing that you can do such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
- Change your thinking and value your time by saying "no" more and time blocking time for your ONE Thing
- You can have a ONE Thing for each of your life domains, but they should all be working toward a common purpose
- If you liked this episode I'd recommend you check out the book the ONE Thing and read through it on your own - I skimmed a lot of parts for this episode so I'm sure you could get a lot more out of it. You can find a link to the book on the show notes page.
Last year there was a surge in the popularity of the game Among Us - 1000's of people jumped on to be funny little scientists running around there spaceship running various little tasks... all while trying to find out who among them didn't belong - the one who was trying to sabotage the mission. The one who was an imposter.
I definitely played my fair share of the game, but always felt like I didn't get to play as the imposter nearly as much as I wanted to... yet in real life, far too often I feel like I'm playing the imposter. I'm sure that many of you can relate to feeling like the only reason you are where you are is that you tricked people into thinking that you belong. Maybe you think that you're not really qualified for your job, or maybe you got into a program that you're sure someone else would have been better qualified for, or maybe you feel like you're friends are just pretending to like you.
This is called imposter syndrome and it is shockingly common - I say shockingly common because when you're feeling it, it's hard to imagine anyone else feeling quite like you do - and yet almost everyone feels imposter syndrome to some extent.
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This Episode’s Top Tips
- Imposter syndrome is the feeling of self-doubt around your skills, talents, or accomplishments where you fear of being exposed as a "fraud".
- By understanding what causes imposter syndrome you can begin to work on overcoming it - understanding that it's not just you and that even if we're chalking up all our success to luck that we still had a hand in creating that luck.
- Talking about and reflecting on our imposter syndrome is a great way to work on overcoming it - when we bottle up those feelings it can be hard to have real perspective on the situation. By acknowledging the feels and removing our beliefs about all or nothing success we can work through those feelings of being an imposter
Occam's Razor is a philosophical rule (and that's rule in a very soft sense) that we can use to help us with problem solving. In philosophy a razor is a tool used to eliminate (or shave off) options that might lead us astray.
Occam's Razor is one of the most popular examples and has made it's way into popular culture from the movie Contact to Sherlock Holmes to The Big Bang Theory.
I imagine that a lot of you have heard of the famous razor before, which states that: plurality should not be posited without necessity. Now I'm sure that's perfectly clear for most of you, but for my benefit I'm going to do a bit of unpacking on that phrase, cause plurality should not be posited without necessity seems a bit dense to me.
The basic idea here is that when we're looking at competing ideas we want to go with the one that has the fewest assumptions - or that the simplest explanation is often preferable to a complex one.
Of course the rule on simplicity also isn't as simply as it seems. Today we're going to be exploring Occam's Razor and also looking at how we can apply it to coming up with better solutions for our ADHD.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Occam's Razor states: plurality should not be posited without necessity - or more simply when we're looking at competing ideas we want to go with the one that has the fewest assumptions - or that the simplest explanation is often preferable to a complex one.
- With ADHD we can use Occam's Razor to help when we're trying to overcomplicate something - often we go all in on ideas and don't let ourselves see the forest for the trees.
- While the simplest explanation is often preferable we also have to keep in mind that we have ADHD - what might be a simple solution for a neurotypical might not be a viable solution for us.
I'm going to be diving into some more aspects of planning in the coming months - I know, shouldn't I have done this before the end of the year? Well I'm going to us my being completely unprepared for the end of the year to illustrate a great point - it's never too late to start working on planning.
One of the most important aspects of planning is knowing where you've been and this typically comes from some kind of review process. The reason for the review is so that we can plan an accurate course based on where we are now. But that review is also a lot easier said than done. I've sat down for many a review sessions and realized that I don't have a great way to look back. I'll skim through my calendar and wonder what exactly happened over the last few weeks or months and kind of shrug and go... stuff?
And what that means is that we want to look at how we measure our success - so today we're going to be talking about how we set our goals, how we can work on measuring their outcomes and also questioning what actually makes a good measurement.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/indicators
This Episode's Top Tips
- When we're setting goals we should focus on the small changes we can make that we can keep up for the long term.
- When we're think about goals we need see if we're measuring them lagging or leading measures. Lagging measures are the outcomes based on what's happening with our leading measures. The best goals have a mix of the two measurements.
- What we choose to measure matters and influence our future actions. Make sure that what you're measuring is incentivizing the outcomes you actually want.
Hey there team, we're nearly at the end of 2020 and I thought I'd deliver a bit of a shorter episode this week focusing on some of the strategies that I find are the most important for managing my ADHD. This is definitely not a definitive list and as for the order of things... well I moved things around a number of times trying to decide what the best order would be and honestly I'm not sure there really is an order or truly a most important thing. When we're trying to manage our ADHD an important to remember is that it's all connected - anyone step we take is going to make the rest of the steps easier and while somethings really are more important than others, what we've really got to focus on is doing what we can, because anything we do is going to be helping everything else. So while there may be things that might be more effective to do in managing your ADHD, don't worry if you're not there yet. Do what you can now and you'll get there eventually.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/topfive
This Episode's Top Tips
- Work on Accepting your ADHD and giving yourself what you actually need to thrive.
- Realize we're all snowflakes and that our ADHD is unique - what works for me might not work for you.
- Learn about your ADHD by embracing your ADHD community and finding out what it means to have ADHD.
- Don't rely on willpower for the things that are really important - set up systems that will work even when you don't want to.
- Work on creating realistic expectations - too often we overestimate what's possible and end up feeling like we let ourselves down just because we couldn't actually juggle all 100 projects we wanted to do.
Sequencing is all about the order in which we do things. Sometimes it seems like it doesn’t matter what comes first, but also try putting your pants on after you put on your shoes.
Sequencing is something I’ve come to realize is a big deal with ADHD. The order in which we do things has a big impact on our overall productivity, but more than that, some of our other issues with ADHD make the sequence in which we do things much more important.
Today we're going to be exploring how the order we do things is important for our ADHD brains and then we'll be looking at some ways that we can use sequencing to our advantage.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Sequencing is order in which we do things and it matters because it can have a big impact on how we remember things and execute our plans.
- Planning can help with our ability to sequence things properly - one technique that can be especially helpful in making sure we don't forget steps is to start our planning from the end and working our way backwards.
- Part of sequencing is making sure that we're paying attention to tasks that will get us off track and making sure we're not putting those right before things we actually want to do.
- Batching tasks is a great way to make sure we're not getting ourselves off track - but remember we don't have to an entire batch at once, we can still break batches into reasonable chunks.
Part of the reason that automations is such a ripe topic is that it can help in almost all areas of our life - this week we're going to focus more on the work side of things, because when it comes to our jobs there are a ton of things that usually can be automated fairly easily, because we all have those little tasks that we have to do all the time that aren't that hard but do require us to shift our attention to them for just a little bit. And that's what I think is the best benefit of setting up automations for our ADHD brains - we've only got so much executive function for the day and task switching can be such a drain on us. When we set up these automations we can make it so that instead of wasting our days doing little nit picky things, that we're actually focusing on the things that matter.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/evenmoreautomations
This Episode's Top Tips
- Use programs like Zapier or IFTTT to create connections between other programs to help automate some of your workflow.
- The first step in making your inbox more manageable is unsubscribing from all those newsletters you don't read and then setting up filters to direct the rest of your mail to various folders.
- You can use predictive text and canned responses to reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to your emails.
In this week's episode we're going to focus on the money side of things and go into how we can use automation for our shopping and then also how we can use automations with our finances.
And as a reminder, automations are things that we can set up in our life that are just going to happen regardless of what else we do. So think clicking a button and having a form filled out or even more basically think about something like your dishwasher, you put the dishes in, click a button and then all your dishes automatically get cleaned. Breaking down the dishwasher example, we still have to load up the dishes and we also have to unload them, but they take care of that process of actually getting them clean. And that's a huge part of automation - it isn't going to solve all of your problems, but often they're worth it because it takes care of those parts that are time consuming or that you just don't want to do.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/moreautomations
This Episode's Top Tips
- The best tasks to automate are tasks that don't require higher-level thinking, things you do regularly and that take away from what you really want to be working on.
- Automating everything isn't always the right answer, we need to make sure that we're still thinking about our transitions.
- There are tons of ways we can automate our shopping from using meal planning to know what we really need to creating reoccurring purchases for all those things we regularly need.
- We can automate our finances with things like direct deposit, automatic bill pay, using budget tracking and making sure that we're putting away money for the future.
One of the paradoxes of ADHD is how much work we can get done when we're interested in something... but then how little we get done when something is boring. Unfortunately in life there are a lot of things that are going to bore us. And this becomes especially true with those boring tasks we have to do over and over again. So this is where automation comes in - automation is simply something that accomplishes tasks for us without our intervention.
Whether we know it or not, all of us already use a lot of automation in our lives already. We often don't think of simple things like setting an alarm as an automated process, but it's a way we can externalize a reminder that will go off with no other input from us.
Today we're going to take a look at how automation can be helpful with ADHD, some of the ways that we can take advantage of automations and then go into some specific things we can look at automating. There was actually a lot to cover here so I'll be going into even more automations next week as well.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Automation is a way for us to frontload our work so that we can save time in the future - it can be helpful for ADHD because it can reduce decision fatigue, reduces chances of us forgetting a step, and just saves us time.
- When we're thinking about automating a process the first things we need to think about are how to systemize the task and then if we can reduce the number of steps it takes. Sometime during this process, we find that maybe we don't need to use automation but we still find a better way of doing the task.
- We can use automation to help with accountability by setting up automations that will let our teammates know when we have (or haven't) done what we said we were going to do. This can be helpful because it takes the reporting process out of our hands.
- There are a ton of things we can do around our house to automate our everyday tasks that will make our lives easier - from automatically locking the doors at night, to getting notifications that we left the garage door open, to getting a smart speaker to read out our daily schedule - our biggest limitation is usually just what we think is possible, so go explore some options.
"There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What's keeping us from sitting down is resistance."
This is how Steven Pressfield introduces the idea of resistance in his book the War of Art, and to me, resistance is the root of the "I don't wanna's."
While I don't agree with many of the things in Pressfield's book (I mean, he states that ADHD was made up by pharmaceutical companies), I do think resistance is a great way to express this idea. Because when I don't want to do something, it's not necessarily that I just don't want to do it - it's that I can't get myself to start.
If I'm planning on going on a run, I know that I'll feel better once I start running - but it's in the starting that I feel resistance. It's putting on my exercise clothes and slipping on my shoes. It's the getting out the door. Once I start putting one foot in front of the other, it isn't so hard anymore. I mean, sure there is the physicality that can become difficult, but the mental block has lifted.
And this is just going to be an introduction to this topic. While I was writing this episode I discovered I had a lot to say and so I've split it into two episodes.
Today we're going to be exploring the idea of resistance and how it keeps us from doing meaningful work. We're then going to look at some of the ways resistance sinks its claws into us, but also how we can work on loosening up that grip.
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For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/resistance
This Episode's Top Tips
- Resistance is the inertia that keeps us from starting. It is also the inertia that slows us down and stops us in our tracks. If we want to be doing meaningful work we need to look at ways we can fight our own internal resistance.
- Comparing ourselves to others is an exercise that is never going to lead us down a good path.
- We need to abandon struggle as a metric for success. Everything gets easier as we do it more and just because something is difficult to do doesn't mean it is more worthwhile.
- What we crave and what we need to grow don't always match. This means we have to work on rewiring our desires so we're not always fighting resistance to go on a walk. We can do this by being mindful and taking note of how we feel after we do things that are good for us.
I'd say I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning, but that implies that there is a part of me that loves cleaning. There isn't. I like having cleaned and having a clean home, but I seldom enjoy the actual cleaning part.
ADHD tends to not make cleaning any easier. Time blindness makes me think most of the cleaning tasks I need to do are going to take forever. I have a natural propensity for clutter, and that clutter often fades into the background of what I notice - so I just stop seeing that stack of mail on my counter.
Today we're going to be looking at why we should stop treating cleaning our house like a project. Ways that we can make consistent cleaning easier and also how we can get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated in our homes.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/cleaninghouse
This Episode's Top Tips
- Stop thinking of cleaning your house as a project - we've got to understand that cleaning is about the small tasks that we do consistently that is going to keep our house clean.
- Work on creating that routine of small tasks that you can do every day to improve the base level clean of your house - focus on starting small at first. Think about what you can do in the morning and what you can do right before you go to bed.
- Time your cleaning tasks so that you know how long they actually take to do - a lot of the tasks that we put off doing actually take way less time than we think they do.
- Use temptation bundling and listen to a podcast while cleaning so that you can stay motivated while tidying up.
- Make sure everything in your house has a place to live - it doesn't have to be an exact spot, but if you know where to put something then you won't waste mental energy figuring out where stuff needs to go when picking up.
- Spend some time decluttering your house by asking better questions about the objects you are thinking of getting rid of - if we can identify the reason we want to keep something it makes it easier to pare down what we have.
This week's a little bit different - today you're going to be hearing an interview I had with my friend Kari Gormley - now I say interview with a bit of hesitation because our conversation absolutely did not start out that way.
Kari is a Certified Applied Positive Psychology Practitioner, Coach, and Trainer as well as a fellow podcaster - her show is The Flourishing Experiment.
but so, I was having a zoom call with Kari and we were just chatting to catch up on a few things and I had mentioned that I had just passed the one year mark on my podcast. She started asking some questions and then went wait wait wait, we need to record this and so we shifted into recording mode and went from there - I know, that's a pretty ADHD way to record a podcast.
In this episode you get to hear about some of my lessons learned from podcasting for 1 year - we talk about some of the systems I use, gratitude, and get into something like how long it takes me to produce an episode from start to finish.
Go check out Kari's Podcast The Flourishing Experiment
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/oneyear
Last week we started our journey of self-compassion.
Self-compassion is key part of cutting ourselves some slack - it's the combination of empathy and action. We're doing the things that'll let us put ourselves at the front of the line when it comes to self-care.
But self-compassion isn't easy.
When we're being self-compassionate we're trying to relate to ourselves in a way that's forgiving, accepting and loving - many of us have grown up with the view that the only way for us to push ourselves forward is by being overly critical of ourselves.
A typical self-compassion practice has three parts:
- Observing what is going on right now - that's mindfulness
- Actively developing and building a healthier self-perspective (self-kindness)
- Connection with others (often called “common humanity”)
In this episode, we'll be going over Self-Kindness and Common Humanity as well as looking at how we can combine all three of the ideas.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/selfcompassion2
This Episode's Top Tips
- Self-Kindness is about understanding that we have unconditional worth and accepting ourselves even with our short-comings.
- One way we can practice self-kindness is by being kind to ourselves with our words - one would that can cause lots of harm is the word "should", which often brings connotations of shame and unworthiness.
- Common-Humanity is about connecting with those around us and understand that what we're going through isn't unique. We're all part of the human experience and even when we're feeling alone we can know that there are people who have also gone through what we're going through.
- When we put together mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity you can create your own practice of self-compassion. When we're being self-compassionate we're able to cut ourselves some slack and learn to be happier with who we are.
In this episode we're going to focus on the difficulties of self-compassion and then talk a little about mindfulness - next week we'll be going into the ideas of self-kindness, common humanity, and some other ideas I've been playing with.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/selfcompassion
This Episode's Top Tips
- Self-compassion can help with ADHD because it can help us realize that our self-image and self-doubts are not hardwired - we can change and we don't have to beat ourselves up to make that change happen.
- We need to understand the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is: I did a bad thing. Shame is: I'm a bad person. Guilt is a healthy coping mechanism, while shame can lead to self-destructive habits and behaviors.
- One of the most effective ways to counteract shame is to shine a spotlight on it, but be sure to do so only when you're in a safe supportive environment.
- Mindfulness is a way that we can practice seeing the world for how it really is - a great mindfulness exercise is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise where you list 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and 1 thing that you can taste.
In today's episode, we have a listener question about writing and how to get back into it after quitting at the hard parts.
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This Episode's Top Tips
- Use prewriting to focus your thoughts and to help build your momentum into writing so that you aren't relying so much on inspiration to keep working on your project.
- Create notes as you're writing so that you know what you were working on when you come back to it and to record ideas as they come to you so that you're not jumping around the page so much.
- You can't skip Day 2 - you've got to forge through the messy middle if you want to get to the other side. Knowing this ahead of time can help you plan on how to get through the hard parts.
- One of the most powerful ways you help get yourself through that messy middle is to find an accountability partner. Your accountability partner won't make your work easier - instead, they just help provide perspective and let you see that you can actually do the things you want to do.
One of the reasons that many of us have trouble giving ourselves slack is because of our internalized perfectionism - it's something that controls our workflow and prevents us from ever taking a break because in our head we know we could be doing more. Even during the writing of this episode I had to fight off some of this internal perfectionism - this episode wasn't supposed to be entirely about perfectionism, but it was going to take a lot more than just one section to really tackle the topic - so now what was just going to be a two-part episode on giving yourself some slack is a series - and had I come into this knowing it was going to be a series I would have definitely approached it differently, but that's okay, it doesn't have to be perfect.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring the idea of how perfection acts as a coping mechanism - and why that's not a great thing. We'll also be looking at some of the different types of perfectionism and then we'll be exploring some of the ways that we can start to work on conquering our own perfectionism.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/perfectlyimperfect
This Episode's Top Tips
- Many of us with ADHD have picked up perfectionism as a coping mechanism to try and deal with the mistakes that have come from us having ADHD - however, perfectionism is a maladaptive coping mechanism that often leads to more problems than it solves
- There are three types of perfectionism - self-oriented perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism and socially-prescribed perfectionism.
- The first step in dealing with our perfectionism is understanding that our perfectionist expectations of ourselves are unrealistic and that having those unrealistic expectations is unhealthy - if we can relax those standards we will often save time, effort, and stress.
- Practice Imperfection by choosing small tasks that you can be imperfect at, such as using multiple colors of pens (without a pattern), not correcting typos in texts to friends or even something like wearing mismatched socks (I mean as long as they're the same kind - I just mean two socks with different colors or patterns not like wool socks and cotton socks, I'm not a monster).
- Look for feedback before you're 100% done with a project - try out asking for feedback at 30% and 90% and be sure to be specific about the type of feedback you're looking for at each point.
Often when I think about productivity I envision something like a well-oiled machine - everything fits together, everything has it's placed and when it is running smoothly it produces amazing results. But the part that my imagination doesn't usually pick up are a few important words - well-oiled machine... what does it mean to be well oiled - well, for one thing, it means that there is someone maintaining the system. It means, that left to its own devices that the machine would breakdown - and for a machine like this, it means it's either running at peak capacity or not at all.
As you can imagine this isn't exactly the route we want to be going - we're going to have setbacks in life and we're going to have times where we have to do less - we're not machines.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring this idea of capacity, as well how we sometimes go above and beyond and then also how we can work on build some slack into our systems.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/buildingslack
This Episode's Top Tips
- Always doing more isn't always our best option - it is easy for us to overreach our capacity and find ourselves doing more than we're able to handle. Once we get past capacity we're more like to drop the ball on everything we're doing. Giving ourselves breathing room isn't being lazy, it's a way for us to focus on what's most important.
- When we're in times of crisis many people with ADHD can thrive by using their surge capacity - however, our surge capacity is limited and we can only access it for so long before we start burning out.
- We can add more capacity to our schedules by adding more slack to our calendars - that is buffer time that allows us to "pick up the slack" when we're running overtime on something unexpected or just need more time to finish something than we thought we would.
One of the hottest trends to come out of the self-help world over the last few years is gratitude. And it's no surprise, gratitude has been found to be one of the greatest indicators of overall well being. I'm usually pretty skeptical about things that get hyped quite as much as gratitude has been - I mean when you see the list of things that a gratitude practice can help with it's pretty easy to roll your eyes. I mean can gratitude really do all those things that people say it can?
Today we'll be exploring the mechanisms that make gratitude work - and also perhaps tempering some of the hype around it - then we'll be looking at ways we can find things to be grateful in our lives as well as looking at some ways that we can start a gratitude practice.
And I'll admit, this episode is a little less ADHD focused - but gratitude was something that was on mind, for reasons that I get into during the episode. And so even though this episode is a little less ADHD specific I still think everyone can get a lot out of it.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/gratitude
This Episode's Top Tips
- Gratitude is showing thanks and appreciation and it has a tremendous impact on our brains. Gratitude can help us release build our relationships, regulate stress, improve sleep quality, build self-esteem and make us happier.
- One way we can practice gratitude is through mindfulness and seeing all the things in our lives that are going right. It's easy for us to latch onto the negative things that happen during our day. We'll miss all the things that went right because when things go according to plan they can often become invisible.
- We can also practice gratitude by journaling or writing a letter to someone in our lives that has greatly impacted us.
The first thing we've got to understand is that when we ask, when should I quit? We're also asking, when should I persevere? And they often serve as the same answer - I should quit when it doesn't make sense to keep going. I keep going when it doesn't make sense to quit. Unfortunately is really easy to get those messages mixed up and with ADHD we've all got a trail of unfinished projects and ideas that are weighing us down every time we need to make this decision again.
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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/whentoquit
This Episode's Top Tips
- We've got to give up the notion that winners never quit. Persistence doesn't guarantee success - we can persist at the wrong things forever and never make progress.
- There are two curves we've got to look for when starting something new - the dip and the cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac is a dead end. The dip is the point where things start to get hard - we've got to stop quitting things when they get hard and embrace the dip.
- We'll often stick out things we should quit. There are a lot of reasons that we might stick something out like the sunk cost fallacy or the planning fallacy. Regardless of why we're sticking around, once we realize that we're in a dead-end we've got to accept that we need to quit and try something new.
Resistance is the embodiment of the I don't wanna's - the part of us that keeps us from doing our work - or anything for that matter. And a big part of resistance comes from our ability to rationalize what we're doing - I'll jump into one task and find myself doing something else and then my brain will come up with a reason why I needed to be watching youtube instead of working on this week's episode.
In today's episode we're going to be exploring what rationalization is, some of the ways that we do it, and also some of the ways we can start working on reducing the amount of rationalization that we are doing.
Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/rationalization
This Episode's Top Tips
- Rationalization is our brains attempting to explain or justify our behavior or an attitude with logical reasons. The difference between reasoning and rationalization is that with reasoning we are trying to apply logic to come to a conclusion, when we're rationalizing, we have a conclusion and we're making up reasons for it.
- One way we use rationalization is through the stories we are telling ourselves - we come up with reasons to explain why someone is acting the way they are (which we have to because we don't have access to their thoughts) but we're not always very accurate in our assessment as to why people act the way they are acting. We can use the phrase, "the story I'm telling myself" to help navigate the reality of a story.
- We also tell stories about ourselves - these are often based in fear and lead us to create more and more rationalizations. Use getting upset as a signal to get curious and explore these stories - and remember that you don't have to do it alone.
- One of the easiest ways to make rationalizing harder is to have a clear goal - this means knowing what the goal is and also knowing the reason why behind the goal. Since we have ADHD we've also got to work on making sure that we are creating reminders about what our goals are - just because a goal feels important when we make it doesn't mean we're going to remember why we're doing it 2 weeks from now.
One of the hardest aspects for me with ADHD is that I can quickly become overwhelmed when I can't find a clear path forward - I know I could do the research, but setting aside the time feels like it's going to be too much and so I just procrastinate forever on starting. For me finding a therapist was one of those things that seemed too murky to get started on. There were just so many things to consider and so many things that I don't know. Not only did I not know where to start, but I also didn't even know what questions I should be asking. In my mind, I knew it would be good for me, but the process just seemed too hard to get started on.
Today, we're going to work on clearing a path on how to find a therapist - we'll be looking into a few kinds of therapy and what we can expect to get out of therapy - and of course, we'll also be walking through how we actually find a therapist that is the right fit for us.
Find show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/findatherapist
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This Episode's Top Tip
- Find out what your insurance will cover and go from there. If you don't have insurance or it isn't covered, there are still a lot of options like University Clinics, Online Therapy, Group Therapy, and therapy offered in your community. For help finding a therapist check out psychologytoday.com/therapists
- The most common type of therapy for ADHD is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses on changing your automatic thoughts. Another common therapy practice for ADHD is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which focuses more on behavior patterns and mindfulness. Talk therapy is another common type of therapy, although it isn't specifically tailored to ADHD.
- When you go to your first session make sure you have a list of questions for your therapist - finding the right therapist is critical for you getting the most out of your therapy sessions.
I know the term spiritual energy is going to throw a lot of people - so let's start off by getting clear on what I mean here. When I'm talking about spiritual energy I'm not talking about anything religious here, I'm simply referring to the idea that you have an energy reserve that you can tap into when you're doing something that matters. And specifically, something that matters to you - this doesn't have to be some higher calling type of idea.
One thing that really illustrates the idea of digging deep into that energy reserve for me is when I'm doing something like weight lifting. As I get to the end of my set I can find myself flagging, I can feel like I'm not going to be able to push the bar the 3 more inches it needs to go to rack my bar - and yet I can have my spotter tell me "you've got this" and my brain hears that and I push just a little bit harder and I finish out. Where did that energy reserve come from? As far as I was concerned I was already pushing as hard as I could and yet, with just a few words I was able to find that motivation to push a little harder.
Access to the human spirit isn't just limited to athletic endeavors. And our motivation to dip into this energy source often comes from doing meaningful work. Many people don’t recognize meaning and purpose as potential sources of energy, but when we're doing work that aligns with our values we are able to accomplish so much more.
Today we're going to be looking at three areas that we can use to access our spiritual energy: living their core values in their daily behaviors, doing the work that we do best and enjoy the most, and allocating time and energy in our lives for the things we deem most important.
Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/spiritualenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- There are three areas we need to focus on for our spiritual energy: Living our values, working with our passion, and scheduling time for those things that matter to us.
- Spend some time exploring your values by asking yourself what you can't stand - when you define what you won't put up with it is often helps define what we do stand for.
- Work on finding what you are passionate about by defining what you are willing to put up with - further refine your passion by finding your work "sweet-spot" by finding where you are effective, effortlessly absorbed, inspired, and fulfilled.
- Use your calendar to schedule your most important work - follow your energy patterns and try to schedule those most important tasks early in the day.
Emotional Energy isn't as cut and dry as physical energy - there are no emotional calories that we can track and measure. And while there is no scientific delineation of how to measure emotional energy it’s still something that we can all feel - we're not robots. We know that when we're feeling those positive emotions that sometimes we can barely contain the energy we're feeling - when we're seething with rage it can feel like we're going to burst. When we're sad it can feel like we want to melt into our beds and never be seen again. When we're overstressed it can feel like if we don't do something our skin is going to crawl off but even the idea of attempting that first step still feels like too much
Our emotions play a big role in our energy levels throughout the day. Just because we don't have a good way to measure them doesn't mean that we should write them off.
Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/emotionalenergy
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Our emotions play a big role in our energy management throughout the day - but emotions are complicated. While we can derive energy from both positive and negative emotions, we're better off using the energy from our positive emotions - The energy we draw off of emotions like fear or anger often comes with a price.
- We want to build our emotional intelligence by trying to observe ourselves - check-in with yourself throughout the day and ask, what am I doing? and how is that making me feel? You can also go beyond that by asking how you feel about the emotions you're feeling.
- When scheduling your day make sure that you are giving yourself time to recover after emotionally draining activities.
- If you need a quick fix to calm yourself down, try taking deep belly breaths. Deep breathing creates a physiological response that encourages your body to relax - as your body relaxes, your mind will follow.
- Give yourself some time to let yourself think. With ADHD we spend a lot of our day go from one distraction to the next - but when we let ourselves have the goal of just letting our minds wander it can help us explore how we're feeling and recharge our emotional batteries.
We've all got things that we think we should be able to just do - for example, I've had on my to-do list for weeks to make a phone call to the bank - it won't even take that long, but I keep putting it off. I keep finding reasons not to do it - what I've done is I've created a wall of awful around making this phone call (really most phone calls) and the more I put it off the more it builds it up. Today we've got Brendan Mahan from ADHD Essentials to explain what the Wall of Awful is and some ways that we can work on getting past it.
Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/wallofawful
This Episode's Top Tips
- The Wall of Awful is the emotional impact of repeated failure and it makes activating on tasks even more difficult
- While our wall starts off being built up with failure bricks, it is also built with things like disappointment, rejection, and shame. It doesn't matter if these bricks are based in reality, it matters how you perceive them.
- There are 5 ways people try to get past the Wall of Awful, two don't work, one works, but is damaging to our relationships and then two that work - the two that don't work are staring at it or trying to go around it - the one that works but is damaging is trying to hulk smash through the wall - the two that work that we want to focus on are climbing the wall and putting a door in our wall
- Climbing the wall is about sitting with the emotion that built up our wall and understanding what's stopping us - it can often look like staring at the wall, but it's more about gearing yourself up to get over the wall
- Putting a door in the wall is about changing your emotional state so that you can get past the wall - it could be doing things like taking a walk, listening to some energizing music, or watching a funny TV show to brighten your mood. Make sure that when you are trying to put that door in that you aren't actually just trying to go around the wall - it's easy to let that one TV show turn into four because you were just looking for a way to procrastinate.
Today we're going to be looking at ways that we can work on cutting down distractions and staying focused. We'll also be looking at ways that we can better schedule our time to focus on when our brain is going to be working best and we'll also be looking at better ways to end our workday.
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/mentalenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- Mental energy is about our ability to focus and keep our focus. To effectively do this we need to stop trying to multitask and reduce the number of distractions we have around us. This means limiting notifications and creating a work environment where we won't be easily interrupted.
- We can create smarter time blocks using our ultradian rhythms to guide us - breaking our scheduling into these 90-120 minute cycles allows us to focus on working when we've got the most energy and taking breaks when we're going to need them the most.
- Schedule your most important tasks for early in the day. By completing what's most important first you'll never find yourself at the end of the day having missed those tasks. You can decide if it's best to eat the frog with this task or to ease into it.
- End your workday with a shutdown routine to signal to your brain that you are really done with work. By only working while you are at work you'll make better use of your time and you'll allow yourself real time to relax and recover while you are at home.
Before we get going here, I just want to make sure you know that I'm not a doctor, and while this episode is a lot about your health, it is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice. Just because I say something on this show doesn't necessarily mean it will be the best advice for you - be smart and be safe. And when in doubt always consult your doctor before changing your diet or exercise routine.
Today's episode is a follow up to last week's on Energy Management, but this week we are just going to be going over the area of physical energy.
When we think about our energy levels, our physical energy is what we tend to primarily think about. We think about being tired or just needing a quick pick me up to get through our day. And our physical energy tends to be a basis for all our other types of energy (quick reminder those were: mental, emotional and spiritual along with our physical energy) - when we're physically exhausted it's hard for us to draw on our other wells of energy. Have a bad night's sleep? You might be feeling that brain fog all-day - blood sugar low? You might be more likely to snap at a family member over something not that important.
We need our foundation of physical energy to power our bodies and to let us fully engage with our other energy sources. In today's episode, we're going to be covering the three main areas that we get our physical energy from: sleep, diet, and exercise.
Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/physicalenergy
This Episode's Top Tips
- Getting enough sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our energy levels. To help get a good night's sleep make sure you are allowing yourself to get 4-6 sleep cycles of 90 minutes. You can improve your sleep quality with a dark, cool room and by creating a routine to get you ready for sleep by your bedtime.
- Instead of focusing on what foods you should or shouldn't be eating, focus on ways that you can make the habits of eating the right foods easier. By making the lifestyle changes you are more likely to stick to your new dietary plan - making mistakes isn't a set back it's just part of the path to changing your habits.
- Aim to get 20-30 minutes of moderate exercise per day - we're just trying to get our heart rate up here. If you are just starting up, then maybe try starting with a light 10-minute walk and work your way up.
- Along with getting enough exercise during the day, you also are going to want to be moving more throughout the day. During your breaks be sure to get up and stretch a little and don't let you're self stay in one position for too long.
It's an hour after lunch and your staring at your computer monitor. There are words in front of you, but you've read the same sentence over and over again five times in a row. Your eyes are glazed and curling up under your desk for a quick nap like George Costanza is seemingly a better and better option by the minute.
Except you have things to do - you have stuff on your schedule and taking a nap is just not an option.
Enter Personal Energy Management - this is an idea of scheduling your work around when you have the energy to do it rather than just when it's entered in on your calendar. Now to be sure this is more than just doing things when you feel like doing them - we know how that can turn out. Instead, this is about using your calendar and understanding that you aren't going to be at peak performance all day.
Today we're going to be discussing how we can work on creating our schedules around when we do have energy instead of just when we've got a free spot on the calendar. We'll be looking at some of the different areas of energy management as well as how our energy levels fluctuate throughout the day. And we'll also spend a little time on how you can make a little more energy.
Find show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/energymanagement
This Episode's Top Tips
- Energy management is about realizing it's not just about how many hours you have in the day, but also how much energy you've got during the day.
- Your energy levels are going to fluctuate up and down throughout the day, and if you want to get the most out of your schedule try scheduling your most important tasks during your high energy times, preferably early in the day.
- Limit your commitments so that you have enough time to work on the projects that are important to you.
- If you're low on energy try having some water or a healthy snack - you can also try to change your state by listening to some music or going on a short walk.
We all know that one of the biggest hurdles from ADHD is starting, but paradoxically one of our other hurdles is stopping. Sometimes it feels like we're better off if we just power through until we're done, but if we really want to get the most out of our workdays, we need to have some breaks.
In today's episode, we're going to be looking at the benefits of taking breaks, some different ways that we can take breaks, and also exploring going beyond breaks and actually taking some time off.
For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/breaks
This Episode's Top Tips
- Taking breaks allows us to separate our work into more manageable chunks. They let us refresh and come to our tasks with more energy.
- We should be scheduling our breaks so that we don't forget to take them. To help out our future selves we should also be planning what we want to be doing on those breaks as well.
- As important as knowing what we are doing on our breaks, we should also know what we shouldn't be doing on our breaks. Avoid things like phone games and social media that are going to be hard to tear yourself away from at the end of your break.
- It's also important to take time off entirely from work to recharge your batteries. While it might be hard to take a traditional vacation right now, we can still work on thinking about other ways that we can take time off, like working on fun projects at home or just taking a few days to catch up on Netflix.
Making the right choices isn't always easy - we've got so many options of what we can do and when I'm tired I don't want to weigh all my options. It would be great if I could just get a gentle push in the right direction. Something that would make the choice I want to make easier to make.
What I'm talking about here is a nudge and that's what we're going to be talking about today. We'll be learning about what a nudge is, why they work, and when they don't. We'll also be looking at some of the various ways we can nudge ourselves and why it's so important for us to know when someone else might be nudging us.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/nudge
This Episode's Top Tips
- At its basics, nudging is an attempt to change someone's behavior by changing the environment or conditions. A nudge shouldn't alter the incentives, it just makes the option we want to pick the easiest option.
- Nudges works because our decision making isn't rational, in reality, we actually usually just take the path of least resistance.
- We can nudge ourselves in several different ways. One way many of us already use nudges is through reminders. We can also alter our environment (like having a water bottle on our desk to nudge us to drink more water) or we can change our default options (like having our web browsers default to a blank page instead of opening up to countless tabs).
- It's important to be aware of nudges because many companies use them to influence our behavior. When we know that we're being nudged we can decide if that's really the decision we want to be making or if there is actually a better option for us.
Last week we started off our discussion of resistance - a term that I got from Steven Pressfield's book, the War of Art.
While there are parts of the book that aren't that ADHD friendly, I do like this idea of resistance. And basically resistance is what is keeping us from doing our work. It's procrastination, rationalizations, comparison, perfectionism, and everything else that keeps us from working all rolled into one idea. It is the embodiment of the "I don't wanna's
In part one I talked about some of the ways resistance keeps us from starting, how comparing ourselves to others slows us down, and what we crave and what we need to grow don't always match.
Today we're going to keep exploring the idea of resistance. We'll be looking at ways we can work on overcoming resistance by planning, setting our intentions, and even calling in a little help.
You can find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/resistancepart2
This Episode's Top Tips
- Our first step in fighting resistance is accepting that we are always going to be facing resistance. Resistance wants us to believe it doesn't exist because when we don't believe we don't do anything to stop it.
- Planning is a critical part of overcoming resistance. Without a plan, it is easy for us to get off track and not even realize it.
- When we're creating our plan it also important to break down our tasks into their component parts so that we are able to clearly state our intentions when we start our work.
- We don't have to fight resistance alone, by enlisting the help of our accountabilibuddies we can get clear on our intentions and help strengthen our resilience in fighting resistance.
"There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What's keeping us from sitting down is resistance."
This is how Steven Pressfield introduces the idea of resistance in his book the War of Art, and to me, resistance is the root of the "I don't wanna's."
While I don't agree with many of the things in Pressfield's book (I mean, he states that ADHD was made up by pharmaceutical companies), I do think resistance is a great way to express this idea. Because when I don't want to do something, it's not necessarily that I just don't want to do it - it's that I can't get myself to start.
If I'm planning on going on a run, I know that I'll feel better once I start running - but it's in the starting that I feel resistance. It's putting on my exercise clothes and slipping on my shoes. It's the getting out the door. Once I start putting one foot in front of the other, it isn't so hard anymore. I mean, sure there is the physicality that can become difficult, but the mental block has lifted.
And this is just going to be an introduction to this topic. While I was writing this episode I discovered I had a lot to say and so I've split it into two episodes.
Today we're going to be exploring the idea of resistance and how it keeps us from doing meaningful work. We're then going to look at some of the ways resistance sinks its claws into us, but also how we can work on loosening up that grip.
For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/resistance
This Episode's Top Tips
- Resistance is the inertia that keeps us from starting. It is also the inertia that slows us down and stops us in our tracks. If we want to be doing meaningful work we need to look at ways we can fight our own internal resistance.
- Comparing ourselves to others is an exercise that is never going to lead us down a good path.
- We need to abandon struggle as a metric for success. Everything gets easier as we do it more and just because something is difficult to do doesn't mean it is more worthwhile.
- What we crave and what we need to grow don't always match. This means we have to work on rewiring our desires so we're not always fighting resistance to go on a walk. We can do this by being mindful and taking note of how we feel after we do things that are good for us.
Years ago now, before I started this podcast, I worked as a sports writer. It was fun work and I also found that a lot of the things I was writing about could be applied to real life. One of the areas that I really saw it was in the difference between teams playing offensively and defensively.
No matter the game teams are going to be playing on both offense and defense, but what I often saw was that teams that had an offensive mindset often were able to take advantage and play better. What I mean by playing offensively is that you are setting the terms of engagement. Instead of reacting to what the other team is doing, you are making them react to you.
It's easy to see how this works on offense, you control the ball the other team has to respond to what you are doing. But you can also do this while you are playing defense. A good defense dictates the ways that an offense can move the ball and once the defense controls where the ball is going they can force the turnover.
Today we're going to be looking at how we can work on being more proactive than reactive. The role planning will play in the process and also how we can protect our time by saying no more often.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/defensetooffense
This Episode's Top Tips
- To focus on doing the right things, you have to know what your priority and goals are first.
- Planning doesn't have to be hard and we can focus on just planning one day at a time.
- We got to say no more often - especially ourselves. We tend to have more ideas than we can ever hope to complete. By saying no to some things we are leaving time for the things we really want to do.
- When we're telling someone else no we should focus on a simple no. When we try to hedge our no's it gives the other person the impression that we actually want to do the thing and they will always try and accommodate which will make future no's even harder.
Following up last week's rebroadcast about creating better reminders I thought I'd add in some more ideas on how we can remember things. One of the tools that I most often use is the camera on my phone.
I think the first time I tried to use a photograph to remember something was when I was a kid and saw a commercial on TV for a bow and arrow and shield set - it looked like the best toy, but the only way I could think of to record the phone number to call for it (yes this pre-internet) was to take a picture of the TV screen.
I of course forgot about it until the picture was developed several weeks later and then promptly told by my parents that they weren't going to order it anyway.
Today we're going to be learning just how taking pictures can affect our memories, what things we can turn from physical to digital with pictures, and how we can use photos to assist with cleaning.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/takeapicture
This Episode's Top Tips
- When taking pictures we narrow our focus and this helps us remember more of the visual aspects of what we are photographing - however, this also tends to reduce the amount of information we can recall from what we heard.
- We can take pictures of our physical reminders like todos, grocery lists, and journal entries to create digital copies to take with us.
- Picture taking while cleaning can reduce the amount of input we're getting at one time by changing spaces from 3D to 2D. We can also benefit from having before and after photos to see the work we've done and to also create a reference of what a room is supposed to look like when it's been cleaned.
- We need to go through our photos periodically so that we don't get overwhelmed by having too many to sift through at once - we also want to create action items on our to-do list from the pictures we take so that we don't forget what we wanted to be reminded about.
When you've got ADHD making reminders is a given. There's just too much going on in any one given day for me to keep track of it all and without reminders I know I'm going to drop the ball somewhere. I've got reminders for big things like when I need to leave to pick up my kids from school and little things like having a cup of tea in the evening but not too close to bedtime.
So when I get told I just need to create a reminder to remember something I just want to shout that I already am using a lot of reminders. A big problem with a lot of reminders is that they just aren't effective at getting us to do the things they are supposed to be reminding us of. Today we're going to be exploring the ways that we can make better reminders so that we're actually following through on them. We'll be looking at what we're creating reminders for. How and when we are getting those reminders and also look at how we are creating our system of reminders.
Find the full show note at: HackingYourADHD.com/EffectiveReminders
Today's Top Tips
- The most important aspect of a reminder is having it delivered when you can do something about it - you can do this by thinking through the context of a reminder. If you need a reminder at work make sure you are getting it when you are at work.
- Reminders are great for reminding you of things, but not for doing unscheduled tasks. Leave projects on your to-do list and actually schedule a time for them instead of creating a reminder that you are never going to do.
- Reminders can either be short-term or long-term but regardless of what kind of reminder you are creating you want to make sure you are giving yourself enough information to follow through on what you were trying to remind yourself about.
- Create a combination of physical and digital reminders so that you can get the most out of your reminder systems. Physical reminders tend to be faster to set up but digital reminders can be more robust in how they are reminding you.
One of the things I want to look at while I'm taking my break is what my prioritizes are - it's easy to let yourself just get pulled along with the flow of things and often that means you aren't following your prioritizes. What you end up following is the path of least resistance and overtime you going to find that you just aren't able to make the time for the things that are important to you.
So during this break I thought it would be a great time to revisit this episode on how to set your priorities. I know that we're not going to be able to do everything that we want to right now, but we certainly work on finding at least a little time to work on our most important projects.
Let me ask you, what's the most important thing on your to-do list? What's the thing that if you did it would make you satisfied with what you accomplished today? Sometimes we've got a clear picture of what our most important thing is - usually it's something that's due that day - maybe even something that was due, yesterday. But we can't always rely on urgency to be our guide for prioritization.
If you're struggling to figure out what's the most important thing to do, you're not alone. Picking out the tasks that are going to make the biggest difference is a hard thing to do and something that we're kind of just expected to understand - yet often there's no clear reason why doing task A is better than doing task B.
Today we're going to be exploring how we can determine what those most important tasks are and how we can make them a priority.
Find the show note for this episode at HackingYourADHD.com/priorities
Today's Top Tips
1. To really get the most out of setting your priorities you've first got to understand what your values are
2. You can use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to separate your tasks into Important and Urgent, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important and Not Important and Not Urgent
3. Large projects should be broken down into their component parts, once they are broken down look for tasks that are bottle necks or that will make other tasks easier to complete - those should become your priorities
This week we were supposed to have a new episode going up but I'm really starting to feel it. I feel like I've been stuck for a while now and pressing on the gas is just spinning my wheels, so I've realized that I need to step back and take a break. And I thought what better way to start off that break than rebroadcasting my episode on burnout. I know I'm going to have to work on picking up a few lessons from this episode again so I though you might appreciate them too.
Exhausted, empty, overloaded, unable to cope - these are some of the words I'll find myself using when I'm feeling burned out or on the path to burnout. We tend to find ourselves in burnout after prolonged periods of stress - it isn't something that sets in all at once. It isn't that we finally have a straw that breaks the camel's back, instead we just eventually find ourselves waking up one morning and realizing we just can't even. We find that we've lost our passion and drive for everything in front of us. We might still find ways to be productive but we tend to be robotic about it and it just drains us more and more.
Burnout is hard. Today we're going to start out by discussing what burnout actually is and I'm also going to talk about some of the times I hit burnout. We're also going to be looking at what we can do to prevent burn and then what to do if we still hit burnout anyways.
For full show notes go to:
HackingYourADHD.com/burnout
Today's Top Tips
- Burnout consists of three parts - exhaustion (both mental and physical), loss of meaning in our work, and a feeling of ineptitude. Burnout is a slow grind and we've got to pay attention to why we're feeling unmotivated when doing tasks we normally enjoy.
- We want to prevent burnout by setting healthy boundaries around our work, prioritizing self-care, and remembering to take time off. Not comparing ourselves to others and accepting that our ADHD makes things hard will also help us with not feeling like we're so far behind everyone else.
- If we do hit burnout, we need to reassess what are needs are and identify what was causing us to burnout. Take some time off and figure out what really matters to you. We often hit burnout when our rewards don't match our efforts.
The ADHD brain has a strange relationship with thinking. One of my biggest gripes is that it often feels like I can't ever turn my brain off. No matter what I'm doing, I'm thinking about something. I could be washing dishes, but I'm thinking about what else I need to do before I go to bed. I could be walking to get the mail, and instead of wondering what's in the mailbox, I'm thinking about a conversation I had three years ago. Even when I'm trying to meditate, I'll often find myself thinking about what it means to be meditating. I'm not really sure that thinking about meditating while meditating is actually meditating - but hey, I'm still putting in the effort, it's called a practice for a reason.
But just because our brains are whirring away doesn't mean that we're producing quality thoughts. Today we're going to take a dive into how we can better direct our brains. We'll be looking at why we should stop multitasking. The value of critical thinking and then explore ways that we can improve that thinking.
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/criticalthinking
This Episode's Top Tips
- Stop trying to multitask. Multitasking reduces the efficiency that we can perform any task and prevents us from really thinking through our problems.
- Critical thinking is valuable because it helps us make hard decisions and it makes us harder to manipulate.
- Ask yourself more questions to improve your critical thinking skills. Always challenge your assumptions.
- Find ways to help facilitate your thinking time such mind mapping or taking a walk.
I'd say I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning, but that implies that there is a part of me that loves cleaning. There isn't. I like having cleaned and having a clean home, but I seldom enjoy the actual cleaning part.
ADHD tends to not make cleaning any easier. Time blindness makes me think most of the cleaning tasks I need to do are going to take forever. I have a natural propensity for clutter, and that clutter often fades into the background of what I notice - so I just stop seeing that stack of mail on my counter.
Today we're going to be looking at why we should stop treating cleaning our house like a project. Ways that we can make consistent cleaning easier and also how we can get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated in our homes.
Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/cleaninghouse
This Episode's Top Tips
- Stop thinking of cleaning your house as a project - we've got to understand that cleaning is about the small tasks that we do consistently that is going to keep our house clean.
- Work on creating that routine of small tasks that you can do every day to improve the base level clean of your house - focus on starting small at first. Think about what you can do in the morning and what you can do right before you go to bed.
- Time your cleaning tasks so that you know how long they actually take to do - a lot of the tasks that we put off doing actually take way less time than we think they do.
- Use temptation bundling and listen to a podcast while cleaning so that you can stay motivated while tidying up.
- Make sure everything in your house has a place to live - it doesn't have to be an exact spot, but if you know where to put something then you won't waste mental energy figuring out where stuff needs to go when picking up.
- Spend some time decluttering your house by asking better questions about the objects you are thinking of getting rid of - if we can identify the reason we want to keep something it makes it easier to pare down what we have.
My desk usually has a least a few fidget toys on top of it. I say usually only because my children sneak into my office and steal them. But the rest of the time I have a couple infinity cubes, a tangle and a piece of sea glass I use as a worry stone. I love having them to play with as I think through sentences while I'm writing and also as something to keep my hands busy while I'm reading.
Today we're going to talk about the rise of fidgets in over the last few years and then dive into how they are supposed to work. We'll also be discussing what makes a good fidget.
Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/fidgetscience
Today's Top Tips
- There are a lot of sketchy claims about fidget toys. Be wary of marketing claims, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - figure out which fidgets work best for you.
- Fidgets work by helping us manage our attention and focus. It can be hard for us to direct our attention when we're either over or under-stimulated.
- The best fidgets are things that we can do with our hands without looking at them - we don't want to be drawing too much of our attention to use them, just enough to help drown out the other outside stimuli around us.
Trying to plan in a pandemic has been... well really what's been a problem is all the plans that I made before the lockdown. Every week I look through my calendar and have canceled events and plans that just aren't going to happen. I mean this was the first Easter I didn't have to pretend to be sick during to avoid going over to the in-laws, but that's a pretty weak silver lining.
We've got a lot going on so planning is more important than ever - I mean going to the grocery store takes a lot more forethought than it used to. But planning also seems harder than ever before as well, so today we're going to be looking at what to do when plans go awry and how to adjust our long-term planning.
Find the show note for this episode at HackingYourADHD.com/BestLaidPlans
This Episode's Top Tips
- No one really wanted to hear me read poetry.
- When our plans go wrong it can be frustrating and debilitating. We can mitigate some of this by thinking through what can go wrong with our plans and coming up with contingencies.
- Right now a lot of our long-term plans are disarray - while it is hard to plan for the future because when we are faced with uncertainty, we can still look at our underlying goals and base our planning around them.
- Give yourself a break - it's okay to do less. While it is still a good idea to plan our days, we can also just plan on doing less.
Going online has its perks - we've got a wealth of information at our fingertips - but with so much information it can be hard to find the truth. Often we can't find the signal for the noise because well, it is just really noisy. And by noisy, I mean there is a lot of bad information out there.
In today's episode, we're going to be looking specifically at science journalism, but really most of what we're going to be talking about can be applied to everything that we read online. We want to be getting the best information and so we've got to be cautious about our sources. So we're going to be looking at ways that research can be manipulated to support a flimsy claim, why we've got to go beyond reading the headlines and what to watch out for when we are reading those articles.
Find Today's Show Notes at HackingYourADHD.com/badscience
Today's Top Tips
- While most scientist aren't trying to create bad science, lack of funding and time can make many studies suspect. To help validate claims, read into the study methodology and see what other research supports those claims.
- Make sure that you are reading beyond just headlines. Many over zealous reporters will embellish headlines to garner more clicks.
- Watch for words like "proved" about science. Science doesn't prove anything, it just creates evidence that supports a claim or refutes it.
- Be skeptical of claims that seem to good to be true, they usually are.
I hope everyone is staying home and staying safe. I know that everyone is going through a hard time right now and ADHD isn't making it any easier. So today we're going to be talking about what we can do to try and regain some of that control you may feel you have lost in your life. We'll be talking about staying in contact with friends, setting up routines and using accountability. We'll also be talking about ways to get in a little more self-care.
For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/ControllingWhatYouCan
Today's Top Tips
- Make sure you're scheduling time to be social - figure out ways to stay in contact while you are apart.
- Create a routine to follow and use accountability to help you follow through with your intentions.
- Prioritize self-care somewhere in your routine.
- Give yourself some slack.
When I'm working on this podcast sometimes I wish my boss would be a little harder on me because it can be easy for me to get behind - but my boss is kind of laid back and lets me get away with more than I should - and that's probably because my boss is me. When I can't count on myself to get the things I need to turn to others to help me out. A lot of us with ADHD can have trouble turning to others when we need help, but we don't have to do things alone. And one of the best ways others can help you is through accountability. Today I'm going to talk about what accountability is, what it isn't and ways that you can get some more into your life so that you can follow through with your intentions.
Find the full show note on my web page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/CompassionateAssKicking
Today's Top Tips
- Accountability is about stating what your intentions are to someone else so that you can accountable to them about whether or not you followed through with those intentions
- There are a lot of ways that you can build accountability into your life - like body doubling and accountability teams
- When forming an accountability team make sure everyone is on the same page when you are starting up so that everyone knows what to expect and what is expected of them
This week we're going to be hitting Working With Your ADHD. One of my biggest struggles with ADHD often comes from my belief that if I just tried harder I'd be able to overcome anything that my ADHD was throwing at me, but surprise surprise that just isn't the case. In today's episode, we're going to be looking at why we don't want to just keep trying to do the same things as neurotypicals, why we struggle so much with the idea of trying harder and also some of the strategies that are going to support us the best.
Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/WorkingWith
Today's Top Tips
1. Pretending that we're neurotypical is exhausting and will lead us to use the wrong strategies for our brains.
2. We shouldn't focus on just trying harder. It's okay for us to just do less, especially when we are staying focus on what matters most.
3. The best strategies for working with your ADHD starts with accepting your ADHD. Make time to educate yourself about what's really happening in your ADHD brain and get involved with the ADHD community.
When I was in school, I always wanted to be the kind of student who able to finish a project well before it needed to be turned in. I loved the idea that I could write a paper and still have a week left to polish it. Of course, I was never actually that student. For me to get started on a paper, I had to actually be able to feel that pressure from the deadline building up on me. That usually meant that I was mostly working on papers the night before - I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Since I was still able to get good grades with this strategy, I never really changed it - but I always wished that I wasn't always riding by the seat of my pants. Despite having a good track record, there were times that I missed those deadlines.
And a funny thing about it was that I always wanted more time to write my papers. In my brain, if the deadline was pushed farther out I would have had more time to start, and yet experience has taught me that it really didn't matter how much time I was given to complete a paper. Given a week or month, I would still procrastinate until the last minute. When those deadlines were moving in on me, I was able to focus like no other. The time pressure allowed me to block out all those other distracting ideas vying for my attention.
Today we're going to be exploring how we can use this time pressure to complete those nagging tasks that we otherwise might not get done and also those things we want to do but just can't seem to prioritize. We'll also be looking at better ways to set deadlines so that we can follow through with our intentions.
Check out the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/deadlines
Today's Top Tips
- Time pressure from deadlines allows us to focus on the tasks in front of us and distill our work down to the most important parts.
- When setting deadlines we want to make sure that they are relevant to either us or the project. A great way to do this is through accountability and getting someone else to check in on your progress.
- Deadlines need to be realistic if we plan on meeting them. Time blindness can make it hard to know how long something is actually going to take, but if we break down our projects into chunks we can work on hitting milestones with mini-deadlines.
Exhausted, empty, overloaded, unable to cope - these are some of the words I'll find myself using when I'm feeling burned out or on the path to burnout. We tend to find ourselves in burnout after prolonged periods of stress - it isn't something that sets in all at once. It isn't that we finally have a straw that breaks the camel's back, instead we just eventually find ourselves waking up one morning and realizing we just can't even. We find that we've lost our passion and drive for everything in front of us. We might still find ways to be productive but we tend to be robotic about it and it just drains us more and more.
Burnout is hard. Today we're going to start out by discussing what burnout actually is and I'm also going to talk about some of the times I hit burnout. We're also going to be looking at what we can do to prevent burn and then what to do if we still hit burnout anyways.
For full show notes go to:
HackingYourADHD.com/burnout
Today's Top Tips
- Burnout consists of three parts - exhaustion (both mental and physical), loss of meaning in our work, and a feeling ineptitude. Burnout is a slow grind and we've got to pay attention to why we're feeling unmotivated when doing tasks we normally enjoy.
- We want to prevent burnout by setting healthy boundaries around our work, prioritizing self-care, and remembering to take time off. Not comparing ourselves to others and accepting that our ADHD makes things hard will also help us with not feeling like we're so far behind everyone else.
- If we do hit burnout, we need to reassess what are needs are and identify what was causing us to burnout. Take sometime off and figure out what really matters to you. We often hit burnout when our rewards don't match our efforts.
When you've got ADHD making reminders is a given. There's just too much going on in any one given day for me to keep track of it all and without reminders I know I'm going to drop the ball somewhere. I've got reminders for big things like when I need to leave to pick up my kids from school and little things like having a cup of tea in the evening but not too close to bedtime.
So when I get told I just need to create a reminder to remember something I just want to shout that I already am using a lot of reminders. A big problem with a lot of reminders is that they just aren't effective at getting us to do the things they are supposed to be reminding us of. Today we're going to be exploring the ways that we can make better reminders so that we're actually following through on them. We'll be looking at what we're creating reminders for. How and when we are getting those reminders and also look at how we are creating our system of reminders.
Find the full show note at: HackingYourADHD.com/EffectiveReminders
Today's Top Tips
- The most important aspect of a reminder is having it delivered when you can do something about it - you can do this by thinking through the context of a reminder. If you need a reminder at work make sure you are getting it when you are at work.
- Reminders are great for reminding you of things, but not for doing unscheduled tasks. Leave projects on your to-do list and actually schedule a time for them instead of creating a reminder that you are never going to do.
- Reminders can either be short-term or long-term but regardless of what kind of reminder you are creating you want to make sure you are giving yourself enough information to follow through on what you were trying to remind yourself about.
- Create a combination of physical and digital reminders so that you can get the most out of your reminder systems. Physical reminders tend to be faster to set up but digital reminders can be more robust in how they are reminding you.
Talking about video games so much last week got me thinking about games a lot and so I ended up getting a new game for myself called Stardew Valley. The game was originally released in 2016 but because it was so popular it has been released for a bunch of other systems - I got my copy on the Nintendo Switch. In Stardew Valley you escape the hustle and bustle of the city by moving to a farm you inherited from your grandfather. And then the gameplay is basically just running your farm. Clearing your land. Cutting down trees. Planting crops. Watering them. Talking to people in town. Upgrading your farm. I'm simplifying but honestly, the gameplay is pretty straight forward.
I know, that doesn't sound all that engaging and yet I've gotten hooked on this game. And so have thousands of other people. Last week we spent some time discussing specifically why the ADHD brain can latch on to video games so well - this week we're going to veer into specifically how games can easily get me to do things that essentially are boring - like watering my crops - and trying to figure out how we can apply that to real life.
For the full show notes go to: HackingYourADHD.com/VideoGameLessons
Today's Top Tips
- Operant conditioning is a learning process in which the strength of a behavior is modified by reinforcement or punishment.
- We can use what we know about operant conditioning to help us modify our behavior by figuring out the right rewards and punishments we need to complete tasks.
- Video games make it incredibly easy for us to pick them up and play - for anything else in our life that we want to do more of we should reduce the steps it takes to start.
- Video games don't punish us harshly for messing up - in fact many video games make it easy to restart after we fail making it easier for us to learn from our mistakes. If we want to fail well in real life we've got to accept that we are going to screw up sometimes and figure out easy ways to dust ourselves off and try again.
I've played video games since before I was able to read - although that statement loses some of its weight once you find out that I didn't learn to read until I was in 4th grade - you know, dyslexia and all. Nonetheless, video games have been a part of my life for a long time. I mean, games are so ingrained in me that while I am writing this, I am listening to video game music - it's excellent for creating a relaxed focus. Video game music was specifically designed to help with attention - I'll link to some of my favorite game soundtracks in the show notes.
Today we're going to be talking about why video games can engage the ADHD brain so well and how that can lead to video game addiction. We're also going to be discussing some of the more positive traits of video games as well as discussing some ways that we can cut back on how many video games we play.
Check out the full show note at: HackingYourADHD.com/videogames
Today's Top Tips
- Video games engage our brains through instant feedback and making us feel successful.
- Video games can be a great tool for learning and for your social life.
- We want to set sensible limits on video games in our lives - not all games are created equally, so choose what you play wisely. Be wary of the games you install on your phone.
- Game Addiction can be defined as problematic and compulsive use of video games that results in significant impairment in your life - if you're seeing signs of video game addiction in your life or you simply need help quitting playing so many video games I'd like to urge you to go check out GameQuitters.com
This week we're going to be jumping - yeah, jumping because we're talking about exercise. I hope you're ready for some Jazzercise - but if that's not your groove I've got some other options for you as well. Somewhere in our heads, we all know that exercising more is something we "should" do, but it feels like the easiest thing in the world to put off. I mean just because when I look out my window and I can see it's raining doesn't mean I need to stay on my couch right now.
In today's episode, we're going to be learning some of the reasons exercise is great for our ADHD brain. How we can work on making it easier to fit exercise into our schedules so that we actually do it, some different ways we can get our blood flowing and our hearts beating. And finally a few things we can do to make sure that we are keeping up with our routines.
Find the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDGym
Today's Top Tips
- Exercise is great for our ADHD brains by increasing our levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine.
- You want to try to get in 20-30 minutes of exercise a day, but if you're just starting out make sure that you're easing into it to avoid burning out.
- Find a type of exercise that you find fun and switch it up sometimes. A great way to do this is through sports and classes.
- Build-in some accountability for your exercise routines to make sure that you keep them going.
This is the second part of the series on how to better manage your smartphone with your ADHD - you don't have to have listened to part 1 to listen to this episode, but if you like this episode I'd definitely recommend going back and listening to last week's episode as well. In that episode, we covered how we can limit the distractions that our smartphone can present and also how to make it easier on our ADHD brains when we're setting up our smartphone.
This week we're going in a bit of a different direction - while smartphones can be easily distracting and endless entertaining, they also provide us with some great tools to help us manage our ADHD. In this episode I'm going to be discussing a number of the apps I use to help me navigate my day - since I use the iPhone that means most of the apps I specifically discuss are going to be iPhone apps; however, I do try and provide alternatives for Android.
Find the Full Show Notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDPhone2
Today's Top Tips
- Make use of reminder apps on your phone - make sure to use lots of different sounds and to create recurring reminders for things that you need to be reminded of frequently.
- Use your calendar as a reminder app as well - for important events make sure to have reminders well in advance so that you can plan for them ahead of time.
- Get a good note-taking app for your phone and create a reminder to also look at the notes that you take throughout the day or week.
- Take advantage of shortcuts on your phone so that you can do complicated tasks without getting distracted.
I've been carrying around a smartphone in my pocket for more than 10 years - I started off with the first iPhone and have since gone over to Android, dabbled with the Windows Phones for a few years and then ended back up with an iPhone again. Through my years with my phone I've learned that it can be a great asset and help me with a number of my ADHD difficulties; however, I've also felt the dark side of the phone as well. Games, social media, email and all those notifications.
ADHD makes it really easy for us to get off track so we want to be making sure that we're not letting our phones dictate our next actions. Through trial and error phone designers have been making it harder and harder for us to put down our phone. Since we have ADHD this means that it is almost too easy for us to get distracted when we pop open our phone to just check the time. The screen lights up and suddenly we're hit with a hundred different ways our attention should go.
This week we'll be focusing on ways to set up your phone to be less distracting and we're going to work on setting up our phones intentionally to make sure that we're paying attention to what apps we have on our phone and where those apps are located. We'll also be looking at other ways to reduce the constant stream of distractions that our phones can produce.
Find the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/ADHDPhone
This Episode's Top Tips
- Purge any apps that you don't need on your phone - both unused apps and also apps that pull you in too much.
- Organize your apps so that your most useful apps are easy to open and your distracting apps are hidden.
- Turn off most of your notifications and make use of your Do Not Disturb feature.
- Check out your phone's screentime feature and set some sensible restrictions on how much time you are spending on your phone.
Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/habits
This week we're going to be exploring the power of habit and how small changes to our routines can have a big impact. One of the easiest ways we can help our ADHD is by working on routines and habits. It's easy to let our default habits run our lives but when we consciously choose what habits we actually want to cultivate we aren't hamstringing ourselves.
In this episode we'll be learning why we don't need to use discipline nearly as much as we think, the importance of sequencing in our habits and how we can make tweaks in those sequences so that we can change our habits to the ones we actually want.
Today's Top Tips
- Don't rely on discipline, instead use your habits to help you navigate the hard stuff.
- Our habits are so ingrained that we don't always realize what we're doing while we're doing them.
- Our habits follow the path of least resistance - if you want to change a bad habit, add resistance. If you want to form a new habit, reduce the resistance to that habit.
- You can automate processes in your habit sequences so that you aren't relying on discipline.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/TheONEThing
In this week's episode, I am going to be going over the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan - I was introduced to this book by Eric Tivers through the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. I can't remember if it was required reading or just strongly encouraged when I took the groups, but the messages in this book were key to getting through the coaching groups.
My first reading of the book was on audiobook and since then I've listened to it three more and read the physical version of the book twice. The subtitle of the book is, "The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results" - and as I've mentioned before, just because something is simple doesn't make it easy. Each reading has helped me understand the concepts a little bit better and I was always able to pick up a few new things.
Today I'm going to be going over the "surprisingly simple truth" in the book and discussing how we can better apply it for our ADHD brains.
Today's Top Tips
- Use the focusing question to help you determine your one thing - the focusing question again is: "What's the ONE Thing that you can do such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?"
- Change your thinking and value your time by saying "no" more and time blocking time for your ONE Thing
- You can have a ONE Thing for each of your life domains, but they should all be working toward a common purpose
- If you liked this episode I'd recommend you check out the book the ONE Thing and read through it on your own - I skimmed a lot of parts for this episode so I'm sure you could get a lot more out of it. You can find a link to the book on the show notes page.
Find show notes for this episode at HackingYourADHD.Com/DearADHD
Thanks for joining me for the very last episode of 2019 - in this episode, I'm writing a letter to my ADHD. This is an exercise I got from Eric Tiver's ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. I'll be honest, I wasn't all that keen on writing a letter to my ADHD when I first heard about the exercise, but it was surprisingly refreshing to address that part of myself.
Since my first letter to my ADHD I've tried to write another one about four times a year. When I write these letters it gives me an excellent chance to check in with how my relationship with my ADHD is going. Sometimes it's going really well, while other times I've found myself to be really struggling.
If you'd like to write your own letter to your ADHD, just set a timer for 10-15 minutes and write whatever feels right to say to your ADHD. There's no wrong way to write your letter - and don't worry, I've heard a number of these that start with Dear ADHD, F - you. The great part about doing this exercise is that you get a nice record of how your relationship with ADHD is going - I can look back and see how I was doing mentally when I last checked in.
Be sure to check out the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/planning2020
Today we're going to be working on planning out our 2020. If you haven't given much thought to planning your year before I think you'll get a lot out of this episode - planning is one of those things that we sometimes think doesn't play well with ADHD, but I've learned that planning is actually one of the most effective ways to manage my ADHD. We're always going to be impulsive and that's not a bad thing but sometimes we want to want to rein that in and our best chance at reining in impulsivity is forethought.
In our session today we're going to be going over how to set goals without making them too challenging, figuring out where our focus is going to be next year, updating our calendars with the most important stuff first (you might be surprised with what that is) and then going over why we want to be doing our most important goals first.
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Find your Goldilocks Zone of Challenge for Goal Setting
- Examine your life domains and choose one to focus on this year
- Re-write your goals from outcome based goals into process goals
- Once you have set dates scheduled into your calendar, schedule out your vacation and planning time before anything else
- Plan to do your 2-3 most important goals in the beginning of the year
Today we're going to be walking through the process of how to conduct an end of year review by letting you in while I went through my own review.
Head over to the show notes page to grab a copy of the Review Your Year PDF that I use in this episode: HackingYourADHD.com/2019Review
Since I've started doing yearly reviews, I've realized that I'm pretty bad at looking back. Often I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels, but it turns out that it's just that my rearview mirror is broken. The problem is that when I look back I tend to only remember a small fraction of what went on over the year. I mean even when I've tried doing a weekly review I find that I can't actually accurately remember what went on that week. But that doesn't mean that we can't do something to help jog our memories.
This Episode’s Top Tips
- List out your goals for 2019 and see which ones you completed (and it's okay if you didn't get them all - I didn't hit many of mine this year)
- Go through your calendar week by week and find all the things that you've forgotten about over the year
- Separate everything you did this year into their various life domains so you can see where you've spent most of your time
- Using all the information you gathered, spend some time writing and reflecting on how your year went
- Keep all this information handy for next week when we start planning our year
And be sure to connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to let me know what your top takeaway was from this episode.
Let me ask you, what's the most important thing on your to-do list? What the thing that if you did it would make you satisfied with what you accomplished today? Sometimes we've got a clear picture of what our most important thing we've got to do is - usually it's something that's due that day - maybe even something that was due, yesterday. But we can't always rely on urgency to be our guide for prioritization.
If you're struggling to figure out what's the most important thing to do, you're not alone. Picking out the tasks that are going to make the biggest difference is a hard thing to do and something that we're kind of just expected to understand - yet often there's no clear reason why doing task A is better than doing task B.
As we are approaching the end of the year I've been thinking about what I want to do next year and what things are going to make the most difference in my life. So today I'm going to be exploring how we can determine what those most important tasks are and how we can make them a priority.
Check out the full show notes and episode transcript at: HackingYourADHD.com/Priorities
This Episode’s Top Tips
- To really get the most out of setting your priorities you've first got to understand what your values are
- You can use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to separate your tasks into Important and Urgent, Important but not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important and Not Important and Not Urgent
- Large projects should be broken down into their component parts, once they are broken down look for tasks that are bottle necks or that will make other tasks easier to complete - those should become your priorities
We all picture different things when we think about the holidays. Some people think about family and food, others think about putting up all those sparking lights and some people think about the shopping - but one thing we all probably think about is all the things we have to do.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/holiday
This Episode's Top Tips
- Pick and choose your events - let your mantra become "I'll have to check my calendar"
- Prioritize self-care by adding it to your calendar
- Have escape routes planned for events that might overwhelm you - identify your co-conspirators to get you out of the worst situations
- Your best weapon against impulsiveness is forethought - knowing when you are most impulsive let's you come up with strategies to curb that impulsiveness
- Be kind to yourself and cut yourself some slack
When I'm working on this podcast sometimes I wish my boss would be a little harder on me because it can be easy for me to get behind - but my boss is kind of laid back and lets me get away with more than I should - and that's probably because my boss is me. When I can't count on myself to get the things I need to turn to others to help me out. A lot of us with ADHD can have trouble turning to others when we need help, but we don't have to do things alone. And one of the best ways others can help you is through accountability. Today I'm going to talk about what accountability is, what it isn't and ways that you can get some more into your life so that you can follow through with your intentions.
Find the full show note on my web page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/CompassionateAssKicking
Today's Top Tips
- Accountability is about stating what your intentions are to someone else so that you can accountable to them about whether or not you followed through with those intentions
- There are a lot of ways that you can build accountability into your life - like body doubling and accountability teams
- When forming an accountability team make sure everyone is on the same page when you are starting up so that everyone knows what to expect and what is expected of them
Last week was all about getting there and this week we're focusing on what to do when you get back. Travel disrupts our routines and habits - and we should take those disruptions seriously. One thing that I've had to learn over and over again is that ADHD makes transitions hard - and coming back from a trip is a big transition.
This Episode's Top Tips
- Identify your routines and habits before your trip so that when you get back you know where to pick things back up. Make sure you are paying special attention to your
- While you are traveling try and keep up as many of your habits and routines. If you need to, you can make small tweaks to them to make them easier while you are away.
- Make sure you are planning your days and regularly checking that plan once you get back. You can use a habit tracker to make sure you are follow through with all of your intentions.
Find all the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/RefocusedVacation
ADHD loves novelty and what could be more novel for an ADHD brain than going to a new place? While you might love the destination, getting there can be really hard for those of us with ADHD. The process of traveling some place new takes a lot of work and a lot of attention to detail that can even escape neurotypicals. Recently my wife was booking our tickets to go visit family during Thanksgiving - except after she booked the tickets she realized she booked them for the wrong weekend. Fortunately she caught it early and it wasn't too hard to fix.
But travel is a lot more than just booking tickets and getting to the airport on time. The entire process of getting out the door with all your bags to sitting wait for your plane to leave takes a lot of executive function and we can really find ourselves wiped out just thinking of everything we're going to need to do. With a little bit of planning ahead though we can make traveling a lot easier on our ADHD brains.
Here are my top seven tips for smoothing out your travel plans.
**#1 - Making a list and checking it twice
2 - Drink More Water
3 - Bring a fidget toy for down time
4 - Avoid overbooking yourself and schedule breaks
5 - Get comfortable
6 - Be mindful of traveling with your Medication
7 - Take Advantage of Your Apps**Check out the full show notes and all the tool mentioned in this episode on the show notes page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/TravelHacks
Find the Full Show Notes:
HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/journaling
This Episode's Top Tips
- Journaling allows us to think through our problems and improve our emotional well being
- You've got a lot of options for how to journal - be it with pen and paper, digital, or an audio or video journal make sure you are choosing the option that is best for your ADHD brain.
- To be successful at journaling we've got treat it like any other habit that we want to form and start off easy - by thinking ahead we can come up with strategies that will make it easier for us to sit down and actually write.
- Remember to approach your journal with compassion - you're not going to be solving any problems just by beating yourself up.
Find the full show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/GST
Today we're going to be exploring the differences between goals, strategies and tactics.
Simply put:
- Goals are a desired result we want to achieve.
- Strategies are the processes we use to achieve goals.
- Tactics are actions we take to implement strategies.
Let's take a look at an example.
A while back I decided to set the goal planning my week every week. My strategy at the time was to do my planning on Monday's right when I started work. This was a bad strategy, but it was compounded by the fact that I didn't have any specific tactics to make sure that I was doing my planning right when I got in. Coming in on Mondays I'd find myself just jumping into whatever needed to be done first and telling myself that I'd get to my planning right afterwards. That rarely actually happened. And while it might have been a good idea to actually try some different tactics here I didn't realize that was the issue, so I instead opted to change my strategy.
I decided that I wanted to try and start planning my week over the weekend. This was a great idea in theory but ended up being a mess because I again didn't implement any solid tactics to make sure that I was getting my planning done. With all my family commitments on weekends I found that I had trouble finding time to do my planning. I liked the results when I did manage to plan on the weekend but I wasn't able to do it consistently.
I ended up changing my strategy again and was able to get it to stick, because this time I also decided to add some tactics. Now I plan my next week on the Friday afternoons and instead of just trying to find time on Fridays, I created a reoccurring event on my calendar specifically for planning on Friday afternoons. By blocking off that time ahead of time I couldn't schedule any other projects then without moving that time block (which sometimes I do have to do).
The biggest reason this has worked for me is because let's be honest, you never just find time to do things - if it isn't in your calendar it probably isn't a priority. When I'm at my office I'm able to respect my time blocks a lot more easily. When I'm at home with the kids they are my priority and so I can't rely on having as consistent time blocks - and this comes back to the idea of working with your ADHD and what works for you. Sure I'm "sacrificing" my Friday afternoons to make my planning happen, but planning is important for managing my ADHD and so it is totally worth it.
SMART Goals
Now that we've got a better understanding of the differences between strategies and tactics let's talk a little bit about goal setting. There are a lot of ways to set your goals but today we're just going to be talking about SMART goals.
SMART stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
When I'm sitting down during the goal setting process I'll often start with a nebulous goal such as: I want to get in better shape. To gain clarity on what I actually want out of this goal we'll run it through the SMART goal methodology.
We'll start by getting specific. What does getting in shape mean? For me getting in shape might mean getting to the gym more and eating healthier. The key when making things specific is to also focus on making them into ways that can also be measurable. Looking at that first part we can say I want to go to the gym at least 2 times a week. This makes it both specific (we know exactly what needs to happen) and measurable (we know the frequency, twice a week).
Eating healthier is a lot harder to quantify, so we're going to have to change the wording so that we can make this measurable - let's go with I want to eat 3 healthy meals a week. If we want to get real nitty-gritty we might also want to define wh
It's easy to get caught up in what neurotypicals do for productivity that we can forget that we're not neurotypical, we have ADHD. And when you've got ADHD sometimes you need to do things differently because our brains are wired differently. Even though neurotypicals sometimes struggle with a lot of the same issues that we are struggling with it doesn't mean we should always be trying the same strategies and tactics to get over those hurdles.
What we need to do is find ways to work with our ADHD brains. Working with your ADHD brain is all about finding the strategies that work with your brain and avoiding the ones that are going to cause problems.
This Episode's Top Tips
- Working harder isn't always our best option - more often than not we just need to take a different approach
- It's okay for us to just do less - especially when are staying focus on what matters most to us
- The best strategies I've found for working with your ADHD are education and community
For all the tools and other goodies mentioned in this episode, check out the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/WorkingWith
ADHD can make it hard to remember all the things that you need to remember on a daily basis. Things get forgotten and we end up missing important appointments because they simply slipped our mind. While everyone can have trouble with memory, it can be especially hard on those of us with ADHD because of how memory works with executive function.
When we are thinking about memory it is important to distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory. Long-term memory holds memories from weeks, months or years ago - while short term memory is all about the now with those memories lasting anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of days. Short-term memory is also sometimes also referred to as working memory
To keep the information we store in our working memory we must put in effort to keep it there. If we don't put in effort to retain those memories they will be forgotten. We can hold about 5-9 memories in our short-term memory. It is important to note that when we are holding things in our working memory we are using our executive function. Since ADHD can also be considered a disorder of the executive function this means that it is harder for people with ADHD to use their working memory.
To be clear we can simply define executive as what controls our ability to get thing done. It helps with things like time management, paying attention, remembering details and planning. You can think of executive function kind of like a well that you draw out of every time you do these things. Our reserve of executive function has ups and down with things like sleeping and eating helping to restore that reserve. We rely on executive function for a lot of thing so we don't want to drain it unnecessarily.
The easiest thing we can do to reduce the strain on our executive function is to stop trying to store these memories in our heads and instead write them down. When we are writing down these reminders to ourselves we need to focus on creating reminders that are specific so we actually know what we were supposed to be reminded about. The second key is to create cues for these reminders so that we get reminded about these things when the information is actually relevant to us.
In the instances where a written reminder isn't warranted such as going into another room just to get an object we can also struggle with remembering things. In a study from psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky of Notre Dame found that doorways "serve as an 'event boundary' in the mind." In his study Radvansky found that subjects were more forgetful after walking through a doorway compared to when they walked the same distance across a room.
To help with these instances of forgetfulness we can implement solutions like vocalization and visualization to help us remember what we needed.
This Episode's Top Tips
- Storing things in our working memory relies on us using our executive function and we don't want to unnecessarily drain our executive function to just try and remember everything
- When we are creating reminders for ourselves we need to make sure that they have a good cue for us and that they are specific enough that we will actually know what we were supposed to be reminded of
- Doorways serve as event boundaries in our mind so we need to be mindful of trying to remember things when we are going to be going through a doorway.
For all the tools and other goodies mentioned in this episode, check out the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/RememberAnything
ADHD can make it very hard for us to accurately tell what time it is now, how much time is left, and how quickly time is passing. This is referred to as time blindness and it creates a host of issues for those of us with ADHD. When you are unable to accurately tell what time it is, you are going to be late. When you don't know how long something is going to take, you are either going to take too long to finish or finish well before you predicted.
When we are unable to accurately gauge how much time has passed we often are going to be late and when it comes to time predictions we often find ourselves woefully inaccurate, either predicting we can finish a task in no time at all or deciding a task is going to take way more time than it actually will. Our brains are great at confusing large and small tasks, making us think that doing the dishes will take an hour while figuring we can type out that ten-page paper in the same hour.
We can work on our time blindness by making predictions of how long a task will take and then taking accurate measurements of how long it actually takes to do. As we do this more often and learn how long things actually take we create time wisdom.
Often we will find ourselves falling to time blindness because of the invisible parts of a task. One common example is parking. If we have a 2:00 PM appointment and it takes 30 minutes to arrive at our destination we can't just allot 30 minutes for the drive. Once we arrive we still have to find parking and go into the building - both of those tasks take time that is usually unaccounted for.
One of the causes of these invisible parts is because we tend not to acknowledge that a task is built up of three parts - set up, the doing of the task, and clean up. In the going to an appointment example, getting ready to go and getting in the car could be considered the set up, driving to the appointment the doing part, and the parking and going into the building is the clean up.
When you start timing yourself you need to get an actual timer that counts up like a stopwatch so that you can create accurate time measurements. Once you have your timer create reminders about what you want to time and also reminders to turn off your timer once you've finished the task.
Also remember that you don't need to judge yourself if you aren't hitting your time predictions. This is called time blindness, which means we have trouble seeing time, so sometimes our time predictions are going to be fairly inaccurate. Timing yourself is about helping you correct your bad predictions and creating time wisdom, not about telling yourself you should be doing things faster.
This Episode's Top Tips:
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Get yourself a timer, you don't need anything fancy, but try and find something that isn't your phone and that counts up.
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Tasks are made up of three parts: the set up, the doing, and the clean up.
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When you are timing yourself make predictions on how long your tasks are going to take - accurately predicting time is a skill and the more you practice the better you will get.
For all the tools and other goodies mentioned in this episode, check out the full show notes at: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/timing
ADHD can make it hard for us to work on our intentions. This is even harder when we forget the things that we want to do. When you are learning about new ADHD strategies while reading books or listening to podcasts (like this one!) it is really easy to forget your intention of implementing those strategies. In these instances when we learn about a new tool, what we can do is write down our intended strategy and put it into our ADHD Toolbox. Our toolbox is simply a way for us to record the strategies and ideas we have for working with our ADHD - a place we can go and look at our intentions when we are off track.
While new strategies are fun to add to our toolbox, we should also focus on adding things that are already working in our life to our toolbox. If you've found a great bedtime routine? Stick it in your toolbox. Figured out a great way to plan your upcoming week? Stick it in your toolbox. Found a great tool for keeping you focused? Stick it in your toolbox.
Just creating a toolbox for yourself isn't enough. We all know that we forget things. That we get off track. And sometimes when we are off track it takes us a while to realize what we are doing wrong. Use your toolbox to speed up the process of getting back in the groove of things. To do this you've got to set up regular times to check your toolbox.
But we also know that sometimes even when we set aside time to check something we aren't always going to get to it, which means we've got to set up redundant reminders for ourselves to make sure we don't miss out on our most important intentions.
This Episode’s Top Tips
- Set up a toolbox for yourself containing any tools or strategies you are currently using in your life
- Set up times to regularly read through your toolbox
- Create automated systems of redundant reminders so you don't forget about your toolbox
For all the tools and other goodies mentioned in this episode go to the full show notes on our web page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/Toolbox