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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/2023

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. Support me on Patreon Ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/freshstartcleaning 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 Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page

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 Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/wiseheart Be sure to checkout Wise Heart Nutrition on their website: wiseheartnutrition.com or on Instagram

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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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. Support me on Patreon 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, 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Check out this week's sponsor, Athletic Greens 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.