Hacking Your ADHD

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. If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/123 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. If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/122 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. If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/121 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. If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/120 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 If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/119 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/117 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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/116 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. Support me on Patreon Show notes can be found at: HackingYourADHD.com/lq4

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. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.