Hacking Your ADHD

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/karenbroda 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.

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/doomboxes 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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/LowCapacity 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 Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/YourBrainsNotBroken

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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 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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask me a question on my Contact Page 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.