Connected Divergents

Have you heard me talk about "following your dopamine" but struggle to feel what your intuitive pulls/calls/longings are? If following your dopamine feels challenging, that makes sense. This is a mental muscle, a spiritual skill, that we've often not been taught how to develop. It gets overcome by "shoulds" and shame. We were taught not to listen to our intuitive pulls because they're childish, immature, lazy, or wasteful. But the concept of "following your dopamine" is a critical skill when it comes to trusting ourselves and learning how to meet our needs. Learning how to answer the questions of, "What do I need right now?" "What does my brain need right now?" "What does my nervous system need right now to feel safe and supported?" Here's a quick and simple tool for learning how to follow your dopamine when it doesn't feel intuitive quite just yet. If it helps you, please share your results with me! I would love to hear it!

This episode is all about demand avoidance, my experiences around it and how I approach it in ways that are helpful for my brain (instead of harmful). Demand avoidance is something that I've struggled with since childhood. For me, the experience is an internal cringe combined with a teen-angsty feeling. Very often, demand avoidance for me causes emotional dysregulation and in extremes, meltdowns & shutdowns. Today I share about what strategies, mindsets, and approaches help me work with my demand-avoidant brain. I also briefly talk about how exercise, moving my body, and dieting/diet culture represented demands for much of my life.

Show Notes:
https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/what-is-pda-menu/what-is-demand-avoidance/

Procrastination is a nominalization—which means, it's a verb that we conventionally use as a noun. Taking back the "verb" of procrastination allows us to gain insights about what exactly is holding us back & keeping us stuck. The wisdom that lies within our resistance. This was a challenging podcast to record, not because I didn't want to record it, but because I was incredibly emotionally dysregulated from a stressful week. But I wanted to be here. I wanted to record it. I talk about a few ways that I created safety in my nervous system to sit down and press the red button, and why this is a critical principle when we're dealing with procrastination and executive dysfunction.

Hi friends!! On this episode, I talk about how I approach deconstructing old mindsets & values that we learned from our parents/culture/society, but no longer wish to carry because it's not serving us anymore. *AND* how to adopt & embody new mindsets and values by experimenting with our brain to create concrete evidence to grasp onto that this shift does, in fact, serve us better. Listen in!

In this episode, I share a tool I like to call "Storm Journaling" as an act of radical self-acceptance & unshaming when we experience intense emotional dysregulation. Emotional regulation is a part of our Executive Functioning & has a huge impact on the experience of both ADHD & Autism. I've spent so much of my life trying to "fix" my big emotions, when what I really needed was to learn how to embrace them fully. I hope you enjoy. **Important note**: I don’t recommend Storm Journaling as a daily journaling practice. That’s a pretty quick ticket to feeling like crap, a lot. This is a tool best-used at your discretion, when you’re in an Autistic meltdown/shutdown or you’re in full-on ADHD emotional dysregulation, and the thought of doing something to make yourself “feel better” makes you even more upset. This is a sign that we need to lean into feeling our feelings, instead of trying to change them. For more routine journaling, I love Amie McNee’s work. You can find her  journaling compendium on her website AmieMcNee.com and get it for free if you sign up for her newsletter. (In no way is this an ad or sponsored in any way—I’m just a huge fan of her work, and this resource is phenomenal).

What does it mean to be someone who is a "verbal processor?" And how can we lean into this to help ourselves understand our feelings, challenges, wins, and experiences? This is my love letter to verbal processors!

There are two structural facets when it comes to "time blindness," or, the non-linear perception of time that ADHD'ers experience. The first is external / environmental: If we don't see it, it doesn't exist! The second is internal / emotional: We vaguely know what time it is, but we're so ashamed about being late that we throw ourselves into nervous system dysregulation (flight), and it makes us EVEN MORE late. Listen to learn my approaches for both. 

How to embrace your ping-pong spaghetti brain AND get the things done that you care to get done—we embrace our ping-pong spaghetti nature, because this is how our brains are wired. And instead of fighting against it or trying to change it, we work with it instead. Here are my mindsets & tricks for working through projects and tasks in a way that's practical & accessible for neurodivergent brains.

Unshaming is a critical skill in any self-acceptance journey, and especially an ADHD acceptance journey. In this episode I walk you through 3 steps to unshame any experience. I talk about how shame is pervasive in the neurodivergent experience and why, and how to take power away from shame and take it back for yourself. 

Edit: My brain *COMPLETELY FORGOT* how Kristin Neff is actually pretty ableist—her book on self compassion, while it has wonderful parts to it, also has a part where she claims her autistic son was "healed" by a shaman. Eugh. I blocked all that out. 

I'd like to quote bell hooks instead: "Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." 

This episode is all about body doubling!! Here's how to make your body doubling sessions more effective by using co-regulation, and strategies to body double *with yourself* if you're an introvert like me.