Hacking Your ADHD

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask me a question on my Contact Page For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/breaks This Episode's Top Tips

1. Taking breaks allows us to separate our work into more manageable chunks. They let us refresh and come to our tasks with more energy.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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. 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/indicators

This Episode's Top Tips

1. When we're setting goals we should focus on the small changes we can make that we can keep up for the long term.
2. 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.
3. 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 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/russellcoaching This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 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/inspiration This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. Find show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/findatherapist Hacking Your ADHD around the web:

• Tiktok
• Twitter
• Patreon

This Episode's Top Tip

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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. 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/dailyplanning This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/lazymyth

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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/empathygap This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 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/leisure This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Our five pillars of quality leisure time are:
   1. Prioritize doing, over consuming
   2. Prioritize things that take some skill to do
   3. Think about making something
   4. Seek activities that foster social interaction
   5. 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. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/wallofawful This Episode's Top Tips

1. The Wall of Awful is the emotional impact of repeated failure and it makes activating on tasks even more difficult
2. 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.
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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.