What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

You went to the doctor. You said you were tired. They ran your labs. Everything came back "within range." And you still feel terrible.

Hali Laricey has heard this story so many times she built her practice around it. Hali is a Certified Functional Wellness Practitioner who helps women uncover the root causes behind the symptoms they have been told are normal. Brain fog. Exhaustion. Gut issues. The nervous system overwhelm that so many ADHD moms know from the inside out.

In this episode:

• The quick win: a deliberate, deep breath when the overwhelm starts. Count to four, hold, exhale. It is not benign. It is your nervous system getting a reset.
• The CBC with differential and three specific markers (neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes) that reveal hidden infections, viral load, and chronic inflammation most doctors don't read for.
• Why the standard lab range is built around population averages, and what optimal actually looks like.
• The gut-brain-immune axis and why ADHD symptoms get worse when the gut is depleted.
• Vitamin D's real target (eighty or above), the cofactors most supplements miss, and why a Costco bottle alone may do nothing.
• Why Hali stopped being polite about "adrenal fatigue isn't a real thing" after she found it in her own labs.

Hali's message to ADHD moms is the one we all need to hear: you are not crazy, you are not lazy, and your body has been trying to tell you something specific. This episode hands you the vocabulary to listen.

Learn more about the podcast:

Follow the ADHD Mom (Jess):
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickwinsadhdmoms
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnlewis/
X: https://x.com/jesslewisvoice
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quickwinsADHDmoms
Website: https://theadhdmom.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Find Hali at halilaricey.com. Download her Dream Labs List (add fasting insulin and ferritin) and book a personalized lab review with her.

• halilaricey.com
• Facebook: functionalwellnesswithhali
• YouTube: @FunctionalWellnesswithHali
• Instagram: @functionalwellnesswithhali
• Guest freebie: halilaricey.com/labs (Dream Labs List)

For more articles and free resources for ADHD moms, visit theadhdmom.com.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

Memory is not a system. For ADHD brains especially, treating it like one is where things fall apart.

Alexis Haselberger is a time management, productivity, and stress reduction coach with ADHD who has taught over 240,000 people to work with their brains instead of against them. Her clients include teams at Google, Lyft, Workday, Capital One, and Upwork. Her approach was built on a lifetime of figuring out what actually works for brains like ours.

In this episode:

The quick win: stop relying on memory entirely. Write down everything, every time, no exceptions

Why high, medium, and low priority labels are mostly meaningless, and what to do instead

The Someday/Maybe list: how to get aspirational ideas out of your head without losing them forever

Why task realism (matching your list to your actual available time) changes how you feel at the end of every day

How to keep your goals visible so they actually influence your decisions

Why ADHD brains need to expect that systems will stop working, and why that is not a failure

Good enough is not settling. It is a strategy.

Alexis has a practical, honest approach that does not ask you to become a different kind of person. It asks you to build systems around the person you already are.

Learn more about the podcast:

Follow the ADHD Mom (Jess):
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickwinsadhdmoms
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnlewis/
X: https://x.com/jesslewisvoice
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quickwinsADHDmoms
Website: https://theadhdmom.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Find Alexis at alexishaselberger.com and her free distraction action plan for ADHD brains.

Website & Social Media:

• alexishaselberger.com
• Instagram: @do.more.stress.less
• YouTube: youtube.com/c/domorestressless
• TikTok: @do.more.stress.less
• Facebook: @domorestressless
• Free resources: Working Parents Survival Guide | Distraction Action Plan

For more articles and free resources for ADHD moms, visit theadhdmom.com

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

You've tried the strategies. You've read the books. You've managed the behaviors. And the chaos is still winning.

What if the problem isn't the behavior at all? What if it starts somewhere else entirely?

Dana Kay is the founder of the ADHD Thrive Institute, a board-certified health and nutrition practitioner, and a mom who watched her five-year-old get prescribed a fourth medication before she decided there had to be another way. Today she walks us through the gut-brain connection, what functional lab testing actually shows about ADHD kids, and the one small rule your whole family can start with today.

In this episode:

The quick win: the "no naked carb" rule and why blood sugar stability changes everything for ADHD brains

Why 95% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine are produced in the gut, not the brain

How a compromised gut sends inflammatory signals straight to the frontal lobe, the part responsible for focus, planning, and executive function

What functional lab testing looks like for kids (hint: no needles)

The "trash can" framework for understanding inflammatory load

Why Dana is not anti-medication and why she still advocates for this approach first

Dana's son went from daily meltdowns and four medications at age five to thriving at sixteen, off medication for years. More than 1,600 families have been through her method. This conversation will change how you think about what your child's body is trying to tell you.

Learn more about the podcast:

Follow the ADHD Mom (Jess):
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickwinsadhdmoms
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnlewis/
X: https://x.com/jesslewisvoice
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quickwinsADHDmoms
Website: https://theadhdmom.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Find Dana at adhdthriveinstitute.com and on Instagram at @ADHDThriveInstitute

For more articles and free resources for ADHD moms, visit theadhdmom.com

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

When you are overwhelmed and everything feels abstract and urgent at the same time, what actually helps? The answer is a quick :30 reset. Yes, that’s it.

Emily Cox is a licensed clinical mental health counselor with over ten years of experience working with neurodivergent children, teens, and families. She is also neurodivergent herself, which means when she explains what is happening in your brain, she is usually speaking from the inside out.

In this episode:

The quick win: physically changing your environment when you are overwhelmed, even for thirty seconds, and why it works specifically for neurodivergent brains

Why direct eye contact can feel threatening to ADHD kids, and what to do instead when you need to have a real conversation with your child

What EMDR actually is, how bilateral stimulation works, and why it can be especially helpful for rewiring the "I'm broken" narrative that builds up over years

The window of tolerance: a concrete way to understand when your nervous system has been bumped out of its regulation zone and what brings it back

What happens to ADHD teens when the scaffolding disappears and they suddenly have to figure out adult life on their own

Emily works with kids as young as five and with young adults navigating the gap between structured school life and the wide open uncertainty of what comes next. Her approach is warm, practical, and refreshingly free of sitting across a couch staring at a stranger.

Learn more about the podcast:

Follow the ADHD Mom (Jess):
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickwinsadhdmoms
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnlewis/
X: https://x.com/jesslewisvoice
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quickwinsADHDmoms
Website: https://theadhdmom.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Find Emily at larkspurtherapy.com

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

Your child is smart. You know it. But the grades don't show it, and nothing you've tried is working. Dr. Linda Silbert, Ph.D., has spent more than 50 years working with kids who struggle in school, raising an ADHD son of her own, and running Strong Learning Centers in New York. She has seen this story from every angle. And she has some things to say about it.

In this conversation, Dr. Linda walks us through what she calls the "three shuns" every ADHD child battles: lack of motivation for non-preferred tasks, disorganization that touches everything including time, and procrastination that can look like laziness but isn't. She talks about why punishing these behaviors doesn't just fail; it actively makes things worse. And she makes the case that the school system itself, designed on an Industrial Revolution factory model, was never built for brains like your kid's.

We also get into the difference between ADHD, high anxiety, and auditory processing disorder (and why they're so easy to confuse), how to use metacognition to help your child build confidence, and what Dr. Linda's dream classroom would actually look like.

She also shares two books worth knowing: her newly updated "Why Good Kids Get Bad Grades" and Berticus, a hilarious novel written by her son, a TV producer with ADHD, for boys aged 9-11 who won't read anything. (My thirteen-year-old immediately wanted it.)

If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave a review. It helps other adhd moms find us!

Learn more about the podcast:

Follow the ADHD Mom (Jess):
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quickwinsadhdmoms
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalynnlewis/
X: https://x.com/jesslewisvoice
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@quickwinsADHDmoms
Website: https://theadhdmom.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Dr. Linda Silbert Website: StrongLearning.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stronglearningcenter

Why Good Kids Get Bad Grades by Dr. Linda Silbert and Alvin Silbert, Ed.D.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

Most nutrition advice falls apart for ADHD moms because it never accounts for executive function. This episode tackles that gap directly. Amy Jones, a functional nutrition practitioner, ADHD life coach, and former teacher who was diagnosed with ADHD at 45, joins Jess to talk about why food chaos is not a discipline problem. It's a physiology problem.

Amy explains how skipping meals or eating inconsistently sets off a chain reaction: blood sugar drops, stress hormones rise, and suddenly you're more reactive, foggier, and closer to a meltdown. She walks through her own go-to move with her son (a cheese stick, seriously) and the simple systems she builds with clients so good nutrition doesn't require six hours of Sunday meal prep.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

You know what habit you want. You just keep waiting for the right conditions to start it. Monday. After the holidays. When things calm down. When you finally feel ready.

Monica Packer is a recovering perfectionist, certified habits and identity coach, and host of the top-rated podcast About Progress. She is also a mom of five currently managing a gas leak, a dying car, and three-hour play rehearsals five nights a week... and somehow, her habits are holding.

In this episode:

The quick win: before deciding what habit you want, identify the time of day you need more support and name how you want to feel during that time; the feeling points you to the right habit.

Why the self-help world's approach to habits was designed to make you fail and what consistency actually means.

The Do Something List: a yearly practice that has nothing to do with goals and everything to do with remembering who you are.

Why bad habits are helpers in disguise, and why shaming yourself out of them does not work.

The baseline habit: how to design your habits to flex with your season instead of collapse under it.

Monica's book Sticky Habits: A Woman's Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits That Last is publishing Fall 2026. This episode is the practical companion to everything she teaches.

Find Monica at aboutprogress.com and pre-order Sticky Habits at stickyhabitsbook.com.

For more articles and free resources for ADHD moms, visit theadhdmom.com.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

You know exactly what you need to do. You just can't make yourself start. Monica Packer knows why -- and it's not what you think.

Monica is a recovering perfectionist, habits and identity coach, and host of the top-rated podcast About Progress. She's also a mom of five -- three of them with ADHD -- and a decade into unlearning a version of success that nearly cost her everything.

In this episode:

The quick win: when a task feels too big, do something to start -- and give yourself permission to stop there

The real definition of perfectionism: not tidiness or drive, but placing your identity on your outcomes

Why perfectionism can look like overachieving or like doing nothing at all -- and why both are the same trap

Shame versus compassion, and why shame is the voice convincing you that you can't change

How to start noticing where that harsh inner voice actually came from

Monica's book Sticky Habits: A Woman's Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits That Last is publishing Fall 2026. This is part one of a two-part conversation -- part two gets practical with the habits she built once she understood all of this.

Find Monica at aboutprogress.com and pre-order Sticky Habits at stickyhabitsbook.com.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

Your child comes home from school and heads straight for the pantry. You tell them to stop. They do it again tomorrow. And the day after that.

Kamy Moussavi spent most of his life in that pantry. He grew up overweight, cycled through every diet program his mom could find, and still could not figure out why food had such a hold on him -- even after he became an engineer, ran marathons, and built a startup. The answer turned out to have nothing to do with willpower.

Kamy is the founder of Step Together, a family-centered program that helps parents understand what is actually driving their child's relationship with food -- and why changing the home environment, not the child, is where real change begins.

In this episode:

The quick win: when your child runs to the pantry after school, they are looking for dopamine -- try a hug first and see what happens

Why food becomes the default coping mechanism for ADHD brains, and why it makes complete neurological sense

The role of alexithymia -- emotional blindness -- in ADHD and how it keeps people stuck in cycles they cannot see

Why parents often discover midway through Kamy's program that their child's weight is not actually the core problem

The Titanic metaphor: why small shifts in trajectory matter more than dramatic interventions, especially with younger kids

How ADHD is the first three letters of addiction -- and what that means for how we protect our kids

Every person on Kamy's team has personally struggled with childhood weight. This conversation will change how you see the pantry.

Find Kamy at steptogether.us

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.

What is your biggest challenge with ADHD?

If your child has ADHD, you have probably wrestled with whether the school they're in is actually built for them. Antoinette Elliott has spent over 20 years in childcare, and her answer is a practical one: most aren't, but they don't have to be.

Antoinette is the founder of All Our Children Elite Childcare Academy in Georgia, a nature-based, extended-hour childcare program that intentionally includes children with ADHD, autism, and other learning differences alongside their peers. Every staff member completes crisis prevention training. Every meal is vegetarian. Every child is treated like they belong.

In this episode:

• The quick win: if your ADHD child's sleep is delayed at night, protect their morning -- a later start time produced fewer discipline issues all summer
• Why inclusive classrooms benefit every child, not just the ones with diagnoses
• How outdoor environments level the playing field for neurodivergent kids in ways a classroom never can
• What crisis prevention training teaches that most schools are simply not doing
• Why the vegetarian meal plan works even for the pickiest eaters -- and what social modeling has to do with it
• The story of a mom in her late twenties who discovered her own ADHD after her children were evaluated -- and why it is still happening to so many women

Antoinette's message is simple: you did it the hard way. Now there are resources. Your child does not have to do it the hard way too.

Find Antoinette at aocelitechildcare.com and on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook at All Our Children.

Support the show

Loved this episode? Here's your next step.

✅ Grab the Starter Bundle: Dopamine Hit List + More — click here for your free reset toolkit for the ADHD mom brain

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.