Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Straight from the Life Empowerment Center, James Ochoa is back today to share a story of his own emotional storm and the strategies he employed to move through it.

This is one of those important episodes. Important, not just because of the lessons and strategies we share for moving through your own emotional ADHD storms, but for the example that James puts on display. He is, after all, a leading voice in healthy living with ADHD, and he’s suffering publicly through a career-defining storm of his own. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. There is no shame in the battles we engage with our ADHD.

Thanks to James for sharing his story (which you can read in full in the links below).

Links & Notes

Thank you for supporting The ADHD Podcast on Patreon!

• Read James’ Audible Storm Story
• Share your ‘Storm Story’ with James
• James’ resources for listeners

• (00:00) - This Is The ADHD Podcast

There aren’t many practitioners writing about today’s topic. Unless, that is, you look up the collected works of Dr. Bill Dodson. Dr. Dodson is an award-winning board-certified psychiatrist and specialist in adult ADHD and his contributions to the study of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria bring him to the show today. According to Dr. Dodson, nearly all those living with ADHD live with some level of rejection sensitivity, and thanks to the poor training on the ADHD connections to the condition, patients are going misdiagnosed and mistreated as a result.

Today on the show, Dr. Dodson joins Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright to discuss Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and provide new language to frame a state those living with ADHD know all too well.

About Dr. William Dodson
Dr. Bill Dodson is a award-winning board-certified psychiatrist and specialist in adult ADHD. While Dr. Dodson has been on the faculties of Georgetown University and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center he is primarily a clinical practitioner who tries to combine evidence-based practice techniques with practice-based evidence. In addition to being named a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and recipient of the national Maxwell J. Schleifer Award for Distinguished Service to Persons with Disabilities, Dr. Dodson is one of two experts from the US to the World Anti-Doping program for the development of guidelines for the use of ADHD stimulant medications in the world’s athletes.

Links & Notes

• Dr. William Dodson at Additudemag.com

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

Living with ADHD can be exhausting. But even at the end of a long day, responsibilities pile up. How do you recharge to stay focused... when your focus has lost its focus?

This week’s show is anchored around a recent article by friend-of-the-show Casey Dixon. Her ideas were inspirational for us and spurred our conversation today. Plus, thanks to a listener question, we get to wax dreamily about our ideal ADHD home!

Links & Notes

• ‘How to Recharge your Tired Brain After Work’ by Casey Dixon

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

The connection between work satisfaction and ADHD is pretty clear if you’re living through the frustration. There are all kinds of reasons to leave a job, but taking the actual step of resigning is one best approached with a clear head. This week on the show, Nikki and Pete share a set of questions that can help you frame your own perspective at work and help find clarity in your desire to leave, or stick it out and work for change.

Nikki’s list of probing questions:

• What’s causing you to even think about this question?
• How much do you complain about your job? What do you complain most about?
• How would you describe your relationship with your boss?
• What about co-workers?
• If you were still doing this job 2 years from now, would be happy or mad?
• Are you holding on to your current job because you are afraid of change?
• Are there more things you like about your job than not like?
• Can you live with what you don’t like?
• Is it possible to change some of the things you don’t like?
• Do you feel supported at your job, do you see opportunities for growth?
• How does your job affect your physical and mental health?
• Can you afford to quit your job before finding a new one?
• Do you feel like you have a good work and life balance?

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

There are signs in certain kinds of organizations that document the last time staff their experienced an incident. Any sort of incident that leads to work stopping counts, and as soon as it happens, the sign gets reset and everyone starts over at Day Zero. “This facility has worked [0] Days without incident,” the sign says.

If there’s anything in our lives that can cause work to stop unpredictably, uncontrollably, sometimes even unconsciously, it’s ADHD. What do we do so that we can reset our own sign to Day Zero? This week on the show, Pete and Nikki take an incident response approach to ADHD with a focus on mindfully controlling what you can control, not lying to yourself, and moving forward. Every bad day has a day zero right around the corner.

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

The idea that individual ADHD symptoms exacerbate one another isn’t new to those of us living with the diagnosis. But what happens when symptoms collude to create cycles of behavior and responses? The results can be vastly more damaging than any individual symptom on its own.

That’s the question that comes from a listener today: how do you navigate the procrastination-anxiety loop that emerges when hyperfocus and disinterest collide head on? This week on the show, Nikki shares background on the conditions that allow this sort of hyperfocus and procrastination to occur, and tools to shape a response before it happens again.

Links & Notes

Thank you for supporting The ADHD Podcast on Patreon!

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast!

Brett Terpstra is a software developer, author, and podcaster and his work has been the subject of Pete’s technology fever dreams for years now. Brett is also unusually candid about his experience living with ADHD and bipolar disorder and after years of processing in public, he’s managed to figure some things out… others, a mystery.

This week on the show, Brett joins us to talk about his experience living and working with ADHD. He shares his experience in learning how to live with his shadow, and how to forgive when the shadow takes control. This is a show about the voices that we listen to, and those that we learn to avoid as we wake up and get moving with ADHD.

Links & Notes

Thank you for supporting The ADHD Podcast on Patreon!

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

It’s one of the most important routines you can manage. Getting it right means you’re impacting every area of your life in some way. You’ll feel better, you’ll think more clearly, you might even be better looking. OK, we can’t guarantee that last one, but you’ll feel better looking!

What is this magic routine? It’s meal planning. Figuring out how to best strategize the food you bring into your home and creating smart habits around eating it is both challenging, and deceptively simple at once. But it turns out that if you’re working to build good living systems for your ADHD, you likely already have the skills you need to make meal-planning successful for yourself and your family!

Links & Notes

• Paprika Recipe App for iOS, macOS, Android, Windows
• InstantPot on Amazon
• Nom Nom Paleo
• Soylent
• Blue Apron

• (00:00) - The ADHD Podcast — Meal-Planning

Sure, we’re in the middle of our back-to-school series. But whether you’re heading back to school or just getting ready for the seasons to change, there’s never a better time to review your routines. From daily hygiene to writing that next report, this week on the show Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright take on the components of a great routine, and the mindset you’ll need to cultivate to make it stick.

Links & Notes

Thank you for supporting The ADHD Podcast on Patreon!

• (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast

If you’ve ever tried to engage in a discussion of your ADHD with a busy professor and run into frustration, you’re not alone. This week, we asked a group of instructors what they would like to hear when working with ADHD students and the results were puzzling, frustrating, dare we say disappointing? But there’s room for hope thanks to some enterprising student services folks and a general spirit of educators that really do want the best for their students. This is an episode about confronting lack of experience in a slow-moving educational system and an effort to get what you need out of your educational career.

Thank you for supporting The ADHD Podcast on Patreon!

• (00:00) - Welcome to the ADHD Podcast