Dr. Micaela
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
So thinking about that, right?
Thinking also about maybe you don't necessarily want to cut down on screen time.
Maybe physical activity is just not your jam or not accessible to you for whatever reason.
Focusing on things like healthy nutrition,
and really being motivated to focus on, essentially, I'm not gonna walk through every single wellness behavior, but thinking instead of like, oh, my sleep is so bad, I must focus on my sleep, which is the best, because then you're laying in bed and you're like, why am I not asleep?
So a broad range of experience and exposure to all the things that we as humans go through.
Why am I not asleep?
Oh my God, how I can't fall asleep because this is really stressful because I can't fall asleep.
And now I'm really not gonna be well-rested, right?
And we go on those spirals, which are totally detrimental to sleep patterns.
So instead, pick your own one or two wellness areas that you would like to focus on.
And the cool thing is that when you can really dial in on like one or two areas of your physical wellness, a lot of times those things can kind of align in a way that make the overall functioning optimal.
So that's exciting.
I do know that a lot of the things that I'm saying are like, I don't know if it's controversial, but like for anybody who's struggled with sleep to hear that like, yeah, you just have to sleep.
I know can feel like, I mean, invalidating for one, but also just like
defeating, right?
Like, ew, you're telling me that this thing that I struggle with that is awful for so many different reasons is something that I kind of have to focus on.
I was at a conference, actually a weird number of years ago now, because I don't think about how long I've been practicing, but...
I was listening to a group that was presenting on a ton of research on sleep.
Because a lot of my career has focused on people who have a lot going on, so people with more complicated mental health pictures or people with more severe forms of mental health conditions, I have actually seen a misrepresented number of neurodivergent folks in my clinical practice.
And what they did was instead of focusing on a single like mental health condition or a single set of sleep behaviors, they just look at anyone who had been diagnosed with a mental health condition, their therapy seeking behaviors.
And then they're like, like rates of like remission or like how long that mental health condition went away and stayed away.
And what they learned was, fun fact, if you can't get your sleep in order, it is the single biggest vulnerability to relapse in any mental health condition, which is like so annoying, right, again.
And so it is one of the things that if I'm working with somebody and we're like, we're solid, we've made such good progress, part of getting ready to say goodbye in the therapy work that I'm gonna be doing with folks
is saying, hey, your sleep is still a little wobbly or we got your sleep dialed in.
That is going to be your kryptonite probably moving forward.
And so how do we make sure that you're not just focused on like, oh, doing my gratitude journal or hanging out with friends or staying connected to hobbies, but also making sure that you're thinking about how am I going to be committed to
to whatever my sleep practices are.
And then because life shows up and slaps us in the face often and mainly without our consent, right, is knowing that sleep is also going to get disturbed and that when that happens to really move that to the top of the pile of things that I need to be focusing on.
Um, yeah, I could go on about this forever and ever but I feel like I'm gonna maybe move on to our next topic because I think that will give us some of the similar rants but also some new things for you to listen to me battle about.
All right.
So my whole life, am I on the right one?
Yep.
My whole life, I thought I just had severe social anxiety, but it was all related to ADHD.
My mind is blown.
I had no idea that so many of my struggles had anything to do with ADHD.
For example, overthinking sentences before speaking, rephrasing things a hundred times in my head.
Preemptively explaining myself before doing anything, as referenced, click here.
Having trouble making and maintaining eye contact.
Having trouble paying attention to or recalling what people were saying.
Preferring to work when there's no one at the office, like late nights or weekends.
panicking and making mistakes when someone is watching me at work interrupting people and or not knowing when to chime in i can never find the natural lull in a conversation so much more i can't remember right now because of my terrible memory did anyone else go through the same thing i mean don't get me wrong i still think i have some social anxiety the all in the title was hyperbolic
But now I'm now starting to find out how much the ADHD contributes to it.
And holy shit, does it explain a lot.
And so what that means is that I do have kind of a specialty vibe around the neurodivergent aspect of humanity.
Just pure catharsis, baby.
If anyone is curious, I'm a 25-year-old male and recently diagnosed.
Okay.
So...
so many things here in this post.
And I wanna start with kind of, well, I guess I'll start with thinking about the brain differences, right?
And because I've already explained how that frontal lobe is the thing that is regulating our emotion center.
And so when our frontal lobe is not as active,
Um, then I am less good at telling my emotions, settle down biscuit.
Um, or like, Hey, we don't need to react to this one.
This is a no big deal.
Um, and so if a person has ADHD, they are going to be by definition, less skilled, um, neurobiologically at regulating their emotions.
That means more reactive emotions, more intense emotions when they happen.
Um,
That can mean, right?
So everybody doesn't have all of these things, but some people do.
And some people have some features of this.
Some people with ADHD have a really, we call it slow return to baseline because, oh my gosh, my emotions get loud.
And because I don't have the shusher active, it takes me a really long, like bunny hill, right?
And so love to layer that on to some of the conversations that we have traditionally around mental health.
Really long time to calm those emotions down.
And for people who have some of that more intense emotion dysregulation because of these biological vulnerabilities, what often can happen in the context of those things is we get, let's say...
I'm sitting in a group of people and talking and somebody kind of like giggles and looks at me.
And my brain interprets that as like, oh my God, they're laughing at you because you sound stupid, right?
So, um, my brain reacts kind of intensely, right?
Maybe in this situation, I'm feeling super anxious.
And so I shut down.
Right.
And then I'm like super quiet.
Maybe even like I blush or sometimes there's like water that leaks out of my eyes when I'm feeling like overwhelmed by emotion.
That being said,
And so, sorry.
we have this primary like stimulus, which is someone laughed at me.
And then I have a cascading reaction of my emotional response.
But after maybe 30 seconds, one of my friends looks at me and is like, what's wrong with you?
Okay.
So now, even if I was trying to like regulate, calm myself down, I have a new spike, right?
Very little of what I talk about when I'm talking about neurodivergent people is not related to all of the humans.
So let's pretend if we like make it, I'm gonna use my hands like a wave, right?
So, whoop.
someone giggled at me and I'm trying, trying, trying to regulate myself.
And then someone says, what's wrong with you?
So I got another spike and then I'm like nothing.
And I'm trying to calm myself down.
And then maybe I hear somebody else in the room who's not even looking at me laugh again.
And they're not even laughing at me.
But right now I'm so sensitized that my emotions are on hyper like threat alert.
And so it's going to ping my radar again.
OK, and then I finish my lunch hour, we go back to class or work or whatever, and I'm still quiet and shut down.
And now I hear my friends whispering or saying something like, God, I don't know what's wrong with her today.
And so you get this pattern of not only am I already like more emotionally vulnerable and emotionally reactive, but then I have these constant pings that are continuing to activate that emotional response.
And so I, now I'm getting a reputation as like, I'm so sensitive.
And so if you don't identify as neurodivergent, that doesn't necessarily mean that the things that we talk about aren't going to be helpful for you today.
I'm such a cry baby.
Like,
You know, maybe we shouldn't hang out with her because I'm just going to hurt her feelings all the time.
And this can look in a lot of different ways, right?
So I'm giving an anxious example because our post is talking about social anxiety, but this can happen with all different flavors of emotions.
And we do each...
have our own vulnerabilities or kind of like predispositions towards being more reactive in certain emotional profiles.
So that complicates things even further, right?
Okay, so let's bring it back to, I thought I just had social anxiety, but turns out a lot of this stuff is ADHD.
well, ADHD is gonna make me a shitload more vulnerable to social anxiety, right?
Because of that frontal lobe deficit that's not gonna be as good at regulating the emotion.
And so my brain is going to activate patterns of responding in socially anxious or in anxious ways when I, and social anxiety is defined as the fear of negative evaluation by others.
And so that is really like,
when I'm talking about social anxiety, I probably should have started with that.
Like I'm afraid that I'm being judged negatively by other people.
So that being said, we're going to get started with our first post.
And so this might look like, oh, I don't like public speaking.
I don't like going to parties, but it can also look like
I'm hyper-conscious about my body or my physical appearance because of the fear that other people are going to judge me.
Not just because I'm like, oh, I don't like my nose.
I don't like my hair.
I don't like this or that.
But it's at the core of that is because other people
are going to judge me negatively.
It can also come up in performance situations, right?
So like, oh, I have to get the best grade on this, or I have to get like a five-star review on this because otherwise people will judge me negatively, right?
And so social anxiety can look like a whole bunch of different things as long as you just think about the fact that at its core is fear of negative evaluation, right?
Um, so, uh, someone with ADHD is going to be way more vulnerable to developing that because their emotions are going to be hyperreactive and then they're going to fall into this pattern.
And we have this like really fun nerdy saying like neurons that fire together, wire together.
So essentially the more often I do a thing in my brain, the stronger that connection is.
And let's pull this up with bigger font.
Or if you think about it, like I just got back from, um, hiking a bunch, um, on a trip.
And so,
if you go on a little trail that only the deer have walked on, it's pretty mild.
You can't really necessarily make out the path always.
But if you go on like a big ass like horse trail that like a lot of people walk every day, that's a well-trodden, established, wider path.
And so when we have repeated reactions, we're building horse trails, those big established path, highways, right?
If we're thinking instead like a car metaphor because not everybody hikes in the wilderness.
So we've got that going for us.
All right.
The other thing is that especially people with ADHD, but people without ADHD can be weirdos too or unique, but neurodivergent people literally are different.
So I think this is what y'all are here for.
And so are highly likely to be judged for being themselves because they're not fitting in with what's going on with the mainstream society.
And so it's not just my brain like misreading cues and like being hyper reactive.
It's no very legitimately people think you're weird, or you different.
And so depending actually especially on your age or social situation.
Do you feel significantly better on a night of poor sleep?
So, adolescence so.
around 12 to early 20s uh again depending on puberty and hormones and all those fun things um the developmental task of a brain at that stage of development is to begin focusing on other people their age and to fit in with other people their age and yes there are all sorts of kids who are like yeah i'm gonna fit in but also i'm gonna be really different and i want my unique identity
but the mechanism of that behavior is still designed to fit in.
So I stand out to fit in, I stand out, but I stand out in a way that I want people to recognize me or kind of like accept me into my like social group or whatnot.
And yes, your brain develops.
And so you have less of that orientation, but it never goes away because our brains are wired to need other humans.
Weird question, but I only had about five hours of sleep last night and I felt more alert.
And so we have socially wired brains.
So we forever are going to be a little bit more oriented to what other people our age think, even though in adolescence, it's like super relevant.
But then we get to a point where maybe you are a member of like a faith community that's really important to you.
But being a little off or being different is something that is pretty actively shunned, right?
Like who forgets to turn their ringer off in the middle of like a faith service, right?
Especially if you've got ADHD, you forget a lot of things.
And so there are going to be a range of benign behaviors that you're going to accidentally be engaging in.
Also, I love the interrupting one because it's like, oh, I can't hold my mouth shut and I just have to let it go.
But also like, is there ever a lull in conversation because I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and then I like miss my chance.
Um, or other people are not so obsessed about whether or not they're going to interrupt people.
My brain feels more functional and my executive function issues have been lessened.
And so they can flow with that, like natural conversational, whatever it is.
Um, and so, yeah, you're people with ADHD, people with autism, people who are neurodivergent in whatever way.
Also people who are just unique and idiosyncratic for their interests or their likes or their
All the things, right?
They are going to be judged more often.
So you're not just biologically more vulnerable, you are socially more vulnerable to experiencing rejection and negative evaluation.
So it all comes together in a unfortunate, messy clump of things that we don't necessarily enjoy or want.
Now, again, the fun thing about this that I think is cool about what the OP was referencing in this Reddit thread is that
It's not perfect by far, but I've been getting around eight hours for two weeks and I've just felt tired and had brain fog, etc.,
when we're thinking about mental health conditions or situations in life, they are, we often use the metaphor of like a house of cards, but I've never like literally seen a house of cards.
So maybe people don't all understand that metaphor.
But if you think about it, like, I don't know, a spider web,
When to dismantle a spider web or to rebuild a spider web in a way that we want it to be, right?
If we think about like a mental health condition, conditions, or like a series of life circumstances, you don't have to peel away every single thread of a spider web.
that's exhausting.
And I guarantee you, most of us would just give up.
Some of us are just like so devoted and dedicated.
And I love that for you.
And I'm so jealous.
And some of us are like, wow, I tried.
And I even gave it a really good try, but I can't do this.
And so we just give up.
Now, the cool thing about mental health conditions or life situations too, is that it's actually more, can I find one or two threads that if I break them, or if I pull just that one thread off, the whole web collapses.
Today is not the level of functionality I want by far, but it's much better than previous days.
Right.
And that, my friends, is much easier to do to gain momentum and change in your life.
And so while this poster probably meets criteria, I'm just let's just pretend.
Right.
This person might meet criteria for both social anxiety and ADHD.
And once they understood that at the core of those things was actually ADHD, then they could focus on that, which actually makes the rest of the spider web kind of melt away and then freeze us up to rebuild the spider web in the way and the configuration that we wanted it to be.
So to give you like an illustration of what that might look like.
you don't just get diagnosed with ADHD and you're like, Oh my God, I'm so normal now.
This always happens unless I've been sleep deprived for two or more days and doesn't work if I pull an all-nighter or get three hours of sleep.
Right?
Like now that I understand that I'm neurodivergent, like I can totally just, um, like fit in and not interrupt people.
Um, just like you can't always say like, Oh, Hey, sorry.
I interrupted you 10 times today.
Um, I have ADHD.
Um, and you can, um, um,
What it allows you to do and what is like the secret key to so many things in life and is very, very hard is that you start to recognize, you know what?
These are my weaknesses.
Yeah.
And now that I kind of have a better understanding of myself, I suck at like large group conversations because I either sit there mute because I can't figure out when to talk or I'm constantly interrupting and I feel like I'm monopolizing the conversation.
And so...
Once you actually start to embrace those weaknesses, you can do something different about it.
Like, I'm just not going to hang out with people who are aggressively offended by me interrupting people.
Only at five to six hours.
I'm going to do my best in situations that I can't avoid it.
But beyond that, I'm going to choose to not surround myself by those people.
Hold on one second, because this...
Okay, hopefully I don't have to do that again because I'm imagining that sounds terrible on audio.
Okay, so...
If I keep the bad sleep up, I crash and feel terrible for the next day like normal.
Uh, it can also be, I, I am, uh, practically time blind.
And despite, I used to say that I have like a tardy arrival disorder.
Um, right.
It's just a funny way of saying like, I'm fucking late, like all the time.
And it doesn't matter how hard I try.
I am late and I'm late and I'm late.
And sometimes I feel like the
I have made everything happen to arrive somewhere a half an hour ahead of time.
And then there is the stupidest accident in the whole world and road construction on the main alternative route.
That is not my fault, right?
And because I'm late all the time, these rare occasions that are really not 100% my fault, they just fall into that pattern, right?
I don't do well with friends who value timeliness.
If that's a person who's like, I worked with someone who I adore, who had the mentality, like if you're not 10 minutes early, then you're late.
Anyone here experience this?
And let me tell you, we had a lot of learning in our early days.
holy gee, relationship, because that was not the way that I operated.
But we actually in that relationship learned how to balance each other out and that my strengths could overcome some of the things that she had a hard time with, just like her strengths really overcame some of my weaknesses.
All I can think of is that I'm using adrenaline to keep myself awake and that's acting as a substitute for dopamine, which I suspect I chronically lack.
So learning about yourself and learning to love the parts that are your warts or your weaknesses are things that can really transform your functioning.
Because now I'm not really that anxious because I have way fewer fucks to give.
When somebody is like, oh my God, you're so rude.
I can't believe you got here five minutes late.
Shut up.
Five minutes late is on time.
Okay.
Um, but we liberate ourselves.
So that's going to melt the social anxiety away because I am no longer, um,
like distributing my fucks around everyone everyone doesn't no longer has the power because it's like yeah you can make fun of me but i already know this about myself or you cannot like this about me and you can therefore choose to just not be around me that being said
We can't do that in every situation, right?
So there are going to be areas where you have to be good at being on time, at maintaining your impulses, like don't swear, right?
And don't pretend like you just caught yourself before you swore.
There are going to be times that you have to really regulate yourself.
not diagnosed.
But the cool thing is, is that when you...
when you devote way less energy to controlling yourself in every possible area of your life, then you've got a lot more to kind of invest in those rarer search situations.
And you're never going to be perfect.
Spoiler alert.
I hope you've all learned that by now.
You are never going to be perfect, which is beautiful because that is what makes us all so fun and unique.
Okay.
And learning how to love yourself is, frankly, it's an excruciating journey because even if you're like 14 and listening to this information.
So I know this is such a hot topic because sleep is the bane of a lot of people's existences, right?
you've got 14 years of learning that you are doing something wrong, that you don't fit in, that people don't like you exactly as you are, et cetera, et cetera.
And I very rare, I'm going to guess like very few of you are 14.
And so you are quite literally combating a lifetime of learning that you need to be different, change yourself, try something new, just work harder.
Yeah.
Be more caring.
Obviously, you're just not a thoughtful person if you have to interrupt or if you have to work so hard to think about what you're going to say before you say it so that you say it right and don't hurt people's feelings, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And so you are doing to learn how to truly love yourself and your weaknesses.
You have to undo essentially that.
a lifetime of learning while the whole time still getting messages from your environment that, yeah, you, you really do need to kind of like fit in.
You need to try harder, do better, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.
Um, and so it's not an easy journey.
Um,
And when you can, think about all the energy that you devote to fitting in or to not being yourself or to not talk about dinosaurs in every conversation that you have.
And not going to lie, just reading the subject header for this post triggered me so hard.
If you just embrace like, yeah, I'm the dinosaur person.
love it or leave it.
It's fine.
Um, then all of a sudden the people who aren't going to like you, that's fine.
Um, they're going to fade out of your life or they're going to avoid you, or maybe they're even going to be like, Oh my God, dinosaurs again.
And you can be like, yep, dinos.
That's right.
Um, and then it, it allows you to just be so much happier.
Um,
And again, I know that sounds, it could sound maybe like toxic positivity.
I want to be real clear that this is hard, hard, hard shit to do.
And if you want to embark on trying that, it can, you can get there.
I've worked with a ton of people who have learned how to be able to do this.
And it's, again, it's probably even a better game changer than sleep.
So you could learn to love yourself and your poor sleeping self.
And then you have more energy to conserve because you're not sleeping well, right?
Yeah, I feel like the TLDR of this whole stream is going to be like, you do you because you're the only one who knows what you need, right?
And the reason for that is that healthy sleep is
And that's hard.
All right.
I'm going to actually check in with the chat and see anything that I'm missing.
Oh, I've got some dynos.
Oh, hey, 15-year-old recently diagnosed with ADHD.
Good on you.
Love a diagnosis in the adolescence.
And I hope you are able to figure out how to learn to love yourself and all your wonderful weirdnesses.
Okay, doesn't look like I have any major big questions or anything on here.
obnoxiously probably the most single, most important thing that anyone can do to protect their mental health.
So I'm going to keep going with our next post.
Yeah.
And this one is super connected to what we've just been talking about.
So ADHD guilt after social hangouts is unbearable.
First of all, preach.
I love people.
I love deep conversations, laughing until my stomach hurts, feeling close to someone.
But almost every single time I hang out with someone, I come home and I feel like a horrible person.
I feel this like so deeply.
I replay every moment in my head and I start obsessing.
Did I interrupt too much?
Did I overshare?
Was I too loud?
Did I dominate the conversation?
Did I make it about me too much?
And if I forget something like responding to a story they told me or following up later, I beat myself up about it.
They probably think I don't care.
I get flooded with guilt.
And then I avoid messaging them for days because I'm so embarrassed, which just makes it worse.
Yes, it does.
It's like there's no off switch.
I either feel like a burden when I show up or a bad friend when I don't.
And I know it's irrational because most of the time they had a good time.
They even tell me they did love that.
Um, which to me as someone who has struggled with sleep my entire life.
But the guilt is louder than the reassurance.
I wish I could just exist with people and not feel like I have to apologize for who I am after every interaction.
Oh my goodness.
Ouch.
Yes.
And this is something that is...
I mean, super common for people with ADHD, also super common for people with social anxiety, but also like if you,
just uh have like crummy self-esteem um the the morning after or like right that the hours after your social time is an opportunity that your brain takes and not it's not your brain it's it's the
the little villains who are holed up in there and are whispering nasty things into your mind, right?
And for somebody who in clinical practice, um, is some of the things that I see most in the folks that I work with, um, is obnoxious, right?
So whether it's a mental health condition or just low self-esteem, because we don't diagnose low self-esteem and it's a horribly debilitating experience.
So-
regardless of the reason why, we can often have this like rebound effect.
When we're in the moment with people, let's just take ADHD off the table for like a hot second, okay?
So when we're in the moment with people, a lot of times those voices are drowned out because we're able to be engaged and distracted and we're experiencing joy or excitement or any kind of stimulation.
Remembering that our brains are socially wired
And so we get a, there's a dopamine response, right?
There's a social reward experience simply from interacting with other humans.
And then that reward is dosed higher the more I enjoy or connect with the people around me.
So it's like those voices fade into the background.
And then we get home and we are alone.
Or mine does this.
We lay down to go rest our weary minds to fall asleep at night.
Like I hate the fact that I need healthy sleep to function well.
And those voices are like, mwahaha.
I finally have the opportunity to take my turn.
And because you didn't give me a turn all day, I'm gonna be extra loud, okay?
And so we get preyed upon by those voices or that experience of low self-esteem, social anxiety,
or the ADHD guilt, right?
And so remembering that if we have ADHD, it's going to make it even harder to regulate that emotional experience because a neurotypical brain is able to say, hey, you know what?
Now there is some research around this and, um, uh,
It's OK.
I'm sure it was fine.
Look, they texted and they said that a great time or look at all these pictures we took.
It was so much fun.
Everyone's face is smiling.
well hello party people welcome to our stream today um to kick us off i'll start with our traditional disclaimer that nothing in our time together today is intended to be medical or therapeutic advice this is for informational and entertainment purposes only and if you do feel like you need to seek professional help i encourage you to do so
I just need to be OK.
Like y'all are lying to me.
Right.
So with ADHD, you have that added vulnerability of the muscle that's trying to squish down that ADHD guilt piece.
is not very strong.
Even if you are a person who takes ADHD stimulant medication, a lot of times when we're done hanging out with friends, it's usually in the later afternoon or evenings.
And so that is when our ADHD medication is wearing off.
So you are particularly more vulnerable to the fact that your frontal lobe is less functional and less able to regulate those loud emotional reactions, whether it's anxiety, guilt, or just that negative self-esteem talk in your mind.
anecdotally, we all probably experienced this.
So it can be incredibly overwhelming.
And then layering, of course, on top that if you have ADHD, you probably did forget to respond to someone's comments or you probably did interrupt a story to tell a story that told a story that told a story.
And, you know, in the best conversations, these are stories that go back and forth and back and forth.
But in that moment, you're like, OMG, we never got to the original story.
Okay.
And I'm such a dick that I like interrupted my friend and they wanted to tell me this cool thing.
So I'm going to dive a little bit into why this can sometimes happen.
And like, I derailed that whole conversation.
And I bet they felt like I wasn't even listening and I don't even care.
And I make everything about me.
And so there's just this pattern of negativity that is related to very real differences or deficits.
If you wanted to use the word deficits, I prefer differences because, for example, I still actually did remember the... Sorry, I just got distracted by that color swatch.
I still did remember the original story that my friend was talking about.
Highly unlikely that somebody who doesn't have ADHD could pluck that single tidbit of content because
And then I'm probably going to go on a low key aggressive rant about why sleep is so important and why, even though we hate it and have such a hard time with it, we want to prioritize working on that whenever we can.
the one of the executive functioning deficits and this is why the name attention deficit kind of sucks is because it's not a lack of attention it's a lack of a filter on the attention it's a lack of selective attention so it's like s-a-d-h-d selective attention deficit disorder
We don't need to go down that rabbit hole.
So people with ADHD are taking in every piece of information all at the same time without the ability to say, hey, stop paying attention to the seams on my shirt.
You don't need that information right now.
um focus on the conversation that's happening in front of you focus on the lecture focus on what your boss is saying right um it's also why people with adhd are like squirrel um because there there's no filter and so they can bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce now um
Is it possible for someone without ADHD to remember all the different things?
Of course it is.
I'm just saying there are certain superpowers that people with ADHD might have more than others.
And I think it's important that while we're getting all those negative messages from society and from the people around us of like, don't interrupt, don't do this, don't do that.
Why can't you sit still?
It's also nice to be like, I can sit still.
In fact, I can hyper-focus for eight hours and knock out a whole bunch of work and you need to take breaks if you're not hyper-focused.
Um, or whatever.
Right.
Um, again, see how learning to love yourself can be really important and learn how to like capitalize on your strengths.
So thinking about that 80.
So of course, I'm not just going to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
ADHD guilt.
Um, let's think about, and I haven't been doing this.
Oops.
Um, well, depending on how time goes, um, I can circle back to our previous posts and talk about like, what are we going to do about it?
Right.
And so thinking about some like really concrete strategies and there's a good chance that like half of you have tried most of these things.
Okay.
So I unfortunately don't have magic to offer.
And all of these things that I talk about.
So why might a slightly attenuated night of sleep, right?
Well, I've been primarily talking about like love yourself, embrace your weaknesses.
So that's a huge journey.
But all of the things that I'm talking about are going to involve like.
extensive hard work which I roll my eyes at because like who wants to do that and it's so defeating every time we try something and then after we try it like three four times or even for like two three weeks it hasn't like reaped the benefit of
what we're like trying to get.
Right.
And so it's like one of those things that you and remember that in your brain, you've got like little tiny footpaths of the things that you're trying to do and you have to build those into highways or horse trails.
So five, six hours actually lead to improved experiences or improved performance.
Right.
And so, yeah, that takes a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of repetition to build these new pathways in your brain, which is exhausting.
So that's my spoiler alert for no magic here.
And sorry, you do have to work hard, but you probably already have been.
Okay.
So thinking about like ADHD guilt and the whole, like when I get home or after the fact, or even, and the worst is when you lay down, because if you lay down, you're really trying to relax and go to sleep.
And if that's the moment that your brain is preying on you,
Now you can't sleep, which is going to make you more vulnerable to emotion dysregulation and is going to continue that spiraling experience.
So love that for us.
So a couple ideas.
Number one is you can actually preempt those voices from getting to take the mic away from you when you get home and actually strategically impose that on yourself, right?
So let's pretend that you hung out with friends and then you're going home and you know that at some point in time, those voices are gonna get really loud.
And that might be for a neurodivergent person, but it also might be for a totally neurotypical person.
Maybe they already have been because there were minutes in between leaving friends and getting home, right?
So you're going to have to figure out your own timing because you do you, right?
Whatever works best for you.
I'm going to give you the groundwork and then you can adapt and fit the way that you make sense for you.
right so i'm just gonna say pretend um as soon as you get home the first thing you're gonna do after peeing if you needed to pee um because don't hold that it makes it thinking really hard um uh is sit down and set a timer and for like i would say 10 minutes um
Absolutely no more than 15.
And if this is something that's really really painful for you to do I would start at five.
person, right?
Okay, but we're going to say a timer for 10 minutes, and actually just without thinking, no coherent speech doesn't have to be complete sentences journal or scribble.
All about what you just experienced, right?
What was it like?
What are your thoughts?
What are your emotions?
Force the guilt to come up, right?
Sleep functions to give our brains and bodies the amount of energy we need to be able to go through our day and conquer any of the things that come up.
What are the things that you're now going to beat yourself up about?
What are you worried about?
What might you have missed?
What did you not...
do well, all the things that your brain is going to come at you for anyways.
So when we do this intentionally, we are building the muscle of emotion regulation.
I'm saying it's time for us to think about and feel this, not you, you being that mean voice inside my mind, right?
So I'm saying that I'm going to spend time thinking about this.
And with a timer, I'm putting a capsule on this.
So you get 10 minutes and you're going to do all of your worries.
And then when that timer goes off, mine is always a duck.
And so it quacks at me.
I'm like, all right, sweet.
The duck is quacking and you are done, right?
This is not the kind of like journaling experience that you're gonna save and like reread tomorrow.
Please don't do that to yourself.
That's very mean.
This is intended to be like word, emotion, thought, vomit onto a piece of paper.
Yes, you can do it by typing.
And because your brain processes things much more thoroughly when you are handwriting, it's much more powerful of a intervention, if you will.
If you handwrite, right, because you're processing at multiple layers of brain interaction with this experience.
And so that helps really get through all of those things.
Okay.
Now, what you can do after the duck quacks or the timer goes off is you can kind of skim that and you may be like, hmm.
And so if we get enough sleep, that means our body is adequately charged, right?
My friend told me that she was having a really hard time in her relationship right now.
And then we got distracted and we never came back to it.
I bet you she really wanted to talk about that, but she was also really scared.
And so she didn't bring it back up.
And I messed up.
And so now that I've reflected on that, that gives me the opportunity to call or text my friend and be like, hey...
I realized that you kind of dropped a huge bomb and then I smothered it with me.
And so what I really want to do is check in with you again.
Do you want to talk about it now or do you want to hang out again soon?
And I promise this is going to be dedicated to you because you're important to me, right?
It's never about being perfect.
I know I already said that, but like, let me say that again.
No strategy is ever gonna get you to perfection.
It's about recognizing when you did something that you actually want to apologize for or that you actually feel like you fucked up on and then recovering from it or making amends or addressing the issue.
To be able to do all the things that come our way.
So yeah, I missed it the first time you brought it up, but I didn't miss it all the way.
And what I'm saying now to you is you're really important to me and I wanna make sure that you have time and space for this if this was a big deal for you.
Um, and maybe your friend is like, oh yeah, no, it's not a big deal.
We got into a big fight about the remote control before I left.
And so I was really angry, but like he found it and he was like, oh my God, I'm such a dick.
If we don't get enough sleep, then our brain is like, well, shoot,
Um, so everything's fine.
Right.
And maybe they're
Covering something up bigger.
I don't know.
But also maybe it wasn't that big of a deal.
But the fact that you said, hey, I noticed and I'm checking in the communication to your friend is you matter to me.
And so that can help really connect me with my values of being a good friend so that, yes, I might miss things in the moment, but I'm still here and I'm present.
Right.
So that might be something you noticed.
Um, if you notice that you have a really loud worry, like everything you journaled is, oh my God, everything I did was make about me.
It's okay to do a gentle check-in, right?
Hey, I'm noticing friend that, uh, I talked a lot about me today and I'm worried that I didn't give enough space for you.
then your friend can be like, no, it's no big deal.
I totally feel like I had enough time and space for me.
I don't know if I'm allowed to swear here, actually.
Or your friend can be like, yeah, you selfish jerk.
And then you can go into your next hangout session being more intentional of like, okay, I am going to laser focus on you and then maintain that for as long as you can, because maybe you can't.
Undivided attention is actually hard for even neurotypical people.
A shoot.
So yeah.
If you read through that and you're like, you know, there's a lot of worries here, but there's no like loud major themes that I need to check on.
There's no big mistakes that I feel like I need to apologize for.
Then you take that, you shred it, you tear it up, you burn it.
If there's a safe way to do that in your space, you get rid of it.
Because that is no longer any of your business.
That is all of my immediate reaction.
And now I'm done with it, right?
I've done my reflection.
I've done my experience.
And then I'm going to plan some kind of a transition activity.
Thank you.
So that might be, I'm going to go get in the shower.
I'm allowed to say shit.
That might be, I'm going to go...
Brush my dog.
I don't know.
Some kind of distraction activity.
Maybe go play a game for 15 minutes.
I'm not sure.
Okay.
Whatever your version of a distraction is.
If you notice, because a lot of people will do that journal activity, tear it up.
So.
They're doing great.
They do their transition activity.
Like let's pretend.
Okay.
So now I'm going to take a shower and I'm going to get ready for bed.
they get in the shower and all they're doing is thinking about all the stuff they journaled about, but they're supposed to shut the door on that, but they can't because it's so overwhelming.
Our body is like, OMG, like I don't have enough energy, which means I'm going to put all of my systems on hyper threat alert mode.
Then what you need to do is figure out, okay, so my distraction activity has to include something that my brain is actively doing.
If just don't think about it was a real thing, I would genuinely not have a job, okay?
So please don't buy into that narrative of, yeah, you just need to stop thinking about it because that is not an easy thing to do.
So if you notice that your mind is still doing things, you need to actively occupy your mind.
So maybe that's do like a crossword puzzle.
I don't know, those require thinking.
Or hopping on like Call of Duty where you're going to be on chat so you can be talking to people and you're coordinating your activities or whatever, right?
Maybe that's when you start jumping onto, I don't know, Pinterest to plan your next vacation.
I'm not sure, right?
But if you notice that your brain is doing a thing, that means you need to actively engage your brain onto something else, right?
Now, another thing that can be really helpful for people with ADHD is actually doing something physical.
So if you think about like sustained attention and exercise as also working kind of in the opposite effect of how a neurotypical brain works.
So a lot of times I use this when I have kids with ADHD.
And their parents are like, they must sit down and do their homework the moment they get home from school because otherwise they won't do it because they don't focus and they bounce around the room and et cetera.
Right now, if I have typically decent sleep and then I have a just mediocre night of sleep, so five, six hours like this poster mentions sleep.
That is the worst possible thing you could do.
So if you, for kids, and I know we've got at least one person here who's probably still in school, the worst thing you can do is the second you, thinking about sustained attention as a marathon, right?
So you're gonna run a whole ass marathon and then you're gonna come home and run another whole ass marathon, shut up.
Don't do that.
So thinking about it as a flip, right?
I'm going to run a whole marathon for my day of lots of thinking and focus and attention.
And then I'm going to do something physically active to reset my brain.
And then I'll go back and run around the block a few times.
So, if you just had a really intense social experience, and you've done your journaling, sometimes what can be best is do something physical, maybe that's run up and down the stairs of your apartment building, maybe that's walk your dog which is awesome because you were just out with your friends and so your dog probably needs a walk, but instead of doing your, your quick like oh I'm just going to go around the block.
maybe walk faster, maybe do a longer walk, maybe pick a different route than you usually do so that you're getting that physical kind of like movement with the stimulation of, oh, it's something different.
And so I'm able to kind of like pay attention to things.
Outside activity, for some reason that I'm not aware of,
And I haven't researched this recently, so I don't know if the literature knows this yet, but exercise outdoors gives your brain way more benefit than exercise indoors.
So obviously if you get home at like two o'clock in the morning from being with your friends, please don't go outside unless that's actually safe for you.
But yeah, physical activity might be the thing that would be helpful for you to then transition into your bedtime routine.
Okay.
thinking about I've got all right so I am going to kind of back up for a moment because I said bedtime routine um and I'm not going to go into a whole bunch of sleep techniques because I feel like that's one of the things that the internet has a lot of um in spades and actually I wonder if
There is a function where my brain says, I can overcome this.
I'm guessing Healthy Gamer might have something fantastic around sleep.
But I'm just going to focus on one thing around sleep because we started this whole thing with sleep.
And so other than you have to do you and figure out what works for you, right?
So that includes bedtimes, that includes waketimes, that includes patterns, that includes naps, right?
You got to do you on all of those fronts.
You have to figure out what works best for you.
Not what you want, but what works best, which isn't always the same thing.
I know we're a little low on energy today, but I can actually push through and keep everything functioning at optimal levels.
One of, in my clinical practice, the most useful interventions for helping people sleep is developing a sleep, like a bedtime routine.
So looking at something that's about 20 to 30 minutes.
And this can be whether maybe you work a rotating shift schedule, so you actually can't have a regular bedtime.
If you can do a regular bedtime routine of 20 to 30 minutes before you go to sleep, that can be the thing that helps you fall asleep more consistently.
Um, this is not magic.
This is not going to be perfect.
Okay.
Just to be really, really clear again, again, again.
Um, and so what does that mean?
I know there is a shitload of research that says turn your screens off an hour before going to bed, or you're never going to be able to fall asleep because blue light.
Um, I think I've fallen asleep with my phone or a device, uh, in my hand for the past, like 20 years.
So turns out you can do it.
Um,
And yes, I use the blue light filters or whatever, but like, come on.
Um, and for some people that's going to be important not to do blah, blah, whatever.
Right.
But, um, all I'm saying is that in the, your journey of figuring out what works for you, you have to figure out, um, not just what everyone says to do, but pick your one or two crumbs of what you want.
As the original poster mentions, this doesn't work if I do it multiple days in a row, right?
Right.
So what a bedtime routine is doing, um, is essentially it's training your brain that these are your cues that sleep is ahead.
And so essentially you're engaging wind down mode.
And because you are rewiring your brain, using a bedtime routine takes at a minimum two weeks, but probably closer to four to six to fully rewire your brain into understanding.
No, I really mean it.
When we do this, we are getting ready for sleep.
And so you might try a bedtime routine and you might try it and stick to it for a long ass time and it still doesn't do anything.
Yeah, I know that sucks.
And you just kind of got to stick with it.
And then eventually you have to figure out like, hmm, maybe there's something that I'm doing that is not useful in my bedtime routine.
A lot of people in bedtime routines change their clothes, right?
So your brain can kind of do this like super mode, apply a bandaid and say, let's keep going as if I have enough energy, right?
So going from like awake clothes to whatever I'm going to wear to sleep.
And maybe you don't wear pajamas specifically.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
But as long as you do some kind of like...
transition, right?
So you're giving your brain not just the behavioral cues, but also some sensory cues.
So are you putting on something softer?
Are you putting on, maybe it's the same pair of sleep shorts that you wear every day?
I don't know.
I mean, wash them every so often, please, but...
Maybe not necessary.
I don't know.
And so change of clothes can be helpful.
A lot of people have hygiene routines, whether that's taking a shower or a bath, whether that's brushing your teeth, washing your face.
If you've got a whole lovely skincare routine, whatever it is.
Okay.
So for 20 to 30 minutes, these are allotting some of these times in here.
If you have a skincare routine that takes two hours, that is not a bedtime routine.
just so you know, uh, you can do your skincare routine for two hours and then a bedtime routine.
But if you're doing something for two hours, you're not preparing your brain for a bed.
That's a new activity.
Okay.
Just to help you kind of understand the way your brain is processing and responding to things.
Um, sometimes we like to do things at bedtime that are very exciting.
But it can't do that forever.
Uh, sometime in my life, I
reading at bedtime went from being something that put me to sleep to being something that very much did not put me to sleep.
And so if I read a book at nighttime, like within an hour,
Right.
Well, it is within an hour, but I'm going to pretend it's a half an hour because I do still do it sometimes.
So it's very adaptive to be able to say, hey, I had one day of bad sleep or I didn't get the nutrition I needed today, et cetera.
And this works whether it's an audio book or like a reading with my eyes book.
I am fucking wired.
Like reading just gets me going.
I'm like excited.
I want to read more and then, you know, forget about it.
So it delays my sleep.
So I had to learn that for myself, that it wasn't just like, oh, it's just this book.
Oh no, it's just this chapter.
Oh no, it's just this phase of my life.
No, right now, for whatever reason, reading gets me going.
So I can't read to fall asleep anymore.
So thinking about if you're having a hard time falling asleep, are there maybe things that you've incorporated into your bedtime routine that have actually accidentally stimulated you in some way, shape or form?
when I will recommend people, I know TV puts people to sleep or music puts people to sleep.
And so thinking about, don't put your favorite playlist on, right?
Like don't put on the new Taylor Swift album or something.
Cause if it's something new or if it's something that you jam to, then you're gonna be like, yeah, let's go.
you're not going to fall asleep, right?
You want to keep listening.
So putting on, you could put on instrumental music for whatever reason that invokes rage in me.
So, you know, you do you and figure out what is maybe some soothing music or comforting music or music that you've heard a hundred million bajillion times.
But I can still operate at this like pretty decent level of functioning.
And so it's not going to stimulate your brain as novel, right?
Novelty is absolutely something that stimulates your brain and that's protective, right?
OK, so if I know that this is something I've never done, seen, heard, looked at before, my brain is supposed to pay attention to that to make sure that there is no threat, no danger, nothing coming at me.
Right.
If you were a person who fell asleep and there were crickets in your bedroom every single night, crickets would not keep you awake, would not wake you up, would not disturb your slumber.
That might be like the harmony of nighttime sleep.
Right.
But if you usually don't have crickets and then there's a cricket who escapes or gets into your home or into the walls of your home and is like making its little chirping sound, then, yeah, that's going to drive you up the wall because it's not common.
That's novelty.
OK.
Oh, also, if something's happening while you're trying to fall asleep and it evokes a lot of a strong emotion in you, that will also alert your brain.
But you can't do that forever.
Because if your emotions are giving you feedback that there's something happening in your environment that is either a threat, kind of going to
interfere with something, et cetera, et cetera, then your brain is like, wake the fuck up.
Right.
We got it.
We got to do something.
We got to handle this.
You can't just like go to sleep.
Um, and so anytime you start to, um, I have a sister, well, it's my brother and my sister-in-law, my sister-in-law gets like rageful.
And then the bigger problem with this is if we have chronically disturbed sleep, right?
My brother snores, my brother snores most nights.
Um, and so she's very angry at him because he's ruining her sleep.
Now, um,
It's not all on her.
He does need to like, you know, I don't know, put those strippy things on or something like that.
But her being angry about it is absolutely making things worse.
And I'm not blaming my sister for my brother snoring, please.
But.
weirdly, you can actually choose to stop feeling something.
But again, that's a really hard thing.
And I'm actually not even going to touch that strategy because we would need like a whole last workshop to go into that.
Okay.
I'm done with sleep.
Make a bedtime routine, make it yours.
No novelty, no stimulation, as little emotion as possible.
Okay.
If you're always not getting enough sleep, not only is it practically impossible for your brain to do this like patch mode, right?
So we're at Slido.
We're posting a Slido in the chat.
So you can start dropping your questions into the Slido.
I also realized I was like, Oh my God, I have a whole hour.
I don't have a whole hour because my last half hour is for Q and a, so I can have more fun with you all.
So I'm going to fly through some of these other ideas.
And there is a Dr. Zohar in the chat that I think I remember from a,
job a long, long time ago.
So hi, I think.
Okay, great.
We're going to do two more posts real quick, and then we'll switch to the Slido for questions.
And I think I've ranted enough about all sorts of different things that these are going to go pretty quickly.
So next question, why do I feel fake when I talk to people?
Whenever I talk to people I'm not very close with, I just feel so fake and bland.
It's like I'm physically unable to be myself.
I think I have a hard time being myself because myself isn't really the type of person that would be outgoing and talk to people.
Yes.
Okay.
So this goes along with basically, I don't know, like 75% of the things that I've been talking about since I started.
And that is, there is such a pressure to perform or to conform that it can be really easy to feel fake
But also sleep deprivation after...
90% of the time, right?
Like if you only talk about the weather, like really talk about the weather with like a small group of people on Reddit, then you're going to feel pretty fake in every other aspect of your life.
And it doesn't have to be around like a specific special interest that we have.
But basically, and this, the OP here is saying, I'm just not really the type of person who talks to people.
That is totally okay.
I am here to let everybody know that you are actually allowed to just not be a person who talks to people.
So if that's your vibe, look at the floor and keep your headphones in and keep your hood up.
don't quote me on this, but I want to say it's like five or four days in a row, begins to mimic clinically significant signs of ADHD.
Now, if you're feeling lonely or if you have a job that like mandates networking or some other types of dreadful social interaction, then you are going to have to do some of these things.
And so, so step one,
you do you okay and if you can't do you um then kind of what is the most you that you could be when you have to be a little bit fake or when you have to mask or when you have to hide some of your idiosyncrasies or whatever um oh try to come up with an example about how to do this um
Okay, so I'm a grown-up, if you couldn't tell.
I know sometimes it's a little alarming.
And I do work in a professional grown-up setting for a hospital.
And there are times when I can't just be me the way I am mostly being me here.
And so I do have to wear heels and sometimes a blazer and other things like that.
um blouses ew uh i do wear those but i refuse to wear slacks right so that might be an example of like look i'm gonna fit in as much as possible but slacks are just like a hard pass for me um also my work bag is a fantastic
SpongeBob SquarePants, brightly colored, visible from a hundred feet away, backpack purse sling thingy.
Because your brain, when you're not getting enough energy to make it through the day, right, your brain starts triaging systems.
So yeah, I'm going to fit in as much as possible.
I can talk the talk, I can walk the walk for briefish periods of time, but I'm still gonna walk around with a shiny, brightly colored SpongeBob bag because that helps me really lean into embrace
the me-est me that I can be while still fitting in and being like traditionally professional.
for people who have less flexibility in this, that might be a pin on your bag or a patch or something like that, right?
It might be, I've worked with actually a number of men who feel intense pressure to look very like fancy and the tie and the thing, and who then wear super fun socks or like undergarments.
So that they kind of have this like, I'm not allowed to be loud and like out there or different visibly, but I know I have like my secret me and I have my fun socks or fun underwear.
And so that can be a way.
There is a term for this that's called alternative rebellion.
So if you wanted to kind of like dive into what are some other ways that I might be able to do this to feel more like me.
And so alternative rebellion, the idea is basically I can still kind of rebel against my social norms or against these things that require me to be different than I am, but
So it starts saying, oh, you know, the cherry on top, don't need that.
I can rebel in a way that's not going to basically fuck me over, right?
Because if I'm supposed to be in a suit and a tie and nice loafers, but I say, forget that, I'm going to wear a purple blazer and jeans, you could get fired, right?
Or you could lose clients or something.
I don't know.
Maybe patients don't want to come back to you.
I'm not sure.
But...
So how do you find that alternative way of rebelling against what I'm supposed to act like?
Right.
And then was I going to say something else?
The whipped cream, let's get rid of that.
Oh yeah.
One other thing is if you do have places or people in your life where you are kind of forced to conform or forced to be fake or mask or whatever, it is of utmost importance that you then have spaces where you can be
fully liberated.
I don't mean this in a literal sense, although maybe this is your vibe, but where you can just be utterly naked.
We bring that brain functioning down to the most basic.
So that, again, not literally, unless that's your vibe, but like where you can just be the youest you, where you can, you know, babble about whatever you want to, you can interrupt whoever you want to.
Maybe that's a group chat where it's four people and y'all are messaging each other back and forth and you're managing to maintain seven different conversations all at once without doing the like, oh, I'm going to specifically and politely reply to this comment that you said.
No, it's the wild west.
And the cherry on top of our brain function is all of those executive functions.
Everyone is just saying everything on their mind, but we all still somehow understand each other.
Or that's where you go into your subreddit about
dinosaurs that still exist today and that Jurassic Park is actually a real thing.
And these are documentaries, not fiction.
I don't know.
Right.
You do you.
But the more that you can, if you have to fake it sometimes, because that's how life sometimes is, make sure you absolutely have dedicated time to balance that out where you can be your you is to you.
All right.
Last post before we get to our Slido.
Scrolling for eight hours when I'm anxious.
People who are dealing with phone addiction, I need your help.
Hey guys, I'm 27 female, inattentive ADHD.
Generally, I don't have a problem with addictions except cigarettes.
I'm lucky enough to not be impulsive with money, sex, and all that jazz, but I have a big problem.
So prioritizing, planning, organizing, impulse control, the ability to understand the consequences to my reactions or the consequences to my actions in real time.
The fucking phone.
You
You know, if I had just remembered that I read all these posts and they swear, I would not have been as awkward at the beginning of this when I was like, oh, can I say shit?
Since I was young, I was obsessed with media.
I used to spend hours on the computer on my Tumblr or chatting with strangers or playing Sims.
Good thing it was the family computer, so my parents stopped me after two to three hours.
I used to love reading books as well, excessively, like for a week.
Queen of hyperfixating on media, don't get me started with music.
Fast forward to today, oh...
bro that is so many okay that's fine i'm gonna keep reading um fast forward to today when i'm anxious and i'm avoiding studying i have to write my thesis right now i can spend eight hours a day on the phone i've deleted tiktok and now i got addicted to reddit it doesn't help that i'm also where she posts on reddit um it doesn't also help that i'm quite a social person i tend to be texting with at least 10 people per day my phone is always buzzing i've tried timers i ignore the notification
I've thought of getting a dumb phone, but unfortunately I need my bank card.
I need my Spotify.
I need to be connected to the internet because I live in two countries and I have to be reachable.
Fucking two-factor authentication as well.
Also, I'm scared that I would still find a way to be online on my laptop and I would go back to my vintage ways.
I've tried putting it in a different room.
I just automatically go and get it after a while.
I've tried disabling all the notifications, but it doesn't solve the problem.
I can still doom scroll even better without distractions."
Please help.
It's affecting my insomnia as well.
I bet so.
I sleep at seven in the morning.
Any practical tips are greatly appreciated.
Maybe getting a jail for my phone or some shit.
If this helps, I'm medicated with dexamphetamine, but I don't take it every day.
Only when I study.
Okay.
I remember why I like this post so much.
If you are struggling with phone or device addiction, check out the comments on this post.
Oh, can you do that?
All of those things are executive level functioning.
I'm going to pretend you can.
Check out the comments on this post because there are a ton of like really creative, great ideas.
So I'm not going to dive a ton into the phone addiction piece, but I am going to do two quick, quick
Um, things about this post number one is, um, because this is the easier low hanging fruit and it came last I medicated with dexamphetamine, but I don't take it every day.
Only when I study.
Okay.
Remember at the very beginning, or I don't know, maybe you weren't here then, I talked about how the deficits associated with ADHD range in a pretty broad constellation of symptoms, okay?
And so if I'm chronically sleep deprived, whether I was born with ADHD or not, my brain is now operating essentially at the same level that another brain that was born with ADHD is.
So yes, you would benefit from meds to study because meds help you focus, help you maintain sustained attention, sustained effort, right?
They help you filter so that you can actually think about one thing instead of all the cool things that are happening in your environment.
and the itchy tag on the back of your neck or whatever.
Meds help with all the things that I said.
Okay.
So impulse control, which it sounds like anybody who's having a hard time regulating their urges is having impulse control problems.
Meds help with that.
Okay.
Emotion regulation.
So I think the scrolling for eight hours when I'm anxious is
Okay.
So meds, ADHD meds help regulate emotions because they strengthen the activity that's able to happen in a frontal lobe when those meds are active in a brain.
And so if you're scrolling or if you're doing things that are not helpful while you are anxious or sad or feeling overwhelmed or stressed, ADHD medication, if you have ADHD can absolutely help you regulate that better.
When I work with young people, as soon as people get a driver's license, we recommend that people take their ADHD medication every single day if they expect to be driving behind the wheel of the car that day.
People diagnosed with ADHD have significantly
higher rates of vehicle accidents for I'm sure all the reasons you can imagine.
And so it's not like, oh, I'm going to take a vacation on the weekends because I don't have school.
No, if you're driving, you better fucking take that med.
Same thing.
People take summer vacations from their stimulant medication because they're not in school or, oh, I'm going on vacation.
And so I don't need to be at work where I have to focus and do all the things.
But if you struggle with emotion regulation or impulse control or,
oh, I'm on vacation and I had all these things I wanted to do, but instead I slept until 12 and then I was on TikTok until four.
And then I only actually had four hours of sunlight to go explore this cool place that I visited.
Yeah, ADHD medication can help with that.
So when you're thinking about when to take medication,
So that can really complicate things.
don't just think about the way that specifically a lot of doctors might tell you, and I'm a doctor, so I'm not shitting on just like psychiatrists, but like all of the professionals, they're like, oh, you don't need meds if you're not studying or doing homework, wrong, okay?
So if there's other things that are going on that are problems for you that are related to ADHD, probably take the medication if you have it prescribed, okay?
The other things that we don't often talk about in executive function deficits are emotion regulation.
Okay, so that's one of the things that I wanted to pull out from here.
Um, that being said, I am Dr. Michaela.
And then the other thing is, and I'm only gonna do this really, really briefly, but there's a strategy.
I know you're gonna be like, what?
I've heard of that a million times.
The strategy called pros and cons that I know we all think about like, oh, pros and cons of taking which class, of buying which car, of dating which person, I don't know.
But when we think about pros and cons, I definitely...
Do want you to like physically write these out when I teach this or for for people to use this a you make a box so think about it like a four square okay so pros are one column cons are another column.
And when you think about scrolling on your phone, right, or locking my phone up or ignoring my notifications, whatever it is, pros and cons, pick the behavior it is that you're assessing.
So one of the most important functions that our frontal lobe has for us is that it works in as a balancing factor to our emotion center of our brain.
So I'm gonna say scrolling on my phone, period.
We're just gonna make it a blanket scrolling on my phone.
When you map out the pros and cons of scrolling on your phone, you are identifying the number of things that are maintaining that behavior.
If you're doing a thing and you're doing it repeatedly, that behavior is what's called being reinforced.
And that doesn't mean that the only thing happening is a reinforcement.
It means that in the giant pile of shit that happens as a result of scrolling on your phone, the reinforcement overwhelms the punishment.
These are behavior science terms.
I'm not talking about spankings.
um or being grounded or something like that i'm talking about punishment is a consequence i did not want and a reinforcement is a consequence i wanted right is an outcome so when i scroll on my phone for eight hours con i didn't work on my thesis con i didn't get good sleep con um i feel like a slug and i feel lazy and lethargic and maybe mildly nauseous i don't know um pros i got
Endless amounts of content.
I didn't have to write my thesis.
I didn't have to think about what I wanted to eat for lunch and dinner because the only thing I had to think about was what was the next reel I was going to look at, right?
So when you can map out that system of reinforcements and punishments, it actually helps you look at and then better assess, wow, can I take away some of these reinforcements and can I add more punishments to myself?
Because I want the punishments to be louder because if I punish a behavior in behavior science terms, punishments decrease that behavior from happening.
And the emotion center of our brain is the second most important function if we go like order of operations of our brain functions, right?
So once I have mapped it out, it really helps me say, oh, well, then I need to do X, Y, Z to change this.
So maybe I say, I'm not allowed to work on my phone until I've done 30 minutes of work on my thesis, five minutes of work on my thesis, written two sentences, right?
So that I'm breaking the barrier of the inertia on one of those pros.
I can't escape
the thesis, which is the pro to scrolling on my phone.
So what am I gonna do instead?
I'm gonna do a little bit of thesis.
And for a lot of people, once you do a little bit, it's easier to do a little bit more, to do a little bit more, to do a little bit more.
Not always, and sometimes.
The best part though is,
introducing your replacement behavior.
So I did say a four square.
So I've got my pros and cons of scrolling for eight hours.
And then what is my replacement behavior going to be?
Because when my choice is, am I going to scroll on my phone or not?
That's a vacuum.
We naturally fill vacuums.
This is physics laws.
Okay.
But applies to human behavior.
So just like, just don't think about it.
I'm creating a vacuum, which I will naturally fill with the thing I'm trying not to think about versus if I say, don't think about it because I'm thinking about this other thing.
So this first most important function is basic life support, right?
Now I have filled a vacuum with an alternative.
So thinking about a replacement behavior, what are the things that you could do instead of screening for eight hours, scrolling for eight hours, and then make that a
your next thing that you're gonna write pros and cons for.
Without fail, the first time I do this with people, they're like specifically for this one, right?
The replacement behavior is spend eight hours working on my dissertation.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's do that.
Let's do that.
Let's look at the pros and cons about working on my dissertation for eight hours.
Let me tell you that bitch is all cons.
Okay.
Because that's why we don't do it because it's all stuff I don't want to do.
My heart beats, my lungs open and close.
And then we put on there, the pros be done with my dissertation.
Okay, obviously I want to be done with my dissertation, but in this moment, right now, I'm not going to be done with my dissertation.
So the pro of being done is fake.
My brain cannot perceive that as a meaningful pro.
I don't have to tell them to do all those things.
And so when I try to make up these things that I'm supposed to think of as what I want to do, I'm just making it impossible for myself because my brain is responding to the behavior science associated with this task.
And so don't say, work on my dissertation for eight hours.
Say, go to a coffee shop.
Everybody just does it automatically.
to work on my computer, okay?
So now when I'm making the choice to pull up TikTok on my phone or to go get it from the other room, I'm choosing, am I going to go get my phone or I'm gonna go pack my bag to go to the coffee shop?
And that is a different choice, right?
That's a different decisional balance of what I'm actually facing.
The second most important function is our emotions.
Writing eight hours of dissertation?
No, but I'm just going to go work at a coffee shop.
Maybe I'll scroll for eight hours.
I don't know.
But working at the coffee shop might actually get me to a different set of behaviors that is going to generate change.
OK, and you can do this whether you're scrolling for eight hours, whether you are
you know, turning on your video games or audio books at midnight and then not going to sleep until five o'clock in the morning, it's because you didn't have enough time for games earlier in the day or your favorite people that you play with are up at that hour.
And so this is like special dedicated time to play with my favorite folks.
Okay.
Well, once I map out that constellation of pros and cons, that helps me tinker with, oh, I need more of here and less of here.
And so if we are chronically sleep deprived, yes, we have all those executive functioning deficits, but one of those deficits is the ability to regulate our emotions.
And I need more motivation for my replacement behavior.
I am a licensed clinical psychologist and Dr. K had the audacity to take a vacation.
Okay.
I'm not doing terrible on time.
So with that, I'm gonna swap over into our Slido to see what specific questions you all have.
Ooh.
Okay.
Question with the most upvotes at this moment in time is how do I know if I have autism or ADHD or both if I have social anxiety?
yeah uh i mean obviously my easiest answer is find a professional um that you can talk to about all the things you are experiencing and have experienced um and they can help you with a diagnosis that being said uh access to highly skilled mental health professionals is um
is tragically limited.
So getting access to any mental health professional is way, way more hard, way harder.
It's worse than it should be.
What are words?
So yeah, trying to figure out like, oh, I'm going to find a therapist and maybe half the time it's not even going to be a good therapist, psychiatrist, et cetera.
That's depressing and can be very defeating in and of itself.
So maybe you don't try to access a professional.
I think if you were really, really interested in a diagnosis and can't access a highly skilled professional, I would turn to, I mean, of course, I'm going to say research literature because that's so boring of me as a psychologist, but also as an ethical psychologist.
Now that is adaptive because if I don't have enough energy to respond to the things that are happening in my environment, then
Okay, so the way that I often talk to kids, and I don't assume that you're a kid, but because youth have less experience in like vetting sources and accessing like professional information and also the like top of the field professional people are like really shitty marketers, right?
They use all these like jargony terms and make it inaccessible just by definition of the way that they speak or use words.
So that's pretty hard.
um what i tell kids is go to the boring websites right check out the uh nimh the nhs whatever your um kind of like top tier scientific
American Psychological Association.
then I need my emotions to be on high level, very reactive, right?
I live in the US, so those are the ones that I know best.
American Psychiatric Association.
There's the, well, that's a kid one.
So check out those resources.
See if you can get a general gist of things.
And then when you move into socials, look for people who are sharing things that sound similar or consistent with what the boring people are saying.
So that then you know, like, okay, these are the people who are packaging the good info
in a way that I can better make sense of it.
Anybody who's telling you they have magic solutions or anyone who is saying that everyone has a thing, those are red flags, right?
Probably not very valuable resources.
Anybody who's selling like a supplement that treats autism, ADHD, and social anxiety all at once, if you just pay 99.99 for this bottle of cool supplements, probably not reputable.
Very ready to go because I can't sacrifice the time it's going to take me to process like, oh, hmm, that is actually a real danger in my environment.
That being said,
A lot of times we look to, okay, I have a huge bias.
I don't super care about diagnosis because to me, it can very, like a different person could diagnose a different, a different professional can diagnose a different person with like five different things with each person who's diagnosing.
So we're not super reliable.
There are reliable measures, blah, whatever.
Okay.
But like, to me, I care less about the name of the diagnosis and more about what's bothering you.
What's going on?
And what are the changes that you want to see happen in your life?
Diagnoses can absolutely help you understand yourself better.
So if you even think you might have ADHD or autism or social anxiety or any of the other conditions,
Do a deep dive, learn about the conditions, right?
Spend time experiencing what other people go through when they have diagnoses like that.
And at the end of the day, you're still stuck with you and your brain and your body.
So what is it that you're trying to change?
What is it you're trying to understand?
What is it that you want?
have or not have in your life that's going on.
And once you have that, it's actually a lot easier to move forward than like, oh, I have a diagnosis because each diagnosis, you could put a hundred people in this room who all have autism and they could all be 100% unique from each other, which is another problem with our mental health conditions and diagnoses is that each one can manifest so differently depending on the person.
Yeah.
I'm going to go to the next question.
Um, how do I deal with extreme boredom after starting to recover from ADHD burnout stress and everything feels meh.
Maybe I should do something about that.
Oh God.
Um, I joke with my colleagues at work that my favorite place of existing in life is on the cusp of burnout because that is like the most exhilarating and where I'm doing the most of all the things.
And, um,
enjoy everything and feel stimulated and enriched, but it is a very short move from ideal to like raging burnout.
When we're at that lower level of functioning in our brains, our brains need to be reflexive almost.
And so if you're recovering from ADHD, burnout, stress, or neurotypical work-related life-related ADHD, uh, uh, burnout slash stress, um,
it is really easy to get impatient and to feel actually like extremely uncomfortable.
And this question is really referencing like a meh feeling.
People with ADHD, boredom in particular is like,
can be as uncomfortable as like that feeling of like crawling out of your skin like oh my god I'm I'm like starving I'm dying of thirst and I'm like I can't deal with the fact that I'm just like bored or like not like intensely stimulated.
And so, the fun thing about this is anytime we make changes and actually particularly in recovery.
And so it's supposed to help us to be ready to react more quickly so that we can preserve our functioning or preserve our safety.
And this is, this could be from an emotional recovery, maybe a shitty relationship or burnout from ADHD work life etc.
It's the same concept when we're dealing with recovery from a physical injury.
which is why I love that somewhere along the way we made physical health and mental health like two separate fields and areas and studies and even insurances, at least in the United States, when they are intimately connected and work together or don't work together.
So
When we are in recovery, it is uncomfortable.
We are over it.
We wanna, we're impatient.
We're like, come on, let's get back to like regular functioning.
I don't wanna be hobbling around on like crutches or in a cast.
I just wanna walk and I wanna do stairs and I don't wanna have to wait for an elevator or I don't wanna be bored.
I don't wanna just relax.
I want to feel stimulated and excited and do all the things.
And part of recovery is healing and healing is a slow-ish process that does require patience, something that people at ADHD often don't have a lot of.
And so it is kind of antithetical.
I would say just like with a physical injury, we do physical therapy, we take baby steps as we are improving.
And so thinking about what would be my cognitive or emotional baby steps.
So do not fucking go and pick up 10 more new hobbies, OK?
But what could you do in just a little bit?
And I know that impulse control is also a weakness.
So this is really, really hard to do.
So all that rant being said, one of the things that we don't talk enough about in any of these things, right?
And if you can't figure out how to take these like kind of slow roll rehab approach, you're going to be stuck in a really shitty cycle of ADHD burnout because you're going to go, oh my God, I'm overwhelmed.
Okay.
Thank God I took a break.
Wait, I'm going to go.
No, now I'm overwhelmed.
Okay.
I'm going to, right.
And so it's this real yo-yo experience in life that is
Terrible.
But it is also pretty uncomfortable to learn how to not fall into the burnout really fast.
As with a lot of burnout experiences, oftentimes you have to go over and over and over again before you...
can I kind of really develop a better system?
And again, you got to figure out what works for you, take it slow.
And then when you fall down again into burnout, rather than doing that thing where you were like, you dumb ass, I can't believe you did this again.
What's, you know, we were so good at punishing ourselves.
If instead you can be like, whoops,
yep, that happened.
Now I've got to figure out how to pick myself back up and rebuild my wellness.
You ironically recover way faster when you're nicer to yourself and your mind.
And there's a lot of things I just described that probably you could benefit from using some...
I'm sure everybody knows you're supposed to have eight hours of sleep to be prime functioning because that's what we all hear.
some sort of help guidance support doing.
I will say one of the reasons I love working with Healthy Gamer is because they have so many legit resources and their like coaching program is out of this world with good quality control.
So, you know, you actually have options at your fingertips if you wanted to seek access to other sources of support by virtue of being connected to this community.
Next.
Uh, how to deal with the dichotomy of ADHD and autism, the desire to socialize and be stimulated, but at the same time, not be in public and avoid stimulation and stress and the stress that it causes.
Ah, yes.
Um, so fun.
Um, this is one of those things where I'm just gonna be like, yeah, you have to do you, um, which is, I realized completely not a helpful response.
Um,
And every body is different.
So people with autism often really love like systems or rules or structure.
And then people with ADHD alone often struggle slash maybe even like rebel against structure and organization because those are weaknesses.
And I will say that people with autism do have weaknesses in their brain areas of being able to create the structure.
They just...
are able to stick with the structure or feel more comforted by structure.
Now, for the people who are combo savings, ADHD, autism, it can feel really confusing and overwhelming because of these like push-pull experiences of what I want and what I need and what parts of me want and need, but then are directly contradicted by other parts of me.
So every body, every brain actually needs a different constellation of wellness behaviors.
And so this is where learning how to get creative with some of those systems or some of those responses is really important.
You have the input, you wanna be social, you wanna get out there and you wanna do things, but also, oh my God, that's overwhelming.
So can you be more selective with the social opportunities that you have?
And then sometimes you can't be.
And so thinking too about like,
And so I am your friendly neighborhood substitute teacher coming in to hang out with y'all for a bit today and hopefully provide you with some helpful information.
So like, look at your calendar for the next week.
What does it look like?
Wow.
I have a presentation that I'm doing on Friday morning.
And then I have a late night at work on Tuesday afternoon.
That's a lot of stuff that's already going to be semi pretty draining on me.
So this is not the week that I'm going to say yes to trivia night on Wednesday or Monday or Tuesday.
Your brain might not need eight hours of sleep.
Maybe I can kind of like feel I really need like fun social time because my other social experiences this week are really stressful and really like performance oriented.
So what I need this week is low key.
And actually, we usually go out for trivia on Wednesday, but trivia is a little too performancy.
So I'm going to suggest we go.
bowling instead or something like that I don't know maybe that's performance too something else fun where you're not going to do a thing that's going to be judged I don't know um
your brain might need nine hours of sleep or it might need seven hours of sleep.
But part of that is really having to be in tune with what you need and respecting yourself, which is hard to do.
And especially for somebody with a combo of autism and ADHD, you're getting a lot of messages that you don't know what you need and that what you think you need is wrong and you just need to fit in better, try harder, et cetera, et cetera.
And so learning how to say, okay,
Am I saying I want to skip tonight because I'm anxious or am I saying I want to skip tonight because I'm totally drained?
And then navigating those waters and then learning over time.
Sometimes, like, for example, there was a networking event that I was supposed to go to and I was like, oh, no, I'm so tired.
I definitely can't do that.
Well, the minute I canceled going to the networking event, I felt better.
Your brain might do best with, I don't know, five, six hours of sleep at night, but then two naps during the day.
And I was like, oh, shit, I should have gone because it was my anxiety that was telling me I was exhausted.
And that I and you'll know that because the second you make the decision, you feel better, like a lot better.
Right.
And sometimes you'll go home and you'll be like, whoa, actually, that wasn't just anxiety.
I was really overwhelmed and I needed a night to myself.
Right.
And giving myself the permission to take that time alleviated some of the stress so that I could go do my own thing.
And it's a learning process and you have to be kind and patient with yourself, which is really hard, especially if you get messages from the people around you that you're not allowed to.
Uh, okay.
Let's see.
Next one.
Why do I forget about people when I'm not around them?
I know they exist, but I don't remember to reach out to people for days or weeks.
Is this from my ADHD?
Highly likely.
Yes.
Um, so a lot of, um, the ADHD deficits can manifest in an out of sight, out of mind kind of a thing, um, that can make it really like, if it's not in front of you, you're not doing it.
You're
This is one of those opportunities to shape your environment in a way that can help you.
I personally feel like I'm gonna vomit if I take a nap and I wake up from it, right?
I have been impressed my whole life with people who will text me and be like, Hey, are you feeling better?
I know you called out sick two days ago.
you remembered that?
Like, that is impressive.
Even just things like birthdays, which seem like, you know, it happens every year.
It's the same time, the same day.
That is something that's like, can be really hard to remember because it's one day.
And I might even think about someone all day and then text them three days later.
And I actually remembered two days later, but then I was so ashamed that I forgot, even though I remembered that I like punished myself for a little while before I actually said something.
So putting pictures of your friends in your immediate environment is a great way of keeping them kind of like in sight and therefore in mind.
And so my body does not do well with naps.
And then the other thing that you can do is like,
set alarms or schedule check-ins on your calendar or with your phone.
So if there's someone that you're like, oh, for whatever reason, you just remembered them out of the blue, you could be like, oh, I really want to like connect more with Michaela.
So I'm going to schedule a reminder every other day at noon to text Michaela.
And maybe you only actually do it one of those times a week.
that's still once a week more often than you were doing it before.
And you're building a practice of remembering to text friends so that you are building the skill of reaching out and connecting with your friends.
Now that doesn't mean I go around town being like naps are the devil, because for some people,
also not easy, but can definitely be related to ADHD.
There are also people with ADHD who talk about like, when I'm not around my friends, I feel like they don't love me or like I have no emotional connection to them.
So making sure that you, like that's where the pictures can really kind of come into play is because you have
like visual representation in your face of fun times that you had together and like, oh yeah, this person or like keeping birthday cards or, you know, like those little like mementos, I guess, because those are these little love reminders, right?
all over your home or your spaces.
And if you have a hard time connecting with that at work or school or whatever, can you remember to wear a bracelet that somebody gave you and you love them?
I have a sister who can literally just curl up in a chair, put a blanket over her head, nap for five minutes, take the blanket off and be fully refreshed and ready to go.
And so you're like, oh yeah, this is, my sister gave me this bracelet.
And so like, I'm remembering my sister more often because I see the things she gave me.
Uh, also heads up, uh, it's really easy for people with ADHD to start tuning things out.
So when I use the example of like set a notification to text Michaela every other day, don't do it forever because then you'll just check it off, check it off, check it off, make it like a two week demo.
And then you can change the time or you can change the friend.
And then you can just kind of like rotate through so that you're getting these different, um,
kind of prompts to connect with the people in your life.
It also doesn't have to be a message.
It can be like, Hey, go on Tik TOK and send Michaela something funny so that you are pinging your rate, your brain with novelty so that you're better at attending to it than like, Oh yeah.
Talk to Michaela.
I already did that.
I'm so bored with that.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Next one.
I love this one.
Even on Adderall, I struggle to follow through with tasks on my to-do list.
I get more done with meds, but I can't stick to plans.
How can I stick to plans?
Okay.
So, um, Adderall or any of the stimulant ADHD medication make it possible to learn and build the habits that we can do with, uh, that people can do without ADHD.
Um, and so, um,
That seems like a superpower to me, but also very dangerous.
Just accidentally, when you take a stimulant medication, it makes your brain function at a different level so that you are able to do the things more easily.
However, in order to develop the skills that people without ADHD build naturally in their lifetimes, it is like learning a new skill.
And so just like any other new skill, so I'm gonna use the metaphor of a baby learning how to walk,
Because if you've ever seen a baby learn how to walk, those fuckers fall hundreds of thousands of times before they can walk.
I don't know.
And when they do walk, they look like they're like hammered, right?
They're like stumbling all over the place.
And what does the environment do when a baby learns how to walk and is taking their drunk steps, right?
And that works for her.
It celebrates, it cheers, it's like you've never seen people more excited than when a baby is taking their first steps, right?
And so thinking about for yourself, hey, you've got the medication on board, great job.
You're improving your function, also amazing.
Now you have to learn new skills.
And so one of the things that's incredibly challenging about thinking about sleep in specific, but also knowing that sleep exists in a constellation of all sorts of other things in my body and in my life, is that no one can tell me what is best for me other than me.
And so it is not as simple as, oh, I'm going to take this pill and then I'm going to make plans.
And then, oh my God, look, I stuck to my plans.
It's so easy, right?
Um, it really involves, okay, I'm going to take this pill, which makes it easier for me to do some of these things.
So now I have to learn how to make plans and stick to them.
And then breaking things down into just like a baby doesn't wake up in the morning is like, fuck.
Yeah.
Today's the day I'm going to walk.
A baby is like stumbling through and trying and trying and trying and falling and falling and falling.
You need to give yourself that same patience and grace so that you make plans and you don't do shit with them.
And then you make them again.
And maybe you do it a hundred times before you can stick to 10% of it, 20% of it.
And as soon as you can even do a little bit, yes, that's success.
That's your first couple steps.
And so celebrating that, oh my gosh, this is progress.
And remembering that this is going to be really hard to maintain motivation for, which is also something that is hard to do if you have ADHD.
So be kind to yourself, be patient with yourself, and remember that you are learning new skills, just like a baby trying to walk or a person trying to learn how to ride a bicycle without training wheels.
Okay.
Good luck.
Also, I know healthy gamer has a ton of resources around like ADHD, things like that.
And I think there's some members lecture.
Well, not, I think I know I did some members lectures around some ADHD stuff.
And so that's another thing that I know is a resource.
Healthy gamer also is putting an ADHD guide in the chat, which is going to be so nice and helpful for you for that as well.
um okay probably um one more question and so we've got how do i stop staring at the screen for hours before getting any work done i know right um
Oh, there are so many things that could be happening for this.
So how do I stop staring at the screen for hours before getting any work done?
So do you need a pros and cons of why getting work done is helpful and why staring at the screen is just easier?
Possibly.
Ideally, you want to, the concept, and I'm pretty sure this is in the guide to ADHD that's in the chat, but the concept of getting work done is amorphous.
Like, what does that mean?
If you don't know what you need to get done, it's really hard to get started.
Or if you think that what I need to get done is a 10 page paper on like Julius Caesar,
that is overwhelming and so if you are a person who's stuck staring at a screen um and you do have like the motivation and like you know like you got to get stuff done um but getting started is really hard start with okay so i'm gonna write down my assignment like what is it that i need what work do i need to get done and then i'm gonna set a micro goal so i am going to write
And so the only way to figure out what's best for me is to find it.
three bullets of content that i'm thinking of like a writing assignment you know so and i don't know staring at a screen or maybe if you're staring at a screen maybe you're making an excel spreadsheet because that's a thing we do on screens too so don't think oh i need to build this excel spreadsheet of all the expenses and
I don't know what the fuck else we put in Excel spreadsheets.
Think like, okay, I'm going to make the headings for my columns.
And then I'm going to make the headings for my rows.
And then maybe I'm going to format so that this column doesn't turn into a date.
which means we kind of are constantly on this journey of figuring out what does my brain and body need.
And before you know it, you've overcome that initial inertia that helps you get going, right?
So you've greased the wheels, if you will.
Your brain might be a brain that says, that doesn't matter.
That's not going to help you.
That voice is fucking lying.
It will help you.
Now, can you turn in an Excel spreadsheets with headings and format and like maybe some color coding with no other content?
Obviously not.
It's not the point that you're going to get it all done in one step.
It's that you're going to build one step to get to the next step, to get to the next step, to get to the end goal.
So making sure that you've defined your task very specifically, and then you've created manageable micro goals or baby steps to get yourself along the path.
And maybe you don't actually...
I guess some people are able to do this, but it's pretty rare that you're able to build yourself a 20-step path with every single baby step you need at the get-go.
You don't know what you need often.
And so by starting with literally anything, it helps get you going to the point where now you know what you need to do next.
And it's not even a permanent thing.
And maybe you only ever know five steps at a time, and that's okay because five steps will keep you going to the next five steps, to the next five steps, to the next five steps.
We are so good at discounting anything but perfection and final products and glossy filtered champion trophy stuff that we become paralyzed because from here to perfection is a really, really long journey.
So on average, our brains mature between the ages of 23 and 25.
And I don't even know how to get there.
So as soon as you can begin to validate and reward and build baby steps, you're going to be so much better.
And this is not a new concept.
If you think about any time you've ever done any project and including in schooling where people were like, let's brainstorm and brainstorming.
includes ridiculous ideas because just generating thoughts and ideas is a valuable experience that then makes it possible to do the things that you need to do.
So with that, I'm going to wrap up our questions.
I'm going to say thank you so much for spending time with your local friendly substitute.
That can be slightly delayed for a variety of reasons, and that can happen earlier for a variety of reasons.
person i guess i'm not a teacher well i'm kind of a teacher anyways yay thanks for being here today um and hope you found at least one or two kernels of things that felt hopeful um or interesting or at the very least entertaining um have a wonderful rest of your day night evening wee hours of the morning okay so this is our final and formal goodbye and um hope to see you soon in other opportunities
So what you needed before your brain fully matured versus after your brain fully matured can be different.
Also, our phases of life create changes in our body.
As a licensed clinical psychologist, I actually specialize in working with young people.
The circadian rhythms that respond to the amount of sunlight our brains are exposed to can change the amount of sleep that we need, our physical activity level, our stress levels, all these sorts of things, right?
So it's a super moving target, which again, obnoxious.
And so you're really challenged to figure out what is it that I need now.
And then to make things even more exciting is that oversleeping and undersleeping lead to the same problems.
That seems like a serious design flaw.
Like, am I right?
Anybody who's ever tried to take care of a plant is the same thing, right?
If you overwater a plant and underwater a plant, they do the same thing.
That is very useless feedback to me, right?
This is why I kill a lot of plants.
because I just don't understand what they're asking from me.
And so a lot of times what happens is for whatever reasons we become sleep deprived, whether that's because life shows up or there's a cricket in the wall or whatever it is that's going on for us, right?
So kids, teens, young adults, they like to call those transition age youth because kids are going through or folks are going through all sorts of transitions once they hit that legal age of adulthood and try to figure out what comes next in life.
We just get some crappy sleep and then we're like, okay, I'm gonna make it up on the weekend, right?
I'm gonna sleep 14 hours after three days of binging a show, whatever.
Um, and then I wake up after 14 hours and I feel like I still got hit by a bus and I think, oh, I'm not caught up.
I obviously need to sleep more.
And so maybe we immediately fall back asleep.
Maybe we get up, move around, but we feel so sluggish and lethargic all day that we kind of feel like we never really wake up.
So doesn't necessarily mean you didn't get enough sleep, right?
So that's cool.
So trying to figure out sleep is incredibly challenging.
Now, the fun-ish, I'm a psychologist, so fun means something a little different to me, right?
The fun-ish thing is that sleep doesn't exist in isolation, right?
And for some of us, sleep is so bad.
I've struggled with falling asleep most of my life.
And so I'm not highly motivated to go to sleep because it's not often a very calm experience.
That being said, I also do okay with not a ton of sleep.
So now add another layer of why I'm not motivated to go to sleep.
And then on top of that, no matter how much sleep I get, when I wake up in the morning, I just feel like garbage.
So if I've had not enough sleep, I feel like a level 10 out of 10 of garbage.
And if I have
an ample amount of sleep, I'm like a seven to eight out of 10 of garbage, like in those moments of waking up because it just takes me a while to defrost, right?
It's like I go into hibernation mode when I'm sleeping and it takes a while to get all those systems operational.
And so why bother getting a good night's sleep when there are so many cool things I could be doing and I'm going to feel yucky anyways in the morning, right?
So, and each person has their own constellation of why they don't want to go to sleep, why it's hard maybe not just to fall asleep, but to stay asleep, or they can go to sleep early.
They maybe even can stay asleep pretty nicely, but then they wake up at like three o'clock in the morning and their brains are like, let's go, right?
And so whatever pattern of yours it is, really trying to figure out, okay,
How do I incentivize myself to sleep?
Maybe you don't.
Maybe there's not a great way to incentivize yourself to sleep because sleep is just such a fraught area for you.
However, in the course of my career, I've also worked with adults and not so much the older adults.
And so what are other areas that you might be more motivated to work on, right?
Maybe that's doing less time on screens, which I love saying in the irony of me doing this with you on a screen and we're here all together, right?
Maybe it means moving your body more.
So walking, taking stairs, exercising, jumping on a trampoline, right?
Like there are lots of forms of physical body movement that don't have to involve running or the gym.