John R. Miles

I've always pondered this question.

You hear a lot of people say that modern life and digital evolution is just making us more ADHD.

This is just a natural coping skill that we have.

Do you think it's that or do you think it's just spotlighting patterns that have been there that we weren't recognizing before?

I want to go back to talking about Adderall and other medications because in chapter four, you go into this and you say pills don't teach skills, but I want to just do a personal story on this.

A while back, I dated a woman who had been taking Adderall since she was probably in middle school.

And she had reached a point where her doses kept going up and up and up.

But when I was dating her, she told me that she couldn't function without being on the drugs.

And that really always scared me because to me, a drug is exactly that.

It's almost like taking a depression drug, but to really treat the depression, you have to develop skills to master it.

I would think the same thing is true with ADHD.

Well, and also when you do try to break free from it, there's withdrawal just like anything else, especially if you've been on it for decades.

Yes.

So at the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that you were pursued by your publisher and it wasn't necessarily something you wanted to write, but if you were going to write it, you wanted to pour your soul into it.

So one of the things I thought was most helpful about the book, and we've spent some time right now giving the audience an understanding of ADHD, but

You have over 100 different strategies that are rooted in your decades of coaching.

And some of these are emotional regulation tools.

Some of these are reducing overwhelmed skills.

Some of them are dealing with reframing negative self-talk.

Well, I wanted to go through a couple of these that caught my eye.