Hacking Your ADHD

Hey Team!
This week I'm talking with Dr. Jolene Brighten, a naturopathic doctor, women's health educator, and author whose work focuses on hormones, reproductive health, and the ways hormonal changes can affect women across their lifespan. She's the author of Beyond the Pill and Is This Normal?, and her newest work, ADHD and Women, coming out October 6th, explores the intersection of hormones and ADHD in women.
I know hormones and ADHD is a topic we've explored before, but Dr. Brighten was a delight to have on the show, and this conversation went in all kinds of directions. So yes, we talked about how hormonal shifts across your life affect ADHD symptoms, why medication can sometimes feel less effective at different points, and some of the ways those changes may show up differently for women with ADHD.
But we also got into the much more practical question of what you actually do when you know your brain isn't going to perform exactly the same way every day, like externalizing executive function instead of trying to remember harder, building small pleasures into the day, and recognizing that sometimes the best intervention isn't the full protocol, it's finding the smallest lever you can actually pull.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/314
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
With ADHD it's often said that we know what to do, but have trouble executing on those ideas. For something like exercise, the best idea is then to work towards making it accessible. Instead of focusing on getting the biggest result, we can look toward what we actually enjoy doing and can sustain, even if for just a little bit, we're going to see far more consistent results.
It's important to remember that everything has a cost, even if we're not noticing it at the moment. These costs can compound when we're not paying attention and lead us to wonder why doing just one simple task can leave us exhausted. This doesn't mean that we necessarily need to be doing less, but it does mean we need to pay extra attention to what something is actually going to cost us.
Our brains are not meant to be at peak productivity all month, and that applies doubly if you experience a cycle. As Dr. Brighten says, "that is [just] how you are physiologically designed." This means that it's important that we're giving ourselves grace and letting ourselves block out time on the calendar for when we're not going to be at our peak (and again, we do not need to be at our peak all the time, or even most of the time; it's called the peak for a reason).

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today, I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called Evaluating Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD: A Review of Current Methods and Issues. And this paper is a narrative review that surveys the current landscape of ADHD diagnosis, where the DSM criteria came from, how they've evolved, and any known problem areas that are in there.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/313
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon

Hey Team!
This week I'm talking with Dr. Jennie Byrne, a board-certified psychiatrist and neuroscientist with over 20 years specializing in high-achieving professionals and adults with ADHD. She has a PhD in Neurophysiology and an MD from NYU with her psychiatry residency at Mount Sinai (pronounced SIGH-nye). Now she runs Constellation PLLC, a concierge telepsychiatry practice where she helps busy professionals manage their ADHD. In her most recent book, ADHD in Professionals: Embracing Your Brain, Dr. Byrne examines how ADHD shows up at work, and why some individuals thrive while for others everything looks great on paper, but underneath they're struggling.
In this episode, we consider why the idea that "you're too high functioning to have ADHD" isn't a diagnosis and how often that same high performance at work can lead to a crash at home. We also play with the ideas of using anxiety as fuel and the costs that come with that, how productivity advice built for neurotypical brains can backfire for us and our environmental fit can make all the difference.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/312
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
Your environment can play an important role in managing your ADHD, but it can cut both ways. A brain that loves working fast and connecting dots could easily be an asset in a high-stress fast-moving environment like the ER, OR or ICU. But then that same brain could fall apart when stuck in front of a pile of emails. Finding the right fit for you allows you to get the results without paying an extra cost you never intended to.
While it is possible to use anxiety as a fuel to get stuff done, it often comes with a physiological cost. And it's important that we acknowledge the cost because it's too easy to let ourselves fall into the trap of letting anxiety provide all of our extra motivation which can then lead to chronic stress, health problems, and even a shorter lifespan.
The idea that you're "too high functioning" to have ADHD often comes from a training gap and it is not diagnostic. High achievers are often able to hold it together at work but then fall apart at home, so it's important that you are able to express the totality of your existence with ADHD and find a clinician that is up to date on the current research.

Hey Team!
This week I'm talking with Dr. Megan Anna Neff, an AuDHD clinical psychologist, author, and educator. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from George Fox University, which she completed the same year that she was diagnosed as autistic. Dr. Neff has moved away from traditional clinical practice to focus on creating research-informed, lived-experience-centered, and emotionally resonant resources and training through her platform Neurodivergent Insights.
In our conversation today, we discuss her diagnosis, how ADHD and Autism tend to run in families, and the ripple effects that can happen from there. We get into sensory processing and its role in burnout and self-regulation. We also hit on interoception, alexithymia, and self-care, and round things out with some frameworks and ideas on how we can work with our brains. It's a conversation of identity and self-attunement that I really enjoyed.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/311
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
Alexithymia, sometimes called emotional blindness, is a trait where you can have difficulties processing or describing your emotions and is often felt in ADHD with the experience of going from 0 to 100 with an emotion. While this can feel impossible to work on in the moment, learning to name your emotions and tracking how you feel through socio-emotional training can provide measurable improvements.
Self-care starts with figuring out where you're at, but most advice on self-care often assumes that you already know what you need. With ADHD and poor interoception that can be a hard read. When we're feeling dysregulated, often our first step needs to be checking in with ourselves, and as Dr. Neff suggests, creating more sensory predictability.
Masking can train you out of listening to your body because it is a learned way of suppressing yourself. While this insight won't necessarily fix what's going on here, it gives you a starting point to notice when you're not listening to your body because you're just not noticing, versus when you've trained yourself out of it.

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today, I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Psychological Implications of Exclusion in Individuals with ADHD Symptomatology." That's a hard word there. This study asked a deceptively simple question: when people with ADHD symptoms are socially excluded, do their bodies respond differently than those without ADHD?

And so basically, what we're talking about today is RSD, or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which is something that a lot of people have really started to resonate with, but there isn't a ton of research on yet. And I think this is a great place for us to kind of dive in on that research. So let's get into it.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/310
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon