I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. Welcome to Stepping Up the podcast where we explore all things organization, mental health routines, personal.
Development, motherhood and health.
I'm your host, Steph Pace, and I'm the woman behind Just Another Mummy blog and also the founder of Steph Pace Planners. But I can assure you this is not just another podcast online. I'm known for my organization tips and tricks and the occasional banter, but it definitely wasn't always this way. I used to be a hot mess and occasionally still am. And I'm here as your honest and real friend each week to show you how I turn my life of chaos into clarity.
Between the house, health, kids.
Work, and wanting to be the best version of yourself, it can be overwhelming, and I'm here to give you the tools and tips to stop you feeling like a slave to your daily time. He asks home life and especially the expectations you have on yourself, Join me as I share my journey and insights into the art of balancing at all and speak to guests who can help
us all live a better life. Whether you're looking to streamline your daily routines forcial wellbeing, achieve your fitness goals, diamond to personal development, or find inspiration to step up into the best version of yourself, We've got you.
So are you ready to step up your game?
Let's go.
Hello guys, and welcome back to Stepping Up. I'm so excited to be officially back. If you guys didn't know, I have been a hit with influenze a and pneumonia for the last two and a half weeks, so I've spent the last three weekends stuck inside and I was going batshit crazy. And as you guys would have noticed, the last two episodes, we had to repurpose some old YouTube videos.
So I just want to say thank you for hanging in there with me.
I know you guys absolutely loved the last two episodes, but for me, I just felt like I was cheating a little bit. But we're all about working smarter and not harder, especially when you are stuck in bed and I can tell you, guys, it was literally not a fun time. You guys know, I cannot sit still for the life of me, which kind of makes it funny that I'm recording today's episode, and this is an episode
on my ADHD medication journey. And this is something again, you guys have been asking for for so long, especially since I recorded my ADHD Journey episode, which I will link in the show notes below because it is a long one and it's something I knew.
I had from childhood, which is pretty rare.
But over the last eight months, I've been on a journey of trying to find the right medication for me.
Now.
I know I don't have to say this because we're all a bunch of smart cookies who are listening, but I have to anyway, As you.
Guys know, I'm not a doctor. I'm far from it.
And I'm definitely not saying if you have ADHD that you need to go on medications. You need to listen to anything that I'm saying, because this is just my journey, and I guess like my experience so far now, just like many of us, the rise of TikTok is something that made me really jump onto managing my ADHD symptoms, and to be completely honest, I spoke about in my
ADHD Journey episode. I was diagnosed with eight D as a kid, so I was in KINDI when I was diagnosed, And back then, there was a huge stigma that if you're on the spectrum you have ADHD, ADD anything at all, that you were stupid. And we know that's not the case, but that was something that I did carry and I didn't realize I carried that all up until recently, until the rise of TikTok and ADHD became something that was really spoken about on there.
Now.
I know there's a lot of people who are always thinking there's like there's trends and fads with these types of things, but you need to remember that it's only been recently that people realize how ADHD and ADD affect women. Okay, I want to quickly just give you a run through about the difference between ADD and ADHD. So they pretty much just call it ADHD now, But there's two types. There's a hyperactive type and then there's the inattentive type. Now I've got the combined, so I've got both the
best of both worlds. Is Miley would say, so I struggle with paying attention if I don't find something interesting for me to start that it's like pulling teeth. And I'm not even joking. I can't explain to you how hard it is to physically bring myself to do a simple task and the amount of anxiety that builds up over starting a small task. It can be something like washing for me a lot of the time. It can be an email that has to use a little bit
more brain power than normal. It is those mundane tasks that need to be done and that they're important, But I can't explain to you how painful it is.
Like physically it actually started.
And I know people out there listening right now that have ADHD your thing they do, they can really relate to this because it's not just like us having a little easy fit.
It is a whole other level.
It's an actual the way the chemicals in our brains work and how I think it's our frontal lobe has been made.
It is different than other people.
So is executive function for other people, like being able to write back to text messages, remember things not bit late, being able to estimate time correctly, memory all that stuff is normal. To them, but for us it is really hard. I guess one of the tipping points for me was especially my memory between having a business, the kids and everything.
It was actually getting to a point where I was afraid it was affecting my relationship with my staff because I literally would forget what they have told me and it was creating issues within the business anyway. So started watching TikTok decided, okay, I want to get you know, obviously my diagnosis as a kid is old, so I
had to get an updated one. And so if you're listening right now and you're like, I need to see if I have ADHD, my other podcast episode about this, I actually talk about the process so about getting a referral who you got to go to. So if you listen to that, I'll link it again below. But that's what really drove me to go and get rediagnosed as an adult and that came back with combined ADHD, so
inattentive and hyperactivity. And the one thing that people have learned now also with women with the ADHD hyperactivity part, is we don't tend to show up in the same way as men. We tend to be hyperactive in our brain is in overdrive and.
This whole time.
You know, I've been medicated for my anxiety for over a decade. Now, I'm on any anxiety meds, any depressants, whatever you want to call it. So, because my doctor had always been trying to treat my anxiety and not necessarily the ADHD that was causing the anxiety, because the racing thoughts, the forgetfulness, the anxiety that is attached to doing everyday tasks and the million thoughts in my head,
that's what caused the anxiety. So we were trying to treat the symptom of ADHHD and not the cause of the anxiety, if that makes sense. So for me to effectively treat my anxiety, I need to be treating the
ADHD itself. And one of my team members, Sarah, who worked for me her son had been diagnosed and just hearing about his struggles and seeing the profound change medication made for him, which was something that wasn't taken lightly for their family, Like, you're not going to pop anyone on medication unless you need it, unless it's affecting them. And that's the thing is living with ADHD. It affects every facet.
Of your life.
For me, it affects my relationship with Ryan. When I'm overstimulated and he wants affection, I can't have him touching me, and it's heartbreaking, but I'm just so overstimulated. I can't have anyone on me, like I feel like I'm being suffocated. And then you know that's exhuberated by getting emails and messages and everything to do with work, that it really does affect my relationship with him, and you know, he's right, and he's a male and they want physical touch and
even with my own kids, and it kills me. But in the afternoons, I can't explain to you the panic and the pure like anxiety I get from them screaming, and then like Ryan's trying to talk to me and I'm trying to do dinner, Like it's just so much stimulation for one person that I was like, I can't
do this anymore. This is affecting my life, and I felt like it was getting worse, and especially around my period, which my psychiatrists really validated me on saying those who have ad H sheet are generally more likely to have PMDD, which is really intensified symptoms of like PMS basically.
And it is so hard.
The week before my period, I cannot describe to you how low I am and how much harder is just to do everyday things. And I think this is a really important conversation, especially with social media and you guys see me doing organization and planning, and I do this because I can't cope without it. But anyways, basically what I'm saying is, after seeing Sarah and her son going through their journey with medication and how much it helped him, I was like, I'm going to go get rediagnosed, which
I did, and then start the process of medication. Now with ADHD medication, it's not a decision you just want to decide on overnight. There is two types of medication, so there's stimulant medication and then non stimulant medication. Basically, the stimulant medication works by increasing certain neurotransmitters in the brain and that will help us be able to focus
and to concentrate and things. With stimulant medication is obviously they're a lot more harsher than something that is a non stimulant medication, which you can also have for ADHD.
So some stimulu.
Medications you might have heard if you're on TikTok and things are things like five ance, Riddlin, dex, and phetamine.
There's other ones but I can't remember right now.
Now, before I run through the pros and cons to stimulant medication, which is what I'm going to focus on first, because that's where i started, I'm going to, I guess, explain my experience with it. So for me, I had my appointment with my psychiatrists and he's like, yep, So we decided to pop me on Riddlin. There's two types of stimulant medication. You can get long acting and short acting. So long acting usually will last all day, ten to
fourteen hours. Again I'm not a doctor, That's what I'm guessing. And then you got your short acting, which can last from like two to four hours. So we popped me on Riddlin and we went on short acting because my days are very different. Some days I'm working ridiculous hours. Some days I might do more like light work in the afternoon, and I don't want to take stimulant medication. And he basically said the pros with short acting is
I can kind of taper it to my day. So, for example, I would wake up, have a dose, have another dose at lunch, and then maybe missed the third dose.
Some people don't even have three.
So I started off with Riddlin and can I just tell you when I took it and it kicked in, which was pretty quick because it's short acting, it doesn't take long to kick in. I cried because for the first time in my entire life, my brain was quiet. It was quiet, And my biggest thing is all the thoughts. My thoughts are just so intense. It makes doing even
things like podcast. Guys like for me to do a podcast, even for this, and I'm still on medication now, it still takes me time to kind of try and calm myself because I'm always overthinking everything like.
Is this good?
Is that good?
And just the utter quiet I felt for the first time in my whole life, And I.
Cried because I was like, is this how everybody else feels? And this whole time?
Sorry, it's just it's very confronting because you're just like, you don't realize how different your brain is to other people until you've experienced that firsthand of having quiet and being able to actually focus on one thought at a time. And I can't explain to you the relief that I felt. And I was like, why did I wait for so long to do this? And I was someone who was very much so like, I don't want to be on medication forever. I'm going to try and do a more
like natural route. I want to like, you know, obviously exercise. Even my psychiatrist said exercise is one of the best things for ADHD and hand on heart. I can agree with that, but I just was like, why did I wait so long? And at first, you know, first couple of weeks, it was incredible. I was able just to
do things. I didn't overthink everything. For me, I do struggle to like not butt in in conversations, not because I'm being rude, but because I'm always scared I'm going to forget what I'm going to say and I get excited. So if someone says something and I relate to them, I tend to accidentally like butt in and be like, oh, me too. And it's not me trying to be selfish and talk about myself.
And apparently that's a normal thing for people with ADHD because that's how we relate to people.
And with the riddle and the biggest pros were focus, attention, the quiet in my brain, being able to be around the kids in the afternoons and not feel like I was like jump out of my own skin. But there are cons and I found the cons popped up the longer I was on it, because at first you're in this new world of being able to focus and everything's quiet, and you're like loving it, and then you start to
realize some other things popping up. So with all stimulant medications, there can be some mood irritability, so you can get quite irritated with people, you can get angry, and I did start getting quite angry, which I'm not an angry person, so things that wouldn't normally make me angry were starting to make me angry. With time, decreased appetite, which is
a big one, especially with me with my workload. I would find because I was in such a good focus, I would work more than what I was before, because normally your body's naturally telling you, okay, it's time to rest. But because I had all this focus and this attention span for the first time, I was just smashing it, and I was smashing myself, and after a while that led me to burn out. Earlier, like actual burnout because I was working twelve fourteen sixty hour days because I could,
you know, around the kids and things. And you know, there's obviously the food part when you're not eating regularly because you now don't have the hunger cues. That's not good and that's not gonna help me mood either. It's also insomnia, so I did get a bit of that, and then there's also something called emotional blunting, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And then the biggest con that kind of made me change from ritalin was the up and downs because it's short acting at
last two to four hours. For me, usually only would last two and a half hours, so I felt very much up and down all day. So I'd feel like yep, good, focus, yep, and then start to feel a bit shitty and go back down and then have another dose, go back up, and then go back down. And I was up and down all day and I didn't really like that. Spoke to my psychiatrists and he put me on Vibance. Now, Vivance is a long acting stimulant, so that meant I could just take it once and it should last me
the whole day now viabance. I loved first Love Love Love. It was smoother. I didn't feel up and down. I felt my focus was tenfold on this, so so I was really focused, like I could just keep going forever.
So tasks for me to create.
A YouTube thumbnail, which should only take me max an hour, I would spending four hours on that because the time would just pass and I didn't even realize and I was so focused. I was wasting all this time on tasks and being so pedantic about it because it can really bring out that perfectionism in you, and you've got this new superpower of focus. And it wasn't really like
working for me very well. It's all well and good about a focus, but if you're spending like bloody all day sending one email or cleaning the couch, like, it's.
Not really good. It's not very productive.
And I loved that.
I wasn't up and down anymore.
But after the first three weeks, I noticed I was a robot, no personality, and that was the same one riddle, and I realized I stopped because I'm actually a very silly person.
I muck around too much. I joke, I laugh a lot.
I laugh at myself, and then I started realizing, hey, I haven't really laughed for a while, like I've stopped being silly because I was always scared because you know a lot of people with ADHD like we're very creative, and I was scared the medication was going to stop me being creative and I need that for my job as well. And it didn't stop me being creative, but I stopped kind of having emotion. I was a robot. I didn't feel as much like I'm the biggest m path.
When I went to the hospital the other week from my pneumonia and I saw this teenage boy who fell to the ground head a siege, I was crying because I actually was off my medication at that time, but I was crying and I just feel so deeply, and I realized I felt not really anything.
And you know, I did have.
A high dose for vivants because again I must metabolize it quick because just after lunch I would need a top up. And then I spoke to my psychiatrist. And that's called emotional blunting. Even seeing my kids playing usually would feel this spark of joy and happiness, and I was feeling nothing. And it was actually very scary because I'm like, is this what serial killers feel like? Just have no emotion, you know? And I was even getting really depressed. I was starting to get very, very depressed.
And I don't know if again, if it's because of the emotional blunting, because I could work forever. So I recently went off that one. Now I'm back on short acting again because it's just one of those things guys, and I'm not here to make you feel like it's not going to work for you.
And I still feel like it's changed my life.
So now I'm on dex amphetamine and it's just the short acting, but I feel like it makes me fee less up and down. Then the riddle and short acting, and that's what I was using to top up with vibe ants.
But I feel like with the decks, I just call it decks.
It doesn't make me feel as robotic and I'm still
trying to figure out my way. What was good, though, I do have to say is that when I did get sick, I completely went off of them because I was on them every single day for eight months, even on the weekends, and I kind of told myself, no, I'm only going to take them when I need them, but I did grow dependent on them, and that can be a con as well with the stimulants, because you love the feeling of being able to do the things and have focus and all that stuff, but it can
have the con of you can become dependent on some of them. Now my plans for the future. Right now, I'm going to just continue and see how I go. I'm feeling much better, but I do miss being silly stuph I don't even know if you guys can tell, maybe even in this very start of the podcast, like till now, sometimes I'm like, do I sound like myself?
Am I robot?
Do I sound flat? I don't know, It's just and then I overthink it like I am right now. But I guess to tell you. The non stimulant medication basically, they can also be any depressant and any anxiety. So the non stimulant also target neurotransmitters, but they work differently than stimulants and they can take longer to come into effect.
So I'm just reading from something. So instead of directly increasing dogamine and other neurotransmitter levels, the non stimulants, they may enhance the availability of these neurotransmitters over a long period of time and that influences the attention and behavior. So they can also be prescribed with stimulant medication, which is what I'm on too. So I'm also on a non stimulant medication three times a day and that helps
with the anxiety. And obviously you are cons in terms of things like appetite, but it depends on you and how you react to each medication. If you're on a stimulant medication, you should not be having coffee. You need to be making sure you're smashing like protein and all those types of things. Cause it happened with me a lot with vibance. It made my anxiety higher, and it kind of like feels like you're defeating the purpose. It really does feel like a double edged sword with a
lot of them. But I know so many people who have been on them and they're like, changed my life, and I agree, it has changed my life for me in the long term. If I can't find anything that makes me feel like Steph and maybe I need to come up with something where I'm just taking it for work, I don't know. But all I can say is when I had a break when I was sick, the overwhelming thoughts and the anxiety came straight back when I wasn't on it, and I realized why I need them so much.
So I don't know what the future holds for me. I would love to look into obviously, natural supplements and other things that can help, like exercise, which really helps me. But I feel like for me in this period of my life, until I can, I guess get a hold of work and all the things. Maybe I'll be on them forever. Maybe I'll just be on them for a while, because life's too short to be at war with your own brain. I think having these conversations openly with people
about our medication. Again, I know it can be controversial, and as I said before, you take this with a grain of salt. Some people love vibance. Some people do not want any stimulant medications. Some people just gone non stimulant and it's amazing for them. But yeah, it's one of those things. So I really do hope this episode helped you guys. I hope it made a bit of
sense on how everything works. Again, please do your research, talk to your doctor if you're in the process of getting a diagnosis hanging there.
I know it takes time for me.
Look, since my rediagnosis, it's been over a year and it just takes time, but you.
Know you are worth it and it is worth working towards.
Whether that is going to a psychologist to work on behavioral therapies, which is what I'm doing next, well, working with medications or working with supplements. There's just so many things you can do, and I just want you to know you're not alone and I'm on this journey with you, and if you have any questions, please shoot them through. I can definitely do some follow up episodes and I'm actually going to be getting a think psychologist on ADHD
on the show very soon. I'm excited to get a lot more like guests on the show, which will be awesome.
So I love you guys as always, Please do subscribe.
This is independently run and I do it just because I love you and I want tonect with you and it really helps me to be able to keep continuing the show.
And I'll see you guys next week.
Bye. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today's episode of Stepping Up. I don't want this to be just another podcast that you listen to. You get inspiration and then you don't take action. If there's been something in this episode that will help you step up into the best version of yourself, open up your trusted planner and make a plan. And if you've loved listening to today's episode, take a screenshot and show me where you've been listening from.
I love seeing it.
Make sure you tag us at Stepping Up and steph Pace Underscore on Instagram so we can see it. And make sure you subscribe because you won't want to miss what's coming up next week.