Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast. Today, we're excited to have ADHD coach Rawi Nanakul here with us to talk about thriving in law school with ADHD. Your Law School Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan, that's me, and Lee Burgess. We're here to demystify the law school and early legal career experience, so that you'll be the best law student and lawyer you can be.
Together, we're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website, CareerDicta. I also run The Girl's Guide to Law School. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review or rating on your favorite listening app. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can always reach us via the contact form on LawSchoolToolbox.com, and we would love to hear from you.
And you can check out the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast if the bar exam is on your radar. And with that, let's get started. Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast. Today we're excited to have ADHD coach Rawi Nanakul here with us to talk about thriving in law school with ADHD. Welcome, Rawi.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Oh, my pleasure. Well, to start us off, can you just give our listeners some information about your background and your work, so they have a little bit of context here?
I'm what you call an ADHD coach. I help people come up with strategies to achieve goals in the way that works best for their brains. In other words, I help them be accountable and come up with ADHD-friendly strategies to achieve what they want to do.
Nice. That certainly sounds very useful. And if people want to learn more about you or reach out, how can they do that?
You can find me at adhdproduct.com or adhdpm.substack.com.
Awesome. Well, to kick us off, let's just talk a little bit about what is ADHD. I mean, how does this show up for people?
Yeah, I feel like in the last couple of years it's really blown up in popular culture, but from a lot of people they've never heard the official definition of it. When you think of ADHD, you either think of a hyperactive little boy, or somebody who can't sit still, or somebody who's forgetful. But the reality of it is that ADHD is far more than that. I'll give you the U. S. medical definition of it, and I'll give you my mental model definition of it.
The medical definition is a neurological disorder that presents in either hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity.
So, you have a mix of someone who can't sit still - they just need to keep moving; someone who can't really pay attention - so, if you give them a piece of paper, they can't just read it down, they have to skip around; and then there's someone who's really impulsive - they want to go gamble, or they want to take a road trip in the middle of the night to go see something they just read about in the news. These are the medical definitions of it, and they're also sustained over at least six months.
So, when people say "Oh, I feel ADD", it's a little hurtful because I've been living with this my entire life. It's not something that is temporary for me. The European definition of it includes emotional regulation, and that's what we're going to talk a lot about today, is that emotional dysregulation is a core component of European diagnostic standards, but not in the American DSM.
So what does that mean, emotional dysregulation?
Yeah, so the way I like to describe it is that as someone with ADHD, I feel emotional reactions that are improportional to the event around me. And that causes a byproduct of inattention and focus. And so, my mental model is ADHD is really an emotional regulation disorder, in which the byproducts are attention and focus. More simply put, because I feel so panicked about something that someone just told me, it makes me come off as being inattentive to you, or not listening to you.
If you were to tell me, "Rawi, I really don't like the color of your shirt", in my head, I might just think, "Oh my God, she doesn't like me, I don't know what to do." And I'm now 10,000 miles away, thinking about all the things that I've done wrong that led up to this point. And at the end you go, "Hey Rawi, are you paying attention to me?" That is the kind of inner dialogue of ADHD that most people don't see.
They just see our actions and our words, but there's a lot more going on underneath, and that's why I think that the core component of it is emotional dysregulation. The focus and attention part is the only thing you get to see, so that's why we jump to that conclusion. It's
very interesting, because I've noticed that a lot of people that we work with who have ADHD also tend to have some type of anxiety disorder, or test anxiety or something like that. So this all kind of tracks with that, but being more than just like, "Oh, I get distracted by things."
And that's a common misdiagnosis for folks with ADHD, is to be diagnosed with anxiety, be given ADHD medication, and it not be effective. And when they take ADHD meds, they find it to be effective.
That is indeed very interesting. It's just, I've noticed the pairing of people saying that they've got both. You were actually diagnosed later in life, I believe. What's that experience been like for you?
Yeah, so I want to take you back a little bit in my life. I used to be a former attention and autism researcher, from 2008 to 2011. I worked in one of the world's foremost labs in autism, at UC Davis. I recognized everybody around me had some sort of neurodiversity and I thought I was the only normal person. I just thought for some reason, I just get along with all these people.
How did I end up here?
How did I end up here? And three years ago, I was having challenges with my wife. I went to a marriage therapist and told them our problems, and the therapist asked me, "Hey, have you ever been tested for ADHD?" And this is my ego. In my head, I thought, "No, I used to be an attention researcher. Someone would have told me." No, they wouldn't. Actually, as a good friend, you wouldn't go around trying to diagnose your friends.
And so they're very good friends to me, and they never brought that up. And so, for me, getting that diagnosis was suddenly a moment of, oh, these things I experienced, I thought they were because I was broken. I thought these were things that was a failure of me. My thoughts of self- harm, my thoughts of constant failure, my thoughts of wanting to quit things all the time. I thought these were because of a personal flaw.
Getting diagnosed helped realize, no, it's not a personal flaw; it is a disorder that I happen to have that's also shared by 3% to 5% of the global population. I am not alone in my struggle.
Oh, it's so interesting. I think a lot of us who go to therapy later in life realize, "Wait a second, I'm actually not the crazy one here. Things happen that cause me to behave this way." So I feel like it's sort of a similar type of realization of just, this is what it is. It's not a character flaw. It's just the way that your brain happens to work.
Exactly. And you see this even more in academia; regardless if you're in neuroscience or in law, academia in general. You're selecting for a certain group of people who are fixated on a very particular thing, right? They've chosen to be experts on this one thing at a deeper level than anyone else. You're probably going to find some neurodiverse people in there.
That is also a fair point. And we see this a lot in students that come to us for help, where they have gotten through other experiences they got through undergrad, they did fine, they got through high school, maybe they've even had some work experience. But suddenly when they get to law school, all these things suddenly start to be really hard and a lot of them start to realize, "Maybe there is a little bit more going on than this just being a challenging experience.
Maybe I do have ADHD or some other type of neurodiversity." What do you think are some signs that people might look for? I mean, it sounds like possible problems in their relationships could be one that you experienced. But just in general, to clue them in that maybe there is something else going on here?
So, first I'll put out a disclaimer that I am an ADHD coach, not a medical
professional. Sure. Of course.
If you want medical advice, if you suspect that you have ADHD or another neurological disorder, please go see a professional. I can show you my personal experience around that. I said this would be my - hot take isn't the right way - but my different way of looking at this is that all of us have created mechanisms for us to live our lives, and it's not a problem until it's a problem. So, this is the classic case of how someone with ADHD gets diagnosed in that.
It was totally fine for me to read the Biology book the night before the test and still get an A. It was totally fine for me to go to college and do that. It did not work for me in grad school. So, these mechanisms that we've all created for ourselves, regardless if you're neurodiverse or not, work until a certain extent. What happens when you have a form of neurodiversity is that at some point, those systems break down and the first kind of culprit is, you think you're broken.
So, the signs here are, if you think that you are the one broken and you're so fixated that you are the problem, talk to a therapist or a doctor. If your thought is, "Oh, I just need to change my study habits or I need to add these different things in", you might be a little bit more well balanced than I am.
But to answer your question, using this framing of, "What are systems that I have in my life that I'm aware that I should probably improve?"- things like studying the night before - if those have become crutches for you and they no longer work but you're struggling to do a different process, I think that's a great time to start seeking for professional help.
It's not so much like a one-to-one medical correlation, but it's more of a reflection of the tools that you have in front of you, the tools that you know are no longer working. So maybe it's a doctor, maybe it's a law school coaching program, maybe it's a therapist. It's just more of a recognition that, "The tools I have no longer work. What do I have available to me to explore to address that?"
And talk to me a little bit about that. What is the potential difference between the possible help you might get from a doctor, versus a therapist, versus a coach, whether it's someone like our tutors or you as an ADHD coach? What's the universe that people are looking at here?
I like to use an image of the spheres of care. So, you have a doctor who addresses your heart and general health, you have a psychiatrist who will look after your psychiatric well-being, and so that's who you'll talk to for an ADHD diagnosis and other things.
You have a therapist you can go talk to, typically about the past, in that, "Okay, why can't I let go of me messing up on this test years ago?" And then those individuals have an unequal amount of power to you - meaning, you are going to them to solve a problem for you. Like, when I go to the doctor, I say, "Hey, this is hurt. Fix it." Now, a coach or a tutor has an equal level of power. They are working with you in order to achieve the goal.
They're helping you identify the strategies and tools you need to pass the bar, get into law school, etcetera. They work with you. You're not going to them for an answer.
I wish we could do that. I wish we had the magic wand we could wave to solve all of your problems and answer everything for you. But yeah, that's unfortunately just not how this works.
And here's the other key difference. So, one is like, "Hey, I want you to fix me." You don't care that your doctor has had a heart attack before to address your heart attack. You just care that they've seen a hundred heart attacks. It's different from a coach or a tutor, where you care if they've ever passed the bar before, you care they've been to law school before, you care if they have ADHD, or in my case been a product manager, because you're trying to achieve that thing with them, right?
So, the context of how those skills are applied are very different between your doctors like your medical providers, and your coaches.
Definitely. And the other thing people might want to look into at their school is, they're going to have an office that you're going to have to talk to if you think you need accommodations or things like that. They're required to have that, so you can definitely reach out and get that level of framework as well. But yeah, there are a lot of moving parts here, which I think could be challenging for people.
Yeah. You brought up another great point of, within the spheres of care, if you are going to pursue an accommodation or a disclosure with an organization under the ADA, your therapist can help you with that, your doctor can help with that. A coach typically, unless the coach is also a therapist, wouldn't typically be able to advise you on those types of things. But understanding the resources that your school has for mental health and accommodations is another great first stop.
And it's going to vary from school to school.
Yeah. Some of them, it's definitely easier than others. It is kind of ironic that people are expected to run this very complicated gauntlet on their own, to get accommodations for not being able to plan things very well and stuff like that, but that is the world we live in.
It is a harsh irony.
It is indeed. Well, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about a few scenarios that I'm interested in getting your thoughts on. So, I'm midway through law school. I was diagnosed with ADHD many years ago. My whole academic career I've had accommodations, everything. I knew I was going to face some challenges in law school, but it's been a lot harder than I expected. My grades are pretty bad. Do you think it's too late to turn things around? Should I just give up and find something else to do?
Absolutely not. And I want to share a quote to you, from Fawn Weaver. She's the CEO of Uncle Nearest Whiskey Company. They're the fastest growing whiskey company in U.S. history. And she recently wrote a book about Nearest Green, who's the first black master distiller in the U. S. that we know, and he was an enslaved person and was the first distiller for Jack Daniel. And the quote is, "I don't believe in failure. It doesn't exist, unless you give up before you succeed."
I really like that quote, because as someone with ADHD, my first reaction to hardship is fight or flight. And for me, that's quitting. My fight or flight is so extreme, quitting might be my first thing, and the second thing is, I should just off myself. Yeah, and I thought that was normal. I just thought it was normal for people to think about suicide, and I'm very open about this subject, because it just shows the extent of this emotional dysregulation, I imagine, that I described earlier.
So, to answer your question, is it too late to turn things around? Of course not. We have lots of different mechanisms for schools to support you. The first step is to recognize, "I'm not a broken person, it's a broken process." And being able to take yourself out of that shame spiral, darkness spiral, whatever it is, whatever is keeping you there, or whatever these thoughts that are surrounding you and keeping you from thinking that it's over - we have to remove you from that first.
And that could be talking to a therapist, that could be talking to a friend, that could be getting into a regular sleep and exercise routine. There are all these different things that we can do to change our neurochemistry, and just reaching out to others, expressing our emotion, because when we don't let that out, this fear of, "Should I give up and do something else? - when we don't have an outlet for that, that just sits and festers within us until it just consumes you, and then you quit.
And so you do fail, because you didn't do anything as a result.
Right. It becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy and downward spiraling of just like, "Well, I'm going to think poorly of myself and not get any help. And then, "Oh, whoops, it didn't work out well, so I must be a failure", which I just hate to see, because a lot of this is learned skills. You can learn to do law school, just like you can learn to do anything else.
Agreed. And really, once you're out of that rut, it's understanding, "How do I want to accomplish this? My tutor says I should study this way." And "should" is a key word that'll probably come up again. "My tutor says I should study this way." Is that actually the way that works best for you, though? If your brain is wired differently, that means that you just need a different way of doing the thing.
So, I think in the case of, if you were working with a law school tutor, "This is the outcome I'm trying to do. What are the ways I get into my flow state?" Flow state being that state in which you actually start the task and you're doing it and you're focusing. "How can I work with my tutor to identify how I get into those flow states, rather than just doing the full fight or flight?"
Yeah. I think what we're trying to do and what it sounds like you're trying to do too is, strategize around the problem and really identify the problem, identify some possible solutions, try them out, iterate through them. And it's a collaborative process. It's not top down saying, "Okay, the only way to do it is this." It's really like, what is going to work for you? And then really identifying those things, so that you can do them and be more successful in this process.
Yes, and that's actually the hardest part. I don't want to minimize that, because oftentimes the strategies that people get from self-help books or a coaching tutor - those strategies may work for that person as they are, but that person has to be in the emotional state in order to allow themselves to process that. Because right now if I were to tell a law student who was doing very poorly and they said, "Hey, what do I do?" and I said, "Well, you should just study harder"...
"That's helpful, thanks."
Right? And so, if you're a tutor listening to this, having more empathy to say, "Okay, this is what we need to do. What do we need to allow you to process?" Maybe it's just processing that emotion and then doing the strategy. Or maybe it's, "Hey, here're some different sets of strategies. How do you feel about them? Which one is easier for you to start and stop?" Oftentimes, like I said, the biggest part is actually allowing yourself to process those emotions.
Strategies and all those other parts are secondary. They're oftentimes much easier.
Right. I mean, we can't focus and learn and think very clearly if our brains are in a heightened state of arousal. I'm sure we all know the neuroscience data on that, that you have to be in a certain state to actually be able to focus and learn. And if your brain thinks you're running from a lion, it's probably not going to focus on learning tort law.
If you have to spend 70% of your emotional energy keeping your sh*t together, that means you only have 30% left to study for law school, work at a day job. That's the biggest thing I work on with my clients, is how do I reduce the cost for them, just to be them? Reduce the cost to managing their anxiety, managing their masks they feel like they have in order to be in the environment they're in, so that they have more capacity to do these things that they want to do?
Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense, that you've got to start with the baseline of getting yourself ready to be in a state where you can actually process information, versus not being able to do that and just getting frustrated with the whole situation.
Correct. And again, it goes back to oftentimes, as a neurodiverse person, you blame yourself.
Right, exactly, which is sad and unfortunate and has consequences that are not great. Alright, let's shift gears to another question. So, I am a new law student, I've got ADHD, and I'm finding it really hard to force myself to do the required reading and also to keep track of all my assignments, especially these semester-long Legal Research and Writing projects. Do you have any tips for just getting better at this?
Yeah, there're two ways to approach this. Within ADHD, one of the areas that impairs the most is executive function. Executive function are these different domains that are classified as these higher domains of your brain. So, things like task initiation, time management, goal setting - these are all parts of the executive function. By the way, there's no one set of executive functions to rule them all. There's a broad term and depending who you ask, there're different categories in it.
And so, my advice to a person would be to take a step back. What are the things that are preventing you from doing these different items? And then understand, how is it that you want to do these? What works best for you? Because for one person, it might be reading, let's say, 20 minutes a day. If I need to read 100 minutes in a week, one person might say, "I'm going to do it 20 minutes a day. That's how I best retain information."
Now, an ADHD-er with hyperfixation might say, "Well, actually, I can do it in 100 minutes. I'm going to do it in one sitting, that's how I best retain that information." And so it's really about allowing yourself to say, "That's how I operate, and that's okay", while still checking in to say, that might be how you operate, but is that the best for you? If you are going to read 100 minutes at a time, instead of 20 minutes a day, what are the other things you have to juggle that against?
How are you going to take notes in that, right? So, you might have read it all, but if you don't have good notes for it, it might not be as effective. So it's constantly going back with yourself of how you operate best, and then working with your tutor or whoever else to kind of figure out where is the happy medium. And creating your own way. When you feel emotionally regulated for that strategy, when you feel like, "Oh, this is going to be successful", you are more likely to show up and do it.
I think that's definitely true. I've certainly seen that you've got to commit to the process before the process is going to be effective for you.
Yes, and oftentimes when you have neurodiversity, you do things that are out of alignment with your feelings, because that's what you think is expected of you.
So, in the case of this, "Oh, I should read 20 minutes a day", there's a cost to that, because it's really not that effective for them, so they force themselves to do it, and they carry the shame because they can't, and all these other ancillary costs to it; rather than being able to say, "No, I'm a read-it-all-in-one- block kind of guy, and that's what I'm going to do", and allowing yourself just to be okay with that.
Yeah. We see this a lot with people who are studying for the bar exam, because they'll purchase a big course and the course will tell them "This is your schedule", and they present them with something absurd like 10 to 12 hours a day of work to do, seven days a week, for three months. And anyone looking at this is going to be really overwhelmed, but certainly someone who's neurodiverse is probably going to say, "No, this is absolutely not going to work."
And then people can't keep up and then they get stressed about it. And that definitely very quickly becomes a downward spiral. So I feel like what you're saying here would probably apply to that as well, correct?
It does. And what you're really looking for is inclusive design. You're not really looking for an accommodation to the program per se, like the accommodation of, "Hey, I would like this program two weeks longer because I need more time for it", or whatever things I come up with. If you're looking at that program and thinking like, "Oh my God, I don't know how I could do this" - to me, that's a reflection of the design of the process. That's not a reflection of a broken person.
And the way to address that is being able to understand and develop your own self-awareness through therapy, coaching, etcetera, to say, "This 10 to 12-hour schedule, this is how I break that down. These blocks that they've told me I have to do in this way, that doesn't work for me. I have to flip it in this way." Or sometimes, the strategy works, but they have to break it down into smaller chunks so they aren't as overwhelmed.
Right. I would argue no one can actually study for 10 to 12 hours a day successfully. That's just not how anyone's brain works. But nobody hired me to design a big bar program. We design our own schedules, we try to make them more flexible. Alright, before we wrap up, I want to get your thoughts on this: so, I'm a student who's considering law school and I'm worried about succeeding because I have ADHD. What type of support system would you suggest getting in place before I commit to this?
I will tell you all the things that I do to regulate my self -care in my day-to-day life. I would say that I'm a pretty high-achieving individual. I'm a Fulbright scholar, I have a master's degree, I've worked at FANG-level companies. On paper, I'm a high achiever, but I do so much stuff to take care of myself. And I'm sharing this because I think oftentimes we just see the high achievements and we don't realize all the work that's involved. So, for me, it's sleeping eight hours a day.
Again, you probably think, "Yeah, okay, it's sleep." What you probably don't know about is something called "delayed sleep syndrome", which is common with people with ADHD and autism, in which your sleep cycle is not the typical sun up to sun down. Sometimes your sleep cycle is delayed. So, my focus, my best attentional time is between 9:00 and 12:00. I have friends, when their best focus time is 3:00 to 5:00. But also be aware that there are going to be barriers for yourself.
And so, see a sleep consultant. I saw a sleep consultant recently, turns out I have sleep apnea. So, my struggles with sleep weren't actually all my fault. It wasn't just me staying up to play video games. I actually had true biological issues underneath it. So, sleeping, have a regular exercise routine. I run five days a week in the morning, because that's what I need to set me up for the day. If I don't run, I know that I'm going to be off.
I see a therapist on a bi- weekly basis, just to talk through all of my stuff. I see a psychiatrist on a monthly or bi-weekly basis as well, in order to make sure that my medication management is in line, expressing any kind of changes I might need. So, I am medicated with ADHD. It's one of the things that does help me. It may not help for everyone. And medications change. There's a myth that once you get the pill, you're done.
No, I've had to go through five different medications in the last three years. And then making time for self-care. Besides having an exercise and sleep routine, making sure that you're carving out time just to be you, because that's how you are able to emotionally regulate into these kind of heavy studying patterns that you're going to be going into. It's easy to, when you enter in a very hyper competitive and new environment, to say, "No, I just have to give it my all."
The reality is, you're a battery. And if you have ADHD, the plugs on that battery pack - if you imagine one of those phone battery things - sometimes you have multiple plugs and it's great, sometimes you get one. You never know. It changes. But that battery pack needs to be charged. There are times that you need to just charge it and not touch it. There are times you can charge it and still do a little bit of work.
I write my newsletter as a way for me to charge my battery, but also do marketing for myself. If you're able to manage that and think about yourself as a battery, "What are my times to charge? What are my times that I'm working? How am I managing those plugs in order to be most efficient with the capacity that I have?"
Now, honestly, I think that's great advice for everyone. I definitely completely drained my battery my first semester of law school, and then ended up clinically depressed the next semester. The sleep was a huge thing, all the things you're talking about, I'm like, "Wow, yeah, that all happened." Alright, we're about out of time here. Any final thoughts you would like to share on this?
If you're listening to this, you're probably already a high achiever. So, my advice to you isn't so much, "Hey, what do I need to do to prepare more for law school?" My advice to you is to really look at how can you better take care of yourself? How are you recharging your battery? Because you're probably going to survive fine. You're probably going to get through school, you're probably going to get through the bar. All this work stuff will happen.
The thing that's most important, the thing that you can't really repair is you. So, if you burn your battery out through law school, that impact is going to carry with you for the rest of your life. You can always get another job, you can always switch to a different school, but the cost isn't worth it to your body and your mind, because you can't repair those things.
Yeah. And I think that's so important when you look at the actual data of outcomes of people in law school and lawyers. It's not a particularly healthy profession. So, I think being aware of that going into it, and really focusing on your self-care and really just staying true to yourself and taking care of yourself. It's a very difficult thing to do in these environments, but I think it's super important.
Yeah, and also that those challenges don't go away once you get out of law school. I carry the same challenges now that I have had for the last decade. It's just a different context, right? So like, yeah, you got through law school, cool. You still have the same problem in your practice.
Yeah. I mean, it's almost like things just start ramping up and up and up. The more and more responsibility you get, the more you're expected to work. If you don't start developing, essentially, really they are boundaries around what you're willing to put up with as a law student, it's pretty unlikely you're going to go into a happy, successful career as a lawyer either, unfortunately.
100%. And boundaries, when you have ADHD, is something that I'm constantly talking with clients about. What am I willing to do for myself? What am I willing to do for someone else? And setting up those boundaries allows you to enforce the self-awareness you have to do the things the way they work for you.
Totally. Well, remind us again how people can find out more about you and reach out if they want to do that.
Yeah, you can find me at adhdproduct.com. And you can also check me out on my free weekly newsletter at adhdpm.substack.com.
Awesome. Well, Rawi, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a super interesting and useful conversation.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, my pleasure. If you enjoyed this episode of the Law School Toolbox podcast, please take a second to leave a review and rating on your favorite listening app. We would really appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to Lee or Alison at lee@lawschooltoolbox.com or alison@lawschooltoolbox.com. Or you can always contact us via our website contact form at LawSchoolToolbox.com.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon!