Today we’re going to be talking about a chemical that is responsible for countless deaths worldwide every year - a chemical so ubiquitous that it can be found practically everywhere - in the air, in our homes, and even in our bodies. I’m of course referring to dihydrogen monoxide or its more common nomenclature H2O Yes, we’re finally going to be talking about water. One of the tips I go back to over and over again to help manage ADHD is that of making sure you are properly hydrated. It's absolut...
May 10, 2021•16 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast With ADHD we often have trouble filtering things out - we can't ignore the hum of the air conditioner, we can't ignore the scratchy tag on the back of our shirt, we can't ignore the fact it seems like the lady standing next to us in line seem to have marinated herself in perfume. We don't want to pay attention to these things, but we can't get our brains to focus on what we want to in the best of times, so how do we expect them to when something is calling for our attention so urgently. Many peo...
May 03, 2021•17 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast This week we're going to be exploring the power of habit and how small changes to our routines can have a big impact. One of the easiest ways we can help our ADHD is by working on routines and habits. It's easy to let our default habits run our lives but when we consciously choose what habits we actually want to cultivate we aren't hamstringing ourselves. In this episode we'll be learning why we don't need to use discipline nearly as much as we think, the importance of sequencing in our habits a...
Apr 26, 2021•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Resistance is the embodiment of the I don't wanna's - the part of us that keeps us from doing our work - or anything for that matter. And a big part of resistance comes from our ability to rationalize what we're doing - I'll jump into one task and find myself doing something else and then my brain will come up with a reason why I needed to be watching youtube instead of working on this week's episode. In today's episode we're going to be exploring what rationalization is, some of the ways that w...
Apr 19, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Making the right choices isn't always easy - we've got so many options of what we can do and when I'm tired I don't want to weigh all my options. It would be great if I could just get a gentle push in the right direction. Something that would make the choice I want to make easier to make. What I'm talking about here is a nudge and that's what we're going to be talking about today. We'll be learning about what a nudge is, why they work, and when they don't. We'll also be looking at some of the va...
Apr 12, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the thoughts I kept coming back to while working on my episode's on multitasking was what it really meant to be multitasking. I settled on using the idea of doing two cognitive tasks at the same time, but that left me with another quandary - what about when I'm doing one thing and just thinking about doing something else. Surely just thinking about something else wouldn't count as multitasking. But still... There have absolutely been times when I've been thinking about something else and ...
Apr 05, 2021•21 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast To recap from last week we learned that are there are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing. We also covered how we're more likely to try and multitask with things we're familiar with but how that...
Mar 29, 2021•21 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast This week we're going to be deep-diving into multitasking - this is one of those topics that I frequently mention in episodes, but I've never featured before. Not because it doesn't deserve its own episode, but because multitasking is actually a fairly complicated issue and is going to take a bit of time to dissect. So this is actually just going to be my first episode in a series on multitasking and we'll really try and dig into the nitty-gritty of it. In today's episode, we're going to be talk...
Mar 22, 2021•19 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast One of the questions that I frequently get is how people can actually apply what they're learning - in this podcast and from all the other things we learn. I know this is a particularly pernicious problem for ADHD because often we see things that we think would really make a difference in our lives, and yet we can't seem to get ourselves to apply these ideas. Today we're going to exploring how we can start working on getting a better understanding of what we're learning, why we might want to sta...
Mar 15, 2021•19 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to understanding our ADHD it can be a bit of a minefield to navigate - one of our most pernicious problems is that often we're never really educated in what it means to have ADHD. And to top that off, what we learn from pop-culture just reinforces stereotypes that don't really reflect what ADHD is actually about. One of the most important ways to help manage our ADHD is to accept it, but that can be really hard to do if we don't actually have a good grasp of what having ADHD means....
Mar 08, 2021•16 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast All right everyone, we've got another listener Q&A episode coming your way today with questions looking at ways we can declutter our phones, re-establishing our routines when life is in flux, and how to recover after taking on a heavier workload. Be sure to checkout ADHD Diversified with MJ Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/buildingtouchstones This Episode’s Top Tips A lot of our ...
Mar 01, 2021•19 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Did you think I was all done with tabs last week... well I wasn't because there's actually a ton we can still talk about. Tabs are one of those small things in our life that can have a fairly outsized impact. Don't think so? Well, keep listening to find out why. Today we're going to be talking about how tabs can literally change the way our brain works, some ways we can cull having all those tabs open, and then talk a bit about those precursors to tabs... bookmarks. Support me on Patreon Connect...
Feb 22, 2021•17 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast A few weeks ago I asked around on Facebook the number of tabs that my friends had open at the time. Answers I got included: 500 on their phone and 20 on their computer, 50-60 across 5-6 windows, 4-5, 16, 3, 80 across 9 windows, 2, 4, 7, 45, 112 over 17 windows… and of course, at the time of my asking, I had 70 across 12 windows, although as I mentioned earlier I'm down to just a few right now - oftentimes these episodes are just as much about helping me as they are about helping you. Clearly, a ...
Feb 15, 2021•19 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast We all have an idea of what clutter is - it's just all that stuff. It's that frustrating feeling when you can't find something just because there are too many other things to look through. Clutter is disorder. While we typically see clutter as a physical thing - the junk on our desk. The pile in the corner of the room. The stuff spread out all over our counters - we can also experience its digital counterpart because we also amass a lot of stuff digitally. Today we're going to start our journey ...
Feb 08, 2021•18 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast #Adulting Now there's something a lot of us can relate to - or relate to the idea that adulting is something we sometimes do, but being an adult is not something we are. ADHD can make us feel like we're not really adults. An adult would get their bills paid on time. An adult wouldn't let their house get this messy. An adult would be eating healthy meals for dinner every night. Now it would be a stretch to say that I feel like an adult all of the time, but I'm certainly getting there. A big part ...
Feb 01, 2021•18 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast When I was in school, I always wanted to be the kind of student who able to finish a project well before it needed to be turned in. I loved the idea that I could write a paper and still have a week left to polish it. Of course, I was never actually that student. For me to get started on a paper, I had to actually be able to feel that pressure from the deadline building up on me. That usually meant that I was mostly working on papers the night before - I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Since I wa...
Jan 25, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this week's episode, I am going to be going over the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan - I was introduced to this book by Eric Tivers through the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. I can't remember if it was required reading or just strongly encouraged when I took the groups, but the messages in this book were key to getting through the coaching groups. My first reading of the book was on audiobook and since then I've listened to it three more and read the physic...
Jan 18, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last year there was a surge in the popularity of the game Among Us - 1000's of people jumped on to be funny little scientists running around there spaceship running various little tasks... all while trying to find out who among them didn't belong - the one who was trying to sabotage the mission. The one who was an imposter. I definitely played my fair share of the game, but always felt like I didn't get to play as the imposter nearly as much as I wanted to... yet in real life, far too often I fe...
Jan 11, 2021•17 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Occam's Razor is a philosophical rule (and that's rule in a very soft sense) that we can use to help us with problem solving. In philosophy a razor is a tool used to eliminate (or shave off) options that might lead us astray. Occam's Razor is one of the most popular examples and has made it's way into popular culture from the movie Contact to Sherlock Holmes to The Big Bang Theory. I imagine that a lot of you have heard of the famous razor before, which states that: plurality should not be posit...
Jan 04, 2021•17 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast I'm going to be diving into some more aspects of planning in the coming months - I know, shouldn't I have done this before the end of the year? Well I'm going to us my being completely unprepared for the end of the year to illustrate a great point - it's never too late to start working on planning. One of the most important aspects of planning is knowing where you've been and this typically comes from some kind of review process. The reason for the review is so that we can plan an accurate cours...
Dec 28, 2020•13 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Hey there team, we're nearly at the end of 2020 and I thought I'd deliver a bit of a shorter episode this week focusing on some of the strategies that I find are the most important for managing my ADHD. This is definitely not a definitive list and as for the order of things... well I moved things around a number of times trying to decide what the best order would be and honestly I'm not sure there really is an order or truly a most important thing. When we're trying to manage our ADHD an importa...
Dec 21, 2020•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sequencing is all about the order in which we do things. Sometimes it seems like it doesn’t matter what comes first, but also try putting your pants on after you put on your shoes. Sequencing is something I’ve come to realize is a big deal with ADHD. The order in which we do things has a big impact on our overall productivity, but more than that, some of our other issues with ADHD make the sequence in which we do things much more important. Today we're going to be exploring how the order we do t...
Dec 14, 2020•17 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Part of the reason that automations is such a ripe topic is that it can help in almost all areas of our life - this week we're going to focus more on the work side of things, because when it comes to our jobs there are a ton of things that usually can be automated fairly easily, because we all have those little tasks that we have to do all the time that aren't that hard but do require us to shift our attention to them for just a little bit. And that's what I think is the best benefit of setting ...
Dec 07, 2020•16 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast In this week's episode we're going to focus on the money side of things and go into how we can use automation for our shopping and then also how we can use automations with our finances. And as a reminder, automations are things that we can set up in our life that are just going to happen regardless of what else we do. So think clicking a button and having a form filled out or even more basically think about something like your dishwasher, you put the dishes in, click a button and then all your ...
Nov 30, 2020•20 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast One of the paradoxes of ADHD is how much work we can get done when we're interested in something... but then how little we get done when something is boring. Unfortunately in life there are a lot of things that are going to bore us. And this becomes especially true with those boring tasks we have to do over and over again. So this is where automation comes in - automation is simply something that accomplishes tasks for us without our intervention. Whether we know it or not, all of us already use...
Nov 23, 2020•19 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast "There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What's keeping us from sitting down is resistance." This is how Steven Pressfield introduces the idea of resistance in his book the War of Art, and to me, resistance is the root of the "I don't wanna's." While I don't agree with many of the things in Pressfield's book (I mean, he states that ADHD was made up by pharmaceutical co...
Nov 16, 2020•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast I'd say I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning, but that implies that there is a part of me that loves cleaning. There isn't. I like having cleaned and having a clean home, but I seldom enjoy the actual cleaning part. ADHD tends to not make cleaning any easier. Time blindness makes me think most of the cleaning tasks I need to do are going to take forever. I have a natural propensity for clutter, and that clutter often fades into the background of what I notice - so I just stop seeing tha...
Nov 09, 2020•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's a little bit different - today you're going to be hearing an interview I had with my friend Kari Gormley - now I say interview with a bit of hesitation because our conversation absolutely did not start out that way. Kari is a Certified Applied Positive Psychology Practitioner, Coach, and Trainer as well as a fellow podcaster - her show is The Flourishing Experiment. but so, I was having a zoom call with Kari and we were just chatting to catch up on a few things and I had mentioned th...
Nov 02, 2020•22 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Last week we started our journey of self-compassion. Self-compassion is key part of cutting ourselves some slack - it's the combination of empathy and action. We're doing the things that'll let us put ourselves at the front of the line when it comes to self-care. But self-compassion isn't easy. When we're being self-compassionate we're trying to relate to ourselves in a way that's forgiving, accepting and loving - many of us have grown up with the view that the only way for us to push ourselves ...
Oct 26, 2020•18 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we're going to focus on the difficulties of self-compassion and then talk a little about mindfulness - next week we'll be going into the ideas of self-kindness, common humanity, and some other ideas I've been playing with. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/selfcompassion This Episode's Top Tips Self-compassion can help with ADHD because it can help us realize that ...
Oct 19, 2020•19 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast 
