In this episode I'm talking with the CEO and founder of the company Shelpful, Sharon Pope - we've all had times when we needed a little help getting ourselves to follow a routine and sometimes we don't have the accountability in our lives to make that happen. Shelpful is all about solving that problem of getting that daily accountability. The program works through text messaging but you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself - this is all in the interview. Be sure to go checkout Shelpful at Shel...
Jan 03, 2022•32 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast As I’m getting ready to head into the holidays I thought I’d deliver you something a bit different in your podcast player - a story. I don’t want to give anything away so get snuggled in and prepare yourself for The Dog and The Dragon by Brandon Sanderson. Be sure to go check out all of Sanderson's work at BrandonSanderson.com Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/dragon...
Dec 20, 2021•17 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast Trimethylxanthine is the world's most popular psychoactive drug - for many caffeine is such a ubiquitous substance that calling it a drug seems like a misnomer. How could something so widely used that has so few regulations around it be a drug? But a drug is simply a chemical substance that affects our nervous system function and can result in changes to our perception, mood, cognition, and behavior. I feel like caffeine ticks the box pretty well on all those accounts. In today's episode, we'll ...
Dec 13, 2021•14 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Hey team, today's episode is coming in a bit more seriously than some of my others so I just wanted to give you all a head's up. In today's episode, we have listener questions dealing with depression so we're going to be talking about comorbidity in ADHD and specifically, we're going to be talking about how ADHD interacts with depression. comorbidity - this is a term that comes up with ADHD frequently enough and really what we're talking about here is two or more disorders or illnesses occurring...
Dec 06, 2021•15 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast The ADHD brain has a strange relationship with thinking. One of my biggest gripes is that it often feels like I can't ever turn my brain off. No matter what I'm doing, I'm thinking about something. I could be washing dishes, but I'm thinking about what else I need to do before I go to bed. I could be walking to get the mail, and instead of wondering what's in the mailbox, I'm thinking about a conversation I had three years ago. Even when I'm trying to meditate, I'll often find myself thinking ab...
Nov 29, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast In a lot of my episodes, I have touted the virtue of asking questions - this is something that is embedded deeply in my philosophy. When we engage ourselves and others with curiosity we are able to solve problems more quickly and with better answers. One idea that I see pop up frequently is that questions are more valuable than answers - to some extent I agree with that idea, but I think it's a bit too hyperbolic. It feels like it stems from the counter-intuitive branch of self-help whereby sayi...
Nov 15, 2021•17 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast Hey team this week I'm jumping on some listener questions - if you'd like to leave your own question for me to answer on the air just head over to HackingYourADHD.com/contact and leave me a message In today's episode, I'll be answering a question about procrastination and how we can work on getting past issues of low confidence, and then we're going to be dive into some ways we can take breaks when our mobility is a limiting factor. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Twitter Tiktok or ask...
Nov 01, 2021•12 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast Often when I think about productivity I envision something like a well-oiled machine - everything fits together, everything has its place and when it is running smoothly it produces amazing results. But the part that my imagination doesn't usually pick up is a few important words - well-oiled machine... what does it mean to be well oiled - well, for one thing, it means that there is someone maintaining the system. It means, that left to its own devices that the machine would break down - and for...
Oct 25, 2021•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast We all know that one of the biggest hurdles from ADHD is starting, but paradoxically one of our other hurdles is stopping. Sometimes it feels like we're better off if we just power through until we're done, but if we really want to get the most out of our workdays, we need to have some breaks. In today's episode, we're going to be looking at the benefits of taking breaks, some different ways that we can take breaks, and also exploring going beyond breaks and actually taking some time off. Suppor...
Oct 18, 2021•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 course based on where we are now. But that review is also a lot easier said than done. I've sat down for many a review sessions and realized that I don't have a great way to look back. I'll skim through my calendar and wonder what exactly happened over the last few weeks or months and kind of shrug and g...
Oct 11, 2021•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week I am talking with Dr. Norrine Russell of Russell Coaching - Dr. Russell has a Pd.D. from Bowling Green State University with a focus on psychology and education and began her ADHD coaching practice in 2009. In our conversation today, we talk about what you can expect to get out of coaching, how we can work on working with our brains, and ways we can help our kids with ADHD. Today's episode is focused more on children with ADHD, but I've always found that these are lessons that we can t...
Oct 04, 2021•37 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast One of the easiest ways for procrastination to creep into our lives is through the thought that we just need to wait to do something until we feel like doing it. I totally get this. I feel this way all the time - it's super easy to put something off because we don't feel like doing it right then. But that's not always our best strategy - in fact, for a lot of things we're never really going to feel like doing them and so waiting for that inspiration to come means that we're never going to get to...
Sep 27, 2021•17 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast This week I'm bringing back an episode from the archives while I'm working on getting some new content put together. One of the hardest aspects for me with ADHD is that I can quickly become overwhelmed when I can't find a clear path forward - I know I could do the research, but setting aside the time feels like it's going to be too much and so I just procrastinate forever on starting. For me finding a therapist was one of those things that seemed too murky to get started on. There were just so m...
Sep 20, 2021•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast While working on the last episode on laziness, one of the themes that came up was how we can become paralyzed when we don't know what our next step is - this can often be seen as laziness from other people or even ourselves. We know we should be doing something, we just don't know what. And this is where the importance of planning comes in. Today we're going to focus on how to plan our day because it's easy to let our days get away from ourselves when we don't plan them. It feels like we shouldn...
Sep 13, 2021•18 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast In last week's episode, I talked about the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap and how it can be hard for us to really remember or predict how our state is going to affect our actions - one of the consequences of this is that we often label ourselves as lazy when we didn't do something. Our cold state brain tells us that we should have just done the thing, all the while neglecting how we felt. This disconnect is what leads to a lot of our self-judgment and in particular, those of us with ADHD often find oursel...
Sep 06, 2021•17 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast Why do we make bad decisions in the moment? We've all done things that we regret doing right? yeah me, neither - but let's say hypothetically there was something that we regretted doing - something that we said or did that we feel like doesn't really reflect on as a person. Why is it I can have the best of intentions and still when it comes time I still make the wrong decision? Today we're going to be exploring the hot-cold empathy gap and why it can be so difficult for us to predict what we're ...
Aug 30, 2021•14 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Hey team, good news, I am finally over Covid - it took me a bit longer than I would have liked but I'm healthy again and ready to get back at things. This is an episode that I started working on before I got sick, and one of the areas that we had been looking into was that of planning and goal setting. So I thought it was time to shift a bit onto an area that we often forget about - leisure time. Now, I want to be clear here, leisure time is not in opposition to goals and planning, in fact, it's...
Aug 23, 2021•16 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast We've all got things that we think we should be able to just do - for example, I've had on my to-do list for weeks to make a phone call to the bank - it won't even take that long, but I keep putting it off. I keep finding reasons not to do it - what I've done is I've created a wall of awful around making this phone call (really most phone calls) and the more I put it off the more it builds it up. Today we've got Brendan Mahan from ADHD Essentials to explain what the Wall of Awful is and some way...
Aug 16, 2021•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the hottest trends to come out of the self-help world over the last few years is gratitude. And it's no surprise, gratitude has been found to be one of the greatest indicators of overall well-being. I'm usually pretty skeptical about things that get hyped quite as much as gratitude has been - I mean when you see the list of things that a gratitude practice can help with it's pretty easy to roll your eyes. I mean can gratitude really do all those things that people say it can? Today we'll ...
Aug 09, 2021•20 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...
Aug 02, 2021•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hey team, I'm going to be taking a little time off in August and I thought that I'd dredge up a few episodes from the archives. Today we're going to be hitting on an idea that has been a reoccurring theme in the last few episodes and that's personal energy management. While many of us have realized that we only have so much time in our day, we tend to still believe that we're going to have the same amount of energy from sun up to sundown. But we know this isn't true. Our energy levels vary throu...
Jul 26, 2021•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast I want to start this episode off by saying that this is something I'm bad at - and not in the sense that what I do to celebrate is bad or that I'm not celebrating the small wins throughout my day. It's bad in the sense that I almost entirely skip the whole thing. Recently this podcast tipped past half a million downloads. That's a pretty big milestone and is pretty indicative of how successful this endeavor has been. But it was barely a blip for me. I didn't want to acknowledge the success becau...
Jul 19, 2021•16 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast As we've been working on goals one place I want us to take a step back on and think about is meeting ourselves where we are. As we get going with our planning we tend to decide that well we want to do all of the things. And I mean why not, there are a lot of things that I want to do, if I don't start now, when am I going to start? I can't tell you how many ill-fated adventures I've started because of that whole "if not now, when?" line - there are so many things that I should be investing my tim...
Jul 12, 2021•17 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast The first thing we've got to understand is that when we ask, when should I quit? We're also asking, when should I persevere? And they often serve as the same answer - I should quit when it doesn't make sense to keep going. I keep going when it doesn't make sense to quit. Unfortunately is really easy to get those messages mixed up and with ADHD we've all got a trail of unfinished projects and ideas that are weighing us down every time we need to make this decision again. Support me on Patreon Con...
Jul 05, 2021•19 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Last week dove into how goals work and the science behind them - now we're going to be taking all of that and looking at how we can better create our goals through simple frameworks. A lot of these frameworks come from a business setting, but with a little tweaking, we can absolutely make them work for personal use as well. Today we're going to be looking at a few of the different frameworks we can use for our goal setting as well as hitting the why behind setting those goals. Support me on Patr...
Jun 28, 2021•16 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast As we continue to think about our fresh start one clear area that we're going to hit is that of, well what should we even be focusing on. That's where goal setting comes into play and while I did touch on this in the original fresh start episode, I think it's worth giving more consideration. When we think about goals there's a ton of different ways to think about them, but at their basics, a goal is simply a future result that you are directing your effort. Now there are a lot of different ways ...
Jun 21, 2021•14 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast One of the things I never quite got a grasp on is seasons... I mean I grew up in Hawaii and we basically had hot and not quite as hot. But this comes up for me because technically we're still in Spring right now so I guess this could still be a Spring Cleaning episode - officially Summer starts on the Solstice in June on the 20th... so I made in by like a week if you're listening to this when it comes out. Regardless of if this is Spring Cleaning or not, cleaning can be a great way to signal the...
Jun 14, 2021•15 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast In just one more month we're going to be coming up on the halfway point of 2021 — I know, I have no idea how it got here either. But with this mark in time we're starting to see a shift going on - while COVID certainly isn't a thing of the past, the vaccine role out has opened up a lot of possibilities for what we want our future to look like. At the end of 2020, I did some planning for 2021, but I knew that a lot of it was going to be uncertain so I didn't make too many specific plans. But now ...
Jun 07, 2021•16 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast In this week's podcast, I continue my conversation with Will Henshall, CEO of the music service Focus@Will In this part of the interview we talk about how we can use music to affect our state of being → and to jump on this because I realized I didn't really hit this in the interview, by state of being I mean how you are currently experiencing things - so this encompasses your mood, energy level, and your motivation level - okay, back to our intro - we also discuss a number of various ADHD tips a...
May 24, 2021•17 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast Whenever I sit down to do some serious writing I always make sure to have something to listen to - music is often a key piece of how I keep myself engaged in the task I'm doing. In today's podcast, I'm going to dig into that idea, by I won't be doing it alone. Today I'm joined by Will Henshall, CEO of Focus@Will which is kind of like Spotify for concentration music. In this episode, I talk with Will about how music can be critical in our ability to focus while working, how ADHD brains need a cer...
May 17, 2021•17 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast