HealthyGamerGG - The Curse Of ADHD

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Chances are if you have ADHD you are overwhelmed. Today we're going to learn how to break free of the curse of ADHD. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the Dream.

Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six-episode docu-series. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book. The End of an Era. And don't miss Taylor Swift, the ERAs Tour, the final show, featuring for the first time the Tortured Poets Department.

Streaming December 12, only on Disney Plus. Chances are if you've got ADHD, you're overwhelmed. And despite your best efforts at organizing things, planning things, trying to keep things under control, you always find yourself in a life full of chaos. And today, we're going to learn how to break free of that. The real curse of ADHD isn't the fact that your frontal lobes are a little bit different, that you struggle with attention or impulsivity or you can't focus. The real curse of ADHD is that you have intact parts of your brain that you're actually not using because of the way that you adapt to your ADHD.

So this all starts with you being a kid. And when you're growing up as a kid, with ADHD, you quickly learn that your brain is different. So you quickly learn that while things are easy for other people, you struggle with them. And that despite your best efforts, everything that you try ends up falling apart in some way. And then something really interesting happens.

When you start to fear that things are going to fall apart, then you actually can't focus on the task at hand. So if I'm trying to, let's say, paint a picture, but I know that I'm going to get distracted and then I'll screw up the picture, then a lot of my cognitive energy is thinking about don't screw up, don't screw up. And the more that you start thinking about not screwing up, the more likely you are to screw up because you're not focused on the task at hand. It's a little bit like trying to force yourself to fall asleep. Oh my God, I need to sleep, I need to sleep, I need to sleep. Oh my God, it's getting so late. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow. And what ends up happening?

The fact that you're trying so hard to fall asleep actually keeps you awake. And so this is exactly what happens to you if you've got ADHD, is you start to realize I'm going to screw up and then you start to focus on not screwing up. But despite your best efforts, you will end up screwing up because that's what happens if you're a neurodivergent kid in a neurotypical world. And then as this happens over and over and over again, you start to recognize that screwing up is inevitable. You've got two options.

Either you can try really hard to do it right and end up screwing up anyway, or you can just kind of screw up right now and mentally free yourself of the stress. Because if you're going to screw up eventually, why bother stressing out about it? And this is what's really interesting about ADHD is that once you screw up, you actually perform better. So if we look at the brains of people with ADHD, their ability to adapt to chaotic circumstances is actually superior to neurotypical people. This is a competitive advantage,

that if you're placed in sort of a chaotic environment where there's a lot of external stimuli that are pressuring you to do things, that's when you actually do your best. You can't study for a test that's a month away, but when you forget that, oh my God, I've got a test tomorrow in its last minute panic, that's when ADHD kids actually rise to the challenge.

And so this is where most of you all learn a really interesting adaptation, which is that, okay, So if I'm going to screw up anyway, I might as well screw up now. I might as well create an environment of chaos. Because as someone with ADHD, you're really good at damage control, but you're really bad at damage prevention. You're really bad at preventing problems and making sure everything goes okay, but you're

actually pretty good at piecing things together. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk, and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. I know this certainly happened with me.

Like, I remember when I was in like the third or fourth grade, I walked into school one day and I noticed that everyone was bringing in school projects. And I was like, oh, crap. I completely forgot to do this project that was assigned a month ago. And so I spent the whole hour of lunch in the bathroom with like glue and tape. tape and toilet paper and cardboard cobbling together something of a school project. And when class time rolled around, even though I hadn't walked in with a school project, I had something kind of pathetic that saved me from failing the class.

The real tragedy is that as you discover that you thrive in chaos and that you may actually do a better job when you're surrounded by external pressures, you actually disable the one part of your brain that protects you against ADHD, which is your habit circuitry. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget.

From luxury to family rides, CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive CarMax. So let's remember that in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, our frontal lobes are the primary thing that's impaired. So our frontal lobes govern things like sustained attention, restricting our impulses, and giving us the ability to focus. But if we look at habits, they're actually a completely different part of the brain.

They're a part of our brain called our basal ganglia. And if you sort of think about a habit, a habit is automatic. It doesn't require attention. It doesn't require focus. You don't actually have to restrain any impulses when you're engaging in something that's a habit, because a habit is automatic. It is done without attention. And even the neurotransmitters involved are completely different. If we look at things like stimulant medication, which is what we use to treat ADHD, that affects the neurotransmitters of norapinephrine in dopamine, whereas our habit system is primarily governed by endocannobinoids, which are cannabinoids.

So that's the same stuff as in marijuana, which is also why marijuana messes with habits. but that's neither here or there. When we start to engage in chaotic behavior consistently, because remember that you're so afraid that you're going to screw things up, that you kind of screw things up now and you find yourself in a chaotic situation. It's something that once you believe that the screw up is inevitable, you might as well do it now and free yourself of the stress of it.

But as you start to do that, it becomes impossible to engage in consistent behavior. And if you can't engage in consistent behavior, your basal ganglia won't help you form how. habits. And this is the real tragedy because if you don't have habits and your attention starts to wander, the automatic part of your brain doesn't know what to do. And I've worked with a ton of people who have ADHD. And when we focus on habit building, what tends to happen is when they lose their attention, the habit sort of starts to kick in. And if it's the right habit, then they

end up being okay. But the real curse of ADHD is that since we start creating chaos, we don't really engage in that habit circuitry. And the problem there is that the habits are actually what's going to save you. Because if you think about going through life with ADHD, you're not paying attention. But if your autopilot mechanism is actually intact and does the right things, like if you have wired a habit of putting your keys in the same place or putting your cell phone in the same place, every time you come in the door, you will always know where it is. The problem with ADHD is that you haven't built a habit and so you end up leaving your keys in the toilet and your cell phone in your bed, right? So we don't use this habit circuitry because we end up creating

chaos. And so if we want to stop creating chaos, we've got to tackle that. And this is where there's another part of the brain with ADHD that is completely intact that y'all are usually not very good at using, which is our capacity to cognitively reframe. And this is literally what therapists do with you in your office. So your analytical capability or your IQ with ADHD is completely intact. Your ability to analyze situations and come up with intellectually the right conclusion is actually completely intact. The problem is that if you come up with the right conclusion, you can't restrain your attention long enough to actually follow through with it. But the analytical capability is completely intact. And bizarrely, this is one of the reason that kids with ADHD grow up with depression because

they recognize that I'm just as smart as everyone around me and yet I'm getting crappy grades. there's something fundamentally wrong with me, although I sort of get deep down that my IQ, I'm not stupid. I know I'm not stupid. I just can't leverage my intelligence. And so what we want to do is cognitively reframe in one particular way that sort of avoids this chaotic environment and allows us to build habits. Now, why do we seek chaos in the first place? If we go back to our earlier example, remember, it's like a sequence of a couple things. Number one, I try and I fail. Number two, I try to avoid failure, and that stresses me out and doesn't work anyway, which means that number three, what I'm going to do is create chaos because I can thrive in chaos, because my frontal lobes

are externally motivated in stimulus bound. If everything is falling apart around me, I'm going to get all these impulses, and I will rise and I will level up my sort of chaos management damage control skills. And so what we want to do is utilize our cognitive reframing or analytical circuitry in a very particular way. We want to use that to allow ourselves to start building habits. Now, why don't we do this normally? It's because we've learned a couple of unfortunate lessons with ADHD. I'm going to screw up.

Even if I try, I'm still going to screw up. I do better in chaos, and I've leveled up my damage control skills. So in order for me to succeed in life, I must make things as chaotic as possible. Because once they're chaotic, at least I don't have to worry about not screwing up, and then I will rise to the occasion. This needs to stop. And the main cognitive reframe that we're going to use is sort of reframing this idea that failure is inevitable. So what we actually have to do is take the belief that you have and sort of reframe it a little bit and create a different

situation. And what I want y'all to do is don't try to stop failing, which is what people usually try to do. Just recognize that the more you can delay failing, the better off you will be. And there's a really great example of how effective the strategy is, and it comes from actually the realm of e-sports. So I was working with a particular team that was very, very talented, but would tend to choke. So on some matches or games, they would do really, really well, and they'd, like, dominate their opponents, and we're like, yeah, like, these guys are awesome. And then in other games, they would sort of start to crumble, they'd start to fall apart, and at 15, 20 minutes into the game, they'd start to realize, oh, man, we're going to lose. And once they started to believe that they were going to lose,

they stopped trying because these are pro gamers and they know how to predict what's going to happen in the game. They know that their chances of winning are close to zero, so you might as well throw in the towel. So this group of pro gamers actually learned a slightly different strategy, which was, okay, even if you're going to lose, we want you to lose less and even win more. And what does that mean lose less? That means that if you've lost the game at 20 minutes, don't actually Gigi out at 25, see how long you can hold on. We're not saying that we're even trying for victory. We're just saying we're going to make the enemy team bleed for every inch of ground. They may have won, but we're not going to make it easy on them. And so 20-minute games became 30-minute games, became 40-minute games.

And the other really shocking thing that started to happen is they started to win games that they should not be winning. They started to make comebacks more consistently, 10%, 15, 20, or even 25% of games that people thought were over, this particular squad was able to make a comeback. Now, that may not be possible for you. Who knows, that's not actually what we're shooting for, but it may work. The reason that we want to delay the inevitable failure is because the more that you delay things, the more time your brain has to form habits. So if you're trying to do something with ADHD, you may start to get really stressed out. You're like, oh man, I'm going to screw up, I'm going to screw up, I'm going to screw up. And so just take a step back and tell yourself, yeah, there's a decent chance that I'm going to

screw up. But what I'm going to do is try to do as good of a job as I can for as long as possible. And if you can frame that way, which is not quite trying to counter what you already believe, it's just not giving up right away and not invoking the chaos. Then what you'll do is buy yourself some time. And as you buy yourself some time, you will start to form habits. And as you start to cognitively reframe and start using your basal ganglia, then you will start to activate other parts in your brain that will start to change the destiny of your life. So instead of constantly being behind and constantly being stressed, you will start to form habits that if you lose track of things, you're still kind of like doing things that are kind of productive or useful.

You'll start to view failure in a slightly different way. And so the real tragedy of the curse of ADHD isn't that you've got some part of your brain that is neurodivergent and can't focus or has difficulty focusing. It's that the adaptations that you create, when you choose chaos and damage control, because that's what you're the best at, you actually disable the most functional and helpful parts of your brain. And that's the real curse of ADHD. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals because we're built for what you're building.

First Citizens Bank, fit for your ambition. Learn more at firstcitizens.com slash ambition.