HealthyGamerGG - What Everyone Gets Wrong About ADHD

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K reacts to a viral ADHD skit to break down what the internet frequently gets wrong about the condition. Moving beyond surface-level symptoms, he explains the neurobiology of time blindness, why high-stakes pressure paralyzes the neurodivergent mind, and how to actually build discipline by severing the link between action and impulsivity. What to expect in this episode: The Viral Assessment: A breakdown of a relatable skit covering tardiness, forgotten hobbies, and dead plants, and why focusing only on the struggles of ADHD ignores the nuance of how to actually fix them. Time Blindness Mechanics: How ADHD impairs the internal biological clock, preventing the brain from subconsciously gathering data on how long tasks take, which makes daily planning nearly impossible. Sensory Organization: Why people with ADHD must stop relying on "neurotypical" memory strategies and instead build rigid sensory systems—like the rule to "don't put it down, put it away". Suppressing Bodily Signals: How hyperfocus causes individuals to ignore basic needs like thirst or hunger until they are starving, leading to highly impulsive and unhealthy choices when they finally take a break. The Avalanche of Guilt: How a simple mistake (like forgetting a friend's birthday for seven years) instantly triggers emotional dysregulation, transforming a missed task into the deep-seated belief that "I am a fundamentally bad person". Meds vs. Therapy: Why stimulant medication only treats the primary symptoms of ADHD (Layer 1), while psychotherapy is equally necessary to heal the broken identity and low self-esteem (Layer 2) that build up over a lifetime. The High-Stakes "Lockdown": Why elevating the pressure or importance of a task—which typically motivates neurotypical people—often causes individuals with ADHD to freeze or completely shut down due to emotional overwhelm. The Secret to Follow-Through: Why the key to finishing a project is actually learning not to start it on a whim, as the exact same frontal lobe circuit that restrains impulsive excitement is responsible for deliberate, long-term discipline. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus. Starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age,

breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. So this is an ADHD assessment, okay? I'm going to take some notes. And we're going to understand what is going on here and what to do about it. Or 45 minutes late. Yeah, sorry, there was like a ton of trap. I forgot it was today. That's okay. Let's review your answers to the questionnaire I sent over.

Didn't do it? Okay. Let's just dive in then. Question one, where are your sunglasses? I don't know. And when was the last time you did know? 2017. Okay. Are you thirsty? Yes. Do you have water? Got it. Will you drink it? Nope. What was that noise? A reminder. For you to wish my best friend a happy birthday today? Two months ago. And you forgot for the... Seventh year in a row. And how many times have they forgotten yours? Zero. Which makes you feel like a terrible friend. Even though your friends are super important to me. And when was the last time you started a new hobby? This morning.

Pottery or pizza making? Pottery. Same more. So that I can make custom plates on which to put my homemade pizza. And your pizza oven has been outside for three years. Filled with cobwebs. And you are too afraid to clean it. Have you ever kept a plant alive?

No. How many amazing ideas do you have on a given day? Between one in 300,000. And how many of them do you execute? Pass. And finally, if you were the star of an action movie where the fate of humanity hinged on your ability to send a thank you card, it would end with, everybody dead. Perfect score. So what we're going to do is go through each of these things that they describe and talk about

how they connect to ADHD. Okay. So the first thing is that he's late. So we know that ADHD has time blindness. Second thing is the questionnaire. Did you fill out the questionnaire? No, I forgot. This is executive function and or disorganization.

The water thing I'm not quite sure about. Do you have water? Are you thirsty? I was kind of confused about that one. You forget to eat or drink. Okay. That's helpful. We can talk about that. Thank you, chat. Bodily signals. Next thing is birthday. This is a big one. Okay, so forgot birthday. Set reminder. Reminder is old. This is the other interesting thing, right? Like, the reminder was from a while ago, but they still haven't turned it off. They've forgotten for seven years. Friends are important to me, and this makes me feel bad. This one is really interesting. We're going to dig into this one some. So adopting new hobbies, impulsivity. And then they have cobwebs, which is lack of follow through, right? So discipline, also executive function.

Plant is dead. This, I think, is also impulsivity. This is kind of the same as number five. How many ideas do you have hyperassociation? And then the last thing is this thing where he says, if you had to write a thank you card, otherwise humanity would die, what would happen? And he's like, everyone would die. So we're going to talk about high stakes and how high stakes impedes action. There was an interesting paper. We're going to talk about all these mechanisms. Okay? We're going to speed run them. There was an interesting paper that came out maybe about a year and a half to two years ago that did. did an analysis of ADHD short form content, I think specifically on TikTok, and found that something like 90% of it was like wrong in some way. So there's a lot of bad information about ADHD on the internet. I actually think this one is pretty good because each of these things we can describe, we can characterize and describe in a particular way. The first problem with this is that when, oftentimes when we see a piece of content like this, we're like, oh yeah, this is me. I have ADHD. This me. What I don't like about this is the finality of it. Right. So this is our experience. And when we hear

that a million other people have our experience, what we don't hear is the million people who are able to change it. Right. So if you have an ADHD, if you have a 60 second clip about all the problems that ADHD causes, that will way outperform what actually works because that requires depth and nuance. Right. This clip, I think, has something like 800,000 views. There's no way that my reaction to it, we'll get that, even though I too have clips in the 800,000 million, whatever, multi-million views. That's a challenge. So let's start with timeliness. Clinical implications of perception of time and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or review. Time perception and children with attention deficit disorder. Why don't you go to bed on time? A daily diary study of the

relationship between chronotype, self-control resources, and the phenomenon of bedtime procrastination. There's a lot of papers about this. So I'm going to give you guys a quick overview of this stuff. Okay. So what causes time blindness and ADHD and how do we fix it? So the first thing is we have an internal biological clock that measures how long things take. In people with ADHD, that basic capability is impaired, which frustrates the neurotypical people around us a lot because they're like, I told you what time to be here. Why are you always late? How long does it take you? It takes you 45 minutes to get here. Why don't you just leave at 5.15? So you can be here by 6. So the reason this is so confusing for them is they will lay it out for you so easily, right?

And that makes sense cognitively. The problem is that that theoretical thing does not translate to your frontal lobes to actually plan action. This is kind of like telling someone, okay, how do you not recognize a tree has branches and leaves and flowers? If the flowers are red, that means it's a rose. How do you not understand that this is a rose bush? And it's because you're blind. Like that's that middle step of, oh, this makes sense into my head, which neurotypical people have no idea that there is a process between make sense in my head, therefore I do it.

That fundamental gap has to be translated by your brain. And time blindness is a good example of this. There's another really interesting thing about time blindness, which is that, you know how people with ADHD don't know how long something takes, right? So it's hard to plan your day. Why is it hard to plan your day? Well, because I have 15 minutes of, I have to fill out this application. How long will it take? Between 15 minutes and 15 hours.

That's why it's hard to plan because you have no idea how long something will take. The other interesting reason why it's hard to plan for your day is because when you do a task, if you have no internal biological clock, your brain gets no data about how long that takes. Does that kind of make sense? When I sit down to do something, a neurotypical person is like, I sat down around this time, oh, how long that day? And it'll take you about half in it. How long were you in line at the DMV?

I was in line for about half an hour. You have an internal biological clock that is measuring things. When it measures how long something it takes subconsciously and without your knowledge, you can also plan because now your brain knows, oh, go to the DMV. That is a 30-minute errand. That is missing in ADHD. So a big part of what we teach in Dr. Kay's guide to ADHD and doing stuff about doing stuff is what are the tools that you can use to overcome that.

So as a simple example, people with ADHD, their sensory input is very, very robust. So if you see something, if you hear something, you get distracted, you start paying attention to it. What you see and what you hear sinks in, which is why the utilization of like an organized planner or something where you measure your time in some way, I like measure things. I'm working on, I started at this time on this day, and I worked for this many minutes. And I just happened to have what games I chose not to play, which was once. Hunter stories in Warhammer and Unicorn Overlord recently. So literally externally measuring things, writing things down will help your brain. Second thing, the questionnaire. Did you forget to do the

questionnaire? So neurotypical people can remember to do things. Now remembering to do something is actually really strange if you think about it. This is one of the weirdest things in the brain is remembering things. I'll give you all an example. I'm on my way home from work and I'm about to take the exit off the highway to return to my home. When I remember, I need to pick up some milk. So I'm like, oh, I was about to take the exit. I don't take the exit. I move one more exit down the highway, and then I go pick up the milk. I want you all to think about how weird that is. I forgot something, and then I remembered. Do I control the remembering? Absolutely not. My brain, I forgot. My brain, my brain remembers, and my brain floats up to the surface of my conscious thinking that I did, I need to do this thing.

So a neurotypical person takes this for granted. The fact that you can remember is bizarre. To remember means that you forgot. And if you forgot, you don't control whether you remember or not. Right, that is the experience of remembering. Oh, sometimes I remember and sometimes I forget. Hey, all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation.

How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So what we know about people with ADHD is that their executive function and their inability to remember things makes it so that organization becomes really important. And particularly sensory input becomes really important. I will never remember where I put my keys. So I always put them in the same place.

I know where the keys belong, but I won't remember where they are. Which brings us to another really interesting thing about ADHD, which is that a lot of the problems with ADHD, the reason we don't solve them is because we try to use a neurotypical strategy. And a neurotypical strategy won't work, right? So if we're blind, we can't navigate with sight. we need a stick. But if you have a stick, you can manage. So this is where, like with ADHD, this is where you won't remember where you put it. That's why there must be one place where it goes. I love this phrase. Don't put it down. Put it away. Put it where it belongs. So what I found working with patients, and this is going to be a big theme that we're going to focus on, is half the

problems that you have are way easier to solve than you realize if you do them in a particular way. Now, building up the habit to do them in that way is not simple, but it's way easier. So, like, a big problem with ADHD is preventing certain steps of this process, which is really where the problem lies. So if I always put things where they belong, I will never lose them, right? Which a neurotypical person can afford to be lazy. We cannot. And if you really think about it, how hard is it to, in my case, you know, in our house, we have a nice little key back thing right by the door. And that's where the keys go.

And what's infuriating to me is, since I lose my keys a lot, I always put my keys in the same place. My wife does not have ADHD. She does not put her keys where they belong all the time, ever. So then what happens is she misplaces her copy of the key, and then she takes my copy of the key. And then I go to drive the car, and I can't find my keys. Now she's lost two sets of keys, because my keys are reliably in one spot, and her keys are who the hell knows where. So then I end up looking for keys anyway. And then what I have to do, and by the way, this is really interesting.

I'm curious about this. If you have ADHD, are you better at finding the things that your partner misplaces than what you misplace? I would bet money that the answer to that question is true. Yes, for y'all too. Now I figured out where to find the keys that she misplaces because there's a pattern or order to them. Whereas when I misplaced them, it's absolute chaos.

Okay. So this is where if you forget to do questionnaires, if you forget to do things, you need to create a system where you are prompted in a sensory way. So like questionnaires or paperwork goes in a particular place that you check on a daily basis. You don't rely on, oh, do I need to do something? Do I not know? You just go there and mechanically you look through what you need to do. Right.

So a good example of this is what I'm using an electronic health record and things like that. When I go to the office, the first thing that I do is I log into my EHR and I see what my tasks for the day are. What I do the night before I go to bed is check my calendar. When I wake up in the morning, I check my calendar. And then it goes into the calendar and it goes out of the mind. We can talk about bodily signals. So this happens a lot. This is kind of with like hyperfocus.

So oftentimes with ADHD, we get so hyperfocused on something. This isn't just ADHD. This is going to be neurotypical people with video games, for example. When we get really hyperfocused on something, we will oftentimes suppress our bodily signals. And then when we have a break of some kind, we realize, oh, my God, I'm so thirsty. And so oftentimes the right move there is to, once again, structure the way that you consume food in the way that you, you know, drink water or whatever. So this is where oftentimes

what I try to do is have lunch ready when I'm done streaming. This I have a lot of help with. Thankfully, somebody else basically takes care of this for me. But when I'm done, lunch is usually ready. And if it's not ready, then I'm going to eat like crap, right? Because I'm so hungry. And the really strange thing about being really hungry, which is true people with ADHD, I think it's maybe more intense, but true of regular people as well, neurotypical people as well. When you are really hungry, you want unhealthy food way more than you want healthy food. But healthy food will satisfy you way more than it will if you're not starving. The food that you want, you want a hamburger so much.

But you will be way more satisfied with a salad when you are starving. And when you are not starving, a salad will satisfy you less. A burger will be more enjoyable because it's fatty and it's delicious and it's got protein in there. It's got that umami and we're going to put that pickles and mayo and mustard or whatever. So this is what's also really hard is oftentimes when we're really hungry, right? Like we want to eat that really unhealthy thing, but you'll notice something interesting. If you want a cookie when you're starving and you eat a piece of fruit, you will love the fruit way more as well. So usually when I work with people with ADHD or who are just trying to eat healthy, we try to lean into this principle.

Next thing, this is one that I want to spend a little bit of time with, the birthday card, okay? This is a reminder to do a birthday card for my friend. Okay, we talked about executive function. We talked about forgetting things. We've talked about sensory input. The biggest challenges in ADHD, in my opinion, are not the first level challenges. They're the challenges that we layer on top. Okay, so this is why this goes.

I forgot my birthday card. That is a problem in and of itself. That could be fixed. Then our mind does something kind of interesting. I've forgotten seven years in a row. So interesting that it remembers that. Have you guys ever noticed that? That my mind is really good.

Oh, yeah, I may have forgotten where my keys are, but it's really interesting. really good at keeping track of how many years I've forgotten this kind of thing. So not only do I forget my friend's birthday card, now my mind is keeping track of it, and it is making me feel worse because I have a very good resolution into how bad I'm doing, and then it does something even more interesting, which is it says, oh, do you care about your friends? Yes, I value my friendship so much. And then it does something kind of interesting. I value my friendships a lot and I failed. And since I value my friendships a lot, I feel so much worse about myself.

You guys see how that works? And it happens so quickly. Forgot a birthday card. Forgot a birthday card for seven years. But I care about my friends. And they got me one. And so you kind of like beat yourself up very, very quickly. So this is where there's also emotional reactivity in ADHD.

There's an emotional dysregulation subtype, which some people are advocating to be its own classification. So there's attention deficit disorder. There's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, right? Those are two subtypes. Inattention predominant, hyperactivity predominant, or a mix of the two, the combo meal. And then they're like, okay, let's do emotional dysregulation subtype. If you really look at what this is, this is dysregulation of your emotions. And here's how this works. Every day when you get the reminder, you are reminded that you forgot the birthday card. That reminder that you forgot the birthday card activates the emotional circuits that give you guilt. And once my guilt emotional circuitry gets hyperactivated, right?

Let's think about what's precisely happening here. I hear a reminder, guilt pops to 100. Literally, the action is an alarm went off on my phone. Response is guilt goes to 100. We're not even aware that it's guilt. Then what happens is when the guilt circuitry activates, it manifests as thoughts. It's been seven years. You care about your friends.

Look at you caring about your friends. How pathetic. You care about your friends and you've forgotten seven years in a row. It's like bludgeoning you with these thoughts. And then there is an identification with it. I am a bad friend. So I love to cite this paper really interesting. If you look at the comorbidity between people with ADHD and depression,

3% of people who are diagnosed with depression will grow up to have ADHD. 70% of people with ADHD will grow up to have depression. A treating ADHD is not just about time blindness, suppression of bodily sensations, executive function deficit, emotional dysregulation. It is also about the consequences of living with those things. I'm an idiot. I'm unreliable. I'm this.

I'm that. Right. We have the first layer of primary symptoms. And then we layer on top of that things that are harder to beat. And here's the tricky thing. If I start someone on stimulant medication, it only works on layer. one doesn't really work on layer two. Works on layer two maybe a little bit because it regulates the amount of guilt that I feel. Reduces the activity of my my guilt circuit in the brain. But it doesn't

change my sense of identity, which is why I really love, and this is what really confuses people. Psychotherapy is equally effective to medication. Works the same. Effect size is the same. And when I, when I work with patients with ADHD, I like to do psychotherapy with them as well because we have to do this identity component. You're not a bad friend. You're not a bad person. You have this problem. We're going to actually jump to this, high stakes. There's one thing that is very, very, very annoying about ADHD. Can happen in neurotypical people, too. So if you look at motivation and action, as something called salience increases, salience is importance.

As the importance of an action increases, your motivation increases with it. Right. So, oh, it's not like, do I need to pick up milk? Not that big of a deal. Oh, my God. I've got a hot date tonight. I really got to pick up that bottle of wine on my way home. As something becomes more important to you, your motivation towards that thing will increase.

It's why it's hard to get patients to take blood pressure medicine. Because if you take blood pressure medicine, you don't really feel a difference. You feel the side effects, but you don't feel the difference. It doesn't feel important. So we really have to help people understand how important it is. Because high blood pressure usually doesn't have any symptoms, unless it's catastrophically high. You run at like 160 doing damage to your body for 20 years and not feel a thing. But I've noticed in my patients with ADHD that high blood,

stakes is paralyzing, not motivating. For most people, as the stakes increase, our motivation increases. ADHD, it seems to have the opposite effect. And even in neurotypical people, there comes a point where if the stakes elevate to a certain point, we become overwhelmed and we become paralyzed. Now, one of the mechanisms for this is when we have a sympathetic nervous system response, so when our body gets turned on, I don't mean like sexually, well, sexually too, but so when our body is facing stress, Tiger in the jungle, I'm taking my final exam. My body's like, we need to be active. So adrenaline increases, cortisol increases. And when our sympathetic nervous system activates, fight or flight is what we think about with the sympathetic nervous system. There's a third element, which is freeze. Fight, flight, or freeze.

So what we know is that, you know, when an animal is being hunted, it'll run away, it'll fight, or it'll play dead. And so there's a point where even like with trauma, right, like there's a moment where we try to run, but then we freeze. When I work with patients who have been sexually assaulted, they will sometimes resist, they'll sometimes fight back, but sometimes what they'll do is dissociate and lock down and freeze. And that lockdown is triggered by a high level of sympathetic activity. We feel overwhelmed, stuck, frozen.

This seems to happen more often in patients with ADHD. And the reason for that is, remember, there's an emotional dysregulation subtype, right? So emotions skyrocket. And when emotions are very, very, very high, that. is what can trigger the freeze response. I'm going to throw down with you when I'm not mildly angry, when I'm absolutely pissed. Oh my God, I'm so angry. I'm not going to dead ass run away if I'm like a little bit anxious. The more fearful I am, I'm terrified. I'm just going to run. I'm going to stop thinking I'm going to run. And when I feel overwhelmed, I'm going to lock down. This is what makes it so

hard for my patience is because the more important things are, the harder it is for them to actually act. So when they want to act the most, it becomes the hardest to act, right? So this is, it's such a beautiful example because he's like, can you write a thank you card if it's not that big of a deal? Yes. If the fate of humanity depends on it, that pressure activates us emotionally. I don't know if it activates really that dissociation mechanism. That's a different mechanism in the brain. But it really causes us to shut down for sure, to feel locked down, to feel paralyzed. I'd say lockdown is a better subjective description from the patients that I've worked with, right? They feel like they're stuck.

They're paralyzed. They're like they can't do it. Okay? And so then what happens is this aspect of high stakes, how important are friendships to you? The more important they are, the more that stakes increase, the more that you lock down, which then makes you feel even worse and leads to low self-esteem, leads to low things like depression. Okay? So this is what's really scary about it.

Now, this is where there's an element of work that oftentimes people with ADHD miss, which is like, how do I deal with this? Actually, the way to deal with this is to deal with the association, right? There's a chain. Forgot card. Forgot seven years. Relationships are important. I am bad. And so people will come in and they say, how do I have self-esteem, Dr. K? And they try to work on this problem, confidence, in isolation. Whereas actually what we need to do is this is caused by this, this is caused by this. If we can break the chain, this melts on its own. So notice the associations. Notice the way that your mind jumps from one thing to another thing to another thing. And you will say, but Dr. Kay, all of those things are true. I'm not saying they're not true. What I'm saying is that as you lose attentional control of your mind, this is why mindfulness and meditation helps so much in ADHD.

Because I want y'all to think about what is really happening in this scenario. The event is an alarm goes off. And the result is I am bad. I'm not disputing the logic of any of these. What I'm encouraging y'all to notice is, just see how when an alarm goes off, I feel like crap. Like what? It's this daisy chain. This is where we have to stop the attention. We have to shift our attention away from this process. Restrain the mind. And then when we restrain the mind, direct the mind. Make a card. Then get excited about it. Make six more.

Then mail one overnight. Just go to the post office. But instead, we do this. We do this every day when the alarm goes off instead of actually fixing the problem. And this is like, this is what's so cool about working with situations like this, all of these things can get better. Now, this too is something that I think is really important. Let's talk about number five. New hobbies. I love this example. Pottery or pizza?

Pottery so I can make a plate for my homemade pizza. So good. So new hobbies. We're impulsive. There's a lot of excitement. Oh, I want to do this. I want to do this. It would be so cool if we did this.

So cool if we did this. But then we have a problem with follow through. So one of the biggest things that I try to help people do is what people will come to me and they'll say, how do I follow through? how do I follow through? How do I follow through? How do I develop discipline? That's not what you need to do. The circuit in your brain that acts impulsively turns on and then turns off. When it's on, you're motivated. When it's off, you're demotivated. So order pizza oven, cobwebs for three years. Really good, right? That's the scenario. So actually what we need to control is not the discipline to follow through.

What we need to control is starting in the first place. If we start to separate action from impulsivity. If we act impulsively in impulsiveness is what gets us to act, then when the impulsiveness goes away, we won't follow through. The secret to follow through is not, uh-huh, ha, ha. The secret to follow through is to not start. You cannot quit or abandon if you never start. Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, look at the wisdom. But literally, so here's the cool thing, okay? There's going to be some weird neuroscience, but I'm like, it's, it's legit, y'all. Action. is motivated by all kinds of things. Nucleus accumbens.

This is dopamine, emotions, impulsivity. So like all of these things can result in action. So when I restrain my impulsivity, this is my frontal lobe, blocking this and preventing that action. This is also the same part of my brain that gives me discipline, that gives me follow through. The ability to plan and execute tasks over a long period of time is done by the frontal lobes. Okay? So literally the same part of your brain that does follow through is the same part of your brain that does not behave impulsively, that restrains your impulses.

It's the same part of the brain. It is to act deliberately. Does that make sense? Act deliberately means act with follow through. Deliberate one after the other. It's the same circuit. Stopping the impulse is the follow through, literally. Same circuit in the brain, same function. And the way that that works, another way to kind of understand is what I said earlier, which is to disassociate impulse. from action, to be able to train yourself to act out of things that are not impulsive. But as long as you are acting out of impulsivity, that circuit will not grow, right? We are stopping one circuit. We are pruning some neurons. And we're strengthening other synaptic connections.

So this one is huge, right? And while I'm learning lots of things, I also have this scheduled on my calendar, right? So like, I'm using organization to be able to do it all, where you guys saw my Excel spreadsheet with the various words that I wrote, the times that I wrote them. So I'm not just buying books on fiction. I'm actually writing. And I have a scheduled time that I go to an art class for two hours a week. And so if you schedule it, you'll do it. If you get prompted by it, you'll do it. If you have to show up, you will show up, right? You may show up late, unless you set a timer and you know where your keys are. See what I'm saying? Keys are in one

place. I have my bag ready to go. I put everything in its place. And then I'm out the door on time. and I'm checking my calendar obsessively four times a day, okay? The impulsivity is also the ideas. How many ideas do you have? One to 300,000 a day. How many of them do you do none? This is also impulsivity. Why do you do none of them?

Because you're impulsive. If you are relying on your impulse, you'll start on a dozen and you'll finish none. If you disassociate impulsivity from action, if you start to act without impulsiveness, and you restrain yourself from acting when you get excited. And I mean, literally restrain yourself. Like, sit and like, I'm not going to order this book on Amazon. I feel like ordering it. I'm not going to do it.

And then another impulse will come up. You check your calendar. You look at what you need to do next. It's amazing. ADHD, when I work with people, it feels like a set of dominoes. But the first one is like Stonehenge. But once one thing gets better, what's really scary about it is all of these deficits cascade.

A snowball becomes an avalanche. And now, suddenly, I. I am a fundamentally bad person because each of these statements is logically true. But it is the process that my brain literally what happened today, my alarm went off. And then I feel like crap for the rest of the day. It can get better. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life.

If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.