Podcast Episode #26: Thought Downloads

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Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults with with adhd. I’m your host Kristen Carter and I have adhd. Let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder. I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B. Hey, what’s up, you guys? How are you? I’ve missed you. Thank you so much. My name is Kristen Carter. I am your beloved host of the I have ADHD podcast. I have taken two full months off for the summer. It has been absolutely delicious. It’s been wonderful. It’s been a great summer. I’m so glad it’s over. For those of you following on Instagram, I’m just so glad the summer’s over, you guys. I’m so happy, but it was a great summer. And listen, thank you for your patience. Patience. As I have just really put the podcast on hold. I thought I could do it. I thought I could do it all. I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you or not, if you can relate to that or not, but I went into the summer thinking, oh, my gosh, absolutely no problem. I will definitely be able to do the podcast and my job and parent my kids and, you know, have my husband travel and us go on vacation and all the things. And that was just really adorable that I would think that. So I ended up taking two full months off, and I will tell you that I really missed podcasting, and that felt good. It felt so good to miss it. It felt so good to want to come back to it. I really enjoy connecting with you guys. I really enjoy being able to create content every week. I love it. Hurts so good. You know what I’m saying? Like, it is hard and it’s painful, but it hurts so good. I really do end up, in the long run, enjoying it. I am so thankful to myself. The me of six months ago that created the podcast in the first place. She did a lot of work, that girl. That girl did a lot of work. She cried a lot of tears and she said a lot of curse words, too. It was hard to get this thing rolling, but now that it’s up and going, it’s been so fun, and I’m so glad to get back to it. I’m ready to party. Okay, so this summer was my first summer medicated as a mom of three kids. It was magical. I noticed a huge difference in my ability to be able to keep up, do the things that I want to do, not get as emotionally triggered, not be someone who yells all the time. I mean, of course I still yelled, but I’m just saying that I noticed a huge difference in my ability to show up as the human that I want to be. So that was really fun. Yeah, that was super great. And another thing that I’ve been doing is coaching. I Started coaching with a life coach in May and I’ve been doing it consistently. It’s now September, middle of September if you can believe it. And that has been life changing. It’s been so awesome. Highly recommend coaching especially for the more high functioning ADHD adults. Therapy is a great place to start and then moving on to coaching has been so powerful for me. I just wanted to talk today about something that I’ve been learning, which is bringing awareness and creating awareness around my thoughts. So as an adult with adhd, I do not have the luxury of being able to have the internal dialogue that my neurotypical friends are able to have. Apparently we have like 60,000 thoughts a day. That works out to be roughly like 3,3000 thoughts per hour. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m not aware of many of them. Now what’s super crazy and annoying is that I’m not exempt from my thoughts having an impact on my life, right? Because thoughts create results. That’s the way that life works. Now of course things happen to us. We get sick, we lose our job, we experience loss. You know, as you know, I’m a person of Christian faith, So I fully 100% believe that God is ultimately in control. But what I think is that we don’t fully grasp how much power we have to change our experience in the world. Thoughts create feelings, feelings drive our actions and our actions drive our results. So ultimately our thoughts create our results. And this can be so tricky for us ADHDers because we’re not really aware of our thoughts and therefore we’re often not aware of why we’ve ended up with the results that we have. We don’t really have the ability to have the internal dialogue like I said, and that’s like super unfair. But it is what it is, okay? So we can often end up in situations and that we really didn’t plan for. Now my husband is someone who thinks and processes internally, like a lot. He will have an idea and spend days or weeks thinking about it, processing it, mulling it over before he even brings it up to talk about out loud. Like what? This is so crazy to me. And it’s because he is able to be super aware of his thoughts. He takes a thought and he can hold onto it and think about it and really dialogue in his mind about that thought. He can process the things internally. He can reason and prioritize and plan all in his mind. That’s super unfair, don’t you think? Ah, me, I get an idea and I have to talk about it. It’s the way that I process. I can’t just keep it inside. And because when it’s inside in my brain, I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t keep track of it. It doesn’t stay organized. I lose it. It just is up there with all of the other clutter, and I can’t keep it streamlined. Okay, so actually imagine 3,000 thoughts rolling around in your brain every single hour. How many of those 3,000 thoughts are you actually aware of? I can tell you that I’m not aware of many. Okay. I’m just really not. Except what’s frustrating with that is that whether or not we are aware of our thoughts, they are still influencing how we feel, what we do, what results we get. My bank account balance, it’s because of my thoughts. My relationship with my partner, it’s because of my thoughts. The way that I’m feeling right now in this moment, it’s because of my thoughts. So this summer, what I’ve really been trying to do is bring a huge amount of awareness to the thoughts that I’m thinking. What am I thinking? What result does that have on my day? What result does it have on my mood? On the way that I show up in the world and interact with other humans? This is the way to take your ADHD life to the next level. This is how we do it. It’s not by getting the latest app or figuring out the best way to calendar your time. It’s bringing awareness to your thoughts. Now, I know we’ve already talked about a brain dump. A brain dump clears the clutter. It gets everything out. It’s like emptying the closet of shame or cleaning the bed. I mean, under the bed. You know, the dark corners of under the bed or behind the sofa. If you haven’t listened to episode 16, I highly recommend you do it. Episode 16. It’s called major Brain Hack. It’s all about the brain dump and how it allows us to clear all of the junk out of our heads and understand what’s really going on with our thinking. So I want to introduce to you the next level concept. Okay. It’s the concept of the thought download. Okay. A thought download is similar to a brain dump. You are putting pen to paper and writing down the sentences that are in your brain. But a thought download is a little more constrained. It’s more intentional. It’s a way to channel your brain’s resources to activate it to solve a problem or to figure out why you’re feeling the way that you feel. Okay. I’ll give you an example. Yesterday, I was feeling super uneasy. And you know that I’m not in tune with my feelings. It’s very hard for me to process feelings. So I really couldn’t figure out what emotion I was experiencing. And that’s something that I’m trying to work on through coaching is like naming the feeling, feeling the vibration in my body. And I couldn’t really pinpoint it, but I could just tell it wasn’t positive. It wasn’t going to be a great day if I did not get a handle on the way that I was feeling. Okay? It was a vibration in my chest. It was tight. It made me not want to work. Side note, okay. It made me not want to work. Because our feelings drive our actions. We always act and make decisions out of our feelings. Okay? So the feeling that I was having that uneasiness, it was paralyzing. I was, like, going on Instagram and Facebook, and that is a huge red flag to me that there’s something going on. All right? So I sat down with a piece of paper, and I wrote on the top, why do I feel uneasy? And I just made my brain answer that question. I didn’t let it think about anything else for about five minutes. I just wrote every thought down that came to my mind. Every sentence that went through my brain, I wrote it down. And a lot of it was centered around the transition of, like, going back to school. And there’s, like, a lot more structure in our life, which is actually great, but it is a little bit more stressful. And I’ve taken on a lot more coaching clients, which is super exciting, but it is also a little bit more stressful. And I want to create more clients for my day job business. And that’s super awesome, but can be very stressful and difficult. And so I just was feeling like I didn’t have enough time and I didn’t have the resources, and I’m just not good enough. And I just kept writing and writing and writing, asking my brain, what else, what else? Why am I feeling uneasy? Why don’t I feel good? What else, what else, what else? I just kept asking and asking and asking, and it was so helpful. And I will tell you why. When I was done, I had a list of reasons of why I felt uneasy. It was so helpful. So here I am, trying to go about my morning, trying to get myself to be productive, and I just felt gross. I just felt blah. I felt icky, and it was really keeping me from being productive. Okay? So when I downloaded all of those thoughts about why I felt uneasy, I got answers. When I asked my brain a question, it found the answer. Now, some of the reasons that my brain presented to me were totally valid. Like, I have a lot to do today and I’m afraid I won’t get it all done. Okay, that’s valid. But some of them were so stupid, silly. And I was able to see that. I was able to recognize it. And all of a sudden, the awareness of why I felt uneasy released a lot of my tension. Now, notice I didn’t say that it solved my problems, right, like it’s not going to solve the problem, but I brought awareness to what was going on. And, and that awareness released the tension for me. I was able to see exactly what I was thinking. And from that list, I was able to put a few things on my calendar and kind of rearrange my schedule for the week so that I could make sure that I would get everything done. Now, a lot of times, I think we’re actually fearful of bringing awareness to our thoughts because we’re afraid, afraid of what’s going on up there in our minds. We’re afraid that it’s going to cause us pain to see our thoughts listed down on a piece of paper. We’re afraid that we’re going to feel shame for the scattered nature of our thoughts. But here’s what I want to offer to you. Not bringing awareness to the thoughts does not make them go away. They’re still there, causing you pain and results that are not helpful. You’re just unaware of what they are. But in this case, ignorance is definitely not bliss. It’s not helpful to not be aware. It’s not less painful to not be aware. It’s still causing pain, tension, unhappy feelings and results that we don’t want. Not being aware actually doesn’t save us any heartache. It doesn’t prevent any pain. The pain is still there. So we might as well know what’s going on. Because dun, dun, dun, if we know it’s going on, then we can make changes. Then we have all of the power that we need to make changes for ourselves. So what if you decided today to begin to bring awareness to your thoughts? What if you started doing thought downloads on certain topics to see what you really think of them? Because the first step to taking your ADHD life to the next level is awareness, Becoming mindful of what you’re thinking. Remember, if you’re anything like me, you don’t have the ability to dialogue with yourself internally, to neatly think through your thoughts, to Process things in the deep, dark places of your mind. And if you notice that you want to talk things out loud with everyone around you, it’s probably because you need to get the thoughts out of your brain in order to understand them. Okay, so I have a really funny example. I was coaching one of my clients this morning, and we were talking about how our brains offer us thoughts. And if we are aware of those thoughts, we can choose to believe them or not. We can accept the thoughts as truth and totally obey our brains without question. Or we can mindfully decide whether or not the thought is a good one. So she said, okay, I have a perfect example of this. This morning, I was going to make my healthy smoothie for breakfast, and I realized that I was out of ice. And my brain told me my smoothie’s not as good without ice, so I might as well just eat cookies and milk for breakfast. And you know what she did? The woman, I mean, she is a grown woman, had cookies and milk for breakfast because she believed what her brain told her. It’s a perfect example. Could she have made the smoothie with that ice? Yes. Could she have made something else that was healthy for breakfast instead? Yes. But instead she listened to the toddler brain tell her that cookies for breakfast was a great idea for a grown woman. Okay, I keep hitting my mic. Sorry about that. Listen. Listen up real close because I’m going to tell you the truth. Our brains cannot be trusted. Okay, sure, sometimes they’re brilliant, creative problem solvers, but sometimes they tell us to eat cookies for breakfast. You know what I’m saying? If we think our brains always tell us the truth, then we’re going to obey them without question. But if we understand that our brain’s job is to find the easiest, most fun thing to do. Our brain’s job is to get us out of pain. Our brain’s job is to preserve our energy. Then we are going to be onto it. We are going to notice when it offers up things that are just kind of hysterical. So if you’re brand new to this concept, I want to encourage you. Go Back to episode 16 and begin with a brain dump. Every day, dump all of your thoughts like a huge dump truck filled with stones. Imagine all the rocks tumbling, tumbling, tumbling out of your mind. Okay. So many thoughts. 60,000 of them to be exact. But if you’re a brain dumping veteran. A brain dumping veteran. That’s really funny. Okay. Anyway, if you’re a brain dumping veteran, try to up level your game by doing intentional thought downloads. Ask your brain a question and write down all the answers it gives you. Put your mom’s name at the top of the page and write down all the thoughts you have about her and then go back and read through. Understand why your relationship with her is so amazing or so disappointing. Remember our thoughts, create our results. It’s just the way the world works and we ADHDers are not exempt from it. We have to actually work harder than the average Joe to bring awareness to all of the sentences in our brains. A thought download is an intentional practice where we set our brains on a mission. You can put your job at the top of the page and download your thoughts about it. Maybe you’ll see why you’re late for work every day because you procrastinate going into work because of all the terrible thoughts that you think and thus all the terrible feelings that you have about your job. You can ask your brain to solve a problem like how am I going to make $500 this week so I can pay my bills? Or you can ask your brain to come up with time management ideas. The possibilities are endless. Your brain is your most valuable resource and I want to encourage you to really use it. But notice that while it does serve an amazing purpose and it is an incredible tool, it will also tell you all kinds of crazy stuff like hey, let’s skip work today and binge watch Netflix because you deserve it. Or let’s eat a candy bar before bed because we’ve been so good today. Or your husband doesn’t really love you because he never takes you out to dinner like Susie’s husband does. Notice those things. Be onto yourself. Bring awareness to what you’re thinking and you will take your life to a whole new, new level. The brain dump is for clearing all of the clutter and the thought download is for intentional thought practice. I encourage you to do it every single day. It has changed my life and I know it can change yours too. All right you guys, that is it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being patient with me while I was on my break. Please reach out to me and say hi. I love connecting with you on Instagram. I love getting emails from you. You guys are my favorite humans. Have an awesome week.