Podcast Episode #58: Adult ADHD + Permission to Rest

This episode is sponsored by CURE Hydration. All right, I’m going to be real with you. Drinking water is boring. My ADHD brain is like, wait, we have to do this again? Like every day, multiple times. What in the world? And because I’m running from meetings to coaching calls to kid chaos, staying hydrated is not something I’m naturally good at. It’s not something I naturally think about. That’s why I’ve been obsessed with Cure hydration packs lately. Cure is a plant based hydrating electrolyte mix with no added sugar, only 25 calories, and it actually tastes good. The watermelon and berry pomegranate have been on repeat for me. I’m actually like really running low on those flavors, which is so sad. They’re refreshing without being too sweet or artificial. It feels like my water finally has a little bit of personality, which I enjoy. I really do. What I love most is that CURE uses a science backed formula that hydrates as effectively as an IV drip. So when I’m scrambling through my day forgetting my water again, CURE helps me to catch up fast. I throw a few packs in my bag and it makes drinking enough water simple. Which for my ADHD brain is basically a miracle. So staying hydrated isn’t just about water. You also need electrolytes. And that’s why I love cure. It’s clean, tastes great, and it actually works. And bonus, CURE is FSA HSA approved so you can use those funds to stay hydrated. The smart way for I have ADHD Podcast listeners. You can get 20% off your first order@curehydration.com ihaveadhd with the code ihaveadhd and if you get a post purchase survey, make sure to tell them that you heard about CURE right here on the podcast. It really does help to support the show. Don’t just drink more water, Upgrade it with Cure. Save over $200 when you book weekly Stays with VRBO this winter. If you haven’t seen your college besties since, well, college, you need a week to catch up in a snowy cabin, take a week long vacation and save over $200. Book now@vrbo.com. Welcome to the I have ADHD Podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults with adhd. I’m your host Kristin 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? This is Kristin Carter and you are listening to The I have ADHD podcast, episode number 58. I am medicated, I am caffeinated and I am ready to roll. I’m gonna start off by being super weird and tell you that I don’t feel like working today. I do not feel like working. And I’ve noticed this about myself in the last couple weeks, that there’s this like huge wall of resistance every time I sit down to do my work. Huge wall. I’ve wanted to blame it on quarantine, I’ve wanted to blame it on my medication change, I’ve wanted to blame it on a bunch of different things. But actually what I think is happening is that first of all I’m a human being and not a robot and so I’m going to be experiencing negative emotion. And also I’m in a season of growth which just leads me to so much, so much fear and anxiety and self doubt. And so I am just throwing it all out there for you today because I want you to know that if you experience fear and anxiety and self doubt like I do, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to quit or that you’re on the wrong path or that you should change directions. It could actually mean that you’re doing the right thing and it’s just hard. And that’s really what I think it is for me, that it’s just confirmation that I’m on the right path. But also it’s just hard. Like achieving your goals and reaching your potential and following through on the things that you say you’re going to do is just hard. I wish that I could make it easier for everybody. I wish that I could just tell you like, hey, like if it’s the right thing, it’s gonn feel good all the time. But that is just not the truth. So I am using this wall of resistance as evidence that I’m actually on the right path. And I want to offer that to you as well. That’s totally available to you. I think a lot of us are feeling a lot of negative emotion having been in quarantine for quite some time and our lives are really maybe a little bit harder than usual. And so this resistance just comes up and I just want you to know that it’s the real deal and it’s okay. Just means you’re human. You guys, I know that my job, my mission, my whole purpose is to be an example of what’s possible for adults with adhd. And so I know that that comes with being really honest about the process. Because if I were to just come on here and be like, guys, like, you should always feel perfect about your work. You should always feel perfect about what you’re doing in life. You would be so annoyed, and you would never follow through with your goals and your dreams. So if you feel gross about it, great. You’re exactly in the right spot. All right, that was a really weird start to this episode. But I feel like there’s value in showing up very candidly, very authentically. So there you go. I’m so excited to shout out one of my beloved Focus members. You guys, we’re having such a blast in this group. Okay, actually, let me just be very clear. I am having such a blast. It is so, so fun. I love being the leader of an ADHD community that is committed to being the heroes of their own story. It is the best. It gets me fired up. Now we’re wrapping up our month on organization. It’s been so good. And one of my clients, Emma, posted this in the Share youe Wins channel on Slack. Here’s what she wrote. Hey, everyone, I just want to share that I had not one, but three closets of shame, and so far I’ve decluttered three. The majority of the stuff in all three. I’ve never been able to do a task like this so fast and with such ease and balance. Don’t get me wrong, it was still hard, but in comparison to how it usually feels, it was a breeze. Feeling a lot of gratitude right now for this community and for Kristen Carter for creating it. Emma, I just heart you. Thank you for being an example of what’s possible for an adult with adhd. Thank you for posting this in the Share youe Wins channel. I love celebrating your win organization. I know it doesn’t come naturally to most of us, but it is a skill that can be learned. And especially if you’re willing to feel and process negative emotion, you’ll be shocked at what you can accomplish. You guys, it’s so cool. So good. Seriously, if you’re not in focus already, what are you doing? It’s the best. Oh, we’re having such a good time. Okay, okay, okay. Here we go. We’re gonna get started with today’s topic, which is productivity, shame, allowing ourselves to rest, deciding to be done. Now, we talked about this a little bit last week when we discussed going to bed on time. And if you wanna listen to that episode, it was great. You should go back and listen to It. But on today’s episode, I just wanna talk about allowing ourselves to be done and how important this is to being a healthy, well rounded human being. Okay? Those of us with ADHD are really bad at just being done for the day. Okay, now I know I’m speaking in generalities here, but I’ve suffered from it. I coach a lot of clients and they suffer from it as well. So I do think that this applies to most of us. Okay, here’s what we do. No matter how much we’ve accomplished accomplished, we tell ourselves it’s not enough, it’s craziness. We shame ourselves for how little we got done in the day. You guys, this is not helpful to us. And yet so many of us do it all the time. We tell ourselves it’s not enough. We shame ourselves for how little we got done. And it’s actually just a thought, it’s not even a fact. Now I’m learning that we can challenge the thoughts that we’re thinking. And when I’ve started to challenge this thought, the thought that I haven’t gotten enough done, it really did change my life. And so I want to offer it to you as well. Now, here’s what I used to do. I used to calculate how much I got done in a day and I would review my day and then I would decide based on how much I got done, whether or not I’m a good person. Now I know that seems extreme and I wasn’t doing that intentionally. But honestly, that’s exactly what I was doing. How good of a person am I? I don’t know. Let me check in. How much did I get done today? I would look outside of myself. I would look to what I accomplished for my worth. I would look to my productivity and I would base a good day or a bad day and a good feeling about my or a bad feeling about myself based on how much I got done. I was seriously just trying to define my self worth based on how much I did or how much I did not do. I’m wondering if you can relate to this. Inevitably, I would either feel super low, super down on myself because I didn’t get enough done by my standards, or I would work myself to death in the evenings and punish myself to make up for it so that I could go to bed feeling good about myself and how much I accomplished. And neither of these are healthy and productive options. Feeling badly about myself simply leads me to depression or avoidance, procrastination, shame. Now, working myself too hard in the evenings leads to an energy hangover the next day, which totally steals my productivity. You guys know about energy hangovers, right? It’s like that thing that you feel the day after you’ve worked way too hard the day before where you worked yourself ragged and then you wake up the next day and you have nothing left to give. You walk around like a zombie. Isn’t it so fascinating that shaming yourself for not being productive only leads to being less productive? How true is this for you in your life? Now, what I’ve decided to do, and this is new, but I tell myself that I’m done. I’m done. The end. It’s just a thought. It is just a thought. There’s nothing special you need to buy. There’s nothing special you need to do. You just need to tell yourself that you’re done. Use your own brain to tell yourself that you’ve accomplished enough during the day. Set an end time for yourself. No thinking, no working, no need to be productive after this time. Or let’s say all day on a Sunday or whatever you choose. Now it’s going to be all relative based on how much energy you have. And it’s going to be different for all of us. I have a ton of energy. I’m hyperactive. I’m an enneagram8. It means that my engine just keeps running and running and running and running, most of the time longer than other people’s engines. Okay, so my husband oftentimes he needs more rest than I do. He often needs more sleep than I do. It’s no problem. We’re completely different energy levels. But I want you to think about your own energy level. How much downtime do you need? I’m not talking about sleep necessarily. I’m honestly talking about rest. Your brain being completely shut off, time away from being productive. Now here’s the inevitable conversation. This push and pull, the part where you try to tell me that you actually didn’t get enough done during the day and you’re just going to actually have to keep working. And I want to say, first of all, I totally get it. I understand these challenges firsthand. I struggle with ADHD too. Do not forget, I have ADHD as well. And I coach over 100 clients who struggle with this. But I want you to know that if you really stop and think, you can question. You can question that thought. Is it really true that you didn’t get enough done? Let’s start here. Were your expectations for yourself realistic? That to do list that you had, was it actually realistic? Could you have really gotten it done? And even if your to do list was realistic and you still didn’t get enough done, is 10pm on a Tuesday really the time to finish now? One of the things that I’m beginning to embrace about being human is that I am human. Let me say that again. I’m human. I’m not a robot. I’m not going to be consistent in my productivity. You can’t program me to output the same amount every day. Sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I’m depressed, sometimes I’m worried or anxious, or I’m filled with self loathing. Sometimes I’m in the middle of my cycle, sometimes I’m filled with anxiety and self doubt. On those days I accomplish less, I’ve decided to stop shaming myself for it. And I’ve also stopped wondering why I’m less productive. Like, I don’t walk around going, I don’t know why I didn’t accomplish enough today. I know exactly why I’m human. I know exactly why I felt like trash today, right? Like, I am really starting to pinpoint why so that I don’t have to beat myself up. Ugh, why am I not accomplishing more? Ugh. Why am I not getting this done? Ugh. Why is this so hard for me? Those questions are not helpful. I want you to answer those questions. So I’ve started answering for myself. The reason why I haven’t been like super productive lately is because I’m feeling a wall of resistance to all of the growth in my business. It’s been absolutely incredible. It’s been an amazing, amazing, amazing thing. But you would think that with success and with growth, that I would feel so good that I would feel confident and empowered and like I know exactly what I’m am telling you that I don’t. Okay? I’m feeling resistance and self doubt and so I know exactly why I’m less productive. And it’s not a problem just because I’m human. Now we could program a robot who doesn’t have feelings and who’s just running off of code to, you know, have the same output level every single day. But humans are not robots. Humans are humans. Humans have feelings. Humans are distracted by the things going on in their lives. And that’s okay. You’re a human. If you’re not aware of it, I’m here to remind you. You’re not gonna have the same output level every day. Your productivity will not be consistent. It’s okay. So what all of this has allowed me to do is to give myself permission to relax. It’s allowed me to Shut off my brain. At the end of the day, I allow myself to rest. I give myself the privilege of enjoying my evening, watching TV with my husband without my phone near me or not worrying about work outside of working hours. Now, a lot of my clients are entrepreneurs, and so we commiserate about kind of the constant connection to our work. But listen, even if you’re not an entrepreneur, we often let our thoughts about work, our thoughts about our kids, our thoughts about maybe a difficult conversation that we had that day. We let that invade our brain space. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s like you have this kind of triggering conversation, or you read a triggering post on Facebook and you allow it to take up space in your brain. You give it access to you, even during downtime hours. And so what I want to offer is that setting a boundary for yourself could be really beautiful here, where you’re saying, hey, you don’t have access to my brain all of the time. That triggering Facebook post doesn’t have access to my brain. I’m not going to allow it to loop in my mind over and over. So if I need to do a brain dump, I do it. If I need to do a thought download, I do it. If I need to go for a walk and talk it out, either with my husband or sometimes just by myself like a crazy person, I do it because I do not want to Give the world 247 access to my brain. So what this is taking is the intentional thought that I’ve done enough, done enough for today. I actively and purposefully give myself permission to rest. Even right now, when I’m in this season of not being as productive as I would like to be, I’m still consciously, deliberately giving myself permission to rest. There’s really no upside to punishing myself and trying to beat myself into productivity. At the end of the day, there’s no upside to it. I’m speaking from experience because I’ve done it a ton. It’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t yield a good result. So what’s been so cool about this is that I actually feel so much better. I sleep better. I’m nicer to the people around me. I’m more connected to my kids and to my husband. And during working hours, when I’m not feeling all of the negative emotion, I do get a lot done, except for the days that I don’t. And on those days, I’m nice to myself. I invite you to be nice to yourself, too. I listen. You got this. You have the ability to tell yourself you’ve done enough and to shut it off and to have a cutoff point where you can then give yourself permission to relax, to rest, to enjoy your evening, and then enjoy having a fresh brain the next day. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Have a good one. If you’re being treated for your adhd, but you still don’t feel like you’re reaching your potential, you’ve got to join Focused. It’s my monthly coaching membership where I teach you how to tame your wild thoughts and create the life that you’ve always wanted. No matter what season of life you’re in or where you are in the world, Focused is for you. All materials and call records recordings are stored in the site for you to access at your convenience. Go to ihaveadhd.com focused for all the info.