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. 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Featuring top audiobooks, podcasts and originals across all genres, our editors have carefully curated this year’s must listens. From brilliant hidden gems to the buzziest new releases, every title in this collection has earned its spot. This is your go to for the absolute best in 2025 audio entertainment. Whether you love thrillers or nonfiction, your next favorite listen awaits. Discover why there’s more to imagine when you listen@audible.com BestOfTheYear. Welcome to the I have ADHD Podcast where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults 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? This is Kristin Carter, and you are listening to The I have ADHD podcast, episode number 47. So glad to be here with you today, my friend. I took the day off from coaching to record podcasts for you. That’s how much I love you. That’s how much I appreciate you. In the last year, this podcast has been listened to over 150,000 times. My mind is completely blown. I seriously cannot believe it. And so I want you to know that you matter to me so much. And, yeah, I created space in my week to record, like, a bunch of episodes. And y’ all know how much I love recording episodes. But I do have to say the response that you guys give really makes it, like, so worthwhile. So, so, so, so worthwhile. So thank you for all of the reviews and the ratings and reaching out on Instagram. If you’re not hanging out with me on Instagram, I would love to get to know you. You can follow me at. I have ADHD podcast. I know that over the last year, I’ve said, like, hey, find me on Facebook. Find me on Instagram at Kristen Carter. I’ve kind of had to figure out along the way what is best. So my personal family account is private. I have a podcast account that I’m on every single day, and I love to hang out with you guys there. Not really doing the Facebook thing right now, but I do have plans to someday. I’m just taken a little break. So I was really happy to create some space for you so that I could record a couple episodes in a row. And it feels really good. I’m sitting here at my kitchen table. I’m looking at all of my plants. It’s raining outside. It is a cozy, dreary March day. I had coffee with one of my oldest, dearest, closest friends this morning, and that was really awesome as well, because I have been working like a maniac, and I love working like a maniac. So don’t get me wrong. I am not sad about it. I’m so happy. I absolutely love to work. I love my job. I love coaching. I love the focused program. It is going, like, so, so, so, so well. So I’m having a blast. But I haven’t had a lot of margin in my life or a lot of space to really invest in the people that I love and see people outside of, like my very, very immediate circle. And so I created some of that space today. So I want to encourage you, if you find yourself in a place where you’re just kind of on the hamster wheel and like going and going and going and there’s no foreseeable break in the future, create a break for yourself. You’re a grown up, you get to do whatever you want to do. And for sure there will be a consequence like losing money. But I think it’s worth it. I really, really want to offer to you that once in a while that is for sure worth it. And for me, that’s just the truth. So today it was totally worth it. And I know that next week when I show up for these Tuesday clients that I’ve canceled on today, I’m going to show up so much in a deeper place of service because I have created that space. And so when you do take a break or create space or margin to get the things done that have been hanging over your head, it doesn’t just benefit you, it benefits the people that you interact with and the people that you’re investing in. And so just want to give you a little bit of that encouragement this morning or this evening or actually, how do I know when you’re listening to this? I really have no idea, but I hope you’re great. Okay, I wanted to shout out one of my clients in focused. This win is from Caitlin. And here is what the dear, dear, dear Caitlin says. Okay, so she says, I’ve had an idea to add value to my day job for months where I do a lunch and learn event for my colleagues to teach them more about the skills I have with the different programs that I know I want to do this before the end of March because that’s when my yearly review is. And I want to have this added value to the company to reference. And pushing for an overdue raise. Okay, so today I thought. Today is the day I sat down and did a thought download on why am I scared to send this email to my boss? I did the unintentional model and the intentional model, had my husband read over my email and finally hit send within 30 minutes of sending. Not only did my boss say it’s a great idea, but the other two department heads I had cc’d also agreed and started suggesting dates. Yes, I wrote down in my notebook, February 27, 2020. I can do hard things. I’m proud of Myself today. When you put yourself out there, it pays off. Thank you, Kristin Carter, for pushing us to push ourselves and separate the drama from the facts. I’m ready to make some more money. Yes, Caitlin, you go. I love it. Go make all the money. It makes me so excited because I love making money. I think it’s super, super fun and I love helping other people to make the money too. Thank you, Caitlin, for putting yourself out there. It is so awesome to walk this journey beside you. So fun. Today we are going to talk about emotions. Actually, this is going to be the topic in Focused in April, which I am very excited to announce to you. So we are going to be studying emotions, emotional balance and emotional dysregulation, which I know such a huge buzzword among the ADHD community. So the way I want to start off this topic is I want to ask you if you have ever seen a celebrity crash and burn and thought, what in the world is going on? They have everything at their fingertips. They have money, they have fame, they have, they have relationship, they have everything. At least it appears that they have everything. Why do they crash and burn? Why do they self sabotage? Why do they do stupid stuff? Like when Winona Ryder got caught stealing, like at the height of her fame, she was so, so, so wealthy and she was shoplifting. Like, why in the world I, in preparation for this podcast, Googled celebrities who crash and burn. And honestly, I don’t recommend it. Like, it’s not, it’s not gonna make you feel good. Cause it’s just super sad. So people on the list were people like Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, people that we would look at and think, they have everything. What in the world is happening? Why are they not super happy? Here is what we’re going to talk about today. This concept has really helped me to understand the way the world works. No matter who you are, no matter where you are on the planet, no matter how much money you have, life is 50, 50. It’s 50% positive, 50% negative. This is the human experience. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter how much money you have, no matter who you’re married to, life is 50, 50, 50% positive, 50% negative. What if that were true? What if that’s just the human experience? Here’s what I think our default programming is. We want to be happy all the time. And when we’re not, we think something’s gone wrong. We think there’s a problem. We think we need to fix that problem. So I’m not happy So I need to go get a new husband, or I need to go get a new pair of jeans, or I need to go get a new house, or I need to go get a new hairstyle or something. Like, I need to fix the problem because I’m not super happy, right? But if you can make peace and accept the fact that life is just 50, 50, 50% of the time you’re gonna feel amazing, and 50% of the time you’re just gonna feel, like, really bad, then you’re gonna get a lot more stuff done. And we’ll get to that part. But first, first, let’s talk about the 50 50. So I know that you have done this where you have thought like, hey, when I get to that point in my life, then I’m going to be happy. When I graduate college, then I’m going to be happy. When I have kids, then I’ll be happy. When I’m married to the right partner, then I’m going to be happy. When I have the job that I’ve been wanting, then I’m going to be happy. Then it’s going to be different. It’s be to going, going to be different. Then, then you reach that goal, whatever it was, and you’re like, oh, wait, why do I feel the same? Why am I still unhappy? Why do I still have this guilt and shame and disappointment and negative emotion that’s coming along with it? And then do you know what we do? Because we’re like, disappointed that our circumstance did not change our feelings, that our getting the job or getting the partner or getting the, you know, having a baby did not make us happy. Then we’re like, oh, crap, there’s something wrong with me. There must be something wrong with me. And so, so many of us are going out and looking for the thing that’s going to make us happy instead of realizing that life is just 50, 50, 50% positive, 50% negative. Now this is really actually very good news because nothing has gone wrong. When you feel negative emotion, that’s just normal. It’s just human. Nothing’s wrong. You don’t actually even need to fix it. It’s just part of life. It’s not a big deal. What I used to do is feel negative emotion and really not know what to do with it. Now I am on this quest to understand my own emotions, to experience the full spectrum of human emotions, to feel the 50% of bad, be really, really bad and feel the 50%. That’s good. Be really, really, really good, right? So like, so that the pendulum can swing back and forth as it does. But what we so often do is we want to numb our negative emotion because we don’t really know how to tolerate it. We haven’t been taught that negative emotion is just totally normal and 100% part of the human experience. So often what we do is we buffer. Does your computer ever get, like, super slow and you have that wheel that just turns and it’s like buffering? That is exactly what we do. We just kind of sit there and spin. And so that might look like going on social media and getting, quote, unquote, lost for, like, three hours and then waking up and being like, oh, shoot, I just lost three hours of my day. It might look like overeating or over drinking or overspending. Buffering looks like anything that you do in your life to numb the negative emotion that you’re feeling. And the reason that we do this is because we do not naturally automatically have the capacity to feel and process negative emotion. And so because we think that something’s gone wrong, because we think that there’s a huge problem, like, I feel totally awful, which means there must be something wrong with me, we then use coping mechanisms to buffer so that we can numb out that negativity. But what happens is we end up numbing out everything, and then our life is pretty much just blah. So we’re not feeling the high highs and the low lows of life. We’re just kind of, like, feeling blah a lot. The one thing that I’ve really been working on is limiting my buffering. So what I used to do, and I can visualize myself from, like, a couple years ago, drop my kids off at school, come back to the house, have all of this intention to get work done for my day job and get stuck on the couch and not know why. I just be like, I don’t know why I’m stuck here, but I cannot get off of Instagram. What is happening to me? Why am I not able to move? And now, looking back, I know exactly why. It’s because I was feeling negative emotion, and I wasn’t savvy in the area of emotions. And so I wasn’t able to name the emotion, process the emotion, and take the emotion along with me while I did the thing right. And so instead, I felt like I needed to escape the negative emotion. And now this was unconscious. I was not saying out loud to myself, I am feeling negative emotion, and I want to escape it. It was just something that was coming, kind of a default setting in my brain that I was Just looking for something to numb that negative emotion. For me, it used to be food and overeating. I did that a ton, A ton, a ton, a ton. And then when I stopped using food as my buffer, then I started using social media. So, like, I was very happy that I stopped using food, but I didn’t realize that then I was just transferring that numbing onto social media. Isn’t that fascinating? So one of the things that I have really been working on in the last year is understanding and processing my emotions and being someone who knows that life is 50 50. So why does a celebrity who seemingly has everything, why do they crash and burn oftentimes because their Life is also 50 50, and they believe the lie. Just like you and I have always believed, most likely that, you know, once you have it all, you’re going to be happy, you’re going to feel good all of the time. And then they get, quote, unquote, all of it, right? They get the money, the fame, the awards, the accomplishments, but then they’re still feeling crappy, still feeling like, negative emotion, disappointment, fear, shame, aimless, you know, all of those things that you and I deal with. We will always feel that there is no circumstance that’s going to take that away. So you become a millionaire, you’re still going to feel 50% of the time totally awful, just the way it is. I am just now really starting to believe this in my own life. So I’ve been told this by my coaches and I’ve wanted to believe it, but I kept thinking that, like, yeah, but for me it’s gonna be different because, like, I actually am going to be happy when these things happen, right? So I think that we probably all have a list of things in our mind that we to accomplish or that we want to happen. And then we’ll be happy. That’s our thought. Then. Then we’re going to feel better. And maybe we don’t even think that consciously, but we pursue those things as if they are going to be the keys to our happiness. So we pursue finding the right partner. We pursue, you know, having the child or getting the job or creating the business or the YouTube channel or the podcast or whatever, right? Because that’s going to make us happy. But recently, in the last couple months, this focused program that I’ve created, the coaching membership for adults with adhd, has been super successful, you guys. It’s been like, really, really, really successful. And do you know how I’ve been feeling? Like, really bad. What’s so crazy about this is that my results that I’ve been trying to create for years are now finally catching up and, like, coming true. They’re, like, manifesting in my life. And I don’t love the word manifesting. It actually does. I don’t love it, but it’s, like, happening, right? So, like, I’ve had these dreams, I’ve been working hard. I’ve been doing a ton of thought work. And, like, now things are happening. Like the, the goals, they’re, they’re, they’re. I’m looking at them, right? I’m looking at the results. And do you know how I feel? Totally crappy. I am not kidding you. Totally been feeling a ton of negative motion in the last couple weeks, Especially largely in part due to the fact that, like, Focused is super successful and it’s going really, really, really well. And, like, I am having to learn to tolerate that and manage it. And I know it sounds crazy, but I think that what we always want to believe is that when we accomplish our goals or when we get the thing that we’ve always wanted, then we’re going to be happy. And I am here to tell you that that is not true. It’s not true. Life is always going to be 50, 50. So what does that mean for you then? What does it mean if life is going to be 50% positive, 50% negative? Here’s what I think, like, the amazing goodness is that comes along with really accepting and understanding that, first of all, you do not expect that the goals that you have, the circumstances in your life are going to mean that you will be happy all of the time. And let’s be honest, we don’t want to be happy all of the time. We don’t want to be happy about kidnapping or coronavirus or rape or child abuse. Like, if you want to be happy all of the time, you also have to be happy about those things. You have to be happy when someone that you love dies. That’s not the kind of life that I want to live. I want to be willing to feel negative. I want to be willing to feel disappointed, disgusted, angry, frustrated, grieved, sad. I want to be willing to feel all of those things. But what I don’t want is for those feelings to hijack my life and keep me in a place of inaction. I don’t want those feelings to keep me from achieving my goals because from being the mom that I’ve always wanted to be, from loving my husband. Well, so what used to happen is I would get very, very, very distracted by my negative emotion. Wouldn’t know how to process it, and it would hijack my entire day. And I’m done with that. That doesn’t mean I don’t create space to take care of myself. I do. But I’m done with getting stuck in the inaction of negative emotion. And next week we’re gonna talk about that. But for this week, what I want to offer here is that life is 50 50, and that’s the way it should be. We don’t want to be happy all the time. We don’t want to be happy when horrible things happen in the world. We want to be angry about it, we want to be sad about it. We want to be disappointed. We want to be horrified. And so if we can accept that, truly there’s 50% negative emotion, and 50% of life is positive emotion. What do you think your life would be like if you could really make peace with that? Imagine what you might stop doing if you began to tolerate the negative emotion in life. You might stop over drinking or overeating. You might stop avoiding your children when they’re, like, super loud and obnoxious. You might stop screaming and lashing out at the people that you love. What do you think you would stop doing if you could make peace with the 50% of life that is negative emotion? Then here’s an awesome question. What do you think you would start doing? See, a lot of times our negative emotion keeps us in. In action because something feels scary. Like sending that email that Caitlin wanting wanted to send. Right from the beginning, she wanted to send that email. She was too afraid to send it. It felt terrible. Because sending the email felt terrible, right? And so we often look at that as a warning, like, oh, well, this feels bad, so I shouldn’t do it. That’s what it means, that I shouldn’t do it. But what I want to offer is that of course it feels bad you’re doing something scary, but do it anyway. It’s totally fine. Because 50% of life is feeling bad. You don’t want to be paralyzed for 50% of your life, do you? So imagine what you would start doing. Maybe you would start that business that you’ve always wanted to start, or you might start exercising, or you might start organizing your house or paying your bills, paying off your debt, doing those things that have always made you feel so terrible. But what if you just embrace that? Like, yeah, it feels terrible. There’s no problem. Nothing’s gone wrong. I’m just going to do it while I feel terrible. So next week, I’m going to give you some like practical tips on how to process the negative emotion. But this week I just wanted to offer that I truly believe that 50% of life, we are going to feel negative no matter what our circumstance. No matter whether we’re in our dream job or a job that we hate. No matter whether we’re in a relationship with someone who is very, very easy to love or very, very hard to love. No matter if we have the number of kids that we want or we don’t. No matter what number is in our bank account. Hear me on that. No matter what number is in your bank account, life is going to be 50 50. And the way to avoid the crash and burn, the way that we watch right celebrities crash and burn. The way to avoid that is to just really understand that accomplishing a goal, getting an award, making the money, having the perfect partner, that’s not the way to to happiness 100% of the time. There is no pathway to feeling happy 100% of the time. And that’s actually good news because it means that nothing’s gone wrong. It means that you’re totally, totally, totally normal and that you can still accomplish your goals and get the things done while you’re feeling negative. It is all normal. That’s what I have for you today, my friends. I hope it’s helpful. I want you to go out and know that negativity in your life is totally normal. And next week we’ll talk about how to process it. I can’t wait. I’ll see you then. Bye. 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 take 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 recordings are stored in the site for you to access at your convenience. Go to ihaveadhd.com focused for all the info.
