#1 - Anand Varma (National Geographic Photographer & Explorer)

Should I another clap? Another clap? Yeah. Cool! Welcome to the first episode of this brand new podcast that is so new it doesn't even have a name yet. Tentatively called "All My Friends of ADHD" *laughs* *BANG* Oh, my friends have ADHD! *BANG* Oh, my friends have ADHD! *BANG* All my friends have ADHD! All my friends have ADHD! Because all my friends have ADHD! And as someone with ADHD I love hearing about how the brains of other people with ADHD work, especially people in my ear, and having gone on my own ADHD journey and still going on it and trying to understand my brain better, it just helps me to hear about other people's journeys. So today for our very first guest we have a very special Anon Varma. He's an incredibly talented National Geographic photographer who has produced some of the most innovative and mind-blowing work. He combines science and photography to show nature, everything from parasites to bees to jellyfish in ways that the world has never seen before. We're both here in DC for the National Geographic Storyteller Summit. It's basically the one time here we get to see each other. And we're here at the Eton Radio Studio, so thank you to them for hosting us. So first of all, Anon, thanks for being here. Thank you, Laurel. Yeah, so I made a bit of an intro, but I would love to hear in your own words what you do. Well, I call myself a science photographer and what that means is I sort of combine my background, my academic training in biology with my sort of creative pursuit in photography. I try to use photography to communicate science, but also as a its own scientific tool to investigate the world. And what are you working on right now? I am working on a long-term project to try to photograph what happens inside a chicken egg. The development of chickens inside an egg. It's about three years into that project right now. And how is that going? It's going really well, actually. I made some progress the first year. I kind of hit a wall, tried some other projects, and finally, this past few months have picked it back up and made really interesting progress. Thanks. Excited to where it's going. How does one photograph inside an egg if you can tell us? There's two approaches. You can either cut a hole called a window. You can window a chicken egg and so you can sort of peek inside. Or you actually can transfer the contents of an egg into a different container entirely. So you can use an artificial vessel to raise the embryo and look at it through transparent plastic or glass. That's insane. It's pretty wild because an egg does not look like a chicken and it becomes a chicken somewhere through in the process and seeing that happen, seeing like a half egg, half chicken Frankenstein monster is pretty interesting. Have you ever had Balloute? I haven't. I have not. For those who don't know, that's the Filipino delicacy, which is a fertilized semi-developed chicken egg, which is part chicken part egg. I've had it. It's kind of what you would expect. It's like an egg, a boiled egg with bits of chicken. Seeing the live version is pretty wild. Right. And I guess you're trying to keep it alive this time, right? Yes, that's cool. So how did you get to where you are now? I tried to become a scientist and I think I realized I didn't have the right kind of attention span to stay in a lab and to gather and process data. And I didn't really know how else to pursue my childhood love of adventure and nature other than pursuing a scientific career. I thought that was the only way that I could have a life outside and a life learning about the natural world. And then by accident, I got a job as a photographer's assistant and all of the sudden I realized there's this other modality of learning about science. And it actually got me all of the things I wanted out of a scientific career. I got to work on a different thing every few months. I got to travel the world and like see weird animals and then talk about it to my friends and to the public. And so it sort of checked all of the boxes that I wanted out of a science career. So I pivoted to that. And then in the last few years, I've sort of pivoted back trying to kind of weave the science back into my works of photographer. Right. So you said you realized you didn't have the requisite attention stand. Is that something that was clear to you at the time or is that something you can say in retrospect? I think I don't know exactly the language I used in my own mind at the time, but I could tell it wasn't the right fit. I was working in labs. I was doing field work and it just felt too monotonous. It was like, I knew I could do hard work and I knew I could do boring things. I knew I could accomplish complicated things, but there was something that just wasn't rewarding on the right time scale for me. And I was like, hmm, I don't know if I'm going to really thrive in this environment. And I knew I wanted to learn about the world, but I just thought like this seems, this just seems boring. And it feels like, oh, I'd have to do boring stuff for many years and maybe then it would, there would be like little bits of reward for that. But I was starting to, I was starting to question like, hmm, I don't, I don't know if this is right for me. I didn't exactly, I couldn't put my finger on exactly what that was. And I knew that I could really focus on something that was interesting to me, but I could tell it was going to be a gamble to really commit to grad school and find something that was going to like hold my attention for five, six, seven years, much less a career pass. Yeah, I mean, it seems that seems quite self-aware to me because in my life, when I think before I realized I had ADHD and there were things that I wanted to do or, you know, thought I should be able to do, I kind of just felt like, you know, it would be on me if I couldn't do it. That there's something that I need to adapt to whatever is asked of me, whereas it sounds like you were kind of like, "Huh, like this path is probably not what's best for me." I think I only figured that out because I was exploring a parallel option. I think I would have just sucked it up and tried to grind it out, but all of a sudden this other door opened and in like, in real time, I could sort of compare the two paths. And so I was working for this photographer, David Litchwager, he was doing National Geographic Magazine assignments, and I was still in school to be a biologist. I was still planning on going to grad school, and so I was like, literally in the field with David while completing classes online and trying to compare like, "Okay, am I going to do this for another year and then go to grad school and like, how's my life now compared to what my friends in grad school are?" I could, I had this like, period of two or three or four years of transition where I was still kind of looking back and forth and being like, "Am I ready to give up on my childhood science dreams? Do I know what I'm doing as a photographer?" Like I didn't, I kind of had to figure that out in real time and I had this extended transition period to do that, that made that less scary. Right, yeah. So you said at the time you couldn't quite put your finger on it about how you needed something, why you needed something with more immediate reward, can you put your finger on it now? Oh yeah, oh yeah. I mean, I think knowing that I have ADHD now makes so much of my life make more sense. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if I recall correctly, yes. We were sitting next to each other. Was it an explorer's festival or a storyteller's time? I actually can't remember. I'm pretty sure it would have been storyteller's time. So it would have been exactly two years ago here in DC. Yes. I missed the last two storytellers time. So I think it was two years ago here. Yeah. Well, I saw you in LA. So yeah, we sat next to each other at dinner and I think so two years ago that would have been about two, three years into my own age. HD diagnosis and pretty soon after I really started personally taking medication every day. And we were just talking, we were like, see to next to each other at a fancy dinner, right? And I don't know. I think I just heard of, um, do you remember how the conversation actually? Of course. I feel like I kind of just, in the being in the midst of my own journey and then hearing about maybe what you were going through or your own journey and kind of also for me, like, probably projecting a lot. Like I was just like, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if you had ADHD too. Um, and I think in general, I've realized A, like a lot of my friends of ADHD because we just like sort of attract each other and we get along, right? We have just like this innate ability to be on each other's level, chaotic level. Um, and secondly, like at these Nat Geo things, we all lead pretty unconventional, non-traditional careers. We're doing things that are sort of unique and out there. So it wouldn't make sense that that would draw people who might have something like ADHD. So yeah, so we had that conversation and then I had no idea the impact it had until I saw you at the following storyteller summit and you're like, by the way, yeah, yeah, so tell me about that was that conversation was a pivotal moment in my ADHD journey. So I think the the background prior to that point is that my older brother and sister were diagnosed as kids. My both my parents were never diagnosed, but were diagnosed by my older brother and sister is definitely having ADHD. And so I always thought of myself as the one and my family who didn't have because I was comparing myself to them and my, and I'm different than them. And each of them are different from each other as well. And so I sort of, I had that reference point. And then throughout starting in high school, I sort of developed a certain habits of strategies for like getting through exams and homework and papers. And that translated to my work as a fatigue too, which is just like totally deadline driven, you know, staying like procrastinating, staying up till 4am the night before. I had to get on airplane or before paper was due. And I kind of, you know, I just thought that was a everybody jokes around about, oh yeah, waiting to the last minute. And there's like the one person who does their work two weeks in advance. Those seem like the weird people and the normal people. Stay up all night. But there was a certain point, this is, I don't know, six, seven years into my careers of tariff or where I started to recognize this is, this is a hard way to work and a hard way to live. And it kind of unsustainable to just like put on the afterburners for not just a day or two, but like sometimes weeks where you're in deadline mode. I think that was, that was 2023. This would have been after my jellyfish project where like that was, that was the first time like I sent myself to the hospital by like stressing too much and being in deadline mode for too long of a time. And my heart was starting to do weird things. And I was like, I think I'm getting ill and the doctor's like, no, you actually just need to sleep. I thought, okay, whatever my high school final exam strategy, that's not working as a 35 year old anymore. I need to other strategies. And I was starting to recognize that my inability to manage my own attention was the biggest source of stress. So I'm like, okay, I can recognize I got to figure out better ways of managing my focus. And it's certainly not ADHD because everybody in my family has it and they're, and I don't because I'm not like them. And that was the background to then talking to you who you're like, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. This is like, I'm late to everything and I feel terrible about myself until I manage this. And now I feel great. I'm like, whoa, what? Interesting. And so then, okay, okay, that was the the background, this conversation. And then looking forward, I knew that I had to manage this better just to get work done with less stress. But I also knew I was going to start family soon. And I just thought there's just no way that I can be both a dad and a photographer. I'm either I'm going to do one of those and I'm going to hyper focus on it and everything else is going to fall away. And so it added some urgency to needing to find a solution. I was like, this is I am just going to either my career is going to fall apart or or or or I'm going to not be the parent I want to be or I'm going to be like crushed in between these two forces. So like I need better strategies and all of a sudden you sort of handed me a pathway. And I will say I didn't take it immediately. And it took actually I talked I had a similar conversation to another explorer, Julia Dumerinas, who had a similar story. I just found out I have this and this is changing the way I think about it. Okay, I'm I'm going to get tested. I'm going to test it and see I think I need help because whatever my own like home spun strategies for getting myself in the in the mode to think and work are just not working. And the and the one of the clearest signals of that was working on my book. So invisible wonders like I it's mostly a coffee I mean it is a coffee table book. So there's not that much writing in it. But I had to write the chapter instructions and that was such a painful process. Yeah, we all quick just to talk about the book. So it's explained what the book is. Okay, okay, well, quick. Self-national. Quick, inside. Invisible wonders is a compilation of what I think are the best science images today. And so I went through and thought about how can photography change? How can photography show us what our eyes can't see? And I kind of created different categories of size, time, light, and focus actually as different ways in which cameras can show us the world in new ways. And so there's a part of that is my own work and and the majority of it is work that I've curated from photographers around the world. So it's part of that. And this is for National Geographic. Yeah, this is published by National Geographic. And so part of that book project was writing chapter introductions that kind of set the theme for that chapter. And the process of writing was so difficult and so painful. It was like the whole book is maybe 10 pages of text. And I remember like the strategy I would come up with for just trying to write, I missed every single deadline and it was yelling at me and we like couldn't redo some of the captions that I hated because I spent too much time writing this text. And so I would have this ritual off like a wake-up and I knew I couldn't talk to anybody. I couldn't look at my phone or my internet or my email. And so I would go into my garage with a book. I'm just a different book and I would spend two hours reading and then I would set that aside and I would pull up my laptop and I would get an hourish of work done maybe. If anything deviated, if I ran into, I live with six housemates at the time. So if I ran into someone in the kitchen, my day was trash. No, not even worth trying to write. If I cheated and checked my text or my email, the day was done. So it just felt like such a rigid thing. And then if I picked a book that was too interesting, then I would just spend the whole day reading. And so it was like this is ridiculous. Like I get, oh, writers block and what I, you know, everybody complains about writing, but I just thought this is stupid. I'm spending a whole day to get an hour's worth of focus work done. Like this is, I can't afford to keep doing this when I have a kid. When I have other things I want to get done in the day. This is so inefficient. This is so not fun. And so I had all of these signals. I had like, okay, your brain is not working the way you wanted to. And it needs to get better soon. And oh, here are these people who have found pathways that have helped. So that was kind of the background to wanting to get to get tested. And in that moment, I asked my parents, like, do you think I have ADHD? And they both laughed in my face. And it was kind of hurt. I was like, I guess this is not something I can talk to you about because you're, because they, they didn't think that you had. Yeah, really? And they both have it. Do they, do they think they have it? I don't know. I mean, no doctor has diagnosed them. They have grew up in India, like, no, he's testing people in the 70s of India for ADHD. So I think my, I don't think they would deny it. But they were comparing me to my siblings. And I think they're also stuck in this my mindset of what our understanding of this was in the 80s and 90s. Back when like ADD was a different thing than ADHD and like people's, they thought it was sort of this like childhood, behavioral syndrome, you know, and I think our understanding of ADHD and. So your sibling. No biology of it. is changed quite a bit in the last few decades. True siblings are much more like typical ADHD, like what, how are you different? In what used to be thought of as ADD, like the distraction. Right. More so than hyperactive, none of us are hyperactive, but yeah, difficulty focusing in school and being late and disorganized and things like that. And you were not those things, they thought? Not in school, yeah. Yeah, I don't remember. But I mean, I went to monastery school. We didn't have like. We didn't have homework, we didn't have structures, so it was like, I don't know how you. Anyway, so they were definitely not supportive of this journey. It was quite hurtful, right? Yeah, kind of so, because it's something I would want to talk to them about. And even my sister was kind of like, I think her line was like, "You have ADHD, we're all screwed." I was like, "Okay, I guess this is not something I will talk about with my family." Which is really hard when, you know, when you're outwardly accomplished, right? Like, you know, this coffee table book that you're talking about, it's in a beautiful, incredible tone of photography that's published by Nat Geo, and it's like such a work. But then to hear about your process, right? Like, this vlog that it was, like, I feel like people often think that you can't be high achieving and have ADHD when obviously that's not the case. Right. Right. And it's a very, it's a complicated condition. I think it manifests differently in everyone. And it's kind of a weird, I mean, knowing how different I am from my sister and how similar I am, it's just like a weird thing to claim in some way. Like, I can't pretend to speak on behalf of everyone who has ADHD. But like, having an official diagnosis from a psychiatrist feels like it gives me some sense of confidence in relating to the condition as well. It's not something that I felt like I needed that to just have confidence in that label or that identity because it's a thing that's very easy to self-diagnose. Or it's like a way that you can kind of excuse for sure. And it kind of has a weird, weird place in pop culture, right? Especially today, right? Where it's kind of, which is not entirely unfounded, but it's like an easy thing to throw around. For sure. And so I don't think I would have taken it seriously myself without having some external bit of validation, even if the diagnosis is a little squishy. Right. And you talk about the diagnosis process and what that changed for you? Sure. So, for me, that was going to my doctor and saying, "Hey, I'm having challenges with attention. Are there ways that I can be evaluated?" And that was a referral to a psychiatrist. The evaluation is a little silly. I mean, it's an interview with a psychiatrist where they ask you about what you're currently struggling with, what you've historically struggled with. It's a questionnaire that you fill out and that someone close to you fills out. And then there's this funny, in my case, there's this kind of funny, like, online assessment where it flashes numbers that you over half an hour and you're supposed to respond to them. So, I came away from that feeling like you could cheat on this test very easily in either direction. If you needed to prove to someone that I do not have ADHD, you could just fill out the form. And then I'm perfect in all these ways and you would just tell this like, "I have no problems. I don't exactly know how to cheat this test, but get someone else to take it." I don't know. And you could very easily be like, "I want some riddle in. I'm going to. " Yeah. So, I kind of had to kind of be like, "What do I want out of this? I want to understand my brain." And so, I don't really want the drugs. I would hope that I don't have to rely on that. I was a little scared about that process. But I was like, "I want accurate information and so I'm going to try to fill this out." As accurate as I can. And what she came back with was like, "You're sort of borderline because historically you've had to have shown symptoms since childhood and you don't seem to have recollection of these same challenges as a kid." So that's weird. And I think she said, like, your answer is on the survey, put you right on the cusp and then your performance on this test pushes you way into ADHD. Interesting. And so, she's like, ultimately, this is kind of just a judgment call. And it sounds like you're struggling with some things, so I'm going to diagnose you so that you can have help. So, even that wasn't that concrete of just like, "Yeah, you were 99% screwed." It was just like, "Yeah, here's a diagnosis." I'm like, "All right, I'll take that and I'm going to use that as a lens to try and take a hypothesis." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, this is now a thing I can filter. Like, let me read some ADHD books. Yeah. Let me read, like, listen to ADHD podcasts. Let me see if that relates to me. And like, does that surface some new strategies that will help? Yeah. Which, I would say, did? Yeah. I mean, I think the thing about, you know, you obviously liked school, right? You wanted to go into academia and you're smart, obviously. So I think sometimes if they look back at your history, you're like, "Well, you did well in school, right?" Or you were interested and therefore you actually put in the work, therefore you can't have it. And I feel like that's also a way in which a lot of people don't get mixed with our nose. Exactly. Yeah. So what changed from then on? Okay, so I started with medication, which I think was like a slow-acting riddle in. And that pretty, I tried, I don't know, four or five, six days of it. And I could feel more energetic. Like if I was doing dishes, I would do them faster. If I was packing for a trip, I would pack faster. But it didn't, which, I mean, that was like, is that nothing? Because there's plenty of times I would just space out in the middle of doing dishes and it would take me two hours. So I'm like, okay, there's certain stuff that is happening faster. But I was like, I don't know that I'm, have better ideas. I'm like, I'm able to do email faster. I'm like, I don't, and on the flip side, it was starting to mess with my sleep. So even though I was saying it at seven or eight or nine in the morning, it was like, I was having trouble falling asleep till one or two. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. This doesn't seem worth it. And so I went back to psychiatrist and they're like, okay, that's normal. Like, there's a few different approaches. There's different kinds of medications. You can try different doses of it. And I tried a couple, and I guess I kind of didn't want it to work. I was like, I am going to be screwed if the only way that I can be functional is if I'm taking drugs every day. That worries me. Why do you think that is? That's just my approach. I don't know. That was my attitude about having to rely on external substances. Like, what if I run out? I'm just like, not going to be able to think. Those are not fair assumptions. But I just, I was like, ooh. I wanted to try it. I am willing to, if that's going to make my life better, I'm going to do it. But it would be nice if I didn't have to rely on it. And so when it wasn't working that well, it wasn't that motivated to follow every different pathway on the medication front. And so I asked her to, I was like, well, are there other resources you would recommend for me to try to understand this? Because I knew there's different pathways for managing this. There's medication and there's sort of, I don't like style. Well, I don't know where to put all the other behavioral changes. I just thought, okay, the medication isn't immediately a magic bullet. There's maybe potential here that I haven't explored. But let me try to explore the other side of things, see how far I can get. And if I come up short, I'll revisit the medication. Right, yeah. In the meantime, give us context for your life. Because you're always up to really interesting things. Like what are you working on? What deadlines are you facing when you're staring at all this out? Where is that? That's almost two years ago. I just passed this first big chicken deadline of like, doing the first draft of this. That was part of a show and part of an exhibit. Finish the book. So I'm in this kind of gap between major work projects. I'm about to get married. Right. There's no plan for kids yet. Were you working on the one-berlake at the time? I'm not setting up my lab. And so I am really-- Oh, sure, sure, sure. So I run a sort of science photography studio in Berkeley called Wonder Lab. It's a hybrid biology lab, photography studio, in classroom. And that kind of came out of my career as a National Geographic photographer, where I wanted to continue photography, but I wanted to figure out how to remix my love of science and my desire to share my. learnings of the world. And so it's a place where science, photography, and education don't have to live in separate silos. And so again, I think that is very much a manifestation of my ADHD self. I want all the things. I want to be able to switch modes. I want to be able to switch from putting my engineer hat to my photography hat to my educator hat and do that in a way that's seamless to be able to stimulate different parts of my brain. I think that is very much a manifestation of my ADHD self. But it also meant I had this period of time where I could focus on myself and I could focus on understanding my brain and testing strategies. I had time and space in my life to pursue this and read and run little experiments on myself. And that was like my project. I wasn't really taking pictures. I wasn't really focused on anything else other than understanding my own brain and body. And it was kind of in preparation for becoming a dad. I was like, I need to level up. And how did I go? It went really well. So I asked the psychiatrist. I was like, okay, are there other resources? And she pointed me to a couple of podcasts and a couple of books. And I'm forgetting the books so they weren't that useful. The first most useful resource was the Huberman Lab podcast, which I bring up with some reservations because it, honestly, it was probably life changing. And there was a minute where he was a real role model as a science communicator. Kind of turns out he's probably a jerk. And so that makes it. Makes me recommend his podcast with some reservations for his personal life, which is what it helped you. It really did. And so he, I sort of searched through his archive of episodes that talk about attention and ADHD. And he does a really good job of explaining the sort of neurological mechanisms of attention and ADHD in particular. And that paired with, I think there's another podcast called the Attitude Podcast ADD. And there was a book called How to ADHD. And so those all kind of gave me a starting point for like having a mental model of what is happening in my brain. And that has really helped me try to then develop strategies to counteract those mechanisms. So what is your mental model of your brain? And I don't remember if it's a Huberman or one of his guests or one of these other side threads who described the executive function of your brain. So this is like the part of your forebrain that's the sort of orchestra conductor of telling the rest of your brain, you know, when to fire, when to turn on, when to turn off. And how ADHD is essentially a disruption of that executive functions ability. And so the most helpful comparison was thinking about an engine transmission. And so if a transmission is in charge of like transitioning between different gears, so you can go uphill, you can go downhill, you can kind of do different kinds of work. The executive function is a transmission and the transmission fluid is dopamine. And so if you've ever driven a car with failing transmission, what you'll know is that notice is a, it's very hard to switch gears, like you'll stop on the gas and you won't shift gears. Or sometimes the gears will slip when you don't want them to. Like, oh, that totally makes sense. You can just like slip into second gear and you become hyper focused on a thing and you are just in that lane for the next 48 hours. And that can be good, but it could be bad if you're like supposed to be writing a book, but instead you're like researching tomato plants for 36 hours or whatever it is. And at the same time, the other slippage is a problem too when you're like, okay, I'm trying to work, but every little thing is like pulling my attention. And so I'm like, okay, that is a, that is a model that makes sense to me. And the dopamine part of that was also interesting too. I don't think it's a complicated thing. I'm not a neuroscientist. I'm going to get this incomplete or wrong. But recognizing like, oh, you, if you do a thing that like squirt some extra dopamine in the right place, then all of a sudden your executive function works a little bit better. And so that has been a helpful thing to think about like, okay, what are things that can help me up my dopamine at the right moments? And that's kind of the, been one of the foundations for my strategies for managing. So what's your understanding of dopamine? Well, so I mean, we think of dopamine as this like happiness thing. I'm like, oh, yeah, I kind of just don't mean it's a reward. And I think it does that, but I think it has this other function of being this like messenger, lubricant kind of thing. Like you need enough in the right place for this conductor to smoothly transition between motor circuits and working memory and like all the different functions of your brain. So so managing dopamine is like one of those things I think about. So as I described, I sort of strategies that'll come up as a, yeah, how I think a certain strategy works is because of some. Right. So tell us about your strategy. Okay. Yeah. I can't wait to tell you about my strategies. I have five pillars of my approach managing ADHD. Oh, and non five ADHD management pillars. Yes. Sleep, movement, mornings, monotasking and mood. So not all those words are like the most accurate, but I was on roll with the M. So we'll go with it. So the first one, well, and each of those has been the like main thing at some point in the last two years, and then it sort of fallen into like more like a bucket of tools. But sleep was the first big one where I was describing to someone sort of, I mean, along this journey, it wasn't just ADHD. There were like other things in my health and life that I was trying to manage and improve and like preparation for being a dad. And so I was describing to someone like, yeah, I was just diagnosed with ADHD. I recently had a sleep apnea diagnosis, which I had, which happened years ago and it's kind of mild. And they're like, oh, you know, those things can be related, right? It's like, what? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you, people with sleep apnea are often misdiagnosis ADHD because sleep deprivation can be, can manifest itself like message with your, your, your function. So it can express itself as the same thing. It's not that one causes the other. Right. But that the symptoms can be kind of very similar. Oh, wait a minute. It's a crazy how like so much of our information about ADHD is just like through conversations. Right? Just like, wait. Why didn't somebody tell me that? Exactly. Yeah. So that was the first step is like going back to the doctor and being like, I actually want to manage my sleep apnea more aggressively. Like none of this nose strip, you know, whatever. So give me a seat. Yeah. And so that was like a whole six months of extra tests and getting adjusted. But that in itself was life changing. It was like, whoa, I now feel like I have 10 to 20% more life. Amazing. Because like I can, I sleep at six to seven hours. I feel more rested than nine hours. Wow. And that's your sleeping with the CPAP machine. So CPAP which is its own giant pain. Totally. And it's like it wakes me up because it's like adjusting it all this time. And in Myanmar recently and my producer will bring his CPAP machine. We were in a rappel held territory. And he brought a CPAP machine with like a huge power bank because we were in an area with no power. But it's that important to him. Yeah. I can't go back. I can't go back. Yeah. So sleep has been a really big one. And so CPAP is part of it. It's also just like trying to get this bed more on regular schedule and like having a white noise machine and dark bedroom and light exposure in the morning. There's other little things that help that I'm not that consistent with. The CPAP is a night and day difference. And I can tell when I don't have a good night of sleep, it's, you know, there's just certain tasks I'm not going to be able to do. Like email, creative work. I can go to my lab and I can answer questions and I can get on zoom and just like be a zoom zombie. But like I'm not going to be coming up with like interesting ideas that day. So that feels like it doesn't, you know, it doesn't magically cure everything. But that's like the foundation requirement. Movement was the second one where I was just because I had this sort of period of not a lot of stress and a lot, not a lot of deadlines. I could kind of play with my day and I thought, okay, normally I'm only ever I'm never gonna go on a run if my wife Jody is back from school and like wants to go on a run or I can go on a bike ride, my friends for you go bike. I wasn't ever a very consistent exorciser for my own benefit. I would do it as a social thing. One day I just decided, I'm gonna, what if, what if I go on a bike ride first thing in the morning? Like how does that affect my day? And I did that, I was, and it felt way more effective than the riddle in Hannah. I was like, whoa, I am like a super human, I can just do all the things I'm trying to do. But whoa, what is happening? And then the next day I was using my housemates rowing machine. I'm like, I'm gonna exercise again, I did the rowing machine nothing. You know, it was like, no, I feel like I came off worse than what I started. So it was a specific type of exercise? Yeah, so then one of these podcasts mentioned a book called Spark, which is about the benefits of exercise to mental health. One chapter is about ADHD and that, that clarified so much, because it was not just about like getting a heart rate up, it's not about like, the effort, it's about doing complex movements that require your executive function to like practice its ability. Oh, we realize. Yeah, so dance or rock climbing or mountain biking or trail running where you're having to switch between balance and vision and muscle activation. Like you're basically like exercising your executive function. In a way that a rowing machine, you can sort of zone out. Oh god, it's so hard. And I was like watching nature videos. I'm like, no, this is actually enhancing my distractibility, whereas a trail run or a bike ride outside really had those benefits. And so all of a sudden I'm like, I'm getting up and working out every morning. And that was, that was the next big level up. Now that sort of bleeds into my third pillar of mornings of just like recognizing how I start my day really affects how the rest of it will go. Like if I get up and turn over and like check my email on my phone, my day is trashed. I could have great sleep. I could like work out for whatever going a long run at 6 p.m. that day or even right after looking at my phone. And it's like, I'm on the wrong trajectory. And the only thing that will pull me back is a major deadline and like some other huge stressor, which if you have that deadline, you don't need to sleep. You don't need any of these strategies because you have like adrenaline. Right, the pressure of, you know. External shame and judgment of existential, yeah. Destruction to keep you going. But when you don't have that, then like you need all these other people. Which is hard because so many of us, right, we're working on these long term independent projects where no one's really checking in on us. And you're just kind of out there doing your own thing. And if you're not able to give yourself that structure, you can be screwed. Yeah, and you don't take your own, you don't, I don't take artificial deadlines seriously. I'm not going to be like, I should get that done by Friday or Wednesday. Those are fake. Are you kidding me? I don't, I know I can, nothing's going to happen. So those didn't work. So the morning thing, I'm recognizing, okay, I got to start my morning right. And okay, so my next, after you've been the most useful writer and resource was Cal Newport. Yeah, it's two books that are that were very helpful. Slow productivity and deep work. And he's, I don't think he mentions ADHD once in these two books. That's not the lens that he's working through. It's more of like, today's busy, distracted world. Like, how can you do meaningful work? And so I read his two book, I said I read, I listen to audiobooks. I have one of his books down. That's much easier for me to manage than reading a paper book. Because you get to do things while you're in the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so those books were so helpful. And one of the strategy I took from them was this time block planning. Like how you start your day by kind of just like thinking about what you're going to do in every hour. I have never, this is now something I do most, almost every day. And I have never once actually followed the plan that I set for myself. But it didn't matter. What's so helpful about it is that you have a pen and a paper the first thing in the morning. And what's not actually helpful is thinking about time or making intention of how you're going to set the day. It's literally just having a pen and paper so that when a random idea comes, I'm already writing and I can write it down. And so I found myself essentially becoming a journalist because I had this practice of starting to write something that has no consequence. Like, oh, I literally be like breakfast. I am working out. I can't mess up this plan. There's no pressure to be smart or thoughtful or meaningful. It's such a minor on ramp to get this thing done. And it's such a minor on ramp to go from that to be like, oh, I have this idea for this picture I want to take. And like on the next page, scribble it down. It is a lot about the on ramps, right? Like making it easy for yourself to just take the first step. And then I noticed if I did that and then I failed to run, it was still in the same brain space. I was like, this feels like it's as good as running for giving myself a one or two or three hour process. And then I came across an article on NPR about how handwriting is like one of the most complex physical tasks we do. So it's doing the same thing of combining, of like exercising your executive function. Because like getting the pressure right and all these fine motor movements and you're accessing your working memory and you're using your vision. And so it's like, oh, it's not about working out at all. It's about movement. And so handwriting can be this like, I mean for me, it's like really about stimulation, right? It's like I basically need every part of my brain to be stimulated enough, right? Not at all times and not all parts, but like pretty much. Like I just need so much to even get to a baseline. Otherwise that boredom feels like death. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, the fourth pillar, what I call it, I call it mono-tasking. The other way of thinking about that is like device management. So figuring out how to like lower the number of choices you have to make in any one moment. So you can focus on one thing at a time. And the two biggest challenges to doing that are our phones and our email. And so the ways, the most useful thing I've done in terms of managing my devices to set myself up for mono-tasking instead of multitasking is taking email off my phone. Oh. Yeah. Wow. This is life changing for me because it means I'm only going to check it on my laptop. And sometimes I just leave my laptop at the lab. So I have no way to check email at home. That means that it's amazing because it means by the time I get to my laptop, whether that's at home or at the lab, I now have not checked email for 12 hours. That's insane. And it means I'm hungry for it. Oh. Because when you think about it, if you look at every single email, like how, what percentage of those are actually rewarding? Oh, you're excited to read about versus you're like, oh, this is like Christmas morning when you get to end the class. Exactly. Because if you take any group of 100 emails, there's one in there. That's awesome. It's like, you have money or like you have a new friend or you have a new award or something that you're just like, yeah. Whereas every other one, you're like, oh, my God, boring, boring, terrible. Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment. Yeah. And you're on your phone and like, this is not a efficient way to respond. You look at all these things and you don't respond to any of them. Right. And then they're sitting in your mind. And then you sit down to write to them and there's like 50 different options of where to start. And that's already like, I got to make a decision about who to respond to. So I already know of all of them. Now it's you show up. You show up and you look at it and there's a couple of hacks. Like the easiest one if I'm functioning pretty well as I just scroll down so I can only see one at a time as I scroll through. And I just tackle each one. And I'm a machine. I can do more in like an hour than it used to take me like three days to catch up on 100 emails. I can just bang it out in an hour. And you enjoy it. You're like, I love email because it's still like I just feel like a machine and I'm looking at all the boring ones. You just like get out of your way immediately. And the awesome ones you can kind of bait like revel in. And if I get behind in this like 100 emails and the whole scrolling thing doesn't work, there's like filtering mechanisms. You can sort of filter your inbox. You can archive stuff. You can snooze things into the future. Or you can filter and be like, just show me the emails in the last 24 hours. And then all of a sudden you have 10 to deal with. Yeah. Because otherwise if I'm looking at 50 emails, I'll spend all day being like, do I want to answer that one? Not really. What about this one? This one's easy. Okay. This one's going to make me think about something. And it's just terrible. And you just blown your day and none of it's fun. So anyway, the email thing was. Right. That's big. Big. Which is a big part of all of our lives, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then mood. I'm going to just to finish the month asking thing. I know we're running out of time. No, no, no. But there's an important part of this. So there's the. The. The. The. The. The key thing of the. learned about my whole philosophy in managing this, I don't know what to call it, condition, this situation is that willpower and discipline have no meaningful part of my strategy. And I think I went through so much of my life being like, "Oh, I gotta just be better." I just need to like. I want it more. I need to want it more and I need to force myself. And try harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then recognizing, I think again, one of these writers' podcasters like talked about how willpower is this finite resource. You wake up with like a teaspoon of willpower every morning. You can't rely on it. And you can. You get to decide like, "How am I gonna use this tiny little resource? Am I gonna use it to like not look at my laptop?" And then it's gone. And then the next time you walk by your laptop, you're like, "I'm gonna check my email." So I'm like, "Oh, this is not a reliable strategy." And discipline, for me at least, has no place in how I manage my life. Like this is not about, "Oh, I need to do this every morning. I need to get up and work out and spend time on a journal." And like, "That's never worked for me. I've been able to stick with it for one or two or three days." Like, "That's a bad feeling." Or weeks, if you're like, "You're really stressed or if you're really motivated out of some like horrible experience, you can force yourself to do it." But it's never sustainable. Totally. Totally. And so I think about it instead as an approach from approaching it through like experimentation and curiosity. Like, "Huh, I wonder what happens if I go on a bike ride in the morning." Like, "I wonder what happens if I try to like this time block planning." Like, "I wonder what happens." And then the thing that works, like, reinforces itself. And so as I think about how do I set up my day to monotask, then it's about not like, "Hmm, I need to make a commitment in the morning to monotask." It's more like, "Hmm, how do I set up my physical environment for me to succeed?" And that means like, it can be as simple as like putting a jacket over my laptop. So when I come down from my bedroom in the morning, I don't see it. Yeah. And if I don't see it. Like, "Cheers for yourself like a lab animal." Yeah. Oh, totally. Totally. And it's working. And so it's totally working. Okay. So I think that's, I mean, I think that's, this is in some ways the least important strategy. It's like the last little tricks in the toolbox. And going back to that sort of model of, you need a little squirt of dopamine sometimes, like, get the gears moving. So all of these things, the sleep, the movement, and the emails of like, "That works up until about lunchtime." Like, that gets me to a few hours of good quality attention. And then it sort of falls apart in the afternoon. And so, thinking about what are the things that could sort of inject a little bit of dopamine to get me through the rest of the day. There are, this probably came from human lab of like breathing techniques and like cold showers. And these, what minor stressors do your body that can kind of wake you up a bit? And cold showers doesn't really work at the lab like after lunch. So I've tried Wim Hof breathing, which I think it just like freaks your body out a little bit. I mean, you still fit high. You're like, "Wake up." Am I dying? You're just like, "Okay, I am ready to focus again." So that's been an interesting little hack when I'm like, "I need to take a picture today." And it's two o'clock and I'm kind of, I'm kind of drifting. So either I can try to do a little exercise or I do one of these little hacks. And it's, again, it's like, it's not as important as sleep and movement and morning routines. So like little things that you can sort of bump up your ability. Right. And for those that don't know, Wim Hof method is a type of breathwork technique, right? Where you basically, from my understanding, experience you like hyperventilate and like put yourself in a hyposic state and then it does things to your brain and you feel kind of high and kind of better. Cyclic hyperventilation. Yeah, hyperventilating and you hold your breath. It's very dangerous to do around bodies of water while driving. Right, yes. A hundred percent. It's dangerous to have your conditions like you should do it safely, but it can be a little boost of adrenaline when you need to. I mean, I liked what you were saying before about motivation and willpower and discipline because I feel like it's really easy when you have ADHD and you are ambitious and are wanting to be high achieving. It's so easy to be so hard on yourself. And that is such a dangerous trap and can lead to a horrible negative spiral, right? It turns out to not be useful at all. Totally. Yes. And that's been my approach to where I'm like, it's just not served. It's just not practical to be hard on myself. Like regardless how I actually feel about myself, it's actually counterproductive to be anything but kind and patient with myself. Which is. I'm curious. I'm like asking yourself, what does this feeling mean? Why am I feeling like this? And yeah, well, thank you so much. Obviously I could keep talking forever. On the final note, what are you working on that you're excited about or what do you have in the pipeline that you can tell us about? I think the next big project is a traveling exhibit that will hold this chicken project and potentially future projects on cuddle fish trout butterflies. I don't know exactly what all this will contain, but that's the next big thing I hope to share with the world. Actually, one last thing because I know if I were listening to this, it'd drive me crazy. You mentioned the Jellyfish project real quick. What was the Jellyfish project? Jellyfish, I was breeding Jellyfish in my garage to try to show the wackiness of their life cycle. And that's doing that in my garage. It's what really inspired me to start one or lab and to be able to have this interdisciplinary space to explore science and wonder. Amazing. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone here. Thank you to Maria Chen for producing. Thank you to Kelly Brottis for filming. Thank you to Andrew Grant for being our sound engineer. Thank you to Ethan Radio for hosting us in this beautiful space. And thanks to Nat Geo for bringing us together. Absolutely. And sparking these conversations. Until next time. All right. Thanks. All my friends have a day.