Beyond the Label: Understanding ADHD - ADHD Specialist & Coach, Jen Lewis

Welcome to Life, Health and the Universe, bringing you stories that connect us, preventative and holistic health practices to empower us and esoteric wisdom to enlighten us. We invite you to visit our website where you can access the podcast, watch on YouTube and find all of our guests in the guest directory. Visit life, health, the universe.podcastpage.io. Now let's get stuck into this week's episode. Today we are welcoming our 80th guest on the Life, Health and the Universe podcast. I feel like I should have balloons and streamers for you Jen. You're the 80th guest so thank you for joining us. Jen Lewis is an ADHD specialist and coach dedicated to helping individuals understand their unique brains and develop practical strategies that work with the ADHD system. She also focuses on emotional regulation, a common challenge for ADHDers. Now Jen before we hit record I told you I was keeping my intro of you super short because I know that you've just got so much that you're going to share with us. There was so much I could have included in the intro Jen but I thought I would hand over to you and ADHD is obviously a pretty hot topic now so we are not going to be short of things to talk about but do you want to give us a bit of an outline of who you are, what you do, how you got into this work and then we'll sort of get into the nuts and bolts. Welcome. Okay thank you very much lovely to be here popping my podcast Cheri. Oh yes. On your 80th yeah it's lovely thank you. So yeah ADHD specialist and coach so in my previous life I guess for many years I worked for corporates and I was a set coach for quite a while. Got two young boys so 8 and 13 and I may jump around because I'm thinking of your few questions but how did I get into this so I suppose the bits that are relevant for today is because we're talking about the emotional regulation piece and even though I was really an optimistic person and always have been I didn't realize that I also had a bit of emotional dysregulation and I started about 10 11 years ago went on this mindfulness course and I can remember my exact coach at the time has suggested it and I could remember sitting in this room with about 30 other people for weeks on end and I was thinking why are they getting all of these insights and I was really frustrated with it and etc etc but I powered on and I powered through it and then at the end of the six weeks I think I was probably one of the most transformed people throughout the whole course it had really changed my physiology my regulation at that time didn't know that I had ADHD anyway fast forward a few years I actually started teaching mindfulness because it had changed me in so many ways it had brought me to so much peace and I just dealt with things internally so differently so then fast forward my now eight year old was diagnosed at age three with oppositional defiance with ADHD I know it's thoroughly but um I struggled for that first couple of years I had one boy he's actually inattentive ADHD but they present very differently so you'll discover there's inattentive ADHD there's hyperactive ADHD and then there's combined the two combined anyway my youngest was super different from other kids and I knew that there was something there not particularly something wrong but just something very different and I struggled for a couple of years really struggled it was hard and then when he got diagnosed it was like my whole world changed it was like I put on my big girl pants if that makes sense and I was like right it's no longer why do I have all of these challenges and they struggle with his behaviors and the differences but it was like this little kid needs me he really needs me and he's come to me for a reason you know so yeah that was when I really started doing all of the developmental courses with kids with the ADHD stuff just learning so much about it and then within that started recognizing everything in myself and I remember the pediatrician said to me oh well it's usually family related and I laughed at the time and said well it wouldn't be their dad because he's very neurotypical but it still took a year or two to start recognizing oh I think that's me I think that's me so I went through this as many late diagnosed women went through this process and even though I knew when I'd got diagnosed it was still this massive process of recontextualizing everything of some not too much regret but a bit of sadness a bit of relief really understanding myself more and then so I was already an executive coach I was already a mindfulness teacher and learning all of this about this world I just thought hold on a minute who needs these internal skills more than people with ADHD so I went on to do my ADHD training and I went on with ADCA and ended up doing their advanced program it's about 18 months but you learn so much first they make you learn so much about ADHD and then obviously more advanced in the coaching set with the ADHD lens I would say I wouldn't rather be doing anything else in the whole world it is so rewarding when people come to me they come to me thinking quite often thinking that they need to help with strategies and what they discover is that I'm just thinking of a lady that I recently had and she said she was 48 actually and she said I knew I had the map I even had the vehicle I just couldn't get there and she said I went to Jin thinking she's going to just make me do this and she said what I didn't realize was that I'd been trying for all these years to do things in a neuro-typical way when all I had to do was find my own way through it and I think that's what is so rewarding and oftentimes as well people come in the shoulds right they come in this I should be doing this and I should be doing that when we discover underneath it and they say actually no I shouldn't who cares this is the way that I want to authentically live my life so helping people understand their ADHD systems in a way that doesn't slant towards I'm broken I'm a deficit and neither either it's like it's not one or the other it's not I'm broken it's not it's all superpowers because there are big challenges but it's more of I have a different operating system I haven't been taught this operating system when I was growing up because 95 percent of the world are neuro-typical so let's relearn let's unlearn what I've learned let's relearn my own system and then find the strengths find the way through so yeah and I think one thing to be very aware of is that the medical model is probably more focused on deficits and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but the medical model focuses on what's the deficits how can we medicate that whereas the coaching model focuses on this is a different operating system that we don't actually know so how can we get to know the system so that we can find ways around it that flow in with our system rather than being a deficit space does that make sense yes definitely and it must be a real challenge for people experiencing ADHD because the like you said 95 percent of the people are neuro-typical so like the world is set up for for that and if you don't fit in if you're what is it they say a square peg in a round hole absolutely absolutely just give them a just give them something numb it like yes and I'd love to I'd love to hear a little bit more about your like what is ADHD because although I've heard of it and like so many people it's like in you know so many conversations come up with adults and you know whether it's them having the experience or them having their children be diagnosed with ADHD it just seems like more and more people are saying that but I don't really know what it is do not I mean it's like it's a term that that we we've heard of and it's becoming more common or seemingly yeah but what is it and how does it present and how do you experience it so it's attention deficit is such a um I think that's one out of you know so many things and it's well it's stigmatized but it also doesn't really convey the right thing for a start as we know it's um it's not often an attention deficit but it's an attention surplus or attention just being in the different place to where it should be so people with ADHD they often have um how does my partner describe it they'll be talking and they'll go oh awesome so it's it's usually an attention surplus there are so many traits if we think um the there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different things right so you've got well as many other parts involved but the prefrontal cortex so think of it as the exact function of the brain so the exact function of the brain is responsible for forward planning organization memory regulating and then you've got this other part of the brain and the nervous system that's more kind of in the feeling and the emotions so the the challenges with ADHD are that the executive function often is not operating as it would in a neurotypical so you'll see it described as so many different things you'll see it described as the conductor of the brain or the policeman of the brain i think gabel mate is got a book and he talks about the policeman's gone to sleep on the job so the executive function is not working as it should the way i like to describe it is that a neurotypical brain is more of an importance based brain so therefore it goes oh that's important i should do that then the right neurochemicals all fire up and the brain goes to do that okay whereas an ADHD brain is more of an interest based brain or an emotional significant space brain so the ADHD brain says that's important i should do that yet the right neurochemicals don't always fire up to go and do the thing so it's not um it's not necessarily based on importance we know it's important but if it's not emotionally significant there will be a type of either hyper arousal like going into an overwhelm around it or there'll be a hyper arousal where you can't lift to do it you know that whole procrastination thing sometimes there's just this kind of shutdown response so it's a very nuanced um very nuanced and i suppose different operating system but that's the easiest way i get to describe it and that emotional significance is really important and i'll give you an example for for example that um the working memory i went out and i had a big crack in my windscreen in the car and i just thought right i should get that fixed do you think i could remember outside of seeing the crack in the car to actually write it down or get it fixed so i must have seen it a hundred times but because it wasn't emotionally significant to me nothing was done about it until the windscreen cracked well of course i remembered to do it then and i've always remembered to keep the windscreen intact from now on but what i mean is if there's no immediate or real consequence or reward attached the brain can't hang on to it so that's and that's just working memory um emotional regulation so i'm just thinking actually doctor there's a guy called Dr Andrew Hill can't remember where he works for but he works in the brain and i once read that he said that people with ADHD produce much more theta brainwaves than neurotypical people which was interesting so there's studies in the brain but if we've got the executive function and the regulation piece that is more challenged then it makes sense that people with ADHD have a bit more regulation challenges because say if you're in your fight or flight say if you're in your emotion or something hits your emotions quite hard you're going to perceive things in a more negative light right there's um i'm thinking of this i think it's hbr your brain in conflict and it talks about how when you're the connections between the limbic system and the different parts when we're in fight or flight they're constricted so we're only able to see in black and white we're only able to see in this kind of i'm right you're wrong so perception for people with ADHD is sometimes a little bit more um i don't want to say negative but sometimes it is more a bit ah what's happening when we're in fight or flight um there's a couple of different parts of and this is in general by the way that should be said that i always say in general not every person with ADHD we've all got our stories and our upbringing and our different systems but in general people with ADHD have a is it a higher or a lower hrv heart rate variability which one's the one that's less yeah it's really interesting this study is not as favorable hrv so it must be lower so it's the stress tolerance basically the body's ability to come back from stress yeah there's also um they talk about how the ADHD system can often mimic a trauma system so it's like that nervous system yeah janina fischer she's um she's a trauma expert and i heard her once talking about um ADHD and trauma and how the systems can mimic each other in that they're um they get knocked into that fight or flight more easily so in general people are born with ADHD with that um biology that is more reactive rather than responsive does that make sense yes but um one of the things that i love and is absolutely true and i teach it is um deb dana she's an expert on the nervous system and she talks about how biology shapes experience but experience also shapes biology right and nadine i've heard you talking about it yeah mindset right yeah so yes people with ADHD are typically born with a um more sensitive sensitive is the right word sensitive nervous system but we can also choose if we have conscious choice to work on that and develop and regulate our own biology and when i did that mindfulness that few months and what i went on to do afterwards is a hundred percent like evidence i remember my sister i hadn't seen her for years and she came out to australia to see me she said janina's so different i said oh it must be all the mindfulness but it was just this different i'll tell you what i was like before well i didn't have a lot of patience oh right i didn't have a lot of patience but um yeah so it's this really kind of nuanced different system but i guess what i'm saying again out of that is that once we get to know our system we can then have a choice over what to do with that i mean when i learn the answer to working memory i'll come back to you but uh that's okay most other things yeah so what is ADHD it is so nuanced you've got all of the working memory you've got the rejection sensitive you've got the ADHD is just a different operating system that has all of these different parts that when we get to know them sometimes in isolation sometimes together we can then get through and yeah yeah so wow okay so um how do we differentiate right because okay lots of people so let's just use i might not be a very good example but a woman our age who is busy frazzled got well i've got a lot of tabs open on my computer i can tell you that much um you know jumping from one thing to the other forgets their keys does all of these things but if you go on if you go online and do a survey have i got ADHD like i feel like you could easily tick a lot of those boxes and you know an online program could tell you that you've got that but is there is there a like is there a difference between that person who's like got a lot of things on the go is a bit forgetful you know um is it when it does it start to affect your life in a different way i guess that's kind of like how do we know the difference like between someone who does whether it's yeah whether it's you know a lifestyle related yeah we're all busy distracted you know we've got our phone our computer our you know someone's ringing a list of you know a mile long and you know a lot of people i think i feel like associate that kind of attention deficit with oh yes the amount of people that i've said oh i think i've got a bit of ADHD yeah and they're clearly very neurotypical right but they're just overwhelmed or they've just got along to do this or something like that but also i think that the messaging is is kind of like distorted so yeah so how do how do we tell the difference how would you tell the difference hey there rebel thank you for listening to this interview i hope you're enjoying it i wonder do you have any other midlife rebels in your life that might enjoy this content i'd love you to share this with them if you do and remember there's a little bit of rebel in all of us so i would say that somebody that is neurotypical and without ADHD if they're saying you know like i feel like i've got ADHD or there's a bit of overwhelm there's a lot of situational and environmental things that play into it but if you take that person out of a busy life an overwhelmed life are those traits still in play do they still have the working memory impairments do they still have the emotional dysregulation do they do they still have all of the things that come along with ADHD or do those things go away and i think the world that we're living in now this overstimulated world has probably also made that overlap harder to see and so unless you are um deeply knowledgeable about knowledgeable about it i can understand why it gets belittled i can understand why people that don't know it deeply would think well what are they talking about you know i get that too or how do i know but it's i would say if you took that person out of the busy crazy environment that we're living in today and all of those things were still in play then that's a good indicator yeah okay um so if someone thought that they might be what would they do would they go to a doctor or a specialist or like does a doctor it does it feel like a doctor knows enough about it to be able to um say yes you are or no you're not or would they refer you on or how does that all work yeah as far as i know doctors do not get a lot of training at all maybe a day or something like that you know it's probably a bit like the menopause thing five minutes training um i shouldn't be so sarcastic but um it's typically a psychiatrist okay interestingly psychiatrist i remember when i first got diagnosed and i had so many questions for my psychiatrist and he just kind of didn't really answer any of them and my um other psychiatrist he was amazing actually and when i went in first to see him this was for medication and he said to me well i'm a bit intimidated by you now and i said why he said you're an ADHD coach and i said oh yes i've been told i know about 90 more than you i was joking but what i'm saying is yes you do go to a psychiatrist but they won't necessarily know the practical aspects the nuanced aspects they just know it from a medical standpoint so who do you go to formally sure a psychiatrist to get diagnosed but then who do you go to to learn more about it obviously a lot of people go attitude and well yeah people that have been not only living it but learning it and helping people understand it for a long time yeah yeah i've just the reason i ask that is because you know there is that different different differing experience but but i don't know it feels like it's coming up more and more like you said there's people that go oh i think i've got it and then they do an online quiz that tells them that they do have it yeah yeah and so then they fly the flag um but there's obviously some real yeah some real differences i think this is really important because i like i just want the listeners to understand from someone who knows what they're talking about not google yes and maybe i should touch a bit on the um inattentive versus hyperactive side actually because that might be quite helpful so and i'll give you an example my son without knowing my oldest son without having known any of this stuff i would never known about the inattentive so inattentive ADHD presents very very different that person might look very placid and they might look like they're away with the fairies and they might be um not interrupted or not emotionally dysregulated interestingly i think that it was Russell Barclay who was arguing for emotional dysregulation to be included in the dsm but not for inattentive people with ADHD so it presents very differently um hyperactive is much more obvious obviously it might look like talking really fast and talking about 10 different things at once and jumping to different conversations or it might look like you know that classic not being able to sit still or getting hyper focused into things that's another thing is hyper focus for people with ADHD you know you might get stuck in something for hours so and then you've got combined which is the inattentive and the hyperactive together so you've got all sorts of strengths and challenges and um sorry possum what was the question do you know what i got a possum as well no um what was the question i was listening so i was listening intently um was it how would you know or something yeah you were talking about the different the two different you answered the you answered the question and then we went on to the two different types and how yeah how they can be quite different in the way someone experiences them right the inattentive compared to the hyperactive yeah and and the hyperactive type is that kind of um is interesting because you said something earlier about that how do you tell a neurotypical and that overwhelm so typically for somebody with hyperactive ADHD typically the overwhelm will often be caused not by external factors but by internal factors and i often get people with ADHD the hyperactive and they're saying i just don't have time i'll never have time to do all the things but all of the things are kind of self-imposed things does that make sense it's like you feel like you feel like there's never enough time you feel like and i've got people that come in with how are they going to get all of this done and when we take it all out some of those things are hobbies or activities that should be nourishing but they're kind of turned into tasks they feel like they have to and they feel like how are they going to get to them so it's like an internal overwhelm no matter what's going on externally okay yeah and um something i just thought of on that as well is the term blindness piece which is another massive part of ADHD i have met barely anyone with ADHD that doesn't have the time blindness piece so gabel mate describes it as the whatever was supposed to develop the maturity around ability to see time hasn't developed and i'll give you an example i had somebody come in and she said i want strategies to be on ADHD friendly strategies to be more efficient in my workplace because i'm not getting everything done so as always i kind of sat and went okay so what's actually underneath this let's before we move to the strategies so i said okay just explain your working week to me what are you doing what are you usually and we're about 20 minutes into the session and she realized she was trying to do 80 hours work in a 40 hour week and i said to her so can i just check in are we still looking for ADHD friendly strategies and she went oh well i'm seriously so often this time blindness piece also plays into the ADHD system because when we estimate things we might estimate they take an hour they're gonna take two or three hours because we see things at face value we don't calculate all of the little things that are involved say taking the kids to the pool it's just the hour taking the kids to the pool it's not half an hour either side wrangling the kids or commuting or you know we just see the thing so that um yeah that what is ADHD that time blindness the internal overwhelm trying to not being able to estimate and forecast time well and also if we've got we're better off just waking up at six in the morning rolling out of bed and getting straight to a workout you'll know this i don't miss my mondays do i but if you give us too much time to get to places the possums will start distracting and then does that make sense so it's like that's kind of blindness so if we've got too much time and then if we've got 10 minutes for something we think it's just not now we've got a world of time we try and get the washing done and the dinner cooked and yeah on Nadine hey i'm just i'm just checking my notes okay let's talk about some of the things that um i want to talk a bit more about your specific work and you've touched on it a couple of times but i'd love to talk now you've sort of talked about how we define what ADHD is and how someone might like figure out what's going on but how much does and like i even mentioned you know the the distractions that we all have in our everyday lives and how people can miss misconstrue that is that the right word misconstrue that as um having ADHD yes how much do those lifestyle things affect someone with ADHD like technology all right having too many tabs open on your computer your phone going off some people having two phones you know um and how much how much can be resolved by uh i'm not asking too many things at once yeah so okay let me take a step back Jen i've i've read recently that children with ADHD like a large proportion of them improved significantly with lifestyle changes specifically diet yes i think that children um especially when they're exposed to technology when they're exposed to unfavorable foods can have behavioral issues so i guess this is a two-part question is it the chicken or the egg you know yes um and do removing those things help a child or an adult with managing yeah so you will hear various different things i've got a friend in england that had an ADHD support person that actually favored technology and giving them technology i think only for certain amounts of time but they considered that they're down time so i think the answer is it sometimes depends i can certainly give you my own experience and that of my kids so the first thing you said i think was diet my before my youngest was diagnosed he was gosh he was probably only about two years old when we got asked to leave the swim school one of the swim scores that was the first swim school the second one we also got asked to leave but he was um he was sitting on the edge of the pool and he just couldn't listen to instruction he kept jumping in they were thinking he was being naughty but he was actually just really overstimulated the sounds in the pool anyway around that um same time we were having a lot of issues with him in daycare and he was in a big daycare um and at that time i didn't know what was happening but i just wanted to try different things so i actually went to sue den gates fed up she had four boys she's doesn't this um thing called fed up and it's all about diet and colors and preservatives and anyway tried that and i basically went around the supermarkets for weeks on end and just looked at all of the packets do they have those ease in them that she says don't do and within a month the daycare teacher said to me that is a different child wow that's scary really it's crazy and i'm not great on it now because i'm not a great foodie person but if i see that things are happening then i'll pull back on preservatives and e-numbers and so i wish i could say to you that we live clean but you know we're human we don't but um at that time it made a huge difference for him and i thought geez jen for breakfast you've been giving him one of those twiglet twiggy things those processed and that was kind of what i was feeding him you know but then it went to like chicken and rice and all of these clean things so food for us did make a big big difference especially at that age the other thing that made a huge difference huge and it's similar for adults is when i say psychology i don't mean psychology sessions but changing his mindset so we went into this deep parenting program for behaviors when he was i think he was about three and the difference was amazing we were told to focus 20% very quietly on the negative and 80% just expand the positive oh my gosh i love it when you did that and when he was when he wasn't displaying the good behaviors we were to really quietly say i don't like that and then move him on and anyway i won't go into it but we had this big process of how to manage behaviors with him and basically he was um this was a year or two later you know i think it was when he was about five we'd done all this work with him we saw the differences within a couple of months it was insane it was really cool just really giving him that time and space getting down on his level understanding him hearing him and then i remember he'd i think he'd gone through a bit of a rough patch but then the school phoned me when he was i think it was about five he was in kinder year one and um i thought oh god what's he done and they said to me i just wanted to show i just wanted to share with you the leadership qualities that were exhibited by him because another kid punched him in the face or something but the way that he handled it was amazing and so when i say psychology i don't mean psychology sessions i just mean your own psychology with that person and i think adults are pretty similar that the way that they have their mind set about themselves and the way that their internal self is you know if you think that you're crappy and you're broken and you're you know you're going to be displaying those behaviors whereas if you believe that actually i'm really cool and i'm good and it's like um yeah i can't think of the word that i was going to use so in answer to your question chicken and egg i do not think that ADHD is created or removed by things like food and therapies and things like that but i do think that they are all huge components of that ecosystem yeah sure yeah yeah very interesting like what you said about the psychology of um like the parenting tactics i guess because um i think that we can all uh take some take some tips from that doesn't matter whether you've got an ADHD child or not like encouraging them listening to them accepting them rather than like pulling them up on all of the shit things all of the time change our attention goes to where they do the crap things unless we're conscious about it and it's like this real it doesn't happen by itself it's a skill that we have to put time into alone yeah definitely and um i was actually gonna ask you about that in relation to someone who's been diagnosed because i think even the word diagnosed someone i'm sure i heard somewhere that that was not like the ideal term to use because diagnosed is associated with illness or something wrong with you yeah is there another term i use the word system a lot i mean is there another term i say i have an ADHD system rather than i have an ADHD yeah so yeah i mean diagnosis i guess you can have any diagnosis of anything does it have to be negative i don't actually know the answer to that i think that if you go to someone for a diagnosis it it has the connotation typically medical and there's something negative because there's something wrong or that you're trying to get something fixed so can you talk to me a to me a little bit about that like that idea of um you know working with someone's strengths instead of like yes because i would expect that for a lot of the time people would come to you because there's something wrong with them that they need to fix yes absolutely and so how do how do you turn that around so that they actually do realize that it's not broken that they're not broken yeah yeah and so interestingly my approach i guess is i love Brennan Brown's work i don't know if you've heard it on fitting in versus belonging okay and she says that fitting in is the opposite of belonging and you'll see where i'm going in a minute but um so what a lot of people with ADHD are trying to do is oh i've had this diagnosis now how can i fit myself in with this neurotypical world rather than belong to myself and what they're doing is in essence kind of rejecting themselves right if you're trying to fit in and Brennan Brown just describes it beautifully and it's something that i found in the ADHD world and then when i saw Brennan's work i was like ah this matches so well so when you're trying to fit in with society or in the shoulds or fix your apparently broken parts then you're rejecting yourself so my approach is to flow in not fit in right so it's like how do i now flow in with my system and if you can remember it can you ask me that question again because there was something else significant that just came up yeah it's just like how do you flip it like from it being uh something that needs to be fixed just something that yes is like a strength often in our coaching sessions and one just that was right something an example came up for me there was a guy and he had his first session with me it was the most beautiful session he said i feel real shame because i've lived in this house for over a year and i never take the house keys out with me and he thought he wanted help with his working memory and he's like how do i take the house keys out and not lose them i said well what happens he said i always have to get new keys can't i lose them all the time and he said i just leave my door open not open but unlocked he said and i just i feel this real shame about it because i should be able to a normal person takes their keys out and i said to him okay do you live in a safe area he said yeah it's really safe i said so is that not your own wisdom telling you that you don't want to lose your keys and so you're actually being really wise by doing that system that way and he's just ah and i think he's come i can't tell you the last year of seeing him from the start to the finish and the message that he sent to me just before christmas talked about authenticity and he said this year my authenticity that is the word for me and he said i love little me childhood me i love adult me and i no longer need to change for somebody else if he's unhappy with something and he wants it for himself he'll change it so in answer to your question how do you flip that i think that you support people to see that the things that they're doing are not necessarily wrong sometimes they might be not the most efficient way but in that case and that story there was nothing wrong with that it's like actually that is the wisest thing you could do well done my um i quite often hang my washing up on my balconies or in a house it was the internal staircase and my children's father came to visit and he looked at me said don't you have a washing line i said we do have a washing line but it's all the way out the back and if i hang the washing out there i will forget it's there for days and it will rain on it and then it'll dry again so that's another example of using your wisdom and it's like i don't care that it's hanging on the internal staircase oh remember it's there i can see it it's tangible so that's that kind of flipping things you know it's like i don't have to do things the way that everybody does them i just need to find my own systems and flow in not fit in yeah yeah nice can you talk a little bit about um you mentioned earlier on in the piece emotional regulation or dysregulation yeah how does that present itself what does that mean is that's a common thing that people might see yeah yep so emotional dysregulation can take many forms and again it's not a wrong thing or there's nothing wrong with it i can imagine um i can remember i saw somebody say i wish people would stop telling me that i needed to regulate myself and i think it's not nobody's saying suppress your feelings or you know that's like the opposite but the emotional dysregulation i think mainly comes from that over sensitive nervous system things so rejection sensitive dysphoria if you've heard of rsd so that is a form of intense emotional dysregulation so what that means is that that sensitive nervous system when somebody perceives a criticism or they're worried that they might be criticized the nervous system gets really overactive and then they go into protection mode like it's like a safety detector does that make sense yeah so it's like um and if we think about emotional regulation is often a safety detector am i safe am i not safe am i psychologically safe or am i psych psychologically unsafe so you get emotional dysregulation all sorts of ways i mean obviously there's sadness anger all of the range but for people with ADHD i think a lot of the emotional dysregulation can stem from a root nervous system response of i'm not safe so if you think about that emotions come from our body mainly right it's not the end result that narrative in our thinking brain so if you think about that more primitive part of us something happens and it affects our nervous system and our emotional we kind of go into a bit of fight or flight that's our body and then we go ah what's happening ooh i feel this horrible feeling and then comes the story right then comes the narrative that we create from it whereas if we can get a handle on what's happening first in the body and go oh i just felt anger what's that about just before it hits the brain just before it hits that narrative then we can stop ourselves and i can remember years ago that's one of the things i learned to do was be more connected to my body it wasn't so connected to my body and then when i was i could feel i'm feeling that feeling what's happening i'm getting angry is there another perspective is it absolutely that before it goes into complete story before it goes into we kind of locked into this and then the ruminations and then that you know absolutely fact when as we know our thoughts are not facts at all and our perceptions are very wobbly so yeah the emotional dysregulation part that i'd say that for most people rsd rejection sensitive dysphoria is a huge part of the emotional dysregulation yeah so what's happening then that that someone's thinking that they're going to be rejected for having a particular emotion or so no they reject themselves like what circumstance or a particular thing and i'll just to my brain just sort of jump to the workplace and so for a lot of people in the workplace when that rsd is present they feel like they can't speak up they don't have a voice they can't put healthy boundaries in place they go into people pleasing so rsd at its core we all have it right it's a human safety mechanism is to be a bit fearful of rejection and but in a healthy way not a disproportionate way and we go oh i don't want to speak up in that situation or i don't want to put myself out or whatever it is but for many people with adhd that rsd is disproportionate so it will limit them in certain ways it will it will manifest in maybe in defensiveness in anger because they perceive they're being hurt in a relationship or it will manifest in people pleasing at work and just saying sure i can take that on when they've already got 10 other projects and they know i'll have to work on saturday night so it's like um it yeah it comes from a disproportionate weight on what other people will think and if you think if somebody had a really high um sense of self or a really comfort level in emotional psychological safety they wouldn't be as worried about what other people think so they'd be able to say well i can put that boundary in place actually and nothing terrible is going to happen whereas rsd is more like a catastrophic thinking something's going to happen from small things does that make sense yes yeah totally okay so i'd love to hear more about how your work actually works how your coaching works who you work with um but question and it kind of dropped in at the beginning but we didn't really um go into much detail about it and that's and this is i guess a concern with for me with people who are doing the the online survey and you know and i don't suppose they can get medicated without having a proper diagnosis but you know that the the ease at which someone can just be medicated for adhd is it necessary i know that you you don't want to like tell people they shouldn't be but like you can have an opinion that you can do a disclaimer you can do a disclaimer you're not a professional but you have your own experience and we're talking like many clients experience so i can i can share a bit so your question was around medication did you say should people be easy well like is i feel like and it's not just with someone who has adhd but you know someone with perimenopore symptoms who gets given medication you know it's like the handouts so is it necessary so 100 as a first as a first line off again it depends because i'll give you another example one of my clients really really bad place and had a really strong um gambling addiction the day that he got diagnosed and started taking medication gambling addiction went away by itself so there was obviously a craving in him and something that felt like it was missing and quite often for people with adhd when they take the medication it feels a bit of a gap of something okay that they need or something like that but for everybody it's different that is 100 percent not that is not a blanket um other people i got told by a doctor friend when my son was maybe six don't you think you're being selfish by not medicating him and as seeing the psychology the food the everything just changed our whole worlds so my personal opinion is what's the purpose what is the purpose of the medication and i do get a lot of people coming to me and actually when i used to do parent coaching the the parents talked about the medication i had one young boy he was 11 and mum was beside herself she said she'd fallen into chronic depression she's emailed me at first and she listed out 12 different specialists that he had seen functional doctor psychiatrists psychologists blah blah blah anyway even taking him for the um i can't remember what the sessions are the neurofeedback or whatever it is but um and she said to me he'd been on all different medications he had oppositional defiance he was just he'd get out of bed shouting f off to the world he was only 11 years old and she said to me she said the medication made him like a zombie he used to play basketball all the time for his hyperactivity medication made him like a zombie and i said to her what was the purpose of the medication she said i don't know the psychiatrist just gave it to us so he got diagnosed and they just gave it so i don't know what's behind that you know i don't know whether they did talk about purpose so i'm not judging on that but what i'm saying is my thing would always be what's the purpose and actually i coached her for a few sessions and then the boy came to see me and he just first thing i did he walked in the room i said oh man i can't even find the light switch in here which was not a lie i said do you think you can find it and straight away he looked at me and he found this light switch and then he came in and anyway i did not treat him like he was a problem to be fixed so i did his strength survey and i said and he was naughty in school and i said i bet there's i bet there's some teachers that you're not naughty with and he went oh yeah i missed so and so in science class and he loved her and it was like aha so this isn't a deficit of yours this is a situational thing and it ended up that he felt emotionally unsafe in certain situations so what we needed to do with him was make him feel valued make him have his strengths put him in situations where and he actually went on to not have the medication so adults are very um some people it makes them more anxious some people it is the magic bullet and their emotions are wonderful and for most probably about 70 percent it's there's a cost and there's a benefit so you know just like most medication so my answer to that is absolutely my personal opinion is it depends let's find out the purpose what are you actually trying to do with that yeah yeah and i feel like i guess you know a big concern when you're hearing of children taking medication is that it's because they don't necessarily it's the square peg in the round hole in a classroom situation where a teacher's trying to take you know control over a whole bunch of kids and if there's one that's you know disorderly for whatever reason um the the parents beside themselves and and you know someone says take this but they do like they can turn into zombies and that's really quite yeah sad it's not i must say it's not the majority that is that is certain cases so i must say it's not the majority and i'll also say that there's a lot of research out there that shows that medication is wonderful and it has changed a lot of people's lives okay and there's also the um there's studies to say that people with ADHD on average and this sounds bad but their life expectancy is around 13 years shorter and when you look into the top reasons for that super surprising the top reasons for that were around things like impulsivity and so if medication tempers impulsivity then it's got to be better in the long run so what i'm saying is medication has been life changing life saving for a lot of people with ADHD but it's not always the case and it's not always the right approach to the right avenue yeah really depends yeah and it's important to get that right yeah yeah okay we're getting close to the end of our hour i'm not going to like cut us off as soon as we get there but um start to round things out a little bit um so let's talk a bit about what you do as a coach because you've got your own business and you work mostly online or do you work face to face and who do you work with online now actually okay so um mostly adults now or do you still work with parents who are trying to understand children with ADHD yeah i do do a bit of parent coaching still it is definitely not my main at least 90 percent of mine is with adults and when people have asked me to coach their children in the past i typically say um that i will coach them to understand their child understand the ADHD part because they're in the home 24/7 i'm not so that's what really makes the difference and the only reason why i've coached a few kids is because i first met the parents and the kids have wanted to that's another thing coaching in itself you kind of have to want it yeah so coaching only really works if you want it and sometimes if it's the parent that wants it and not the kid then it's probably the parent that needs it yes um there are plenty of beautiful ADHD coaches that do coach kids and families and some of them have been family trained as well so they're actually trained in the dynamics of families and i have got an amazing network of ADHD coaches and they're all i can't tell you a more supportive profession they are really really just open and lovely and we're kind of all in it for the cause rather than the business aspect which is just beautiful and so when someone comes to you like how first of all how does well obviously podcast help how does someone find out that ADHD coaches even a thing an adult so like does someone who's an adult with ADHD is it like they they they've just found out and they they like i've got to do something about this i need some help and so they find someone like Jen or you know if you've got a whole mixture of people like people who've been trying the trying to live with it and not getting along or yeah it's definitely a mix it's not all newly diagnosed it's probably people in the majority maybe they've been diagnosed for about a year or something and they've been down some rabbit holes and they've been trying medication and they've come across this coaching thing and they never knew it was a thing but not everyone i mean everybody comes to it from a different way a lot of people they're psychiatrists says some okay i could really do with finding a good ADHD coach because it's like the psychiatrist there for the medication side but then they say if you find an ADHD coach they're the ones that can help you with the skills because as they say pills don't teach skills right and it's like and also it doesn't magically make you interested in the things that you weren't or it doesn't magically make you know how your brain works because when we're coaching we go i didn't know that about myself and then you can apply that in different situations so it's almost like you get to know your brain like i see what you're trying to do and take a different way around it so yeah really different roots um michelle toner who is um the godmother of ADHD coaching she's done an amazing job of getting um getting information about coaching around two psychiatrists so that now a lot of psychiatrists in australia have that in their toolkit so they can also offer to people here's your diagnosis and this is what's going on and i'll be able to support you from a medication standpoint and a good coach will be able to support you with going forward in your life how do you now navigate that ADHD system now that you know it's there yeah cool and how long would someone have coaching for um great question so i always say life to coach myself out of a job no no no actually i say that i still have coaching myself i think that we've all got things that we can't see and we've all got situations that might be helped with coaching but as a what is the word acute that's probably not the word as a kind of um ongoing consistent support mechanism i i say that after about say 10 sessions hopefully you now have the keys to the kingdom and i had a client recently and he was um what he actually said he actually asked me quite a similar question and i said to him you've kind of got the keys to the kingdom i've just helped facilitate that they were always in you you just didn't know yourself so coaching is a very um we believe that everybody has their own gold we're just helping them find it so it's not a hierarchical position it's not a i know more than you i'm better than you it's just that i have the skills that to go on that detective hunt with you and ask you all the right questions and help you see what you can't see and i had somebody just this morning and we were going through the session and she said jen i just she said kind of want you to just give me that strategic steps and i just smiled and she said you know we sort of went share share what you can see anyway there was oh i'm going to it but there was a conflict between her mindset and what she was trying to do and just by mirroring that to her it's like we hold a mirror up to what people can't see it's like you'll be in your business and talking this that and the other and i'll be like i'm just going to point that out to you do you realize the way that you said that and they'll be like oh no what was that about so yeah so that coaching is really um so back to your how long do you have coaching for some people the shortest is probably about six sessions yeah some that's normally parent coaching actually some people around 10 sessions i get people to invest in a journey because i say this is about change you can back out at any time of course but this is not a one one and done but typically around 10 sessions and then people might come back for maintenance they might come back for some people i have come back once a month some people i have come back twice a year you know it's a bit like maybe if you've been through psychology and then you have something acute happen in your life and you go coaching would really help with that so in general i think that teaching people how to manage themselves and giving them that own skill set because i have a lot of clients that now coach themselves it's wonderful great what they are coaches they've become coaches or they go oh i do have a couple of those as well the ones that now know what questions to ask themselves they're not stuck anymore and they know my hope for people that go through coaching is that by the end of whatever they now know how to get themselves unstuck and they'll only come to me for things where they can't but they learn their own skills while they're in coaching it's superb yeah that's amazing how can people find you gen we've got your info in the guest directories so they can obviously find you there but is there anywhere that you generally direct i'm smiling because i remember you said to me you only put gin yeah don't worry i've added lewis on to the end and if the links aren't in their field website then we can add them but it is that the best way to find you is to um is there like a main directory for adhd coaches or yes website absolutely yes because i certainly won't be the right coach for everybody and i think that most coaches are at capacity as well or full near capacity sometimes like we open flow but um so adhd coaches australia is the best directory because everybody on there is qualified they're all trained they're all qualified is an amazing directory it's the one that the psychiatrists give out um and everybody's at different qualification levels but also there's all different profiles so you might want somebody for your child you might want somebody that's been through the same experience as you there's a lot of people that go oh gosh that really resonates and so there's males there's females you know there's there's all there's really really good selection and i would say that anybody on there because there's also a lot of coaches that are not trained or qualified i don't just mean adhd but in the world and you don't want to end up with somebody that's just calling themselves a coach and hasn't had the right training so adhd coaches australia is the most comprehensive and the one that's the most formally yeah everybody on there is trained so you're obviously on there and um we'll share your personal info yeah your website um in the guest directory as well and in the notes jen thank you so much for joining us it's been really insightful and like yeah just a really super important topic because it's like so prominent in today's society but i feel like we don't know that much about it and so having people like you that can educate us is um super important and really helpful so thank you so much and i'm sure yeah i've probably just given you the tip of the iceberg it's so nuanced so but hopefully that information helps people yeah it's great amazing thank you so much and congratulations on popping your cherry thanks Jen before you go can i ask you a small favor if you've enjoyed this show or any of the other episodes that you've listened to then i'd really appreciate it if you took a couple of moments to hit subscribe this is a great way to increase our listeners and get the word out there about all of the wonderful guests that we've had on the podcast if you'd like to further support the show you can buy me a coffee by going to buy me a coffee dot com forward slash life health the universe you can find that link in the show notes thanks for listening