Hey listeners, Laura here. If you're a woman with ADHD, I want to make sure you know about the ADHD channel for women, formerly called "Misunderstood." It's a place for honest stories and trusted support made by and for women like you. We change the name so our shows are easier to find. Search the ADHD channel for women and follow along. I felt like lied to, almost. I felt like how has nobody mentioned to me that it is possible that all of your options for productivity help were not made with you in mind. And so my kind of "Aha" moment being like, if things were not made with you in mind, make the thing that you want. From the "Understood" podcast network, this is ADHD Aha. A podcast where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they or someone they know has ADHD. My name is Laura Key. I'm the editorial director here at "Understood." And as someone who's had my own ADHD Aha moment, I'll be your host. Oh my goodness, I am here with Danny Donovan. The famous Danny Donovan, if you don't know who Danny Donovan is, you should know who Danny Donovan is. She is an ADHD creator. You may have seen her comics. If not, you should check them out. You may have seen her TikToks. She's also the creator of the Anti-Planer, which is an activity book specifically designed for procrastinators. And I love the opening line. I'm just going to share this. The opening line of the Anti-Planer is, "Your worth is not measured by productivity." Danny Donovan, thank you for being here. You're such a big deal. How are you today? That's the best intro I've ever had. I am wonderful now. I'm just going to take this and set it as my morning alarm sound or something. Can you imagine if I'm your alarm clock in the morning, would you need to set to alarm clocks if it was me? And then the second one is just going to be being like, "Oh my God, get up!" Which is usually my husband's, but I think maybe if it's in my voice, I'll listen to it. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. We'll talk more about the Anti-Planer. Later, this is the ADHD Aha podcast. I have a question for you. Danny, have you ever talked about your ADHD Aha moments, the moments that led to your diagnosis with anyone or publicly? The exact, well, it's so funny that you say that, you mean the moments where I thought to myself, like, "Oh, maybe I have ADHD?" I actually did not have that moment. It's an interesting story. Can I tell you? Yeah, but you have to get off the show now because this is a show about those moments. Yeah. Okay. But I had an Aha moment. Funny thing is now that I know I have ADHD, I'm able to Aha and figure out all of these ways that my life is impacted by all of these things I struggled with that I thought were personal failings, like having such difficulty doing laundry. I hadn't put the pieces together that that requires a lot of executive functioning skills and therefore could be related to ADHD. When I got my ADHD diagnosis, I was a freshman in high school and had gone in to talk to someone about depression because I was having a really hard time fitting in. Like, I'd always gotten good grades in school. I just had social difficulties that my peers didn't seem to be having and I went into talk to her because I thought I needed to go on antidepressants and she heard how fast I was talking and how fast I was like flitting between topics and just the tangential lines of thinking and she said, "Has anyone talked to you about ADHD?" I was 19 and I had this moment where I literally was like, "I don't have that. Everyone I know who has that is like an annoying little boy with no friends. I hate admitting that." But that was the, I remember that being the thought process of like, "Oh no, I don't want to have that." This was in like 2010 and then she handed me a card that had all the list of stuff and I read it. Am I just so make just stank? I'm like, "I'm having one thing that's like, wait, I have been told that this is not a good thing." Then the other half of my brain goes, "This one explains so much stuff." I really had that acceptance moment and she told me she goes, "Well, I recognize it in you because I have ADHD and you remind me of me." I didn't come in there looking for things that were necessarily ADHD symptoms but she was able to surmise that, "Oh, your depression and anxiety are sitting on top of this untreated foundation of ADHD," which is what happens to a lot of girls and I think to myself all the time, honestly, what if I wasn't so chatty? What if my psychiatrist didn't have ADHD? What if she hadn't said anything? Like, how long would it have taken me to find out? And so now that I've accidentally stumbled into becoming an ADHD content creator, I always want to make sure that the conversations that I'm centering are around moments that people actually see themselves, right? We are so much more than that symptoms list. I think by being able to show people, this is what daily life is like. This is what those symptoms look like when applied to actual life experiences because on no list of symptoms does it say, "Has difficulty grocery shopping and feeding oneself and all of your vegetables go bad all of the time so then you eat junk food because you're too exhausted to cook anyway, right? That's not a thing on a symptom list." Must buy fake plants. Yeah. You'll see enough. Everybody does that and you see another one and you're like, "Oh, well, everybody does that, right?" And then you keep going, "Well, everybody's like that. It's like famous last words by someone who's about to be diagnosed with ADHD." Totally. And speaking of that, so the untangling of ADHD depression, anxiety is so tricky, I still struggle with it today. Am I anxious because I'm having trouble focusing or am I having trouble focusing because I'm anxious? Can you tell me about what was getting tangled up for you? It was really hard for me to kind of parse that I had been told that ADHD was really something that affected your schoolwork, right? And my mom, when I was in fifth grade, my mom had asked my teacher, explicitly, "Do you think that Danny could have ADHD because I kept getting demerits?" Oh, so this was not new to you. Well, I didn't know she asked that. Oh, okay. I found this out later when I got diagnosed on my own because she had asked my teacher in fifth grade, "Do you think Danny could have ADHD?" And her response was, "She can't have ADHD. She's too smart," which is really rough because the misinformation prevalent among people who have such an impact like that, like that set me back. Like I could have gotten diagnosed in elementary school. And because one person who didn't know what they were talking about said that to a parent, like there were a lot of struggles that I could have, you know, I mean, everything worked out just fine. So I'm not mad. But. You're recording a podcast in the closet right now. Exactly. I have to be thankful. But like that story is not everybody's story. And the reality is, is that thinking that it was so much about, just about school and just about work and not realizing that like being a perfectionist and a high achiever as a measure of my worth and I was coping by overcompensating, right? And it was like masking all of those symptoms. But with the depression and anxiety, realizing how much of that was all about not getting stuff done. I was sad and upset at myself for not getting stuff done. I was anxious because the stuff wasn't getting done. I was depressed because I felt bad about myself because of my inability to get stuff done. And so so much of those, ooh, I have, I have to give myself goosebumps. But like I, I'm in this constant mode of I'm not doing enough, which ends up thinking like I am not enough. And so that's kind of the lies I think that we've been told for a long time. We start to believe them. Oh my God. Yes, I just got goosebumps too because I really don't, I'm not kidding on my legs. Where did you get it on your arms? I got on my arms. Yeah. I mean, it was my legs. I've had so many of those conversations. I'm anxious because I don't want to be anxious right now. And I'm feeling, I'm distracted because I'm feeling so anxious and all I want to do is just get this stuff done. Like the whole productivity, you've done so much in that space to take the shame out of the whole, yeah, away from it. I did it for me. And then I realized, was anything that helps me is probably going to help other people. Danny, I have to tell you, I love going on your website. It's a-d-d-d-d.com. But my favorite thing, I was scrolling around and then I got down to the footer and you pranked me at the footer of Danny's website. It says, "Really? You're seriously reading the footer." Man. I didn't know anyone actually looked down here. Well, this is awkward. Maybe I should have thought this through better. Whatever, too late now. Thanks for sharing this little moment with me. You're awesome. I love that so much. I was dying. It's so perfect, especially for people with ADHD brains who, like, you almost need to be snapped out of that kind of doom scroll kind of thing. The book actually also has a lot of Easter eggs. And so I love getting tagged on social media when people notice some of the Easter eggs I put in the book or Easter eggs for my website because they know a bunch of people did not see this. And it feels like a cool little thing because we pay attention to things when we are engaged and interested in them. And sometimes more attention than other people, even. ADHD is not a deficit of attention. We just don't have a whole lot of say in where that attention lands all the time. I want to ask you about analysis paralysis. As far as I can remember, we haven't had anybody on the show yet speak to it. And I can't think of anyone more perfect to talk about this than you. What was your first memory of what we might call analysis paralysis? It's really funny because my mom forced me to start
having to choose my outfits the night before because the morning of, she couldn't get me out the door on time because everything had to match. But to speak to the analysis paralysis, getting in the way of really my own success is with TikTok. I started making TikToks in like 2019. There weren't really a lot of people making ADHD content. And I was just doing my own thing, having fun, ha ha ha. And started getting big, started having a lot of popular videos. That was awesome. It was really lit up my brain to wanna keep making more. And it got to a point though, where I cared so much about quality and my perfectionism sitting in. And my, should I reshoot this when I have actually showered and put some effort into my appearance? Or, oh, I should wait and actually write a script for this. I wanted it to be so good that I stopped making content. And because then when I did make content, the algorithm was like, you haven't posted here for three months, tough beans. Right. And I was gonna say something else, but you said shoot earlier. So I'm like, I'll curb the car. I allow some cursey and I'll say in my Midwestern way. But I think tough beans is actually just really fun. And we should just all say that. - Shadow grandma. Which is your grandma actually say tough beans? - She did, yeah, she did. Sorry, keep going. - Fims the brakes. Oh my God, now I forgot where we were talking about. - You were talking about perfectionism. - Oh, that's the analysis, yeah, perfectionism. And the analysis paralysis. And I read a really great article yesterday about how that perfectionism costs us because the amount of time and effort that it takes to go from like 90% to 95% is often the same amount of time that went to go from zero to 90. - Yeah. - And so like at a certain point, you got to know what are the criteria for this thing being good enough and being happy with it, being good enough and just moving on with my life. Instead of assuming everyone's gonna sit there and analyze everything you do. And I realized so much of that is borne out of the rejection sensitivity place and that comes back with ADHD stuff from worrying about being judged constantly because we have been judged constantly. So making sure that all of my stuff is above criticism, above reproach, like I have to criticize my stuff super harshly and fix everything so that nobody else can criticize me, right? And that worked for me as a graphic designer. It helped me make really great awesome quality things but when that starts to become part of your identity, part of your identity is like this level of quality is how I see myself and if I put anything out there that I don't feel is that high level, like I will reject it, I don't wanna do it. And so that's how you are me and with 700 TikTok drafts and go a long time without posting. When I had been doing it consistently that like fear that analysis paralysis all sort of gets in the way. Well, making decisions is a really complex process and then if you have anxiety on top of that and you're worried about getting blamed, you're worried about making a mistake and then just the act of making a decision involves more things than so many people realize, seeing the different possibilities and knowing what each option entails. - The example that I do it, I think is for task breakdown which is like what is the task and why have you been avoiding it? Which feelings are getting in the way? There's a bunch of spaces to kind of go through and process, here are all of the big emotions of why I'm not doing this thing that I want to do and once you can actually sort of target and be like, is that kind of bullshit though? That's kind of bullshit. And when I think about it, so being able to again step back and reframe things and think through not just, oh my god, I procrastinate it again. It's why did I procrastinate? Like asking yourself constantly, like why? Oh, because of this, well why? And like asking until you get deep down to the answer of, because I'm worried it won't be good enough and I don't want people's view of me to be that end, you know? So it's better to stall out then post something I'm not proud of. - Totally. I have a question that I mean completely as a compliment. - Okay. How much time have you spent in therapy? - A decade. - Because your ability to reframe and step back and ask why is just like masterful and-- - Thank you. - It's been a long time for me too. So I'm kind of like, so how many more years do I have until I get to that level? - Big ones. So I had been seeing someone for a while who prescribed me medicine. She was my nurse practitioner. I did not realize she wasn't a talk therapist. I kept booking hour long appointments, but the funny thing about my current therapist and how I found out about her is the thing that kicked off my first ADHD comic and all of this to start with. I had just started as a graphic designer and I heard some of my coworkers that we were like hanging out on the couches on our laptops working. And she was talking about what she was working on in therapy. She was talking about it and I'm like, oh, that's awesome. They're being open about their mental health. I have never shared things about my mental health with coworkers and I opened up that I had ADHD and they were like, yeah, we figured. You know, pretty good. What does that mean? And, but then we were able to talk and joke about how I told stories because I kept following the same kind of pattern and we named the conductor of my train of thought, Donnie Danovan. And he would be like, oh, he's really bad at his job and he keeps trying to take you to like every single teacher and blah, blah, blah. And I turned it into a comic to send to my coworker and she was like, oh, my God, that's so you. And I'm like, oh, my God, I know, I made it. And I wasn't going to post it online because I hadn't talked about my ADHD openly. And she goes, it's too good to not post. And she goes, well, put it on Twitter. Our boss doesn't follow you or anything on there. And I said, okay, cool. No one will see it over here. And that did not, I'm glad it didn't work out. But it took off, it took off pretty quickly and everything kind of came from there. But she ended up recommending me to that therapist who I've been seeing for four years now and absolutely love it. But I owe a lot to the fact that like one of my coworkers was open about therapy and about mental health and seeing someone else disclose like that and be open gave me the courage to be open 'cause I wasn't gonna bring it up on my own. Like as much of the badass as I like to think I am, it was seeing someone else be brave and go first that makes it a lot less scary. Was that the tweet that Mindy Kaling retweeted? - Yes, that's amazing. Melissa Joan Hart just reposted it the other day and I was like, you are my childhood idol. The teenage witch. - Yeah, Sabrina, teenage witch. - Yes. - I was so obsessed. (upbeat music) - Danny, do you mind if we switch gears? - It's like a hard right or a hard left. We're gonna take care. Switching gears is my middle name. - Last time we chatted, do you, I think you have some stories or things maybe you could share about how ADHD can impact friendship. Will you speak to that a little bit? - Where did you get that? - Did I just take it to a whole other tonal level? Should we not do that? - A whole other level. No, no, no, it's great. It goes really back to what I was saying earlier in the episode when I got told, hey, have you thought about ADHD? The first place my brain went to was those are the annoying little boys with no friends because everyone I knew who did it, didn't have friends. Again, that is a obvious stereotype generalization that is very wrong. I know that that goes without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway. But the first thing that I associated it with was friends. That it wasn't, oh, those people who get bad grades or oh, those people who don't pay attention, it was like no one wants to hang out with them or they have a hard time maintaining those relationships. But now that I'm an adult going back and looking at my past relationships and my past friendships, even dating back to when I was younger, not just not picking up on other people's social cues 'cause I assume that everybody is honest all of the time. And if something was bothering them, they would tell me because if something is bothering me, I tell people and that's not how everybody works, right? I wear my heart on my sleeve and other people don't. So that was like a hard lesson I had to learn. But it turned out that a lot of people have fun finding the weakest person in their friend group and talking about them behind everybody's back because that makes you feel like you belong. You've got not a common enemy, but someone that you keep in the group enough to where you've got, they tell you things and then you go back to friends and tell them stuff. And so then I started-- - You feel superior to that person. - Yeah, being superior. So I was the subject of gossip a lot, especially for things that were related to my ADHD symptoms. And then also the difficulties that I have of maintaining relationships because they require maintenance just like anything else. And I struggle with maintenance in all areas of my life. And so being able to remember that people exist and that I should call them and check in on them if they don't reach out to me first or if people text me and I mean to text back and then I don't, and it looks like I'm purposely just ignoring them. Or if I accidentally monopolize conversations and people think I don't care what they have to say, or if I, you know, there's a lot of things that lead to people who were your friends who may not say something to you and then just pull back. Like I was really started getting used to thinking everything was okay. And then being all of a sudden really wondering why nobody was hanging out with me anymore. - I'm sorry. - Yeah, when you're different, like kids are ruthless, man. But even as adults, like in the workplace, you know, judgey co-workers are ruthless. ADHD I think primes you to being an easy target for bullies. - Yeah, yeah, I agree. We have a whole episode on EDM bullying, frankly. And why that can happen, not just for kids, but adults with ADHD too, like you mentioned in the workplace and yeah. - But with the friendship thing, it's hard 'cause it is yet another thing where my brain starts to tell me you are not enough. If you were enough people would stay. If you were enough, you know, people wouldn't leave.
You are not enough. You are not doing enough. You are not enough. And we get that message so many times and that shame of thinking that if people leave, it's our fault and wondering what we did and what we could have done differently. Had you cope with that? Finding a lot of friends with ADHD. That is the only thing that I did at all of my close friends, like really, and the friends that I made that I have kept that didn't have ADHD have all now been diagnosed with ADHD after I started making content. They were like, "Oh, wait a minute." And I go, "Oh, well now it makes sense why I never felt judged because when you meet someone with ADHD and you click and them talking a bunch and getting really excited does not put you off. If they change topics a bunch of times and and and swerve, you're not mad at them. If you care enough about the topic, like you will bring it back, but we are able to like weave and flow because it just feels really natural and it feels so great to feel understood and to feel like I don't have to worry constantly that they secretly think I'm annoying and they're not telling me. I don't have to worry constantly that like they're going to be so judgy about my mess that they're going to talk to people about it. And so it alleviates a lot of that anxiety that goes into at least for me a lot of friendships with neurotypical people. I must never again, not everybody. I have neurotypical friends, but they are very chill. There are people with ADHD who don't have chill, but there are neurotypical people who also do not have chill. So chill is not discriminated in your anti-plotent you have like neurotypical people, people who are not neurotypical and I will call them on Sunday and I will call them just kidding. Yeah, I kind of have this, I miss ADHD, right? And I had friends who got diagnosed and I'm like, "Oh my God, I should have known." Now that we're talking about, that makes a lot of sense, but I wouldn't have guessed, especially with the perfectionists, especially with the people who make a real effort to like, I don't want anyone to think I'm lazy. Like the laziness and ADHD and people calling people with ADHD lazy, that hits so hard for some people that they're like, "I have to do everything within my power to prove to myself and other people that's not what I am because I don't want that to be my identity." And a lot of the times they end up burning themselves out trying to live up to these expectations of society. Oh my God, I'm sorry that I'm on my soap box, but I like it. No, but sadly I'm still, I'm getting there, but I'm still kind of there. I'm still kind of like, "I will prove to you all that I'm not lazy. I will prove it." So this is why I'm asking you how much therapy have you had. Yeah. The laziness, I'm at the point now where I'm like, "Laziness is a societal construct that was created to make people feel guilty for not being productive at all times." Yeah. Perfect segue. I wanted to ask you about productivity. I'm going to put that term in quotation marks. Give me an example of before you had kind of a newfound sense of what productivity really is and what it could be, what it could mean and the shame that's around it, of when you were super hard on yourself about your own productivity. I had multiple meltdowns when I was wanting to do freelance branding work. Freelance work is really challenging because it requires you to manage yourself and to manage deadlines and to communicate well with clients. I would take on this big project and I would get so excited and I would sit down to work on it and I would get so absorbed in one little tiny aspect of the thing that wasn't actually important and I'd get like half of one of the things done because I went down such a rabbit hole of looking things up and of possibilities and of optimizing and like getting sticky, right? Things get sticky and I would have a meltdown and I would be like, "Okay, it's 10 o'clock, it's late but I can still get some stuff done. I could work for two more hours until midnight and then I would get a half of something done." Again, now I know it's like, "Well, that's better than nothing but when there are deadlines and potentially disappointed people hovering over here and I'm throwing my. " I'm in the room. At a certain point you think, "If I could have just watched TV, I could have enjoyed myself. I could have done something with this time and instead I just spent it on something that felt productive but wasn't and now I'm going to cry." I would just cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and I was having breakdowns. This was also before I went on mood stabilizers because I hadn't been diagnosed with bipolar too yet and so that does again contribute to some of this but I was having these frustrated meltdowns about not getting things done and they all came from this. I should be doing this. I always do that and a lot of that labeling and self-judgment and frustration because I couldn't figure out how to do it. I'm reading so many self-help books, I'm watching so many online classes, I must just be horrifically broken and nothing will fix me. That's how it felt. It's not so much that wanting to be productive, wanting to get stuff done which is a reality in this world and when you have a job, etc. is a bad thing but rather this, our perception of what it means to be productive and what productivity actually looks like is perhaps flawed. Is that what you mean? It was one where I hadn't learned the coping skills yet that I sent to the anti-planar is just a giant coping skills recipe book that's sectioned by emotion and that's what I needed because what I kept doing was kept trying to use systems that were not designed for me and then feeling like I was the thing that was broken. Not that I'm actually continually picking things that were not made to work well or seamlessly with the way that my brain operates. What it really was, it's an issue with the tool of trying to use a time management process versus a task management process and getting less hung up on the, it's taking me more time to do things than I thought it was going to because that was, I was trying to use planners. I was trying to block out my time and then I'm like, "Oh, I made this perfect time block." Then it turns out, "Oh, I got distracted halfway through and went on this rabbit hole and now everything that I planned, I spent all day making this perfect time block schedule, everything is off now." So it was all pointless. What's the point? Why do I even try, you know, and then you fall down into the rabbit hole of like, "What's the point? Why do I even try?" Rather than even try using planners or anything like that, I just email myself giant subject lines of all the different things I need to do but it'll include things like, do the dishes and in five years, remember to take down this picture or something like this. So it's just giant. Oh my God, I'm completely, it's so stressful. It is. I don't, it's not, I'm not listeners. I'm not recommending that anyone do this. It's terrible. It's terrible. So hence maybe get the anti-planar, right? Yes. I think so. It's really, it is the easiest thing to sell. I tell people the name of it and the first sentence out of everybody's mouth is, "Oh my God, I or someone I know." And it's fun. It's so much fun. We will put a link to your website in the show notes of this episode. It's a-d-h-d-d.com. Yep. Or you can, if you go to anti-planar.com, you can, it'll take you straight to the part of the website. Was there anything that you wanted to touch on that you felt like you didn't get to touch on? I hope that more and more people are able to recognize that the way things have always been done is not the way that things need to keep being done. And if you stopped and listened to this gigantic demographic of people who have needs that are different than maybe what's been provided up to this point, and I've got actually a couple companies now that I am getting to do some like design consulting for new features and things that they're launching, making sure that they are like ADHD brain friendly. In the same way that like people are looking to make things, you know, colorblind friendly, things like that where they are literally accessibility features. And so whether it's a video game company or a social media company or a consulting company, anybody who's doing work that's going to be used by a lot of people, which will eventually lead to, you know, some people with ADHD, there's so much creativity about that we are going to be able to kind of achieve together. And there's so much that I think people will be able to accommodate for. Because when you accommodate for ADHD brains, you make things better for everybody, honestly. Correct. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much for being on the show, Danny. We'll have to do this again because I feel like there's so much more that we can talk about. This was great. Oh my God, I hate talking about myself. Never. Thank you so much. This has been great. We've been listening to ADHD AHA from the Understood Podcast Network. If you want to share your own AHA moment, email us at
[email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. If you want to learn more about the topics we covered today, check out the show notes for this episode. We include more resources, as well as links to anything we mentioned in the episode. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people who learn and think differently, discover their potential and thrive. We have no affiliation with pharmaceutical companies. Learn more at Understood.org/mission. ADHDaha is produced by Jessam and Molly. Say hi, Jessam and Hi, everyone. Brianna Berry is our production director. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. For the Understood Podcast Network, Scott Hoshira is our creative director. Seth Melnick is our executive producer. And I'm your host, Laura [Music]
Thank you. Thanks so much for listening.
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