Fresh Take: Jessica McCabe on How to ADHD

FT 166 JESSICA MCCABE

Amy: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome to Fresh Takes from What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. And today I'm talking to Jessica McCabe. She is the creator of the YouTube channel HowToADHD, where she shares fun, relatable and research-based educational content about ADHD and neurodiversity with her 2 million followers. Her content helps listeners understand and accept their unique brains while getting tips and tricks to help navigate life with ADHD. Today Jessica is here to talk with us about her new book, "How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain, Not Against It." Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica McCabe: Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. This is a great podcast.

Amy: Thank you. All right. So we're going to start with the insider's guide part. You are somebody who really knows whereof they speak about ADHD and tell us about that.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. So I know about ADHD from all of the angles. I have it. I have family members [00:01:00] with it. I have a partner with it.

I have talked to many people in my community who have it, spoken with ADHD experts, read all the research papers. At this point, I think it's safe to say I understand ADHD quite well. But I didn't always.

Amy: Tell us about that. You were first diagnosed at 12, but that was only the beginning of the story.

Jessica McCabe: That was the very beginning. Yeah. So I was a scattered kid. I lost jackets all the time. My mom said I'd lose my head if it wasn't attached. I was daydreamy, stared out the window, would lose myself in books. I didn't really know how to fit in with my peers. There were struggles, I was a smart kid.

I did well in school and nobody was really worried until I went to middle school and suddenly I was responsible for bringing my own books to class and remembering to do my homework and my locker combination and stuff, and things started to fall apart. And at that point is when I got diagnosed.

But it wasn't until I was 32 years old, so 20 years later, that I actually started to understand my [00:02:00] diagnosis, what I was told and my understanding was that I had trouble focusing and this medication would help me focus. I thought everything else was my fault. All my difficulty with planning and prioritizing and sustaining effort toward long term goals and my emotion dysregulation, all of that stuff I thought was just me being a terrible human and not trying hard enough and I just needed to find the right organizational system or the right self help book and then I could reach my potential, right?

Or I just needed to put in more effort, I needed to try harder. So I went 20 years being diagnosed and going to doctors without understanding anything about ADHD, really, other than I got distracted.

Amy: And that's that's one small part of it, that a kid with ADHD has a hard time paying attention in class and that might be where it's first picked up on because the teacher sees 20 kids who behave a certain way, maybe 2 or 3 others that don't.

Jessica McCabe: That trouble paying attention is what I knew, I had an attention deficit, that's all [00:03:00] I knew. And even that aspect of it, I was wrong about, I didn't understand that because it's not actually an attention deficit. What it is, it's difficulty regulating your attention. And I didn't understand that.

So I didn't really take my ADD, which was what I was diagnosed with originally, I didn't take it that seriously because the one symptom that I supposedly had, I knew I could focus when something was engaging to me, I could focus just fine. Even that just didn't feel that big a deal. And now I understand, know that attention regulation is the issue.

It's difficulty choosing, you might be able to pay attention really well to some things, but it's that you don't get to choose which things you're going to pay attention to. So there were times where I would pour myself into a project and do a really good job because it was engaging to me.

It was exciting to me. And so then the times that I couldn't focus, I blamed myself. And yeah, just knowing that comes from the same place, that distractability comes from the same place as that hyper focus. It's difficulty regulating [00:04:00] attention.

Amy: You said something in the book that I had never heard it put this way before, that ADHD is like a door that's always open.

And I thought that's a very good description and it has helped me so much over my time parenting a kid with ADHD to understand that, again, it's not a deficit of attention, it's a surfeit of attention. There's too much and it's hard to, I have the same I don't have ADHD, but I have the same if there's a bird tweeting outside, I can't concentrate on what I'm doing.

I can't just tune that out like somebody else might be able to. And again, that's not a deficit of character, that's brain wiring.

Jessica McCabe: Our brains don't filter out sensory input the same way that a neurotypical brain might. Where a neurotypical brain might do some of that automatically, we have to do it manually.

We have to manually shut the door. We have to manually put headphones on and do things to help ourselves focus or take medication so that our brains can do a little bit more of that automatically for us.

Amy: In the beginning of the book, you [00:05:00] talk about the word disability as applied to ADHD and that some people might want to use that word, not want to use that word, that you are very much in favor of using that word in that terminology.

So tell our listeners how you came to that decision.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. Disability is not a bad word. It's something that is heavily stigmatized just ADHD is heavily stigmatized, but all it means is that you are experiencing an impairment in one or more life activities. So that can include focusing, that can include working, it can include walking, it can include all these different things, right? And so it's important to understand that there's a reason that we use this term, which is there are protections that come along with it. The Americans with Disabilities Act protects people with disabilities from discrimination in the workplace.

We are allowed and we are given, we are entitled to accommodations, reasonable accommodations in the workplace, and that's actually really important. And so it [00:06:00] felt really weird for me to use the term both because of the stigma against it, but also because am I disabled? Is this a disability?

I felt I wasn't disabled enough to claim that. But then when I look back at my struggles do I have trouble completing projects? Yeah. Looking back at my life, it's a whole mess of projects I've started and abandoned. I dropped out of community college.

I didn't finish massage school. I just, clearly there is an impairment there. But in the moment it just doesn't feel like that big a deal, right? Oh, I got distracted. It's funny. It's quirky. It's cute, but no, it's actually quite disabling.

Amy: And there's this internalized ableism, as you said, that gets in your own way of saying yes, this is something that I am entitled to. I'm entitled to these protections around it. It's counterproductive.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. There's this idea that I shouldn't need this. I should be able to do without this. And I [00:07:00] think with ADHD, that's exacerbated for two reasons. One is it's what's called an unseen disability.

You can't look at it. You can't touch it. You can't measure it on a chart. You can't pee on a pregnancy stick and be like, Oh, it's positive, right? You can't see it. So that's part of it. And it can be hard to remember that invisible does not mean imaginary. We're not making this up.

This is a real struggle. But the other aspect of it is that we're not always struggling, right? If something is engaging to our brains, we might actually do really well with it. We might outperform our peers with something. And that variability makes it really hard. It's hard for an ambulatory wheelchair user to be taken seriously sometimes. If they don't always need the wheelchair then it can seem like this is a matter of willpower. You don't necessarily need this thing, right? Because sometimes you don't. Whereas I'm short, right? I'm five foot three. I will always need a step stool if I'm going to reach the top shelf.

Always. I'm not going to be tall [00:08:00] one day and short the next day. That's not going to happen. I always need this thing. So it's a little easier to accept that I need that help. But yeah, between internalized ableism of it is somehow, you're somehow morally superior if you don't struggle with these things and then that sometimes I don't struggle with these things. It's really hard to accept it.

Amy: And you made the point in the book that you get used to things being hard when you're somebody with ADHD. And you're not maybe using all the support, you don't have all the support, you're not utilizing all the support you could, you just think that you are - going through some of the things you say in this book - oh I'm just irresponsible, I'm just careless, I'm just messy, I'm just not trying hard enough, right?

Jessica McCabe: And you take on all those things. Because you don't know what it's like for other people, you just, you see your exterior and other people's exterior, but you don't know what it's like in their brain. You don't know that when they want to sit down and do homework, they can just choose to do that.

And it's really tough. You're [00:09:00] comparing your interior to other people's exterior and it just, it doesn't work. It's really hard to tell. So a lot of people who take meds for the first time are like, is this what it's for everybody else? Man, I've been playing on hard mode and didn't even realize it because it is your normal.

Amy: Yes, that it makes so much sense to me, and it's just something that I hadn't really perceived before, but it's very helpful as a parent to understand that's part of it, that they're not going to necessarily tell you this is really hard for me because they don't know that's not a human experience. It's a personal experience. How would I tell you that?

Jessica McCabe: And so what I try to tell parents is if your kid is struggling, there's a reason they're struggling. Okay. If they're not doing what you are asking them to do, there might be an impairment there. There might be something getting in the way.

It can look intentional, but I have spoken to so many people with ADHD and almost [00:10:00] all of them are trying so much harder than their neurotypical peers. And the only time that they're not trying is when they've gotten so discouraged, they've given up.

Amy: Jessica, you are in your thirties, out of school, when you do all this research for yourself and realize that all of it, so many things that you struggled with were all the same thing, were all ADHD and you just, you weren't aware. How did you feel looking back at at all the times you internalized it as being something else?

Jessica McCabe: It was interesting. There was almost a grief process to it, and I hear this from a lot of people who are diagnosed later in life, too, where you look back and you wonder what could have been if you'd known this sooner. All of the missed opportunities, all of the shame you picked up, and the anxiety, and the depression, and all of these things that maybe could have been avoided if you'd known a little sooner.

So it was really sad, there was a [00:11:00] grief process involved, but it was also exciting because it meant that there were answers. If this was a real issue, if there were real challenges involved, then there must be real solutions too. And so it was really validating and very encouraging for me to learn about these impairments.

It sounds like it would be depressing, but for me, it helped so much to learn what the things that I was struggling with were called because I had labels for them, but they weren't good labels. I was messy and irresponsible and lazy and all of these really negative things and knowing - or I was dumb, I was stupid.

All this really problematic ableist language that I had internalized and what it actually was: Oh, I have working memory impairments. My working memory is a relative area of weakness for me, which explains why, even though I was a really gifted student, I still felt really stupid sometimes.

I couldn't remember people's names or I couldn't answer a teacher's question because by the time they [00:12:00] got to the third answer, I had forgotten what the question was. There were so many times that I struggled in ways that I didn't understand and learning the language for how to explain it was so empowering.

It felt like learning the error codes on a printer so that you can actually go, Oh, it's out of paper. Cool. I'll go get my more paper. And you had strategies. I found strategies for the specific things that I struggled with instead of just the blanket solution being do better, try harder.

Amy: Yeah, and I wish I had read this book 10, 15 years ago, because in my own case, with my own child with ADHD, I was putting supports in place. I was watching it. I was getting advice.

I was doing the research, but there was one thing I didn't do, which was share the diagnosis with my kid because I thought, why hamper them with that information, right? Why have them think that there's something wrong when they're just, it's a superpower and it's special and whatever. [00:13:00] It wasn't intentional, I didn't tell the kid in the moment and then I didn't tell the kid the next week either and then time went by and then my child later came to me and said, I think I have this thing and here I had been operating under that assumption and trying to parent the child accordingly for a couple of years before the kid understood it for themselves, which is, oh wow, I thought I was doing the right thing. No need to burden this kid with that information, but you would argue it's completely the opposite no matter what the age of the kid.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. I think that sharing it with them at an age appropriate level is actually really important.

They need to understand how their brain works because they're the one who has to work with their brain. You can do a lot as a parent, but they're the ones operating it on a daily basis with everything they do. And if they don't have answers for why they're struggling, they're going to invent them or they're going to accept the ones that society tells them and they're inaccurate and they don't point them to the strategies that can help.

It's not as [00:14:00] empowering, right? Even me, I had the diagnosis. I knew I had the diagnosis, but because nobody explained what it meant to me, I was really disempowered. When I ran into struggles, I didn't know what to do about that. And I understand as a parent, you don't want to hamper your kid.

You don't want your kid to think that there's anything wrong with them. And that's totally fine. But the problem is your kid's getting the messages that there's something wrong with them regardless. And so then understanding what it is that they're struggling with, I think is actually really important.

Amy: We're talking to Jessica McCabe. She is the author of the new book, How to ADHD, and we'll be right back. So Jessica, I wanted to talk about the very unique perspective you can offer to everyone listening, which is the idea of not parenting a kid with ADHD, but parenting as someone with ADHD and how that affects your parenting.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. I think this is really [00:15:00] important. There's a lot out there about how to parent a kid with ADHD, but not a whole lot about what if you're the one with ADHD whether or not your kid has ADHD, it's going to impact how you can parent because kids need routine and structure and for you to read all of the emails from the school and things that are really difficult for people with ADHD to stay on top of. And if you're also being told, Hey, do this to support your child who has ADHD, set up routines and set up systems and do all of these things, it's really easy to end up with a lot of shame around the fact that what would help your kid and you can't do it, you're failing, quote unquote failing, as a mom because, or as a parent, because you're not doing the things that your kid needs. We have a brain that makes it hard to do that even for ourselves. And so once you add another person into the mix, a tiny human into the mix, it gets even harder. So I'm just at the very beginning of that because I am currently seven months pregnant.

But already there's so much that I'm [00:16:00] expected to stay on top of and keep track of. And doctors are like, Oh yeah, just do this and this. And I'm like, okay, I'll just do that. What? I have to remember to take prenatals and I have to set up my appointments and go to my appointments and avoid eating certain things and not take Advil.

And there's just already a litany of things that you have to do to be a quote unquote good mom that are really difficult. The self care has to be better. I have to go to the dentist regularly and I have to make sure that I'm brushing my teeth all the time. There's just so much that I already feel the pressure that I need to do.

That it's already a challenge. And then if it turns out that my child has ADHD and needs extra supports, that's gonna be a whole other level. But one of the things that I did immediately was I talked to my partner about this, and I'm like, Look, I get that a lot of times the executive function stuff falls on women, right?

It does fall on women. A lot of the time, we have to manage every everybody's schedules and carpools and be the [00:17:00] one to respond to all the emails and figure out childcare and all of this stuff falls to women really early on, right? Even during pregnancy, I'm like, cool, I have to be the one to find the doctor and the childcare and the doula and the everything.

And I had to talk to my partner and say, I don't have the executive function for this. I need this to be a joint effort. And so we've been really intentional and talking through: where are your strengths? Where are my strengths? What are you going to handle and what am I going to handle?

And figuring out those areas of responsibility has been really important for us because I don't have the executive function to do what society expects of women, I don't. And that's not even getting into the fact that it's not fair - if you both have full-time jobs, it shouldn't fall to the woman anyway. But I see how easily it happens because you are the one who's pregnant. So I told my partner at one time, when he wasn't doing the thing that he was supposed to do and I had to do it, or I had to take over it.

And I looked at him and I was like, it's not [00:18:00] optional for me. It's not optional for me because I'm the one carrying this child, right? The buck stops at me. I need it to not be optional for you either. I need this to be as serious for both of us because I can't opt out. I can't not carry my child around inside my belly today.

That's not an option. So I need you to do your part. I need you to support. And that's been tough. And it's also been frustrating for him because he's seen that he gets left out of a lot of things. If I'm the one who emails for child care and I say, hey, my partner and I are looking, here's his email address, I copy him on it, they only respond to me.

Yeah. It's almost by default, right? The default parent thing.

And if you have ADHD and you are the default parent, that's really tough because even if you ask for help, you are still carrying the mental load and you are still responsible for the executive functioning for the entire family.

And that's hard. [00:19:00]

Amy: And something else I think is hard for every default parent is that there is so much, right? There is just a barrage of stuff you're supposed to be worrying about, particularly when you're pregnant and the baby's little. It just feels like what am I forgetting right now?

That's true for all of us. And the advice that we try to give in this podcast is to separate out the wheat from the chaff. I'm like, this is important. This is not important right now. This can wait, this is really a decision. This is really not a thing, but you're, you are constantly sort of decision tree.

No, you know what? I'm gonna let them have some gummy bears today. Who cares? There's just constant decision making happening.

Jessica McCabe: And that's hard when you have difficulty prioritizing. And also there's memory issues involved, working memory, there's different challenges.

So it would be really easy for me to be like, Oh, okay, cool. Today I'll let it go. They'll have gummy bears, but in two weeks, it might not occur to [00:20:00] me that's happened seven times in the last two weeks. And maybe it's time to not let them have gummy bears all the time.

Keeping track of things, staying on top of things, all of these things are really challenging. Your child does not have a very developed executive function system. A lot of parenting is being the executive function for your child. And so if you yourself have impairments in executive function, that's going to be difficult.

Amy: You talk in the book about how executive function is delayed in people with ADHD. It's not necessarily absent. It's just delayed on a flatter trajectory by up to 30%, you said, which I hadn't heard before. So explain to somebody who doesn't even know what executive function is, what that means and how it might play out.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. Executive function is the CEO of the brain. It's your planning, prioritizing, sustaining efforts, long term goals, making good decisions. It's the things that we associate with being an adult. And that's because the prefrontal cortex, where a lot of that executive function functions is one of the last parts of the brain to develop and in [00:21:00] neurotypical people, it finishes developing around age 25, which is probably why that's the age at which you can rent a car.

But in people with ADHD it does tend to be a few years behind, up to 30 percent behind. So Dr Barkley talks about this. If you have an 18-year-old child that you are sending off to college and that child has ADHD, you are sending a 12-year-old off to college in terms of their executive function. They're gonna need a lot more support. So that's part of it, too, is I'm now 41 and I'm having my first child and that's because it did take me a long time for my executive function to finish developing, for me to understand my ADHD, for me to get to a point in my life where I felt like I was ready to have a kid.

And by the time that happened, it was like, Oh shoot I am now considered, this is a geriatric pregnancy. [00:22:00] Whoops. It just, it took me longer to get here. And it's going to take, if I have a child with ADHD, it's going to take them longer too. So I'm going to have to support their executive function for longer.

And that's, I think it's really helpful for parents to understand if you've got a child where you're like, they should be able to clean their room on their own by now. Act their age, all of that, they are acting their age. They're just acting their executive function age as opposed to their actual age, right? So yes, it's really important to know that your kid isn't necessarily doing this on purpose. If they seem like they're needing more support or struggling harder than their peers, it's because they are, their brains aren't as developed.

Amy: Can you talk about set shiftings? Something else you discussed in your book that made a lot of sense to me, but I hadn't quite heard it explained that way before.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. Set shifting is the ability to shift between cognitive tasks. So shifting between talking and listening or shifting between reading and cooking. [00:23:00] So if I go to cook a recipe I'm going to have a bit of a hard time shifting between let me read the recipe, now let me do the recipe. And part of the difficulty with set shifting for people with ADHD is the impairments in both working memory and response inhibition. So working memory is the ability to hold multiple pieces of information in your head while you work with it. So if I read something from a recipe, now I have to go implement that.

I have to remember what I read. And so if your working memory is impaired, you essentially have fewer slots. And so stuff is going to fall out of your brain a little bit faster. So there's a lot of times where I'm, even with a box of mac and cheese, I'm like, cool, these are the instructions. Now I'm going to go do the mac and cheese, throw the box away, fishing the box back out of the trash.

I forget what I just read. So it's a working memory challenge, but also response inhibition is an issue for [00:24:00] people with ADHD. So I might wander off, right? I hear a noise outside while I'm cooking and I wander off and now I forget that's on the stove. So there's a bunch of different executive functions that are impaired in ADHD and they can work together to create further impairments.

So if you have impaired working memory and impaired response inhibition, your ability to quickly and accurately switch between cognitive tasks is also going to be impaired.

Amy: I want to make sure we have plenty of time to talk about solutions and what does work and how you can help your kid or yourself with ADHD.

And one of the first ones I wanted to underline is that people with ADHD, I'm quoting from your book right now: people with ADHD often work better and faster when they're not forcing themselves to do things in the right way. "Right" in quotes, being the neurotypical way. This is really important as a [00:25:00] parent and a lesson I had to learn again and again, that a kid who is going up two steps and down two steps and up two steps and down two steps while you're saying, first, don't forget, you need your baseball mitt and then we're going to Aunt Carol's, and the kid's... stand still and listen to me, stand still and listen to me by looking at me and acting like you're listening to me is how a neurotypical person thinks my child should focus and pay attention to what I'm saying.

When, of course, what I learned over time is if I really want the person to hear what I'm saying, let them go up the step and down the step and up the step and down the step. But by doing that, they're actually listening better, not worse.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah, it's so counterintuitive. But part of it is our brains are chronically understimulated and sometimes we need that extra level of stimulation in order to be able to be present and focus. And so that can look like using a fidget toy. It can look like moving while somebody is talking to us. And [00:26:00] it's very counterintuitive. Like you said, as a neurotypical person, your idea of what somebody paying attention is them standing still, looking at you, paying attention, because if they are moving around too much, then they must be paying attention to that, whereas somebody with ADHD often needs to be doing something else in order to be able to pay attention to you.

And so a lot of, I think parenting a child with ADHD or even working with your own ADHD is letting go a little bit of what you think should work and paying attention to what does. It's work.

Amy: And it's so important because, kids who are earlier on in this journey or who go to a school where the teachers don't understand it, they're going to spend a lot of time trying to sit still with their hands folded. And you can do that, right? But then that's all you're doing. Then you're definitely not listening to the quiz for next week.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah, because you're essentially, because you're using working memory slots, which again, we already have fewer slots to begin with a lot of us. But you're using some of those to remember sit still, make eye contact, you're trying to remember to do these things that don't come [00:27:00] naturally to you. And so then it actually does make it harder to learn. It makes it a lot harder. So there's, there's a lot that we can do, but one of the things that I love if you have a child with ADHD or if you have ADHD, or especially if both are true, is implementing what's called universal design.

Setting up an environment in a way that it's going to be functional for the least functional person in the household, ideally. Putting labels on things is gonna help. Maybe not everybody in the house needs a label on everything, but maybe some people in the house do. The people who do need that label, that's gonna make that area more accessible to them while also making it easier for everybody else.

Amy: We're talking to Jessica McCabe. Her new book is How to ADHD, and we'll be right back.

Jessica, I want to make sure we have lots of time to talk about strategies that work and toolbox, because your book is so full [00:28:00] of those things. And it seems to me that's what makes this book a little bit different than some of the other ADHD books I've read or people that we've interviewed is that this is for the person with ADHD - strategies that they can apply to themselves. And then, of course, as a parent also, if that applies.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah, as I did my YouTube channel, there were two things I was trying to figure out. What is going on? Why am I struggling with this stuff? And what do I do about it? And so that's what this book is. It's: why are we struggling with these things?

And then what do we do about it? So every chapter has a tool box section with four or five main tools for tackling whatever that chapter is about. How to motivate your brain. How to sleep, how to execute a function, how to focus. Every chapter has a toolbox with these main tools and then a bunch of substrategies that are different ways to implement this tool.

And I think it was really important to me to do it that way because there are so [00:29:00] many strategies out there for ADHD, but I think it's important to understand what type of strategy is this because then it gets a little bit less overwhelming.

Amy: And there's so many things - I've been going through this book. There are so many things that I circled "that's ADHD too? That really specific behavior? Wow. I didn't know." But it's all part of the same thing. And as you say, it's by connecting with others, I'm sure this is why the YouTube channel has grown such a following. It's a community, right?

Just like this podcast with, Oh my gosh, there are people just like me who feel the same way I do, who struggle with the same things I do. I'm not crazy and I'm not alone.

Jessica McCabe: That's exactly it. It's getting all these things. It can feel shameful, Oh, I shouldn't be struggling with this. Don't tell anybody.

And talking about that in the open and having this community of other people that are also talking about it normalizes the struggles, which is really important because these struggles are normal when you have [00:30:00] ADHD just like there are struggles that are normal when you are a parent.

There are struggles that are normal when you have ADHD, but everybody feels like they shouldn't be struggling with that. So it's really empowering to get that out in the open and have these conversations. So I did in my book too, I included quotes from the community about the things that they struggled with, as well as the strategies that work for them.

So you're not only hearing tools and strategies and getting a deeper understanding from me, but also from people in my community as well.

Amy: Let's talk about some of the strategies that are in the book, because there are so many and I know a lot of people listening are like, give me some strategies.

One of them was the, I'm sorry, what did you call it before, the universal design?

Jessica McCabe: Universal design. Yeah.

Amy: So tell us a little bit more about that how you might play that out in your household.

Jessica McCabe: So universal design, again it's things that make it accessible to people who have disabilities or makes things accessible to the people who struggle the hardest.

So if you imagine curb cutouts, [00:31:00] that's really important for people who are in motorized wheelchairs, because how else are they going to get up and down off of curbs? Having those curb cutouts is really critical for them in terms of making a sidewalk accessible, but it also is really helpful for people who are just wheeling luggage.

You could get up the curb with your luggage without a curb cutout, but the curb cutout makes it easier or riding those electric scooters. Or strollers. Yeah, it's those curb cutouts are helpful for everybody, but they're really critical for somebody who's in a wheelchair. So it's that universal design for somebody with ADHD might look like having whiteboards and sticky notes and pens available. Having supplies ready and able to be used wherever you might need them, having sit/stand desks or different seating options in a classroom is a really good example because sometimes I need to be up front at a desk and sitting there really close to the teacher and sometimes my anxiety is really bad that day and it's actually better for me to be [00:32:00] you know, sitting on a couch in the back of the room or sitting on the floor. Having those options be available is really helpful.

Having meeting-free days is really critical. It's again, something that's helpful for everybody, but for people with ADHD who need to be able to slip into hyper focus and be able to lose track of time to be able to get into any sort of meaningful focus, it's really important that they don't have to keep watching the clock and worrying about missing a meeting.

So having meeting-free days is another example. There's so many different ways to create an environment where it's more accessible to somebody with ADHD, but it's helpful for everybody else as well. And that's good for everybody. That's what I love about it. It benefits everybody. So, why are we not doing this?

Amy: I was thinking that as you were saying this - I love a meeting-free day. I plan a couple every week. I want all my meetings in one day and then one day where I can just write or do whatever I need to do. So you're right. These are strategies that make everybody's life better. And then maybe they're more essential for certain [00:33:00] people.

Talk about tracking your time on how long something will take versus how long it did take.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah. Schedules are the bane of a lot of people with ADHD's existence. It's one of the first things that doctors or coaches or whatever will say: have you tried using a calendar? Yes. And it falls apart immediately.

And one of the reasons for that is because people with ADHD are essentially time blind or time nearsighted. We have really a lot of difficulty telling how much time has passed, estimating how long something will take us. And so if we put a calendar together, if we outline, Oh yeah, I'm going to do this on Monday and this on Tuesday and we've got 15 things on our calendar, that's going to fall apart immediately and get frustrating. I ended up spending so much time putting my calendar together in the first place, figuring out what I need to do and when am I going to do it and planning it all out that took me longer than it would take a neurotypical person.

But then I would immediately be off track and immediately feel [00:34:00] like I was failing. That's because I didn't know how long things actually took me. It is not a possible schedule to stick to, because that is not how time works. That is not how long these things actually take. Me, at least, I was planning for somebody that was maybe neurotypical, or even superhuman sometimes.

Learning how long things actually take me not on a good day when everything's firing on all cylinders and it's urgent and I can pull stuff out of my butt, but on an average day how long things take me was really important and the way that I did that I got from ADHD coach Eric Tivers. He recommends writing a list of some of the, to really get the use out of this, write a list of some of the really common tasks you do.

What do you do on a regular basis? Do you take a shower? Do you walk the dog? Do you get ready and drive to work? Just tasks that you do on a regular [00:35:00] basis. Write those down. And then write down how long you think that task is going to take you and then set a count up timer. Not a countdown timer because you want to know exactly how long it takes you.

You don't want to just know when the timer goes off. So you set a count up timer. And then you go and see, you go and do the thing and come back and write down how long it actually took and that can give you a really good sense of do you tend to underestimate how long things take? Not usually for people with ADHD.

Do you tend to overestimate how long tasks are going to take? And if so, how much do you tend to underestimate how long that task is going to take? And then you can start to plan a little bit better if you're usually 30 percent off, you usually think that you can get it done in 10 minutes, but it actually takes you 15.

Cool. Now, you need to add an extra 50 percent anytime you're brain convinces you Oh, this will only take an hour. Cool. Give yourself an hour and a half.

Amy: How about reality checks? This was something else I thought was a great tip. It was in terms of the time. Am I right [00:36:00] about this? That packing for vacation should take 20 minutes?

Jessica McCabe: Part of it is going to somebody else and saying, Hey, is this gonna work? Is this how time works? Cause sometimes they can tell you. Sometimes somebody else can look at your schedule and be like, yeah, that is not going to work.

You didn't leave yourself any buffer time for food, right? You planned a 10-hour day and there is no time for lunch. When are you going to eat? When are you going to pee? When are you going to...right? Getting that reality check from another human can be really helpful. And that human can even be somebody with ADHD.

Because one of the interesting things about ADHD is for our own stuff, we're pretty impaired. The hot executive function system, which is when emotions come into play, when something's important to you personally, that can skew our ability to function. Whereas our cool executive function is a bit more logical.

So that's when there aren't emotions at play. So somebody with ADHD can look at somebody else's calendar who has ADHD [00:37:00] and they're tapping into their cool executive function and can be a little bit more logical and practical about it. Whereas the person with ADHD might be in their hot executive function because they're like, I'm really excited about this and I can cram all this in.

So the other person can look at it and be like, no, you can't. Because they can be a little bit more cool and logical about it. So it doesn't even have to be a neurotypical person looking at your schedule. Get somebody who isn't you, who isn't as invested in what you're trying to cram in that day to look at what you're doing and give you that reality check and help you prioritize.

Maybe it can be a really great thing to go to your boss or your partner and say Hey, I've got these 15 things on my plate today. I don't think I can do all of them. Can you help me decide which are the top two or three that I need to focus on?

Amy: We've been talking to Jessica McCabe. She is the author of the brand new book How to ADHD: An Insider's Guide to Working with Your Brain, Not Against It. She's also the creator of the YouTube channel How to ADHD.[00:38:00] I'll put the links to the YouTube channel and the book in the show notes for this episode, but tell everybody who's listening or who might be driving right now or doing something else right now, all the places they can find you.

Jessica McCabe: Yeah, you can Google How to ADHD, honestly.

I'm @HowToADHD across all the platforms. You can get the book at HowToADHDBook.com, and yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. Just Google HowToADHD and you'll find me.

Amy: Thank you so much. This is such a useful book. Whether you have ADHD, whether you parent somebody with ADHD, whether you're in a relationship with somebody who has ADHD, you will learn so much from this book.

Jessica, thanks for talking to me today.

Jessica McCabe: Thanks, Amy. These questions are great.