155 - ADHD and Falling Back To Square One

Any time there's a transition in my life, from depression, to jobs, to break ups, to kids on summer break, to kids back to school...I always have this feeling that I'm back at square one. 

Today I'm talking about a way that I deal with "square one"

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Do you ever feel like anytime there's a big transition that's gonna happen, that you have to start back at square one? This happens to me in so many areas of my life: being sick, being depressed, new job, kids are back at school, kids are out of school, fucking daylight savings time. Rather than trying to figure out how to never ever see a square one again in our lives, let's talk today about getting into square two. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of The Standing to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I love Mondays because I get to pop into your ear holes. And it's my ooh, okay. That's that's gross, but it's I I honestly am happy to be inside of your ears. It's great. So let's kick off the Monday then with the mental health uh update. I get I got this from the dudes uh who do the mental health and tech podcast. They share their mental health of the day when they record. It's a way to normalize talking about our school spaghetti, which is freaking rad. The good, the bad, the weird. Let's talk about it in the open, out in this park where people can hear us. Uh so in honor of that art form, I'd like to do that uh at the top of my podcast as well. So, in terms of like depression stuff, I've I'm feeling quite a lot better. I just got over being sick. I don't know if you can tell by my voice. It kind of I'm still get that cough. Yeah, my voice goes down a couple registers when I get sick. Can you tell? But man, when I get sick, I get so frustrated. I get so down. I hate having a pain in my body that I can't like will it away. I can't make it go away. But my trajectory is so much better now. It feels uh good. The things that are still lingering, I'd say, are the desire to nap throughout the day. That's big. Uh, I do all this work from home, so it's very easy to just lie down. And I don't know about you guys, but naps for me, they go from highly beneficial to sinking me in the dark swamplands so fast. It's like the difference between a nice 30-minute recharge nap and then, oh crap, I kept sleeping, it's been an hour, and now I'm just blah, and I just want to lie in bed for the rest of my life. It's a real fine line there. I do have a quick hack for that, by the way. It's if I know exactly what I'm going to go do after the nap, if I have it scheduled as an appointment at a specific time, then I'm more likely to get out of bed and get to it. Because anytime I spend deliberating on what to do, like in the moment, it's fruitless. No fruit, fruit-free, sans fruit has no fruit. Nothing will ever seem worthy of my time. Even though my brain is going to be saying things like, you know, you should really be doing this right now. Doesn't matter. And I don't have to like or enjoy what I'm going to do, but just to at least I know what the plan is. That helps me out when I do it. And I know I'm feeling better again because I'm out there dating. Um, I'm having a lot of fun with that. Gets me out, gets me having fun new experiences and connecting with other human beings is radical. I like it a lot. So a mental health update is feeling good, hopeful, optimistic. More of this, por favor. Back to you, Russ. Okay, uh, let's check in with the business report. I currently have two open slots for the 101 Big Brothering. So if you're looking for that aggressive get your shit togetherness, uh, some people call it coaching. Yeah, whatever. Uh, if you want to get a sense of the results, uh, what kind of stuff I do, you want to read some testimonials, head over to adhdbigbrother.com and you'll be able to learn more about that process over there. You can go check it out over there. Uh, and then there's currently unlimited seats in the ADHD Big Brother community. And I would like to do a big shout out to the seven new members that joined so far this month. We are growing. It is a growing collective, and I love it. And I don't, you know what? I struggle with that word as well. I was talking to one of the members the other day about this. Like the word community. I feel like it's because it's more than a like-minded group of people. And that it's like a saturated word. You know, all the influencers have their own community. It's about, you know, just a bunch of people that like cross-stitching or whatever. This is a mastermind of people getting their shit together. It's about doing those difficult life things, sharing insights and tools. It's a growing database of iterations and things to try, because when one thing stopped working for us, we need the next creative idea to get things moving. And so our quote unquote community is we're crushing it. I actually got an email from Circle, uh, which is the platform that I hosted on. Uh Circle.so, if anybody wants to create your own community, uh, they uh awarded me with the honor, thank you, of being named a platinum uh community. And I'm like, cool. What did that mean? Uh it's because our community is still relatively intimate compared to some of these mega communities with thousands of members. It's because we have crazy high engagement from our members. People are showing up every day, people are changing their lives, and it fills me with so much joy. And and check this out three months of membership in there costs less than the cost of one single session with an ADHD coach. And spoiler alert, I'm not the only coach in my community. Oh, and I don't know if I mentioned this before, but uh I don't know. Did I I don't know, but regardless, uh, I added a new space into the community for promoting your business or the knowledge that you have to share, the thing that you'd love to talk to people about. Because my dream of dreams, like in this community, is to amass a collective of ADHDers helping ADHDers. It's not just with the ADHD symptom bullshit, but in like in life. Because I can't tell you how annoying and frustrating it is whenever you know you join a community and the first thing they want you to know is to shut up about yourself. You know, don't tell anybody what you do, or if you have a service or a product, like, oh, you told people what you do? Well, you must have an ulterior motive for being in here. Get out. Ooh, I hate that. So I'm I combat that by actively asking members to like share, let's share our gifts, right? Let's share our talents. Tell people how to how can we pay for your service? How can we pay for the thing that you are trying to make money on? Why aren't we giving people microphones for that? I don't get it. Anyway, that's a bit rambly. Uh I just I get so goddamn juiced up about it. So let's get to the meat of the episode. Let's do that. These damn square one moments. This happens to me without fail. Whenever I get sick, every time I have a depressive episode that lasts for a while, any gains that I've made in life feel like they've been wiped away. And it's because I'm starting now from a farther place than I was at, it's super disheartening. And I would always feel like I let myself down because of it. Like I failed. There's no grace in the sickness, there's no forgiveness for the depressive episode or the transitional life thing. It's just, guess you couldn't cut it, you big loser. Look what you'll never be able to do. It's really, it's an atrocious self-reflection. It's pretty awful. That big dramatic feeling of being at square one, uh, it's not a fun feeling. Even if it truly isn't a square one, it feels like it's one. Because I remember when I was in really good shape. Uh, I've talked about this on here a bit before, I think, and and you know, it's you know, things happen in life depression, uh, life, heartbreak, all that bullshit. And I still to this day battle with getting myself into that level of health that if I dwell on it, it feels like a square one. It feels hopeless. Like, what's the point? I I can absolutely come at this stuff from an extremely negative place. It's super easy for me to do. It's not helpful, but it's super easy. I'm I'm quite adept. And then when life things happen and my hard fought routines, they're thwarted, you know, like my kids are out of school at summer break, and now all these things that I was doing are now discombobulated with two humans that are home now. Or when they go back to school, and now I'm I've got all this free time, but I'm paralyzed with choices because I'm like, how do I maximize this time now? How do I get the most out of it? Right? I gotta be doing everything because I can, because I have the time. I really want to say, oh, let's let's get a jump on these transitions, let's plan for these transitions. But I'm kind of like that's a bit bullshitty for me because I don't see transitions coming, even though I know they're coming. I know summer break comes, but my brain doesn't process that as alert, protect the routines, save the routines, summer break is on the way. It's only when the routines are destroyed that I notice, oh ah, that transition screwed me up. Some of you guys might be bangarang routine protectors, or like you're like the Nostradamus of transitions. You're like, I foresee a depressive episode on the horizon. Let's move these routines to later in the day when I'm more likely to get out of bed. Wow, that would be savvy, and you're cool. But here's what I've been attempting with uh myself to some degree of success. If you're an ongoing listener, then you know everything begins with me with trying to be cool with myself. Okay, so I'm starting to feel a bit better. I'm out of the mental swamplands, I've got my eye back on my health and getting some of that self-confidence back that comes from you know that feeling like when I'm in some kind of physical shape, or when you are not you know that feeling that I get, you guys, when when sorry, when a person is in physical shape, I w it's like I want that self-confidence. Um, but I feel currently like I'm at quote unquote square one. And this is super tricky because I can rationalize why I'm in square one compared to other times in my life and I can justify it. I can I can say to myself, you're at square one, you big loser. So that rather than thinking I'm in square one, it's helpful to think that I'm just in a particular square, if that makes sense. It doesn't have a number on it. It's just a square. And I'm on a journey to the next square. Also doesn't have a number on it. It's just farther down the road. And would you like to know what I'm doing currently on my on my way to the next square? I'll tell you, I created it as a challenge in the community just to make it more fun. Um, it's always more fun when you do things with other people. So in the square that I'm in, I decided that I would do a push-up and pull-up challenge. You know, we do sets of push-ups, right? And we and like we count how many we can do and we're pushing ourselves. I got super curious of whether or not I can prove without giving a single shit about the numbers. So, what that means is that I'll take a baseline number, of course. I'll just I'll see how many push-ups can I do in one clip. How many pull-ups can I do? And post sickness yesterday I did this, and I can do 15 push-ups and I can do five pull-ups.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

That is so square one, you guys. Compared to who I used to be, that is square fucking one. I used to be able to do like maybe 15 pull-ups.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

I would do three sets of 10. I could almost do a muscle up. And I've done the 100 push-up challenge at some point in my life. This could all feel totally like square one to me, but I gotta be cool with myself. So I'm just playing this game for funsies. How it works, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do three sets of push-ups, 90-second break in between. And each time I do as many push-ups as I can until I can't do any more push-ups. And I'm not gonna count. I'm just gonna do pushups until I can't do a push-up anymore. Three sets. And then on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I'm doing the same thing with pull-ups. And then what I'll do is I'll test after every four weeks. That'll be the interesting part to see how many can I do in one clip. I'm very intrigued at what can happen if I don't give a shit about the numbers during the workouts. Will I improve? I can't wait to find out. We have other community members that are playing too. We have one that I know is doing it for squats. So it should be very interesting. This is how I personally get to my next square. Like over the next few weeks, I'll begin to feel stronger and I'll begin to gain more self-confidence. I know that that's what happens to me when I work out. It just naturally happens, even if I'm working out for like a measly 10 minutes, and then that next square will present itself with another fun challenge and perhaps a more involved workout. We'll see when we get there. But I'll be able to do it because I eased my way in from one square to the next. And then after that square, I'll go for the next one. Usually I'd be sitting in that initial square, square one, oh my God. And I'd be seeing the potential or where I've been or how long I've lived life and not done anything about a thing. And I would see a square that I wanted to be in, but it would be like square five, it would be so far in the future, and it would be too daunting, it would be so overwhelming, too many things to work out, too many things to think about and to consider. It's unattainable. It would be a waste of time, it's impractical, it's never gonna happen. I'm a big loser. I think you know the dialogue, you know that conversation. So what if we just stopped giving a shit about the numbers? As a test. You know, maybe the numbers come back. I don't know. I think what my challenge to you guys would be this week. Uh, first of all, it's join the community. Do the push-up, pull up challenge with me. Let's compare numbers. And so I can support you while you support me. The other challenge would be to eliminate the numbers on your squares. It's basically redacting judgment, I'd say. No numbers on the squares. Wherever you're at, that's where you're at. No biggie. And from that square you're in, what is something you could do that would move you towards your next square? I challenge you to put some time into that this week and see what happens. Tell me how it goes for you. I am more curious about this stuff than you could possibly ever know. I am a goddamn dork for this stuff. I will talk your face off about it. I dare you to reach out and tell me how it's going. Anyway, hope that's helpful. Uh, and I truly hope you are being cool with yourself. It's there's too, too, too much self-loathing going on in our ADHD brains. I don't like it. It's very important, I believe, to be cool with ourselves. And with that, uh, as always, guys, reach out if you have questions. Links to everything are always in the show notes. They're down below ski. And I hope you have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.