249 - ADHD Later in Life

Finding out we have ADHD in our 40s and up can be filled with both grief and relief. I enter the picture when you've said, "OK, this is ADHD...now what?" 

Today I'll talk a bit about what I use, and it's the same thing I offer to you. 

Mentioned in this episode: The Weekly Planning Meeting Template

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For those of you that are wondering why nothing is sticking, why you read things and don't do the work, why you have epiphanies about what could work but it goes nowhere...Join myself and others at ADHDBB.  There is a 'team' component to managing ADHD. Join our team. 

Transcript

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Why is it that late in life ADHD years? Um, and to me that means over 40. Uh, what does that mean to you? Is that I don't want to exclude the 38-year-olds. I'm sorry, you're just not gonna get it. Uh late in life in spirit, maybe, uh at the atrocious struggles that a life of undiagnosed ADHD has done to our sense of self-worth. Let's talk about what it takes to manage ADHD late in life, even though. So take your blood pressure medicine and put on your readers and let's go. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD, their comorbid depression, their anxiety. Oh, it's just a new. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Rush Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crapastic. So let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff, let's make some commitments to do some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast. I don't know why I said readers, that's but you know what? That's something that us late in lifers we we do, right? That's like uh our close range vision just starts to go to shit naturally. So do we naturally just assume that we we shouldn't have to read anymore? Like that's the Lord's way of saying the reading portion of your laugh is over. No more reading for you. We now we've got readers, we can still read. All right, let's do the mental health report. This is where we uh we normalize talking about our school spaghetti. We do this every episode. We talk about the good stuff, the bad stuff, and the weird stuff because we're not always fine. I don't love that I'm talking about my mental health every week. I'm finding that to be quite uh frustrating. I don't know if it's frustrating. I just like, uh, do I have to? But you know what? I made a promise that we're normalizing it. So we talk about it no matter what. We put it out there, we make it visible. Um, I had to spend a bunch of money, and that made me feel not good. Doesn't it feel like being an adult? It's it there's always something that you have to spend money on. So you start catching up, and then all of a sudden life is like, hey, you gotta get new tires. And you're like, I thought I could just breathe for a little bit. And like, no, no breathing, no breathing for you. Anyways, I'm actually quite proud of myself because while that kind of thing, uh, it totally dysregulates me emotionally. I mean, you guys, I can go from zero to full anxiety so fast. Uh, and I'd say on the good side of things, I'm aware of that. And I think, okay, I need to do something physically to get this emotion out. Uh, I recognize that I'm dysregulated. So that is pretty rad. Not the being dysregulated part, but just the awareness. Um, so I'm not necessarily swept out to sea. I can hang on to the shore decently enough, I'd say. And that really requires external support. Uh for me, it does. Uh, wonderful girlfriends, supreme kids, friends and family that'll listen. And then for those areas where people don't tend to truly get it, uh, I've got ADHCP brother. So that community is just riddled with people who get it. Um, so that's been my mental health. Um, as far as that the depression goes, I feel like that mood state is sort of lifting. So that's great. Um, and I'm writing this early before I head out to Arizona with my kids to see Graham and Grandpa. Uh, and I'll get to see my brother and his wife and my other brother, so it'll be a big reunion of people. That'll be awesome. The card playing, the dominoes, the backgammon, two days of shit talking, and I cannot wait. Always a good time. So there you go. Mental health report complete. Excellent. Did I pass? Did I get a good grade on my mental health report? Today I just want to talk about processes for managing ADHD. Maybe in general, we'll talk about accountability and talk about the weekly stuff. But there's literally thousands of millions of billions of solutions to for every nuance of your experience in life. And that to me creates overwhelm, it creates confusion and paralysis. Doth it not, doth it not create paralysis? Doth thou have thine solution for everything? Me methinketh noteth. I don't think though. Um the process to me can be simplified. Uh so I'm gonna share a little bit about my process and my thinking uh that goes into that process. Shaltstwe. Um, this is how I coach others. It's but more importantly, this is how I do it. I work with people who are dealing with unique circumstances. Nobody's the same. Even if some of the core components are highly relatable, right? I relate to probably 95% of the same shit my clients are dealing with. Not their exact circumstance, but like the thematic elements of it. Like the fact that certain tasks feel wrong, or the fact that it's out of side, it's out of mind, or the fact that I feel an injustice and then the entire world becomes fucked up and everything is wrong. And I can be highly dramatic internally. And the desire to hang on to hyperfocus and we're afraid to let that go, the struggle to do important things. I relate to all of it because I also experience it myself. But the reason that people will come to me is because they're trying to do something and they can't do it on their own. Like that's why you hire people, right? They need education, but beyond that, they need proximity to support. Like you don't typically hire a uh a trainer to just tell you what to do. That's a component, but that's the trainer walks you through the gym, body doubles you while you're working out, tells you how to do it differently in the moment. That's proximity to support. So ADHD people will reach out because they need some sort of expedited process to stop living in overwhelm and chaos, stagnation. They want to achieve a goal, they want to manage their time, they want to finish a thing, they want to get started on a thing, they need to get their shit together in whatever fashion is mission critical at the moment. So if you're late in life and you're realizing that this has all been a big ADHD clusterfuck of a life, I just realized it's ADHD. Okay, fantastic. Now what? The path that I've chosen to do something about it has been to bring in other people. It works. It works so well that I built an entire goddamn implementation engine around the concept. You know how you hear me saying all the time, like community is everything. And what that means is that people who understand what you're going through because they are going through it also. They are the best people to get together with and collectively work on your own individual shit, but together. I support you, you support me, just by being there, just by existing. I repeatedly say that you have to experience it to understand it. Um, it's the same thing with the body doubling concept. You gotta try it just to see. Because we have this history, um, don't we? Like we have this history of negative forward thinking. We have a history of like trying and failing things, like fist history of letting people down, history of saying we're gonna do a thing, and then we have egg on our face and feeling worthless when we yet again didn't do the thing. And we have a history of like um seeing how a thing won't work for me because I know myself, and that that won't work for me. So, how does that person get on the other end of that successfully? That person has created a condition where nothing can work because that person is waiting to feel right about a process that may never feel right. Behavior change does not feel great. It sucks. We're pulling ourselves off autopilot to try and be different. That blows. My belief is that every guru's system, everybody who wrote a book about a way of getting in front of your ADHD, they're right. I think. I mean, I haven't read all the books, but like everybody, myself included. I mean, I would say I have a unique twist on things. But like, you know, it's like your Tony Robbins or your Mel Robbins, or I don't know, Tim Robbins, if he wrote a book. It's the they all work if you do them. Do you do them, or do you just say like Epiphany, yes? Oh my god, brilliantly stated. I should try to remember to do that next time. And then on to your day you go, and into the abyss of forgotten things it goes. And our belief is that somebody is gonna say something that ignites us into action. And I don't know that that's real. Not ongoingly, not for the fucking dishes, it's not. To me, what is more real is declaring my intentions to someone else and know that I have to speak to it tomorrow, whether I did it or not. And I've gotten quite comfortable at the discomfort of that. You know, just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about, in our community, like so we have the daily accountability club, people get scared of that. They don't want to fail. They want to learn how to do ADHD right and win at it right away. We don't want to feel frustrated with ourselves. We don't want to feel that self-loathing that comes with trying a thing and then, oh shit, I failed at it. Not another thing. But the people that show up in our daily accountability are putting their effort in front of others safely because we all get it. This is the safest place to do this work. Here's a perfect example of a day in the life of the ADHD Big Brother daily accountability space, right? Last Monday, we had 76 comments and we had 23 unique individuals posting their daily accountability. The rest of the comments are all support. It's magical. So that's posting on a day streak. How many days in a row can you do the thing that you said? And it can be different every day. Like, what's the one thing that you want to put time toward? Some people will post and say, posting here is my one thing. Great, getting comfortable with the process. Some people put a lot on the line to challenge themselves. Of those 23 people, some were posting day one. I was posting day two because I recently screwed up, totally forgot. It was laundry that I screwed up on. That killed my 22-day streak. And then before that, I had a streak of like 150 or something like that. Oh God, it hurts. Some people were posting day seven. That is shout out to Erica, Jonathan, and Lisa. They were getting their noodler badge. That's what you get for one week. We've got to make the slog fun somehow. So we do badges for day streaks on the journey to becoming school spaghetti masters. Some people had posts over 100 days. And then you have the dream team, Mick, posting day 514 in a row. Uh Dave at 691, and then Stephanie, the reigning champion, who I think will take her day streak to the grave with her, posted 885 days in a row. That's over two years in a row of posting in daily accountability and doing what she said. That sounds intimidating, right? But who gives a shit? Half of us are in there posting day one and two. It's not about the number, it's about showing up. I've been in the community longer than Stephanie has. Okay? So if I was just being like, how many times have you posted in Daily Accountability? I'd be kicking her ass right now. But I but I have ADHD and I screw up sometimes and I forget to do the thing I said. Even I, the ADHD big brother, the coach in the room, riddled with ADHD and depression and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm prone to the same symptoms as everybody else. But what I've learned is that showing up the next day, feeling the pain, feeling the discomfort, you know, imagine, oh my God, the coach has fucking failed. Holy crap. Like that's egg on my face, man. I mean, that's embarrassing, right? But who gives a shit? The people might give me some shit, jokingly, supportively, uh maybe advice, and I love it. We're we are all people who have good days, we have shitty days, we have we change jobs, we go on vacation, we iterate the process, but these are people the we all understand how big of a deal it is to keep our intentions visible and troubleshoot as we go. This is how you do it in my mind. This is how I manage my ADHD. And then you know I offer it to you. You manage your ADHD with me. Like, let's support each other. That's let's give each other loving, non-judgmental shits where applicable. Let's make rolling down the hill toward our important goals, towards doing the things that suck. Let's make it easier. It's not easy, let's just make it easier. One thing that I'm gonna offer to you guys, uh, here, I'll give you this. It's something that uh we implemented at ADHD Big Brother. So we have a partnering system set up inside our community app that helps you find and connect with other members who are looking for accountability partnerships. And then I offer members a template on how to structure your weekly accountability sessions. So if you want that, I'm gonna put the link to that in the show notes and it's free. You can have it. You grab the PDF yourself. If you have somebody in your life to partner with that you can try this for yourselves, if you're somebody that is gonna go just download the PDF and try to do it on your own, um I mean, okay. That just didn't we just talk about how other people is good and how good that is phone a friend, goddammit. Don't stop trying to slog it out on your own. It doesn't matter. We're all over 40. You know, it's okay to say I can't do the dishes on my own. I need to create a challenge for it. Who gives a shit? All right, if and when you find yourself unable to do it on your own, if that's if that's you, if you're like me and you realize, hey, behavior change is so much better with other people, then I would like you to join us for a month. At the very least, experience it, watch what other people are doing, try it on, you know, like a warm, cozy jacket. Get your wings so that then you can go off and do it on your own. I've just decided that I don't want to do it on my own, and it's more fun that way. It's more fun in a group setting. It's alone is too isolating, it's too frustrating, and it takes longer, you know. We're like cars that are always pulling left. So when you have proximity to support, you can catch yourself off track sooner and recalibrate quicker. So join up. You will get a free coaching call from me, and you know what you get out of that? It's like you will believe that you can do this. I will inspire you. That's just tends to happen. That's my super gift power, super special gift. That's what I can do for you. I can throw light on your inner fire. Or if you're on the fence, you're like, I just need to talk to this guy and really suss this all out. I don't know if I trust him. Well, give me a call. Like, you book a 30-minute free chat. I give everybody a free chat. You can talk about whatever you want. Community, group coaching, one-on-one coaching. I don't know if I'm always gonna do this. So if you're listening to this in 2028 and the link to book that call is available, great, do it. And if not, I guess I don't do it anymore. We'll see that that's the problem with announcing things on a podcast that lives in perpetuity. I am not going back to re-edit. But I just genuinely I love talking to new people. Uh, everyone is so unique with similar elements. It's fascinating, and I'm fascinated by all of it. And I feel lucky that I get to meet and talk to you, and some of you I get to be part of your support journey. It's like, what a great life. I j I wish my brain would recognize that more. Good gravy. Alrighty, guys, hit the show notes, get your weekly planning meeting template. Weekly planning meeting template. That's about the dumbest phrasing of that. Anyways, please share this also with all of your late-in-life ADHDers who might be struggling. Wrap it all up into an email and blam it out to them. We do this work better together, I believe. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week. And I shall talk to you later.