260 - Transitions Suck

We all know how hard it is sometimes to transition from one thing to another when you have our kind of ADHD skull spaghetti. In this episode I share a few of the transitions that I struggle with and the ways that I have found to work for me. I'd love to hear what works for you! 

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Transitions. Oh my god. 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 neot. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Rush Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's craptastic. 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. Alrighty, welcome to the podcast. How do you do? I sounded unsure. How do you do? I don't know. I'm excited. School's back in session. Uh we're trucking along over here. Um, we're gonna switch it up real quick. Let me tell you what's going on with ADHD Big Brother with an update first, then we're gonna get into the mental health report. In ADHD Big Brother land, I opened up some spots for uh the kind of coaching that I prefer to do. Uh if you go to adhbigbrother.com, you can learn more. I still offer one-on-one coaching when I have availability and group if that's your jam. But man, if you're ready for change, if you need something to be different, if you're like, I want to be waking up at 6 a.m., I want to go for a walk every day, or I want to make sure I'm leaving work by six o'clock every day, or I want to have work goals that I really want to hit, but I'm not hitting them. Or I have a client right now that wants accountability on data entry for a CRM. It's daily accountability, proximities to support. That's the quite literally the greatest answer of all time. If you want it done. And if you want to learn about yourself, what it takes for you to do that thing, let's go. Let's do it together. When I look at like, okay, so if in the in the space of helping with ADHD, my whole purpose is in like the helping of the doing part. You have the education already. If I know you, then you're listening to all the educators, you got science people on your on your uh on your rotation, you got your influencers, you're doing that. So I'm not here for that part because nothing beats the you-iness of you. And so if you're ready to do that work, I'm daily accountability. That's the answer. That is the goddamn answer. ADHD's a team sport, so you got to be who's your teammate or who's your coach that you're reporting to as you're running your laps, you know, doing the things that you know you need to do, that you know how to do, but you're not doing. If you text me every day at when you're done with your 30 minutes of work on your book, let's say, I mean, you can ghost me, sure. Yeah, you could do that. You're not guaranteed to get your writing in, but I do guarantee that you're way more likely to get that streak of daily writing in, and you're gonna feel so good about yourself when you send that text that it will help fuel you forward. And then when we meet once a month to talk about the times that you won at it and the times that you sucked at it, and the obstacles that are in your way and the plan to move forward, you're gonna write your book a lot faster than white knuckling yourself to a keyboard every day, trying to summon the will to sit and write. It's teamwork, man. It helps. So, anyway, final note about that. It's my belief that we learn about ourselves not from sitting back and trying to eliminate the tension. If we want to learn what it takes for us, like we learn about ourselves by jumping in. Shitty, jumping in angry, and then while we're angry, we're curious about it. We're jumping in scared and we're experiencing that, oh man, we lived through it and we're jumping in overwhelmed, even though there's a million things on my plate and nothing seems like it's the right thing to do. And oh my God. That's very hard to do alone. I don't do it alone, and I'm a school spaghetti master. I don't think our brains allow it. I just don't. But it does become less tense and more fun through proximity to support. So for me, it does. Anyway, all that is to say I have some one-on-one daily accountability slots. So uh it is daily. If ever there was a fast track, you guys, it's not for everyone, but you know, seriously, we don't we don't change by waiting for life to be different for us or for the tension to go away first or waiting for our head to get above water first. We turn it into a team sport and let's freaking play. All right. Obviously, the links to all that stuff is in the show notes, but so let's do the mental health report. Uh, this is where we talk about our school spaghetti and how we're really feeling. So every episode, I'm gonna do my part to normalize the conversation about our mental health by um by talking about my own. The good stuff, the bad stuff, the weird stuff, because we're not always fine. So, you know, fuck it. Let's let's talk about it. And so here we go. All right. Uh I don't always love talking about my mental health. Uh, maybe even more often than I not, even more than I. Even more than I, I don't know how to say it. Uh, I don't always love talking about it's I mostly don't like talking about it. So, but that's what makes it feel more important. So uh I've been feeling waves of anxiety and overwhelm lately. Uh, my answer to this is usually to go for a walk. Uh, and I find that if I go for a long walk, the anxiety feeling, like the physical part, it usually sort of whooshes away physically around 45 minutes. Um, and I'm not doing a brisk walk either. I'm half-assing it. I'm enjoying the scenery, maybe just getting the fresh air. Uh, however, I live in Los Angeles, California. It's really hot out here, and I just want to get on the 210 East and I want to get off on the 330 and take it all the way up to Big Bear. I want to get out of here. So I have not been doing the long walking. Uh, but I do have a community challenge going on where I have to get 150 minutes of exercise per week. Uh, and I'm hitting that, but it's like freaking, ah, it's so hot. Uh, it sucks. So, but anyway, my mental health is good-ish. And I'll tell you this: anytime I'm not sunk in depressive thoughts, that's always better for me. If I had to pick one thing to have every day, if all the disorders, if I if I had to just choose one, I would choose anxiety over depression. I think I would. Simply because I think there's more energy. It has anxiety has more energy to it. I'm compelled to go on the walk when I have anxiety. Depression, though, god dang it. I just hate myself and I want to sleep. So doing anything becomes like an Olympic event. That's me. What about you? To all of my anxiety-laden depressos out there, which one would you pick? Like which crippling disorder? If you had to order it from a food truck, what would you get? Would you get the depresso marinara sandwich or the anxiety burger? And you can only pick one though. I would take anxiety cakes. Tasty little anxiety cakes. All right, that's mental health report. And it's done. Uh, how are you doing? Feel free always to reach out athbigbrother.com. You can click on the contact form and just shoot the shit. Tell me how you're doing. Um, transitions are a pain in the ass for us, right? Aren't they? Who's with me? To me, a transition for the purpose of this podcast is it's physically or mentally moving from one thing to a different thing. Like I'm writing an article and then I'm making a phone call, or I'm on vacation and then I'm home. Stuff like that. Transitions are super tough for me. Um, I have a few examples I can give you, and then I'll share what works for me. The ones that I can remember, which were really tough for me, it's like when my kids were little, uh, I was a stay-at-home dad and I was writing at that time. And if we know anything about children around age four, it's that when they have something to ask you, you're gonna be asked. And if we know anything about me at that time, I was pre-ADHD diagnosis, pre-all the diagnosis. I just knew that I could not handle being interrupted while I was getting a creative idea out, or if I was sending an email that required thinking about tactfulness or whatever, I would get so agitated. And you can't really agitate at a four-year-old. I mean, it's because it's like it's not their responsibility to know when and when not I'm approachable or if I'm not in a deep thought, or am I in a deep thought. So I I would always I would get so discombobulated. In hindsight, there was no transition, there is no smooth flow from writing to whatever my son wants to then back to writing. I would start over in my thought, and that's was so oh, it was like having to spend a bunch of time fully rebuilding something. It's that feeling like you know when you're playing a video game, like an old school video game, right? Where it doesn't save often. So you die close to the end boss, and then you have to restart the whole level. You're like, what the hell is that? I don't even want to play the game anymore. I don't know how my kids play Geometry Dash. Have you ever played that one? No, thank you. One little wrong thing, and then the whole level restarts. That's insanity. So that's one. Like the other transition succotude for me is I tend to have a period of grief after vacations. I don't want to get back into regular life. So that becomes a process for me. And then a third transition issue for me is I have it's when I get sucked into media stuff. You guys all know that, you doom scrollies. It's very hard to get out of being in that social media trance or a video game trance. It's like you just become one with that thing. And it's so common. So let's start there. I have some ideas about it and I can tell you what works for me. So I'm just gonna share what I do. Um, let's just all agree that transitions can suck and they can be hard for our type of brain. Okay, fine, done. Science, whatever transitions are a big pain in the ass for our kind of school spaghetti. What to do? What do you do? I'm curious. Reach out, go through the website and let me know. I'm interested in your transitions. My go-to, if I can, is black and white for this kind of stuff. I have a problem with uh doom scrolling, things like Instagram. So I just delete the whole damn thing. It's easier that way. But for things that I can get locked into, for things that will suck me in, like the doom scrolling, that I'm not ready to give it up yet. Like I don't, I don't want to delete that app or whatever. This is how that scenario looks for me. I see this as we get sucked into these things and it becomes like a mental glue. We become imprisoned in our own mind. So we know what we're we know we're doing it, we know that we want to stop, or that we're thinking that we should stop, but we keep at it. So I don't want to say that we don't have the will to stop because to me it feels like I don't even have the ability to connect my thinking to my body. They're they're not talking to each other. I can't activate from the standpoint of, hey, it's time to stop tomb scrolling. I just keep thinking I need to stop. And then so the debate is inside my own head, but there's no movement. The answers here, it's so it's not inside the head. They're externalized. For me, timers and radical physical movement is my answer. Before I start on what has the potential to suck me in, because I already know this is my weakness. I give myself the time. Okay, I have 45 minutes to fuck around on this. Great. I'm setting a timer for 45 minutes, and that sets the tone. Then when the timer goes off, I chuck the phone onto the nearest soft surface because you know, technology's delicate, but I toss it like a hot potato. It doesn't matter what I'm doing or what I'm watching. I am not allowed to wait long enough for my brain to gift me the reason to keep going. Like, oh, let's just finish this reel and then we'll be done. Or let's just finish this video and then we'll be done. This is the start of the transition. Just bam, chuck it on the couch. I can't go right into something after that. I have to undaze. So I have to check back into reality, take some breaths, walk around, shake my body out, get some water, whatever the fucking thing is to do. I something else physically. And then I can connect to what comes next. Hopefully, I already know what is supposed to come next, and I can ease into it. But in my world, there's no transition that goes doom scroll, call the insurance company. That would be that would be impossible. There needs to be something in between. How many of us do this like in our lives? Like we schedule things for the top of every hour. Like from nine to ten, I do this, from 10 to 11, I do that. Like you just stop the one thing and then start the other thing at 10. No, where's the transition? Some transitions for me, I they just have to be acknowledged. Like I always have a grief after a vacation, like I said earlier, or after I see my parents. It comes with the package. Uh so to me, that typically means that it's up to a week of half-assing things, not executing at my full potential, because I'm slowly getting back into things. What I find helps is putting things away. That helps unpacking and putting suitcases away. Those to me, they're they're just like annoying extra work sessions, you know? I want to get back into it. And these are like my dangling to-dos from a vacation that's already over. There's no urgency, so who gives a shit? But it helps me to get back into my current life by putting everything away. The one with my kids, that transition, that required creativity. Uh, my kids had questions at really inappropriate, inconvenient times for me mentally when they were little. That's not on them, that's on me. Uh, and I also can't not get dysregulated when I'm being forced out of a mental place. So, what to do? I can't be different here. So, this could actually be a long talk here. Like, we're philosophizing moments in a life, which I'm a total nerd for. Um, so many things in life we go like, I need this to be different, or I need you to be different, or I need me to be different, or I'll read a book on how to think different. And uh, let's just ignore the fact that you don't change overnight. You have to work at something. And in ADHD land, we're like, I need something that works now, today, like this time. So there has to be like an acceptance of an imperfect setup. I'm a crazy person that can't handle interruptions, and you're a crazy kid that needs attention. So we came up with the red light, green light situation. Uh, I found that I could, in fact, without breaking concentration, see my kid coming, and I could hold up a hand and I could say red light out loud. And this is the game we created. And that means, hey man, I love you. I think you're awesome. And I cannot wait to hear what you have to say, and I am stoked to ask you what it is. So just know that I am wrapping it up, whatever it is I'm doing, and my kid waits for me. And my responsibility is not to finish what I'm doing, it's to find a smooth place to stop or do whatever I have to do to write down what I need to keep going when I'm done. And that allowed me to transition out and then transition back more smooth. Perfectly? No. No, I'm so sorry. It is still kind of annoying to get bothered, uh, but not to a dysregulated degree. Those are three of mine. Uh, question for you. Where do you need transitional help? Without overthinking it or over-educating yourself about this stuff, call it out. Between thing A and thing B, do you have areas where God, you just suck, man? No judgment. Like, I know that was blunt, but I I absolutely suck at certain transitions. So ask yourself from a curiosity standpoint, where do I suck at transitions? I wonder. From work to home, from doom scrolling to something else, from eating dinner to cleaning up, from a casual lunch to back to work. Where could you look at helping yourself by adding some kind of a transitional element, some kind of an in-betweene-y for you to ease you out of one thing and then ease you into another. And then here's the challenge for you: practice that transitional thing over and over and over again. Practice the skill on all kinds of transitions, even when you don't think you need it. It is from the practicing of the skill that you'll get the insights and you'll have these ideas of where you might iterate your process and make it visible. ADHD is a team sport. So come join our team, or if you want the one-on-one daily accountability with me, if I got spots left, let's go. Get on a team. Text somebody. That is the faster pass for that. Alrighty, that'll do it. If you are enjoying this podcast, please click the links in the show notes. And you know what? Let's build our relationship with each other. Let's get to know each other. It's gonna take some work, it's gonna take time, but I think we can make something magical. And with that, uh, I hope you have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.