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Before we dive in, I just want to remind you this podcast is sponsor free and it's been this way for five years. I do it because I love it. So if you're interested in supporting my work and you'd like to learn how to fall in love with your ADHD brain, you can find the link to my youy ADHD Brain is a OK Academy, my patented program in the first line of this episode's description. Look, your brain is not disordered. The problem is no one gave you its manual. But I can and I will. Now let's get on with the show. Richard Branson, Michael Phelps, Justin Timberlake, James Carville. Wait a minute, where are the women? Greta Gerwig, Lisa Ling, Audra McDonald, Simone Biles. That sounds like a list of highly successful titans in a variety of industries. They all have adhd, but you don't hear much about that now, do you? You know what else you don't hear about are the 43% of people with ADHD who are in excellent mental health. Why aren't we talking about them and what they are doing? I'm your host, Tracy Adsuka, and that's exactly what we do here. I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, a lifelong student, and now the author of my new book, ADHD for Smartass Women. I'm also a certified ADHD coach and the creator of youf ADHD Brain is aok, a patented system that helps ADHD women just like you get unstuck and fall in love with their brilliant brains. Here we embrace our too muchness and we focus on our strengths. My guests and I credit our ADHD for some of our greatest gifts. And to those who still think they're too much, too impulsive, too scattered, too disorganized, I say no one ever made a difference by being too little. Hello, I am your host, Tracy Otsuka. Thank you so much for joining me here for another episode of ADHD for Smartass Women. My goal, you know what it is? It's to always show you who you are and then inspire you to be it. Today we're going to do exactly that through a solo episode on a topic that I just love talking about, gratitude. And since we are right smack dab at the beginning of the holiday season, this felt like the perfect time to talk not just about gratitude, but ADHD and gratitude. You know, gratitude matters for every human, but for those of us with adhd, it's not optional. It is literally foundational. And so why would that be? Because processing emotions starts in the brain, and our ADHD brains. We can't get anything done without positive emotion. We talk about this all the time, don't we? Positive emotion, it spikes our dopamine. And dopamine is what runs the show. It's responsible for our memory, our behavior, our focus, our motivation. But I always say we don't really do motivation, more our inspiration. And emotions don't just make us feel things. They also push our actions. They cause us to act. When we're in positive emotion, we take action. We're happier. We're more inspired. We move our lives forward. So how do we get ourselves into positive emotion instead of waiting for someone else to deliver it, which over time, that seldom works. We start with gratitude. Every damn morning when you wake up and you begin your day with gratitude, you. You set the direction for every thought and decision that follows. You spike your own dopamine. And because it feels good, your brain wants to do more. That feels good. And that's why checklists can feel so ridiculously satisfying. You check off one thing, you get a hit of dopamine, and suddenly you want to do the next thing and the thing after that. Same with exercise. Same with breath, work, or tapping. And anything at all that lifts you emotionally helps you move into action. So how does gratitude directly improve ADHD symptoms? Well, gratitude improves our sleep, and sleep improves our executive functions. You know, our ability to focus, plan, make decisions, and of course, emotional regulation. I will say that sleep is free therapy, especially REM sleep. It's one big loop. We have better executive function, we're in a better mood, we have less anxiety, we feel more gratitude, our dopamine spikes, and we're more motivated or inspired. So again, one big loop. And that dopamine hit. It actually helps us focus on what matters. So we can ignore the noise. You know, noise like impulsive shopping, junk food, Instagram rabbit holes, all of it. With more dopamine, everything feels more doable. Schoolwork, family organizing, finishing projects. So it feels more doable instead of impossible. Gratitude also helps us build habits. And here's the part that most people miss. Dopamine feels good, so your brain repeats whatever created it. If gratitude gives you even a tiny lift, your brain starts scanning for more things to be grateful for. You're literally teaching your brain how to feel better. This is exactly how ADHD brains build habits. Through positive emotion, shame, and negativity. That'll just shut the whole system down. But gratitude. Gratitude flips the lights on. Gratitude also boosts serotonin. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter of happiness and confidence. It also supports focus. But here's the wild part. Do you know that you don't even need to successfully come up with something you're grateful for? No, just trying to think of something to be grateful for triggers serotonin, so your brain rewards the attempt. Isn't that amazing? And remember, whatever we focus on gets bigger. We talk about that all the time. If you focus on what's good, you're going to see more good, versus if you focus on what's bad and what's wrong, you're just going to see more bad and more wrong. ADHD brains, well, we can often latch onto the wrong right. Everything we've ever done wrong in our entire life, we can sometimes be Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive. Think about it. You can have an incredible day, Everything went right, and then one tiny thing goes awry. And what takes your attention? Yeah, that one tiny thing. Research actually shows that it takes five positive things to counteract one negative. Bad is just stickier than good. And that's for all brains. So. So when it comes to the ADHD brain, I'm pretty certain it takes more than five positive things to counteract one negative thing. But gratitude, it helps us rebalance that. Gratitude forces a pause. And let's be honest, ADHD brains, we do not pause naturally. We barrel through life at 90 miles an hour without noticing all that we're doing well and right. But gratitude? Yeah, gratitude makes you stop and look around and register what feels good, which is how you slowly start training your brain to find more of it. And there is always something to be grateful for. If you have kids, a gratitude practice at breakfast or dinner is really great. When my kids were little, we did it nightly. It trained their little brains to look for what was working, just like it trains ours. I knew a lovely woman named Marla. She had adhd. She was a wife. She was a mom of a younger child. She was also a business owner. And she'd been living with stage four metastatic breast cancer. Sometimes watching what she handled with the grace she did literally took my breath away. She was so grateful for everything in her life. All she could see was everything that was going right. The cancer. For her, it was just a blip. All she did was think of others. She had ADHD too, right? So she was constantly dreaming up new ideas. A few years ago, this is how I met her. She called because she wanted to start a podcast for women who were newly diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. And what stood out Most for me in our conversation was her unbelievable gratitude. I will never forget it. And I asked her about it, and what she told me was she was simply so grateful to be alive every day that she had on this earth with her son and her family. She felt it was a gift. And I believe that she lived much longer than the doctors ever said she would because of that gratitude. I really believe it was her gratitude that kept her alive. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I know a lot of women and a lot of men who have never faced a major challenge financially, emotionally, physically. They have every resource and every opportunity, yet all they do is complain. They don't want to do anything to make things better. They just want to talk about what's wrong. They don't have a gratitude practice. They live in the problem, not the possibility. And the energy, well, the energy is contagious for all the wrong reasons. It's hard to be around someone who is constantly complaining because gratitude is literally a gift that you give to others. It inspires people, it attracts people, it brings them closer. It is so easy to be around grateful people. You know, several years ago, I bought myself the Five Minute Journal. It's a gratitude journal. It's how I started my gratitude practice probably about 10 years ago now. And I'll be honest, I tend to be an optimistic kind of person anyway, but I didn't really know about gratitude. I didn't know how gratitude worked. And I thought I was a pretty grateful person until I started with that gratitude journal. So the Five Minute Journal, it's super simple, structured, works beautifully with ADHD brains. I think I bought it on Amazon. The Five Minute Journal has three morning prompts. Number one, three things you're grateful for. Number two, what would make today really great. Number three, a daily I am affirmation. I don't know I am a great parent or today I am the kind of person who sees everything that is working for me. For the longest time, what I would do is I used this journal before I got out of bed. I would wake up, open my eyes, I would open up my journal and write in it before I even got out of bed, those three morning prompts. And then in the evening before I went to bed, I would open up my journal and I would fill out two evening prompts. What was the highlight of my day and what did I learn today? So what I was doing is I was starting and ending my day in gratitude, which means I was starting and ending my day in positive emotion. As my friend Dr. Christine Lee says, we need to feel well in order to do well, because ADHD brains can often forget our wins. I also keep what I call a positive emotion dossier. It was so successful for me that I made it part of our patented program. Your ADHD brain is a. Okay. What the positive emotion dossier is is a running list of everything from childhood to today that I feel proud of, anything that makes me feel good, anything that represents my strengths, and I add to it whenever there's something new. So then when I'm feeling low or I'm spiraling into I'm not doing enough, why am I so slow? Why can't I do this thing right? I pull it out and I remind myself, wait a minute, Tracy, stop it. You're completely wrong. Look at all of the things that you've done and you've done so well. You know, ADHD brains, we just need this. We need evidence. We need reminders of our brilliance. Because otherwise we can forget. A couple of years ago, right before the holidays, I was in a mood. I was feeling like a lot of women feel during the holidays. Just the sense that, why am I the one that has to create the holidays for my entire family? I had heard about a book called 29 Gifts by Cammie Walker, and I followed her prescription. And this was the prescription. You give one gift, I'm holding up the book. It's 29 Gifts by Cammie Walker. If you're seeing this on video, but most of you listen on a podcast so you wouldn't see it. So the deal is you give one gift every day for 29 days. And I decided to do it around the holidays, starting on December 1st. The gift could be anything that you'd give to someone. It could be a small present, it could be a big present. It could be paying for someone's Starbucks when you're in front of them in the drive thru line. It could be the gift of your time. It can be a sincere acknowledgment. It. It could be a smile. But you know what? Giving the gifts is not the part that changed me the most. The part that changed me the most was I also had to give a daily gift to myself. I had to acknowledge a gift that I had received from someone else during that day. So that could be someone holding the door open for me, someone giving me a smile, someone telling me a joke, someone sharing a meal with me, someone calling me like a friend, or even my dogs running up to greet me when I just got out of the car. That is the gift that made me pause it made me notice what I normally miss that I had just taken for granted. And so by looking for these gifts from others, guess what? I saw more of them throughout the day, and that really helped me get my head around the holiday season. It made everything feel so much more meaningful. That and the fact that I told my family, okay, I'm not putting the holidays on all by myself. You guys are going to help me. And so that's how it's been ever since then. Gratitude, though, it's not just a list. It is a feeling. It's a frequency. It's energy. It's the energy you're in when you are receiving something you want. I want you to think about the last time someone surprised you with something you genuinely loved, whether it was a present or a text from your child or a compliment that someone gave you. And you were like, you know what? That person really believes this. Maybe it was someone paying for your coffee. For that split second you weren't thinking about what was wrong or what was missing, your whole body kind of went, oh, that feels good. I like that. That is the feeling of gratitude. Gratitude is actually the emotional state of receiving. So when you're in gratitude, you're basically living in a perpetual state of receiving. Your brain is on the frequency of, you know what, good things come to me, or if anyone's going to get a break, it's going to be me. You've been told your whole life that your way is the wrong way, that you need to do it their way, and over time, you stop trusting yourself. But here's the truth. You were never the problem. You just have a different brain, which means you need different systems. That's where my six step patented you'd ADHD brain is a okay program comes in. Let me help you reconnect with your intuition, trust yourself again, and build a life that actually works for you. You've had the answers all along. I'll help you see them. Click the link in the first line of this episode's description to learn more or book a discovery call. Now let's get back to the show. Now, here's where ADHD women can kind of get tripped up. We are actually visionaries. We live half of our lives in the future. And that's because we see what's possible with this ridiculous clarity. And this is a strength until we look at where we are right now and immediately notice this gap between where we are and where we want to be. And that gap is what pulls us right out of gratitude. And so it starts sounding like, okay, I'll be grateful once I lose weight. I'll be grateful once I get that job. I'll be grateful once the house is organized, once I figure out my life, then I'll be grateful. But that's conditional living. And here's the truth. You have to change first. You have to change the emotion before the circumstances shift. Otherwise you're going to drag the same patterns, the same thoughts, the same emotional habits into every new chapter. I hear this all the time. Once my schedule calms down, then I'll finally take care of myself. But you know what? Schedules never magically calm down. That's just not how life works. If you are waiting for perfect conditions, you're going to be waiting forever. Gratitude is you giving yourself the permission first. It's choosing to see what's working now. Instead of waiting for everything to be perfect before you let yourself feel good. It's moving your brain out of that nothing is ever enough mode and into okay, there actually is good here, and I'm allowed to see it and find more of it. And that brings me to what I refer to as the five levels of gratitude. I think it was Abraham Hicks. That might have been the first person I heard talk about levels of gratitude. But I want you to consider and think about what level that you might be at right now. So level one, no appreciation, no gratitude at all. You are a full on complaining curmudgeon, Eeyore. Nothing is enough. Everything could be better. And you are perpetually scanning for everything that's wrong. Level two, appreciation for what's good. And this is where most people start that are even willing to listen to a podcast about gratitude. So you're making the list. You're noticing the blessings, what you can be grateful for. You're counting the good, and that's progress. You are doing great. We all start at level two when we're thinking about gratitude and starting a gratitude practice. Level three, you feel gratitude for what's coming. Now, we shift into being grateful in advance. A client asks for a refund, a friendship ends, a job shifts, a door closes. Instead of panicking and focusing on all that's wrong and all that is not working, you see it as a space being cleared for you. You trust that something better is coming to replace it, even if you can't see it yet. Level four, you have developed an appreciation of the hard stuff. So your setbacks, breakdowns, people who annoy you, the decisions that feel painful that you have to make. This is where you start to see that challenges aren't Just obstacles. They're information. They show you what matters, what doesn't, and where you want to go next. Hard moments, I'm sorry, but they just force clarity. And sometimes life closes a door you didn't have the courage to close yourself. This is the shift from life is happening to me to nope, I'm driving now. And then finally, level five. There is no bad. This is the highest level. Even calling something bad, well, that's a choice. Because you believe there is no failure. There is no problem that you can't solve. And everything is happening for you, not to you. And guess what? You are grateful for all of it. Which one are you? And let me add this, because this is the part that everyone tries to avoid. We act like we are not supposed to have problems, like if something goes wrong, something must be wrong with us. But honestly, think about it. That belief is absolutely ridiculous. If we didn't have problems, we would be bored out of our friggin gourds. Truly, there would be no contrast, no variety, nothing to respond to. How would you even know that things were going well if you didn't also have times when they weren't right? You would need that contrast. Problems are not an interruption of your life. Problems are your life. And solving problems, that's how we build confidence. You get through one tough thing and suddenly you realize, hey, I didn't die. Guess what? I can do more of that. I can stretch farther. I can help other people. I can trust myself. Every time you solve a problem, your brain learns, oh, I'm actually capable. I can handle things. Problems are literally the workout that builds strength and confidence. They are the curriculum. So this idea that life shouldn't have any problems is ridiculous. So let's get rid of it and retire it forever. Now, one really important caveat that I want to make sure and mention is if you're dealing with trauma, you need more support than gratitude alone. I mean, gratitude will help you 100%. But you also have to process the trauma so you can actually build from it. And here's the hopeful part. Once you've done that work, many people experience something called post traumatic growth. It's the way your brain reorganizes after pain, making you more grounded, more empathetic, and more connected to what actually matters to you. Not because the trauma was worth it, but because your brain is wired to adapt, rebuild, and come back stronger when you give it the right support. Sounds a lot like level four and five gratitude, doesn't it? Anyway, I want you to know how grateful I am to share all of this with you here. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and thank you for being here. That's what I have for you for this week. If you like this episode, please let us know by leaving a review. If you Our goal is to change the conversation around adhd, helping as many women as we possibly can learn how their ADHD brains work so that they too can tap into their amazing strengths. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you here next week. You've been listening to the ADHD for Smartass Women podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Otsuka. Join us at adhdforsmartwomen.com where you can find more information on my new book, ADHD for Smartass Women and my patented you'd ADHD brain is a okay system to help you get unstuck and fall in love with your brilliant brain. If this episode hit home, don't just stop here. ADHD doesn't have to be a struggle. It can actually be your greatest strength when you learn how to work with it. That's exactly what I teach inside our patented your ADHD brain is a OK academy. So if you're ready to stop fighting your brain and start using it to your advantage, look for the link in the first line of this episode's description. The sooner you start, the sooner life gets easier.