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Before we start, a quick note. If you've been listening to this podcast and thinking, I need more than insight, I need support, this is for you. Your ADHD brain is not broken. It just never came with a map. That is why I created you'd ADHD Brain is a okay academy. It's my patented step by step framework to help you build a life. And that finally fits how your brain works. Ready to get started? Click the link in the show notes to sign up or book a free discovery call with me now. 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 files. 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're 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 a ok. 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 is always to show you who you are and then inspire you to be it. So thank you so much for being here today. We are talking about dopamine. You know, that brain chemical that makes you crave the cookie, the scroll, the last minute deadline rush. Yeah, we live in a world drowning in dopamine. Phones pinging us constantly, social media on tap 24. 7, Netflix, where you can binge eight episodes of House of Guinness, which by the way is fantastic if you love, oh, I don't know, big old fashioned costumes and grand estates and frankly, rich people problems. And then there's Amazon, right? Three clicks at your door tomorrow, sometimes at your Door today. And ADHD brains. We chase all of this harder than most. But here's the key. The more dopamine we chase, the less joy we feel. Does that sound familiar? This is what most people do not know. ADHD is not a lack of dopamine. It's actually a regulation problem. We don't have a broken gas tank. We have a sticky accelerator. And dopamine. Chasing it doesn't just look like scrolling or shopping. Sometimes it looks responsible. A new planner, a new system, a new app that promises to finally fix you. Same dopamine, different outfit. So I want you to think about the last thing that you couldn't stop doing, even though you knew you'd regret it later. Maybe it's Online shopping. Or TikTok. Instagram, my personal nemesis. I guess they call it X now. I refuse to call it X. Twitter. So now that we've set the stage, let's talk about what actually happens in the brain. Here's the pattern most of us live in without realizing it. We get a hit from scrolling or shopping or sugar, deadline, adrenaline, whatever it is, and it feels good for a moment. But the brain hates imbalance. So every time we spike pleasure, the brain automatically counterbalances it with a dip. This is something that Anna Lemke, I love this book explains beautifully. In Dopamine Nation, she describes it like a seesaw. Pleasure on one side, pain on the other. When the pleasure goes up fast, pain follows right behind it to restore balance. So it does this right? And that dip shows up as restlessness, anxiety, guilt, irritability, or that flat kind of blah feeling that you. You can't quite name. So if you keep chasing those spikes over and over without giving your brain time to reset, the counterbalance gets stronger, the dip gets deeper, and eventually you can find yourself stuck on the low side of the seesaw. Even when you're doing things that should feel fun. That's why you'll hear people saying nothing feels good anymore. And they don't understand why. There's also another important distinction most people have never been taught. Dopamine has two modes. Spikes and baseline. Spikes are the hits, the cravings, the anticipation. And baseline is what determines whether you feel motivated, steady, and okay in your body day to day. When you chase spikes all day long, guess what happens? Yeah, your baseline drops. That's why you can be busy, stimulated, entertained, and still feel empty. Kent Berridge. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. He explains this through what he calls the wanting versus liking system. Dopamine drives wanting, not liking. And when I first heard this, it kind of made me chuckle because it explains so much of my own behavior. I used to do this awful thing in college where I'd be completely obsessed with a new guy. He was perfect. I was convinced that he was the one. And the second he showed interest back, I was kind of like, ugh, that was too easy. I was done. Obnoxious, right? Totally obnoxious. My friends used to get mad at me, and I always wondered, gosh, why am I like this? Well, now I know. Dopamine was fueling the wanting, but not necessarily the liking. That's why you can finish a pint of ice cream and immediately want more without actually enjoying any of it. So I want you to think of one habit where the wanting has been bigger than the liking for you, and I want you to write it down. I'm going to give you a couple examples. You are, oh, I don't know, driving home from a long day after work, and you can feel the craving of that glass of wine that you want before you even pour it. But after two or three glasses, do you actually like how you feel? Probably not. You're fuzzy, maybe a little bit groggy, maybe even more anxious. That's wanting without liking or Instagram, right? The urge feels urgent. You tell yourself it'll help you relax, and then 30 minutes later, you feel flat or annoyed at yourself again, wanting without liking. So here's the practice. The next time the urge comes up, notice how you feel afterward compared to before. Did it actually leave you feeling better or worse? And if it left you feeling worse, why are you doing it? So we've talked about how chasing pleasure often leaves us in a crash, but what about the productivity hack that works for a week and then it disappears? You know this one. You download a new app, or you buy a new planner, or you color code your calendar, and for about a week, it works. And you feel like, I don't know, this might be it. This might finally work for my brain. And then the next day, nothing. A week later, you completely abandoned the system. And instead of saying, my brain adapted, what do we say? What is wrong with me? Right? Andrew Huberman, the bro podcaster, neuroscientist, Stanford. He talks about this a lot. Novelty creates a dopamine spike. Actually, we talk about this a lot, too, right? The brain goes, oh, shiny. And motivation surges. But the brain adapts fast. What was exciting yesterday can become background noise today. And for ADHD brains, that adaptation, it happens even faster. So it feels like I was obsessed with this yesterday and today I can't even look at it. It's not that you flooded your system. It's that your brain is incredibly sensitive to novelty and incredibly fast to normalize it. That's why I always say that our ADHD brains are great starters. Okay middlers and terrible finishers. Unless adrenaline shows up or we learn how to manage dopamine on purpose. I mean, we are Olympic level novelty seekers, which is why so many of us feel like we're constantly reinventing, switching systems, searching for that next magic fix. It's not a character flaw, it's a dopamine cycle. So now the question becomes, what do we actually do about this? This is where dopamine fasting comes in, or what Anna Lembke calls self dopamine binding. Now, before you panic, this does not mean that you have to delete everything you love or you have to become a joyless monk. Not at all. Especially with adhd. We know that would totally backfire, wouldn't it? This is about removing noise, not joy. You pick one high dopamine thing that's been running you and you take a short intentional break. Not as punishment, but to recalibrate. Think of it like resetting your taste buds after you've had too much junk food. The first couple of days can be a little bit uncomfortable, but by day three or four, the cravings totally quiet down your baseline steadies, and when you return to the thing, you actually enjoy it more. For ADHD brains, this might look like no Instagram until afternoon. No online shopping for 48 hours. 72 hours, maybe a week. TV only on weekends, no sugar during the workday, or muting your notifications for a couple days. The rules matter, though, and these are the rules. You have to make it time bound. ADHD brains love a finish line, A time you start and a time you stop. Number two, replace. Don't just remove. Give your brain a healthier swap. I'm not going to scroll Instagram. Instead, I'm going to call a friend. Number three, add friction. Make the tempting thing slightly harder to get to. My daughter was just telling me about a new product called a brick. I bought it for her for Christmas, actually. And apparently you keep this thing on your desk and you put your phone on it and it shuts down all kinds of apps so you can't get to them. That would be a way to add friction, right? I also love micro abstinence. A 10 minute pause before the thing. Sometimes you still do it, but you prove to yourself that you're the one who's in charge. Okay, I want you to think of one thing that you're craving today, and I want you to imagine hitting the pause for just 10 minutes. What would you do instead? Go out and garden? Take a walk around the block? Go pet your dog? Some sort of substitution. Now, here's the part that most people. A little pain is actually medicine. Science calls it hormesis. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Hormesis is small doses of stress that make you stronger. Exercise, cold water, plunging, doing the hard thing first. Biologically, stress goes up briefly, right? And then the brain compensates by raising dopamine and endorphins. So your baseline lifts. But there's also an identity effect. Every time you do the thing you said you'd do, you build self trust. Look, confidence is not a personality trait. You're not born with it or born without it. It's a side effect of keeping small promises to yourself. So here's how I would frame it. Pick your pain. The short pain of doing the thing now, or the long pain of avoiding it and carrying the stress for days. Either way, pain is coming. One hurts up front, but it's brief. And then it frees you. The other drags you for days, sometimes weeks and months, and can get worse and worse. And the truth is that you're going to feel pain either way. So why not choose the one that actually pays you back quickly, chemically, and emotionally? You know, it never fails. I hate dealing with money, but it never fails. I always feel better when I go into my account and I check where I am. I pay the bills. Even when it turns out that it's actually worse than I thought it would be. I don't know why that is, but I always feel relieved because now I know where I am. Always feel better. One more reset that most people ignore. Radical honesty. When we hide the behaviors that we're ashamed of, it keeps that shame cycle alive, right? And shame keeps the nervous system in threat. And threat shuts dopamine down. When you name the pattern, it loses a lot of its power. I don't know. I scroll when I get anxious, or I shop when I feel like I'm behind Patterns. They don't make you broken, they make you predictable. And predictable things, well, we can redesign them. Connection matters, too. Connection signals safety. And safety is what actually restores dopamine. A Netflix binge might numb you for a night, but a real conversation with another human that you care about that can literally shift you for days. So let's simplify this. You don't need to fix your dopamine system. You don't need better discipline, and you definitely don't need another system. You just need to work with what we already know about your brain. Everything we talked about today boils down to one where is my dopamine Running me instead of supporting me. So instead of overhauling your life, downloading another system, or trying to out discipline your brain, I want you to pick one lever to pull this week. Maybe it's the dopamine delay. We're going to pause 10 minutes before the thing. Maybe it's the energy trade. You're going to swap draining dopamine events for fueling dopamine events. Or the 24 hour reset. You're going to fast from one habit for one day. That's it. One lever, one week. No perfection needed. Look, dopamine isn't the enemy, it's fuel. But if you don't learn how to steer, will run you straight into a ditch. ADHD brains, we don't run on willpower. We run on energy, on interest, on meaning. So the work, it's not discipline, it's design. Design your environment so it fuels you instead of draining you. And here's the identity line that I want to leave you with today. I am the kind of person who knows how to work with my dopamine instead of letting it run my life. You know how to do that now. And that's what I have for you for today. I am your host, Tracy Outsuka. Thank you so much for being here with me for another episode of ADHD for Smartass Women. If this episode helped you see yourself a little more clearly, I'd really appreciate it if you'd take a moment to leave a review. It helps more women find this podcast so they too can see themselves more clearly. 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 adhd for smart women.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. Let's pause here. Have you spent your whole life being told your way is the wrong way? If you try to use systems designed for a neurotypical brain, of course you'll feel like you're failing. But here's the truth. You were never the problem. You just have a different brain, which means you need different systems. That is exactly why I created the A OK Academy. It's my six step patented framework designed to help you reconnect with your intuition and build systems based on your unique strengths. 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. Look, it's time to stop second guessing and start trusting yourself again. Find the link in the show notes to sign up or book a free discovery call. Now let's get back to it.