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Hi and welcome to ADHD Friendly. I am Patti. I am an ADHD and executive function coach, and my passion is finding ways to create ease and less friction in my life so that I can do more things and have more time to do the things that I really want to be doing. So I bring them here and share them with you in the hopes they might do a little bit of the same in your life. This is episode 247, and today I'm going to be talking first with about my celebration for the week. And that has to do with some changes in what I'm eating that I'm noticing or supporting me. Then I'm going to share a tip that I call instead of waiting. Make the waiting time magic time. And then our main topic for today is the hidden role of resistance with adhd. I hinted at this last episode and we're going to dive into it today. All right, let's kick it off to my celebration, and that is that I have really noticed that the healthier eating that I did while we were on vacation has really been motivating to continue now that I'm home and I'm starting to see benefits and feel benefits that are again, creating that motivation to continue. So I just really, really highlight that for myself because it isn't something that I necessarily set out intentionally to do when I got back, but I just felt like why would I let the last couple of weeks pattern drift back into kind of like snacking all the time? And it's just really impacting my energy and how I feel and how I even starting to feel like I'm looking in some of my clothes. So I'm enjoying next what I purchased this week. All right. This isn't a celebration at all. I definitely did some impulse spending. I bought some baseball cards for my husband. It is an early birthday present I got him, but they were 45.99. He's gotten totally into baseball cards in the last like 12 months. And I found a set on Costco that I know he'll love. I also bought a black summer dress that I intended to wear for this episode but didn't end up happening because I'm recording it at a different time than I normally would because I'm still trying to catch up after my vacation. So that didn't happen, but it was on clearance. It was $7.97 on Costco as well. And the last thing I got, also from Costco, this is my big kind of splurge Costco order since I was ordering him baseball cards. I just. Even now, I'm feeling a little like, oh, my God. Gosh. But I did. I bought a two pack of Peanuts throw blankets. This thing, the yellow. Oh, my gosh. Like, it is just. It's just one of those, you know, kind of velvet throw plush blankets. I love the yellow so much. I don't need another throw blanket. I don't need a peanuts blanket. This was totally an impulse buy, but I have to be honest, the color of it, the yellow, and the Peanuts characters are all around it. It just made me so happy looking at it. And now that I have it, I decided when I brought it in here to share it with you guys, that I might just leave it in here as part of my podcast corner. It has a little thingy in it holding it together, and I might just kind of keep it here. Isn't that happy? Okay. I'm kind of loving it even more. Oh, my gosh. It's just such a yummy yellow. I love it so much. So it came as a two pack, and this is why I couldn't resist it. Guys. 24.99 for two of these guys on Costco. And I know from my experience on Costco, they run out of versions that have peanuts in them. If I try to buy PJs or something, they'll still have, like, the Lilo and Stitch character or Mickey Mouse, but they won't have peanuts. So that was also what led to my. My impulsive buy there. Yeah. So I don't have a product of the week because. I don't know. I just don't. I mean, I could say this, but I just opened it, but I do love it. But again, it is on Costco if it is something that you want to check out if you have a Peanuts lover in your life. All right, on to my ADHD friendly tip for this week. And that is to turn waiting time into magic time. And I'm phrasing it this way because a lot of us with ADHD brain wiring really hate downtime. Like, we hate the waiting where we have to be doing something and there's nothing else we really can do, and we tend to scroll on our phone, like that kind of thing. And when those times that we have to wait and we're distracting ourselves that way, I invite you to think, what else could I be doing with this time? And I call that time magic time. Because if I'm, like, at a doctor's office waiting to be called in, I can't go anywhere. So I can use the time scrolling on My phone or I can use it for something else. And it's time that you can use to do little tasks and sometimes if you have to wait a long time, large tasks that you might also otherwise struggle to do because there's no time to do it and you're just looking for, you know, oh, yeah, I really need to get to that. Or because it's kind of really boring and you don't want to do it. So it's like an opportunity. So I think of these times as like, if I'm waiting in a doctor's office, maybe I'll read an article I've got queued up, but I haven't had time to read. If I'm getting my car serviced or the oil changed, I'll literally bring my laptop and I'll update my financial details. If I'm at an airport waiting to board a flight, you know, that either two hours early, you know, where you're just like sitting around just waiting. Or if you're on the plane and yeah, I could like scroll and see if they have a movie I want to watch or I can get my phone, whatever. But I love to use that time to either, like, clean up my emails, just go through and delete all of the things I don't need to read that are just making that number of unread emails keep ticking up, up, up, up. Or one of my favorite things to do is to organize the photos on my phone and put them into folders and delete duplicates. I will not do that anytime. Except airports seem to be the time that I really embrace doing that. If you are sitting in carpool and you can't get out of the car, but you also aren't going to be moving for a while or you're pumping gas and you just have a minute or two, I love to use that time to kind of tidy up the car, throw trash out, that kind of thing. Like, I have like, little, like, cleaning wipes in my glove compartment and I'll just take them out and wipe down the dashboard and the armrests or, you know, whatever. And I'll throw the trash out if I'm at the gas station because I got to be there anyway. I got to wait for the car to finish filling up. So I'll just do that if I have a service person coming up that to the house. My example that happens, you know, a couple times a year is when I have the air conditioner or the H Vac serviced. They're going in and out. I don't feel Like, I can be out, you know, kind of in my office doing something, because they typically have questions, and I feel like I need to be available when they're done. I need to pay them. So I'm kind of hanging around. So I'll organize or clean things. Like, I'm great at cleaning, like the kitchen sink, or I'm organizing a drawer or a cabinet that keeps me close by. But I would never do it ordinarily. So it's time. I'm waiting for them to be done, but I'm getting things done I ordinarily wouldn't do. So these all magically feel easier during these wait times, which is why I call it magic time. So if this is something that you find is true for you, that starting is the hardest part for some of these things, when you're stuck waiting for something, think about it as a natural boundary being held, right? So if you're pumping gas, like, you literally have maybe two minutes. So what can I do in two minutes? I can clean the window. I can empty the trash. There's less pressure to do something perfectly. It's like, well, I can't clean the whole car, but I could wipe off this window that has fingerprints all over it. That's it, right? It. It keeps us out of the. Oh, I don't want to do it all. No, I only have a minute. I can just do this. That's magic time. It makes that task feel easier. So if you want to try this for yourself, I invite you to think about what small task could fit into this wait time. So you might even want to capture, like, a magic time list on your phone where you just start jotting down, like, things you can do when you find yourself with two to five or even more minutes, that it takes advantage of that wait time. You're not going to solve everything, but it can turn wait time into magic time. And magic time creates momentum. That's my tip for today. All right, now for my main topic. Gonna roll right through this today. I can feel it. And that is the hidden role of resistance with adhd. So my example for this comes from years ago, when my four kids were younger, and I would lay in bed when the alarm went off, and I would run all of the things like a mental to do list through my mind that I would have to do the minute I got up. And that would lead to me hitting the snooze, because I just thinking about all of those things had such strong resistance to starting that I would be immobilized. And the more I Hit the snooze, the harder it was to get up. And then the more I would beat myself up because I've already now wasted, you know, 20 or 30 minutes hitting the snooze button. I'm making my morning so much harder for myself. Why didn't I just get going, stop being lazy, get up. Like all of these things, I'd be running through and judging myself and telling myself instead of just asking, what is it about this that I'm resisting? Because resistance is information. It tells us what about a task is making it harder to meet for me or for you to do with adhd? Tasks require executive function skills. And those skills, remember, are often impacted by adhd. So it makes what other people might perceive and we might even look at objectively and say, well, that's a simple task. I should just be able to do it. But it makes those tasks not simple. It can actually make them really complicated. If not, it feel impossible to actually do. So remember, if you're going to do a task, you don't just need the time to do it. You need to be able to start the task, that task initiation. You need to be able to regulate your emotions so you don't get overwhelmed and you can maintain what you need to do to do it. You need to be able to plan and prioritize what you're going to do, how you're going to do it. You need to be able to shift your attention. So for me, like, from going from being in bed to starting the thing, instead of just shifting, instead of just focusing on all the things I still need to do and avoiding them, we need to manage our time, and we need to use our working memory in ways that don't drain us, right? So if I'm laying in bed and I'm just running through a list, my working memory is maxed out and I am overwhelmed. So when I was in bed, immobilized, I can now look back at that and see I was not able to start that task initiation because my working memory was so taxed. So I just became absolutely overwhelmed. And laying in bed longer didn't help me. It didn't make it easier. I would lay there and, like, the tasks weren't hard, right? So, like, even now, like, objectively, I can look at it and say, okay, like, I needed to get up, I needed to go brush my teeth, wash my face, do my hair, put on my makeup, get dressed, get the kids up, walk the dogs. You know, all of the things that you need to do in the morning and I was so overwhelmed with the amount of decisions. And often it really was the, what am I going to wear today? What's the weather? All of the decisions that went into that would keep me kind of laying there the longest. And because I would lay there thinking all of these things and how long the list was, I literally was completely overwhelmed before I even started. I didn't even get out of bed and I was exhausted. My energy for the day was gone. Dr. Russell Barkley says, I love this. I'm going to read this. He says ADHD is less about knowing what to do and more about the difficulty of doing what you know at the right time. Gosh, I wish I'd known this back then. Research shows that ADHD brains can perceive effort as disproportionately costly. So, meaning we'll perceive the amount of effort something's going to take as taking more energy, more effort, more time than it is in reality going to take. And it makes low interest tasks feel much harder than they are. Remember that boredom factor. Boredom is like kryptonite to our brain. So this can make resistance feel physical. So this is one of those hidden costs of resistance. It feels heavy, it feels foggy, it makes it feel impossible to start. I remember when I was literally, this is why my example is always the laying in bed. It's so visceral for me. I could put myself right there. I can remember the position I was in. I can remember hitting the snooze. I can remember the whole thing. And I would literally daydream about, when I was a kid, I would watch reruns of the Jetsons cartoon and the mom, Jane Jetson, would get up in the morning. She would just get out of her bed and stand on, like a moving treadmill. That would take her through her bathroom where it would, like, she'd sit down, it would, like, whirl her around and brush her teeth and wash her face and fix her hair and do her makeup. And then she'd stand up and it would take her through the closet and it would dress her and put on her shoes and she would come out and she was ready for the day. And then she would go to the. I forget what their breakfast food machine was called, but she'd punch in what she wanted and it would bring it out in this little pill form and she would just swallow it. And that was breakfast. And I thought, that's it. That is what I need. Why can't someone or even I invent that? Because that's what I need. That's the magical morning that would get me from point A to point B without exhausting and overwhelming myself. So, oh my gosh, I still. I still want it. I'm not lying. But let's define where hidden resistance comes from, because we often judge it instead of acknowledging what's creating that friction. Resistance creates friction, and it makes us pull back and resist doing the thing that we're trying to do. So maybe there's too many steps, right? So, like my morning routine, there's too many things for my head to hold on to, and I was expecting myself to get up and do them all. And thinking about that before I started didn't help. So it can be as simple as if your hamper has a lid on it, and opening, taking that lid off to put clothes in feels too much. Get rid of the lid and open bin, you could just throw things in is one less step that reduces the friction. Another hidden area of resistance is an unclear starting point. So this comes up a lot with my college students, where they'll have a project, a group effort, you know, something that they have to do that they have no idea what the first step is. And because they don't know where to start, they're immobilized and they resist it. So identifying the first step can get us through that resistance. If we feel emotional discomfort. So remember, if we're anticipating it's going to be stressful, it's going to be boring, we don't know how long it's going to take, or we don't know what the outcome will be, or maybe we anticipate there might be some conflict with what we're trying to do, or there might even be shame attached. So we might feel badly that we haven't done it yet, which doesn't help, and then we'll avoid it more and we'll take longer to do it. Anyone like this emotional, like, swirl is just awful. So acknowledging if you feel emotional discomfort, what is creating that resistance? If you're anticipating boredom, what would make it more interesting? If you're anticipating uncertainty, give yourself structure to frame it so that you know, okay, if the answer is no, this is my next step. If the. If it's going to take an unknown amount of time, let me make sure I have enough time so I'm not creating pressure that I'm going have to hang up. Like, I always think about this if I'm calling, like the cell phone company or the Internet company, and you never know how long it's going to take. So it creates a lot of resistance. So it might be okay. I'm going to do it when I have, like an open enough time. Keep them on speaker. I'm going to organize, you know, something I can stop instantly if they come back on, and it's not going to irritate the credit out of me or I'm not going to have to hang up before I get my answer. Maybe you have low energy or low capacity. Our brains will anticipate not having enough of that kind of cognitive fuel, so we'll resist things that exceed our capacity. So I always think of that as if what we're trying to do requires this much fuel and we have this much. We have to level that out and either lower the expectation or fire up our brain to meet what we're trying to do. There's no creating it and just wishing it away. We have to acknowledge, I don't have the fuel for this, so I'm going to make it smaller. I'm going to find a way to fire up and get more fuel in my brain so I can do this. So that kind of leads us to resistance busters. So how to work with our brain to lower resistance so we can get things started with more ease? Number one is going back to where I started, and it's naming or defining the friction. So what am I resisting? What is it that is creating that feeling of resistance? And then number two is to shrink the first step. So I think of this as making starting stupid, stupid small. Make it so small it's ridiculous so you can start. So for me, it might be just put it standing up. Like, literally stop thinking about all the things and just stand up. Get out of bed and stand up. That's it. Or it might be brush your teeth or, you know, whatever that that really small first action is that would work for you. Number three is lower the expectation. So what's the minimum version? So it might be, you know, shrinking it to. Instead of like a workout, I'm going to walk for two minutes. Or instead of I need to clean the kitchen, I'm going to put a dish in the dishwasher. I'm just going to put my coffee cup from the nightstand downstairs in the dishwasher. Call it, I'm done. Number four tip is to reduce decisions. Decision fatigue is draining. Create default routines where you can so you're not having to make the same small decisions over and over. So for my morning routine, I lowered my morning resistance by defining my breakfast. I did the same breakfast, and I, most of the time, eat the same breakfast every day. Still I just have oatmeal done. I put the clothes out the night before. I really, through my experimentation over the years learned that not having clothes pre decided creates enormous, like disproportionate resistance in the morning. So I will pick out my clothes the night before so I can just get up knowing I've already decided what I'm wearing and it's laid out and ready to go. It creates so much more ease. And then my fifth tip is to add external support. So again, going back to my getting out of bed example, I set an alarm in my bathroom that will go off very loudly and irritate others in my home. So it creates an absolute fierce prompt that I'm getting up and getting out of bed before it goes off. You might want to consider checklists or habit trackers that you can see like visual prompts like putting things in front of the door or on the door, or maybe even implementing an accountability partner or a body double to externally support you to do the thing you're trying to do. The key here really is don't judge the resistance. Ask yourself where it's coming from. Get curious. If you can ID the friction, you can reduce it and it makes starting and following through much more ADHD friendly. All right, that's it for resistance. Now let's go to our final segment. And that is the book of the week. And it is Whistler I in hatchet. And I'm aware my nails look horrid. I still have my nails from vacation and I've picked them all. I've broken a couple of nails. I've picked them all off. They're driving me crazy, but I'm not letting it stop me. I'm usually like, like really sensitive to my nails looking like this, but I decided not to let it stop me today. Okay, back to my review. All right, so from the COVID of Whistler, I went into this thinking it was a book about a horse named Whistler, which technically there is a horse named Whistler that is mentioned. But I was a little disappointed that it wasn't fully about a horse named Whistler. But Ann Pachette so expertly woven her story within the story around Whistler by that by the end, the title felt completely spot on. So it's a small story within the story, but where it shows up and how it shows up was perfect. So the significance of the horse becomes surprisingly powerful, adding depth and meaning in a way that Whistler is still lingering in my mind after I finished reading the book. So I give this a 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed it. If you're looking for a summer read, this might be right up your alley. If you like, it's not all about horses. If you're not in love with horses, it's a. It's a short bit about horses, but it's powerful. So there's my review. And now, finally, my quote of the week. And this is from somebody's name who I'm going to butcher. And I apologize. I don't know if this person's alive or dead. I don't know who it is. So there. I'm highlighting my. My ignorance on this. But it's France. France. See? Can't even say the first name. It's French, I can tell you that. Franchos de la Roche. Falcon. Yeah, that was awful. All right. Francis Franchise. I can't say his name. I'm. Oh, my gosh. Okay, I'm just gonna say what he said. He said, no persons are more frequently wrong than those who not. Who will not admit when they are wrong. Wow, that's deep thoughts there. All right, that's it for this episode 247. As with everything I share, please take what works for you. Leave the rest behind. Do not hold on to what does not serve you. If there was something that you try from this episode or you have an additional tip to reduce hidden resistance, this is episode 247. Please post it in the comments. And until next time, tally ho.