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Hi and welcome to ADHD Friendly. I am Patti. I'm an executive function and ADHD coach. And every day I look for ways to create more ease in my life for my brain. And I bring what I find here to share them with you in the hopes that they might do the same for you. This is episode 243, and today I'm going to kick us off with a celebration about how I supported my future self or am supporting my future self. I also have a tip on how to get off the phone. So if you're somebody that struggles on phone calls of figuring a way off of a phone call, if somebody's talking and you're going kind of longer in the call than you wanted to, got a tip for that. And then we'll dive into our main topic, which is why future you feels invisible when we have ADHD brain. So that is our topic and this is the start. Let's go. All right. As always, I'm starting with a celebration and it is tied to our main topic today. And what I'm celebrating is that with my upcoming vacation, I am really leaning into my tools to support my future self in planning so that I'm able to relax and feel confident and grounded. Kind of, you know, those anchors are holding me in place where I need them to. And specifically what I did was I searched for travel packing lists and just to see, like, is there something I should be bringing that I'm not thinking about because we're going to Ireland. And one of the things that I found when I searched for that and you know, a lot of the things already on my list, but one of the things specifically that I did not was waterproof shoes. Rains a lot in Ireland. Apparently, you know, a lot of our time is going to be outdoors. So I had a good, I already have a good rain jacket, but I don't have waterproof shoes or at least not waterproof shoes I could walk around on a, you know, eight to ten hour tour all day and be comfortable in. So, you know, I have like rain boots but not like walking shoes that are waterproof. So I ordered a pair and ended up having to go exchange and try on different ones, but found the most comfortable pair and I've been wearing them each day for my walk to break them in and they're so comfortable. I'm so excited that I don't have to worry about my feet getting wet and being miserable the rest of the day. Something else might create an issue, but it won't be wet feet. So that's A a huge future self win. And my second celebration tied to the same future self support is that I took the itinerary that my husband and I have been creating, that I've been whiteboarding and putting into, like, all the details, and then I put it my weekly planner so I could see where we're going to be when. But my husband wanted a more visual itinerary, not my handwritten on my calendar planner. So I typed it all up and created a visual one for him that I now am noticing I really like. So I printed out physical copies and I took a screenshot and saved it in my photo so that if something happens and we know aren't able to, either we lose it or it gets wet because it's raining. I have a copy in my phone and I sent one to him so he has a copy as well. And I'm just feeling like I'm really thinking about my future self from focusing on it this month, this past month. And it's really helping me to feel like I'm better prepared for my vacation. So that's a huge win for me. What I purchased this week, I purchase the shoes that I mentioned, and I purchased food for the trip. So we're packing a lot of, like, Clif bars and, like, I bought a thing of raw nuts. I'm going to put in individual little snack bags so that we can just grab them instead of spending a bunch of money on or, you know, struggling to look for things. Having to eat something I don't really want because I'm starving instead of having something that I can just kind of munch on to hold me over until we can, you know, find what we actually want to eat. So that's always been an issue for me. So I've really mindfully purchased things that will help that we can just pack in our luggage and take with us. All right, so now for my tip. I don't have a product for the week, but I do have a tip, and that's how to set up a short call. So calling this the short call setup. So if you are having a hard time or you notice, like, when you get on a phone call with certain people, you have a hard time getting off of it, that can create, I know for me, a lot of resistance to get on the call in the first place. If I feel like, all right, I haven't talked to them, I'd like to talk to them, but I don't want to be talking for an hour or more because as much as I enjoy it in the moment. It's doesn't support my future self if it takes away time that I needed to do something else. So instead of avoiding those calls, I've tried to think of ways to support myself to get off the call. And for me, yep, my dogs are with me, having a good time playing. I sometimes support myself by starting the call off with a little, I call them back pocket phrases. Just little things that I can say to plant that seed that I'm going to need to get off the call at a certain time or after a certain amount of time. And it makes it so much easier to circle back to that if I say it at the top of the call instead of looking for a place to interject it once the call gets going. At least that's been my pattern. And I know from a lot of the work I've done with clients over the years it is not something that I am alone in. So if that's something that you struggle with, my tip is to start the call with a boundary to make it easier to get off the call. So your boundary is really that back pocket phrase. So I want to share a few phrases. Again, as with anything I share, take what works for you, leave the rest behind. It's just a place to explore what might work for you and to go from there. So my examples include if I'm answering or calling someone, I might just say, hey, I'm between tasks, but I had 10 minutes and I wanted to call you back. So it's letting them know that I really wanted to connect, but I have a limit, limited amount of time. I might say I have a hard stop, like, oh, gosh, I'm so glad that you caught me. But I have a hard stop at, you know, this time, letting them know I'm going to have to go. I only have a few minutes today, but I'm glad that we have a few minutes to catch up. So just kind of planting that seed that I can't talk for an undetermined amount of time. I have an opportunity to talk, but it's for a set amount of time. So during the conversation, if you didn't start with that phrase or you did, but now you realize you've lost track of time or you're reaching the point where you want to circle back and remind them that you do have a hard stop and you need to get off the call, you might say, I should really wrap this up in a few minutes. Is there anything we haven't talked about or, you know, I like to always ask, like, you know, how are the rest of the family, the kids, that kind of thing. Or I might say I want to be mindful of my time and I'm going to have to end in a couple of minutes, so just don't want to have to hang up abruptly is something that I'll say. Or if you need to end and they aren't acting like they're really wanting to end the conversation. Some things that you might say are, I'm so glad that we connected. Let's continue another time. So I'm literally looking for another time to schedule a call so that it creates that ease. So I'll literally get my calendar out and say, hey, I'm free next month on Monday evening. Are you free around seven? Right. So we're getting it on the calendar. And that can feel very intentional and structured to help. It helps me transition off of the call. Or I might say, it was so good to catch up. So it's kind of like prompting like, hey, you know, like, it's getting late, but oh my gosh, it was so great to catch up with you. Or I might say, hey, I do have to hop off and get back to work. But this was great, you know, to have a few minutes to catch up. If you still have a sense of resistance that you might say it and try it, but you'll have a hard time following through. I'll even use an external alarm where I'll say, hey, I have a hard stop. In 20 minutes you're going to hear my alarm go off. Because when I talk to you, I lose all track of time and I want to enjoy our conversation but not be late for the next thing. So that's what, you know, the alarm is going to go off to remind me that I need to wrap it up. And so that's letting them know what it is and so that when they hear it, we're both aware of what that means and it makes it easier to transition. Or I might have. This comes up for a lot of us naturally, but, you know, the phone is getting ready to die or my AirPods are getting ready to die. So I want to wrap up before they do so that we're not just suddenly, like the conversation just ends in the middle of a sentence. My life Hack calendar that gives me a tip every day had this suggestion. It's a little, I hate to say aggressive, but that's how it feels to me. But I'm sharing it in case it would work in certain circumstances with certain people for you. And that was to say they said if you're stuck on an annoying call with someone, this would have been great for grandmother when she was still alive because she had a tendency to go down a really negative loop. Although she wouldn't have understand that this understood this phrase, I don't think. But to switch to airplane mode because it gives the person. If you're talking on a cell phone, the message says call failed instead of call ended. So it. It looks as though your phone either died or you went out of a service area instead of you hung up on them. So I thought that's an interesting way to approach it that I would not have thought of. So I'm just sharing it in case that might work for you. So the real takeaway here is without setting up an exit ramp for calls that we tend to get stuck on or lose time in, it can create a barrier to continuing to connect with people who we may want to or need to have those calls with in order to. You know, for me, like I have certain people I've had to talk to over my life that I didn't love talking to them, but they were kind of like the. The gateway to somebody I needed to get to to find out how they were doing and that kind of thing. So conversations can stretch, they can drain our energy or unravel the rest of the day. So it's just a tip to help you to manage that with a bit more ease. If you try something out to help you set up a short call. Love to hear how it goes. This is episode 243243. All right, now on to our main topic. And that is why future you feels so invisible when you have an ADHD brain. So my connection to this comes from my daily future self challenge. So our future self is anytime we it's not now, it can be myself five minutes from now, it can be myself later today, tonight, tomorrow, all the way into as I'm planning my vacation, right? So I'm kind of like stretching my my future self when I work with students. It's how do we help you see that your decision today will impact your grade for this semester and then potentially your ability to reach your goal while you're in school when right now. Like the party tonight feels so much more sparkly than studying for an exam, but that the grade will impact you in some way. But it's so disconnected. It's so future you impact that it's hard to really stay tethered to it. So for me, I've really struggled more recently with if I eat breakfast, I intermittent Fast. And what that means is I try to eat within. For me, it's usually like a seven hour window. So if I eat breakfast at 6am, I'm finishing eating for the day at 1pm with my lunch. And my struggle comes with committing not to eat anything to snack on before I go to bed so that I'm not eating again till the next morning for breakfast. But I can get into these patterns where I'm like, okay, I'll just have this one little thing. Even though I promised myself in the morning I wouldn't do it. The reality is if I get hungry later on I can talk myself into, oh, it's just blank, it's just this. Or I'm just gonna have, you know, a few, or I know I'm hungry because I ate earlier today and I finished up eating earlier. I maybe I didn't eat as much as I should have to sustain myself. So I'm gonna need to eat something else. I'll explain it and rationalize it. If this kind of thing feels familiar to you, that's an example of our future self being invisible. We make plans now for our not now self. And right now that feels like absolutely there's no way that's not going to happen, I'm going to do it. But our future self arrives at that time that we planned for without the tools and the capacity to navigate it successfully. So some other examples include maybe you promise that you'll get to bed early to be ready for a big test or meeting the next morning and then you stay up late despite knowing you're going to pay for it in the morning. It's that, yeah, you know what, my future self will deal with it. We're disconnected from the reality of what that's going to feel like. We push it to our future self because it feels like that's a different person and that other person will arrive with more energy and more motivation and they'll figure it out. We've got great optimism for that future self to be able to handle something that our immediate now self cannot do or doesn't feel like doing. You might also decide that this is the last time you're going to put off refilling your prescription. So that gets another example. Like you struggle to get it filled and when you get it, you're like, oh my gosh, I am so glad. Now I've got like a whole bottle of my medicine. I'm not going to do that again again. In the moment feels so absolute. But as the month goes on and the, the Prescription amount in your bottle gets lower and lower, you might find yourself repeating those patterns. And again, it ties to that feeling disconnected, like your future self is invisible and a separate person from you. This is literally our now, not now, brain. It's how we're wired. So when you think about now, it's literally how you're feeling right now. So it's why a lot of times you'll. You'll hear, don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry, because if you're hungry, everything ends up in the cart. It's like, oh, my gosh, well, yeah, I would love to have that. And then you're ending up when you're not hungry anymore, like, why did I buy all this food? I have all of this stuff. I couldn't even eat this much food before it goes bad. I always think of it of my. When my kids were younger, they would not want to pack a lunch or wear a jacket when it was cold outside because they weren't cold or they weren't hungry. They just had breakfast and they were like, you know, I'll be good. I'll be fine. And so they wouldn't bring a jacket or they wouldn't pack a lunch. But then when lunchtime came around or when recess came around and they were supposed to, you know, play outside, they didn't have their lunch or they didn't have a jacket, but they didn't learn from this pattern. It was really something for me that I learned when I did my ADHD coach training. That is really one of those kind of tells of an adhd. Brain is repeating the same pattern despite evidence that it's not working. So it's like, okay, well, next morning, you're not hungry again, you had breakfast, so it doesn't feel urgent to pack a lunch. So you're also not cold, so you're not taking a jacket. And it just goes on and on. So future events don't feel emotional, emotionally real until they become urgent. So when you're hungry, it's like, well, yeah, I'm gonna pack a lunch, or, yeah, now I'm gonna have to buy a lunch because I am hungry. Dr. Russell Barkley calls ADHD less a disorder of knowing what to do and more a disorder of doing what we know. So we know what we need to do, but we're not doing it. That's really the bottom line. We know what we need to do. We know what happens if we don't do it. We know the consequence, and we still don't do it. That's one of the things that we'll judge ourselves for the most. And other people will look at us and say, well, why didn't you just blank. It's that connection to our now, not now self. That can really be a big reason why we struggle in this area. ADHD is not a disorder of knowledge. It's a disorder of performance. It's doing the things we need to do because we know we need to do them, but actually implementing them. And that really comes back to ADHD impacting our executive function skills. So remember, when you think about time management, we struggle to feel the passage of time. Just like if you're on that phone call and it's suddenly an hour later and you're like, what happened? I always say, like, my. My biggest challenges on some phone calls are that I get so lost in the moment. It's so sparkly and firing on my brain. I don't want to hang up anymore. Like, everything else feels less important. I want to keep going with how I'm feeling right now, and I'll that longer conversation with my future self. Right. We also struggle with that immediate stimulation. It's that immediate reward overpowers the distant reward. So the thing that we'll get for supporting our future self is often too far away. We're supporting ourselves now because that delayed reward creates a challenge for our brain. Remember, it's not now focused on now. It also impacts our working memory. So that comes in with our future plans disappearing if they aren't visible. So it's that whole out of sight, out of mind. If you can't easily see what you're planning to do and what you're intending, we'll just flat out have it fall off our radar. It's like, oh my gosh, I totally forgot that I was intending to do that. So it really does come down to your future self feeling invisible. What do we do about that? Well, part of it is shifting our awareness to understanding that our brain is supporting us by pushing things to our future self. And by that I mean, if something feels like you're anticipating, it's going to be boring. Remember, boredom is like kryptonite to our brain. So your brain will do what it can to protect you from experiencing that. So it's going to look for the most sparkly thing in the moment to do and put off that boring thing. It's that I can't do that right now. Let me get this going that feels like I can do it. So we go to the thing that's right in front of us. And then of course, that shift creates relief for our brain. So it's now like, okay, this is good. Instead of that, I'm going to have to tolerate this tedious, boring thing. The thing that we might go to may not be very productive though. So if you're trying to do something like fold the laundry or do the dishes or my examples are always houseworks, I find it so mind numbly boring. You might find yourself like without even thinking about it, holding your phone and scrolling or turning on the television and getting distracted with something. Or maybe you're doing something productive, but you're doing it to avoid the thing that you really should be doing and need to be doing, but you can't tolerate doing. You might also find yourself impulsively spending because remember, these things are more sparkly and they fire up your brain, activating that reward center. And the boring, tedious thing isn't going to do that. So it's literally a way to get away from that discomfort. But again, it's an urgency trap. It makes us, what we're doing right now feel like the most urgent thing. We need to be able to make the future feel urgent enough to be able to connect to it. That's a, that's a big statement. So I want you to think about like, how do you make the future feel urgent, especially if it's further out. So here's a few what I call future you strategies. You have to make your future self visible. So when I started planning our vacation, six weeks out, in terms of what are we going to do on what days? I had to create. That's why I got my giant dry erase board out and I had to create a calendar where I could see. What time do we get in? Where are we physically? How long will that take? How many days are we doing activities in a row? Let's build in an easy light day in here so that we're not overwhelmed. Like literally seeing what we were planning so we could keep up with that working memory, that prioritizing. How much energy are we going to have if we did a 10 hour tour this day, maybe we'll do a light day the next day. Or how much is this? And how does that fit into our budget to help us to see the future and make it concrete so we could plan it. You might use sticky notes or visual timelines to help you to see your future self. When I work with college students, I really strongly encourage them to work with a semester calendar so they can see not only big project deadlines, end of the semester, but where's their three day weekend? Like where are the little breaks that your brain can navigate towards and know like oh, okay, like there's fall break, so I just have like two more weeks and then I get a longer weekend or this is the parents weekend, so my parents are going to come visit. It just helps you to see what's coming up. Both to create urgency for due dates and deadlines, but also for sparkly things to help you keep moving forward the second time. The second tip I should say is to shrink the time horizon. So if you're trying to set a goal for yourself a year from now, that might be a really stretch long, like a big time horizon stretch. So maybe shrink it a little bit for big goals or big projects and focus on what can I do today, what can I do this afternoon? Or what can I, what's like one tiny step I can take? If this is my ultimate goal, what's one thing I can do today? So we're focusing on the short term to help future you. So it's if I have 10 minutes every day to do do something towards this bigger goal, what is it and how can I track it and see it? So I'm seeing that time horizon. The third tip is to reduce friction for future you. So anything that we're trying to build into a routine and do has to be sustainable. If you have the the feeling of resistance when you go to do something that you're asking yourself to do repeatedly, it is a red flag to pay attention to. So simple things that can reduce friction are like laying out the clothes the night before to help it make a little bit more ease in getting up and getting going in the morning. Maybe you prep your medication once a week so that it's ready to go and you just are dealing with it once a week to set it out and have it ready. Instead of every day having to open up and try to remember if you took it or not, whatever would get in the way. It could be setting up automatic payments or creating prompts for the day and time you need to do something. So for me, I have calendar reminders to water my plants on Wednesdays and Sundays. Even though it's a routine, that prompt helps to make sure I don't forget and I get to check it off. So it's a little dopamine reward for doing it. My fifth tip is to focus on self compassion. Notice where you are now and meet yourself there. Don't beat yourself up for not being where ideally you'd like to be. Meet your expectations so that you can be aware of your patterns, tweak what you would need to work better, and celebrate those wins as you build to where you're trying to ultimately get. So you might ask yourself, what's one thing I can do to make following through easier? Or what tends to be invisible until it becomes urgent? Look for those patterns that get in your way over time. Because if the future is invisible, the ADHD brain treats it like it doesn't exist. And future ADHD you often depends on making the future easier to see and feel. When I was preparing for this. If you're still hanging out and listening to this topic, I encourage you. If you're not on YouTube, go to YouTube to see this. Because I used AI to create an image that I because I had this picture as I was mapping out what I would talk about in this episode of a cutout of myself on the wall. Like a picture that I put post it notes. It would be future me representation and I would put post it notes. Every time I delayed a task, I would write it on a post it note and stick it on my future self cutout to see visually how much I was pushing to that future self so I could feel the impact more concretely. And so I asked AI and I apologize if you. My daughter was like, I cannot believe you're making it an image with AI. Sorry, I don't draw. So it is what it is. But I created this and it just made me laugh because when I saw it I was like, that's exactly what I think about. And again, it's a visual. You can just have a small little stick drawing on a piece of paper that you stick post its with some visual way to connect when you make a decision to push something from today to your future self, to remember what the things are, but also to see how many things are you putting on your future self to help create that awareness and that connection to the impact on future you. All right, that was a big one. Okay, let's wrap this up. Finally, I have my book of the week. It is an older book. I think this came out in 2015, but I learned that it's being turned into a movie. It's coming out in February of 2027. It's the Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. And this is historical fiction. It tells the story of two French sisters who are fighting for survival and freedom during the German occupation in World War II. I read this book five or six years ago, but when I heard it was in production with the actors playing the two sisters from the story are Dakota and Elle Fanning, of course, sisters in real life. I had to read it again and I didn't remember all the details. So it was really fun to dive back into this and I gave it 4 out of 5 stars. Really enjoyed it even on the second read and highly recommend it. So if you haven't read it yet, it's a really fascinating book about World War II in France. And if you have read it, read it. But you want to dive back in before the movie comes out in February. Just a reminder. It's a good one. All right, finally, my quote from the week. And this is from the Nightingale and the quote is love has to be stronger than hate or there is no future for us. That's it. All right. Have a good rest of your day week. And if you have some ways that you support your future self that you would like to share, celebrate, we all learn from each other. Would love to hear it. This is episode 243. Until next time. Tally ho.