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Everyone deserves to be connected. T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together, bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built they leave out Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you. Bigger network. The combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits credit Stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.
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Welcome to Hacking youg adhd. I'm your host William Curb, and I have adhd. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with with your ADHD brain. Hey team. This week we're talking about coping, which is our ability to help ourselves through stressful situations with our thoughts and behaviors. And more specifically though, we're going to be talking about how we can work on coping with our ADHD and the stressful situations that it creates. When we're coping with something, we're just trying to figure our way through a tough situation, and when we're trying to cope with our adhd, it's often less about our emotional response although that is important too. But more so how we're using our problem solving skills to alleviate some of our ADHD mishaps. If you'd like to follow along on the Show Notes page, you can find that@hackingyouradhd.com Copen alright, keep on listening to find out how you can cope with all the bad dad jokes I keep coming up with. When we're coping with something, we're finding a way to deal with an adverse situation. Or more generally put we're finding our way through when things get tough. The idea is that our normal or typical behavior isn't enough for the situation. We need something that's different than what we usually do. Coping skills are the thoughts and behaviors that help us manage these situations. While there is no universally agreed upon classification for coping strategies, they can be broken down into four subcategories problem focused, emotion focused, support seeking and meaning making Coping Skills but these categories of coping skills aren't that important because often we're going to be implementing numerous strategies at the same time. When we're trying to get out the door on time, we don't just put our keys in the basket by the door and call it good. We also have alarms and other means to help get us going when we need to go. Additionally, we can think about coping in terms of reactive and proactive strategies. Most coping skills tend to be reactive, that is that we receive a stressor and then we have to react to whatever's happening. Proactive strategies are things we do in anticipation of those future stressors and actually that's what we're going to be focusing on when we're talking about coping with adhd. A lot of the stressors that come from ADHD are somewhat predictable. So what we can do is work on coping strategies that are going to help us mitigate the stress we get from our ADHD life. A good example would be adding an event to our calendar 15 minutes before we actually need to leave. By creating that extra 15 minute buffer, we're hoping to reduce the stress we'd feel when it comes time to leave and we realize we don't actually have all our stuff together yet, we're proactively giving ourselves extra time to get ready. And this isn't to say this isn't without problems. I've definitely added something to my calendar early, forgotten that I added the extra time, then day of, planned to leave early so that I'd be there on time and then left extra early just in case and then arrived an hour early for an appointment and Then still ended up being late because I went to get coffee and lost track of time while I was doing that. Whoops. And while we're talking about these types of coping strategies, it's also important to acknowledge that we can have unhealthy maladaptive coping strategies. Remember, a coping strategy is simply a way that we are attempting to lower our stress levels in the moment. For a lot of people, that might be something like substance abuse or impulsive spending. With adhd, it can be really easy for us to turn to these maladaptive strategies while we're looking for that quick hit of dopamine to get us back on track. And sometimes doing that small thing might get your head in the right place and you're going to be okay. If having that cookie is going to help motivate me to start my next task, well, by all means, let's have that cookie. The issue comes from the longer term outcomes here. Yes, maladaptive coping strategies are going to lower our stress in the moment, but over time, they often increase our stress levels. One common maladaptive strategy for those of us with ADHD is using self defeating humor, where we're disparaging ourselves. No one else is going to be able to make fun of how disorganized I am if I'm the one doing it first. But the long term effects of self defeating humor often outweigh the short term relief as we internalize these negative beliefs about ourselves. It's not good. And I know because self defeating humor is one of my most common coping strategies. It's also easy to embrace because you're making people laugh and hey, I'm getting that quick hit of dopamine from being the funny guy. But again, it's about the long term effects here. And research has shown that when we internalize these beliefs, we're just reinforcing those existing stressors. Now, what we're really interested in here though, is how we can create ADHD coping skills. That is skills that we can use to overcome our difficulties with adhd. And really, that's what this podcast is mostly about. Most episodes cover various coping skills that we can use. One of the ideas that I keep returning to is that we've got to work with our brain and that idea in itself is a coping skill because we're reframing how we want to do things. What we're looking to do is create skills that work for us to help us get stuff done. Of course, one of the key things we need to identify when creating coping skills is figuring out where we're not coping well. One of the issues I often have is the sheer amount of clutter that seems to appear from the aether around my space. I mean, really, where is this stuff coming from? Well, obviously it's me, and specifically it's from me putting stuff down without thinking about it. And that often comes from the fact that when I don't know where to put something down, right in front of me usually seems like a pretty good place. One of the best skills I've adapted here is making use of the vertical space and hanging stuff up around my house. Having hooks for specific objects is a great way to help me keep my space organized. Typically when we're storing stuff on a desk or counter or taking up space that would otherwise be used for an activity. But I don't really use my walls for anything. So off the bat, I'm making better use of that space. But I'm also saving myself from having to deal with moving stuff around when I want to do something else on my desk. Additionally, when I'm putting stuff on a desk, it's easy for me to just stack more and more stuff on top of what's already there. With my hooks, there are only so many things that can go in that space. And usually what I'm doing is creating a specific space for something to get put away. When I'm done with my headphones, there's a place for them to go. When I take off my jacket, I have a place to put it. And even if I don't manage to put it there right away, when I do end up doing some cleaning, there's a place for me then to put those things. I'm not just trying to find a new one. And often right there, that is how a lot of clutter tends to develop. We don't have a specific place to put things, so they go wherever is easiest, but then they have to get moved around because we also need that space for other things. Oh, and one additional benefit of having stuff on hooks is that they're still out in the open, so I don't have to worry about these things becoming out of sight, out of mind. I can still see all the stuff I need while it is technically put away. And this is how we want to look at our ADHD coping skills. We're looking at those particular issues that we have with our adhd, and we're looking at the proactive things that we can do to help mitigate that future stress that would manifest had we done nothing. And we also want to acknowledge that we probably have a lot of coping skills that we already use, but we just look at them as how we do things. Maybe we use hooks and hang up a lot of our stuff already. We look for some of the things that we already do. We can take those ideas and try to implement them in other places in our life. Maybe they won't transfer over one for one, but that just means we can try and modify them to fit in those spaces. Some other examples of ADHD coping skills I use are putting my toothbrush in the shower so I can brush my teeth when I'm in there. Using a brightly colored phone case so that it gets easier to spot it when I put it down someplace weird. Also, using Apple Airtags or the tiles on my keys makes it much easier to find things because I can just click a button and beep beep. I also try and keep multiple sets of things that I need in different places so I'm not just moving my pens from one desk to the counter to wherever I'm doing things. If I have multiple sets of pens, I can do them, or multiple sets of cleaning products to help curb impulsive shopping. I tend to just leave stuff in my shopping cart both online and in person. Just walk around the store with stuff in the cart and maybe 10 minutes later I go, hey, maybe I don't actually want that to buy that thing. This can also work by just taking pictures of things and then, you know, the next day looking at my photos being like, why did I think I wanted this? Audiobooks are a great coping skill. When I'm having trouble concentrating, they are great to help get me into that book. Also doing brain dumps where I just empty out my everything I'm thinking about. Great way to help with my writing and it's a great coping skill to actually getting started. And then there's also building more transition times into my calendar. I know it takes me longer to switch from one context to another, and I do better when I give myself time to make those transitions happen. But overall, my best skill for coping with ADHD is giving myself some slack. Often I'm tied up in what I'm supposed to be doing, a perfect vision of myself in my mind, just knocking one task after another, not needing to take breaks or ever getting off track. That perfect vision is fiction. They're not real, and honestly, they seem like they might be a bit boring. Trying to hold myself up to that standard of perfect has literally never helped me get anything extra done. Just gets me down on myself, which in turn makes me even less likely to finish what I'm working on. So giving myself space to accept that I'm not going to hit everything on my to do list or might not hit anything on the my to list has been incredibly beneficial. And as we wrap up here today, I also want to quickly talk about how we can think about the differences between good coping skills, bad ones, and maladaptive ones. And I do think that we need to make that distinction between a bad coping skill and a maladaptive one. The difference being that bad coping skills are simply ineffective, whereas maladaptive ones have adverse consequences. For example, it is incredibly common for us to use reminders to help us remember all those things we no we're going to forget to do. But often when we're getting those reminders, we're not getting them in moments in which we can do anything about them, and so they're rendered fairly ineffective. This doesn't make using this kind of reminder maladaptive, but it does mean it's not terribly effective at helping us cope with our adhd. Procrastination, on the other hand, can be incredibly helpful at reducing our stress levels in the moment, but over the long term it's going to cause an increase in our stressors as we have less and less time to complete our tasks. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether or not our strategy is actually solving our problem, and if not, we can then look to see how we can modify our strategies to actually work with that reminders. Example, we can look at ways that we can make reminders that are going to reach us at the right times. This might mean creating multiple reminders or it might be something else such as a context based system where we get our reminders, where we reach for a location or open some kind of application. The point is that we can often create better systems for ourselves that will help us better cope with our adhd. Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. Before you go though, let's do a quick rundown of today's top tips. 1. Coping is the thoughts and behaviors we use to get ourselves through tough situations. 2. It can be easy for us to fall into a maladaptive coping strategies like substance abuse or impulsive spending when we're feeling stressed. So it's important for us to make sure we're developing healthy coping strategies ahead of time. 3. When we're looking at ADHD coping skills, we're trying to proactively build up ways for us to mitigate some of the stress that can come from our difficulties with adhd. That's it. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. You can leave me a Message over@hackingradhd.com contact if you'd like to support the podcast. The best way is to share episodes with someone you think would get something out of it. Just click the Share button on your podcast player and send your bestie the link with something like Hey, I loved this episode of Hacking youg adhd. I'd bet you'd get a lot out of it too. Or you can support the show through my patreon@hackingyouradhd.com patreon and now for your moment of dad what do you call a DJ on Halloween? The Boogeyman. Foreign.
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Deserves to be connected T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Our networks are coming together bringing more T Mobile coverage all over the country. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20 versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is available in a US cellular store near you. Bigger network. The combination of T Mobiles and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the costs of options, benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third free line free via monthly bill credits. Credits stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.
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Instacart makes Grocery shopping easier and just because you're not doing the shopping yourself doesn't mean you don't care how it's done. With Instacart Shopper notes, you can get particular about what you want right in the app. Like rotisserie chicken that's extra crispy steak with marbling the Romans would have loved, and lettuce you'd actually pick yourself. Just leave a note for your shopper so they can get it right for you without having to ask. That way you can get groceries just how you like. Download the Instacart app and shop today.
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You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet. Like the Just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today@shopify.com win.