← Hacking Your ADHD
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- [00:00]
Azurewell Brand Voice
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- [00:33]
William Curb
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 your adhd brain hey team this week i'm talking with christine lane an accredited financial counselor with a master's degree in psychology christine has adhd herself and luckily for the rest of us her hyper fixation happens to be on personal finance she's the founder of mind over money where she focuses on the psychological hurdles that make traditional budgeting feel like a personal failure rather than just a glitch in your executive function in our conversation today we get into her four bucket banking system and why we need to stop making our money multitask we also explore the concept of using friction as a tool for impulse control and why simulating the physical loss of cash can be a great way to get your limbic system to play ball we also talk about the specific tools she uses to gamify spending why detailed categorization is often just a form of productive procrastination and how to set up set it and forget it systems that protect your bills from your worst impulses if you'd like to follow along in the show notes page you can find that at hackingyouradhd dot com two hundred ninety six alright keep on listening to find out how to trick your limbic system into actually liking your budget
- [02:03]
Podcast Host
budgeting is such a wild thing for adhd sometimes and so can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do and how that works with
- [02:12]
Christine Lane
adhd absolutely so i am an accredited financial counselor who completely accidentally has fallen into specializing with folks with adhd i come by this pretty honestly i have adhd myself but i actually have a bit of a hyper focus on finances so finance i was very lucky i had parents that taught me early on age appropriate i had the knowledge and i had the interest so i've always been really good with my money but other adhd type things keeping a neat environment managing time oh my god managing time can't do that to save my life i can have money to pay a bill but that doesn't mean i'm going to pay my bills on time thank god for my husband and for autopay because that part was not working out well for me but when i started my coaching business and i used to have a whole other career but then i was really interested in personal finance again hyper focus for me and i decided i wanted to help other people get good at this not because at the time i knew that it was specifically a problem for folks with adhd i just saw so many people that were in debt and couldn't save and were afraid of money and were bad with money and i said hey this is something i would love to do i always liked managing my own money i used to manage corporate budgets and then this was a career switch for me but i was very specific in what i wanted to do in addition to being an accredited financial counselor i have a master's degree in psychology always had an interest in psychology and i call my company mind over money because i really wanted to focus on the psychological aspects of managing money the math behind budgeting it's just not that hard right we can all pretty much do it we we're not falling not failing at our budgets because we can't do the math we're failing because we don't know what our internal mental structure should be and we don't have good external systems so when i started working with folks i took what i knew that worked for my brain in the things i was bad at right time management managing my physical space and i tried to apply how i would handle things thing like that if i was bad with money so i was always taking hey here are things i'm not good at i can't tell people who have who overspend just spend less just do it that doesn't work i can't just give them a budget that doesn't work right for for most people with adhd most of my clients were coming to me had already tried the major things out there they tried the budgeting apps they tried putting it in a spreadsheet they tried giving themselves certain limits and over and over again they would blow the limits not keep up with the spreadsheets and blame themselves right the guilt the shame around all of this why can't i just do better this shouldn't be too hard so i was taking what i knew about trying to manage my own brain and possibly more important what i knew just wouldn't work and trying to coach people the way i would want to be coached through something i was very bad at and because i knew certain things about how brains work for everybody but just sort of turned up a lot for adhd i was applying some of that so i don't want to get too technical but we can talk about the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system and how they interact to make life difficult for folks in the money world so one
- [05:36]
Podcast Host
thing i want to hit before we get too far into just so that because people won't know what it means is being an accredited financial counselor so
- [05:45]
Christine Lane
there are a variety of types of financial professionals most of the ones that you're going to find out there are financial planners they go by cfp registered investment advisors they are there to help people that have a lot of money turn it into more money right they're there to help you with your investments what accredited financial counselors do is we we we all do different things but my real focus is helping people get out of debt build savings learn to budget but again when i find is the problem isn't that people don't know how to write a budget they don't know how to stick to a budget so i'm helping people spend less save more i also do making sure you've got the right information so that you can invest you are making that you do have the financial knowledge to make smart decisions but particularly when it comes with the adhd clients information is great and they need that but even more than information they need really good systems and tools because you can give them all the great information but they won't follow through if they don't have the right systems and tools so creditor financial counselors are more focused on helping people get their finance together save get out of debt rather than making sure their investments make a lot of money okay
- [07:00]
Podcast Host
that makes a lot of sense too yeah and if people are like looking for these kind of things is there anything they should be so obviously we'd love everyone to go work with you but if they're not if there are there things they should watch out for when they're looking at financial advisors absolutely
- [07:13]
Christine Lane
absolutely if you want to find accredited financial counselors go to afcpe they are the organization that does the accreditation accreditation and they've got lists and they've got information about what afcs do all that
- [07:27]
Podcast Host
good stuff all right and then going into some of what you were talking about earlier i think yeah talking a little bit about so you're saying we really want to make sure that we're working in ways that work with our adhd brains because it's you know we you don't want to there's things that are just difficult for us so what are some of the things that you've noticed that are like really helpful for working with adhd in this field so
- [07:50]
Christine Lane
one of the things is so one of your previous guests talked about brain scaffolding and brain scaffolding can work in terms of time management task management it also works in terms of money management we're not going to do it just in our heads actually i can because it's my hyper focus but i can't do anything else that way so most people need really good systems and i'll just jump into a couple of the tools right away so we've probably tried the apps right a lot of people have tried modoc or mint or you need a budget i mean there's dave ramsey's every dollar there's a ton of them out there what happens with most folks with adhd when they use the apps is they set it up maybe it connects to the bank accounts maybe they categorize things and they turn it into a categorization exercise you know if you've heard the analogy of you're rearranging items in the spice rack instead of writing your report for work categorizing your spending is not a useful tool to keep you from overspending if you have adhd so what works better than you know just categorizing it in an app is making some friction around spending in ways you shouldn't spend so i've got a few tools that i use to jump straight into the tools when i'm working with clients first of all one of the hard things for folks with adhd and myself in particular any given task is where do i even start i know i need to write a budget i don't know what categories to use i don't know how much i should put in each category i'm going to give up this is the part where i think a coach especially one that understands adhd can help a lot some coaches really have a i'm going to help guide you to the right answer approach i ain't got no time for that i'm going to give you the system then we're going to we're going to test it and we're going to change it based on what you need but i'm going to say hey we're going to try this as your budget we're going to try it and we're going to see what works i am going to give you a number that is for general spending and i'm going to give you a tool we're going to gamify it right we probably all know dopamine is sometimes in short supply i mean i'm exaggerating the way dopamine works but we need dopamine to keep us on task gamification can really help with that the first simplest game that i have my clients do is i've given you a number that is your general spending number here are the types of things this encompasses you're going to get a calculator on your phone a second calculator or a dead simple envelope budgeting app let's say i've told you that you've got dollar eight hundred to spend for the month on general expenses first of all a month is too long for the adhd break you could spend that whole dollar eight hundred in the first week and now you got nothing well then you're going to pull out your credit card right because you're not going to go three weeks with no so i say right we're going to take this eight hundred dollars we're going to break it down into two hundred dollars a week so at the beginning of the week we're not even looking into your bank accounts yet we're just doing this on a calculator you're typing in dollar two hundred let's say friday you've got dollar two hundred then when you go spend money on anything that's in this general category in that moment you have to subtract it from the dollar two hundred so you've got two hundred dollars you spend fifty dollars going out to dinner now you have one hundred and fifty dollars in the moment is key because what typically happens the way money is set up today is we spend money on a credit card or even a debit card we get the thing and we get the card back our limbic system the emotional concrete part of our brain that has more control for folks who have adhd than folks who don't doesn't realize there was a trade off all it knows is it got a thing and getting things acquiring things is good for survival especially when it doesn't cost us anything that our limbic system can see so it wants to acquire and acquire and acquire that feels good something that feels good is good for survival your brain wanting to spend money is your brain working to keep you alive the limbic system the prefrontal cortex the neurocortex or the neocortex that's the part of the brain that can do abstractions that can tell time that knows actions today impact that impact our lives a month from now limbic system can't tell time it is never going to learn if you're using a credit card that you spent fifty dollars today and now your credit card bill is too high yes your preferred to cortex knows but your limbic system thinks the threat to its survival is not that you overspent but that you looked at the bill and so the feedback that that part of your brain is getting is all wrong for what's actually happening and your limbic system could adjust if it got proper inputs if it got the loss along with the gain but it doesn't get that particularly not when you're spending on a credit card and some extent not even when you're spending on a debit card so we take this simple calculator you've got dollar two hundred you subtract fifty in the moment in the moment your limbic system registered a loss okay i can see that along with the gain it is now balancing the input you start to feel protective of that money what i tell people is it doesn't usually when we're starting out it doesn't include your bills it does not include your groceries it doesn't include gas for your car there is nothing in this dollar two hundred a week that you can't live without until next friday so if you hit zero you have to stop spending until you get your next dollar two hundred infusion your limbic system is going to automatically start changing your priorities at an emotional level you're not going to have to use willpower so not the same way you're used to thinking about it not that i just gotta do better i gotta try harder because your limbic system is now pulling the cart in the same direction as your prefrontal cortex and the other aspect of gamifying it is if you end up with more money at the end of the week you can roll it over and now you have more and people get really excited about that so that is a tool that i have found just that one tool for some of my clients is mind blowingly game changing some clients need other tools some clients need a mix but that first one some people are like oh this is hard this is scary some people find it to be freedom right off the bat now i know what i can do i don't feel guilty when i spend it and it just completely because it's doing a bunch of things it's gamifying it's also creating a level of clarity it's also you're not trying to manage ten things at once because working memory being able to hold multiple things in your brain at once is in short supply for folks with adhd it's hard to keep a bunch of different competing priorities in our brains at once so simplifying it down to a very small amount it's like taking a baby step on a task so that's one of the tools that i
- [14:14]
Podcast Host
use yeah and i mean i see so many things like as you were saying because i mean i have seen the research that like separating your like the more you separate your money from like how you actually spend it like the using the plastic instead of cash kind of thing makes you how you view it not work quite as well but it's also very impractical for us to try and carry cash around all the time for everything well that's the
- [14:36]
Christine Lane
real challenge because i am pretty old i'm old enough to remember when my parents had to make it to the bank by three o' clock on friday to get cash to spend over the weekend because there were a lot of places that didn't take credit cards back in the seventies and eighties you couldn't use them at a grocery store you couldn't use them at a fast food restaurant and when i was really young atm's were just starting to become a thing they weren't on every corner and so if my parents couldn't get to the bank they like literally didn't have any money to spend other than the only reason i know this is a thing is i was a good little saver and they would come and borrow my allowance so that's the only reason i know this was actually happening that's where they would get the cash but if you think about that if you had cash in a wallet that was disappearing and you knew you weren't going to have anything to spend over the weekend you would automatically treat that cash as a limited resource and but it's not practical it is actually the most effective way it's so physical if it's so concrete but i don't have any of my clients do that because you can't buy anything off of amazon with cash there's now restaurants that don't take cash and actually cash feels different to people now it tends to feel like found money especially for younger folks who used to be using plastic their whole lives i have had young people tell me oh cash doesn't feel like real money to me el poder de whatsmart mas informacion en b whatsmart punto com
- [16:23]
Talkspace Brand Voice
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- [17:22]
Podcast Host
eighty that's interesting yeah and then it wouldn't feel like you're actually losing anything when you spend it and that's because
- [17:31]
Christine Lane
they're real money right their paychecks are in cash they're usually somebody gave them twenty bucks right and that's why they have cash it just feels very different so the point of the calculator is to mimic what cash does which is to get your brain to see that there's a loss in the moment the loss happens so that it is automatically making a comparison between the reward it got and the loss it withstood and it automatically sees that this is a limited resource and again there is a level of adjustment that happens it happens with emotion right like it feels tight but it doesn't need the doesn't need the same kind of top down willpower it's sort of a bottom up change
- [18:08]
Podcast Host
in behavior yeah absolutely because it's yeah it's getting you how you feel into your head rather than how you fit your head what your head's thinking to feel in your body yeah and i i totally see how this is such an important rewiring to do because yeah i mean i know how many times i've taken tried to not do purchases on my phone but you know sometimes i need to and i'm like this separation there is amazing especially when it's like you know the amazon one click
- [18:35]
Christine Lane
buy and i'm like they're they're the they are the champion of the frictionless spending right like that's go make it as easy as possible and what i try to do with some of my clients is let's add the friction back to spending so i've had clients where amazon is their problem like you got to delete the app and you got to take your credit card out of the app i want you to have to type it in i am kind of a fan of the amazon wish list sometimes what i tell my folks is you're going to have one day a month that is a buy day the day that you can buy stuff physical things you can shop if shopping is fun you could shop any day you want you just have to put it on an amazon wish list or take a picture of it if you like to shop in person and put it on your phone and then when you go back and look on your buy day if you haven't thought of that thing since you put it on that list you don't need that thing it hasn't crossed your mind of course impulsiveness goes along with adhd right so having a buy day is one way to rein in that impulsiveness i can first of all you get to give yourself permission to have the thing i can have this thing in three weeks assuming i still want it in three weeks and assuming there's still room in the budget that takes a little practice right that because as folks with adhd delayed gratification isn't really our thing this is sometimes called temporal discounting or delayed discounting something feels less worth it if we're not going to get it until the future right and of course impulse control is part of it so that is a broader category of tools i use with my clients is let's find ways to add friction to your spending and they can be different for different
- [20:14]
Podcast Host
people yeah i mean i always friction i love is a concept for like all things where you're like more friction for things you don't want to do less friction for things you want to do it is such a good good system for adhd being like oh yeah i recently just had a credit card that needed to get uh you know like in some fraud thing so i had to get like the new number and the number of things where i'm like oh i have to reenter this this is and i'm like there's certain things where it's just like oh this is perfect because this is good and there's other things like this is really inconvenient because i have to go downstairs and get my wallet and get this now but it is really really illustrating to me how important it is to or like how yeah how that friction works because you know if because it's easy to overcome the friction for things that are important when i was like oh i'm paying for groceries yeah that was i just walked downstairs and grabbed my credit i mean it was i didn't want to do it but there was no problem but had i been trying to buy something that was not necessary i would have been like i'm not going to go downstairs for that
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Christine Lane
right now right right exactly it gives you a pause to think also right the time between stimulus and response if you can drag that out a little bit you're giving your executive functioning a little more time to chime in yeah
- [21:24]
Podcast Host
and i love that approach for getting people to think about things because the impulsiveness often is really just like that one second of impulsiveness and if we go with it it's great but if we slow down at all we're like oh yeah i don't actually care right
- [21:38]
Christine Lane
exactly exactly so we're talking here about
- [21:41]
Podcast Host
like regular spending is this and then how do you like build in this budget idea then okay so what i
- [21:46]
Christine Lane
do when i'm working with my clients i usually i have a process the process is give me your fixed expenses your regular monthly bills these are your rent your subscriptions your cell phone bill all of the things that come in you're you're paying this bill on a date right it may not be the exact same amount utilities obviously could vary but these are sort of your fixed things they're not necessarily essential you could have twenty streaming services but they are fixed then we've got your variable expenses this is usually your groceries your gas and i say everything else i am not a huge fan of detailed categorizations and budgets i don't think there is any value to separating your eating out budget from your entertainment budget from your clothing budget no value in terms of actually changing behavior it can give you information but we adhd folks know that information is often not enough to get us to act and i think a lot of the apps really encourage detailed categorization which makes people think that categorizing is budgeting part of it but it doesn't change behavior so with variable this is where i usually go we're going to separate out groceries and gas and the rest is one big bucket this is eating out but it's also the occasional medical copay it's also something your kid needs for a report and we're going to manage that bucket as one but there's two more important buckets there's a bucket that most people forget about adhd even more than most and these are the periodic expenses that come up during the year that you know are coming but they don't come every month so this is back to school clothes for your kids money you spend around the holidays if you're doing landscaping on your house just in the summer if you're going on a vacation if you're going to need a new laptop anything that's say over one hundred bucks but doesn't come every month this is where adhd folks get into trouble everybody gets into trouble with this who hasn't done a budget but adhd in particular if you think about if i think about my approach to time and when i have to get somewhere i assume that everything's going to go perfectly that i will be able to find my keys and my phone when i'm leaving the house that traffic will not be bigger than average that i will find the parking space that i won't get lost right nothing unexpected is going to happen and of course when something unexpected happens i'm late the folks with adhd are particularly vulnerable to the unexpected because we're also not always great with foresight a lot of those things on this periodic list are not unexpected if we stop to think about it if you pay your car insurance once every six months you know that bill is coming if you pay for landscaping you know that's coming but we don't think about it so what we do that's a separate bucket and in fact i like to after the calculator my next big system is the four bucket banking system so we've got the fixed expenses the variable expenses and then we're setting aside money for these periodic expenses the overly simplistic way of thinking about it is add them all up divide by twelve and then create a bill where you're setting money aside for these things every month that is not sometimes these are called sinking funds i sometimes call them save to spend funds that is not the same as emergency savings and most people lump these together we have one savings account i don't have mental clarity on how much i'm going to need to spend on my vacation so versus an emergency that might come up and we tend to want money to multitask i've got five thousand dollars in savings that means i have five thousand for emergencies and also that i have five thousand for a vacation and you don't it's one or the other this this is my nemesis with time i always think oh i've got the whole weekend i'm going to do these ten things over the weekend and i never stop to count how much time each of these ten things are going to do they're going to take and there's no way i could get them all done because i never did the mental math how much time they're going to take most people don't do the mental don't do the math on how much all these things are going to cost me oh i already have four thousand dollars of planned expenses for this year they're going to have to come out of savings therefore i only have a one thousand dollars emergency fund most people don't think about that if they've even saving at all like a lot of times it's just all going on a credit card but even pretending we've got some savings so credit card so those are the types of things that wind up on a credit card or make other things wind up on a credit card so that's bucket number three bucket number four is a true emergency savings and a way to create mental clarity and to create some friction around not messing that up is to use the four bucket banking system so i like to have four banking accounts for now that sounds like i'm adding overhead and in the beginning it a little bit is but let me tell you why this works really well you've got an account that's purely for your bills thing you know your rent the things that you have to spend x amount of dollars on every month you set that up and to the extent to which you can everything goes on auto payment you don't put more money in that account than it needs to cover your bills so month in and month out money goes into that account to cover the bills it comes out more money comes in you don't touch that for anything else i don't care what comes up you can't touch that bank account because you know for sure if you do you're not going to be able to pay your bills it only has enough to pay the bills then you've got your variable expenses account those are the things that i put on the calculator the calculator is a short term thing for most people i say try do it for like four weeks maybe two months that's going to start to grind into your bones what dollar two hundred a week feels like but i don't expect anybody with adhd to log every purchase in the moment they make that purchase from now until eternity not going to happen you're going to fall off the wagon but what you can do from now until alternity is have a banking account with a debit card that you use for all those variable purchases most people that i think get paid like every two weeks so i like that to run on an every two week system you add just enough to it every two weeks to cover what you're allowed to spend on variable now you can watch that balance and it works almost like a gas gauge on your car you know when things are getting tighter you know it's going down going down going down and as you're spending it your brain is still getting that feedback not quite as in real time as when you're subtracting from the calculator but close enough once you've established some good habits you know now that does include groceries and gas because those are variable even though they're essential it's not just fun money but you're paying attention to the sort of the needle on that account it gets replenished every two weeks as you get good at this as you've learned on your calculator you're not going to overspend that account if you over if you run out of money on that account you're only going to have a couple of options you could take from bills but you know you're not going to be able to afford to pay a bill you could take from savings but you got to be honest with yourself this is not an emergency you can take from your future periodic expense but then you got to know you won't be able to afford the things you were saving for there so it creates real obvious or you can pull out a credit card but it's made it much more obvious that you're doing that again especially if you've practiced with the calculator for a while it's harder to kid yourself your prefrontal cortex your executive functioning has more power over your brain when it's got clear cut information so giving it that clear cut information gives it a fighting chance of impacting your behavior when it's got murkiness the immediate limbic system is always going to win so i have found those first two things so an example of client i worked with with adhd woman and a man a couple they had always they said you know voids kind of spend above our means but we were always able to be saved by a bonus or raise right we were making it work and then we bought a house they had two kids and you know how it is with adhd you can have a precarious system that's working until something stress tests it and then it all goes haywire so since they purchased the house and she became the stay at home mom their credit card debt was growing growing growing and her description was i don't understand money and i have adhd and i can't focus and he said i have a bit of an addictive personality not in the sense that he had you know true drug addiction or anything but he overeating impulsive spending he said that's my thing gave him the calculator as a starry place she she like i don't even know how to explain how fast it changed her thinking she's like oh my god i know what my limits are now i know exactly what to do this is easy this is fun i now feel like i'm contributing to the household again because i am managing the spending now his psychological psychology was a little bit different he was able to do it but for him it wasn't fun it was hard it felt a little bit like deprivation for him accountability was the stool that was really important to him and also being able to forecast and i'm kind of getting into another tool but people everybody sort of has people with everybody sort of has this they don't tend to think ahead when they're budgeting when they look at the apps they go oh i went over on my grocery bills oh well or oh i spent more on entertainment than i should have one of my clients said you know the apps are a lagging indicator of behavior i said you're right it shows you what you've done it doesn't help you think through where things are going so with him it was always using forecasting tools to say okay you overspent this month i'm going to type this in let's pretend you overspend by fifty dollars it's not that much but you overspend five hundred fifty dollars let's see what life looks like in a year here's how much your credit card debt has grown because again your limbic system he's dealing with the same limbic system issues it may not be adhd but it's i want immediate i want to feel good it's sometimes we talk about a lesser ability to tolerate a bad mood if you have adhd right so you want even more so than most people you want to fix the mood so he wants to fix the mood by spending but we could arm him with better forecasting better information again to give his prefrontal cortex a fighting chance of changing behavior like you could do this because you just think it's dollar fifty it's a little amount of money but here's what that's it's been dollar fifty a week for years which has given you this thirty thousand dollars of credit card debt and dollar zero in savings so if we forecast if we learn about thinking ahead then you will make better decisions and actually being able to visualize that forecasting is really important it can't be just abstract so for some folks like i said that calculator is a game changer for some folks the four bucket banking is the game changer so i had another client he had actually gone through bankruptcy severe adhd and with a little bit of autism thrown in for good measure he had just gone through bankruptcy he had zero dollars zero dollars he'd also just gone through divorce so he was like all right i've got no blank slate what do i do i always ask my clients what have you tried before i don't usually get the apps or just telling myself i'm going to do it he said i've tried the apps i've tried using only cash i've tried putting cash in a lockbox i've tried nothing nothing worked when i had him when i tried to get him to use the calculator he couldn't remember to use it i tried to teach him how to forecast he's like no i'm never going to do this i'm never going to sit down once a week voluntarily and type numbers into a spreadsheet and see where that ends up but the banking absolute game changer he used to always he made over one hundred thousand dollars and he always used to shop on payday because he groceries on payday because if he didn't buy his groceries on payday there wasn't going to be money to buy them later once we separate it out into buckets these are your bills you can't touch this for anything else this is variable also he was supposed to be doing a birthday road trip for his son that was coming up and he had christmas that was coming up he had these things that were really important to him and no nothing safe for emergencies no way could he save money for these things and within three months totally under control he's like i don't even you know the set it and forget it right like he was like this i can do this now he had a three thousand dollars emergency fund by the time we were done he had the money to do the road trip with his son and that one tool clicked in his brain in a way nothing else had because it created clarity and it created friction because he only has a debit card for one of those accounts right you cannot easily go take it from another account he's like i don't have to buy my groceries on payday anymore i feel safe that there's going to be money in that groceries account when i need to buy groceries yeah
- [33:46]
Podcast Host
i mean and what i'm really hearing is like we not relying on willpower and that kind of stuff oh god
- [33:52]
Christine Lane
no yeah you won't yeah it does
- [33:54]
Podcast Host
it doesn't work even though and it feels it sometimes feels like oh but if i was an adult i could do that but it's like we just have to accept reality like it's not that's not even what's important here what's
- [34:03]
William Curb
important is what works and what doesn't
- [34:04]
Christine Lane
yeah a million years ago when i when i was young and i had a credit card i had a debit card couldn't have a credit card bill to save my life just could could pay it on i mean i have the money i was i to me saving lights up my limbic system i love watching the numbers grow it's like watch it's like earning points on a video game so i'm not good with money because i'm disciplined i'm good with money because of the way it lights up my limbic system i'd also again an interest in it i found when i started using a credit card that even i started spending more than i wanted and also i kept getting late fees because i wasn't paying it on time and i was like you know what i can't make it work with a credit card i'm just going debit all the way forever and the and this is even before i think i even knew i had adhd because when i was young it wasn't even a phrase and people would hassle me but points but fraud but this and that i'm like yeah but they'll just pay it on time i'm like but i'm not gonna like i know what i will and won't do so i'm gonna work with who i actually am rather than your idealized version of who i wanna of who i should be i just i know how my brain works and i'm gonna work within that structure
- [35:07]
Podcast Host
yeah it sounds so important to me of because often yeah we were like oh if i just change this fundamental part of who i am then it'll all be fixed it's like ooh that's that's a big ask it's a big
- [35:19]
Christine Lane
ask and we probably all know from experience it doesn't work you know one of the things that i tell people generally just i even get into it on the first free call is to try to reduce the shape by explaining hey your brain is working exactly how it's supposed to work to keep you alive in an environment it did not ever evolve to be in spending money feels like it's just acquiring resources with no loss whatsoever to your limbic system so why wouldn't it do that i mean that's it's doing it's working exactly as it should in a world you weren't fit to be in so let's bend let's bend the external structures rather than trying to insist you're going to do it better and i do tell my clients i do have some willpower boosting exercise what i tell them is low first month might suck some people love the tools from day one and it's game changing from day one but i said you're changing habits you know with change there's discomfort so you need to be willing to tolerate the discomfort for a month what i usually say before i even take somebody on a client is i say how badly do you want this on a scale of one to ten and how hard are you willing to work for it on a scale of one to ten because we adhd folks want all kinds of things have you ever had somebody tell you well if you really wanted to
- [36:27]
Podcast Host
you would yeah it's one of the most like it feels so like defeating like like you you don't understand yeah
- [36:34]
Christine Lane
i do want it i don't want credit card debt i want savings right like like of course i want that and then you get the but if you just and i always say it's i mean and this is hard one from you know being old at this point that i have answers when people say well you could just and i'm like if i could just i would for me for you it's adjust for me it is absolutely not a just so what i usually am trying to tell my clients up front is your brain is working as it was meant to in an environment it was not meant to be in but the first month until we start getting the limbic system kicking in and getting excited because that's what happens for a lot of folks it's like oh my god it's more fun living on a budget i love this i'm less stressed i'm running more i'm getting along better with my partner i once had one woman who was dealing with dysfunctional families she was smoking a lot of weed she was a long haul driver she had a whole lot of things going on that were a problem with her life and she came to me and honestly didn't think she was gonna be able to do it i said look i i never want to be selling hope i only want to be selling results you've got so much going on i don't know like are you really willing to do the hard work and she said yes and i said are you sure because i don't want to just take your money and have you be worse off right like that's not the point of this and man if she didn't do it all and i gave her some of the willpower exercises which i take from a fabulous book by kelly negonigal called the willpower instinct she's the only client i ever had that went out and became bought the whole book and read the whole book and she said oh my god now i know why i'm so hasty in my choices she deleted amazon app every structural thing i had her put in place she put in place and within a year paid off thirty grand of credit card debt and had an emergency fund and had to take two weeks off of her job because it was a physical job and didn't miss any bills and she got health insurance which she originally had not wanted to pay for and she told me she told me at the end of three months i mean i checked in in a year to see how she was doing she's like this is the thing that changed everything for me i've changed who i'm hanging out with i'm not stressed so much anymore so i'm not smoking pot as much and that saved me money and it was just this whole upward spiral and it was because of her that i started asking the questions on the first call i ask how much do you want it and i usually get an eight nine or a ten and then i say how hard are you willing to work for it and by work for it i don't mean filling out a spreadsheet and categorizing and meeting with me i mean how much discomfort are you willing to endure for the first month to get where you want to go because you can't change without discomfort and we are all ready to take on that discomfort sometimes more than others usually if they're calling me they're pretty motivated but if they tell me a five or a six say you won't get anything out of this i can give you the best systems in the world you want it i absolutely know that you want it but you can't muster the willingness right now and that ebbs and flows in a person and i've had times where i'm really willing to work on my stuff and i put systems in the place and it works for a while and then sometimes the willingness kind of drops off and sometimes the systems can carry me for quite a while i try to set up my systems for my adhd folks saying hey i want to set this up for when your mom gets sick and you're busy dealing with that or work becomes crazy so that you can go three four six months without giving this a thought and it still works but you've got to not be in that state when we first start you need to be able to give it some attention and feel some discomfort in order to get past the initial hump so being being at least temporary willing willing to feel some discomfort is an important part of getting the process
- [40:05]
Podcast Host
started yeah and i think that's a really important thing for people to understand because yes it's the like you know if you wanted it enough you'd do it kind of thing but that is it's not because that this is the point here is that often it's like okay but we have to have this other piece that was is going to keep us pushing when it's because it's
- [40:23]
Christine Lane
going to be hard but you can't use that piece forever that piece has you have to like minimize the amount of that right the goal is like you're going to need a little bit of willpower in the beginning i'm going to give you some exercises to help boost it but you just got to hang on for a few weeks with some willpower before the internal rewards the intrinsic rewards of this behavior start kicking in and get your limbic system on the same pace and once the systems are set up it requires so much less brain space right it's another thing that's in i call it brain space in sort of a it's a premium for people with adhd how many things can you track and focus on at once so i'm like you need you need to give me a month of brain space on this topic and a month of willingness to feel discomfort so that we can get things set up and then we don't need to use that or at least not nearly as much anymore and then you can use your brain space to run more get along better with your partner just the reduction in stress that people who are really worried about their their finances that is taking up brain space which again is a premium so like just repurpose the brain space that's spent worrying to focusing and doing for a month and then you're going to get that brain space back to do other things with
- [41:28]
Podcast Host
yeah i think this is some really fantastic stuff i was just talking to someone the other day about regulation work and i'm like this for self regulation and this seems like a piece that is often like not really thought about there too because like even though it's very external from who you are it does affect how much stress you are experiencing and you're not going to be able to really focus on yourself that much if you always have this like nagging stress of like oh things are going to go wrong and i can't do anything about it and it's like
- [41:56]
Christine Lane
a program in the background using a brand in your brain even if you're not actively thinking about it all the
- [42:02]
William Curb
time so i was wondering if you
- [42:03]
Podcast Host
had any final thoughts you wanted to
- [42:05]
Christine Lane
leave the audience with fixing this is more doable than you you think even if you have failed many times if you've got the right systems if you've got somebody who understands the adhd brain i have seen people succeed working with a coach working with these systems when they have failed trying to do it in other ways so do not give up hope but also don't just keep repeating the i'm going to do it i'm going to be better next time you need different processes and systems you cannot just insist your way to changing
- [42:35]
Podcast Host
absolutely well thank you so much for coming on the show this has been
- [42:38]
Christine Lane
fantastic oh thanks for having me i really enjoyed it
- [42:43]
William Curb
thanks again to christine for coming on the show and thank you for sticking with us all the way to the end before you go though let's do a quick rundown of today's top tips one modern digital spending such as our cards and phones provides a gain gain without the physical feeling of the money leaving to help bridge this gap tools like a calculator where you can subtract the cost at the moment of purchase can help the limbic system register the loss balancing the emotional input so you can feel protective of your remaining funds two when we let our savings accounts multitask we can end up imagining that the same five thousand can cover both an emergency and a vacation by using something like the four bucket banking system bills variable periodic emergency you create object permanence for your money ensuring that essential funds are physically separated from your spending urges three willpower is a finite resource that often fails when we are stressed instead of just trying harder we want to focus on bending external structures like deleting the amazon app or removing saved credit card info to create enough friction to let our executive function outpace some of our more impulsive spending choices all right that's it thanks for listening i'd love to hear what you thought of this episode feel free to connect with me over at hackingyouradhd dot com contact hacked if you'd like links or to read this episode's transcript you can go to the show notes page at hackingyouradhd dot com two hundred ninety six and if you'd like even more hacking your adhd be sure to sign up for my newsletter any and all distractions which comes out every other week in it i give out my best distractions of the week be they what i'm reading what i'm playing what i'm watching and everything in between i also try to give out a few bits of actionable advice in each newsletter although your mileage is certainly going to vary there if that sounds like something you're interested in head on over to hackingyouradhd dot com newsletter to sign up i also want to make sure you know about our patreon which you can find at hackingyouradhd dot com patreon it's a pay what you want model meaning that all levels of the patreon receive all the same stuff you can pay dollar zero or dollar two or dollar ten and it's all the same right now we've mainly got early access to all the episodes and some behind the scenes content also you can check out the hackinguradhd discord at hackingyouradhd dot com discord and also don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel which you can find at youtube dot com hackingyouradhd and finally if you'd like another way to support the show best way to do so is to tell someone about the show especially if you think a particular episode would resonate with them just click the share button on your podcast player and now for your moment of dad say what you will about it but i think velcro is a real ripoff
- [45:50]
ZipRecruiter Brand Voice
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- [46:26]
Christine Lane
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Podcast Host
largest mammal in the world sir in the orange phone away please um my kid a smart smoke alarm sent an alert through the ring app see the
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Talkspace Brand Voice
train monitoring agent is calling now hello
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Christine Lane
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