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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD Podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my sparkly brained friend. Welcome back to the podcast. We've got to tell you something a little bit funny. All right? My sewing skills do not exist, and I have got a slipper on that I have got gone to. What should we say? I have applied my DIY skills to my slipper. It's one of those like. Like, sock ones. Gosh. How do I describe it? Like a fabric one with, like, little tacks on the bottom that stop you from slipping over. You know, those kind of, like, cheap travel slippers. Anyway, it's a pink pair of those, and it had come apart at the stitching that would hold it up at the back by the heel. And so I have applied a bulldog clip. I have to keep tightening it because it keeps wearing out and coming undone. But, yeah, that's how we're rolling today. I've got a bulldog clip on my slippers. Should I buy a new pair? Probably. But I'm pretty impressed with my creativity and my DIY skills today. So there we go. So today we are going to explore this question. How do I stop myself from reacting to my emotions? Right? Like, how do I stop overspending, yelling, doing things I regret later? Right? So I want to give you some examples. Having an argument with my partner, getting really angry, and then kicking a hole in the wall. Right? How do I stop myself from reacting like that, kicking that hole in the wall, feeling really frustrated at the state that the house is in, and then yelling at the kids and feeling like shit because you yelled at the kids. Right. Or buying a $500 jacket on the way home from work because you had a bad day and you needed to pick me up. All right, I have done that. Yes, I have. Okay, so if you have done something in the heat of the moment and then later thought, why did I do that? Right. How do I stop myself from doing that? You are not alone. In fact, we have all been there. Now, this is one of the top questions that I get asked. I get asked this question all the time. How do I stop myself from reacting to my emotions? How do I stop myself from behaving like that? Okay, so that's what we're addressing today. So first of all, I want to ask you this. Is the. This a realistic expectation? Can I actually stop myself from reacting to my emotions? Is that a fair ask? No. Okay. My dramatic long pauses are not just for effect. They're. Because I really want you to Think about it. Here's the thing. The answer is no. All humans react to their emotions. Every single one, right? Growing up, you would have seen your parents, your siblings, your friends, your parents, friends, your teachers at school, everybody in the community. You would have seen them reacting to their emotions. Slamming doors, yelling, and raising their voices. Right? This is a human thing. All humans react to their emotions. Okay? Now let's add the little layer of adhd, shall we? Okay, we know ADHD brains have executive dysfunction. So specifically, one of the executive functions that doesn't always function so well in our brain is something called inhibition, okay? That plays a very key role when it comes to reacting to our emotions. So inhibition is the thing that helps you to pause and think before you speak. You know when you blurt something out in a conversation? I do this all the time. You interrupt someone mid conversation to say something or ask a question. Right? That's because our brain doesn't always get the mental message to pause and think before we speak or think. Is this an appropriate time to insert this in conversation? Okay, so that inhibition, that pause button in the brain, that doesn't always work so well for us. It doesn't always pause when we want it to pause. Okay? So that means that, yes, people with ADHD have more times where they are likely to react to their emotions. Correct. The goal here isn't to never react, okay? If we think, what is a more realistic ask of ourselves, it is to react less often, less intensely, and also without the shame afterwards, which is something we're going to talk about today. Okay? So first of all, I just want to address the trap of all or nothing thinking, right? Black and white thinking. This is a very perfectionist thing that our brain, our ADHD brains love a little bit. All or nothing, right? But there is this perfectionist belief. I should never yell, I should never spend impulsively, I should never lose my shit, throw my toys out the cot, my friend. No. Okay? That is all or nothing thinking, which sets us up for a lot of failure and a lot of shame. We are human, right? This is not like flicking a switch. You don't turn off the switch that, you know, reacts to emotions, okay? It's not the way it works. You're not going to never react again, hello. Real life just doesn't work that way, okay? So again, just be mindful of that kind of all or nothing thinking that that is setting us up to feel terrible. The idea that we should never yell, we are still going to yell. We should never spend impulsively. Hello. We are Going to spend impulsively sometimes. We should never lose it. No, it's. Everybody loses it at times. Okay? So again, it's that very all or nothing thinking. Like it's like a switch that you flick. But the world doesn't work that way. But life doesn't work that way. So I want to introduce you to the idea of a layer cake of judgment next. Okay, so you know those layer cakes like you get at like weddings where they've got like multiple layers? Okay? Our layer cake, we're going to have two main layers in this cake. The bottom layer is the behaviour, the reaction. So that's the layer where we might spend money, right? We might slam doors, we might yell at someone or send like a nasty email to somebody, right? That's the reaction. That's the thing that we don't like. Okay? So the bottom layer is the behavior in our cake. The layer on top of that, the second tier in our cake, that's the judgment layer. So that layer of the cake says things like, I shouldn't spend so much. I'm a terrible mum for yelling at the kids, right? I'm a bad person for sending that email, right? That second layer, that judgment layer, that is where so much unnecessary suffering comes from, right? I call that the shame layer, okay? Because that's where we shame ourself for the behavior. We shame ourselves for shouting, we shame ourselves for spending money. We shame ourselves for, you know, sending an email or slamming a door or kicking a hole in the wall, right? So the real suffering comes from that added layer on the cake, not from the behavior itself. I'm going to break this down a little bit more, okay? But before we get to that, I just want us all to agree on something, okay? Can we just agree on something, please? Pretty please, my friend? Can we just agree to take the morality out of it, okay? Take the morality out of it. And what I mean by that is take being a good or bad person right the fuck out, right? When we think things like, I'm a bad person for yelling at the kids because I was frustrated, or, you know, I'm a bad person because I punched a hole in the wall. No, okay, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not a bad person for yelling at the kids. Neither are you, right? You're not a bad person because you put a hole in the wall when you were angry, right? You are a human feeling some really loud emotions, right? There is no morality in this. A hole in the wall, right? An impulse purchase doesn't make you a good or A bad person. Hello. Can we just agree, please? Okay? When you think of it like this, your GPS doesn't shame you when you miss a turn. Doesn't say, oh, you're a shit driver. It says, recalculating. Recalculating, right? So again, let's just take the morality. Let's just agree that we can just take the morality right out of it, okay? We are not bad people when we react to our emotions. No? We're simply a human who is feeling some very loud emotions inside our body, okay? So please, please, please, please agree with me here. From now on, we're going to remove that layer of morality, okay? We're not bad people. We're simply a human who is feeling something really loud and intense inside of us. So it's really important to also understand that emotions are just data, okay? So when you feel an emotion, it's a lot like a smoke alarm going off, right? The emotion is not the fire, it's the signal, right? It's the signal going off. Hey, something's going on. Something's going on. Like, I want to draw your attention to this. So all of your emotions are data, right? They're just telling you something. They have something to share with you, right? So instead of how do I stop these emotions, how do I stop myself getting angry? What if we asked, what is this anger trying to tell me, right? Like, what is this frustration that I feel telling me? What is this sadness telling me? Right? Again, it's all just data. It's all just information, okay? When we're feeling these emotions, it's the smoke alarm inside of our body going off, saying, hey, hey, hey. Just so you know, something's going on over here. I want to draw your attention to it, right? So as I said before, the problem is not the behaviour, right? It is the judgment that happens afterwards. So the problem is not the fact that there's a hole in the wall because you kicked the wall, right? The problem is not the fact that you yelled at your child. The problem is not that you spent $500 on a jacket. The problem is the way that you judge yourself afterwards, right? Oh my gosh, we can be so hard on ourselves, my friends, right? For example, let's go through an example of this, okay? And I've done this one buying a $500 jacket that, let me tell you, had the tags on it and never got worn, okay? That's beside the point. So buying a $500 jacket on the way home from work, okay? That's not a problem until I have A thought about it, for example, I shouldn't have done that. What a waste of money. Or, you know, I can't be trusted with finances, right? Or I'm a terrible person. I can't get my shit together, right? Those thoughts that we have, those judgments that we have about ourself, that brings up so much shame, right? And what do we do when we feel shame, right? I know I would beat myself up. I would hide my purchases from my partner. I would definitely not share them with my friends. Like, I wouldn't be telling them about this cool new jacket I bought instead. I'm going to ruminate on it. I'm going to think about, you know, think about it constantly when I need to be switching off or relaxing. I'm going to hide from my finances. I'm not going to look at how I can cover it. I'm just going to, you know, feel bad about it, right? I'm not going to spend time trying to regulate myself. I'm not going to be, you know, trying to be kind to myself, reach out to my support team. No, right? The judgment layer, right? Coming back to that layer cake, that judgment layer is what spirals us out into shame and hiding and rumination and disconnection and feeling terrible, okay? So oftentimes it will sound like a should. I shouldn't have yelled at the kids. I shouldn't have sent that email, right? And that should's kind of like followed by like a. Like, I shouldn't have done that. And because I did, I'm therefore a bad person, right? If you were to imagine wearing a huge thick fur coat that is soaking wet, that's the judgment, right? Judgment makes everything heavier and harder. And that judgment layer, my friend, is what causes so much unnecessary emotional suffering. Like, it's so painful, right? I think we can all agree on that. So again, the problem is not the behavior. It is the judgment that happens afterwards. It's that layer of shame that gets piled on top. So, of course you're screaming at me, okay, great. So what do I do about it? I know if I was listening, I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, I get it, I get it. So now what do I do? What do I do instead? How do I remove that heavy, wet coat? Right? How do I take apart that layer cake that, you know, stops me from reducing the intensity and the frequency of these big emotional reactions, right? We've got to take that judgment layer off to be able to get to these reactions and do something different. So, my friend, I've got two Things for you. Okay? And here's the best part. These are two things that I know you're already doing in other areas of your life, okay? You're already doing these things. So the first one is to swap out the judgment for curiosity. Okay? Now, I know you're really good at being curious and asking lots of questions, especially when you're really interested in something, right? You know, when you're fascinated in something and you want to know more, what do you do? You ask a shitload of questions. You, like, lean in, right? Oh, tell me more about that. That's like, that's so interesting. How did you start that? Like, I'm so, like, intrigued. Tell me more. Right, so I'll give you an example of this. Last night I was feeling really annoying. I was so annoyed with my partner for letting our 14 year old make himself chicken nuggets for dinner. That was it. Just chicken nuggets, Nothing else? Just chicken nuggets. Okay? And so I decided, after being annoyed for a little while, I decided, you know what, I'm just gonna go upstairs and just explore this a little bit, okay? And I leaned into that curiosity, like, why do I feel so annoyed about this? And the first thing I hit was like, well, to me this seems really unfair because the other two kids didn't get a choice in what they had for dinner, right? I just made them dinner and I didn't offer them chicken nuggets, okay? Now, the 14 year old wasn't home at this time. That's okay. But for me, it was like a justice sensitivity thing. I was like, well, it doesn't seem fair. I'm sure they would have preferred to have had, you know, chicken nuggets over the dinner I made them. So for me, I was like, okay, so there's this justice sensitivity coming up. I was like, what else? Why else could I be, like, really annoyed by this? Like, what's this annoyance telling me? And I was like, well, also, my ADHD meds are wearing off around this time and I'm typically kind of irritable around now. So I know that that's definitely going to be at play here, right? I'm also really sore. I'd done some workouts and like, and my whole body was feeling sore and I was quite tired. I was like, yeah, that's actually going to be a factor here too. So it's much easier for me to feel annoyed. And then this morning, before I decided to record this episode, I kind of revisited this again. And. And I discovered, actually when I got curious right I was like, actually, there is something else, right? I got my period this morning and it's early, right? I had no idea I was gonna show up. I was like, okay, so there's probably an element of hormones at play here where everything feels really intense and dramatic and, you know, not great. I was like, okay, huh. Well, that makes even more sense, right? But I want you to notice how there's no judgment in my curiosity here, right? When we are being curious, we can't judge, okay? There is no judgment in curiosity. It is just asking lots of questions, seeking to learn and gather data and get information and find things. Just like a scientist would. Gather a lot of data, ask a lot of questions. We're doing that to learn from ourselves, from these emotions that we have. So I want you to think, what does curiosity look or sound like for you? Right? Because judgment says I'm a terrible parent. Curiosity might sound like, well, what triggered me just now? What was happening in my body before I yelled, right? What was I doing in the lead up to this? Like, if I retrace my steps, where was I? What was going on? Now, I find it really helpful to speak this out loud. Literally, I talk out loud to myself all the time. But I find it so helpful because I'm helping to get outside of my brain, which, I swear my brain goes way too fast sometimes, right? So I'm helping to slow things down, get out of my head and just speak it out loud. Like, I will say to myself, what was I doing? What was happening right before I got irritated? Like, if I walk through the kitchen again, what was I doing in the kitchen? I just finished my dinner. I went and put my plate up and noticed that my partner actually hadn't loaded the dishwasher, which was his job today. Okay? That probably ticked me off, right? So it started building from there. Okay? So the second thing, right? The first thing I want you to lean into is this curiosity. It's like a really helpful bridge to bridge our way out of the shame and the judgment, right? Like, get on the curiosity bridge and start asking a shitload of questions. Get really fascinated, right? You're seeking to learn, right? Honestly, you are. Your biggest and best experiment ever. The more you can gather data and ask lots of questions, right? That's leaning into that curiosity. And again, there's no judgment when we're in there. Now, the second thing. The second thing I already know that you are doing in your life, especially where your loved ones are concerned, is to be compassionate. Okay? So hear me when I say this self Compassion is the antidote to shame, okay? When we turn that compassion inwards and we give it to ourself, we have the antidote to shame, right? Just like antibiotics are going to cure an infection that you have, right? You have the antidote to shame, and it is self compassion. Okay? So it might sound like, yeah, I'm feeling really bad for yelling at my son. How human of me, right? I'm not a bad parent. I'm just feeling something really hard right now. So there are three elements of self compassion. The first one is self kindness, right? Kindness is talking to yourself the way you would talk to your partner if they'd had a really rough day. The way you would talk to your best friend who might be going through a breakup or your child who's being bullied at school, right? That's what that. The way you would talk to them, turning that into yourself. Self kindness, that's the first element. The second one is common humanity. This is my favorite. How human of you, right? How human of you. You yelled, you slammed a door, punched a wall, you got a speeding ticket, you spent a thousand dollars. How human of you. And the third element of self compassion is mindfulness. And not in the necessarily unless you want to sit down and meditate kind of way. That's not what I'm meaning. It's about acknowledging and allowing your emotions and what you're feeling without over identifying with them. Okay? So for example, saying I am feeling really bad, right? Or I am feeling anxious, I am feeling really guilty, not I am a bad person, right? It's the difference between saying, I am feeling really bad and I am a bad person, right? Like creating that separation there. Okay? So part of self compassion really requires you to put your measuring stick away, right? The way that you are measuring yourself, right? Put that measuring stick away. Okay? Zoom out. Zoom out of this picture. Okay? Our imperfections are not inadequacies, right? We are all imperfect humans, right? We're all going to react to our emotions in ways that we are not proud of, in ways that we would rather not react, okay? Those imperfections are not inadequacies. They're reminders that we are all in this together, okay? We're all in it together, my friend. The goal is never to react to our emotions. The goal instead is to remove that layer cake of shame, right? As soon as we do that, we have access to being able to, you know, build our regulation muscles, to react less, to experience less intensity to our emotions, right? So the goal is to remove that shame, to be curious, right? To get really, really curious and learn from ourselves. Gather all of this data. Right? Why did I do that? What was happening? What was going through my head, through my body? Right. Again, there is no judgment in curiosity, right? So get really curious and practice self compassion. Acknowledge that you're human. Of course. Right? And build those regulation muscles over time. My friend, you are not a bad person for reacting to your emotions. No. You are a human with some big, intense feelings. Right? And you are an amazing human who is learning how to work with their ADHD brain. And I just want to say thank you for pushing play on this episode because it really shows us that you are here to learn to work with your brain. And you are doing that. Right? You are already making little changes to your life. Okay? And I acknowledge you for that. All right, my friend. Huge, huge love. Take care. Have a beautiful week. Hey, friend, if you want some more help navigating and thriving with ADHD and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website, navigating adultadhd.com.