← Navigating Adult ADHD
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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD Podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to Navigating Adult adhd. Today we are going to talk about something that I learned again. I learned this lesson again the hard way. Learn whilst I was on holiday over the Christmas break. And it's something that you might also be accidentally doing most days, quite possibly without even realizing it. Okay? And this is called dopamine layering. And it might be the reason or one of the reasons why you feel anxious for no reason, why you feel numb or like you can't relax without a screen, a drink, or a snack. We are going to talk today about what dopamine layering actually is, how it hits ADHD brains differently. We're going to talk about what Dr. Anna Lemke, who is the expert on all things dopamine, the author of the book Dopamine Nation, which I love. We're going to talk about her work and what we know based on that. And most importantly, I'm going to talk about what you can do to reset your dopamine baseline so that you can actually feel more present, more calm and alive again. So, my friend, if you have been feeling wired but tired, restless, or kind of flat, especially after the holidays or a big treat yourself period in your life, this is for you. So I want to start out by telling you a little bit about what happened to me over the Christmas and New Year break. Okay. I was fortunate to have three weeks off work, and I did the classic holiday things. Okay? I ate all of the things that I would usually try to limit, and I ate lots of them. So I had chocolate almonds. I had croissants with ham and cheese and cheesecake. Oh, my God, I can make a mean cheesecake, guys. All of these, like, indulgences. I drank a shit ton of champagne. Okay. Bubbles is, like, my favorite thing. Bubbles with some strawberries in it. Love it. I stayed up late some nights. For me, it's so funny. Right? Right. For me, late is like 11pm because I get into bed at like, 9 typically. But then I would sleep in and there was no real routine. Okay. Most mornings when I woke up as well, before going for my walk, I would hop on my phone and I would start scrolling, like, even before I got out of bed. I also started a massive jigsaw puzzle during the break, which, I've got to be honest, I was very surprised to find jigsaw puzzles very enjoyable. Now, while I was doing this jigsaw puzzle, I started listening to audiobooks now, specifically Frieda McFadden's psychological thrillers. Love them. All right, I smashed through a few of those. Now, when audiobooks finished, I then started to binge watch a Netflix series. Whilst I'm still doing the puzzle, and sometimes I'm watching Netflix or I'm kind of, like, paying attention to it, I'm doing my puzzle. I'm also eating a big bowl of cherries, and sometimes I got a glass of bubbles there as well. So I want you to picture there's me in my pajamas and I've got this giant puzzle on a desk, and my cat, there's always one cat sitting on it. So I'm just working on a section where the cat's not. So there's me and my PJs with the puzzle. I've either got Netflix on or I'm listening to my audiobook. I got snacks, I got alcohol. My phone's nearby. I might be scrolling on that now. This probably sounds great. Sounds like bliss, right? Sounds like a dream. It sounds like a dream to me, at least. Total freedom, treats, no responsibilities, right? Three weeks off. But as the days went on, I started to notice I was feeling more and more anxious. Now, it's not the, you know, I've got a few worries kind of anxious, but, you know, that really heavy, tight feeling in your chest. It's kind of like there's a bowling ball sitting in your chest and it's this rapid moving. Ugh. You know, that sense of unease that will just not leave you alone, that kind of anxiety. Now, logically, I'm on holiday. I have nothing to be anxious about. I'm with people I love. Nothing terrible is happening. So my brain did what human brains do. It said to me, I don't want to feel this way. Make it go away. So what did I do? I watched more Netflix. I drank more alcohol. I ate more of those foods that I typically wouldn't. I kept distracting myself with all of those high dopamine things, okay, all of the high dopamine things to try and drown out the anxiety. And guess what? It didn't go away. If anything, it actually got louder and louder. It was gradual. It got louder and louder, that feeling. And then I remembered this really hard and fucking annoying but incredibly useful thing that I'd actually learned earlier in the year when I was away in Hawaii for a few weeks, that dopamine layering creates anxiety. And the more anxious I felt, the more I was layering dopamine on top to try and escape It. And I was literally stuck in the cycle that I am talking about in this episode today. Okay, so let's break it down. What is actually happening here? So to explain this, I want you to imagine that there's, like, a tiny seesaw inside of your brain. Okay? There's a seesaw. And on one side of the seesaw, you've got pleasure, and on the other side of that seesaw, you've got pain or discomfort. And every time you do something enjoyable, that little seesaw, it tips towards the pleasure side and you feel good, right? You get that spike in dopamine, and you feel that this is nice feeling. But here's the part that most of us were never taught. Our brains love balance. So when the seesaw spends some time tipped towards pleasure, what happens in the brain is our brain pushes back and it tips the seesaw towards the pain afterwards. So pleasure side goes up, and then the pain side goes up afterwards to bring you back eventually to baseline. Okay? Now, that oppositional response is completely normal. It is how our brains have been designed. Okay? So Dr. Anna Lemke, who I mentioned at the beginning, right, she is a psychiatrist at Stanford University. She's the author of the incredible book Dopamine Nation. And she actually talks a lot about this. So I've learned so much from her about this. And she explains that we live today in a world that is saturated in dopamine. Okay? We live in a world where there is fast food, alcohol, social media, shopping, porn, gaming, streaming, all available all the time. Every time we use those things, the pleasure side goes up, of course. And if we keep hitting it again and again, like, imagine this pleasure button that you keep smacking again and again and again, the seesaw ends up spending more and more time in the pain side. Because every time, what goes up must come down. What goes up must come down in order to reset. Okay? So that pain side, though, doesn't always feel like physical pain. It can also feel like anxiety. It can feel like restlessness or irritability, numbness, emptiness, or this vague sense that something's wrong, but you don't know what it is. My friend, sounding familiar. So back to my holidays, okay? I was hitting that pleasure button constantly with the food and the alcohol and the Netflix and the puzzle and the cherries and scrolling on my phone and audiobooks and TikTok. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure pleas. And my brain, of course, did what it's wired to do. It compensated. It tipped the seesaw over to the pain side. And for me, that pain showed up as anxiety. This like unexplainable feeling of anxiety that just kind of didn't make sense because I was on holiday. So what is dopamine layering like? Let's define this, let's get really clear about it. Dopamine layering is when we stack multiple feel good things on top of each other at the same time so that our brain then gets a much bigger, faster spike in dopamine than it would if we just did any one of those things alone. So, for example, when I'm sitting on the couch and I'm watching Netflix and I'm snacking on a bag of lollies and I'm also scrolling on my phone at the same time, that's three different sources of dopamine. So that is me having layered. Could also look like gaming and drinking an energy drink and eating some junk food, or me doing my puzzle, listening to an audiobook whilst eating some snacks and having a glass of bubbles. It's all of these layers. Now, individually, some of these things might be fairly mild, but when we stack them, we create a much bigger dopamine spike. And the higher the spike, you guessed it, the higher the drop that we experience afterwards. So I wasn't just doing a jigsaw puzzle, I was doing a jigsaw, which, you know, on its own is actually slow dopamine, which I'll talk about soon, which is lovely and fantastic. But I was doing the jigsaw. I was listening to this like twisted Thriller audiobook. I'm eating a big bowl of cherries, drinking a glass of bubbles and occasionally like picking up my phone and like looking at it, which, trust me, in the moment, felt amazing, fantastic, loving it. But that is a lot of pressure. Pressure that is a lot of pleasure for my little seesaw in the brain to actually handle. So of course the anxiety and the flatness that I would feel afterwards started to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So let's add in the ADHD layer, specifically here as it relates to dopamine. Okay. We're talking about, we know as adults with adhd, as people, humans with adhd, our brains have less of three key chemicals. Now these key chemicals, they support motivation, focus and mood. So the first one is dopamine, we talk a lot about that, obviously. But the next one here is noradrenaline, which is a fancy ass way of saying adrenaline. Okay? Because it's nor. Well, it's norepinephrine that they usually talk about. Like, why are there three names for this? Seriously, there are three names. Norepinephrine, Noradrenaline and adrenaline. But it's norepinephrine or noradrenaline when it's in the brain, and then when it's released into your body, it's adrenaline. And that's the one that we would commonly hear about. Okay, so first one's dopamine, Second one, we're just going to call it adrenaline. And the third one is serotonin. Okay? So again, these all play a role in our motivation, our focus, our mood, serotonin, and also plays quite a big role in sleep, etc. But you often hear a lot of people talking about dopamine when it comes to adhd, and that makes sense because it plays such a big role in our motivation to act, to do things. Also in that feeling of reward, that feeling of like, oh, this feels nice, this feels good, or I want to do this. Okay? So it's a real motivator in our brain. And when we have less dopamine available, which us ADHD is too, our brains go hunting for it. Okay? So we are naturally more drawn to things that are gonna give us a quick, strong dopamine hit. That could be things like sugar, right? Fast food, caffeine, alcohol, scrolling social media, online shopping, gaming, porn, binge watching TV series, new exciting projects, or even, like, risky or impulsive decisions or behaviors. Okay, now here is another really important bit, my friend. We seek dopamine for two key reasons. One, we seek it to feel good, right? Dopamine feels good. We love that feeling. And two, we also seek it to avoid feeling bad. So back to my Christmas story. At the beginning, I was chasing dopamine to feel good. Hello. It's the holidays, right? Let's enjoy all the things. I want to enjoy all the things. I'm on holiday. Then after that big wave of pleasure, what happened? My seesaw tipped to the pain side and I started to feel anxious. I started to feel off. I started to feel a little bit low. And at that point, I was no longer chasing dopamine purely just to feel good for the fun of it, right? I was chasing it to get away from the discomfort because I didn't like feeling feeling that way. So quick, let's watch something else. Let's eat something else. Let's have another drink. Let me grab my phone. I'm gonna scroll. And ADHD brains are particularly vulnerable here because we feel boredom more intensely, right? Like this is proven on brain scans. Like, we feel boredom more intensely and we don't like that feeling. So we typically will seek something like dopamine. Some will do something to avoid it. Right. We also struggle to sit with discomfort. Right. We are more prone to experiencing emotional dysregulation, and we haven't been taught how to regulate our emotions. So we don't like feeling uncomfortable. Of course, we also can swing from kind of flat and disengaged to hyper focus and overstimulated quite easily. And we also have this history of using stimulation to cope to get through whatever's going on. Right. I know in my past, I've talked about how when I was, like, in the most anxious and sort of miserable part of my life, I would literally walk in the door after work. My. My iPad would be sitting on the. What is it? The washing machine at the back door. I would grab it. I would turn it on before I even moved into the house so that I had Netflix playing straight away. Like, I just constantly had noise in my ears, constantly. And I was using that stimulation to try and cope with the way I was feeling. So when a neurotypical friend layers in. So somebody without adhd, when they layer in, say, the Netflix and the snacks and the Instagram, they might feel a little bit flat or me afterwards, okay. They're gonna still experience. What goes up will come down. But when we do this, that experience is more strong, right? Like, we feel things more intensely, and when we do it on repeat, it can really tip us into full body anxiety, burnout, or numbness very, very quickly. Okay? So one of the key things I want to make sure we're all understanding here and we're on the same page, my friend, is that this is not a moral failing, okay? This is not, you know, you're weak or lazy or broken because you're laying, layering dopamine like this. This is your brain chemistry, okay? This is your brain doing exactly what it's wired to do in an environment that is literally saturated, covered in high dopamine hits. All right? Okay, good. Glad we're on the same page, my friend. So the next thing I want to talk about is the difference between fast dopamine and slow dopamine. And if you are a longtime listener of the podcast, you will have heard me talk about this before, and we're just going to recap it, right? I love to talk about dopamine. I find it fascinating. I love our brains. I'm so like, oh, my God, I'm obsessed. So understanding the difference here between fast dopamine and slow dopamine is really important for ADHD brains, okay? So fast dopamine is the things that Feel really good right now, but that feeling does not last. Like as soon as you stop it, you drop it, you lose that feeling and there's often a noticeable crash afterwards. For example, it's things that, what's the word? I want? Things that tend to be like, little to no effort, right? Drinking alcohol, eating sugar, eating junk food, scrolling social media, binge, watching your favorite TV show, online shopping, gaming, porn, all of that sort of thing, right? Very low, little to no effort, very stimulating. And often they're, you know, available on our phone. Like literally the barrier to entry is just non existent. It's so easy to get. So that's one type of dopamine. Okay, I'm just pointing out here that not all dopamine is created equal. The second type of dopamine is slow dopamine. So these are the things that require a little bit of effort up front but give you this longer, steadier release of dopamine. Even when you finish doing the thing that help you feel good throughout the day and feel good about yourself. So for example, things like going for a walk or any type of movement, right? Going to the gym, working on a puzzle. Or maybe your thing is crocheting or knitting or coloring. Could be cooking a meal, maybe talking with a friend, doing something creative. It could be tidying a small area of your bedroom, getting out in nature, like working on a meaningful project even for just 10 minutes. Okay. They are less wow in the moment, but they build a sense of satisfaction and this well being that sticks around. Now I like to often give people the lemon analogy here. So if you would imagine you had a lemon and you chopped the lemon in half. So I wanna first demonstrate, One half of the lemon is our fast dopamine. So if I was to grab my phone and for 15 minutes I was hopping on TikTok and to scroll through a bunch of, you know, my things. Cat videos, of course. Scroll through TikTok, watching cat videos. Okay, that's fast dopamine. And as soon as I put my phone down, what's happened is I've got my lemon and I've squeezed all the juice out of it and there's no juice left in my lemon. As soon as I stop, I get off the TikTok, I put my phone down, I got no juice left. Now to demonstrate slow dopamine, if I was to get the other half of my lemon and I was to go over to the beach and just go for a 15 minute walk and come back, that would be like getting that half of my lemon and Slowly squeezing it. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. Even after the 15 minutes I've done my beach walk, I come back. I'm still able to get juice out of that lemon. I'm still getting the drips released. The dopamine is still being coming into my system. Okay? So again, not all dopamine is created equal. So we've got the fast, fast, quick and easy source, and then we've got the slow dopamine. So in my holiday, that jigsaw puzzle that I was doing, that is slow dopamine, okay? It takes effort, but it's satisfying. And I feel really good about making progress on it. And I'm always glad that I'm doing that instead of, you know, sitting down to spend 20 minutes on TikTok or whatever, okay? But I didn't just leave it at that. I stacked a whole bunch of fast open men on top. I'd do the puzzle, I'd listen to the audiobook. I'd eat some cherries, I'd drink some, and bubbles. You know, I was doing all of these things, and my brain, not only did I kind of squish the slow dopamine from the puzzle, I got fast dopamine from listening to the audiobook or watching Netflix. I got fast dopamine from the food and from the alcohol, from having my phone there and grabbing that every now and again. That, my friend, is dopamine layering. And if we keep doing that, we can effectively train our brain to say, I don't just want the puzzle. I want the puzzle plus the audio book, plus the snacks, plus the wine, or it's not worth doing, okay? Which is totally what my brain did. And what that means is our baseline, right? Our baseline level of dopamine that we start with. Each day, it gets lower and lower. And every day we start, like, life starts to feel a bit more and more boring, less and less satisfying. We don't get joy from the things that we used to get joy from, okay? Like, I used to just enjoy sitting there doing the puzzle by itself, and that, like, doesn't register as much anymore. And that is really, like, sneaky, I would say, almost dangerous place to be, because that's when that numbness can creep in and the anxiety can creep in or that constant sense of irritability can really start to creep in. Okay, so let's talk about what we can actually do when we notice that this is happening. All right, so again, I'm going to reference Anna Lemke in her book Dopamine Nation because she talks about There and her clinical work, she's done a lot of like studies on this obviously, but she talks about doing something called a dopamine reset now in more severe cases. And she talks about a variety of cases, but for the people who are addicted to things like drugs, alcohol, gambling, she often recommends that you do a full 30 day break from their air quotes, drug of choice just to allow the brain's reward system to reset. Now for us ADHDers, the idea of cutting something out entirely for 30 days might feel completely overwhelming at first. So I want to translate this into some more ADHD friendly steps and I want to share with you what I have done. I did this earlier in the year when I experienced this and I did it again over the Christmas break. And I'm still going through this at this at the time of recording. So I'm going to share with you that how I was able to rid myself of that constant feeling of anxiety that was, oh, horrible. Okay, so my friend, we're going to talk, talk through, walk through, whatever. We're going to go through three steps together. So the first one is doing a gentle dopamine audit. So just understanding where we're getting our dopamine from. The second one is unlayering our dopamine and the third one is just doing a mini like dopamine fast and also building a slow dopamine menu to go alongside that. Okay, so I'm going to go through these three together. So the first thing is to do a gentle dopamine audit. So instead of judging yourself, I want you to become a scientist in your own life. And I found this like, like very interesting to do. Like we're often quite curious by nature. And so this is like something where you can like get really curious as to like all of the different ways in which you're getting dopamine. So for one day, for 24 hours, just notice and if you can drop these things down, what am I doing? Like where am I getting my dopamine? Is it Netflix? Is it scrolling gaming? Is it snacking? Is it the online shopping? That was one of mine was like scrolling online shopping websites and Boxing Day sales, right? Is it drinking? What is it? Now these are three questions I want you to ask really important. So the first one's like, what am I doing? The second question, how do I feel before I do it? Right? Emotions drive actions. So am I feeling bored? Am I feeling lonely? Am I feeling anxious, overwhelmed, tired, sad? What am I feeling before I do it? And then the third question is how do I Feel after I do it, right? Did I feel calmer or did I feel more anxious? Did I feel guilty? Did I feel numb? Do I still feel restless? Okay, now, we're not doing this to judge ourselves. Hell no, my friend. Right? You're not in trouble. You're not bad for all of the any of these things that you do. Okay? We simply just want to gather some data and be really curious about it because this alone can be incredibly eye opening. Like, I did not realize how many different things in my life I was getting dopamine from and the variety of sources. You might realize, for example, that every time you feel lonely in the evenings, you scroll for two hours and then you just feel more anxious and disconnected afterwards. Or you might notice that every time you feel overwhelmed, what you do is you start looking online to do online shopping. And afterwards, when you buy something or you put your phone down, you feel guilty and you're still overwhelmed. Okay? So this is just sort of seeing that dopamine seesaw in your brain in real time. It's sort of seeing that pain, pleasure, balance going up and down. Okay? So step two, this is where we undo layer the dopamine. Okay? So we're going to just play with this, right? Play with some unlayering. Now, please hear me when I say this. You don't have to cut everything out. And I sure as shit do not recommend that. Don't do that. What I want to encourage you to do is just not stack so many things on top of each other at one time. So pick one situation in your life where you are constantly layering dopamine. So I went initially with the puzzle, okay? And it was the puzzle. Plus either it was audiobook or Netflix, it was one of the two. And then sometimes there'd be snacks and sometimes there'd be like a glass of bubbles. Okay? You might pick, you know, at bedtime, you are scrolling on your phone, watching TV and snacking on some lollies, or you're gaming with an energy drink and YouTube. Right. Just choose one layer to remove. Right. For example, you might, you know, keep Netflix. This is something I'm doing this. I'm not going to say this year, but I'm playing with this at the moment, is when I watch Netflix, especially with my partner in the evenings, I'm not on my phone. I'm going to tell you about something really cool that I'm doing to help with this in a minute, okay? Also, like, for me it was keep the puzzle, but I'm going to remove the audiobook. And the Netflix or, you know, I can have that, but I'm not going to have the alcohol and the snacks. So it was like, just making sure that I'm only. Instead of having like three or four layers, I'm just going to drop back to two. Okay, so you can still get dopamine, right? Like, we're not. We don't want to, like, take it away completely, and we don't necessarily want to, like, remove. If you've got five layers, don't take them all away at once, right? Just slowly take. Take one off at a time. And just as I said, play with it, right? You're still going to get some dopamine. You're still going to get some pleasure. We're just turning down the volume in your brain so that you're not getting slammed with multiple hits at once and having that massive spike, massive crash. Okay? Anna Lemke, she actually calls this strategy self binding. And it's about creating gentle limits around when, where, and how you use those high dopamine things so that they don't take over your life. And for ADHD brains, like, as I said, we're more sensitive to dopamine and we seek it more, and it can quite literally take over our lives. So I recommend that you make this as concrete and as simple as possible. So for me, some examples of this are no phone after 9pm in bed, okay? Like, the phone goes elsewhere. For my partner, it goes outside the room. For me, it just goes on the dresser, right? I can watch Netflix after dinner, but it's only one device at a time. So I'm not on my phone when I'm watching Netflix. And what I've done, all right, to support myself with this is I have created an analog basket. So I have a basket full of slow dopamine activities to make me less likely to want to grab my phone or to have something else that I can do with my hands. So, of course, I've got a bunch of cool fidget toys. I've got, like, coloring books, word puzzles, other things in there to take me away from, like, trying to layer multiple fast dopamine things together. Like, I could so easily watch Netflix and still scroll on my phone looking at stuff. And I don't want to do that at the moment. So for me, having this basket really helps me to, like, keep my hands busy and have a variety of things I can do with my hands, which is really fun, but it's also, like, creating this boundary between me and the phone. Okay, so again, we want to keep it simple, specific boundaries. Okay, so the third step is where we do a mini dopamine fast. This is the ADHD friendly version. Again, I'm borrowing, like, Anna Lemke's 30 day reset idea, but we're scaling it back. Okay. So in her research and with her clinical experience, it shows that taking a full break from a highly rewarding behavior for long enough actually allows your brain to come back to baseline. So what that means is over time, if you're having too much high dopamine, too much fast dopamine, right? And too much layering, your baseline level of dopamine drops, meaning the amount that you have in the tank each day becomes less and less and less. You're gonna wake up less and less and less in the tank every. And over time. What that means is you stop getting joy out of the things that you used to get joy out of. Right? So when we can take enough of a break to allow our brain to reset, we start to enjoy the simple pleasures in life that we used to once enjoy. So you want to pick like one main vice, any one thing. Just pick one thing, right? And this is like the third step. And you know, you know you best, right? So anything, it could be social media, it could be alcohol, could be gaming, online shopping, a particular app or a website, binge watching, whatever, and then choose your level. Okay. It could be you want to just do a micro reset of 24 hours without it. 24 hours without social media. Okay. And I did this a couple of times during the Christmas break. A mini reset, seven days without that thing, or a full reset of 30 days without it. And I do recommend you get some support along the way if you're going to do that. Okay. Now notice I am not telling you which level to do. Okay? Just choose whatever feels challenging but not impossible for you right now. Okay. So for me, one of the things I'm also doing at the moment is 30 days, just no alcohol. I just decided, dry January, I'm just gonna do that to help reset because I was drinking every single night, just one drink. But it had crept in again, and it had become like this constant need and, like, source of dopamine that I was seeking every single evening. And I would, of course, like, layer that on. I'd, like, have my glass of bubbles and go up my puzzle and blah, blah, blah, right? So again, just choose whatever feels right for you, whether it be the 24 hours, the seven days, the 30 days, whatever. No wrong way to do it, my friend. And during that time, you'll See, Saw your seesaw, right? It's going to complain a bit. It's gonna be like, I want that thing. Trust me, I have wanted to drink this week. But that's normal, right? You're going to experience maybe a little more restlessness or anger, anxiousness before you feel better. And I definitely noticed that the last time I did this reset, I noticed myself feeling more restless and anxious. Whereas this time around, I think because I knew kind of what to expect, I actually experienced a huge drop in anxiety really quickly as soon as I started, you know, taking the layers off these different dopamine activities and even resetting some things. Okay. So again, if you do feel a little more restless or anxious in the first few days, totally normal. It's just your brain recalibrating, resetting. Okay. And this is where I think it's so important to have some support, whether that be friends or my partner's been super supportive of certain things. It could be your community, a coach, therapist, what have you. And also having replacement behaviors. So, you know, instead of having the glass of bubbles in the evening, now I have a glass of soda water and I'll put some fresh water, fruit in it or I might squeeze an orange into it. Okay. Also replacement behaviors, like I just said, like scrolling on my phone, I've got my little analog basket with a whole bunch of cool stuff set up in there for me to be able to grab, making it super easy. And then we want to talk about having a slow dopamine menu, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. Okay. But also lots of self compassion, right? Like if you slip. All good, just like reset again, like it's not. We don't want to punish ourselves, okay. We just want to give our nervous system a break so that it can reset and come back to baseline. So as a second part of this, I want to talk about building your slow dopamine menu. Okay? So again, slow dopamine is the type of dopamine that helps give you that kind of when we come back to the lemon, like it continues to drip feed you dopamine throughout the day and it's something that you feel good about. So it's the, it's the real sort of gentle, nourishing stuff. So I really want to invite you just to make a menu to create your own slow derp and mean menu. So it's a list of things that take a little bit of effort up front, right. But they don't give you a huge spike or instant high. However, they leave you feeling Good afterwards or sometimes during. Like you might feel calmer, more grounded, more satisfied, etc. So some examples of this are going for a walk out in nature. It could be doing some yoga or some stretching, a short gym session, perhaps working on a puzzle without stacking all the things on it, right? Maybe it's you love to go horse riding or crocheting or mountain biking. Could be calling or voice messaging a friend, doing something creative, right? Colouring, music, crafts, writing, whatever. Sitting in the sun with a cup of tea. Like listening to a podcast while you fold some washing. Working on a meaningful project for just 10 minutes. Okay, now you do not have to love all of these. It's about having a bunch of different ideas, a handful of things that feel doable, not horrible, and also help you to feel good, right? Give you that slow dopamine release. So I want to encourage you to grab a piece of paper or even like open the notes app on your phone and draw two columns, right? What are the fast dopamine hits? Right? What are the fast dopamine sources that I often go to and what are the slow glows? What are the slow dopamine sources that I have? Okay, so in the fast, write down your current go tos. No shame, just honesty. Just have a look at it. And in that slow, slow glow, that's hard to say, slow glow column, brainstorm. I want to say at least 10 things that you can do that fall into that slower dopamine, steady release of dopamine kind of a category. Okay, now again, my friend, this is not our brains love, all or nothing. This is not an all or nothing thing. Okay? The goal is not to like eliminate the fast dopamine sources. Heck no. Right? We're not trying to become monks. Heck no. The goal is just to be mindful of the layering and to, you know, not layer quite so many fast dopamine things at one time to give your brain some regular breaks to be able to sprinkle in more of that slow dopamine so that your the baseline level, the amount you've got in the tank, right? Your mood, your anxiety, all of that, those things improve. Okay? So when you feel that familiar, anxious, like restless, glued to your phone feeling, my friend, you can ask yourself, is this my dopamine C source stuck on the pain side? Am I trying to avoid feeling uncomfortable right now? Is there one layer I can just unstack right now? Is there one thing I can do from my slow dopamine, my slow glow list that I could just do for five minutes? And set a timer. I actually had a client this week. We were talking through this because she was really stuck in the cycle. And we decided that she was just going to set a timer for five minutes and she was going to do something that she really enjoyed that gives her slow dopamine for five minutes. And then she's allowed to just jump on her phone and scroll on her phone. Right? Again, having that timer just makes it, you know, it's only five minutes. It makes it more doable and easier to kind of break up the layers and break up those habits. All right, so I know we've covered a lot today, so I just want to do a little bit of a recap. Okay? So I've shared with you about how over the holidays, I was stacking multiple high dopamine things at once. We had the food, we had the alcohol. There was the Netflix, the puzzle, the audio books, the scrolling, all the things. And that constant layering created huge dopamine spikes, right? And what goes up, what happens, it comes down, right? If we imagine that mini seesaw, the spike up, the pleasure side, and then all of a sudden the pain side is going to jump up as well. And for me, that showed up as anxiety and that really heavy, tight feeling in my chest. With adhd, we know that we are also more sensitive to dopamine, right? We have less of it and we are prone to seeking it out. We've got, you know, having less of it impacts our motivation and our mood, and we go hunting for it. And of course, we. We feel that crash, that pain side of the seesaw more intensely. Dopamine layering is what we talked about. And that's when we're lacking, lacking layering. Layering. Multiple feel good things at one time, okay? Feels great in the moment, but over time, it can and often does lead to a lot of anxiety, restlessness, numbness, irritability, excess, et cetera. Okay? And we also. I've referenced Anna Lemke and her. Her book Dopamine Nation and her work multiple times throughout. But also I've taken the reset that I've adapted in my life and. Sorry, I've taken her reset and adapted it to be more ADHD friendly. And what I shared with you, that three step process is, number one, noticing your patterns, right? That's the dopamine audit. Keep a track of it for 24 hours. Number two, unlayer your dopamine. Just one thing at a time, right? Like peel the layers back. And number three, experiment with a mini dopamine fast, right? Pick one thing that you're gonna either take 24, seven days, sorry, 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days break from. And make sure as part of that, that you build your slow dopamine menu so that you have those things easily and accessibly on hand so that you can continue to focus on the slow dopamine source. Alright? Wow. I feel like we've covered so much, my friend. So if you are feeling anxious or numb right now, please hear me. You're not broken, your brain is not a disaster. But you are living in a world that is absolutely drenched in cheap, fast, easy to get dopamine. And you're living with a brain that's wired to seek the stimulation and the relief more intensely than most. Okay? But once you understand what's actually happening, you can stop beating yourself up. You can start making just some small, compassionate changes, some tweaks that really support your nervous system instead of accidentally kind of frying it. Now, as always, my friend, take what resonates today. Leave the rest. Be gentle with yourself. Right? You don't have to fix everything in one entire week, just unlayer one thing. That's my invitation to you, all right? And that's how change happens for ADHD brains. It's not in huge, perfect overhauls, but it's in small, messy, repeated experiments. Right? My friend, that is what I have for you today. If this episode was helpful, please share it with another adult with ADHD who might be feeling anxious and maybe they don't know why, and it might give them a lot of relief and a new way of thinking about and understanding what's happening, happening. All right, Huge love to you. Take care. I'll speak to you soon. 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.