Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:04]
A
You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, Hello. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to Navigating Adult adhd, where we are talking about one of my favorite topics today, and I think one of the most important topics when it comes to adhd, and that is emotional dysregulation. So, my friend, if you have ever thought, why did I react that big to something so small? Or why am I crying over this email? Why can't I just calm down or chill out like other people? Then you, my friend, have already met emotional dysregulation. You know what I am talking about. So today we are going to talk about what emotional dysregulation actually is, how it impacts people with ADHD and the ways in which it might show up. We are going to explore why this is not actually a character flaw, okay? It is a skill that can be developed even when you have adhd. It's just. It's a little harder for us. Okay? So we're going to talk through all of the things. I've got a lot for us to go through today, including the ways in which we react and respond to our emotions, the power of our emotions, what they do for us, and why this matters so damn much. Okay? We got a lot. So, starting from the top, what is emotional regulation? So emotional regulation is the ability to recognize what you're feeling, understand it, and then effectively manage it. So manage your emotions in healthy ways, okay? So if that's sounding very textbook, which I think it does, let's make it real. If you have ever talked yourself out of a bad mood or if you have calmed yourself down after getting heated or getting angry, if you have taken a few deep breaths and just kind of hit pause before you've replied to an email that's kind of, you know, triggered you, that, my friends, is demonstrating emotional regulation skills. And when our nervous system is reasonably regulated, and I think about this like a traffic light system, like when we are in the green, we are good to go. When we're in that orange zone, we're starting to get dysregulated. When we're in the red, we are fucking dysregulated, okay? But when our nervous system is reasonably regulated, when we're in the green zone, that's when we can think clearly, we can make decisions, we can take action and follow through on our plans and actually thrive, okay? We thrive from that regulated green place. So when we are dysregulated, everything feels harder. Ask me how I know I like to imagine this, and I'll often describe it to people as when we're dysregulated, if you are in a manual vehicle and you're just stuck in first gear, you're not using all five of the gears that you have, you are in first gear in 100k stretch of road, revving the shit out of the engine, burning a lot of fuel. Like that. There is what it's like to be dysregulated. Everything is harder, it takes longer. So little things are going to feel huge, tip you over the edge. Our reactions when we're dysregulated are going to be very dramatic and everything is going to feel very big, too much. Or sometimes when we're dysregulated, it's that we shut down and we go completely numb to try and feel nothing at all. So what is emotional dysregulation? Right? We've just explored the regulation and what that is and why it's so important, right? Because we thrive. So what is the dysregulation element? So emotional dysregulation, it's the opposite. It's when you have real difficulty with being able to recognize, understand, and effectively manage your emotions in healthy ways. So getting, you know, very intense, fast emotions that you react to that stick around longer than you might like often you might feel like you've been hijacked by your emotions. You can't sleep at 2am because you're still feeling really, really anxious about that email that you got. It might be that you notice you have a reaction that doesn't seem to match what happened, or a reaction and response that doesn't sort of match how other people are reacting and responding. And then you really struggle to bring yourself back down to come back into that green zone, that regulated place. Okay, so let's go through some examples to paint a picture of this. If, for example, your partner makes a comment to you about, let's say the dishes, okay, there's some dishes maybe he cooked, and he makes a comment to you about the dishes getting done, and your brain just hears, I'm a failure. And suddenly you're super angry, defensive, you're in tears, you're yelling at him. My friend, that is emotional dysregulation. Your boss sends you an email, you know those emails that says, can we talk tomorrow? Without any context, right? What happens? Your stomach drops. You cannot focus on anything for the rest of that day. You become incredibly unproductive. You don't get shit all done because you're Replaying every single mistake, impossibility that you've ever made. Okay, that, my friends, is emotional dysregulation. Say a friend doesn't reply to your text message, and you can see that they've read the message and they don't reply for a few hours. And then your brain's hijacked. Like, they secretly hate me. What have I done wrong? I must have done something wrong. And you feel really, really sick with anxiety. That is emotional dysregulation. Maybe you plan to do some boring admin task that you've got to do. Say, like, call the doctor and get a repeat prescription. Okay. And your body feels like it's being asked to climb Mount Everest in a thunderstorm. Okay, we can all picture that. So that, my friends, that is emotional dysregulation. This is not you being dramatic. It's not you being too sensitive. It's your nervous system just hitting the panic button faster and harder than most people's. Okay, so let's do a little check in with our emotional world. I want you to notice this for a second. How would you describe your current relationship with your emotions? Do you tend to overreact? Do you tend to shut down or go numb? Or are you somebody who just tries to avoid emotions altogether? Like, you know, sweep them under the rug and pretend like they're not there, but you keep tripping over the rug, no doubt. Okay, what's an emotion that you have felt a lot lately? Is it anxiety? Overwhelm is one I hear a lot. Frustration, guilt, shame. And how do you typically respond when that emotion shows up? So what is it that you do when you feel that emotion, when it's with you? Do you grab your phone and start scrolling? Do you snap at people? Do you clean the house? Like, clean out, you know, the kitchen sink and all the things? Do you eat more, work more? Do you freeze? Do you go to Netflix? What do you do? How do you respond when that emotion shows up for you? Now, I'm not trying to say fix anything, do anything differently. I just really want to encourage some awareness. Like, awareness is such an important step, okay? So we just want to notice. Notice some of these things. So let's talk about emotional dysregulation and adhd. Now, I want to be really clear. Emotional dysregulation is something that every single human on the planet experiences, okay? Whether you have adhd, you know, whether you're a neurodivergent human or not. Even our neurotypical friends experience emotional dysregulation. However, for those of us with adhd, we experience it more often, more frequently. So let's talk about some of the reasons why that is to help kind of build this puzzle together. As people with adhd, what do we know? We know we feel our emotions more intensely. It's like ADHD brains experience their emotions on full volume. Our emotions are loud, they're turned up full volume, and we don't know where the hell the remote is to turn them down. So a mildly awkward interaction can feel horrifying. A small win, a small achievement can feel like we are literally flying. A bit of criticism can actually feel like a full body panic attack. As people with adhd, we also have a lower frustration tolerance, and we are prone to being more impatient than our neurotypical peers. So if your technology is not working and you might be literally on the verge of throwing it out the window, shut the. Shut the door shut. Like, leave the room stuck in traffic, and you can feel your blood pressure climbing. Okay, kids, asking you just one more question, and then you're snapping. And of course you instantly regret it, right? As people with adhd, we have a lower frustration tolerance. We get frustrated more often. Then we've got the rsd, the rejection sensitivity dysphoria. So as people with adhd, we are prone to experiencing rsd. This is a real or perceived feeling of being criticized, rejected, and failing. And when that happens, it can have a very intense reaction for us. We can be very kind of hijacked by that, and it can be very all consuming. So where somebody else might experience, you know, nobody likes rejection, let's be honest, but somebody else might experience rejection. Oh, that's like a 7 out of 10 on the scale for us. It like breaks the scale and we're. We've blown the scale. We're 10 out of 10. 12 out of 10. Okay. And it's a hijacking effect that can happen even in situations where we haven't necessarily been rejected, criticized, or failed. But we could, we can be very hijacked by that. Okay, so that's the rsd. That could look like a friend canceling a coffee date with you, and then you just feel like they secretly don't like you. And you're really hijacked by that. It could be that your boss gives you an email that says, hey, can I give you some feedback? Oh, my God. And it feels like your whole identity is on trial, right? You make a tiny mistake, and it feels like you are the worst person in the whole entire world. That, my friends, is the RSD element that we have at play here. And then we need to talk about something called interoception. And again, I've got whole podcasts on rsd. I've got a whole podcast on interoception. I think it's around. They're both around number 76, 77 ish. I will link them in the show notes actually, because I highly recommend listening to both of those. But interoception is something that people with ADHD have real difficulty with. It's like a muscle that we have that's just a little bit weak. Okay, so interoception is how you perceive what's going on inside of your body. It is one of the senses that we have. And people talk about like the five senses. You've got your taste, touch, smell, hear, see. I think sometimes I mix them up or double them, but you know what I mean? So we've got those senses. Then we've got these other internal body senses. We've got three of those. One of them is about like your balance and your. I think it's proprioception, but it's your ability to sort of sense where your body is in relation to objects as well and your ability to balance all of that. And then we have this one called interoception, which is how we sort of feel and perceive what's happening in our body. So for example, like you might start to feel this pressure in your bladder and know that you need to go to the toilet. Okay? So that's your body's giving you a signal. You might also get this rumbling in your tummy and this kind of hollow, airy feeling in your stomach that signals to you that you are hungry and that you need to eat some food. Now as people with adhd, we have difficulty reading, interpreting, hearing, feeling, knowing that those senses are going off in the body. So an example I like to give here or a scenario is one time I was driving back from Auckland. I was driving through a gorge, getting home. This is a three hour trip and I was sort of just over halfway and I was in this gorge and all of a sudd see smoke pouring out of my car. There is smoke coming out from under the bonnet. I was like, what the fuck? What's going on here? And I look down and I see that the temperature gauge in my car is like off the scale. It's like redlining, as hot as it can get. But I hadn't been reading the temperature gauges, I hadn't been looking at the signals, I didn't see the signs that my car was slowly starting to overheat. Here's the thing, it did it gradually. I just didn't see it until there was smoke blowing and billowing out of the car. Okay, so what this might look like to translate this into emotions. Okay. Because we again have difficulty sometimes telling that our emotional sort of alarm clock inside is going off. So you might not notice that you're anxious, that you're feeling really anxious about something until you're like snapping at everybody around you or you don't realize that you're really overwhelmed until you're, you know, sitting on the kitchen bench in tears. And maybe you only notice that you're really stressed when your neck is so tight that you just can't even turn your head. Okay? So it's kind of like we didn't necessarily get the message, the little warning signs that were coming and then all of a sudden, boom. It's like we're 10 out of 10, like so stressed, so anxious, like we're doing all of these things, noticing all of these things. Okay? So again, if you struggle to sort of read your internal body signals. Right? Again, so many of us recognize this when I say things like if you, you know, forget to pee until you're busting, if you forget to eat all day until you've got this headache at 2:00 clock in the afternoon, if you forget to drink water, that is a sign that interoception is something that you're having a bit of difficulty picking up on. Like that muscle just needs strengthening, that's all. Okay? So yeah, by the time we often sort of realize that we. Hang on, what do I want to say here? Yeah. If you're struggling to sort of read these internal signals, it's. It can be harder to catch the emotions early, okay? To know what you're feeling, you know, what's going on in your body. So by the time you sort of realize you're upset, you might already be, you know, in full meltdown mode or shut down territory, etc, okay? But my friend, of course there's good news. You're like, oh God, I'm screwed nowhere. Heck no there is good news. Emotional regulation actually is a skill now. One that if you ask me, this shit should be taught in schools. Like, it should be like English. It should be a subject we learn right the way throughout our entire schooling system. Okay? That's just me. And I think it's so important because it is a skill. It's not something you either have or don't have. Right? It's not that our neuro typical friends have the ability in the skill built in and programmed. No, they learn it, right? But they, they. When I say that, I just want to clarify that by saying, like, they have learned it through observing other people, okay? And doing what other people do. So of course neurotypical people can still struggle with emotional regulation because everybody gets dysregulated at times. But for people with adhd, it is something that we can learn, okay? It just is a little harder for us to develop because of the brain differences that we have, because of the wiring that we have. It might be harder for us. But here's the beautiful part. It's not impossible, right? It's not that we can't do it. We can do it. It's one of those things you've got to learn, you've got to practice, and over time, you'll get better at. Get better? Better. Better as in fish and chips better? I don't know. Anyway, here's how I like to think about this, right? Because you guys know I love to speak in word pictures. But when I think about emotional regulation and my journey with learning this, developing this, like, you know, getting the skill in my system is I think about learning to drive a car, okay? When you first learned how to drive a car, you had to really concentrate. It was hard. It felt really clunky. There was so much that you had to do and remember, and it was really awkward. And then one day, you don't even realize when it happened. But one day, all of a sudden, you're driving this car without even having to think about it. It's now on autopilot. It is exactly the same when it comes to developing our emotional regulation skills. We've got to go through that weird, hard, awkward and uncomfortable stage before it becomes something that we can flick over onto autopilot. So I want to talk a little bit now about the messages we got about emotions. Because as I have said, I have not yet met a single human with adhd. And I have met hundreds, if not thousands. Thousands of them, I would say. But I haven't met one who was taught emotional regulation, who was taught how to understand, express and manage their emotions in healthy ways. So the reality is we were not taught this shit. But here's what we did learn, okay? We heard messages like, calm down, you're overreacting. Don't be sad. It's not that big of a deal. Stop crying, toughen up, right? Or the classic, go to your room and come back when you've stopped crying. When you've got your shit together. So what did we learn? We learned that big emotions equal bad. That crying equals weakness. That anger equals dangerous. That sensitivity equals something to be fixed or hidden. Basically, we learned that our emotions were wrong, they were bad, they were too much, they were not right, or that they should just be hidden. So it's no wonder this is something that can be so difficult for us. And there was no class, like, definitely no class at school called Feelings 101, how to be Human. I'm keen to teach it. Just saying. So I want us just to take a moment to think about this, my friend. What were some of the messages you heard about emotions growing up? Were they something that were openly talked about and acknowledged and celebrated and understood? Or were they ignored? Were they mocked? Were they punished? And who in your family was allowed to have big feelings? Who wasn't? Did they try to hide their feelings? So if you look at today and think about, how do all of those messages that you got, all of that information that you learned growing up, how does that influence the way in which you react and try to respond to your emotions? Do you apologize for crying? Do you try to hide your anger? Do you make jokes out of it? Like, here's the thing, we didn't just make this up. We were trained into it. We learned this. We absorbed, like, little sponges from all of the people around us. And that's great to know because we were trained into it, which means we can retrain it. Okay, good news, my friend. Now we have to talk about just how powerful our emotions are. Like, this is important. If you have gone off on a brain tangent, my friend. If you're thinking about something else, come back to me now. Come back. Come back. Because this is really important, this part right here. Okay? So important. Emotions are so powerful because our emotions drive all of our actions. Psychology literally teaches us that our emotions drive all of our actions. Our emotions determine what we do and what we don't do. Now, that's really fucking valuable information. However, it's not widely known or communicated. Again, be great to have this class at school, right? So what this means is we take action or we avoid taking action. Hello? Procrastination. Because of how we feel. Okay? So if you, my friend, are watching Netflix when you had promised yourself you were going to work on that book proposal, if you're on your phone scrolling instead of sending that email you need to send, if you're cleaning out the pantry, instead of starting that big, scary project, you need to start, it's not because you're lazy. It's because there is an emotion that you are feeling or trying very hard and creatively to avoid feeling. And maybe it's fear, there's a fear of failing. Maybe it's shame from past experiences, maybe it's overwhelm, maybe it's self doubt, maybe it's anxiety. Again, it's not that you're lazy, that's not the issue. No, my friend, you simply were not taught how to understand and regulate these emotions. So your brain has found other ways to cope. So what even are emotions? Okay, like what? What the fuck is an emotion? Like, let's just get to that, shall we? And I want to break this down really, really simple. So first of all, an emotion is a one word description of how you feel. Okay? So that could be I feel happy, I feel angry, I feel anxious, I feel calm, I feel overwhelmed, I feel excited. Those one word descriptions of how you feel and what really is an emotion, what makes up that description of how you feel? It is the sensations that you experience in your body. For example, when I am feeling anxious, I will experience sweaty palms, a racing heart, this tight sort of pressure in my chest area. My face sometimes heats up, heavy or tense shoulders. Maybe it's a lump in your throat. It is the sensations you experience in your body. Another way I like to think of emotions is like energy in motion. It is your nervous system responding to something and sending a signal. With all of these sensations in your body, it's that energy moving around. Okay. So sometimes it's helpful to think of it as like a smoke alarm. Okay. Our emotions are little smoke alarms. They are signaling that something is happening inside of our body or something could happen. And our ADHD smoke alarms, they're just a little on the sensitive side. So one of the things I have observed in coaching, hundreds, I would say thousands probably. Yeah, definitely thousands. Thousands of humans. Okay. One of the things I've observed is that we have trouble naming what we are feeling. And I for sure did. This was me for most of my life. I had a very limited emotional vocabulary. Basically, I would feel five things. I would either be happy, I'd be fine, I'd be sad, I'd be pissed off, or I'd be anxious. That was it. Which can make it pretty damn hard to regulate your emotions when you can't even name what you are feeling. So my friend, right now, I invite you to check in. What are you feeling right this second? What is that one word description of how you are feeling? And how do you know that's what you're feeling, where is this in your body? Do you struggle to name your emotions? Did you potentially just say, I feel fine or I feel tired or I feel stressed? If that's you, welcome to the team. You are in good company, my friend. So the last element I want to talk about here is the four R's. These are the ways in which we respond to our emotions, okay? And remember that our emotions drive all of our actions. What we do, what we don't do is because of how we're feeling or how we're trying to avoid feeling. So one thing we know about humans from psychology is that humans are wired to seek pleasure. We want to do shit that feels good, okay? We're also wired to avoid pain. Nobody wants to feel pain. That sucks. And we also are wired to save energy. Now, if you think back to caveman, cave woman days, that literally kept us alive, right? Seeking pleasure was like having a warm fire, eating berries, you know that having sex, all of those sorts of things that help to keep us alive and evolve. Avoiding pain, like pain back then certainly meant death. If you fell out of a tree, you know, you were probably gonna die, okay? So pain back then was something you wanted to avoid. And saving energy, of course, made a lot of sense back then because we didn't know how often we'd go between meals or if we needed to, you know, relocate our tribe, what have you, okay? So that literally kept us alive, right? Being wired to seek pleasure, avoid pain, save energy. However, we still have that exact same brain wiring. And when the pain is emotional, not like, you know, you've just fallen over, and I've got a sprained wrist. As I tell you this right now, I literally sprained my wrist at the gym yesterday, okay? That was painful. So when it's a physical pain, very different. But when that pain is emotional, when it's coming from inside of us, we get really fucking creative at trying to escape it. We try to escape that pain because we don't want to feel it. We don't like feeling the pain. I don't like feeling the pain of a sprained wrist. Now, we get very creative in ways in which we try to escape the emotional pain. And sometimes these backfire. So I want to break it down. There are four responses. Four ways that we respond to our emotions, and they are the four Rs, okay? The first is resist. Second is react. The third is reject. And the last, the fourth one, is receive. So let's go through each of them. Resisting our emotions is when we try to numb or distract ourselves so that we don't have to feel them. That might look like scrolling social media for hours instead of opening the scary email. Binging on Netflix instead of going to bed because you don't want to feel lonely. Or maybe you just don't want to hear your brain think. Raiding the pantry when you're actually feeling really anxious, not hungry, right? Keeping yourself so busy so that you just don't have to be with your thoughts and hear what your brain is saying. So for us with adhd, a lot of procrastination lives right here. In resisting our emotions, we're not avoiding a task. We're not avoiding sending the emotion. Sorry. We're not avoiding sending the email. We are avoiding the emotion that we're expect to feel if we start that task. Okay, so the second one is reacting. This is the second way we respond to emotions. Reacting is when you act the emotion out. I like to think of it as like you've got this big awful feeling in your body and you just want to throw it out of you. Like throw it off you somewhere else. So that could look like yelling at your partner, right? Yelling, screaming, crying, slamming doors. Like yelling at your partner because they're 20 minutes late slamming a door and snapping at the kids. Or rage cleaning the house when you're feeling really frustrated. Sending a keyboard warrior like shitty ass email in the heat of the moment. That, my friends, that is reacting. And reaction is often what other people, people around us see. They don't see the buildup of the emotions. They don't see, you know, what's happening inside of our bodies, what we're feeling, the stress, the little hurts, the overwhelm, all of that. They just see the explosion. And number three, the third way we respond to emotions is the rejecting them. So rejecting emotions is when we deny that they are even there or we shame ourselves for having them. So this often sounds like I'm fine in our house, like I'm fine. It's like a dirty word. It's worse than the swear word because it means you are not fucking fine. Right? But saying I'm fine to people, how are you? I'm fine, right? It's not that bad. Other people have it worse. That's one I hear a lot. It's like, okay, but you're not feeling good, right? Rejecting emotions can sound like, I shouldn't feel this way, or positive vibes only. Good vibes. Good vibes only, right? Slapping a smile on your face when you are falling apart inside. This is where toxic positivity and self gaslighting show up. Now, the tricky thing here is that research does show that when we suppress our emotions, when we try to avoid them and hide from them, it does not make them go away. Okay, we're well intended. We're trying to make them go away, but it doesn't make them go away. The research shows this. It actually amplifies them over time. It makes them louder, they leak out, and then they can even turn into physical symptoms. So what this could look like if you're trying to hold it all together at work all day and then having a massive meltdown when you get home, being the strong one for everyone else when you're silently burning out inside, right? Joking your way through the pain instead of saying, hey, like that comment really upset and hurt me. So the fourth way we respond to our emotions. And again, this is one that blew my mind when I learned to do this years ago because I was like, what? That's an option. What? Receive. Number four. Receiving our emotions. This is what we're aiming for. So what this means is noticing what you're feeling. You got to name it to tame it. Okay, I'm feeling really anxious, right? Name it to tame it. Noticing what you're feeling and then allowing it to be there without judging it, it's not a good or bad emotion. It just is. Right now I'm feeling anxious. Doesn't make me a good person or a bad person, right? I'm just feeling anxious, just allowing it to be there. And this is such a big difference. When I teach this to people, it's like instead of fighting it, you allow it to be there, Letting it move through your body in a safe way and then choosing how you want to respond. So let me give you some examples to, like, put context to this. Okay? If you notice that your chest is feeling really, really tight and your thoughts are racing, and you name it. Okay, I'm feeling really anxious. And for me, I will often put a hand on my chest. I'll take a couple of deep breaths, just kind of hit pause on what I'm doing. And often I'll do some rounds of eft tapping. I might go for a walk if I can, if I can get outside, go for a bit of a walk, you know, change rooms, right? Move away from from where the event has occurred, where I'm feeling it. Just move around and then decide, okay, what am I going to do about this task that I'm feeling really anxious about? What am I going to do now? If you feel that really, like Hot, prickly, friggin anger feeling rising up inside of you. Instead of firing off a text that says fuck you, which you really want to do in the moment, you know, it's taking a couple of breaths, taking a step back, hitting pause and going, I'm actually texting back. I'm not in a good place to respond right now. I'll come back to you. And then taking a break, taking a time out. Okay? If you're feeling a lot of shame because you made a mistake, and instead of spiraling into like, I'm a piece of, I'm the worst human in the world, instead practicing self compassion, that's receiving an emotion, Trust me, like, self compassion is like, okay, I've made a mistake, I stuffed up. That doesn't mean that I mess stuff up. This is really hard, this is really uncomfortable. Like, how can I take care of myself? How can I support myself through this? Okay, Receiving doesn't mean that you enjoy the feeling. It just means that you're willing to actually feel it without attacking it or trying to run from it. Okay? And when you learn to receive emotions, you get your power back. And the best part is the volume of that emotion gets turned down and they go away so much sooner when we stop fighting them, when we stop fighting them and just let them be with us, that is when they start to dissipate, they start to slowly disappear, right? The volume gets turned down, all of a sudden they're gone. So, my friend, which hour do you usually go to think about a recent situation where you had a very strong emotion? Maybe you had an argument with your partner, you're yelling at the kids, got an email that you didn't like, whatever it is, which of the hours did you go to? Was it resist, react, reject or receive? And what did that look like for you in real life? Did it actually help? Did it create more chaos, more shame or fallout later? Which of these do you notice yourself going to a lot? And do the strategies that come with that? Let's say it's like resisting and you're maybe scrolling on your phone a lot and maybe eating a lot more in the evenings to sort of numb that pain. Does that kind of temporary relief that you're trying to create, does that lead to more discomfort in the long run, to burnout, to self criticism? What is the result of that when you add it up? Now, I just want to say here, like, if this is bringing up some regrets about like past moments, past ways that you've reacted and responded to your emotions, like that's Very normal. Especially when we're newly diagnosed and we kind of, you know, start running over our whole life and replaying all of these things. But I do want to be really clear and say you did the best that you could with the tools and information you had. You didn't know this. You weren't taught it. My friend, this work is not about judging your past self. It's about giving your future self new options, new tools, new support. And just seeing these patterns clearly is a very powerful first step in developing the skill of emotional regulation. Okay? Awareness is everything. If we're not aware of something, we can't do jack shit about it. I like to describe it as like if you imagine being in a pitch black, dark room and you're fumbling around in that room trying to find something. Awareness is like turning the light switch on in the dark room. Now you can see what you're working with. Now you know where things are. Now you know what to do, where to start. Okay? So, my friend, if you recognized yourself throughout our episode today, welcome to the team. Hello. You are right at home here, okay? It simply means that your emotional system is working. Hi. You have adhd. Your emotional system is just a little extra sensitive. And remember, you were never taught these skills. You were never taught how to work with it. And the beautiful best part here is emotional regulation is a learnable, practiceable skill. Is practicable a word? Yeah, I hope so. We're going with it. This is a skill, okay? You're not lazy, you're not too much, you're not broken. Your brain and nervous system, right? They're doing exactly what they're supposed to do, and they can continue to develop and build these skills of emotional regulation. Right now, if you want to go deeper into emotional regulation with adhd, that's exactly the work that we do inside my course, Emotional regulation with adhd, and then inside the membership, which is called adulting with adhd. Okay? We've got practical tools, you've got guided exercises, and of course, you've got my expert coaching. So I will drop some links about that. Right? But my friend, this is one of those episodes I feel like you could listen to a couple of times. I asked you a ton of questions today that you could really hit pause on and reflect on, and you would take a lot away from this. You would really start to begin to develop that skill. All right, Huge, huge love to you, my friend. Take care. Have a beautiful week. 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.