Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and I’m here with Nikki Kinzer.

Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.

Pete Wright:
Oh hi. Hi, it’s you, and we’re going to make a podcast.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, we are.

Pete Wright:
We’ve been talking about productivity and capacity and those kinds of things.

Nikki Kinzer:
So many things.

Pete Wright:
We’re kind of continuing that conversation. And I think this is a good one for you because you’re someone whose career is about providing guidance to help other people do stuff in a new way. And what happens when they’re tired and they just stop listening to you?

Nikki Kinzer:
When they’re tired. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Wright:
Because I know what it feels like to be real tired and to get cranky when people tell you how to do stuff.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
I don’t care for it.

Nikki Kinzer:
So true. Okay.

Pete Wright:
So let’s talk about what that means. Before we get into the show, we want to tell you about Patreon. Our Patreon community is fantastic. Members of our Patreon community get early access, ad-free access to every episode. The Patreon versions of the show — and I want to just say we had a question in the live stream from last week that came in late that I did not see, and we haven’t responded to it. The question was, where do I listen to the bonus after-show? Well, you just listen. If you’re a member, the version that comes out to our patrons is the version that contains the pre-show and the post-show. It’s all in one. So you, as members, get to listen to that version that comes out in the secret Discord channels. There’s no special place. It just comes directly to you.

Even if you are a member, you get to join us for that live stream and you can participate in the post-show chit chat, and we’d love to have you there too. Come ask questions, get access to the special channels. All of those good things happen when you are a member of the Patreon at patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.

But really the biggest benefit that you get for becoming a member is access to the people. The people in this community are incredible. They are real people. They are living with ADHD and they show up for each other every day, whether it’s in accountability chat rooms, whether it’s in body doubling sessions, whether it’s just in support when life gets hard with ADHD. If you’ve ever wanted to be more than just a listener, this is where it happens. Again, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more.

And if you’re not ready for that, that’s fine too. Just visit takecontroladhd.com to connect with us on socials. Join the Discord. Sign up for the weekly email newsletter. We’d love to have you no matter where you decide to land.

All right, Nikki, why does advice stop working when you’re tired?

Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly what you said earlier in the intro. You’re cranky.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
You don’t want to be told what to do. As podcasters, as coaches, as leaders in the ADHD community or whatever you want to call it, we’re not here to tell people what to do. That’s not what we’re here to do. And when you’re offering advice or guidance, it’s always with that intention of trying to help the person, but also helping them figure out what works for them because it’s different for everybody. It’s not a one-size-fits-all when we talk about ADHD strategies and things like that.

But I think what’s important too is to understand that this isn’t about just being lazy or being unmotivated. It’s not a character flaw. It is part of your ADHD that needs recovery. So by the time you’ve gotten to that part, that time of day or time of week or whatever it may be, you’ve worked really hard. Your brain has worked really hard. And it needs to recover. And that’s not optional. People forget that. They think it is optional and that for some reason they don’t need to be the ones that need to rest.

Pete Wright:
I just want to add in here because I don’t want people to mistake this conversation about being able to take ADHD advice or advice about living with ADHD. We’re talking about being able to listen to the world around you and take any advice and internalize it. This is a conversation about what happens when your brain and body are fatigued and you become a raw nerve in the universe. That’s what we’re talking about.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Because most people will tell you that they know what to do.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
Most people will say, I’ve heard that before.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
A lot of the things that we talk about every single week is not necessarily new information.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s when you have reached that point where you’re just— I can’t make myself do anything. I’m just tired, I’m exhausted.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
And instead of thinking, I must be tired, the thought becomes, something is wrong with me. I’m doing something wrong. My point is, you’re not doing anything wrong. What you need is that recovery time. And people just don’t account for that.

I want to reference one of our shows that we did before because I think it’s a good one to put in the show notes, and that’s the opportunity cost. We do talk about that a lot in that show, where we’re talking about when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else, and there’s a cost. There’s always a cost. Because we’re not putting in the recovery time in our schedules, then we’re always going back to back and we’re trying to run like little energy bunnies. Do you remember that commercial with the little energy bunny?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, the Energizer bunny.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I remember.

Pete Wright:
I like the idea of the energy bunny as a sort of mascot for ADHD.

Nikki Kinzer:
I like the energy bunny, yeah. The brain’s not built that way. But this is the thing too: I think that a lot of people fall into that trap of, oh, this is about willpower.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
I will logic my way into capacity, which we’ve talked about. We talked about capacity with Brooke, that you just don’t have. But again, there’s still this belief that we feel like we should have this all the time consistently. And I can tell you, nobody has this. Neurotypicals do not have this. ADHDers do not have this.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Nikki Kinzer:
We all get tired.

Pete Wright:
Everybody gets tired.

Nikki Kinzer:
We all hit a capacity that gets filled.

Pete Wright:
Here is an interesting thing. Can I take you to the research?

Nikki Kinzer:
I would love you to take us to the research.

Pete Wright:
There is a journal piece. This was a paper that was written by the wonderful Rogers, Dittner, Rimes, and Chalder. They write bangers in the ADHD research lit.

Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.

Pete Wright:
The title of their paper is “Fatigue in an Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Population.” That’s the part I can’t say multiple times fast.

Nikki Kinzer:
You could say “fatigue in an ADHD disorder population” and people would get it.

Pete Wright:
That’s not what it says, though.

Nikki Kinzer:
I know.

Pete Wright:
I’m true to the words.

Nikki Kinzer:
You are true to the words, yes.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So what they wanted to look at was, everybody gets tired. But to what degree does this impact ADHDers differently? And it turns out the results of their research suggest that the ADHD group were significantly more fatigued than the healthy group, with 62% of them meeting the criteria for fatigue caseness for chronic fatigue syndrome. ADHD symptoms were significantly greater in the chronic fatigue group than in the healthy group. ADHD and chronic fatigue groups did not differ significantly on measures of functional impairment, mood, and self-efficacy. Sixty-two percent of the folks in this group tested positive correlationally for chronic fatigue syndrome. That’s something. So everybody gets tired. But the ADHD population gets tired in a different and vastly more significant way.

Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.

Pete Wright:
That’s what we have to keep in mind.

Nikki Kinzer:
That’s pretty crazy.

Pete Wright:
It’s nuts.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. We need to just sit on that for a second because that is crazy.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
To your point, when we talk about what’s happening when you have ADHD, it’s those executive functions that are not working. And when you hear advice, whether it is ADHD-specific or not, most productivity advice assumes that those executive functions are working and that they’re available at their full strength.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Nikki Kinzer:
It assumes that you can pause and you can prioritize and you know when to take a breath and you know when to step back and you can remember things and you can switch tasks easily. But all of these things we know are hard for the ADHDer anyway, and then you put on top of being tired, and they get worse.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
It gets harder. The more tired you are, the harder your work gets.

Pete Wright:
This is another one of those — we’ve talked about metacognitive performance before, and this is one of those meta skills or those meta-awarenesses for me that just reading some of these papers this morning. This one was related to the impairments of sleep loss on core executive functions, and we know that the executive functions go down. In the context of our conversation about being able to take advice or guidance or direction or just listening to others, what we have to remember is, with ADHD, it’s hard to do the task. With ADHD and fatigue, it’s hard to even listen to guidance about doing the task. You aren’t even able to cross the transom from learning how to do a thing to being able to try the thing. You can’t even get there. That’s the piece that has me just sort of stepping back and relating a little bit.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
To the experience of what it means to be — we’ve talked about burnout — but to be at a task level compromised. I wrote this line down that really sticks with me. Fatigue distorts reality. On a really good day, an email is just an email. But when you are depleted, when you are fatigued, an email is a moral referendum. Fatigue distorts reality. Everything is dizzy when you’re fatigued.

So here’s another one. Shaw, Stringaris, Nigg, and Leibenluft did a study on emotional dysregulation, said it’s obviously common with ADHD.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
This was the number that I thought was mildly questionable and gave me a holy crap moment. It appears in 30 to 70% of adults with ADHD. What the hell kind of stat is that? Like almost all or just a few — three out of ten is substantively different than seven out of ten. So that statistic has me looking a little bit sideways. But when we’re talking about emotional dysregulation—

Nikki Kinzer:
And they’re saying 30 to— oh gosh. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
They’re saying 30% or 70%. This is why I’m saying, I don’t need a statistic to tell me what I feel in my bones.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
I already know it.

Nikki Kinzer:
When you’re tired, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. I just think that statistic was really funny.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s a little ironic, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right. So anyway.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
That leads us to this sort of point of self-awareness and not being able to see, because reality’s distorted.

Nikki Kinzer:
I love that. The fatigue distorts your reality. Your self-awareness is going to go because you lose the ability to really see any patterns or insights. And your accommodations, the things that you’ve put in place, you stop noticing. The check-ins, the alarms, all of those things stop. You don’t see them or hear them anymore.

And then I think flexibility too. That is already hard when something changes in your day and you have to pivot, but when you’re tired and you have to pivot, it will feel like it’s the worst thing ever. A different day when you had a good night’s sleep, it may not feel as bad. But today it feels like it’s the worst thing.

Unrealistic expectations are one of those things that are already happening on a good day.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Nikki Kinzer:
And then you get tired, and again it just makes it worse because you believe in all of your heart—

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
—that you should be able to push through. You spend the little energy that you have left fighting yourself instead of recovering. You believe that every day. Even though every day, you’re wrong.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s not true.

I think it’s interesting too, the guilt loop. I have to talk about guilt because I see this in clients all the time. They feel guilty to rest. They don’t feel like they’ve done enough. They feel like, I need to be doing more. And what’s interesting is that guilt is also taking energy, and it’s actually making you feel even more tired. Brooke talked about this a little bit in that spiral in our last episode. So definitely go back and take a listen to that.

But I think that’s really interesting that we feel that guilt. And then we have to look at the many people who spend Sunday dreading Monday instead of actually using Sunday as a rest day.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. That leads to one of the most important takeaways for me, which is this experience of having to rewire around recovery. Because my assumption and my attentive challenges all drive me toward the next productive thing I could be doing. And I don’t think ever in my life have I sat down and thought, I need to time block my rest.

There was a time where I was really active about building my ideal calendar, and I still have it, the ideal calendar.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
I can turn it on in my calendar and it will tell me when I’m planning sleep and carpools and breakfast. I did the hyperscheduling thing just to see, when I’m feeling my best, what does my schedule look like? And that helped me work towards sprints and all that stuff. But rest was always — I’ll be sleeping at these hours. It was never proactively, I should work a recovery period into every major activity that I take that’s going to be cognitively draining.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
I guess I sort of do that now with my scheduling calendar. If somebody tries to book an hour-long recording, I have it set so you can’t. I have to take 15 minutes between sessions. But that’s not quite it. That’s not a disconnect. That’s a chance to go to the bathroom.

Nikki Kinzer:
That’s a transition.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s a transition.

Nikki Kinzer:
You’ve built in a transition, but you haven’t built in the recovery. Because if you did one podcast and it was really intense, and then you have another podcast that you have to do right after that, you’re not giving yourself enough recovery.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
And we don’t know that until you’re in it. You may not know that.

Pete Wright:
This becomes a challenge to productivity hot take culture, hustle culture, which is—

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
If you’re going to rest, it’s because you worked real hard constantly, and now you’re going to Cabo. Now you’re taking a vacation.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
It’s a prize, like it’s a treat you’ve earned. And that’s the rewiring part. For us with the ADHD brains, the only way I’m going to get the next thing done is if I rest a little bit in order to recover from the last thing.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. And that’s not what it is. It’s not a reward.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s part of the job.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s part of the work. It’s part of what your brain needs to do.

Pete Wright:
No one ever taught me that in college.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Absolutely. No one talks about it even now. We talk about buffer time and transition time, but the recovery time — as I referenced back in the opportunity cost — it is not something that we talk a lot about. But it makes such sense when we think about when we are doing those intense tasks, there’s a hangover. Have you used that word before? I think that’s an important way to kind of— that’s what it feels like. You’re tired.

I noticed this just the other day. I did a webinar. And after the webinar was over, I was like, okay, I need to shut down, and social battery—

Pete Wright:
Oh, you’re zapped, yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
—low if not completely out of charge. And I need the rest of the night. I can’t do anything after that. I need the rest of the night just to rest. And I don’t have ADHD. So if you think of somebody that has to be on, and you’re like that, you have to be on in your podcast all day long. How much recovery time do you give yourself, Pete?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, no, I don’t even know.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, right.

Pete Wright:
Because I don’t track it that way. This is one of the things that I really have been latching onto as I read your notes. Going into this session, you had written, rest isn’t the opposite of productivity. For ADHD brains, it is a condition for it. I’ll bet this is the first time anybody’s ever heard that listening to this show.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
It’s definitely the first time that I have ever considered it that way.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
I don’t know how I would get— this is why we go through the day feeling like we’re working in a deficit all the time.

Nikki Kinzer:
Sleep.

Pete Wright:
Well, but not always sleep.

Nikki Kinzer:
Not even sleep. I think that’s a good place to start because there are so many issues around sleep. So I think it’s a good place to start. But yes, and I think this is where you were going. It’s not just that, it’s the rest. How do I shut my brain down? Or what do I do in the evening or morning or whatever that quiets the noise?

Pete Wright:
You may not be surprised to hear that I have some more— I found another journal piece from Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz, who have a great discussion of the recovery experience.

Nikki Kinzer:
Research.

Pete Wright:
And how people wind down from work in order to be productive when they are at work. What it confirms is, sleep is a foundational part of it but not a large part of it. The most important thing to be able to do when you’re in recovery mode is not think about work. Not think about the thing you’re recovering from. It is changing gears. You’re an expert at it already. When you’re done with your day, you’ll do a puzzle. That is a great way to recover. You’re not asleep, but your brain is doing something fundamentally different than it’s doing all day.

It turns out the brain is kind of musical chairs. You thinking about different things is developing the recovery muscle. So reading a book, watching a film, doing art, taking a long walk, forest bathing.

Nikki Kinzer:
Art.

Pete Wright:
That’s a thing. I’ll bet you do a lot of forest—

Nikki Kinzer:
You take a bath in the forest.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, you bathe in the forest. The oxygen, it’s hyper-oxygenated. The light is really good for you. If you really want to exercise that beatnik muscle, you take all your clothes off and walk through the forest naked like a real bohemian.

Nikki Kinzer:
And you all of a sudden are on that reality TV show, Naked in the Woods, or Alone in the Woods.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Alone? Yeah. You’re alone.

Nikki Kinzer:
Whatever it’s called.

Pete Wright:
You realize there’s a bear. Who knew that recovery is actually running from a bear?

Nikki Kinzer:
And then there’s a cameraman.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. So that’s the trick. One of the greatest muscles and the hardest thing for us to do when we’ve been living in a state of ADHD, of living with our ADHD for so long, feeling the shame of not being able to get enough done, at the same time internalizing the experience of feeling like we can’t get things done as efficiently as our peers doing the same thing — now to tell us that the only way I’m going to get better at doing those specific things is if I stop thinking about it for a little while, forget it. That is so hard. I just want to acknowledge that.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, but it is.

Pete Wright:
Like that is crazy to assume. And yet we have to be able to carry both of these ideas in our heads at the same time.

Nikki Kinzer:
We have to be open to it. Because at the end of the day, the takeaway here is that rest and recovery are not things for you to feel guilty about. It’s how your brain gets back online. And if you are noticing the fatigue, if you’re noticing that your traditional go-tos are not working, you’ve got to check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What’s going on? And shift that a little bit from, I need to do more, to, okay, well, maybe I need to take a little bit of time to just rest.

Pete Wright:
This has made me think and maybe recontextualize a little bit some of our past episodes, our past conversations, things like “I don’t wanna.” “I don’t wanna” is a core response to taking advice that you’re not ready to take yet. So that’s a similar thing. If I have a project coming up and I say to myself, I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna think about that. Or the person who’s involved in that is making me mad. I don’t wanna do it for them. I think you’re right. I gotta check my capacity before I question the veracity of that feeling, because I may be burnt out and tired. And the last person I want to listen to about that is myself and my own interpretation of whether I’m tired.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
I’m not tired. You can’t tell me I’m tired. The cognitive dissonance is rich in this area.

Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yes.

Pete Wright:
But we have to talk about it. We have to acknowledge this is possible.

Nikki Kinzer:
We have to talk about it.

Pete Wright:
All right.

Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.

Pete Wright:
Is that it?

Nikki Kinzer:
Great job, Pete Wright.

Pete Wright:
Did we solve it? We may have solved it.

Nikki Kinzer:
No.

Pete Wright:
You’re welcome, everybody.

Nikki Kinzer:
There’s our two cents. Rest and do a puzzle at the end of the day.

Pete Wright:
Rub those together and do a task. Thank you, everybody, for hanging out with us for this podcast today. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. Don’t forget, if you have something to contribute, and I have a feeling you might, we’re about to head over to the Show Talk channel in the Discord server, and you can join us in that secret channel right over there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better at patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.