18: ADHD entrepreneurs - 4 areas of self care you MUST focus on!

ADHD Self Care (Transcript)

What are the four areas of self care we need to focus on to function as normal human beings?

In this episode we're gonna talk about the ADHD prerequisites to function like a human even in times of stress.

So today we are going to be talking about self-care and not that namby pamby bubble bath, spa day kind of self-care. We are talking about the ADHD requisites for you to function like a proper human. Now , there's functioning like a proper human being when things are going perfectly. There's functioning like a proper human being when you're having a normal day, when everything is going more or less to plan.

And then there's functioning like a normal human being when everything goes wrong. And I wanna share a little story about how this happened for me in the last week we're recording this on Wednesday, February 8th. Last Monday, my dog, who had had a little cough for about four days started declining rapidly. This dog, who normally walks four to five miles a day and spends an hour to an hour and a half playing with her friends at the dog park.

Was having trouble standing up. She was listless, she wasn't eating. She looked confused

And I had to take her to the vet that day. Now the vet gave her a couple medications, some of which had side effects. That night, Monday night, she just kept getting worse and I was under the impression that it was a side effect of the medication. So first thing in the morning, the next day I called the vet, explained that the side effects were really bad, and they explained to me that those aren't side effects.

She was just getting worse. So I had to take her back to the vet. Thank God my friend Jess came with me. By the way, if you don't have friends like Jess Regatta in your life, get. because this friend, she showed up, she helped me get Luna into the car cuz Luna literally couldn't walk down the stairs.

She went with me to the vet where we were for about two hours. She drove my car, my little fiat, where I literally had to sit in the trunk because , there wasn't space cuz we had Luna in the front seat. And when they told us that they didn't know what was wrong and sent us to the ER at Penn University, she drove us there and sat with me for three and a half.

Luna then had to be in the I C U for five whole nights. She couldn't function without being on oxygen. And if you don't know apparently when dogs have to be on oxygen, it's not like a human being on oxygen. They don't have a mask. They have to literally be in an isolation tank, basically a plexiglass box where oxygen is just pumped.

So this poor dog who normally has me right next to her 24 7 and gets all the attention in the world was not feeling well on oxygen and isolated from other humans and other dogs. She was also highly contagious, so that added a whole other element to how much she could be handled and cared.

And on my side, they had told me that they would check in with me between eight 30 and 10:00 AM in the morning and 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM in the evening. Now, I don't have to tell you as someone with ADHD waiting is not one of my strengths. So I would literally sit with my phone in my hand with my headphones in my ears looking at my phone from eight 30 to usually 10 15 when they would actually.

In the evenings, again, 5:00 PM rolled around. I was sitting, holding my phone in my hand, staring at it until about six 15 when they would call. They also told me that the only time they would call outside of those check-in hours was if something was really, really wrong, and they needed me to make a really tough decision.

Waiting for people with ADHD completely stops us in our tracks. It makes us unable to do anything else, to focus on anything else, but let me tell you, from experience waiting for something to not happen is 10 times worse.

And I wish I could tell you that I slept, a certain amount of time in those days. I wish I could tell you that I was eating like a normal human being. I wish I could also tell you that I had exercised at all in this time, but I literally couldn't focus on it. I could only do the bare basics.

Now we're a week and a half after Luna is on the men, she's home,

and she's getting plenty of rest. We are in quarantine for about four weeks because she has this dog influenza that's going around and this infectious pneumonia. that is really transmittable to other dogs. So, we're gonna be going nuts in about three weeks when she has all her energy back

 I wanna share with you what my normal self-care routine is and how setting that up before this whole ordeal actually helped me function at all during this stressful.

 Now there are four elements that I'm gonna be touching upon. The first one is nourishment your food. The second one is alcohol. The third is the rest you're getting, and the fourth is the support. The support that you have around you. So first and foremost food for people with ADHD we tend to either go hours and hours and hours and hours without eating, and then we get hangry and then we have to eat something and then we're tired because we have this sugar crash.

Or we get into snack mode. . people with ADHD also have a really hard time eating breakfast. My personal flavor of ADHD breakfast is I will tend to cook breakfast for myself, like eggs and toast and put it all together, and then I walk away and then three hours later I wonder why I'm hungry and why I'm so angry and why I'm grouchy and all this stuff.

And then I look over into the kitchen and there's my plate of breakfast that I made, but didn't. Because I got distracted. Something on my phone caught my attention. I realized that I needed to take a shower before I hopped on a zoom call, whatever. So making proper breakfasts do does not work for me, . So what I work, what I do for myself is I either make myself a smoothie in the morning, something that I can walk around with and have with.

Like I can drink it right before I go in the shower. I can drink it right before I hop on a Zoom call. I can drink it while I'm on the Zoom call and just risk the and just risk having a ton of seeds in my teeth. And you know what, it's okay, , my, my clients all understand. Now the other thing that I do that makes me feel like a child but it's super effective is I go and I get high protein toaster waffles.

And actually I have some right here cuz I didn't finish eating them this morning. I mean, they're toaster waffles, they're high protein. I think a serving has 12 grams of protein, which is enough to get you through the morning. It gets you fueled. It also cushions your stomach if you're putting any caffeine in it, which I'm gonna touch on in a moment.

The key here is that if you have ADHD and you're skipping breakfast and having caffeine, it's probably the worst thing you can do. A, it's not good for your. It's not good for your anxiety levels. And three, it's setting you up for a major crash in about an hour to an hour and a half

because caffeine only spikes you for a little bit and your body actually needs calories to burn while it's functioning. , while it's being creative, while it's doing work, while it's doing everything that you have to do in your day. As a society, we get really wrapped up on like, what's the right thing to eat? What's the perfect calorie amount and what are the macros? And I need to have all the vegetables and fruit. I have to eat the rainbow. And let's just say, fuck that. Okay, . The win here is that you ate breakfast.

The win here is that you ate breakfast that had a little bit of protein in it. We're not getting precious about what is in your breakfast. We're getting precious about you putting food in your mouth, chewing it, and swallowing it. That's it.

Later in the day when you have a lunch or a dinner or a snack, that's when you can get your fruits and vegetables. That's when you can focus on having some more healthy things.

The other thing that is really common with folks with ADHD is we tend to eat the same thing over and over and over and over again until we get absolutely sick of it. I also talk about this in the first episode of this podcast, all about shiny object syndrome. If you wanna go check that out, please do. But after you listen to this whole episode, obviously we're not jumping around

now. We eat the same thing over and over and over again until we get absolutely sick of it, and that's okay. I know everyone out there, all the nutritionist and diet experts and fitness people are telling us that we have to, have fish one night and red meat the other and legumes the next, and chicken and, and then repeat.

No, we don't, we don't have to hold ourselves to that standard, especially if you're just a single person cooking for yourself. or if you and your partner or your family are really, really busy, it's okay to batch a bunch of food and make it super easy for yourself. The key here is you have to make the food and eat the food.

Anything you do in addition to make it healthier is a win.

Just like we can't. Stay focused on something that we find boring. If we're given food that we don't want to eat, we're not going to eat it. Okay. There's an element of having ADHD that makes you kind of like a toddler, right?

It's like you want what you want when you want it, and you're not willing to settle for anything else.

And instead of making that wrong, let's just embrace it and call it a win.

Now your tolerance for caffeine. So a lot of folks with ADHD, they don't realize it, but they actually learn to self-medicate using caffeine. because caffeine is a stimulant for a lot of people. With ADHD, a stimulant actually helps us settle down more and focus. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where you wake up, you have a big cup of coffee or really highly caffeinated tea and you start working and then you get really tired.

And instead of working, you're like, you know what? I'm just gonna go take a nap really quick. The caffeine nap for ADHD folks is a magical experience and I don't know if you've experienced this, but I feel like every time I have a caffeine nap, like that, sleep is the most magical sleep I've ever experienced in my life.

It's like the gold standard of. and you wake up and you are so refreshed and it's like a new world and your life is so much better after that. Just know that's an ADHD thing now. Okay? Because we use caffeine as a tool to self-medicate. We can sometimes get a little out of control with this. Let's not forget. That caffeine affects your body by stimulating your adrenal glands. So when you introduce caffeine into your body, you're literally telling your body you have to start producing adrenaline. I've done a lot of research on coffee and caffeine and how you take it into your body, and one of the things that I was really surprised by is that when you wake up in the morning, your very first thing should not be a cup of.

The reason being is that when you first wake up, your body is still producing a certain level of melatonin, and melatonin is the hormone that makes you tired and makes you wanna go to sleep. Now, when you introduce caffeine immediately upon waking, your body starts panicking, cuz it's still producing melatonin and all of a sudden there's this adrenaline.

So it's producing a downer. You've introduced an upper, and your body is always going to wanna find homeostasis. So if you're producing melatonin and you're introducing adrenaline into your body, guess what the body's gonna do? It's gonna uptick how much melatonin it's pumping in, making you more tired ultimately. What you want to do, if you wanna use caffeine in the best way possible, in the most effective way possible, is you actually wanna give yourself about an hour upon waking up to let that melatonin drain out of your system to let it taper off.

Once the melatonin tapers off and you introduce caffeine, guys, it's a magical experience that caffeine hits so much harder. Because you're , because it's not fighting that level of melatonin in your system.

Now, there are some things that you wanna be aware of if you're drinking a lot of coffee because it does affect your adrenals, it can absolutely amplify any anxiety or stress that you're experiencing.

Now for some people, that makes you way more productive and effective. I'm talking about my mom here. She drinks all the coffee in the world and she gets shit done. I could never accomplish what she does in about five minutes. Now, for other people, when their stress and anxiety gets triggered, they start downwards spiraling.

I'm gonna say that word again. Downward spiraling. , and this is where you get like these sad mopey moods because you're all amped up and you have all this anxiety and you don't know what to do with it. And so instead of, instead of doing anything, you just kind of start shutting down, your executive dysfunction and sadness mixed together and it just becomes like this swamp of sedation.

But not true sedation because you're internally punishing yourself and feeling so behind on all the things that you think you need to be doing right now.

Another danger of having too much caffeine throughout the day is that you're gonna need to have a downer at some point, because to be able to go back to sleep, you can't go to sleep if you have all this adrenaline pumping through your. And so that takes us to alcohol. The conversation around alcohol.

Now, I realized in the last couple years that how I was using coffee and wine was coffee would wake me up in the morning and it would pump a bunch of adrenaline in my system and get me, moving for the day. And then in the evenings I would actually kind of need something to bring me.

because that caffeine was still pumping through my body. I still had adrenaline. And to relax enough to go to sleep, I would really need to have just like a small glass of wine with dinner. For people with ADHD what alcohol does to our systems, and I'm not telling anyone if you're listening to this, I'm not saying you have to cut alcohol out of your diet completely, if you really enjoy wine, beer, cocktails, whatever.

I support you in drinking, but I want you to be aware of how this is impacting you with your ADHD and how it can really impact how you're able to show up in your business. So folks with ADHD, because our. Work so hard all day. They're connecting all these unrelated topics. They're being creative and they're solving problems that other people can't even begin to solve.

We actually need more sleep than the typical person. We need between eight to eight to nine hours of solid rest each evening. Now even a half a serving of. It could be beer, wine, cocktails, whatever will impact the quality of sleep that you get.

Having any amount of alcohol in your system when you go to sleep will prevent you from going deeper into sleep, so you get into that deep rest. , it'll make you more restless in your sleep, so you'll wake yourself up. And we all know that feeling after having a couple drinks in the evening and waking up at two or three o'clock in the morning with that dry mouth, you know that cotton tongue and it's ugh, and that slight headache that's starting the front of your forehead and going to the kitchen and shuffling around, trying to find the aspirin, realizing, oh, crap, I can't take aspirin without anything to eat. So then finding a banana or like a slice of, of sandwich bread, eating that, taking the aspirin, glugging some water, and then going back to bed. Now waking up at that time is really, really impactful to your day, not in a.

And what can happen is you have the coffee in the morning. You have more coffee throughout the day. You need a slight downer to get yourself to sleep so you have some alcohol. It does get you to sleep, however, it doesn't let you get into that deep, restful sleep. You also wake up in the middle of the night, go back to sleep.

Wake up in the morning feeling tired again, so you have more coffee and more caffeine throughout the day. And then you just start this cycle over and over and over and over again. And let's acknowledge also that people with ADHD tend to have a predilection to addiction. Anytime we're setting ourselves up to need something can be really dangerous for us And the last thing I want to hear from my fellow ADHD folks, is that they've struggled with alcoholism, that they've struggled with a drug addiction.

So as you're going about your day, I want you to be conscious of the things that you're putting into your system, the stimulants and the depressants, and I want you to notice how it really does impact you. And again, I'm not saying don't do any of this. I am saying be aware and I will share. I I will share that.

In July of 2022, I decided that alcohol was no longer serving me.

I was finding that the day after having any amount of alcohol, even half a beer, I would wake up with this mass amount of anxiety

And I just didn't wanna deal with it anymore. So I decided to give it up for a hundred days. After a hundred days, there was just no way I could go back. My anxiety actually went sky skyrocketed after about a month of no alcohol. but the reason being was that I didn't really have any coping mechanisms to prevent. To relieve anxiety as it was happening. Because how often in our world are we told, oh, did you have a stressful day?

Oh, grab a glass of wine. Oh, was that a tough call? Oh, let's go grab a beer and talk about it. Oh, has this been a long week? Oh, cool. Let's go out to dinner and have a couple cocktails. Right in there. There's no room for you to meditate, to exercise, to do things that are consciously designed to reduce your anxiety.

It's just reach for a beverage. So even not being a heavy drinker, just being a light social drinker when I gave up alcohol that first month was hell, . I don't wanna lie about that. I wanna be completely honest. That first month was hell. I was in therapy asking How do I deal with all this anxiety?

I don't know what to do. But by the end of the a hundred days that I had set for myself, there was no going back. It doesn't take long to find coping mechanism. It doesn't take long to find the coping mechanisms that work for you to manage any stress and anxiety that comes up in your life.

And so if this is a change that you need to make, I would love to share any of my insights. If you want any support in your going dry journey please reach out to me.

Okay, so we've touched upon this in our talk about caffeine and about alcohol, but rest. Rest is the most important part of life. You know that saying, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I used to live and breathe by that saying. all week throughout, school, throughout work, I would, give myself four to six hours a night to sleep.

I would get to work, I'd pump the caffeine, I'd stay up late again, four to six hours, and then until the weekends I would end up sleeping until noon. Right. And we all know that feeling of waking up on a Saturday morning or a Saturday afternoon at noon and feeling like a complete. because you've just wasted the day, right?

This is what I love to call sleep shame, and for something that we need to survive. Why the fuck do we shame ourselves about it? There is no shame in giving your body the rest that it needs. Stop doing it. . If you need to sleep until noon one day, that is absolutely fine. Of course you're gonna pay for it that night because waking up at noon is gonna make you go to sleep later.

So ultimately, the best thing you can do for yourself is to plan to give yourself eight to nine hours of sleep per night. And this is the least sexy advice I'm ever gonna give on this podcast. But having a bedtime really. Having a time in the evening where you have to be in your bed. You don't necessarily have to go to sleep yet.

You can get into bed and have your phone. You can desk roll, you can watch a show, you can read a book, you can do a little work on your computer, but you're ahead of the game here because you're already in bed, you're already in your pajamas. Hopefully you've already brushed your teeth and washed your face cuz you know we like hygiene here and we don't want any breakouts from all that caffeine that you're consum.

Because side note adrenaline does make your face produce more oils. And if those oils sit in your pores, guess what happens? Pimples. And we don't like those, So just side note, if you have not tried the hyaluronic pimple patches they are absolutely incredible. Okay. Just a little skincare note. This really has nothing to do with ADHD except that if you're having a lot of caffeine, you might be prone to some breakouts.

But they are a game changer. It's. Especially if you are a business owner who has to be on camera, on social media, often there's nothing that prevents you from wanting to be on camera more than a giant zit on your face. So let's just mitigate that. These little patches, you can buy them pretty much anywhere these days.

And you put them on at night and overnight, they basically suck out all of the impurities that are in that blemish. Side note, if you have more pigmentation in your skin, I want you to talk to your dermatologist first because it can cause skin lightening, and I don't wanna give blanket white person advice to everyone that could potentially harm someone's skin deal.

Back to self-care

So every single night the win here is be in bed at the same time. The win here is have a general time where you turn off the tv, where you put the phone down, where you put the book aside, you shut your laptop and close your. If you have trouble with your mind racing, some hot tips I love are any kind of meditation app that has guided meditations to fall asleep.

Any books on tape that you have listened to enough that it's just background noise at that point? My go-to here is the whole Harry Potter series. I can't tell you there. There are years of time where I have gone to sleep every single night listening to one of the Harry Potter books. The only one that's a struggle is a seventh, cuz there's a lot of scary moments in that and you get kind of wrapped up in it.

But the rest of them are great also. There's nothing wrong with falling asleep with the TV on if it helps you personally. My go-to is the West Wing. I find it very soothing to see a government that functions.

Especially between 2016 and 2020

Neal likes that one…

And the final bit I wanna share with you is if you're not falling asleep, I want you to give yourself credit that you're still resting your body, you're still resting your mind, you're still giving yourself relaxation. So even if you're one of those people who takes a while to fall asleep, I don't want you to get into that cycle of, oh my God, I'm not falling asleep.

Oh my God, I'm not falling asleep. This is gonna be awful. I'm gonna stay up forever and then I'm gonna be so tired tomorrow. I'm gonna oversleep, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let that go. Let that go and celebrate the fact that, oh, cool, I'm laying down and I'm resting my body. I'm laying in the dark. My eyes are closed, I'm resting my.

One of the things that I noticed when I'm falling asleep, especially in these nights where my brain just won't turn off, is I kind of let myself just go down like a thought worm hole. And I noticed that like at some point my thoughts get weird. Like they get a little fantastical. Like all of a sudden there's a unicorn in my living room in this thought.

And in that moment I realized, oh my God, this doesn't belong here. This is not realistic. And I get excited. I'm like, oh my God, this means sleep is coming. Sleep is about to happen because my brain is already kind of going into the dream mode. So I don't know if that's helpful to anyone else, but I just figured I'd share it just in case.

Oh gosh. Now the final bit I wanna go into here is having a proper support system. Having loved ones who will check in and remind you, did you drink any water today?

Having loved ones who will check in and say, Hey, have you eaten breakfast yet? Or is it sitting in your kitchen? Or better yet, people that you live with, either a partner, family members who will just walk by and just hand you a snack.

If you have a partner like that, never leave them. They will keep you alive.

Likewise, when you're building your business, as soon as you can hire support to take care of the stuff that when the shit hits the fan, you're not able to focus on, it's going to be a game changer for the longevity of your business and your welfare. So last. When Luna was so sick and having to be in the I c U and I was so stressed out and just sitting by my phone so scared that I'd get those phone calls, it was incredible because I was able to touch base with my team, tell them what was going on, and have them handle rescheduling everything.

I was able to have them I was able to have them send an email to my list. Letting them know that I was pausing enrollment in a program that I was launching. I was able to lean into them and have them handle the bare basics of my business for that time cuz I was not able to. Now that's the worst case scenario.

Something blows up in your life, you're not able to handle the basics of your business. That support team is going to be an incredible bridge to when things get better, but also, When life is going well, when you're feeling creative when you're present and you're feeling engaged in your business and everything else is just kind of flowing, having that support system to make sure that everything in behind the scenes is happening correctly, is going to free you up to be better in your.

 And if you wanna learn how to train your team to be the best support for you, you're gonna wanna go check out episode four where I talk about.

It's where I talk about dopamine seeking and how you can train your team

To best have your back as an ADHD entrepreneur.

So let's review, shall we? First and foremost, you have to nourish your body, and it's okay if you eat like a toddler so long as you're eating.

We wanna be careful with the caffeine.

We also wanna be aware of our consumption of alcohol and less is better. We want to make sure to rest our bodies consistently and not sleep shame ourselves. And we need to have that support system to make sure that we're able to do all of this.

Once you have these basic self-care systems set up in your life, it really doesn't matter how many things go wrong or how many things go right,

You're gonna be able to handle so much more when you're taking care of yourself and when you've set up your life to take care of you.

If you’d like more help with this, I invite you to join my weenie ADHD - preneur community, where you'll get all of the support from myself in a group of fellow ADHD - preneurs.

Go to weeniecast.com/members.

© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs