Latest / ADHD Strategies & Support for Women / Why ADHD Isn't Just a Brain Thing: The Nervous System Connection | Ep 151

Transcript

Why ADHD Isn't Just a Brain Thing: The Nervous System Connection | Ep 151 · ADHD Strategies & Support for Women

• 0:28
  Hello, welcome to Inspire.
• 0:29
  Inspiring Women with adhd.
• 0:31
  I'm Renee Allen, the host of this podcast.
• 0:32
  Excited to be here today.
• 0:34
  I am gonna probably have a shorter episode today because I am recording before class and I'm just fitting it in.
• 0:42
  And I had to tell myself it's okay to do this and have it be shorter.
• 0:46
  I have so much content that I wanna talk about that.
• 0:49
  Finding the time to do it all in one chunk hasn't been working.
• 0:52
  So I'm gonna implement.
• 0:54
  One of the ADHD strategies I've talked about in the past is doing small steps or even part of it is okay.
• 1:01
  Even if that's not the goal or that's not the ideal, that's not exactly what we think is best.
• 1:06
  So here I go, practicing what I preach.
• 1:10
  Today's episode is gonna start looking into the nervous system and how our bodies, minds, brains, everything is affected by adhd and how taking the approach of addressing the nervous system to help our ADHD symptoms will help, and how.
• 1:37
  It's such a great approach.
• 1:38
  And on this podcast, there's a lot of things that I'm not an expert of.
• 1:43
  I'm not an expert on neuroscience.
• 1:46
  My youngest son just got his bachelor's degree in neuroscience.
• 1:50
  He's more of an expert.
• 1:51
  He's not a professional in this, but he's more.
• 1:53
  He's far more of an expert.
• 1:55
  And he.
• 1:55
  He gets straight A's in college.
• 1:57
  He's.
• 1:57
  He understands and remembers everything he learns.
• 1:59
  I don't.
• 2:00
  I don't.
• 2:00
  I understand.
• 2:01
  I just can't rephrase it, and I can't always recall, but I love to share how it applies to my life and the things that I do have a great understanding of and that I do really well.
• 2:19
  Sharing is how to tune into our bodies, how to reset our nervous system or regulate the nervous system, how to.
• 2:26
  To help what's happening in our brains and our bodies when things can frazzle us.
• 2:32
  And recognizing when we're frazzled and frazzled may not be your definition of what's going on, but when your brain's not functioning at its peak, you probably know there's times when you're doing really well, you're getting a lot done,
• 2:48
  you're comfortable, you're just in this groove.
• 2:51
  And it's like, why is this working right now?
• 2:54
  And there are so many reasons.
• 2:55
  Sometimes it can be the time of the day, it can be your environment, it can be what you ate, what you drank.
• 3:01
  It could be if you exercised or not.
• 3:03
  But sometimes there are things emotionally that are going on or that we're sensing.
• 3:09
  And because of that, we don't even know what's happening.
• 3:11
  But we know that we feel different and we know that we're not able to think clearly, perform very well.
• 3:17
  And I'm not talking about performing on a stage, although it could be that, but it could also just be holding your keys, holding your phone, grabbing your things, going out to the car and not dropping your phone, or
• 3:30
  not thinking, where are my keys when they're in your hand.
• 3:33
  That's not functioning at peak level, but it is very real for a lot of us to not have that awareness and not know what's going on and just not be able to perform and function in a way that
• 3:46
  just is normal and every day for everyone else.
• 3:50
  So let me find my notes.
• 3:54
  Oh, my goodness.
• 3:54
  I've just, I've just been starting, Just been starting.
• 3:59
  I've been working at.
• 4:03
  I don't know why I use the words I use.
• 4:04
  I've been using a different browser that's not Google.
• 4:08
  I don't know if you've heard of DuckDuckGo and this is not a commercial because I don't, you know, have any, any ties to them.
• 4:15
  But I was just learning yesterday that there's a way to search with without getting all the AI stuff at the top because even with Google, it's gives you the AI answers first and a lot of times it'll give
• 4:27
  you a sentence of here's the information and you actually click on the link and that information isn't anywhere.
• 4:34
  It's lying to you.
• 4:35
  It's telling you that that sentence is in there and it's not.
• 4:38
  I don't know why that happens.
• 4:40
  I'm not anti Google or anything, but I just know it's not serving me very well.
• 4:44
  And I know that AI is not always accurate.
• 4:47
  There's a good chance that it's not.
• 4:48
  It can I usually when I have researched things with AI, I'll ask for the source and I'll click on the source and go there.
• 4:57
  But I could do that with, you know, a different search bar too.
• 4:59
  So anyway, if you could do no AI, DuckDuckGo, which I know sounds like a lot, it takes you to a different browser and you can find information that's actually from a source and not summarized or anything.
• 5:14
  So ADHD and the nervous system.
• 5:18
  It's kind of interesting because we think of our brains and ADHD as being a brain disorder or something, that our brain was developed, and I've said this many times on the podcast, our brains were developed in A way
• 5:35
  at birth.
• 5:35
  Neurodevelopmental disorder.
• 5:40
  ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder.
• 5:44
  And.
• 5:45
  And our brains were formed in a way, and they function or dysfunction.
• 5:51
  And that's what causes things not to be so simple, easy or neurotypical or normal or baseline.
• 6:03
  That might work for somebody who doesn't have that right.
• 6:05
  But I was talking to my son yesterday because I said, I saw the question, is ADHD a brain disorder or is ADHD a nervous system disorder?
• 6:19
  And he said, the brain is part of the nervous system.
• 6:24
  The brain, it's all connected.
• 6:27
  It is both.
• 6:28
  And that's what the article I was looking at was saying, too.
• 6:33
  But it's just very interesting because it does say neurodevelopmental.
• 6:37
  Right.
• 6:37
  It's the way the nervous system was developed, which includes the brain.
• 6:42
  The brain is part of the nervous system, and the spinal cord is part of the nervous system.
• 6:48
  And if you've heard of the polyvagal theory, which has a lot of merit, it's not scientifically proven, and that may or may not matter to some, but the polyvagal theory, that the vagus nerve that goes through the spinal
• 7:04
  cord, that's all connected, that stimulating that vagus nerve can help calm the nervous system.
• 7:10
  If that's exactly what's happening, whether or not that's happening, a lot of the things that they say to do to stimulate the vagal nerve are the things that calm the nervous system.
• 7:20
  If that's the reason for it or not, that's debated.
• 7:25
  But the cause and effect is still the same.
• 7:30
  Does that make sense?
• 7:30
  Like where.
• 7:32
  Because you're doing these things, it does calm your nervous system.
• 7:35
  And by calming your nervous system, you're in that sympathetic nervous system.
• 7:39
  In it, it changes to the parasympathetic.
• 7:42
  Parasympathetic is the calm.
• 7:44
  The.
• 7:45
  I can do things without feeling on edge or excited or anxious.
• 7:51
  And then the sympathetic nervous system is up.
• 7:54
  Fight, flight, freeze.
• 7:55
  There may be another one.
• 7:57
  Changes all the time.
• 7:58
  I'm just sitting here going through all my tabs from last night.
• 8:00
  It's like, why do I have all these Open, close, close, close, close, close.
• 8:04
  So is it.
• 8:05
  Do you ever do that where you're going through your tabs?
• 8:07
  I should have closed these last night, but I.
• 8:10
  To get myself to stop.
• 8:15
  To stop going down a rabbit hole.
• 8:17
  Just close your computer because, like, right now I'm seeing all the tabs.
• 8:21
  Oh, yeah.
• 8:22
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 8:23
  Okay.
• 8:24
  So the brain, the nervous system, all connected.
• 8:29
  I have seen just in my own studies, my own personal studies, and talking to other people and going into what I've learned and studied as a yoga teacher.
• 8:40
  Mindfulness, mindset, approach and body.
• 8:45
  So backing up a little bit interoceptive.
• 8:50
  Gosh, I should have notes on this because I'm going to try to tell you, I'm trying, going to try to explain it to you in the way that I like to think of it.
• 9:01
  But I haven't really said it out loud before.
• 9:04
  But in Tarot September, deception is your ability to notice what's going on in your body.
• 9:11
  So if you're sitting here right now, your interoception would be noticing what you notice.
• 9:18
  I don't have to tell you what to notice.
• 9:20
  I can, as a yoga teacher I can say, you know, see if there's any tension in your face.
• 9:27
  That's something that I see happen a lot.
• 9:29
  The shoulders on up go in and get, you know, it's like something squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
• 9:35
  So the shoulders come up and into the neck.
• 9:37
  You know, we call this tension and it's coming in and then in the face we feel it coming inward.
• 9:43
  We see people with their mouths going when they're, when they're mad and their mouth comes together, shoulders raise up.
• 9:49
  That's all that tension.
• 9:51
  So that might be something that you notice.
• 9:53
  What's happening in my shoulders, what's happening from my ears to my eyes?
• 9:57
  Does it feel like it's being pushed inward?
• 10:00
  And you can reverse that manually.
• 10:03
  You can also make it happen manually, but it's something that happens automatically with stress and doing the opposite, not taking the stress away.
• 10:15
  A lot of times I remember my mom used to say she went to the doctor and the doctor would say, I'm looking for something.
• 10:21
  My nose is just a little bit not drippy, but it's distracting me anyway.
• 10:29
  She would say that she went to the doctor and the doctor would say, you need to have less stress in your life.
• 10:33
  You need to lower your stress.
• 10:36
  Well, for her that was all fine and dandy, but she had five kids, four boys, me, a busy life, two families that she lived in the same town with, coordinating, going to different things, all the things that, that
• 10:48
  a mom would do.
• 10:49
  She wasn't, she was a stay at home mom at that time that she eventually taught school, taught middle school for a million years.
• 10:55
  But she's thinking, you're telling me to lower my stress and you can do that.
• 11:02
  You can go home and say, okay, what am I doing too much of or what can I do to take something off my plate or make my life a little easier or outsource something.
• 11:15
  She wasn't really somebody that outsourced, but that's something that we think of more now.
• 11:20
  Somebody's saying, well, it's too much for me to clean my house every day.
• 11:23
  Well, I have enough money I can budget to outsource.
• 11:25
  I can have somebody come in and clean or I don't like dealing with traffic.
• 11:30
  When I go to the grocery store, I'm going to outsource that.
• 11:33
  I'm going to get Target Circle or whatever it is and have my groceries delivered to me.
• 11:39
  Do I need to tip?
• 11:40
  Will that cost me five or ten dollars?
• 11:41
  Yeah, but I'm not spending money on gas and I'm not having to spend that time.
• 11:46
  I'm not having to park in the parking lot and walk in.
• 11:48
  I do love walking into Target, but I don't really love the whole drive there and back.
• 11:51
  So that's something that I.
• 11:53
  I'm outsourcing.
• 11:54
  Right.
• 11:55
  And my husband was even just saying last night because I spent last week and it's why I didn't have an episode last week.
• 12:01
  I'm looking at the time because I don't.
• 12:02
  I'm thinking, do I need to leave yet?
• 12:03
  But last week, let me see how to pause because I need to take a drink of water.
• 12:09
  I know when we have adhd, sometimes we narrate our lives, which is okay.
• 12:13
  I just realized I don't need my glasses on all the time.
• 12:15
  But as I.
• 12:19
  When I said drink water, I was guzzling water and.
• 12:21
  And it just made me laugh because I'm on Reddit too much.
• 12:24
  I just took it off my phone so that I'm not on it as much.
• 12:27
  But I'm in a yoga teacher Reddit and a hot yoga Reddit.
• 12:31
  And people were saying, yeah, you should drink yoga or drink yoga.
• 12:35
  Drink water throughout your class, but don't guzzle.
• 12:38
  Only sip, sip.
• 12:40
  And, and sometimes.
• 12:43
  And I know this is a part of adhd, I'm not trying to say everything the world is, but this definitely is, is that I can take one little thing that resonate with me or I know is not true
• 12:53
  in all situations.
• 12:54
  Might be true for some people, but it's not true for me.
• 12:55
  It's not true for her, it's not true for him.
• 12:57
  And so then I'm like, no, not necessarily, because I do guzzle in class.
• 13:02
  And they were saying, oh, you'll get nauseated, you'll throw up.
• 13:06
  That may happen for some people, but it doesn't happen for all people.
• 13:10
  And so if I need to guzzle, I can guzzle Yes, I spell myself sometimes, but I didn't this time, so yay for that.
• 13:17
  But guzzling.
• 13:18
  Some of us guzzle anyway.
• 13:20
  Okay, back to what was I talking about?
• 13:22
  Nervous system parasympathetic interoception.
• 13:27
  I know it was somewhere else.
• 13:28
  I am so sorry.
• 13:29
  I know I could go back and listen, but I'm not going to go.
• 13:32
  It'll come around.
• 13:33
  Okay.
• 13:34
  This is what it's like being my friend.
• 13:36
  And it may be like that for you, but the interoceptive approach is noticing what's going on here in your body.
• 13:44
  Having that awareness, it might seem like, well, that's such a simple thing.
• 13:48
  You know, everyone has interoception.
• 13:51
  They have the ability to have interoception, but.
• 13:54
  Or be interoceptive.
• 13:57
  And there are great benefits to doing this.
• 14:00
  But do they ever do it?
• 14:01
  And do they know how to do it?
• 14:03
  Have they ever thought about doing it or tried to do it?
• 14:07
  You might notice when you get bit by a wasp because it hurts, right?
• 14:11
  So you're going, ow, something on my body hurts, or I just got a second degree burn on my arm in the oven while baking bread for my grandchildren.
• 14:18
  I know, I was talking about my grandchildren, wasn't I?
• 14:21
  So I'll go back to that.
• 14:22
  Anyway, about that trip, I don't know what it was about, but anyway.
• 14:27
  So you may notice some things, like an immediate alarm like, oh, I'm getting burned, or oh, that hurt, I just tripped and hurt my toe, or my mosquito bite itches.
• 14:40
  You might have that awareness because that's something that's blaring.
• 14:44
  But the true benefits of being interoceptive is noticing the things that aren't just blasting out to you and they're very real and they cause a lot of problems in your health, but you may just ignore them.
• 15:03
  Or it could be that you understand that one thing's happening, but you're not tuning in enough to know how to release that.
• 15:11
  An example would be if you are really stiff in your shoulders in the back.
• 15:17
  Your shoulders can be on the top right here.
• 15:19
  Right.
• 15:19
  But the shoulder blade's in the back.
• 15:21
  So if you think, ah, there's a knot in my shoulder.
• 15:23
  Have you ever woken up like that?
• 15:24
  I used to have that happen a lot.
• 15:25
  And I do have some tips if you want to fit.
• 15:28
  Like one of the things, that was a game changer for that.
• 15:30
  But.
• 15:31
  But the massage would be great.
• 15:32
  But you can't always get it massaged.
• 15:35
  But learning.
• 15:39
  So going back to the massage, learning that when that happened, you might be clinching more in those tissues and learning how to let that relax.
• 15:49
  And the first time that I even heard that idea was at gymnastics with my daughter a kajillion years ago, like 30 years ago.
• 15:58
  And a friend of mine said, I used to be a massage therapist.
• 16:02
  Lay down on this bench.
• 16:03
  We were just watching the girls do rhythmic gymnastics.
• 16:06
  And lay down and I'll see if I can get that knot out.
• 16:10
  And then she said, first, I need you to relax.
• 16:11
  And I'm like, I am relaxing.
• 16:12
  She goes, relax, just relax here.
• 16:14
  She's touching where she needs to be to relax.
• 16:16
  I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 16:18
  And she had to teach me how to let go, where to start, where to let go.
• 16:23
  And sometimes that can happen.
• 16:25
  And your hands, you'll be clenching up your hands, and you don't realize that you're driving in a tense situation or something's happening.
• 16:31
  Your kids are fighting in the car or you're arguing with somebody in the car or whatever.
• 16:35
  And you can start with your hands.
• 16:37
  You can look at the steering wheel and see that you're getting fingernail marks in your hands.
• 16:41
  Like, I didn't even know I was clenching.
• 16:43
  But it's also happening in your shoulders.
• 16:45
  It's also happening here.
• 16:46
  Your body is in a stress response.
• 16:48
  It's in that, you know, it might not be fight, flight or freeze, but it might be clinch.
• 16:52
  Let's add that one.
• 16:53
  Clinch.
• 16:54
  And you're getting all the stress in your body.
• 16:56
  So recognizing that, knowing what's happening in your body, having that awareness, and even your mind, your brain is part of your body, right?
• 17:06
  Even noticing a change in that from the.
• 17:13
  My brain is usually able to work.
• 17:15
  Right now it's not working.
• 17:16
  We would think that, like, I hurt my foot, now I'm limping.
• 17:19
  You know, that's more of a outer analysis, but it's all tied into being super helpful for adhd.
• 17:29
  And I know I've taken you on a million loops and hopefully I'll get back to where I was with my grandchildren.
• 17:33
  If not, and maybe you don't care if not, like I said, this will be a shorter episode.
• 17:38
  I'll make another one.
• 17:39
  I'll make another one and continue because I'll be able to go back and listen.
• 17:43
  But okay, what I wanted to say is, let's see sensory systems.
• 17:55
  Okay, so I'm going to try to do this and be clear about it.
• 17:59
  So proprioception, that's something that we more commonly hear.
• 18:03
  It's a sense of where is my body compared to everything.
• 18:08
  Else in my surroundings.
• 18:11
  So if you have good proprioception, then when you take a step down a staircase, you realize how far you need to let the foot go down and land so you can do the other step.
• 18:23
  And that might sound like it's simple.
• 18:25
  It's not always simple.
• 18:26
  When you have kind of the klutzy part of adhd, sometimes you can get distracted and not put your foot out the right amount of distance or whatever and end on the end of the stair and end up on
• 18:37
  your back.
• 18:37
  Or I kind of get worried sometimes that I'm going to think I'm done with the stairs and.
• 18:45
  And I'm not done with the stairs and think I'm just on the floor and then trip, because it's probably happened before.
• 18:51
  So anyway, I have to increase my proprioception manually with things like that so I don't trip.
• 18:58
  And maybe some people don't have a problem with that, but I do.
• 19:01
  But there are a lot of things that we have to have that sense anyway and have that awareness.
• 19:08
  And we sense also boundaries with people, like when they come to talk to you and then they get super close and it's like, oh, it's a little too close and you start backing up or you just feel like
• 19:17
  somebody's invading your space.
• 19:19
  You have a natural sense of how close people are and your orientation to them.
• 19:26
  It's really fascinating because we often know.
• 19:30
  I mean, I would think a lot of us know with autism, and a lot of people with autism also have adhd.
• 19:35
  There's the ADHD connection, right, that some of our sensory systems are elevated with.
• 19:43
  And I say, I, I don't have autism, but even with adhd, your sensory system can be elevated.
• 19:51
  I've made episodes about that.
• 19:54
  It can be what you see, it can be the visual, it can be the sounds, for sure.
• 19:58
  And so there are eight sensory systems, and one of them is interoception, the awareness of the inner workings of your body or the signals.
• 20:08
  Or sometimes it's not the signals, it's just things that you wouldn't notice unless you were really paying att.
• 20:14
  But there are other things that are signals besides, like, I'm getting burned or I'm itching or something.
• 20:20
  It could be, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, or even just a recognition of how you feel emotionally.
• 20:27
  A lot of times we feel a certain way emotionally, but we don't pay attention to it.
• 20:33
  And sometimes it's really obvious, like, I'm really sad.
• 20:37
  Or you could be in a conversation, you could be at lunch with friends or something and feel left out and just think I'm not enjoying this as much as I thought I would and just not having a good
• 20:52
  time and realizing if you really tune into it, I'm sad because I would really like to be connecting with this friend, but she's sitting over there and she doesn't even seem interested in me.
• 21:01
  And the rejection sensitivity can be elevated, but that can be an awareness of your emotions.
• 21:07
  There's also your awareness of the temperature and how your body feels with that.
• 21:13
  Have you gone swimming?
• 21:14
  And you're just like, this water's really cold and somebody else is like, it's not cold to me.
• 21:18
  We sense those things differently.
• 21:20
  We have a tolerance for it differently.
• 21:22
  I'm usually cold.
• 21:23
  My fingers are cold right now.
• 21:24
  If I had that little light up thing, you know, that little light up map that you can see at a science museum or something, my fingers would be the dark, dark ones because they're so cold all the time.
• 21:34
  And I'm aware of that and that can be distracting for sure.
• 21:39
  And then there's other systems, you know, like my stomach hurts, you know, all those things.
• 21:43
  It's an awareness of what's happening in your body.
• 21:48
  The proprioception is the awareness of your body in comparison to the surroundings.
• 21:54
  And then the other sensory systems you can think of, like hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching.
• 22:03
  There's one more, and this is called vestibular and oh, kind of interesting.
• 22:15
  So this has to do with your ear, your inner ear and it's your balance.
• 22:20
  Some people get dizzier easier when they're on a ride at a theme park or when they're on a boat and they're out on the ocean.
• 22:30
  My gosh.
• 22:31
  We went on a whale watching trip years ago.
• 22:35
  Like 36 years ago.
• 22:37
  I went whale watching on very rough seas outside of San Francisco.
• 22:43
  Had I known that I could see the same whales just south of there, Moss Landing, Santa Cruz, Monterey, without going out in the ocean for four or five hours with horrible, choppy, huge waves, I would have done it,
• 23:00
  but it was before the Internet.
• 23:01
  And somehow I found out about a whale watching trip where you go under the Golden Gate Bridge and out past the Farallon Islands, which granted was exciting because later when I watch nature shows, they always had the Farallon
• 23:12
  Islands and that's where all the sharks are.
• 23:14
  And we got to go through the San Francisco Bay and under the bridge, which was fun.
• 23:18
  But my vestibular system, Wait, let me see if I'm saying it.
• 23:24
  Vestibular system.
• 23:26
  I think that's how you say is different than my husband's.
• 23:29
  He was saying, come up to the front of the boat.
• 23:32
  This is so exciting because at the front, the boat was going up and down, like up one or two stories.
• 23:38
  I don't know.
• 23:39
  That's what it felt like to me.
• 23:40
  Really far up and really far down because it was going over these super choppy waves.
• 23:44
  And to me, that was not something that my body could handle.
• 23:51
  You know, I was sick for hours afterwards.
• 23:54
  My sense emotion was different than his.
• 23:59
  And what I need for balance.
• 24:01
  At Disney World, they have this ride in Epcot.
• 24:04
  That's where you can go and pretend that you're on a rocket and that you're getting launched.
• 24:10
  And I don't know what it's called.
• 24:11
  It's probably something launch, but it's an old ride.
• 24:16
  And I had been to Epcot quite a few times.
• 24:19
  I keep hitting the microphone.
• 24:19
  I hope it's not annoying to you.
• 24:22
  You know, I move my hands a lot.
• 24:25
  But they have two options.
• 24:27
  You can go on the orange ride or the green ride.
• 24:29
  And one is more gentle for motion, for people who have motion sickness.
• 24:35
  And the other one is like, do you want to experience what it's like to be an astronaut?
• 24:39
  So we chose the mellow one.
• 24:42
  I think it was the orange.
• 24:43
  I won't even go look into that because these are the kind of things that I'm like, I try and try to figure out.
• 24:47
  And while I'm talking to people, I think, not an important detail, but I did all right on it.
• 24:53
  At the end when we were landing, it was a little jolty and I felt kind of sick, but thankfully it was at the end.
• 24:59
  But my son said he went on the.
• 25:01
  I think the green one's the bad one.
• 25:02
  Could be wrong.
• 25:04
  One of my sons said, yeah, I've gone on the other one and it's just fine.
• 25:08
  And the other one said, I went on, it was the most horrible thing ever.
• 25:13
  So he has a different vestibular system of how the inner ear works.
• 25:18
  And what's fascinating is if your inner ear stops working, stops functioning properly, then you can get extreme vertigo.
• 25:27
  And you may have experienced this.
• 25:29
  But I had a woman in one of my yoga classes who stopped coming for a long time because she got extreme vertical vertigo.
• 25:36
  And she said it was something about a crystal in her ear was dislodged and she had to do all these things.
• 25:44
  I mean, it was.
• 25:44
  It was pretty bad.
• 25:45
  And I thought that sounds kind of like woo, woo, you know, crystal in your ear.
• 25:48
  But then I kept Hearing other friends that talked about it.
• 25:52
  So I don't know, I haven't looked into it.
• 25:54
  I should look at that.
• 25:54
  My no AI duckduckgo to look that up, but you can on your own.
• 25:59
  But that was her reasoning.
• 26:01
  It.
• 26:02
  It wasn't any hearing loss, but something got dislodged and completely affected her ability to sense motion.
• 26:12
  Like when or to deal with motion walking and stuff.
• 26:16
  When I was expecting my fifth, my fifth child, my daughter, now who's something.
• 26:22
  I know it was 1999, but I had a blood clot pass through my ear which thankfully didn't go to my brain because that would be an aneurysm, right?
• 26:35
  But one day I was at Costco and I felt really dizzy and not like fall over dizzy, but just like my ears were buzzing and something was weird and they were kind of plugging up and I thought something
• 26:47
  feels crazy.
• 26:48
  And so we took our cart.
• 26:49
  I actually went and sat down and had my kids push the cart through until they got to the register.
• 26:55
  And then I went up and paid.
• 26:56
  But long story short, for a couple weeks I had extreme vertigo from the time I got home.
• 27:05
  Maybe the next day I woke up and if I stood up to walk to the bathroom, it felt like the entry, you know, the door frame was shifting right, left, like I was on a boat or I was
• 27:19
  in an earthquake.
• 27:20
  I don't know if you've been in a big earthquake before.
• 27:22
  I haven't been in major ones, but big enough to like the hallways moving.
• 27:26
  So nothing got damaged.
• 27:29
  But it felt like that.
• 27:31
  And I knew something was wrong with my ear.
• 27:33
  Couldn't go to the doctor to have anything fixed because I was pregnant.
• 27:36
  But they gave me an MRI later and found out what had happened after my pregnancy.
• 27:44
  But because that was damaged in my ear, because of that blood clot, my inner ear on the right ear was not working well.
• 27:52
  It damaged hearing, it's hearing loss.
• 27:54
  It won't come back.
• 27:56
  But what made me so happy is that my brain, my nervous system, the bed, let's look it up again.
• 28:07
  Vestibular system learned how to adjust on its own.
• 28:12
  Within those couple of weeks, I went from having to either being laying down or sitting up with my head propped up like in the in between two parts of the couch.
• 28:24
  Otherwise I would just get so dizzy I'd feel like I was going to throw up and I would fall.
• 28:29
  And at the beginning, without the use of that, it could not work.
• 28:38
  My inner ear could not detect gravity properly.
• 28:41
  But my brain and body learned how to adjust.
• 28:44
  And now it does it without that side of that ear working properly.
• 28:50
  However, I can't detect where sound is anymore because you need both ears for that.
• 28:55
  So if I can't find my phone and it's beeping, I go in about five rooms before I actually find it because I can't really tell.
• 29:02
  I have to ask other people.
• 29:03
  But yeah.
• 29:05
  So that's a little brief rundown on the eight sensory systems.
• 29:10
  And I'm just pointing that out because the interoception is very, very important to understand if you want to help your ADHD from the inside out.
• 29:26
  And what I was saying before I took my drink of water and I forgot because I did go back and listen is that.
• 29:32
  Is that there are things that we can do to lower our stress levels because when we have stress, when our body is activated into this sympathetic fight or flighter can't process things.
• 29:49
  Right.
• 29:50
  Mode noticing what's happening in the body, having that awareness, that interoception is very important because you can reverse a lot of things and get into the parasympathetic nervous system of being calm and having your brain work better.
• 30:09
  I really wanted to go farther with this and I still can.
• 30:13
  But what I wanted to.
• 30:16
  Let's see if this is the right article is explain that with adhd not only is our brain different, but our nervous system activates differently than somebody who is neurotypical.
• 30:33
  And it's fascinating.
• 30:35
  I was reading the studies last night and our nervous system can be more elevated at a normal state and it's just the way we run it doesn't mean we're always stressed, but it's elevated a little bit more.
• 30:55
  And let me see if I can find that.
• 31:01
  And it's even.
• 31:02
  It changes in the morning, it changes at night, which makes sense, right.
• 31:05
  Our body's rested at a different level, our brain might be functioning different level.
• 31:09
  I've noticed it before and I've advocated before of if you notice at a certain time of day this is when you're better at doing that, then plan to do that that time of the day.
• 31:18
  If you can't, if you can work that into your schedule because then you're giving yourself an advantage, right?
• 31:23
  And you want to be able to give your brain and as big of as an advantage as it can to function properly.
• 31:30
  I think I'm going to have to stop with this.
• 31:33
  I wanted to be able to explain it more because I don't know if you heard my alarm went off on my phone and I tried to not react, but yeah, so just.
• 31:43
  It makes sense.
• 31:43
  So the nervous system sensitivity is if we are more sensitive to sounds, we are more sensitive to our surroundings, we are more sensitive, sensitive to light or for me, I'm sensitive to where I'm sitting in a room compared
• 31:57
  to where whatever's going on is happening, whether it's a screen, whether it's a person talking.
• 32:03
  If I'm sitting at the edge of a room and we're all in chairs and all the seats are facing forward, I'm not as relaxed if I'm facing forward because the person is to the left of me.
• 32:13
  Right.
• 32:14
  If I'm way to the right, I don't want to turn my head the whole time.
• 32:17
  I want to turn my chair, make it as easy as I can.
• 32:21
  So all those things that are distractions to you and you think, why can't I just relax?
• 32:24
  Why can't I be like other people?
• 32:25
  Why, why can't I be okay sitting here and having this person with a hat in front of me?
• 32:29
  And sure, I can see what's happening on stage, but I see that hat, that hat is distracting me.
• 32:34
  We have this sensitivity that is different than other people and that can cause some stress.
• 32:40
  And so we're not able to endure our situation.
• 32:44
  Or we're cold and we're not as comfortable and somebody else is like, yeah, I'm cold too, get over it.
• 32:48
  And you're like, but no, I can't get over it.
• 32:50
  I can't get over it.
• 32:51
  I'm not having a good time.
• 32:51
  I want to leave, I want to bolt.
• 32:54
  So, yeah, having this understanding that the overloads, that we can feel some of them jump out at us, bright lights, how our clothes feel in our bodies, that's the tactile sensitivity.
• 33:12
  Yeah, it's all a lot.
• 33:14
  And it makes sense that this affects our nervous system because it's part of this nervous system.
• 33:20
  It's part of the sensory systems and it's all tied together.
• 33:27
  And I think I'm going to leave it there for now because I need to get out the door for my class.
• 33:35
  I hope you're excited to learn this too, because it's just kind of the beginning of figuring out, okay, now that I know this, what can I recognize in myself?
• 33:47
  What things are distracting to me?
• 33:49
  And I say distracting, but what also elevates us to a more stressed out body and brain that can't function as well, can't do things as easily.
• 34:03
  And for some, they're motivated by certain kinds of stimulation.
• 34:06
  And for us, it can be too much.
• 34:10
  Pressure for some people is good pressure for Other people isn't.
• 34:14
  So yeah, I think I need to make my own little charts in the way that my brain understands to be able to communicate it to you more simply.
• 34:25
  Hopefully you're able to understand it.
• 34:28
  But back to.
• 34:29
  Okay, I said, I'm going to go bet one more thing back to what I was saying and it really wasn't very much of a tangent when I went to drink my water.
• 34:36
  Is that talking about outsourcing things and what can I do to make it easier than what it could be?
• 34:44
  And I was telling my husband that I was up watching my four grandchildren in Virginia last week and that's why I didn't make an episode last week.
• 34:51
  It was a last minute trip.
• 34:53
  I left, I was going to make an episode before I went and the, the Internet went out for 24 hours.
• 34:59
  And so that, that affected my ability to record.
• 35:03
  I even thought of recording in the airport because people do airport recordings.
• 35:06
  And as I'm in there I'm thinking, how does that work?
• 35:09
  Like they're making announcements left and right and I thought they must be people who have like the Sky Club and get to go into a quiet room because I was thinking of you.
• 35:17
  But anyway, back to my trip.
• 35:20
  While I was there, I made pancakes with the grandchildren every morning.
• 35:26
  And one of my sons and my daughter have celiac, so everything in their house is gluten free.
• 35:31
  And so it was a gluten free pancake mix.
• 35:33
  And so my daughter said, do you need me to order something?
• 35:36
  She was going to get some gluten free.
• 35:39
  There's Play Doh and then there's air dry clay.
• 35:42
  And she was going to order some of the air dry clay.
• 35:44
  I had brought some Play DOH and a Barbie set that you can make Play Doh dresses and stuff.
• 35:48
  And I bought the, the gluten free play dough.
• 35:54
  And you can also make it.
• 35:55
  I've made it before, but it's not as great, I think because the colors aren't great.
• 36:00
  But anyway, back to this.
• 36:02
  She asked, I'll place an order.
• 36:04
  And so she said I'll just get some more of that dough, the wow dough or WO dough.
• 36:11
  And she said, do you need anything else?
• 36:12
  And the kids said, yeah, pancake mix.
• 36:15
  And.
• 36:16
  And so I was telling my husband, he's just like, that's so amazing that she could be on a trip across the country and place an order and have it delivered within a couple hours it was there and we
• 36:25
  had what we needed and then we ran out of syrup and then the kids wanted more pancakes and so I thought, oh, I'm not going to have her make another Target order because, you know, you have to have
• 36:35
  a certain minimum.
• 36:36
  And so I was able to have something delivered too, you know, that was just quick and easy and outsourcing because in my day, we had to put all the kids in the car, walk all the kids in the
• 36:44
  store with us to go get anything.
• 36:47
  I can go to multiple stores, right?
• 36:49
  Because, you know, the grocery store wouldn't have the wo do.
• 36:52
  But now Target has groceries.
• 36:55
  And in the olden days, you know, like, a store like that would have snacks but not groceries.
• 37:00
  So anyway, okay, that was my tangent then, and maybe it didn't matter, but it is nice to look for ways to make it easier for yourself.
• 37:10
  So that is it for today because I really need to go.
• 37:12
  And thank you for being patient with my portions of episodes.
• 37:17
  And maybe it's plenty to think about it, because this is more like, wait, what's going on?
• 37:21
  There's eight nervous systems.
• 37:22
  Maybe you're a scientist and you already know all this.
• 37:25
  You majored in biology or something.
• 37:28
  But a neurodevelopmental disorder.
• 37:32
  It's a nervous system disorder as well as a brain disorder.
• 37:35
  I love knowing that because I know that changing the nervous system helps adhd.
• 37:43
  And I knew why, from the practical standpoint, but not the, oh, it's all part of the same system standpoint.
• 37:51
  So, anyway, that is it, as I always say.
• 37:54
  And then I always talk longer.
• 37:55
  But thank you for being here.
• 37:56
  Thank you for listening to my shows.
• 38:00
  And I go, even when I was gone, I could go on and see, you know, is anybody still listening?
• 38:05
  And you're still downloading episodes.
• 38:07
  You're still listening even while I'm gone.
• 38:09
  I may have some new listeners that are listening to past episodes and please forgive me, who knows what they're like, But I'm just doing the best I can.
• 38:17
  And we all do, right?
• 38:18
  We do what we can and we contribute what we can to the world in some small way.
• 38:23
  So I will be back.
• 38:24
  Thanks for being here.
• 38:25
  Bye.
• 38:27
  Help other women find the show Rate Review Share with someone you know Help other women find my show Rate Review Share with someone you know Hurry before you forget Open windows Broken shadows Frozen dreams are left for tomorrow.
• 39:25
  Harmonies I'm cut short the silence of sound has yet been found but not by me.