Latest / Quick Wins for ADHD Moms - Short Episodes, Real Solutions for Burnout and Overwhelm / Why Am I So Exhausted All the Time? ADHD Fatigue Explained for Moms | 038

Transcript

Why Am I So Exhausted All the Time? ADHD Fatigue Explained for Moms | 038 · Quick Wins for ADHD Moms - Short Episodes, Real Solutions for Burnout and Overwhelm

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You slept last night.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you tried to.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't very great, but you slept.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: You had coffee?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably had a second coffee.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on my two and a half cups right now.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: You've got lots of things to do.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: People are counting on you and the list doesn't stop.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And yet at 2 p.m.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: your body feels like it weighs twice as much.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: By 3 p.m.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: you're moving through something that feels like wet concrete.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in the back of your mind there's this thought you just can't quite shape.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: What is wrong with me?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: You've googled it, you've asked AI about it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder if they're depressed.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder if maybe you're getting sick.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder if maybe you're just not cut out for all of this.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then you feel guilty for thinking that, which costs you more energy that you don't have.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're talking about today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The science behind all of that.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it has nothing to do with how hard you're trying.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jessica Lynn Lewis, and this is Quick Wins for ADHD moms.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your quick win for today, I'm gonna give it to you now before the science, because you need to hear this first.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Your quick win for today is stop pushing through.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's the win for today.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you have my permission right now, from me to you, to just stop.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you earned it, not because you've done enough, but because pushing through is literally making your exhaustion worse.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna show you the science behind that in a minute.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Your exhaustion is quite possibly neurological.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not moral, it's not a character flaw, it's not evidence that you need to try harder.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, trying harder when your brain is already running on empty is like flooring the gas when you're out of fuel.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: You don't go faster, you just might damage the engine.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So stop, take a breath.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're allowed to be here without powering through it.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about what's actually happening.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I got my ADHD testing done, one of the things that came back to me was I work harder than 96% of people just doing normal tasks.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not hard tasks, normal tasks.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: The stuff other people do on autopilot, planning what to do next, switching between tasks, filtering out all the distractions, keeping track of where you are in a sequence, all of that costs me significantly more effort than it costs most people.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So when I read that, 96% of people, I work harder than 96% of people who do normal tasks.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: When I read that in my results, it took a while to sink in.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And quite honestly, a couple years later, I'm still processing that, but it 100% makes sense.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you could relate to this.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think back when I was in middle school and I was striving to complete all my paperwork.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we went to a private school, and there was a lot of homework because they were very high achievers.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone else was reading books or playing games.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I see this in my son now.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like he has to work 10 times harder to get the same amount of work done.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in the middle of this right now, trying to figure out what to do and what the next steps are to help give him support.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have any ideas, I am all ears.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the neuroscience behind why we have to work so hard is that ADHD brains have lower baseline levels of dopamine and norepinephrine.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's the chemicals that drive your attention, your motivation, and your ability to get started.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when those levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are lower, your brain has to recruit more effort to do what other brains do automatically.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And more effort means more cost.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: More cost means faster depletion.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers have found that over 62% of adults with ADHD meet clinical criteria for significant fatigue, not just tired, clinical fatigue.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a coincidence, that's more of a pattern.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So now let's talk about sleep, because I know you've thought about this and probably at 3 a.m.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: when you wish you were sleeping.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The ADHD brain has a circadian rhythm that runs approximately 90 minutes behind schedule.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: The brain's melatonin signal, it's that chemical that tells your body it's actually time to go to sleep, fires about 90 minutes later in adult ADHD brains than in neurotypical brains.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: For kids, researchers have found that to be about 45 minutes later.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're trying to fall asleep at 10 p.m.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: because you have to be up at 6, your brain is treating it more like 8.30 p.m.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: and it's not quite ready.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when you can't get those deep restorative stages of sleep, you wake up still depleted.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Up to 80% of adults with ADHD have sleep disturbances.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: 78% have sleep onset insomnia, the lying there awake kind where your brain just won't stop.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And around 50% also have restless legs or body movement during sleep that keeps them back into like a lighter, non-restorative stage of sleep.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you can be in bed for eight hours and still not actually get rest.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then add stress and cortisol and perimenopause, like all of that, just dump it all on the ADHD brain.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Fun, right?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then another piece, and one that I think we as women really struggle with is women with ADHD mask.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: We learn to mask early.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: We watched what was expected of us, and we build a version of ourselves that could perform the way we should.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Being organized, being calm, being on top of things, not too scattered, we're not too much.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we carry that performance all day long on top of the mental load of managing your household, your kids who need things constantly, and maybe a business as well.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand if you have more than one business.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I really do try to hold it together all day, but by dinner time, you know, the dinner that I haven't cooked yet, because I'm like, oh crap, it's dinner time.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: The kids are hungry, they're tired, whining, complaining, they're just looking at me to fix their problems and just give them spaghetti again.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to make them stop and wait while I cook the spaghetti, and it's the longest 15 minutes of their life and my life.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just done.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: The mask comes off and I become mean mommy.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a joke now, but I do warn my kids, now that they're older, that mean mommy is about to make an appearance, and none of us want that.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So go find something to do for 10 minutes, then come back and check on dinner.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain is doing the best that it can with what it's got.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the gap between the effort you put in and the result you get is real.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's exhausting in a way that probably almost no one else really understands unless you have it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really hard to explain, right?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do we actually do with this?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: The design move for this episode is rest is strategy, not a reward.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Use rest as a strategy.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Build it into your day.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a reward for after you get all your things done.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of us treat rest like it's something that we earn, like there's a productivity threshold that we have to hit before we're allowed to stop.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But we almost never feel like we hit that threshold.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's always more.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's always something that we forgot, or that we didn't finish, or we should have caught.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we never fully stop.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then we wonder why we're always depleted.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's exhausting.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: I end up going to bed five times.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because I get into bed, think I have everything, and then my brain starts relaxing, and it was like, oh wait, I didn't write that thing down.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if I don't write it down, I'm gonna forget it.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna get up, write it down, okay, get back in bed.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oh shoot, tomorrow is field trip day.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: They need a paper bag.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't buy paper bags to get their lunch.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and so there's never this complete like, hey, I'm done, time to rest.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's just always something going on.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: So here's three things that I want you to try instead.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna name the three things and then we'll go through each one to better explain it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So one, name what's actually draining you.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two, microtest it before you hit the wall.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then three, stop fighting your phone the wrong way.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So one thing to try is name what's actually draining you.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not in a journaling, sit with your feelings kind of way, but maybe in a more practical, okay, where are the leaks kind of way.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Time blindness costs a lot of energy.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: The constant recalibrating, catching yourself, realizing an hour has passed, adjusting everything in real time, that's a lot of work.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sensory overload also costs a lot of energy.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Think about your environment.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: The noise, the movement, the kids, all of it flooding in at once.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there's certain parts of the day I think you'll realize where there's more sensory overload than the others.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of work too.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Decision fatigue, that costs a lot of energy.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do have ADHD, you're making more micro decisions than you realize because nothing runs on autopilot.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So name what's actually draining you.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's all of it, maybe it's part of it.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is it time blindness, sensory overload, decision fatigue?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you can name it, you can actually start to see where the tank is draining the fastest and put structure into place so that it's not draining.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Or it's not draining as fast.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the second thing you can do is take a micro reset before you hit the wall, not after.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Two to five minutes of genuine downtime.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Your eyes closed, no phone, no planning, no organizing your thoughts.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just stop and give yourself two to five minutes.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you're completely drained and empty, the recovery takes so much longer.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain needs small resets distributed throughout the day, not one big collapse at the end of it.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I prioritize naps, and I can do that now that the kids are older.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is really challenging when the kids are really young.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: But now that I can schedule my day a little bit more, I do prioritize naps or just tiny little getaways.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it could be at 10 a.m.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: if I'm up at 5 a.m.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm working really hard.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it might be 3 p.m.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: before the boys get off the bus at 3:30.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a way for me to stop any spiral.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And right, when you have very small children and on your own, you can't stop.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's no stopping.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you try to put your kids down for a nap and you happen to fall asleep and they don't, you pay for it.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And three, stop fighting your phone the wrong way.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: The advice is everywhere.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Put your phone down.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's overstimulating you.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's making you tired.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it probably is.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: But for ADHD brains, the phone is often the external brain.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's where your reminders live, your alarms, your lists, your notion, your second brain.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's your scaffolding.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's your structure.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So taking that away doesn't really create rest.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: It removes a coping tool and leaves a gap your brain has to fill some other way.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we also need to make sure that our phone is not a distraction.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So in the coming weeks, I'm teaming up with a company created by X Tool.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: They have a Kickstarter campaign coming out, and I'm going to be telling you about that next week, so stay tuned.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the goal isn't necessarily less phone, it's more intentional phone.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Use it when it works for you, but notice when it becomes a stimulation loop instead of a support.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And those are two very different things.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's about being intentional with your phone use.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so now let's just take a pause and take a minute to reflect and process all of this.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I hear a lot.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just need to try harder.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you're already trying, and you're trying really hard, and you're probably working harder than 96% of the people around you just to keep up with normal things.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you think more effort is the answer.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: But reality is that you're running your brain in a world that wasn't necessarily built for you.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: While raising kids, you also have the same kind of brain, and you're running a business or two, and you're managing a household with its own chaos.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and on top of it, all you're supposed to exercise and eat well and sleep enough and be present and be patient and be grateful.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And your exhaustion is not evidence that you're failing, it's evidence that you're carrying all of this, and that's very real.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: But know this: when your body is tired, it's communicating something.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the message isn't try harder.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: The message is, hey, this brain needs a little bit of different support.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not more effort, different support.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: You get to rest, and it's not as a reward for doing enough.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's as a strategy for continuing to show up at all.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your quick win one more time because I want you to remember this.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I want it to stick.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Stop pushing through.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not as surrender, but use it as a strategy.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Your exhaustion is neurological.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain is working harder than most people's brains.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And your body clock might be running that 90 minutes late.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you are carrying more invisible weights than anyone around you can probably see because you're really good at masking.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So pushing harder into that doesn't help.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It just deepens the debt.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Rest is the answer.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Use rest as a tool.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Use rest as information.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Use rest as feedback.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Rest as something you choose on purpose, not something you collapse into when there's nothing left.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you want a list of quick ADHD-friendly ways to actually refill your tank without needing an hour or a perfect environment, go grab my free dopamine hit list at theadhdmom.com.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Short, practical, and built for your brain.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: That again is the dopamine hit list you can download for free at the ADHDmom.com.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have an amazing week.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.
• 14:44
  unknown: It's the little thing, little things that keep us going.