Welcome to Learn To Thrive with ADHD. This is the podcast for adults with ADHD or ADHD like symptoms. I’m your host coach, Mande John. I’m here to make your life with ADHD easier. Let’s get started.

All right, this week we’re going to do something just a little bit different. I am going to be teaching you a portion of a course that’s available in the ADHD Academy. It’s called Overcoming Overwhelm: Feel better, do more and stress less. The full agenda is part one understanding ADHD and overwhelm. Part two mastering your mind. Part three strategies for success. And part four breaking it down.

I chose part two mastering your mind as the part that just stood out to me, standing on its own, to be the most helpful to you in a short amount of time. The reason I even created this course is because I know, for myself and for many of my clients, overwhelm is a big problem with ADHD. I hope this is helpful to you. If you want to see the visuals, the slides that I’m showing as I’m teaching this, you can head over to YouTube Learn to Thrive with ADHD or you can catch it on the podcast.

Same thing Learn to Thrive with ADHD. So, I’m going to go ahead and jump to part two, mastering your mind, our thoughts. So, we have a tremendous amount of power to reduce overwhelm with our thoughts. What we can do is we can become aware of our thoughts that are causing feelings of overwhelm.

We can choose to think helpful thoughts. We can be kind to ourselves and understand our negative thinking. So, I want to teach you how to do a thought download, and what you do is you write down all of the thoughts you are thinking. You don’t edit yourself. You want to gain a true understanding of what you’re thinking. This can be private, this can be destroyed, this can be whatever you want to do with.

It is completely fine. But you want to get everything down, even if it’s. I think this exercise is stupid or a waste of time. You know, whatever it is you’re thinking, we want to get the true sense of what you’re thinking, what’s causing your overwhelm. And then you want to question your thinking. Be careful not to dismiss your thinking, but really question it. Is this thought really true? If so, keep it. If not, cross it out here.

I’m showing you the model, if you’re looking on YouTube, and I will explain it. It is first, a circumstance. Circumstances are completely neutral. Everyone would agree. Nobody would argue with you that that was the circumstance, of course, your thought about the circumstance, and then you have a feeling from that thought and then you take or don’t take certain actions from the way you’re feeling, and then you get the results that you get.

And this is true for everything. And what I recommend in the course is that they head over to another course called becoming a brain boss, how to feel in control of your brain and get what you want. And that really goes into the model and how to work that.

But I gave you some really quick tools here, one great thought changing tool that I cannot remember where I got it. I want to say maybe it was from Jody Moore, maybe it was from Corinne Crabtree these are also coaches, but it was very effective for me, and it’s called. I just call it, or you could be thinking, or I say, or I could be thinking sorry, and I’ll give you a story.

You know, you pass yourself in the mirror sometimes and sometimes you think you look great and sometimes you think you look terrible. This was just one of those terrible days and my mind started to spiral into all this negative thinking, and you know how it can be.

One negative thought, another negative thought, another negative thought, and it just gets worse and worse and worse. And I stopped myself and I was like, okay, or I could be thinking, and I finished the sentence with something better. So, either it’s neutral or better and I just win another round.

Okay, or I could be thinking, and it was just a little bit better than the last one, or it could be just from another angle, right, or I could be thinking, and just about three rounds of that will take you out of that spiral of negative thinking really well. And what’s important with this exercise is it has to be true. Whatever thought you’re replacing with the negative thought has to be true.

So, a great one is I have this lovely talent of thinking I’m a terrible mom. It happens all the time. It is a thought that just is a favorite thought of mine that pops up all the time, and I could, I could say I’m a terrible mom, and then I could start like listing all the ways I think I’m a terrible mom, and or I could just go, or I could be thinking I’m doing okay, or I could be thinking, well, actually, I did some really great things yesterday as a mom, or I could be thinking, well, I’m actually doing a pretty good job.

You see how that takes you completely out of the kind of I don’t know if I want to call it a shame spiral, but that’s spiral for sure.

The four ends I do know I heard this from Corinne Crabtree. I’m not sure where she got it, but I thought it was really helpful and effective. First, you want to notice. I notice I’m thinking whatever it is you’re thinking. Number two you want to name. This is making me feel, name your feeling.

And then you want to normalize. Lots of people in my situation might be thinking or feeling this because of, and you go ahead and finish that. And then, the next best thought I will think blank instead. You understand the exercise.

So let me think of an example. I notice I’m thinking I’m not getting my work done fast enough and this is making me feel anxious. Lots of people in my situation might be thinking or feeling this because they just want to be more efficient and get things done quicker.

The next best thought let’s see; I will think it’s taking the right amount of time. Or a favorite thought that a lot of my clients use is it just takes the time it takes. So that is an example of the four Ns.

Beliefs are thoughts that we’ve thought enough times that we have decided they are facts. In some ways this works for us and in other ways this can cause big problems. Here we’re talking about problematic beliefs. I don’t have enough time. I have to work hard. I’m so busy. It’s funny that kind of went along with that example that I did for the four ends.

I have to do it all myself. I can’t do it. I’m not a person who and these are just some examples of problematic beliefs one might be Well, that’s right along with. I’m not a person who I was going to say I can’t. You know, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. What are you believing? That is just not working for you. It’s not working in your favor.

And then feelings how are your thoughts and beliefs making you feel? How would you prefer to feel? What would you need to be thinking in order to feel that way? And that’s where that become a brain boss goes really deep into how you can change your thinking with the model as well, like how you can shift your, your feelings and your thoughts to better feelings and thoughts, and sometimes it’s just about accepting them. I’m not really changing them at all, but just being okay with them.

And then at the end of these lessons, what I do is I give you ways to take action, and number one I have, decide when you will do regular thought downloads. And number two, start noticing your thinking throughout the day without judgment. And I just gave really simple actions here.

Usually, I do about three actions you’ll find in your workbooks. The workbooks go along with these courses. You’ll find that you can follow along in your workbook and do the work while you’re taking these courses. So, I hope this little section of the course was helpful to you. Next is strategies for success, of course, when I’m doing the regular course.

Let me just go on to the next part. Like I said, the larger courses have four parts. There’s lots of courses there, so you take advantage of the ADHD Academy. We also have a private WhatsApp group where you can check in daily with your intentions for the day and then check in at the end of the day on how you did on those intentions, and it’s total, positive accountability. We have group coaching three days a week where you can get in with peers and get coached or listen to coaching. You can listen to the replays that are in there. We have quite an archive of replays now.

I also create bonus courses every month. Right now, I create them every month. Sometimes it might be different bonuses that go in the bonus vaults and that’s just kind of a freebie. That’s all I can think of right now. It’s very easy to use, it’s very easy to understand. It’s only right at this moment of this, recording $97 a month, so it’s very affordable as far as coaching, and we would love to have you join us.

So, I hope you enjoyed this. If you enjoyed learning this way, come join us at the ADHD Academy and check out the description for any other resources that might be helpful to you. All right, thanks, guys.

Thank you for your time, and especially for your attention today. If you haven’t looked into the ADHD Academy, you’ll want to do that. This is my membership, with binge-able courses, weekly life coaching, new courses every month, a community of like-minded people and more.

Be sure to head over to www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/membership to get the details. See you next week.