Hacking Your ADHD

In today's special rebroadcast, we're revisiting a deeply personal and essential conversation from the Hacking Your ADHD archives. When the world feels heavy and focus feels like a luxury we can't afford, how do we keep moving forward?
Will opens up about the "surreal" experience of navigating life's mundane demands: laundry, dishes, and school runs all while grappling with the sudden loss of his mother. It's a raw look at the cognitive dissonance of surviving a personal tragedy while the rest of the world refuses to hit the pause button.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/212
What You'll Re-Learn:
Numbing vs. Resting: How to tell if you're actually recharging or just hiding from your feelings.

The "Go Big or Go Home" Trap: Why your ADHD brain loves a fantasy plan, and why "going home" is usually the result.

The Power of the Bucket: Shifting from the despair of being alone to the strength of community.

Self-Grace: A much-needed reminder that being hard on yourself is never the productivity hack you think it is.

Whether you're hearing this for the first time or the fifth, William's insights on "resisting despair" are as timely today as they were when this episode first dropped

Hey team!
This week, I'm talking with Dr. Anupriya Gogne, a psychiatrist at Brown University Health in Rhode Island. Dr. Gonge works at the crossroads of addiction psychiatry and neurodevelopmental disorders, with a specific focus on treating ADHD during pregnancy and the postpartum period. She's dedicated to clearing up the misinformation surrounding medication safety during pregnancy, which can be seen in her book, Neurodevelopmental Disorders in Adult Women: Special Considerations in the Perinatal Period.
In our conversation, we dive into why hormonal fluctuations turn ADHD symptoms into a "perfect storm," the actual science behind "mom brain," and why your internal systems for keeping your life together tend to implode the moment a baby enters the picture. We also get into the nuances of how ADHD presents in women versus men, specifically regarding internal hyperactivity and emotional regulation.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/281
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
When ADHD symptoms suddenly appear or worsen, it's often not because the brain has changed, but rather that the environment's demands have finally exceeded the brain's compensatory systems. When life transitions occur, such as having a child, external chaos disrupts the systems that previously helped keep the ADHD in check.
Chronic sleep deprivation isn't just being tired; it's also a failure of the memory consolidation system. While we are in deep sleep, our brain is encoding the day's events. If you aren't getting those stages, your working memory cannot function properly. These memory issues then compound with ADHD symptoms which can make it feel like you are experiencing early-onset dementia.
In many adults, and especially in women, hyperactivity often isn't physical; instead, it's mental. It can manifest as negative self-talk on a loop, racing thoughts, or just feel like you have too many tabs open in your brain. Shifting the mental model to see internal ruminating as a form of hyperactivity helps identify the need for mental breaks rather than just physical outlets.

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Use of Cosmetics in Pregnancy and Neurotoxicity: Can it Increase the Risks of Congenital Enteric Neuropathies?" That's a lot. In this, the authors explore the hypothesis of neurotoxins such as microplastics, parabens, benzophenones, phthalates, and metals that can cross the placental barrier and disrupt the development of the fetal nervous system.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/280
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon

Hey Team!
This week I've got Cate Osborn and Erik Gude on the show. Cate, known online as Catieosaurus, holds an M.Ed and uses her background in research and sex education to help neurodivergent folks navigate relationships and communication. Erik, known online as HeyGude, is an advocate and speaker who uses his platform to destigmatize the messy internal monologue of the ADHD brain. Honestly, it almost feels like I don't need to introduce these two given everything they've produced; they are definitely an online powerhouses. I've been a fan of their podcast, Catie and Erik's Infinite Quest: An ADHD Adventure, for quite a while now. So I imagine you've probably seen at least something from them.
And they've spent the last few years distilling their combined experiences into a new book designed to act as a foundational knowledge base for neurodivergent adults. The book The ADHD Field Guide for Adults was a ton of fun to read; it's written in an incredibly ADHD-friendly manner, and I really appreciated the approach, making this a book for adults where I don't feel like I'm being talked down to. So in the episode, we're definitely talking about the book, but we go into a ton of different topics. We talk about the "systems-first" approach to ADHD management. We break down the precision of language and why understanding that distinction matters. And a whole lot more, there's just a ton of stuff in this episode.
Check out The ADHD Field Guide for Adults which is available in hardcover, e-book, and as an audiobook narrated by the authors Cate and Erik.
Visit Catieosaurus.com for information on Cate's national tour, "Wildly Unprepared," and upcoming book signing events.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/279
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
Understand the difference between shame (a fixed belief about who you are) and guilt (a feeling about what you did). Shame is an unchangeable dead end, but guilt is a "window for change" that allows you to acknowledge a behavior, such as being late or having a messy car, without condemning your entire identity.
Recognize that "defeat" is often more comfortable than "failure" because defeat asks nothing of you; it simply means the game is over. Overcoming ADHD difficulties requires a healthy relationship with failure. Try viewing failure as a data point for "dissecting the system" rather than a reason to just stop trying.
Many ADHD systems fail because they are built to satisfy "residual gook" from childhood. We often have internalized rules about how things "should" be done, like folding socks or separating silverware that have no basis beyond that it's just how we've always done it. Audit your tasks to see if you actually care about the result; if you don't, dismantling the expectation (like using bins instead of folding laundry) can remove the cognitive load of a performance you don't actually value.

Hey Team,
I've been working on a presentation for an upcoming conference called Neurodiversion, and when I was thinking about what I wanted to present, the idea of memes came to me, and I'm gonna be honest here: this was mostly out of a desire to just make looking at memes part of work. As I started looking into the concept more and putting together the presentation, I realized there's a lot more to it than I initially thought.
Memes are more than just digital clutter; they're a fairly vital part of modern culture. I know how that sounds, but this is visual shorthand. They give us a way to communicate that we are part of an in-group simply by understanding what the meme is. They are these inside jokes across entire online communities, and the more I dove in, the more I realized that memes are more important than they seem on the surface. They aren't just jokes; they're ways to find community, understanding, and meaning in our own experience. That's important even if they come from something silly.
And so that's what we're going to explore in this episode: how memes can give us meaning, how they can give us community, and how they can be a little dangerous.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/278
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
For ADHD brains, traditional social upkeep sometimes requires more executive function than we have available. "Pebbling" allows for a low-stakes connection that signals "I am thinking of you" without the cognitive load of a conversation.
Digital content can act as a starting point for self-discovery, but it's still not a diagnostic tool. A meme can point you in the right direction, but it doesn't represent the actual lived experience of your impairment. Don't mistake a "relatable quirk" for the totality of the disorder.
Virality is not a proxy for truth. ADHD brains can be prone to "sticky" ideas and sometimes skip steps on verifying facts. The shift here is moving from "It's relatable, so it's true" to "It's relatable, but what's the source?"