Foreign welcome to the second episode of the More Yourself series.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef.

I am your host.

I'm here with the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.

But on these Monday episodes, I am coining them More Yourself because it's going to be coaching insights.

It's going to be sort of solo episodes from me, hoping to deliver you things that I have learned along the way after writing my book, the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, and navigating and coaching and guiding so many women who are late diagnosed with ADHD and all different types of neurodivergence.

And so what I wanted to bring to these sessions, these episodes, was really little moments where you can listen and get curious and ask yourself some questions and reflect and process.

And this is all sort of feeding into the world of what I'm hoping, hoping to be more intentional about.

And that is helping women probably like you, who are listening right now understand themselves, become more aware and gently accept themselves for who they are and lean more authentically into who you really are.

Come home to yourself, however you want to see it.

It's not that easy, unfortunately, to do this in one go.

So these are sort of little gentle reminders, gentle nudges that you're able to, I hope, bring in, bring in in different ways in your life.

Now, what I want to be able to suggest today is we kind of start from a place of deep awareness because we can't do anything if we don't know what is happening for us.

So you could be listening today, and it could be day one, day one of finally understanding who you are.

This could be the very first time you listen to this podcast.

Or perhaps you're one of my old school listeners.

You've listened to hundreds of the episodes and you are really quite far down the line.

But there's still blocks.

There's still blocks which is preventing you from showing up for who you actually want to be or how you want your life to look like.

And we have to become more intentional, more awake and more aware so we can release and let go of what no longer serves us.

Now, I do this pretty much every day for different things.

I'm still working and living and breathing this process every single day, myself.

My plan, hopefully, through these episodes and through the More Yourself community space that I'm building, is to have an opportunity where we can open up and feel more truthful, but also be vulnerable and show up with a deep understanding of all the different sort of challenges and difficulties that we Find in life where we struggle to believe or trust or surrender, where we struggle to release that control and sadly, the only way.

And I've tried lots of different ways with our ADHD brains and our nervous systems, it's really hard for us to become and stay present, stay in the moment.

And that is why I'm constantly trying to find ways where I can be, be present to create that awareness.

Now, there's a practice in my book which I've kind of honed over the years and I've included it in the book because actually I find it so helpful.

Now.

It's called the APBR method.

It's in.

I don't know which chapter it's in.

I've got the book right in front of me.

Oh, I've got it right here.

Amazing.

How clever am I that I just opened it up and it's all about calming and living with anxiety.

The chapter is chapter two, soothe your anxiety.

And what we do know is that so many of us are living way ahead.

You know, we're not living in the present.

Many of us live in the past.

We're ruminating, we are resentful, we struggle to forgive.

And many of us feel depressed, depressed because of what could have been, all the things that we wanted to be different and sadly weren't.

But then we have the other thing of where we constantly living in the future and we're worrying and we're catastrophizing and that leads to a perpetual state of anxiety.

And we are probably, I would say if you are listening to this podcast right now and you have not experienced anxiety alongside your adhd, you are very much in the minority.

If you are listening right now and you're nodding and you realize that anxiety has always been there.

The fear, the worry, the ruminating, the what ifs, constantly being plagued by what potentially could happen in the future.

Our nervous system is dysregulated from a very young age for various reasons, including childhood trauma, including being parented by people who may also have been neurodivergent but had no idea whatsoever, including trying to hold so many different parts of us that may not have felt authentic or truthful or safe for us.

So what you have to remember, always, always have compassion for that version of you who genuinely didn't know any different, didn't understand about a nervous system, and didn't know how to calm and regulate to find peace in that present.

So I'm going to go back to the APBR method.

I'll give you what it is short for.

So A is awareness, P is for pausing, the B is for breath, and the R is for release.

Now you can hear me flicking through the book and I bring this into the anxiety chapter, because for me, it's always about grounding, grounding ourself into that moment.

So with the awareness, with the A, we need to create awareness around our triggers.

Your triggers.

Notice what happens in a situation when you lose your temper or feel dysregulated or you feel unsafe or you feel anxious, anything like that, and how you experience it in your body.

Awareness always helps us feel more control, more in control.

I don't want you to feel like you.

You have to white knuckle.

I don't want you to feel like you have to be in the driving seat.

But the awareness brings us back to this present moment and gives us that opportunity to learn and reflect for next time and learn how we can maybe do things differently or how we want to respond differently.

Now pause.

So if you can allow yourself just to pause after you've created that awareness, pause, give yourself space to recognize what's going on.

And this provides you with an opportunity to choose how you want to react and respond and then breathe.

So you're going to take five long breaths here, and this is going to give yourself that time to choose how you want the situation to develop.

So many of us, especially when we've been living with dysregulation, maybe chaos and shouting and losing temper and anger and all of that is just so part of our childhood, part of our conditioning, part of what we've seen that we actually don't any different.

But I always say to people, we have to pause for perspective.

We have to take a gear shift to choose how we want this to pan out, because we can keep doing the same thing over and over again and we keep getting the same results, or we can allow the awareness to come in and say, actually, how do I want things to change for the better?

How do I want to react or respond to this situation in a different way?

How can a new version of me show up?

How can a version of me that has always wanted to show up but has never had the tools show up?

And then the R. So the R is for respond, but we can also release.

Respond, release.

I don't love the word react because react feels like it's an instant reaction.

It's a.

We're not bringing in that choice, but we do react from the stimulus of what's happened.

It's the cause and effect.

So I say in the book, notice that The R is actually for respond, not react.

Responding comes from pausing and breathing, whereas reacting comes straight from our emotions.

And we remember with adhd, emotional dysregulation is very often at the core of so many different situations that we find ourselves in and feel sadness or shame or judgment about afterwards.

And with this action, we are actively stepping out of a more destructive spotlight of a part of our brain called the default mode network, which is actually responsible for more of the.

The negative thought patterns that we have.

Whether it's sort of the past thought patterns or the anxiety thought patterns.

We intentionally use this dimmer switch to light up the tpn.

So the TPN is the task Positive network.

I talk about it in the book.

It's a little bit of a very basic neuroscience, and I Learned it from Dr. Ned Halliwell.

And the reason why it's really important for us to know about the DMN and the TPN is because with adhd, we are more prone to this ruminative thinking, the negative bias.

We're more prone to the catastrophization, the overthinking.

And it's harder for us to access this tpn, which is more about feeling grounded, feeling present, feeling mindful.

We have to actively switch this on.

But what I do know about neuroscience is that when we do this over and over, so we bring in the APBR technique, we're able to have a softening, we're able to have big feeling present for, you know, two or three times a day, the neural pathways in our brain will change and evolve, and we will create new neural pathways where dysregulation and reaction reactivity isn't our default.

So we have to think of it as using this like a gentle dimmer switch to illuminate a different area of our brain that we want to focus on finding the good, the gratitude, all the things that we can do the glimmers.

Now, I'm going to talk about this in another episode, but just understanding about glimmers and understanding about our touch points and understanding about our nervous system can be so integral in leaning into these more grounded, more present, more mindful moments with adhd.

So I just wanted to share with you today in this episode is that we can't do any of the authenticity work, the belief system work, the release work, all of that until we have a practice for finding more awareness, practice for grounding ourselves, being in the present, being able to feel an essence of control over our emotions and our regulation, and come back to exactly how we want to Respond and how we want to be in the situation.

It's so easy to keep doing and reacting and being in a place where we're just on this default robot mode that potentially throughout the generations we will have seen.

You know, despite feeling like we're living in the most chaotic times and we are in many, many ways, we're also very lucky that we have so many resources of help and support available to us.

And it's a weird old thing that we're finding ourselves in moments where we feel like the world is coming to some apocalypse, this awful crunch point of humanity.

But we're also in a place where we have so much access to spirituality and self help and self development and understanding of mental health and emotional well being that can we choose to focus our energy on that and it is choosing to focus and direct our energy.

So I really hope that this little conversation is of interest and has is helpful.

So if in doubt, go straight to bringing awareness to the situation.

Pausing, asking yourself, what do I need right now?

Taking those breaths, how can I ground myself right now?

Breathe.

Using that breath work to regulate your nervous system and then you're in a better position to respond to the situation and potentially to release what has happened.

So sending you love.

This is a More Yourself episode.

Now, if you have enjoyed this conversation, don't forget I have opened up or I'm beginning to open up a space called also More Yourself where you're going to have more access to me as a community space.

It's a membership.

It will be starting properly at the beginning of October.

But if you are signed up to the wait list, you're going to have access to a free workshop with me towards the end of September.

But you'll get all the information if you're signed up to the wait list.

And I promise you I'm going to be bringing so much more of this kind of content into the space where it's all adhd, affirming female spiritual wisdom, empowerment.

This is about building the blocks.

This is about building new foundations and creating new pathways so we can show up with more authenticity and more belief and more trust in perhaps a new version of ourselves, a different version ourselves that doesn't feel like they need to change or that they need to keep working and pushing and being more productive.

This is about being and sitting and softening and just connecting, connecting with other people and I hope learning and growing and evolving and sharing.

Most importantly, this is going to be sharing.

Me sharing, but you guys sharing.

There's going to be mentorship.

I feel really excited because I actually don't know how this is going to evolve.

And this is, is again, this is a new version of me.

This is a version of me that wants to always be in control.

But actually I am using this opportunity to have time to have the breadcrumbs and to step on the stepping stones and see where this evolves to.

But I do feel that it's right and I feel that the evolution is there and I think that the intentionality of so many people now of seeing that their ADHD is a moment in time for a new version, a new chapter of themselves and a more authentic version of, of of themselves.

And I really hope that you will join me on this journey.

And so I will see you for the Thursday episode with the guests, but I will also see you every Monday for this type of episode, the the more yourself episode.

So if you're interested in the community space, it's all going to be in the show notes, but it's also on the on my website, ADHD.

Womenswellbeing.co.uk take care and I'll see you soon.