So, hi, welcome back to another episode of the ADHD Women's well Being Wisdom.

And this is where we just bring shorter nuggets, little takeaways to get you and your week started on the hopefully on the right foot.

And I'm going to be sharing more themes from the book and I'm really happy and excited to be doing this.

I've been so looking forward to being able to talk more about what's in the book and now this is my opportunity.

So we're actually going to be touching a little bit about actually anxiety and ADHD friendly tools and strategies to help with anxiety.

And I know that probably almost every neurodivergent person I speak to has to deal with the challenges of overthinking, worry, rumination, catastrophizing anxiety.

The blend of it all together and how pervasive it can be to our daily life, it's just there and it makes life really hard and really tiring.

And for me, it was a massive part and is still a massive part of my adhd.

Just my restless brain just constantly what if ing all the time.

And I wanted to make sure that we had a full chapter talking about this and validating it so more people can feel seen and to just normalize the conversation that yes, this anxiety may always be there, but we feel more empowered and we feel like we have better ways to move through the day when we have these tips and strategies in our back pocket, which is part of the book.

That's why I called it the Toolkit, because genuinely that's what I wanted it to be.

Just daily practical things that we can lean on when life feels a little bit more tough.

So I'm really happy to bring in a guest of mine who I love speaking to and his name's Josh Fletcher.

And Josh is a psychotherapist and he's also an author and he's really big on all the social platforms and he is anxiety Josh on Tick Tock and on Instagram.

And I really loved speaking to Josh because he really is an expert in this area.

Very specifically, he's got a fantastic book called how does that make youe Feel?

Which I know is sold incredibly across the world.

And so his insights for me were really powerful because I really make sure that anxiety and my anxiety prevention is part of my daily life, which is why movement and exercise and breath work and self inquiry, really helping myself because I want to have a full, exciting life, full of opportunities and new things and anxiety often and sadly takes that away from us.

So first of all if this is something that is resonating with you, please don't forget this is a full chapter in my book.

So you'll be able to get go there.

And there's lots of different exercises and tools and we talk about tapping and breath work, we talk about different sort of CBT approaches are sort of neuro affirming ones.

So it's really through the lens of really understanding our adhd.

And in this clip we talk about things like the role of our brain and the functions such as the amygdala which triggers these anxiety responses and how powerful psycho education is as a tool for understanding and managing our anxiety, especially for us neurodivergent individuals.

And we talk about the stress jug metaphor which is great way to visualize and manage everyday stresses so we can really understand the nitty gritty of what perhaps is overwhelming us.

So I've also got a clip from Pearl Lopian and you'll hear how EFT or tapping can really help us soothe our anxiety and calm our nervous system and regulate our emotions.

And you'll hear that towards the end of this episode.

But here is my clip with the brilliant Josh Fletcher who really understands anxiety so well from a lived perspective, but also from a professional perspective.

Here's that clip.

What were the tools that you found the most helpful for yourself?

For me is psycho education.

Psycho education saved my life.

It's learning what was happening in my brain and how my brain worked because I felt weird.

I felt like no one got me.

I didn't understand these intrusive thoughts I was having.

I didn't understand these waves of fear and fright, didn't understand dissociation, why that was happening, my heart racing, skipping beats, the need to run out of places that weren't dangerous.

But I felt unsafe.

Why my brain fixated I'm a fixator.

As someone who's high functioning autistic, I didn't understand what saved my life was being able to acknowledge what my brain and body were doing and then ultimately one leave it alone or two put in a behavior to help calm me down to stop fueling the anxiety.

Anxiety is a very broad topic and each person's anxiety presents differently.

And for me it was really helpful to identify that I was a fixator.

So if I had panic attacks, I'd fixate on them.

If I had an intrusive thought, I'd fixate on them.

If I worried about what someone thought about me, I'd fixate on it.

Don't get me wrong, being a fixator is cool.

If you fixate on productive stuff, then great things happen.

If I fixate on work projects, whatever.

But that fixation part of my personality was really, really helpful to identify because I can label it and step back.

Yeah, when you say about fixator, I'm sort of thinking about the hyper focus element of adhd.

Of.

Yeah.

And really kind of like having those things where we hyper focus.

But when you say about fixating, it is.

I do see that more in like the anxiety sense.

You mentioned autism, and we know that with neurodivergence, adhd, autism, there's a much higher propensity for anxiety.

I don't know one person that I've worked with and part of my community who hasn't had some form of anxiety or an anxiety disorder, whether, however that shows up.

And like you say, it shows up so differently for many of us.

And I know that there's so many people listening here that may have been diagnosed with anxiety and the neurodivergence has come decades later.

So they've been sort of given anxiety tools, practice, or maybe they haven't, they've been medicated.

And they just know that there's something else beneath the surface.

And we know now with ADHD that it's the internalized, the restlessness, the mind, the nonstop thinking, the ruminating, the overthinking, the catastrophizing, all of that, that really kind of helps kickstarts that anxiety and we spiral with it.

And so when you talk about psychoeducation, for me as well, that was the biggest thing.

I was like, oh, okay, so I'm diagnosed with adhd.

I now understand about my wiring in my brain.

I understand that this is happening for me.

This is why it's different.

This is why I'm more prone to anxiety and hypervigilance and all things like.

And I then was able to distance myself from thinking it was all about my personality.

And I just.

If I just powered through, if I just tried something different, if I just did something better.

And that again, you know, the understanding, the awareness, the recognition has been so powerful.

But if someone's sort of thinking psycho education, can you break that down a little bit?

Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, when we look at psychoeducation, we look at what anxiety is.

Anxiety is the brain's threat response, the almond in our brain called the amygdala.

Everyone has one.

Whether you're neurotypical, neurodivergent, whether you're a mammal or, you know, we have the amygdala.

It's the fastest, oldest but not the smartest part of our brains.

And it will fire off either when it detects threat or it will fire off in response to accumulated stress.

For a lot of people, that accumulated stress could be over a long period of time.

So if you're someone with ADHD who hasn't known and has tried to conform and live in a very heteronormative society whilst being neurodivergent, that's going to add to your stress.

When you just go through general life stress, family stuff, relationships, work, grief, chronic illness, things like that, that all builds up.

Maybe there's self esteem issues about your identity, what it is to be valued.

You mentioned a bit, hinted a bit about productivity anxiety, where you're constantly driven.

I have to keep doing stuff because if I don't, if I keep still, I feel guilty, et cetera, et cetera.

But what happens is this oldest part of our brain, which isn't linked two ways to our thinking brain, tries to look after us like an overprotective parent.

You know, it's kicked in.

And when stress has got too high, when you have panic attacks, often people say, oh, I had a panic attack from nowhere.

No, usually when I sit down, my clients in my practice, I say, well, tell me what's happened in the last month.

And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, maybe that was coming when terms of psychoeducation.

It was really helpful for me to understand that the amygdala is something that fires off out of my control in the short term anyway, and it fired off for me because of accumulated stress.

So it floods my body with adrenaline and cortisol and hijacks my attention to bring my attention to potential threats.

So suddenly I'm in ASDA trying to buy my beans and my bread and now everything looks weird, the lights are brighter, my peripheral vision is shut down, my heart's racing, I'm dissociating and I feel really scared, like something awful is about to happen.

And that's because the amygdala's kicked in and flooded me with loads of adrenaline and cortisol.

You know, it's.

The psychoeducation is really helpful.

I used to struggle really badly with morning anxiety and rumination.

The body needs cortisol to wake up, but cortisol is a primary component of anxiety.

So if you're someone who wakes up with that feeling of doom and dread and then you lie in bed ruminating, try not to just get up, honestly, get up, put your shoes on, honestly, do not ruminate through that lens because it's cortisol.

It makes you feel icky and horrid and this doom feeling for someone who struggles with pmd, perimenopause and menopause, you know, rather than having those lovely balancing hormones of progesterone and estrogen, the body's like, best I can do is cortisol and just gives you loads of cortisol instead.

So, you know, if you wonder why you feel like awful during these times, it's because of that cortisol chemical.

Just understanding why you feel the way you do, you know, and understanding it's actually okay, your body can handle it, it's there, then natural occurring things happen in your body.

But trying not to fear and misinterpret it is one of the cornerstones of my practice.

And it was really helpful for me too, honestly.

When I used to struggle with panic attacks, I was diagnosed with OCD as well.

It would feel very important to give this potential threat, whether it's a thought or a feeling or something or situation attention.

And what I learned was to do the opposite if whilst feeling like rubbish, to rewire my brain and I managed to get to a really good place, live a very happy, content life now.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, because that power of understanding and the labeling and then saying, okay, this is what's going on neurologically.

We're understanding the amygdala, we're understanding, understand what's happening with our hormones and, you know, the cortisol and the adrenaline and all of that, what that does to our body and the sensations in our body.

My approach as a therapist, so I've seen, I work with a lot of people who have adhd, who have anxiety, who come with me with a multitude of things.

ADHD is just part of all the stuff that they've been through.

I use the, the old metaphor of the stress jug.

It's not new, it's not original, but I like it.

And in my practice, my aim is to we identify what's in the stress jug.

So immediately.

And I got a huge whiteboard in my practice and you know, once a teacher, always teacher, draw the big receptacle of, of your choice.

I had a client the other day, it said, can you draw a carafe?

I was like, okay.

And we drew a carafe on the whiteboard and I said, let's find out what's in this stress jug.

And so we started with everyday worries, you know, like work, money, family, relationships, health, the world burning, etc.

And then we put other things in there, like Grief, adhd, autism and anxiety disorder itself.

The fear of fear, stress, horrible work colleagues.

Maybe mummy and daddy weren't very nice and we have some horrible resentment built up towards them.

Maybe we've been through traumatic stuff, you know, we've been on the receiving end of horrible things that goes in the stress jug.

Everyday stuff, politics, elections.

I forgot to put the bins out.

Environmental issues.

That goes in there too.

And other things about your identity, self esteem.

How do you value yourself as a person?

Well, I only have value when I look a certain way, I've achieved a certain thing and people accept me.

Etc, Etc, well, that goes in there too.

And by now we filled the carafe, the stress jug.

I believe that when the stress jug is overflowing, excessive anxiety and anxiety disorders thrive because the amygdala trying to protect us.

Doesn't understand all these subjective stresses, doesn't understand your work emails, it doesn't understand why you had an argument with your sister, doesn't understand why you're fretting over your social media presence.

It doesn't understand that because it's the oldest part of our brain, doesn't understand it's trying to look after us, doesn't understand why we're stressed.

So what I do and what my approach is, is that we empty as much of the stress jug as we can.

Now, there are things in the immediate, you know, short term that we can do.

So I said, well, what can we work on?

What can we empty now?

Well, I want to get my ADHD sorted.

Well, maybe not, you know, you know that's going to be part of you, it's how your brain works, similar to me.

But we can empty a bit of that out of how we manage the adhd.

I want to talk about grief.

Brilliant.

Can we, let's empty some grief out there.

We're never going to get rid of all of grief, never.

But the cumbersome grief we can.

I want to talk about me as my identity.

I want to talk about my failed marriage.

I want to talk about my friend who's annoying me.

I want to talk about the world, whatever, okay?

And talking helps empty out the stress jug.

I want to talk about my anxiety and my fear of anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

Okay, well, here's some psycho education.

Does that turn the anxiety off?

No.

Does understanding it help?

Actually, yeah.

And now we've emptied half the stress jug out.

Wow.

Okay.

Have we applied perfectionistic traits and tried to get rid of everything in the stress jug?

No.

And no one's got that.

No one on the planet can empty out their stress jug.

And the perfectionists really struggle with this one.

But what we do is we try and make it as light as possible.

And that's what I do.

And I think that's where psychoeducation helps.

It's like understanding what's happening to your body eases the burden.

Understanding when your stress jug is overflowing that you may go into shutdown mode if you struggle, someone struggle with adhd, the traits that come with that may exacerbate probably will do.

I know when I'm super stressed, my sensory overload is a big warning sign for me.

It's like, wow, why is that supermarket light burning my retinas?

And certain sounds are really difficult for me to process.

And that's what I do.

That's the cornerstone of what I do.

There's no one thing or approach.

We just as a therapist, I try to work through and empty it as best I can.

We also have the fantastic Pearl Lopian who was my EFT teacher, my mentor.

She's also a psychotherapist, therapist and an EFT master trainer and she's been a practitioner with over 15 years of experiences and she specializes in lots of different types of EFT modalities.

She's really is an expert and she has helped a lot of people in this community as well.

So in this clip it's going to give you more of a holistic tool to help you soothe your anxiety through using one of my favorite modalities, which is EFT or tapping.

I've got lots of resources on on my website about this, so if you go to my website which is ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk I've got free resources and paid for workshops so if you are interested, do go and check them out because I use tapping pretty much every day in my toolkit and it's also in my book as well.

I talk about it a lot in my book and I really do use eft, which is short for Emotional Freedom technique, to feel calmer, more emotionally free, more inner peace, more regulated and just grounded so it can be used for so many different, different things.

And that is why I just love sharing it.

From the most basic way of doing it to using it for things like overwhelm, anxiety, rsd, stepping into our true authentic selves.

It really does cover so many different parts of our adhd.

So here it is, we're utilizing the acupressure points that we've got in our body that have been identified for thousands of Years.

But we're blending it with the Western modalities of understanding our brain, understanding how our neural pathways work, our nervous system.

And we're sort of blending it together with something that is really hard to explain and can look bizarre.

And when you start saying, oh, I do this tapping on my face and then the memories kind of like disappear and or lessens or the intensity of the memory or the trauma lessons, it is hard.

But whenever people have tried it, I always find that it's a very quite.

Not an extreme reaction, but they're blown away by how different they feel within just a few minutes.

Yeah.

Are you able to explain any of that?

I wish.

I wish.

I've probably after doing maybe 7,000 individual sessions, my work is all anecdotal.

It's all total.

I think first of all, just tapping on the points is sending a calming message to the stress area of the brain.

So that's something that it's doing and what are we also noticing.

And that's more what happens in a therapy session.

We're changing our brainwave state.

So when we change our brainwave state, so the repetitive tapping on the points changes the brainwave state.

And when we change our brainwave states, we get in touch more with our subconscious areas.

And it gives us the ability to see what's really going on in our deeper mind and where our issues have come from.

And that's why we use it in therapy sessions as a retrieval technique, which is very different from anyone can do this any day to feel better.

So to do it anytime to feel better, it's just a matter of tuning into whatever's bothering us, then just gently doing some rounds, gently just going around the points and that is calming the nervous system down.

But I have to be honest, I'm not medical.

My work is all anecdotal.

It's the results that I see.

And also I'm seeing how you can help a loved one by tuning into their energy system and helping them.

So we all have an energy body that's living inside our physical body.

That's how we operate.

So when we're tapping, we're connecting to our energy body and something that we often don't think about it.

So that's how our mind body system works.

We respond in our body to whatever we're thinking.

If I'm late for a meeting, I might get what something might start to feel inside me.

If I have an exam, I might start churning in my stomach.

So our body responds to what we're thinking and when we're Tapping.

We're interrupting that whole system.

Yeah, we're doing, we're interrupting the mind, body.

So instead of, you know, we like to talk mind, body, but it's actually body, minds.

Because if we can change how the thought sits in our body and the body feels calmer, the.

The thoughts change.

So that's really what we're doing.

Because we have a circumstance.

We have a circumstance and then we have a feeling about a circumstance.

Whatever's going on in our lives, we have thoughts and feelings about it.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

The way we feel about the circumstance starts to change.

And that is so empowering.

That is empowering.

So what I want to do is I want to give you this example.

I want to give you this example.

So I call a situation.

Imagine this block as a situation.

And imagine this pen is you.

So the situation can either imprison you, push you down, grab you and you can't move, or you can get on top of the situation.

So what am I thinking that tapping is doing for us?

It's giving us movement and freedom.

And that's why we call it emotional freedom techniques.

Situation might still be there and it might be hard like a block, it might be really strong.

However, we can move around and the tapping kind of takes us from underneath to on top and we can start to feel better and we have a different perspective about the situation.

And that's the paradox.

That is the paradox that tapping.

And we do say negative words than we tap.

We'll say, I'm angry, I'm angry, or whatever it is I'm feeling in a bad mood, I'm not coping very well.

We give ourselves permission to articulate how we feel.

And the paradox is that the energy changes the thought, the tapping changes how that thought feels in our body.

So tap, tap, tap.

A few rounds of saying I'm angry, or a few rounds saying, I can't resist cake.

Something changes.

And that's the fascination.

I mean, that's what we want to do is whatever's going on in our lives, we want to feel in the moment and have healthy responses and accept ourselves because none of us are perfect.

So we want to accept all parts of us.

And I always think like guilt, shame, self judgments are a route to nowhere and I would banish them.

We banish, we banish any guilt, we banish any self judgments, we banish shame because there's no, there's no plus side to having.

It doesn't serve us in any way.

And we're able to do that with a tapping.

I Think what happens is the minute someone tries it and they really resonate with it.

They think, I want to learn how to do this.

But we can use this very simply.

I know you've got videos.

I've got videos, like you say every morning.

It's just part of our, you know, the morning routine.

If, you know, you don't kind of align with meditation of sort of sitting there, the tapping, and maybe visualizing how you want your day to go of, you know, closing your eyes, tapping, and just sort of seeing the day going calmly and everything kind of just falling into place and accepting where you are right now.

You know, with your day, there's just so many different.

That's what I love about it.

It's so flexible.

I'm wondering if it would be helpful if I give two suggestions for people so you've got something to go away with.

So there's two things that I think would be useful to do.

So.

One is tune into how you feel.

Rate it 0 to 10.

0 is always the calmest and 10 is the worst.

And then, you know, why don't we just go around the points and I'll just show you just by tapping very, very gently on each point.

And there's the eyebrow points.

I'm going to name the points as I go around the eyebrow points.

And then you can spend maybe 10 to 15 times on each point.

So if you're doing it silently, I would be quite slow with the tapping.

And then side of the eye, 10 to 15 times on each point.

And then under the eye, very gently, Very, very gently.

Then under the nose.

And I would say go around maybe two or three times.

Not more than three or four minutes.

That's it.

And then the chin point, and then we come down to the collarbone point.

Just very, very gently.

And it's a doing thing, as I said.

Again, it's a doing thing.

We're not being still, we're doing.

We can do it with breath work as well.

We can just take nice breaths while we're doing it.

And we're trusting the tapping to hit the mark.

And then the underarm point, which is just about 3 inches below the armpit, and then the top of the head point.

And then you can just keep going around.

So that would be one thing we would do.

And then we take a breath in and blow it out.

And then you measure where you're up to, and then you repeat as necessary.

So that's one thing you could do.

The other thing is have a rant as you tap.

So just say exactly how you feel.

So I'm feeling in a bad mood today.

I'm not, I'm not liking how my day is going and I'm feeling and whatever it is I'm feeling.

Just go around and let yourself say whatever because I promise you, you will not make yourself worse by saying it and tuning into how you feel.

You do not feel worse.

You'll feel better.

So whether I'm angry, I'm upset, name the feelings, say the feelings.

Give yourself permission to say whatever you like.

Go around the points a few times saying how you feel and then just checking in afterwards.

And that is so simple.

And it's at your fingertips.

Yeah, fingertips you can do as you know, as you know.

I love that one.

That's one of my favorite ones.

So I hope you enjoyed listening to this shorter episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing podcast.

I've called it the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Wisdom because I believe there's so much wisdom in the guests that I have on and their insights.

So sometimes we just need that little bit of a reminder.

And I hope that has helped you today and look forward to seeing you back on the brand new episode on Thursday.

Have a good rest of your week.