Welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef and I'm a wellbeing and lifestyle coach, EFT practitioner, mum to four kids and passionate about helping more women to understand and accept their amazing ADHD brains.

After speaking to many women just like me and probably you, I know there is a need for more health and lifestyle support for women newly diagnosed with adhd.

In these conversations, you'll learn from insightful guests, hear new findings, and discover powerful perspectives and lifestyle tools to enable you to live your most fulfilled, calm and purposeful life wherever you are on your ADHD journey.

Here's today's episode.

Welcome back to another episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast and today we are talking about neuroaffirming design and I'm really looking forward to having my next guest on because I think we're going to learn so much more and understand so much more about how design and how we use space and how we live in space can really impact us from a sensory perspective, but also understanding it from a neurofirming perspective as well.

So we have Dr. Katie Pedito here and she is based in Denver, Colorado.

She has a PhD and she is a design researcher and behavioral scientist operating at the intersection, this is where it gets really interesting, of architecture, psychology and neurodiversity.

And as an autistic woman with adhd, Katie moves beyond standard accessibility checklist to champion neuroaffirming design, an approach that centers lived experience and views neurodivergence as an identity to be supported, not a problem to be solved.

She is currently writing a book on how the hidden curriculum of our built environments impacts neurodivergent people and how we can design for true flexible flourishing.

I have a feeling this is going to be a very validating conversation and informative.

So welcome to the podcast.

Kate.

I'm so excited to be here.

I have a real soft spot when I get to combine both my personal and professional expertise as a woman with autism and adhd.

This is very personal to me, but to be able to also integrate it in my professional life and share all of that with you is very, very cool for me.

Well, you listen.

You sound so accomplished.

It sounds like you have such an insight into something very nich, which is what we love, you know, in this neurodiverse sort of situation.

But I would love to learn a little bit about you and I guess what brought you to this intersection of work that you've blended your lived experience and your I guess what you're passionate about.

Yeah, the professional experience came first.

My background is in psychology, but I knew that I didn't want to be a clinician.

I didn't want to be a counselor.

Having interacted with those folks my entire life, I knew that that wasn't something that I was necessarily cut out for.

But I really enjoyed research, and so I went to grad school.

My PhD is in Human behavior and design.

I still very much consider myself a social scientist, but I interact with architects and designers every day.

My doctoral advisor is an architect, so I learned to speak the language between design and behavioral science.

At that point, I started working as a professor.

Realized that that wasn't for me.

Again, as an ADHD woman, I assume many of you can relate to the feeling of having to, like, go to class on time and do certain things, and that doesn't stop when you're a professor.

So now I work for a one of the top 50 design firms in the world.

And we do everything from K12 and school design to higher education and university, to workplace to sports and entertainment.

And it wasn't until I started to interact on the back end through the design process that I started to realize how many assumptions our designers are making about the people who inhabit space.

Whether you're in a sports stadium or a hospital, we make a lot of assumptions about what people are going to feel or do or how they interact.

And yet neurodivergent folks are often not represented at the design table, nor are they necessarily included in the design process.

We don't.

It's not standard process to interview people on every single project about how they feel.

So we're often left with people who make assumptions that all neurodivergent people need a quiet, dark sensory space.

And that's not necessarily true.

Right.

Especially for people with ADHD and executive dysfunction.

So that was when I started to be more vocal myself about my own personal experience.

Because the way I approach design and the way I guide our design teams is that lived experience is a key piece of evidence that we are often missing.

So by leading with my own lived experience, recognizing that certainly I am not the only example or I'm not the only proxy for people who are neurodivergent.

But being able to speak to lived expertise as a way to combat some of the inherent bias that we often come to the table with has helped change the way we integrate people in the design process.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

So, I mean, I'm just interested in the fact that designers or architects are actually considering neurodivergent people now.

I mean, that's, that's, that has to be completely new because I can only imagine when hospitals or stadiums or schools were built, it was efficiency in mind, it was financial, it was maybe safety, like all the different things that you kind of think.

But apart from that, all humans were just kind of like lumped into one category.

And that is what a classroom should look like, that's what a seating area should look like.

And now, I mean, if you tell me, is this a standard practice now that they're considering different types of brain and nervous systems when they're designing big projects?

I wish it was more of a standard practice.

I'd say we're still in the buzzword phase where a lot of designers recognize that neuro inclusive design is just good design.

There's nothing that I would suggest that is completely different than maybe the way that we would typically approach a school.

But doing all of these things holistically and with engagement and kind of cooperation and iteration with actual neurodivergent occupants, that's where it becomes different than how we've typically been designing in the past.

So what, I mean, what you, you said that neuro inclusive is not the same as neuroaffirming.

Can you explain a little bit about the difference?

Yeah, that I feel like is a, it's still kind of a hot take in the design research, built environment world because I think we are still even just trying to get like neuro inclusive under the door.

Right.

The idea that if we are being thoughtful about the different ways that everyone thinks and feels and behaves, then we are actually creating a more effective environment for everybody.

So that's already great.

Right?

Like if we can get to that foundation, that's really wonderful.

But neuro inclusive design has really started to come down to checklist items or just like a process that you follow and you check the boxes and you've done it.

And often we are not actually targeting the people who need intervention the most and need support from the built environment the most.

We're just assuming that one size still kind of fits all.

If we create a better acoustic environment in general than other, everyone will be happy.

When in reality something more targeted that might only uplift one or two people in the space is still a really, really valuable intervention to make and a design strategy to invest in.

So that's where I think neuroaffirming design takes a slightly different approach.

It's completely rejecting this one size fits all universal approach.

Instead it's, it's really taking the heart of the neurodiversity paradigm that we all have different brains and recognizing that there is still a need to target our designs to the most vulnerable folks in that space, and that that's okay, and it's actually okay to exclude people from a design strategy who are otherwise not encumbered by the built environment in their daily life.

Okay.

So as a designer with such interest in behavioral science and psychology and understanding it from a neurodiverse perspective, when you walk into an environment or any form of building or surrounding, what are those kind of, like, red flags that you're like, oh, my God, this is, like, the worst thing ever.

Like, who.

Who would design this now?

Because I think it's so important, isn't it?

Because I want to kind of bring it down to, like, the basic level that many of us aren't in airports or hospitals every day, or maybe some are.

But essentially, we kind of want to bring that into our daily lives, but also understand why we might feel so overloaded or burnt out by our sensory.

By our sensory surroundings, especially when it's not our usual place to visit.

So, yeah, maybe you can give us a little bit of an insight into what you hate, what really, like, turns you off.

I feel like it's the.

The med student effect.

Like, once you start paying attention to how you're feeling, all of a sudden you start to assume that, like, all of these things are happening.

And I think that's true of, really, any designer.

And I am usually the most immediately sensitive to your basic sensory challenges.

So if we've got a lot of fluorescent overhead lighting, I think that's something that most people could say if they walked into a room with a bunch of fluorescent overhead lighting.

That something feels off, that it's not comfortable, that it's too bright, or something is happening.

And then it takes a design eye to be able to say, oh, that's actually.

That's the fluorescent lighting.

If we had LEDs or something that was at a different angle, we might actually feel visually a lot better in this space.

Acoustics are also a big one for me.

There are ways that we can create high occupancy spaces that don't feel noisy.

There's a difference between sound and noise, and noise is unwanted sound.

There are ways that we can reduce unwanted or unpredictable sounds.

When people walk into a stadium, they expect it to be noisy.

Right.

But there are also things like alarms or interruptions and notifications that are unexpected and add to our cognitive load in places where even we're Expecting it to be loud.

It's often just something unconscious that we can't put our finger on.

And yet we know, especially women, right?

We are very in tune.

ADHD women have a very, very keen sense that something is just off and isn't quite working for their brains or their bodies.

And.

And yet it's really, really hard to pin that down when you are in what looks like a typical space.

Like, why would I be more sensitive to my office when it's the office that everybody typically works in?

And yet when you break it down in terms of not just lighting or acoustics, but also maybe your sense of agency and control, are you able to move throughout the space and find somewhere that better fits you, even if you can't describe why it fits you better?

Do you have the ability to get up if you're at work, right.

Are you tied to your cubicle or is there a cafe space that might have a little bit more energy if that's what you need for your executive function?

Oftentimes we equate neuro inclusive design with a sensory room.

That's my biggest turnoff.

If we're talking about things that I immediately notice there are some awesome sensory rooms, I am totally not saying that we should stop doing sensory rooms, but we are not getting them right and we're using them as again, a proxy for being neuro inclusive.

If we have a sensory room, then we've done it, We've checked the boxes, we've accommodated people and in reality that's just simply not true.

It's accommodating the population who is potentially having a dysregulation event.

But if you're going through an airport, ideally we don't want you to even have to leave the main area, right?

Like we don't want you to have to have such a dysregulating experience that the only place you can be is a sensory room.

When in reality, often they are either locked and you have to call someone to get into them, which is already something that's a huge barrier, or they're completely open.

And then it's usually a place where children are taking their opportunity to regulate and move their bodies, which is very different, I think, than what many adults need as they're moving through space.

So that's my biggest, like, if I see a sensory room, I'm going to have my, like, haunches up to look for other inclusive, affirming elements.

Because if all you have is a sensory room, but you haven't addressed the lighting, the noise, the crowding the materials that you've chosen, then you've checked a box and it's not actually improving outcomes for your population.

Yeah, I totally see that.

And what you said before really hit a nerve actually with the regards to the sort of the sense of autonomy.

So if you're in an office space and the only place that you can work is sitting in that one area and that is your day to day, that in itself, like you say, you just feel like hemmed in, you've got no control, you've got no autonomy over of where you can work.

That's really hard.

Which is why we find so many neurodivergent people who end up being self employed or freelancing or starting their own businesses.

Because that autonomy is almost the thing that drives us to need to choose our area where we were.

We need to choose the hours, we need to choose the sensory output and input that we've got.

And I remember working in an open plan office, had no idea about ADHD then.

None at all.

And I could not understand why everyone could work.

While there was chatting, the radio was on, deliveries in and out, people on the phones.

I just looked around and there was people just working.

And I just felt so dysregulated the whole time.

And everyone would say to me like, why are you so tense?

Like chill, like relax, like why can't you just kind of.

That's no big deal.

Yeah.

And I was so conscientious, I just wanted to work.

But I could feel myself, you know, falling behind because of the distractions the whole time.

And I think back, you know, back in those sort of late 90s, maybe mid-90s, when open plan offices became a thing, it was like if you're a cool agency, you're like a marketing firm and creative agencies, everything has to be open plan because we're all creating and brainstorming together.

And then I think the amount of neurodivergent people that pro were in those environments that thought they wanted this and then it wasn't working for them and then there was burnout.

And it's interesting, like, have you looked into that, that evolution of like working environments?

Yeah.

You like that?

Yes, yes.

I love the way that you've described your observations because everyone, everyone can relate to that experience of, of walking into a space and acknowledging that it's like a cool Silicon Valley tech hub style space and like acknowledging that that would theoretically be a really cool way to work.

But then when into it, you realize that there are a lot of challenges in that space.

Open Office work plans started with soap factories in upstate New York in the US There's a couple of other examples of it, but the thread that I really like to follow is how we went from soap factories in Buffalo, New York to the Silicon Valley open office plan that you, that you really picture.

That has permeated the way that we design offices everywhere now.

And it's interesting because multiple steps along the way, as we evolved from like an open factory floor to what we now think of as an open, open tech office, we've had multiple chances to be like, is this too loud?

Do we have a lack of privacy?

Is this challenging our ability to have protected conversations?

Is this working for everyone?

We've had so many chances to take inventory of that and audit whether these spaces actually work.

And we don't.

We just assume that since it works for the big fancy places, that it should work for us and that maybe that's what our clients are expecting.

So that's how we should present ourselves.

And if you trace it back, it's really, truly bizarre that we've ended up in this situation.

Yeah.

Now that you are designing neuroaffirming spaces, what are we seeing?

Like, what we see now that we have better research, we have better understanding, you know, there's people like you out there who are working in these, in these spaces and hopefully making change in writing books and doing the research.

If someone is listening now, they're like, I want to create a really amazing neurofirming space that people are going to be productive, they're going to be creative, they're going to work, you know, to their best, you know, use their energy, not feel depleted.

Where we, where should people begin?

And, and also I want to think about from an education, like, schooling perspective, because that is so archaic as well.

But let's start from like a workplace.

If you could wave a magic wand and it could be a place where more specifically adhd, autistic people could work to their best and thrive, what would that look like?

And I know that everyone's different as

well, and all spaces are different.

Right.

The way the strategies that we might use for a school are going to be different than the strategies we'd propose for an adult workplace.

But there are some broader principles that we look at regardless of who's in the space and what the space actually is for.

One of them is going to be the sensory profile of the space.

But that is not all of it.

Often we equate neural inclusive design for just sensory design.

That's really only one of the Principles.

But we will look very carefully at acoustics lighting.

Those are two things that are often inexpensive to change as well.

If you have overhead lighting in your workplace or your school, for example, you often can't convince them to take out the overhead lighting out of the ceiling.

You could encourage them to use LED lighting instead of fluorescent.

Fluorescent lighting has a kind of a sub visual subconscious flicker that can often cause visual fatigue.

And it's not just true of neurodivergent folks.

It's true of individuals who might have a temporary disability like a concussion or a traumatic brain injury.

The things that affect us also affect other people.

So it's just good design.

In terms of acoustics, again, I'm thinking of opportunities in spaces where you aren't in your own home office, or you're not homeschooling.

So you don't have the ability to literally put up acoustic padding all over your entire room.

But perhaps you're being more thoughtful about the furniture or the materials that you're picking.

If there's not a rug in a classroom or an office that's not carpeted, so you've got concrete, you've got tile, you've got hardwood.

Just putting down a rug dramatically dampens the amount of noise you're getting from footprints or reverberation.

And that's actually just really good in general for speech comprehension.

If we're trying to teach young children who are trying to learn language and they're constantly getting an echo, regardless of whether they have autism or ADHD or they're neurodivergent in some other way.

No.

Kids learn language particularly well when there's an echo or too much noise.

So that's a cheap, quick solution.

Just putting a little bit of extra soft material on the walls and on the floors immediately brings down the amount of cognitive resources it's taking.

That's so cool because we've got.

In our living room, we've got wooden floors and we've got no curtains, and we got a dog five years ago, and she.

She destroyed our whole house.

And we used to have a rug in the living room, and she destroyed the rug and we never replaced it.

And we always say it's really hard to hear the tv.

And I'm always like, what did he say?

And I'm thinking, am I going deaf?

Like, what is going on?

But I do wonder if maybe because we haven't got.

We've literally got wooden floors and big windows, we don't have anything, I think

you would genuinely benefit from curtains or a rug.

I say that as someone with three dogs.

And we.

We have a limited ability to do rugs or anything that will get destroyed, but it makes.

It makes a huge difference.

You'll start to notice that sound is bouncing around, but it's often something you can't put your finger on.

And then you start to feel like something's wrong with you.

But in reality, there's something about the room that could be a very easy fix that gives you so much more.

So many more cognitive resources back.

Yeah, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna put a little note down.

What are your thoughts on new buildings?

So there's a lot of new builds now that are being built without the ability to open a window.

I have a real problem with this, like, a severe visceral reaction to not being able to open a window.

And it's caught me off guard many times where I'm like, oh, I'm really hot.

And the person says, oh, we'll put the aircon on.

I'm like, oh, you know, I prefer to have the window open.

And they're like, well, either the window doesn't open or we use the aircon.

Like, do you think that's a neurodivergent thing that we need to have windows open?

I think it's related to that concept we talked about earlier of choice and control and autonomy.

I just mentioned that one of the principles that we think about is the sensory profile of the space.

One of the other ones is choice and control.

We talked about the evolution of open offices before, but we can also think about the evolution of things like windows not opening because this is a response to climate change.

It's a response to the amount of energy that our buildings use.

So on one hand, you can look at it from a sustainability perspective that if we can't open our windows, then our buildings are less leaky, and whatever energy we're putting into the air conditioning or the heating, it's staying within the building.

Alternatively, though, there are ways that we can design buildings, even large office buildings, that harness the ability to open and close a window, that harness natural ventilation, that reduce energy use even far more dramatically than if we're like, sealing the building off.

Because you seal the building off and you lose a lot of sense of choice and control.

You lose the ability for individuals to individually regulate whether that's thermal comfort or visual comfort, if you want natural light coming into a space.

So all of this is a balancing act.

How do we balance energy usage and sustainability with occupant satisfaction and human experience?

But There are ways to do both.

It just often requires more intention and more thoughtfulness in the design process.

It doesn't even have to be more expensive.

In reality.

It helps your bottom line in the end if you can harness natural ventilation.

But we often just don't do that.

It's the harder way to do things.

It is.

It's coming back to that sense of choice, that lack of autonomy that we really struggle with.

And when you are put in an environment, whether it's an airplane, it's a school, it's an office, it's someone's home again, I've got a.

A real thing with anything sort of artificial smelling.

So if I've gone to someone's home and they've got candles burning or they have, you know, air, air fragrance, things that they, you know, they've put in, like, I just can't handle it anymore.

I used to be able to mask it and now I can't.

I just get a migraine.

I can feel my, you know, I can just feel everything getting more dysregulated.

I have to just pretend I need to go outside to get some air or something, but I just have to, like, breathe in fresh air.

And I wonder, I wonder, like, how we move through this, because the more we understand ourselves, the harder it is then to be put in many situations that we find ourselves in, in this very neurotypical world that we live in.

And it is, it's once, you know, like you say about the medics, it's like kind of once, you know, you know, and once you understand, it's like, well, I don't want to do that anymore.

But then we kind of get cleansed

and it's harder to mask, right?

Like, I. I no longer feel like I need to accept this as my reality.

I know we can do better.

And so now I'm not.

I'm not trying as hard to fake it.

And that's such a tough position to be put in, right?

That's even more of a burden, especially on women who are already so high masking compared to their male counterparts, especially in a workplace.

And this is just yet another expectation that we need to go with the flow and just deal with it.

I've heard so many times in workplace design in particular, when a workplace has gotten larger, they've brought in more employees.

They don't have a ton of space left for everyone to have their own desk.

So they move into that hot desking, we call it hoteling sometimes, where no one has an assigned desk.

And when you come in for the day.

You choose what space you want to be in.

On one hand, awesome.

If you've got a variety of spaces to choose from that can be successful alternatively.

Usually it's not designed in that way.

It's just a series of desks that no one has any sense of ownership or personal space around.

And we often hear this myth that people will just get used to it.

We know it's going to be a hard change.

We know it's going to be something that our organization is going to need to push through for a few months, but then it'll be better.

My argument when I'm talking to those types of clients is that no, for a very large portion of your employee population, it might never get better.

You have removed a lot of the sense of territory and ownership that neurodivergent folks thrive on.

The sense of routine that we might need.

We can have a flexible space where people have choice and control and still have clarity and routine and predictability.

And hoteling or open desking situations often don't accomplish either of those things particularly well.

And we're just expected to go with the flow and deal with it.

Yeah, it's, it does make me think, you know, they want productive teams and staff and they want to do well and they want to, they want a team that's thriving, but they need to listen, you know, and especially around schools, I kind of think, you know, if there's ways in here in the uk, so many of the schools are really old.

They're really old schools and they're in like Victorian buildings and, or spaces that haven't been updated for like decades.

And we're still, you know, the kids are still put in classrooms that are, you know, without any form of neuro inclusive or neurofirming consideration at all.

But we're understanding that kids need better spaces or they need different spaces.

So we're not quite there yet.

Do you get frustrated or do you feel like quite empowered that you're at the forefront of what you're doing to help drive change?

Oh, what a good question, that.

I feel like many people can relate to this idea that once you know better, you can do better, and that's empowering.

But also once you know better, it can be really frustrating to constantly find yourself trying to challenge the status quo.

And that can be really, really exhausting, especially for individuals.

Right.

There's a lot of overlap between ADHD and traits of autism like justice sensitivity.

So once you're really sensitive to the fact that the built environment has failed us for so long.

It's hard to keep up the energy and the advocacy when, like you said, Kate, there's so many things that are working against us, both in the UK and in the US we do have some policy and federal regulation around accommodating individuals with physical disability in the uk there's actually a little bit more formalization around standards for neuro inclusive design.

You're a little farther along than we are here in the us but it's still a checklist, right?

It's still the bare minimum we can.

We've got ada, the Americans with Disabilities act here in the US and people treat it as an accomplishment of inclusive design to comply with the ada.

But in reality, that is the very least that we can possibly do.

So we were working against a lot of misconception, both from a policy perspective and just from the traditional design, the historical design process.

So it's.

It's exhausting.

It's really tiring sometimes.

But I listen.

This is why we have these conversations on the podcast, because it's.

It's there to open people's eyes, to question, to get curious, to maybe think, well, what do I have control over?

You know, if you are running a team office school, it's like, what are those little things that I can bring in that may not cost a fortune, but can potentially, you know, make a difference to people's day, like, daily lives?

You know, at the end of the day, we don't want kids and people coming home from their day burnt out, drained, exhausted, completely depleted by their sensory sort of, like, environment.

So I think what you're doing is fantastic.

Tell me a little bit about the book that you're writing and what are you hoping to achieve with the book?

It's exactly this conversation, Kate.

The working title of the book is you aren't broken.

The Room is.

I think we've already picked up on that theme a lot in our conversation so far, that we are all extraordinarily sensitive to something that feels wrong.

But often as.

As women with adhd, we internalize that as something that we should be doing better or why can't I work?

Why can't I learn?

Why can't I go throughout my daily life with my friends and family when it seems like this isn't affecting them at all?

And we internalize that as something that's broken.

Even when we firmly believe and are rooted in a sense of neurodiversity, that everyone is different, it's still really hard to not internalize that.

And I make the argument in this book that because of so much history and poor design decisions in the built environment, we are constantly in spaces that are working against us for so many reasons.

I'll talk about the original standard human that was dreamed up by this really famous French architect who's still so famous, and yet he modeled this standard human after a handsome detective in a mystery novel.

And now those are just the measurements that we use.

So there are so many reasons that our spaces are working against us that have nothing to do with our actual capacity to live and work and learn.

Yeah.

I mean, it transcends all our life.

You know, I think about a restaurant.

We like to go out for dinner, we like to socialize.

We like to, you know, go out and enjoy ourselves.

And if those environments are working against us, then, you know, it can make our lives smaller and harder, and we want to be able to experience life, you know, well.

So, I mean, I would love for this conversation to.

To kind of, like, be shared to anyone that has control over those environments to think a little bit outside the box and think about, like, how can we make this a more pleasant experience for all neurotypes?

And so I think what you're doing sounds so fascinating.

Do you.

I mean, I guess.

How do you work?

Say someone's listening right now and would like to, like, have con.

Like a consultation or something.

How do.

How do you work in your capacity?

I am open to having conversations across all different types of design modalities, whether you're looking kind of as small as your office space at home or a classroom that you are in charge of as an educator all the way up to, you know, a new office building and how you might attract more clients by creating spaces that do provide a sense of control.

They've been given some thought about the sensory experience.

I also have an audit that I'll share with you, Kate, to share with everybody.

It's not an audit in the sense of a checklist.

I hope you can tell by now that I'm very anti checklist, but an opportunity for you to think about some of the things I've already discussed that you might not have a word for.

What does my lighting look like?

What are the acoustic challenges in the space?

What are the things I'm touching?

How often do I feel crowded?

And so then you've got some vocabulary to use to advocate for yourself.

There are protections in place if you need cognitive accessibility.

Right.

It's just like the design strategies we put in place for individuals who have physical disability.

So I'll share that with you.

Kate, to share with everybody else.

I love that cognitive accessibility.

I've never heard of that before.

I mean, I've obviously had both, but I've never heard them together before.

And that feels really good.

I like that.

That's the next step.

To me, we still haven't nailed physical accessibility.

I'm not saying by any means that we've done that successfully and we're ready to move on, but it is often a missing piece of the conversation when we talk about accessibility.

We add a ramp and we add clearance for wheelchair users and we call it a day.

But there's a lot more to creating an accessible space.

Well, thank you so much, Katie, for your insights and your, yeah, your really interesting thoughts on this because it's given me lots of, lots of, you know, spaciousness to consider how things can change, perhaps in our house, but also in the different environments that I find myself in.

What I can be noticing, hopefully not noticing too much because then it's, it's just another thing.

I'm like, I don't like that restaurant.

I'm not going to that cafe anymore.

I'm not going to go on that airline because they don't do this.

And then all of a sudden I get, I'm always called very picky, but

I know that it's Disney World for me.

Oh, you can't do that.

I cannot do Disney World anymore.

I used to, like, think that it was very magical.

And as soon as I started to notice how often I felt overstimulated and crowded, I was like, nope, just not going there anymore.

And that.

And that's okay for us to be able to have those places that was just like, no, that doesn't do it for me, but thank you so much, Katie.

So good to talk to you.

Kate, it was such a pleasure.

What a wonderful audience you have and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Likewise, If this episode has been helpful for you and you're looking for more tools and more guidance, my brand new book, the ADHD Will Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, is out now.

You can find it wherever you buy your books from.

You can also check out the audiobook if you do prefer to listen to me.

I have narrated it all myself.

Thank you so much for being here and I will see you for the next episode.