Lindsay Guentzel (00:01):

You are listening to episode 91 of Refocused, a podcast all about ADHD. Today’s episode is Understanding ADHD and anxiety in our lives.

(00:13):

Welcome back to Refocused, a podcast all about ADHD. I’m your host, Lindsay Guentzel, and on today’s show we’re doing something a little different and I’m really excited about it. As you probably know, we just got done airing back to back episodes with Dr. Marcy Caldwell, diving into one of the most common comorbidities people with ADHD deal with; anxiety. Instead of just jumping right into the next topic, which is what we’ve done in the past, I thought why not take a minute and actually let this information, this incredibly important information, let it sink in a bit. Let us digest it just a little bit, and even better, let us discuss it with members of the ADHD community who have their own experience with anxiety that they can pull inspiration and insight from, one that’s likely a little different from my own. That’s exactly what we’re doing today, a little understanding ADHD and anxiety recap show, if you will, where I’ll be joined by my coordinating producer and fellow ADHDer Phil Rodemann.

Phil Rodemann (01:46):

One thing that Dr. Caldwell talked about in that stress response cycle was that it would end when you get away from the bear.

Lindsay Guentzel (01:54):

As well as a new voice to welcome to our Refocused community, someone I was lucky enough to connect with at the international conference on ADHD last year, someone whose work I really respect, Jaye Lin.

Jaye Lin (02:08):

In true ADHD fashion, I’m not just doing one thing.

Lindsay Guentzel (02:11):

She isn’t kidding. Jaye is an ADHD coach, an educator, a speaker, and a podcaster based in the Seattle area.

Jaye Lin (02:20):

I also am working on a cookbook because I have a background in restaurant management and a culinary school degree. I’m a former food truck and restaurant owner, and so I look at all of these ADHD individuals who are really struggling with the same struggles I have with making my own food, getting food on the table, especially after COVID where I started making all of my meals.

Lindsay Guentzel (02:44):

She also, as you might have guessed, has dealt with anxiety. In fact, before being diagnosed with ADHD, Jaye was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder as well as panic disorder. I have a feeling she’ll have plenty to add to the conversation as the three of us go back and share our own observations from the two-part series, Understanding ADHD and Anxiety with Dr. Marcy Caldwell. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the series, episode 89 and 90 yet, I highly recommend giving them a listen so you can explore your own connection to anxiety right along with us.

(03:29):

Jaye, I am so excited to welcome you to your first Refocused appearance. Thank you so much for being here.

Jaye Lin (03:36):

Thanks so much for having me. You can’t even know how excited I am to be here.

Lindsay Guentzel (03:40):

I know. I kind of mentioned, I was like, “I want the energy behind this to be low key and fun”, as low key and fun as a conversation around anxiety can be.

Jaye Lin (03:52):

Well, I mean, years ago anxiety conversations would not have been fun, but now it’s one of my favorite things to talk about because of where I’ve come from anxiety to ADHD to all of that treatment, and I just feel like I’m in a really great place and I want to share that with other people.

Lindsay Guentzel (04:13):

Well, that’s a perfect way to segue into how anxiety shows up in your life. I’m curious, before you even listened to the episodes and were able to connect back your own experience to some of the stuff that Dr. Marcy Caldwell was sharing with us, how did you view your anxiety? I know you and I are similar in the sense that I was also diagnosed with anxiety long before ADHD was even something I considered. How do you view it and how do you see it show up in your life?

Jaye Lin (04:42):

Well, this is a much more complicated answer too, which is no surprise, but I had started working on my anxiety years before my ADHD diagnosis, and that was really rough and a lot of it has to do with how the ADHD affects the anxiety and the anxiety affects ADHD. It’s almost like a snowball effect. But years ago, I had known myself to be … known, not thought. Known myself to be someone who was just unreliable in every single way, so my emotions were something I was afraid of. I was afraid of me making promises because I didn’t think that I would be able to follow through on them, me doing all these things that would hurt other people. It was just a big panic and shame fest for my entire life.

(05:33):

A lot of that resulted in big blowups and it resulted in starting over so many times, it’s the reason why I’m in my fourth or fifth career, depending on how you look at it, is because it always got so bad that I couldn’t go back to what I was doing in my career, and I had to start over all the time. I just knew myself to be someone who hurt people, who wasn’t in control of anything, who probably couldn’t achieve anything long term, who couldn’t wait, who was impatient and all these kind of terrible qualities about myself. I just internalized all of them and also externalized all of them. I wasn’t really a walk in the park to be around all the time, and that’s kind of how anxiety can present too, especially when we feel awful about ourselves, we’re not always at our best to be around other people.

Lindsay Guentzel (06:38):

I have a lot I could say there. I was like, “Oh my goodness”, things you were saying that I’m like, “Yes. That connects back to some of the things that I dealt with.” Now, Phil, you come to this community a little later. You were more recently diagnosed in just the last couple of years, but I know that you also struggled with mental health, and I know that anxiety was one of the things on the list for you long before your diagnosis. I’m curious how you have seen anxiety show up in your life?

Phil Rodemann (07:08):

Well, definitely. I was diagnosed with anxiety and the medications that they give you and the therapy that you go through, they just aren’t as effective as the stimulant medications are for ADHD. I’ve heard that many times, that the stimulant medications are by far the most effective of all the mental health medications that they know about. The way that anxiety, though, showed up in my life was we get distracted quite a lot and so our brains start to realize that and they start to say, “Well, I’m going to be there and I’m going to make sure that you see everything so that you don’t get distracted”, and it becomes this control thing for me. I studied organizational systems and I was very busy when I was in high school and I had everything written down. This was before you went to the first day of school and you got a planner.

(08:12):

It was something that I did, and I found that the more out of control I felt things were, the more disorganization there was in the near future, the more my anxiety would fill up. A good way of explaining that is like let’s say you’re going to go on a trip and you’re going to go to the airport and you’ve got to check your bag in. Since 9/11, you’ve got to go through security. They could pull you out and you can get delayed and you can forget you had a water bottle in your backpack. That’s a actually happened. That’s really the way that anxiety showed up with me since my diagnosis and seeing things through the ADHD lens, if you will, my anxiety has dropped to about a quarter of what it was before. So life is much more enjoyable.

Jaye Lin (09:10):

This is a really great point about the medications, Phil. I’m so glad that you brought that up because I was on SSRIs years ago and I stayed on them even though I had every single side effect ever. I couldn’t sleep, I was irritable, all these things. Because it was better than the alternative, which was being on the verge of panic for the entire week, it was just better than that, and I wasn’t able to really even get past the anxiety then. It really wasn’t until I started on my stimulant medication, and at that time I had already kind of tapered down and I was just managing myself with basically not doing anything that would give me more anxiety. I was a little bit of a shut-in during that point, but I still had incredibly high anxiety despite that.

(10:03):

But when I started on my stimulants, I even told my ADHD doctor, “I feel like myself, but so calm”, and I didn’t even know that this level of no anxiety could exist because I had this baseline of high anxiety for my entire life, and that’s just how I functioned. I was just like, “Yeah, I haven’t even felt this way when I was on antidepressants”, and he said, “Yeah, because what is stressing you out, what is giving you the anxiety is that you aren’t feeling like you are able to have any control over your life or to get things done or all of these things, and the SSRIs didn’t help you with that. It just made it so that you didn’t care.” I was like, “Bingo. Bingo.” That’s exactly what it was because I still wasn’t getting anything done, but I just wasn’t able to feel the full brunt of the shame and negative feelings around it, but it was still there.

(11:03):

You remove that piece and it’s like everything just starts to crumble and the stimulants really changed a lot for me. So when people are just like, “Oh, I can’t go on stimulants because my doctor says that I have to handle the anxiety first, so we’re going to go on SSRIs first, and once I’m over the anxiety, then I can start on stimulants” and I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, how long is that going to take?” Because I spent years trying to work on anxiety and it didn’t do anything really until the stimulants came on board.

Lindsay Guentzel (11:33):

One of the things that stood out for me that Dr. Caldwell talked about was how anxiety can cause a person to shrink their life. For me, that just totally hit home. I can look back at so many parts of my life where I let anxiety take control and I let it dictate who I was in life and how I showed up in life and it felt so overwhelming in both a good way and a very sad way to hear it explained that way because I’m at a point now where I can address it and I feel so grateful for that. But it’s come with a lot of work. It also reminded me that there are a lot of people who are in a similar situation to the one that I was in who feel this way, who don’t know how to stop it or how to fix it.

(12:25):

Jaye, you mentioned that this is something that you talk with people all the time and you mentioned that you have found ways to help yourself, so I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how maybe that idea of shrinking yourself from anxiety might fit into your life, and then what were some of the things that you’ve done and that you continue to do and that you share with other people?

Jaye Lin (12:45):

As I mentioned earlier, I became a huge recluse to kind of minimize the chance of me having a panic attack in public. I stopped doing stuff, I stopped meeting with my friends, I stopped going out in public, and that definitely is a shrinking of a life, and I stopped taking risks. I only did things that I knew that I could succeed in because I just didn’t have that trust. With ADHD, this is a really common thing that happens where judgments are placed on things, and it starts even when we are kids. You turn this in late and it wasn’t, “I turned this in late because … here are the factors. Here’s how I’m going to change it in the future or prevent it in the future. Here is what I learned from the situation”, which is kind of what I teach others to do. That’s what I do myself.

(13:45):

It was, “I’m really awful. I’m really awful.” If I feel bad enough, people will stop going after me. That was also really terrible for me because I have always been a really authentic person, even when I was a kid, so I couldn’t just look like I felt bad, I had to actually feel bad, and it just created this never ending snowball that continued all the way throughout my life. How that showed up was just reaction, reaction, reaction, reaction, reaction. It doesn’t have to be that. We can look at what we are actually afraid of and not the thing that we are associating with don’t do that again. Especially I don’t like to use the word, and I even did a reel on this where everyone focuses on don’t like, “Don’t blurt, don’t interrupt people, don’t wait till the last minute, don’t do this.”

(14:44):

Instead, there is a do, which is “I’m going to write down my thoughts before I say them out loud in a meeting so that I can let them finish without losing it.” That’s a do that will help me remedy that. But instead, we often focus on the don’ts and what the don’ts are are unpredictable. There’s no way for me to know if I’m going to do a don’t. So there’s that piece of always looking for what are you going to do? Because that’s a track record that goes in our favor. It doesn’t have to be like, “I have to do all of these kind of neurotypical things perfect in order to get my result. I can just focus on what the result is.”

Phil Rodemann (15:30):

The anxiety piece, I think, as it’s associated with ADHD, tends to cause us to withdraw into our own head. I learned that at a very young age. So as a result, I spent so much time in my own head that my whole life, I don’t feel like I’ve really gotten to know people really well. I had too much of my mental energy being used up trying to make sure that I had everything under control. Since my diagnosis, one thing that has meant so much to me is working on this podcast because of the fact that I have a genuine interest in hearing the stories of people that are like me, so that it’s just been a revelation and having a genuine interest in other people and their stories and their experiences in life.

(16:26):

I think that if we get out of our own heads, whether that’s through seeing things through a different lens, the ability to do that I think has to … if we’re diagnosed, it comes from medication, it can come from therapy, from learning, from coaches. I don’t think there’s any one way that you address all of this, but there is so much beauty that I think we deprive ourselves of.

Lindsay Guentzel (16:54):

Well, I want to ask you about that, Phil, in the sense you’re here, you’re the only man in the group, and men notoriously don’t like to talk about their feelings. I’m curious what sort of roadblocks you have felt going through life with that, this idea that don’t talk about things, don’t show emotion. For women, it’s a little different. It’s very much there’s the expectations for men, there’s the expectations for women. We have in the middle people who would fall into the category of non-binary or gender-fluid, and we’re still learning about how anxiety affects them. From your perspective, what has life been like to been told to just shut it down?

Phil Rodemann (17:44):

It’s interesting you asked that question. My father was very German, and as a result, he was very controlled emotionally. He softened a lot as he got older, but he traveled a lot for work when I was growing up. Home life was much more dictated by mom, and so I was much more exposed to the emotional side of things and strong women. I don’t think I’m stereotypical at all. I think that it’s been a little bit of a challenge in hindsight because with ADHD, we do the feels, and when I was grade school age, it would not take a whole lot for me to fly off the handle, and I would get either extremely angry or extremely upset or both. The way families work, they know how to push buttons. You’ve got siblings that know how to push buttons and they get enjoyment from that.

(18:51):

But on the other side, my father, I can remember him telling me that this anger thing that you have is going to be a problem until you learn how to control it. My next question was, “Well, how do I control it?” “Well, you can scream into a pillow”, and that’s the only thing I remember being taught about that. I think that the resources that we have now are so much better, not only in terms of the ability to educate people in how to deal with emotions and all these different things, but I’m not stereotypical. Sometimes I feel a little ashamed of being an older white man because so many things are impacted in our lives by the fact that it was always expressed in a way that it showed up in white males. The symptoms of ADHD is a perfect example.

Lindsay Guentzel (19:50):

Jaye, I’m curious, when you listened to the information that Dr. Caldwell shared, was there anything that stood out for you that we should be amplifying right now for the ADHD community? I mentioned keeping in mind that for us, we are talking about this all the time, but for people who are either newly diagnosed or don’t host podcasts about it, there’s times where there’s probably stuff that they’re being introduced to for the first time.

Jaye Lin (20:19):

Two major things. One is how the difference between a panic and an overwhelm, that kind of piece that she talks about, how that anxiety attack feels for someone with anxiety versus ADHD and overwhelm. I was just like, “Ugh, that is so good.” Because often with ADHD, we have a lower capacity to interpret what our emotions are as they’re happening. It’s unfortunate, but it can still be done. But oftentimes when distress is happening, it is labeled by us as anxiety. It actually is very different things, so when we are able to look at it that way and parse it out, it doesn’t have to be so bad anymore. I’ll even admit, while I was listening to the episode with Dr. Caldwell, I started feeling that way because I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, I have so many thoughts and all of these things are really good. What am I going to say? What am I going to say?”

(21:21):

So I just wrote down the thoughts of hers in black that I wanted to touch on, and then I made little bullet points in red of what I wanted to say about it. So it’s just like, “Yeah, no, I’m just overwhelmed. It actually is an anxiety. I’m just overwhelmed with the whole process and I can work on that.” The second piece is on how the research isn’t there yet and that is a major thing for me right now. As you know, I’m doing this talk on eating and cooking and for the conference we had to submit some articles that support what we’re saying, and I’m very disappointed to share that there are no academic articles on how cooking for people with ADHD and the process of cooking and all the needs that we have to do is more difficult.

(22:08):

Instead, there are scientific articles on how very healthy diets will lead to less ADHD and those all stem from one study that I found that says a healthier diet will eat to less ADHD. Their methodology was they surveyed people about their diets and then asked if they had ADHD, and the people who ate healthier diets had less instances of ADHD, and the people who had unhealthy diets had more instances of ADHD, and so their conclusion was, if you eat a healthier diet, you will not have ADHD. That is the opposite of what’s happening because it’s much harder for people with ADHD to have a healthy diet. You’re creating causation that isn’t there. There is a correlation between diet and ADHD, but your conclusion I think is erroneous, and now it’s leading to all of these other studies using your study as a guide for them.

(23:09):

That’s what I mean about the research not catching up, and this whole idea that everything has to be evidence-based. A lot of people are like that, where they’re just like, “You talk about ADHD a lot and it’s all misinformation because it’s not evidence-based, there’s no scientific study that supports what you’re saying.” I usually say there are limitations with science and with ADHD, it can present in a lot of different ways. If one out of 10 people presents this way with ADHD, that’s not statistically significant, but it is significant because one out of 10 people is a lot of people. We can’t necessarily attribute that to ADHD in a scientific sense, but it’s still there and we also can’t control what studies get done and how they’re doing their methodology and what conclusions they’re drawing from it. We don’t have any power over that.

Phil Rodemann (24:05):

I think that the biggest difference in views about ADHD, jumping on what you said, is that people will take those studies that show a correlation and they’ll assume it applies to everybody. ADHD is one of those things that shows up so differently in each person. Scientific studies are very important, but the other things, like you’re talking about, for example, how to eat healthier when you have ADHD, that’s something that you understand personally, and you’re not putting it out there as something … you’re not saying that everybody is this way. You’re saying that this can be helpful, that it’s very helpful to be presented that way. In the last week or so, some of the algorithms on social have detected that, “Gee, I might be interested in seeing this video”, and it shows me a video about somebody who is saying something that is entirely not supported scientifically, and they’re presenting it as this is true for everybody.

(25:17):

That to me is one of the big struggles. There’s already stigma around ADHD and is it real and do people just want these medications because addicted? For people on the periphery, it’s easy to believe what they hear. The one thing I would want everybody to know is that look at how it’s being presented, not only the source material, but are they saying that this is true for everybody, that it’s not physically based, it’s not passed on from generation to generation? And I think that the truth is probably in the middle somewhere, but you’ve got people going to extremes because that gets the algorithms and that will get people’s attention.

Lindsay Guentzel (26:11):

Jaye, you said something earlier that brought up this thought for me, and it kind of goes back to the ADHD brain and my brain can be thinking about 15 different things at once, and people will be like, “No, that’s not possible” and it’s like, “Oh, yes, no, it is very possible. They’re all living in there and they’re swimming around and they’re popping out at different moments.” What made me think about this connection with anxiety is, I wonder if you guys have experienced this, in that a lot of times my anxiety is tied to context that I have added to something that I don’t know is true. For example, if someone sends an email and it doesn’t have the punctuation that I want, or if someone asks for a meeting and they don’t provide context for what the meeting is for, I make up what that scenario is and I can get myself worked up about it, and I can spend a lot of time ruminating on that and building up that anxiety.

(27:13):

Whereas what I’m working on now is saying to myself, “I don’t know what that person means. I don’t know why they’re asking for this meeting. I should ask for more answers.” You know what I mean? I’m just curious if you guys have dealt with that? Jaye, is that something that you have struggled with?

Jaye Lin (27:30):

Yeah, I even wrote it down on this board.

Lindsay Guentzel (27:33):

Yeah, look at us!

Jaye Lin (27:34):

Making the unknown known, right? Because there are a bunch of unknowns, especially in the example I used about interpersonal challenges, Are they grumpy with me because of something I said? Are they looking at me, which is what Dr. Caldwell used? Are they looking at me weird because they’re thinking this about me? It’s like we don’t know that, and either is it important for me to know that? Is it important for them to love me? Sometimes it isn’t. It’s fine. I’m not for everyone. I understand that. Or we can clarify and say, “Hey, is everything going on with you? Are we okay?” And doing that, it’s kind of just like … they’re like, “Actually, there is something that I want to bring up with you” and suddenly we’re looking directly at it again, suddenly we’re not shying away from the monster.

Phil Rodemann (28:24):

Aside from the difficulty in text messages and emails of understanding the tone of what’s being said because it’s the written word, the one thing that I was taught a while ago, there’s a book called The Four Agreements, and I can’t remember the author and I’ll have to look that up and I know, I’ll put it in the show notes, but one of the four agreements that you have with yourself is that you assume positive intent, assume that the other person is doing their best. It’s harder I think for us with ADHD to do that, but if you can get to that place, that’s a good place to be.

Jaye Lin (29:11):

That’s kind of what I started doing because before I would just work myself up into a tizzy all the time about “Do they like me? What do I have to do to get them to like me?” It was really, really exhausting in general, and I just decided, “Hey, if they’re going to tell me everything’s fine, if it’s not fine, that’s kind of on them, and that is what they want me to think, that everything is fine, even if they don’t like me and they tell me they do, they want me to think that they like me.” I want to create an environment where people can be very honest with me so it isn’t this thing where I have to anticipate everything that they’re thinking all the time.

(29:58):

So I welcome it. I ask them for feedback. I ask them how I could be a better friend. I ask them if it was okay for me to say this. All that does is create data points and check in with them, and it is up to them to be honest with me, but by creating an environment where they can be honest and I won’t descend into despair and all of that, it makes everything so much easier. I’ve had very hard conversations still, but I would say that it’s still better than the life I was living before when I was just thinking everyone hated me all the time and then would start fights or I’d nitpick things because that just created more tension. I was trying to get them to like me more, they probably like me a lot less, and now it’s opening up conversations to become closer, to create more connection, to have them share their feelings with me and have me be a better friend.

(31:03):

It’s always a net positive every time these conversations happen and I get to just feel secure that if they do have an issue, they will tell me. It’s freed up a lot of energy for myself. It’s great.

Lindsay Guentzel (31:21):

The life of a woman who has been told that she’s too much. I connect a lot with a lot of that. To add on to the incredible advice you gave, one of the things that I repeat to myself is, for example, if I am communicating with someone and there’s been some tension or something feels off and I ask them about it, and I hope that they’re being honest, the other thing I say to myself is “They’re an adult. If something is off and they want to talk about it, they can come to me. But until then I’m going to take them at their word because like I said, they’re an adult”, and you just kind of have to let it be. You can only control so much, and it’s hard. It is incredibly hard. The amount of energy I think all of us have expelled for things we wish we could take back, whether they weren’t worth our time or they ended up to be stories we were telling ourselves, I mean, we could have done a lot. Right?

Jaye Lin (32:27):

Yeah.

Lindsay Guentzel (32:29):

Jaye, it was such a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us for this fun little experiment. I think it’s just so important to take some of this information that I think it’s very science heavy, it can be a lot to digest and to be able to give real life examples to it. We’re so appreciative of your time and your energy, and just thanks for being here and for all that you give back to the community. I know putting yourself out there can be a lot, and I’m grateful that you do it day after day.

(33:03):

I just have so much gratitude right now to both my coordinating producer, Phil Rodemann, as well as our special guest, Jaye Lin, for being so honest and thoughtful, especially for a topic that can easily be anything but easy to talk about. I also want to make sure you all know where to go to find more of Jaye on the internet and the easiest path to all things Jaye is through her website, jayelin.com. That’s J-A-Y-E-L-I-N.com. If you aren’t already following her on Instagram, ADHDJaye, that’s A-D-H-D-J-A-Y-E and her podcast, Now Presenting ADHD, can be found wherever you get your podcasts, as well as through the website npadhd.com. If you aren’t following us on Instagram, now’s a great time to get over there to check out all of the show content we’ve been sharing over the last few weeks. You can find us on Instagram @refocusedpod.

(34:08):

Next week, we’re moving on to another comorbidity people with ADHD can find themselves dealing with, obsessive compulsive disorder, more commonly referred to as OCD. I’ll be joined by OCD and ADHD expert Dr. Roberto Olivardia for back-to-back episodes exploring the comorbidity, what he refers to as ADHD’s cousin. I learned so much from my time chatting with Dr. Olivardia and I can’t wait to share our next series with you, Understanding ADHD and OCD, that kicks off on July 31st.

(34:54):

Thank you so much for listening. If you’re new here, my name is Lindsay Guentzel. I am the host and executive producer of Refocused, a podcast all about ADHD that would not be possible without the incredible talents of the team I get to work with, including Phil Rodemann, our coordinating producer who leads our live production, scheduling and audio editing, Sarah Platinitus, our managing editor responsible for leading our research, as well as guest and show development, Al Chaplin, our go-to for planning, creating, and organizing content strategy for social media, Lauren Terry, our associate producer, and jack of all trades, who, if I can add, just graduated from high school a few weeks ago.

(35:43):

Support for this podcast comes from our partner, ADHD Online, and the incredible team of people I’m honored to work with every day, including Keith Boswell, Suzanne Spruitt, Melanie Mile, Claudia Gotti and Tricia Merchandani. Our show Art was created by Sissy Yi of Berlin Gray, and our music was created by Louis Inglis, a singer-songwriter from Perth, Australia, who was diagnosed with ADHD in 2020 at the age of 39. Finally, a big thanks to Mason Nelly over at Dexia in Grand Rapids, Michigan for all of his help in getting our videos ready to share with you guys. Links to all of the partners we work with are available in the show notes.

(36:28):

To connect with the show or with me, you can find us online @refocusedpod as well as @lindsayguentzel, and you can email the show directly [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. I say it every week, and I mean it. Take care of yourselves and please, in an effort to reduce the unbelievable amount of stress we all carry around with us unnecessarily, be a little kinder to yourself this week.