Taking Control: The Adhd Podcast

We're on summer break, so this week is a Revisit: a favorite conversation pulled back out of the archive. The idea takes after Dr. Kurosh Dini's concept of the visit, showing up to something with curiosity rather than judgment.In this one, we talk with coach Jane Massengill about the negative self-talk that so many people with ADHD carry, why it can run louder for us, and a simple practice she calls word watching for catching it in the moment. It's a warm, useful conversation about learning to be kinder to yourself. Whether it's your first listen or a return trip, it's worth your time.Links & NotesJaneMassengill.comThe Gremlin-Taming InstituteTaming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way — by Rick Carlson (00:00) - Welcome to The ADHD Podcast! (03:28) - Introducing Jane Massengill of the Gremlin-Taming Institute (08:37) - Why do some people struggle when others don't? (16:01) - About the Book and Jane's History (19:55) - The ADHD Internal Dialog (24:23) - Word-Watching

At the end of the day, when your brain starts tallying everything you didn't finish, where's the credit for everything you did? In the Season 32 finale, we close out the season on the quiet skill that gets buried under all that mental accounting — noticing your progress instead of measuring it.The unfinished stuff is loud: the laundry pile, the twenty-item list, the messages still waiting. The progress is silent, and a lifetime of report cards and performance reviews has trained us to see only what's left. We get into why that happens — with a detour through a 1927 psychology experiment that explains a lot about the ADHD shame loop — what self-compassion actually looks like in a real day, and why the answer isn't a shinier scorecard. Plus a family-dinner ritual worth stealing, an optical illusion that makes the whole point, and one of the more memorable cold opens of the season.It's our send-off into summer break, and a reminder that sometimes the entire practice fits into one word.Links & NotesSupport th

You can lose six hours to the thing that lights you up, then completely stall on a task that takes three minutes. Same brain, different room. In this conversation, Pete and Nikki get into why ADHD shows up hard in one setting and nearly disappears in another, why "broken" is the wrong word for any of it, and what changes when you stop asking how to fix yourself and start paying attention to the rooms where you do your best work. It's the capper on a season-long conversation about living with ADHD instead of fighting it, and a grounded look at the context, fuel, and environment that make hard things doable.Links & NotesSupport the Show on PatreonDig into the podcast Shownotes Database (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast (01:41) - Check us out on Patreon (02:44) - You're Not Broken. You're Contextual ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

You can have the perfect planner, the right system, and the best intentions, and still not follow through. It isn't a caring problem. After enough broken promises to yourself, some quiet part of you simply stops believing the plan. That's where this conversation with Dr. Tamara Rosier begins, and it reframes self-trust as something closer to a nervous system skill than a mindset you can think your way into.Dr. Tamara Rosier has written the books and built the center and stood on the stages, and she still wakes some mornings and reminds herself, deliberately, that she is a trustworthy person. The belief underneath — the one she's carried since she was small — is that she's a person who screws things up. ADHD feeds a belief like that. It chips away at your sense of who you are, one forgotten thing at a time, until distrusting yourself stops feeling like a wound and starts feeling like good judgment.So much of that, it turns out, is happening in the body. An ADHD nervous system can spend its whole life braced —

GPS is Now Open! Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/gps to learn more and take control of your planning today!---There's a rule most of us signed before we could read it. It decides whether we're worth anything, and it tends to set the same terms for everyone who carries an ADHD brain: you're valuable if you perform, if you keep every plate spinning, if you never let anyone down. Live under that contract long enough and it stops feeling like a belief and starts feeling like a fact — written, as the metaphor goes this week, in permanent ink.Where did the rule come from? Often from the earliest lessons — the pulled-out-of-class, extra-time, here-are-your-accommodations lessons that were meant to level the field but landed as proof you were different. The gap they leave behind doesn't shrink with age. There's research suggesting it widens. The assumption that everyone else has this figured out turns out to be the lie that keeps the rule in place.Links & NotesSupport the Show on PatreonDig into the podcast Sho

---Register today for our upcoming webinar: Webinar: Stop Starting Over! Why Your Planning Keeps Falling Apart — June 15, 2026, 4 pm PT/7 pm EThttps://takecontroladhd.com/gps---"Good enough" is a phrase that can land like permission or like an accusation — and for ADHD brains that have spent a lifetime being told we're not trying hard enough, both feelings often arrive at once.This week, we're untangling that knot. Why does a phrase meant to release us so often feel like settling? Why does the ADHD brain hear "good enough" and translate it into "not enough"? And what would it actually take to reclaim the phrase as our own?This is really all about intention — the difference between walking away from something because you've been defeated by it, and walking away because you've made a choice. One leaves you smaller. The other builds something. We talk about the standards we measure ourselves against (almost always invented), the freeze that comes when nothing feels possible, and the small, almost invisible acts

Grab the Guide ... FREE! If you've spent years thinking the problem with planning is you — too scattered, too inconsistent, not disciplined enough — this guide is FOR YOU! Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/planwithadhd and get started today!--- There's a kind of waiting most ADHDers know well — waiting for someone, somewhere, to say it's okay. Okay to rest. Okay to stop masking. Okay to take the accommodation. Okay to want what you want without justifying it.In this conversation, we get into the permission slips we keep waiting for, often from authority figures who may not even exist anymore. We talk about why ADHDers wait — the research-backed link between years of childhood correction and adult reliance on external validation — and what that has to do with decision paralysis, rejection sensitivity, masking, and the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that you didn't sign up for.Plus the swan, self-determination theory, and a small concrete first step you can try this week.Links & NotesDownloa

We've all been there: someone offers a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and instead of taking it in, you bristle. You're tired. You're cranky. The last thing you want is advice. This week, Pete and Nikki tackle what happens when ADHD meets fatigue — and why the strategies that usually work suddenly don't.This isn't laziness. It isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when executive functions are already running on a deficit and you pile fatigue on top. Pete brings the research, including a study showing 62% of adults with ADHD meet the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome — a reminder that "everybody gets tired" is true, but ADHD brains get tired in a different and vastly more significant way.The conversation moves from the science to the lived experience: the guilt loop that keeps you from resting, the way fatigue distorts reality until small tasks feel like moral referendums, and the rewiring required to treat recovery as part of the work — not a reward you have to earn.Plus: why "I don't wanna" might be

We've all said it. "I'll deal with it later." And somehow, later never comes. The thing just sits there — not in your calendar, but in your head. It pings you in the shower. It shows up right before you fall asleep. That's an energy leak.This week, Ari Tuckman returns for his sixth appearance to unpack what's actually happening when we tell ourselves "later." What is the ADHD brain doing in that moment? Are we making a real decision, or just kicking the can? And how do we tell the difference?We dig into:The two flavors of procrastination — not feeling the future vs. avoiding the discomfortWhy "later" needs a "when," and what specificity actually changesThe difference between a task that needs doing and a decision that needs makingHow to close an open loop that's been open way too longGoing toward positives vs. avoiding negatives, and why one of those is more sustainableTime estimation, and why some things aren't knowable until you startAri's new book, the ADHD Productivity ManualGuest SpotlightAri Tuckman, Ps

---Join the Declutter Challenge! Registration is now open through May 15!https://takecontroladhd.com/declutter---You've heard it before, probably said it yourself: time blocking doesn't work for me. Every block that slips becomes one more piece of evidence that you've failed the system — or that the system has failed you. So this week, Nikki and Pete try something different. They change the word.Nikki walks through three terms that get thrown around in planning circles — intentional planning, time blocking, and the one she's been reaching for more and more lately: flexible scheduling. Pete pushes back (gently, mostly) on why we need a new word for something that was never supposed to be rigid in the first place. And together they unpack the real reason so many ADHDers bounce off scheduling: it's not the strategy, it's the story we tell ourselves when the strategy bends.Along the way: the dangerous allure of hyperscheduling and why it only really works if your livelihood is measured in billable minutes; why ti

---Join the Declutter Challenge! Registration is now open through May 15!https://takecontroladhd.com/declutter---There's a moment every ADHDer knows: you open the task manager, see the sea of red, and close it again. This week, Nikki and Pete sit with that moment — and with what it's actually telling you.The instinct is to blame the tool. Something's wrong with the app, the planner, the notebook. Time for something new. But what if the tool is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and the thing you're really avoiding is something else entirely?Nikki walks through the two non-negotiables of any planning toolkit, why hybrid systems quietly fall apart in the in-between stages, and the one thing she asks every new one-on-one client to do within a week. Pete confesses to running four systems at once, lays out his tool-finding intestines on the table (his words, not ours), and makes the case for why your app isn't just an app — it's a lifeline. Plus: FOBO, task rot, the moral weight of a few simple minutes, and w

---Register today for our upcoming webinar: Webinar: It’s Not the Clutter… It’s the Decisions! — May 4, 2026, 4pm PT/7pm EThttps://takecontroladhd.com/declutter---Most productivity advice was built for brains that start on demand, stay consistent, and prioritize logically. That's not us.This week, Brooke Schnittman returns for her third visit to the show to dig into one of the most frustrating disconnects in ADHD life: the gap between what we think we can do in a day and what our actual capacity will allow. Pete and Nikki walk through the familiar trap — fifteen red-line tasks, two hours of actual focus time, and the stubborn belief that somehow we'll get it all done anyway. Brooke names it for what it is: magical thinking backed by people-pleasing, propped up by shame.Together they explore why ADHD brains need to plan to plan, what "sampling the no" actually looks like in practice, and how masking shows up in our task lists in ways we rarely notice. Brooke introduces her STOP framework for sorting the week —

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE! Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!--- This week kicks off a three-part series on planning, and it starts where every planning conversation should: with honesty about why plans fall apart in the first place. Pete opens with his own cascading construction disaster at home, where raccoon damage set off a chain reaction of disruptions that has bled directly into his work life. Nikki’s diagnosis is both simple and profound: when you make a plan, you’re trying to predict the future with the information you have right now. When that future doesn’t cooperate, the real problem isn’t the plan failing. It’s that we treat plan failure like a personal failure.From there, Nikki walks through the full spectrum of executive function challenges that make ADHD planning uniquely hard: time blindness that operates at every scale from individual task to entire month, working memory that drops the ball the moment you turn around, p

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE! Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!--- Here’s a story a lot of women know. You’ve been getting by — maybe not perfectly, but you’ve been getting by. And then something shifts. Suddenly the coping strategies that used to work don’t. The brain fog is different. The irritability is new. And nobody around you — including your doctor — seems to have a particularly good answer for why. For women with ADHD, the answer is often estrogen. And for too long, that connection has been wildly undertreated.Linda Roggli has been living this story and researching it and coaching women through it for twenty years. She’s the founder of the ADDiva Network for ADHD Women 40 and Better, and she joins Pete and Nikki to trace the whole arc: what estrogen actually does for the dopamine-depleted ADHD brain, what happens when it starts its perimenopause roller coaster, why the Women’s Health Initiative study scared a generation of women

Here's something nobody tells you about aging with ADHD: the part that feels like decline might not be decline at all. It might be retirement. Or perimenopause. Or just the fact that the external structure that quietly managed your symptoms for thirty years finally disappeared — and nobody warned you it was doing that much work. The question isn't whether your brain is changing. It is. The question is whether you understand why, and what the research actually says about where it leads.Dr. Brandy Callahan is a clinical neuropsychologist, Canada Research Chair in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology, and the founder of the LiBra Lab — the Lifespan Brain Health Lab at the University of Calgary. Her research sits at the intersection most researchers haven't bothered to explore: what happens to the ADHD brain across decades, and specifically, what connects ADHD to elevated dementia risk. What she's finding — about allostatic burden, about the gap between how people perform in a lab versus how they function in a grocery

What happens to your sense of self when the coping strategies you've relied on your whole life start to give out? For a lot of us, "pushing through" wasn't just a strategy, it was the story we told ourselves about why we kept making it. And when that story stops being true, what we're left with can look a lot like grief.Dr. Kathleen Nadeau has spent decades sitting with people in that moment. She's interviewed 150 older adults with ADHD about what the losses actually feel like — the unmet retirement fantasies, the disorientation of late diagnosis, the particular sting of watching younger generations get the support that was never offered to them. She knows what keeps people stuck. And she has a lot to say about what's possible on the other side.This is the second episode of our ADHD and Aging series, and it goes somewhere we didn't fully anticipate. Kathleen pushes back on the idea that aging with ADHD is mostly a story of subtraction. She makes the case, grounded in decades of research, that our brains are m

"You forgot because you didn't care enough." Most people with ADHD have been told that — or have told themselves that — more times than they can count.Dr. Daniella Karidi returns to challenge it. She's a PhD researcher from Northwestern who has spent her career studying memory in ADHD, and her opening argument is one of those ideas that reframes everything that comes after: forgetfulness isn't a failure. It's the default of the system.This episode also kicks off a new series on ADHD and aging — what happens when the structure we've built around our ADHD starts to change, how to tell normal forgetting from something more serious, and why brain fog in perimenopause and menopause is absolutely not your imagination.Dr. Daniella Karidi is the founder of ADHD Time and a board member of CHADD Greater Los Angeles. Find her at adhdtime.com and on YouTube at ADHD Time on Air.Links & NotesSupport the Show on PatreonDig into the podcast Shownotes Database (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast (00:46)

If you've ever given everything to a friendship and been left wondering what went wrong, Caroline Maguire has a gentle but clarifying answer: you probably gave too much, too soon, to someone who hadn't yet earned it. That's not a character flaw — it's the ADHD brain doing what it does when it finally finds someone who sees it. The dopamine hit of new connection can tip straight into hyperfocus, and suddenly you're all-in on a relationship that hasn't had time to prove itself. Caroline calls it the impulsive friendship cycle, and she has spent years helping neurodivergent adults find their way out of it.Caroline is a social emotional learning expert, ADHD coach, and author of the award-winning Why Will No One Play With Me. Her new book, Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults, arrives April 14th — and it's not another book that asks you to fix yourself to fit a friendship model built for someone else's social battery. Instead, she starts with a reframe that carries the whole conversation: our friendship st

If you've ever spent an entire day performing a version of yourself that felt nothing like the real you — holding it together at work, seeming calm when you're not, passing as organized — you already know something about masking. But knowing it and understanding it are two different things. Dr. Sharon Saline returns to help Pete and Nikki unpack what masking actually is: hiding traits, suppressing impulses, and overcompensating to appear more polished than you feel. It's a coping mechanism that can be useful, but for adults with ADHD, chronic masking carries real costs — increased anxiety, emotional exhaustion, a growing disconnect between who you show the world and who you actually are.One of the most important distinctions in this conversation is the difference between masking and presentation. We all show up differently in different contexts — there's a version of you at work, with close friends, with your partner. That's not masking; that's healthy. Masking is specifically about hiding, about a core sense

It's not the blow-ups that do the most damage in a relationship — it's the quieter stuff. The look you misread, the deadline you missed again, the apology you've given so many times it stopped meaning anything. For those of us with ADHD, these small misconnections harden faster because we arrive already carrying a lifetime of being told we're too much or not enough. Dr. Dodge Rea is back to help us name what's really happening beneath the surface when relationships start to calcify.Dodge walks us through the concept of misattunement — the challenge of being both intact and in touch at the same time — and why ADHD brains and neurotypical brains can miss each other without anyone being at fault. He shares a powerful reframe: "It's not your fault and it's not your fate, but it is yours." Both partners have ownership work to do, and it starts with putting down the shame long enough to actually talk about what's hard. From the kitchen stepladder analogy to his expanded Ferrari metaphor, Dodge offers language that