In this episode, Ash and Dusty explore the complexities of moderation for people with ADHD. They discuss how impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and black-and-white thinking often make it difficult to moderate behaviors such as alcohol consumption, nicotine use, marijuana, and internet usage. Ash shares personal experiences and insights about managing these challenges, emphasizing the importance of building awareness and connecting to positive motivations rather than striving for perfection or all-or-nothing approaches. Dusty highlights the slow and gradual nature of behavior change and stresses the value of multiple small tools and interventions that can help people stay on track even when self-discipline feels elusive.
The hosts also touch on practical strategies, like switching from cocktails to bottled beer to improve memory retention and reduce negative aftereffects, using apps that create a pause before impulsive internet use, and structuring marijuana use to support productivity rather than hinder it. They advocate for accepting moderation as a sustainable lifestyle shift rather than a quick fix or drastic overhaul. The episode concludes with encouragement to embrace incremental progress and patience, recognizing that setbacks are part of the process.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I am Ash. [00:00:03] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:00:05] Ash: This is Translating ADHD. Before we get started, I am still taking on new clients. If you’re interested in working with me, you can visit coachasher.com for more information and next steps.So Dusty, you wanna tell our listeners what we are talking about today?
[00:00:22] Dusty: We are talking about ADHD and moderation. [00:00:25] Ash: Moderation is tough, but it is also a thread that I am pulling on right now. [00:00:30] Dusty: I feel like it’s a dirty word when you have ADHD. [00:00:33] Ash: It sure is. And for anyone that’s into Enneagram, I’ve recently I started getting into this a few years ago and then it kind of got disrupted and I’ve picked it back up and I am a type seven and the primary, one of the primary challenges for Enneagram type sevens is in fact moderation. So this is something that’s had my attention lately as far as my work on myself.It is getting out of that black and white thinking and instead trying to find opportunities to know when enough is enough for myself. Like when I’m crossing that threshold of I’m doing this because it feels good to, I’m doing this because I’m in that mindset of I want more, or as a client of mine put it, that mindset of sometimes I need something, right? I’m tired, I’m this, I’m that. I need a boost, I need something. I’m stressed. I’m overthinking. I can’t sleep. I need something. And I do think that. Type seven or not Enneagram wise, moderation is a huge challenge for those of us with ADHD for a number of reasons.
The biggest one being we aren’t that good at connecting to what we know, so we may not be that great at paying attention to our consumption, our spending, our whatever, even when we face those consequences later. So if I wake up on Monday morning feeling like crap because I drank on Sunday night, I may not put two and two together.
And even if I put two and two together in that moment, linking together those effects and sort of getting that bigger picture of, oh, if I drink this much, I’m gonna have a bad day the next day is something that is kind of difficult for us to do.
[00:02:21] Dusty: Yeah, so I think this is applicable to a lot of things with ADHD in general.You know, there’s sort of a lot of things that we might like to moderate or modulate our, you know, participation in or usage of. But alcohol’s like a really obvious one that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately because it’s just not as big a culture among Gen Z is what I’ve heard anecdotally, right?
Alcohol sales are down and like here in Canada, Health Canada has released new guidelines around the usage of alcohol showing that alcohol is a major carcinogen. It’s much more stringently linked to cancer than we thought before. So regular usage, and especially heavy usage of alcohol really puts you at an increased risk of cancer.
So there’s good reasons now more than ever to modulate or moderate your usage. But with ADHD, we’ve got that impulsivity, right? Like it’s meeting some need that we have for like you said, stimulation or maybe destimulation.
I saw a little reel on Instagram and it was a woman with ADHD, and it was like, oh, women with ADHD before drinking alcohol and her brain was buzzing and there were all these thoughts. And then in the video, she takes a sip of wine and everything kind of goes quiet. I think that’s probably really the case for a lot of people and why they’re using alcohol or marijuana, you know, various things.
And I hear this as well with clients around stuff like binge eating snacks too. I think anything or any behavior we’re trying to stop doing, we have the best of intentions, but we’re such black and white thinkers that often I see a lot of clients yo-yoing from all to nothing and back again.
And then also in the moment there’s impulsivity and your executive function is low. I know for me the thing that usually gets in the way of any kind of moderation for anything I’m trying to do is feeling emotional overwhelm. Like once I get pushed too far emotionally and I’m dysregulated, I can’t make choices that are in the service of my long-term goals.
So when I’m emotionally dysregulated, I can’t connect back to those goals and make choices in the moment that are based on those goals. I have to make choices based on anything that’s gonna help me with my distress tolerance at the moment. So finding ways around that has been a lot more challenging for me, and it’s often a lot more challenging for a lot of my clients around any kind of thing that you’re trying to change.
[00:04:45] Ash: Dusty, that’s really well said. And for me emotional dysregulation and nicotine use go hand in hand. I have quit smoking for long periods of time, more than once in my life, and currently don’t smoke, but I do vape. And every time I have completely quit nicotine, the time that I have bought a pack of cigarettes is when I was dysregulated enough that I’m just back to that language that I just needed “something” and there I was, hooked back in after a year, two years, three years, five years of non-nicotine use, picking it back up. With nicotine in particular, once you pick it back up it’s really easy to go from zero right back to habitual use, and it’s really hard to kick.So I think what you said about emotional dysregulation is really pertinent here. From the flip side, when we talk about behavior change, what can be really challenging? There is again, all or nothing thinking, and this is where for myself and my clients, I encourage you to put yourself in the picture.
So for me, if I were to design my life or start to work on designing my life around being as carcinogen free as possible, and or to live as many years as possible, that would not be an enjoyable life for me. I enjoy substances in moderation. I enjoy a number of substances in moderation.
I like rich foods. I like to be in smokey environments. Well, I don’t like to be in smokey environments, but so often the things that I enjoy doing put me in smokey environments so there’s a balance to be struck here between the best case scenario and what fits with your life. What is either harm reduction or getting closer to what is a better fit for you look like, rather than what does doing this perfectly look like? Because from my perspective, this all ends the same way for all of us, right? None of us gets out of this alive. And so while I want to be healthy in my body as a 40-year-old for as long as possible, and I don’t want my body to be a limiter, and in fact, that’s a huge source of motivation for me in any health related threads that I’m pulling on is keeping my body strong enough and limber enough and healthy enough to the degree that I can control that my body itself, my ability to do things like walk or hike long distances or endure long days in the city or out doing tourism or out at a festival or whatever.
That’s what motivates me, keeping my body healthy enough and paying attention to how I feel in my body at the moment. But staying alive as long as I possibly can? That’s not such a great source of motivation, and also would be a miserable life for me. I wouldn’t enjoy that life. So what’s the point of eking out another 5-10 years if I am not enjoying the life I’m living?
[00:07:50] Dusty: Yeah, I think what’s interesting and fascinating to me about this is modulating or moderating a behavior or a usage of something is already such a big step down from like going cold turkey or going all or nothing that I think’s hard to get people to buy-in that it’s like a good way to go in the first place.But beyond that, it’s honestly so hard to just get to the point where you are modulating that. My experience is that the process of behavioral change in this area, especially with anything sort of like addicting, is so slow and I think that’s really hard for people.
I have some clients right now who are dealing with various kinds of addictions that they’re trying to mitigate. Not like serious addictions where they should be under the care of a doctor, but more they recognize that it’s having a negative impact on their lifestyle. And just getting to the point where they’re ready to modulate their usage or that behavior is in and of itself a big job because we are really talking about a whole lifestyle shift.
Let’s use the example of alcohol. I think it’s interesting ’cause I see all these apps now, like on Instagram and different places where it’s like, oh, plan out your drinking with this app, which I think that’s a great first step in theory. It’s a good idea to set an intention ’cause I bet you a lot of people never have, right? They go oh, I should drink less, and then they go and drink their face off and think, ah, I drink too much. Right? What a novel concept – decide in advance how many drinks you wanna have. That’s a great first step.
The problem is when we get in that environment with each drink, we’re subsequently losing our sort of self-control and what you might call willpower executive function. And we’re increasing that impulse, you know, like that lack of impulse control.
We might be increasing emotionality or excitement, and we’re certainly decreasing our self-monitoring. So it’s all well and good for me to say, oh, I’m gonna have three drinks tonight but by that third drink, is that person who’s had that third drink capable of stopping themselves?
If we’re talking about me going and buying three tall cans of beer or something at the liquor store and bringing it home, okay, great, I’ve only got three cans. But in a bar environment or at a party or when you’ve got a whole bottle of wine or something I just think that’s not enough.
And it can be really frustrating for people because they see themselves fail and they’re like, ugh! So there’s something more that has to happen around increasing your ability to connect back to your goals when you’re on that third drink if you don’t wanna have a fourth or stopping after that first cigarette or that first YouTube video. Right? And being like, okay, I promised myself I was gonna go to bed at 11. Now it’s 11:10pm, but I feel like I’m not done watching YouTube. You know, whatever the thing is that you’re trying to change.
When you arrive at that moment, I don’t think we’re planning for that version of ourselves. We’re planning for some hypothetical version of ourselves who has a good amount of self-discipline and that’s never been the case for me. I don’t know about you, Ash.
[00:10:51] Ash: Well, even something like self-discipline, I don’t like to think of it as an all or nothing thing. So in the way that you’re expressing it, no, it has never been a thing for me either. But this is where finding the positive motivation to connect to can be really helpful.So Dusty, you’re talking about how long it can take sometimes to even get to the stage of modulation. Another way to talk about that in coaching language is building awareness.
I was noticing in the last few months, because so much of what I do socially takes place in drinking environments. I attend a lot of queer events, which unfortunately, since third spaces aren’t really a thing, particularly in the US anymore, are typically pretty bar queer, bar centric, and I attend a lot of live music, both drinking environments.
Funnily enough, the first thing that I noticed was my spending because I can be perfectly happy not drinking at all when I go see PHISH, because those are at big venues. I don’t drink because I am just not willing to pay $15 for a tall boy of crappy beer or $25 or whatever for a mixed drink. It is just so outrageously expensive that I don’t drink at all, but because my social activity has gone up, I noticed that my spending on alcohol has gone up more than I would like now.
Did I do anything about it at that moment? No, I didn’t because there was a second piece of awareness that was completely unrelated to the first, and that is I read an article on ADHD and alcohol consumption that talked about memory and here’s the thing – alcohol consumption can inhibit the ability to convert short-term memory to long-term memory.
So this is being blackout drunk. This is being drunk enough for most people that you don’t remember the next day. But what this article was stating is that for people with ADHD, that alcohol consumption threshold is actually quite a bit lower, and that added up to my own lived experiences. So queer bars are notorious for pouring really stiff, really strong drinks.
And while I wasn’t getting hammered when I was out at night, I would notice that there were gaps in my memory. I had a really interesting conversation with a friend, and I wish I could recall more of the pieces or I am working on this history project and so somebody dropped some lore that I wish I could remember the fine detail enough to capture so that I don’t have to go back and have that conversation again.
So when I read this article, that became the motivation to start experimenting and what I did, because queer bars are so notorious for pouring really strong drinks, is that I switched to bottled beer. So I haven’t really changed how many drinks I have, but I have changed how much alcohol I have consumed and how “tipsy” or “drunk” I get.
I have noticed since I have done that, that I have much better recollection of the evening before, like much better. And on top of that, I am much more likely to stop between drinks and have water because, not because I’m so concerned about my alcohol consumption from an inebriation level, but because I really do enjoy being able to wake up the next day and fully remember the good night that I had before.
Bringing back the moderation piece, a side effect that I’ve noticed is I don’t feel as crappy the next day if I feel crappy at all, when I’ve had a few beers versus when I’ve had a few cocktails. So at least for me, there does seem to be a pretty significant difference between those two types of drinks in terms of the effects that I’m going to feel into the night and onto the next day, but were those effects why I made a change in my drinking? No, were the finances why I made a change in drinking? Kind of, that was in the mix. And this change does also benefit that goal. But the real reason was the memory thing so that coming into my awareness was the positive motivation needed to make change.
So if you’re kind of stuck in the phase where you’re just cultivating awareness, that’s okay, because again, that’s hard with ADHD. It’s hard to connect today to tomorrow, to the next day. So if you’re just noticing and making note of how something feels, what is the impact on you? What are you noticing? What information out there feels useful or relevant to you? Then over time, you will start to find your own reasons for making a change.
[00:15:37] Dusty: I think if there’s one message I would like to relay to people struggling with this, having worked with a lot of clients on it in coaching and also having, you know, worked on it with myself is that we feel like moderation or modulation should be so easy ’cause it’s such a big step down from cold turkey, right? Oh, I’ll just do it a little. And in some ways, it’s maybe almost harder, certainly, but I think cold turkey is harder to sustain. This is harder to talk yourself into doing because there’s such a dance, if you will, for talking yourself out of things, right?Like, ah, I’ve already had one, might as well keep going. It’s so easy to let ourselves off the hook. I think the thing that I’ve really learned is that you wanna use multiple tools or multiple avenues.
So something that I used to struggle a lot with was internet drama. I was really into Facebook and I am a very political person, and inevitably someone would upset me and I’d waste a bunch of time getting into some online argument with some idiot, usually someone I didn’t even know. And then not only would my mood be bad, I would be late for things and it would feel like it sucked all my productivity for the day, after being in some internet flame war.
I would just find that I wasn’t able to rally my brain and get organized. So for me, it wasn’t like cold turkey going off all social media, but I kind of did a few things that helped me. Number one, I noticed that the most harmful time for me to use social media was first thing in the morning. If I woke up and went on Facebook, which I often did, like scrolling just to wake myself up, I realized I was still way more dysregulated right after waking up. And so if I saw something upsetting, I was way more likely to clap back at that person and then, you know, get a thing going.
Whereas if I did it in the afternoon when I was already busy, often I’d be like, oh, that person said something really stupid, but I don’t have time to get into it with them right now. So I realized, okay, the first few minutes after I wake up, I cannot go on Facebook – that’s like a very dangerous time.
And same thing with alcohol, I came to recognize long ago, when in my life I shouldn’t be having drinks, that if something hard was going on, or if there’s certain people around that might trigger me in different ways or if I’m gonna be in certain environments, just identifying the most harmful part of when you do this thing, like when is it the least bothersome? When is it the most bothersome and just cut that part out.
The other thing that you helped me with specifically, like internet stuff, was using tools that limited things, but they didn’t work all the time. And this I hear from clients all the time that they’ll try to use different methods of getting themselves to abstain from something, but they tend to go all or nothing. If it doesn’t work all the time, they’ll just discount it. I think that it’s still relevant to count it if it works some of the time.
So there’s this app that I love called One Sec. For a free version, you can pick one website and if you do the paid version, you can set it to any websites you want. Anyways, it’s not an internet blocker, but if you try to go on a certain website it’ll just throw up a screen and you just have to wait for the screen to slowly go up.
So like for mine, I just have the free version but it says take a deep breath in and out. And then it goes okay, you’ve been on Facebook 10 times today, do you actually wanna go on Facebook again? And honestly, because I’m impulsively dopamine seeking, sometimes just the delay of getting to Facebook is enough for me to be like, you know what, I don’t even want you. Whatever, I’ll do something else instead. But you can do that for any and all apps. And the thing is, you can still proceed to the app, so it’s not gonna work 100% of the time.
When I talk to my clients about internet addiction, which is so common, especially like smartphone addiction, they’ll say, oh, well this blocker didn’t work all the time. Okay, but here’s the thing guys, if it’s even working one in four times, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Maybe we need three more tools if your goal is 100% compliance. But you know, maybe it’s only two more tools. But if that’s absorbing 25% of the time, that’s not nothing.
And if I use that app about drinking alcohol, and I set my intention to only have three drinks, well, when I’m at home, if I only buy three drinks, I only have three drinks. Okay. I’m succeeding. Maybe that approach doesn’t work when I go to a bar or a friend’s house where they’re gonna keep offering me a drink, but if that approach works when I’m buying alcohol at home, it still works. It still counts.
I found that for me and for my clients, assembling a whole sort of like rabble of small interventions is how you effectively achieve modulation. It just feels like it shouldn’t take that much work because it’s not even all or nothing, but you know, like that’s fine.
[00:20:25] Ash: . Dusty as far as smartphone usage goes, one thing I will add, that is a low tech solution and something that has worked for me, is just signing out of apps. So if I open up Reddit or whatever and I have to sign in first, that creates that same pause moment.And really that’s what we’re talking about. There’s that pause moment. Cam and I used to talk a lot about pause, disrupt, pivot. As a reminder, when we talk about that model, the pause is the hardest part with ADHD – coming to that useful awareness in the moment. So even if you’re only getting one out of three times, if you are pausing and you’re aware that you’re making a choice that you don’t want to make in a way that you might not have been before…like the phone’s in your hand and you’re on Facebook and you’re not even realizing what you’re doing. That is progress. That is getting you closer to being able to get to that next step of disruption in the moment, and so, that alone has value. That is practice in noticing what it is you’re doing, noticing the choices that you’re making, and even if you’re not able to stop yourself, that’s okay.
There’s an opportunity there on the backside to cultivate some awareness. What was it about that moment that made it not possible for me to stop myself and curious questions like that is how we get to, what else can we try here.
I do also wanna talk about marijuana because I know a lot of people with ADHD experience positive effects of marijuana. Certainly I feel like marijuana has a positive place in my own life. You talk about that brain quieting with wine, that’s what marijuana does for me as it kind of turns off the inner dialogue.
It can be a presence enabler, especially at something like a show or a social outing. So in those settings, I really enjoy it, but I noticed for myself that I was getting into a habit of once my day was done, I was like, okay, let’s get high and then let’s do chores. Well, what would end up happening is I would get high and now I don’t want to do chores because those are boring.
So I would go off seeking something more interesting to do. For me, the solution has been, in large part, I don’t get high until I don’t have stuff to do, but I had a client who had a similar dilemma and he was describing, I really actually like when I’m getting into something that doesn’t need a lot of heavy thoughts, that isn’t super intricate.
If it’s more of organizing or I’m cleaning, or I’m gardening, or I’m doing something that’s manual, that I can kind of get into a rhythm of., I really enjoy marijuana alongside that, but it’s not always effective and I don’t know why. And so what we discovered over the course of a couple of coaching conversations about this is that the client had to already be activated for the task. If he was already activated for whatever it was he was going to do, then he could go ahead if he wanted to and enjoy some marijuana alongside that task and keep on trucking along. But if he wasn’t already activated for the task and for him, activation is getting from that place of like planning, knowing that I have all of the things that I need to do the thing and having somewhat of a plan of what happens next, doing that part while high does not work well for that client. So getting that part out of the way, which was a separate practice that we came up for, to kind of grease the groove to activate for whatever came next.
The marijuana comes in the middle and can be a little treat, a little carrot, right? I did the boring planning part, I’ve greased the groove and now I’m actually motivated and ready to go. Now I can kind of ease into this and do it in a relaxed and enjoyable way. I don’t have to sprint, I can just vibe.
[00:24:18] Dusty: I just wanna sort of summarize my thoughts on this, like as you’re talking about when you accept that you don’t have to go all or nothing, or that maybe all or nothing isn’t the best way, you can actually start to think about like how to work with this.You know, this circumstance that you have and when is it gonna be harmful? When is it gonna be helpful? When is it gonna be less harmful? And I think that’s really important because we would all love to make the best, most safest, you know, health or behavioral choices we can and that is not realistic.
And cold turkey is just not sustainable for so many of us because it’s not just about removing something or adding something, there’s a whole lifestyle shift that has to happen, right? You can’t just say, remove alcohol from your life if all of your friends drink, or you’re expected to drink at work functions or something, right? Or you have a bunch of alcohol sitting in your fridge, and you just decide tomorrow, I’m not gonna drink anymore, well, what are you going to do with all of that stuff in your fridge? You’re just gonna go, oh, well it’s gonna go to waste, right?
I think I’ve accepted modulation and moderation into my heart and, what I think is so great about it is it allows you to slowly make those lifestyle shifts that you would need to make to sustain the behavior ’cause this is all, this isn’t about short-term change.
Anybody with ADHD can do short-term change while it’s novel. But to really make a long-term behavior stick, it’s exactly like what people say with diet and exercise, right? And obesity and stuff, right? People say everybody yo-yo diets, so they lose weight, they gain weight, they lose weight, they gain weight because if you want to reduce your body size it’s about lifestyle change, right? It’s about changing the way that you relate to your food habits and your body movement habits.
It’s not just about adding in something or taking something away and, you know, there’s such a ripple effect there, right? Whether it’s drinking or it’s marijuana or it’s how you eat or how you use the internet – there’s gonna be a million little shifts that you have to make and we can’t make all of those at once and we can’t even anticipate what all those are.
So it’s just such a more healthy and sustainable route, I think, to actually getting where you’re trying to go but it is maddeningly slow. I always tell my clients instead of trying to have a major lifestyle overhaul, by this time next month, let’s think about this time next year or like this time, five years from now, because that time is gonna pass anyway. And if you, yo-yo back and forth with whatever it is, that time passes anyway and you’ve only made 50% progress. You just did it in an all or nothing fashion.
Well, why not make that 50% progress sustainably and evenly over the same amount of time and so that you can actually build towards it. I don’t know. I know if I’m making myself clear or if I’m just rambling at this point, but I’m definitely a big fan of the moderation approach and it requires a lot of little interventions and understanding. It requires patience, which we’re not great at, but I do think it’s a lot more sustainable.
[00:27:27] Ash: Dusty, that was really well said. And listeners, I just wanna be clear – when we talk about incremental and sustainable progress, it is okay to have backsliding in those moments, but when we do it in small steps, rather than I’m on, I’m off, I’m drinking, I’m not drinking, I’m smoking, I’m not smoking, then we are also more able to notice.So if we start to slip back into, at least this is true for me, I am much more able to notice the effects of those things than when I go from I haven’t smoked in two years to now I’m back on a pack a day. It’s such a drastic change that I almost don’t even notice the impacts. But if I’m doing pretty well with smoking and I bum the occasional, I’m drinking cigarette from a friend and feel like crap the next morning because my body is no longer used to cigarettes, then I’m able to remember why I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, because if one cigarette made me feel that bad, then how was I ever smoking a pack a day and feeling okay?
And I certainly don’t want to know what it feels like to go back to smoking a pack a day at this point. I think we have more to say on this, and next week listeners, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna kind of take the same topic that we were talking about today, about changing negative habits. So stopping the thing that you no longer want to do, or reducing the thing you no longer want to do, changing your relationship with a substance or something that has an addictive quality.
Next week we’re gonna do the same thing, but we’re gonna talk about how you use this same idea of modulation, to build positive habits, to introduce something new. So we’re outta time for today, but until next week, I’m Ash.
[00:29:13] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:29:14] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
