In this episode, Ash and Dusty introduce the conversational labels “big brain” and “fast brain” as alternatives to inattentive and hyperactive ADHD descriptors. They explain how big brainers tend to get stuck in planning, perfectionism, and idea-generation—always needing the full picture before starting—while fast brainers rush into action, overcommit, and underestimate time and bandwidth. Through client stories and personal examples, they show how each style creates different practical problems (paralysis vs. toxic optimism) and why the internal experience matters more than external labels.
The hosts offer concrete coaching approaches: for big brainers, set committed milestones, decouple long-term product ambitions from immediate learning goals, and create low-stakes experiments to break inertia; for fast brainers, treat time and energy as finite resources, practice saying no from values, and build constraints that prevent constant overcommitment. They emphasize that few people are purely one type—many move between both—and the goal is finding the “middle gear”: practical strategies that move projects forward while preserving presence, quality, and meaningful connection to others.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:01:14] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:02] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:06] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. [00:07:19] Dusty: Hey listeners, on October 29th I’m going to be hosting on zoom like a coffee chat hangout from 6 to 7 p.m. EST or 3 to 4 p.m. PST. And that is for anybody on our Discord or our Patreon. So if you’re not a member, now is a great time because we’re going to start doing sort of like monthly live events.And this is an event where you can just come hang out with me, introduce yourself, ask me questions, ask for support, ask for advice, or just, you know, shoot the shit. Let’s get to know one another. It’s definitely a really great time to become a Patreon supporter. So go check that out and I will see you guys on the 29th.
[00:46:18] Asher: So, Dusty, you want to tell our listeners what it is we’re going to be talking about today? [00:51:22] Dusty: Big brain, fast brain, big brain, fast brain. [00:55:23] Asher: It’s big brain and fast brain. This is language that has become just such a part of my ADHD coaching. This is language that Cam and I were playing around with, because we didn’t really like the descriptors of inattentive and hyperactive. Last week when we were talking about understand, own and translate, when we were talking about understand, we were distinguishing between cause and effect and how cause can be so hard to understand with ADHD.And what I don’t like about the language of inattentive and hyperactive, is that they completely talk about a fact. It talks about how other people might be experiencing you, but it says absolutely nothing about the internal experience of a person who is either big brain or fast brain. Dusty, I’m actually curious which are you? I don’t know that I 100% know.
[01:56:14] Dusty: Really? What would you guess? [01:57:22] Asher: I’m going to guess. Combined type like me, but I could be wrong. [02:01:16] Dusty: Yeah. So I was diagnosed with a combined type. But I think the older I get, the more I feel like I am becoming more hyperactive. Interestingly enough, I feel like as a child I was really, really inattentive. So I think I do get kind of both, but I tend towards more of the just going so fast. It’s hard to slow myself down.How about you Ash?
[02:22:15] Asher: I am also a combined type, but interestingly enough, we are having divergent experiences as we age because I think that I definitely present more big brain than I do fast brain. And I was a very hyperactive child. I was often unable to sit still. Very squirmy. That’s still true to a lesser degree for me. Now, I find that fidgets and other things sort of keep me busy.If I do have to sit still for a while, I’m always playing with a fidget when I’m working with clients. Like that’s definitely in the mix. But as far as where my big ADHD challenges come from, they definitely come more from the big brain side of things, right?
[03:08:18] Dusty: Yeah, I mean, I know I’m skipping steps here and we’re going to talk about everything, but something I have been really wanting to ask you, actually, that I’m really curious about, because, you know, coaching is such a solo activity, you don’t always get to talk to other coaches.For me, one of the most fascinating experiences of being a coach was coaching people who were the complete opposite of me, like who I really didn’t understand that well because their ways of being were like a flip of mind even though causal mechanisms were the same. And sometimes, I feel like it can be challenging for me or maybe it’s more challenging for the client to get out of, I think I can also use the term, galaxy brain. I’m not sure where I got that. Was this a Cam-ism, galaxy brain?
I feel like yes.
[03:53:16] Asher: Yes, 100% is. [03:55:18] Dusty: Yeah. So I have a couple clients and historically I’ve worked with clients who are very galaxy brain and they have a hard time getting out of the big picture and stopping seeing all the interconnectedness of things to get into action. So sometimes there’s this challenge where I can talk with a client and talk and talk and talk and talk about something that they need to do.And it’ll still be really, really hard for them to just figure out one step or the first step or just commit to doing one thing. And so we’ll meet each other week after week, and they’ll have thought and thought and thought and to them that seems like progress. Like I’ll say, hey, did you make progress? And they will reply, oh yeah, I made progress. I really think I really got clear on this and I think I really figured that out.
I have a client right now who’s starting a business and it’s been months. They haven’t made a logo for their business. It has been months that they’ve been working on this logo. And every time I meet them on how’s it going with the logo and it’s the same thing. Oh yeah, really good. I think I figured out what I want. I’ve had some really good conversations, but months have gone by and we still haven’t got this logo.
That’s so different for me because I think my problem is the opposite, where instead of measuring a million times and never cutting, I’ll just start cutting without measuring and then have to figure out later how to reconstruct enough material.
So I have the problem where I would have made the logo and then months later have been like, oh my god, this logo is terrible, right? But I’m curious when you’re working with, sort of a more big brain or galaxy brain client who’s having trouble getting into action, how do you coach around that? What do you find useful because I would love some advice.
[05:28:22] Asher: I’m going to answer that by sharing a client metaphor that I often share with my big brain clients when I see that they’re stuck in a pattern like this. This client was working in the entertainment industry, but she was also, alongside that, working on a startup, working on something that was completely different and removed from what she’d done before.She had gone back to school and gotten a master’s degree as the foundation of this but she still wasn’t quite sure what this thing was ultimately going to look like. And in a coaching session, she said, “it’s like I can see myself on the Oscar stage getting the award, but I don’t even know what type of production I’m trying to make yet”.
And that right there is the challenge or one big challenge of the big brainer. We can, and this is absolutely true for me as well, spend forever trying to get the complete picture. It’s almost like we want to have all of the pieces in place and know exactly how it’s going to look, and exactly how it’s going to go before we even start.
Just starting can be the absolute hardest thing. When Cam and I first started this podcast, he and I made an agreement to do it for one year, and part of that for me was and for him as well, was stepping out of that big brain enough to just do the thing, to just start making the episodes, putting it out there, detaching from the outcome and seeing whether or not there was an audience for it, rather than doing what both of us could be prone to doing.
Certainly what I could be prone to doing, which is spending months, years, decades trying to figure out the exact right audience and exactly how to bring the exact right thing to that audience and never actually making a podcast. So for me, if this was my client, I would introduce the language of big brain, and I would introduce this idea of getting caught in the planning of trying to make it perfect before you even start.
I am working with a client now, he’s a tech guy and he had this big idea to have all these tech tools talk to each other with, basically with the goal of, being able to externalize his brain in a way that he could no longer screw up or lose information or be late or missed something because it was all already done for him.
Interestingly enough, when we started breaking down the pieces of that that he had already done some work on, at some point along the way, he lost sight of the goal. So he had these two tools speaking to each other, built around this habits framework that he was trying to develop, but it wasn’t actually serving him in any way.
What it actually ended up causing him to do was kind of game his own system, so that he could get the dopamine reward of having “done the thing” while it was doing absolutely nothing for developing consistency around habits, which was the whole goal in the first place. It took us a number of sessions to kind of break that down and for him to be able to have a perspective shift there, because more than anything, that’s what your client needs here, is a bit of a perspective shift.
Being able to see their own stuckness a little bit differently can be really, really hard for big brainers, because there’s always, in addition to that thing where we want to get to the Oscar stage and we want it all to be planned out and perfect before we even begin, there’s also, and this is some Cam language, that big idea generator.
There’s always another thing that we can throw in the mix or another thread we can pull on. And that’s where my client’s project went awry. The ideas were coming in strong, but they were completely detached from the original outcome he was looking for when he was building this system for himself.
And so seeing that was a helpful place for us to start to dig in and revisit. What’s the outcome we’re actually looking for here? So we often talk about detaching from the outcome, but for big brainers, kind of knowing what the next milestone is can be really helpful. So for Cam and I, setting a milestone of one year we’re going to commit to this for 12 months, was a way to get us out of that place of idea generation, of trying to make it perfect before we even began and into action. Right? We know what the commitment is, and after a year, we can step back and reevaluate. Does that help at all, Dusty?
[10:34:18] Dusty: Yeah, actually, that’s really interesting because I actually do that in some ways. So I guess this is helping me see my own big brain. I find that I’m very much that way when it comes to songwriting, because I get really ahead of myself before I’ve even started. I don’t know what I want it to be, but I know I want it to be good and then I can’t figure out where to start.So often the way that I “trick myself” into starting is I go, okay, instead of trying to write a good song, that’s this thing that I want it to be, I’m just going to pick one thing to iterate on. I’m going to pick a key that I want it to be in, or I’m going to try to use a certain technique and build a song around this technique and just let that be whatever it is.
It’s often about task initiation, right? Once you get started, it’s not so bad. I had a client who recently was trying to learn some software programming, and she wasn’t into software. So she was, you know, kind of new to learning software in general and she had an outcome that she wanted to achieve. But, there were so many things that the software could do that she felt really overwhelmed. And I said, okay, instead of trying to do the thing you want to do, why don’t you pick something that’s low stakes that isn’t what you want to do. Like if you want to use this software to make project X, but making project B would just give you a chance to try all these features of the software, why don’t you try making project B just so that it’s a smaller goal?
And that actually clarified for her what the actual steps were, what she was trying to learn and what she wasn’t trying to do. I find that true for myself with songwriting. If I can just make it about one aspect of musical practice, the rest of the song will come. I just have to start somewhere. And it’s hard to find that starting spot, but you can get there by having a specific goal, like you said.
[12:16:22] Asher: Yeah. And interestingly enough, for the client that I was speaking about, the starting place for us became decoupling the goals he had with software and what he would like to see it be able to do from the changes he wanted to make now. Because as long as those two things were coupled in, it felt to him like we couldn’t do one without doing the other.Decoupling them allowed us to learn some things about what support actually looks like for him, what he actually needs in order to be successful, and whether or not he actually goes on to build a product out of that. He now knows what he needs from that product, should he choose to build it in a way that he didn’t before, which can shortcut that “rabbit holing” of “I could do this without stopping to ask, should I do this? Or is this a useful thing for me to do as part of this process?”
[13:17:10] Dusty: Oh my God, I feel it’s so hard that I could, but should I? Especially with my tech clients, I find that that’s quite the thing. They want to build an app for everything and it’s like, okay, you could do that but that would put a lot of steps in between you and the goal you’re trying to get to.Yeah. And I sort of hijacked this episode a little where we skipped over maybe just talking about big brain and fast brain, but I think people are maybe starting to get the vibe for what a big brain might be, if they’ve listened this far.
[13:48:20] Asher: I don’t think you hijacked the episode at all. I think the way that you opened up kind of illustrated what is big brain, what is fast brain, and so big brain is the planner, the big idea generator, the person who sees themselves on the Oscar stage and wants to know every step between here and there, when every step between here and there is unknowable, and when we’re working at it from that place, when we’re seeing the outcome from the 10,000ft view, it can be impossible to know what steps one, two, and three are.And like your client, we can get really hung up on perfectionism of things that maybe don’t matter so much. I empathize so much with that client because I got stuck in a similar toxic pattern in my very first organizing business. I had all of these ideas. I was rooming with somebody who is neurotypical and somebody whose business was exploding because she was just able to have an idea and act on it.
So here we are, having started our businesses around the same time, and hers is booming and mine is completely stagnating. And at the time, it really hurt my feelings but it was kind of a nice wake up call, you know, at the time, she noticed for me that over the course of the weekends, we were rooming together at a conference that I kept talking about all the things I was going to do, and at one point she just looked at me and she’s like, Asher, quit talking about what you’re going to do and just do it right.
And at that moment, it really hurt my feelings. But in hindsight, it really opened my eyes to all the little details I was getting hung up on because, like your client, I was very stuck in branding. How does it look? Everything has to be just right before I can do anything and that meant I was doing nothing at all.
So now let’s talk about the flip side of this, because you talk about coaching clients who are very different from you. My very first pure fast brain client kind of scared me. This was not that long ago. So this was at a time when I knew myself to be a good coach, but I genuinely wasn’t sure when we first started working together if I could help this guy or not, because he was coming to me with a perspective that if I could just organize my to-do list the right way, then everything else will be fine.
Because his problem was never doing right. He could always find the capacity to do more. And this man worked a full time job, owned some rental properties, and was often doing his own work on those rental properties. He had a pretty complicated life, but was always the guy that said okay, if this thing needs fixed, everything else being equal, I am capable of learning how to fix it and fixing it myself.
And if I need the tool, I can buy it off of Facebook Marketplace. And so very early on in our coaching relationship, I could see that his relationship with time was the entire dilemma because he wasn’t seeing time as a resource. I think that is often where fast sprinters struggle as they fail to consider time, energy and bandwidth as resources in their minds.
If those things, if they could just solve for those things, if they could just arrange things differently, they literally could do it all. And so over time, this client started to become aware differently of his relationship with time and introduced this language of toxic optimism. Specifically for him, as relates to time, he has this tendency to be toxically optimistic about what is possible for him to be able to do.
But it was a really challenging change for him because, you know, interest and novelty, those things are such drivers of the fast brainer. And so he had more things than he could ever possibly accomplish on his list at all times. And again, I thought if we could just organize the list, the “right way”, that was the “solve” we were looking for when really the perspective shift that he needed to have was time as a resource.
And I have toxic optimism about how much of that resource that I have at any given time.
[18:21:13] Dusty: Yeah. Not me with my two bands, five pants business, pregnant roommate, boyfriend, four children. Couldn’t be me, couldn’t be me. [18:34:16] Asher: Couldn’t be you. And I’m pretty sure I’ve said to you off mic multiple times that your life exists for me. Like you, I would never, ever, ever want to have your life. Your life would be untenable for me. [18:51:05] Dusty: Well, it’s interesting because I think what you said earlier about you could, but should you is really the key thing. I think there’s pros and cons.There are some people who have said some really complimentary things to me about my capacity. I remember I had a friend say to me, Dusty, something I really admire about you is that when you say you’re going to do something, whether it’s a normal thing or it’s like this totally crazy thing, it might take you out, but you do it.
You say you’re going to do this thing/something, and it could be whatever and then you do it. And she’s like, I’ve always really admired that about you. I had another old neighbor who said, you’re a seed sower, you sow seeds. That’s your role in life, you’re a seed sower. You grow a garden wherever you go.
And no matter, in what capacity that is, it’s true. I’m always starting something. I’m always growing something. And so in a way, you know, that’s really good. I get bored easily. Sure, there’s something to be said for the value of learning to slow down and learning to do something longer. But largely, I can’t think of a time in my life when I’ve been drastically less busy than I am now.
Like it ebbs and flows, but I don’t like to be bored. I don’t like to sit down for too long. If I sit down for an hour a day and chill, that’s enough for me, that fills my tank. I don’t even think I could take a whole day off. Maybe if I smoked weed and got really high and like, lost my sense of time, but even then I’d probably be anxious.
I’m like a little bumblebee, that’s just my energy, right? But on the other hand, I’ve also realized, yeah, there’s pros and there’s very much that optimization thing, but there’s also cons. Everything you say yes to really means you’re saying no to something else. And I realized at a certain point, one of the things I was saying no to for a long time was being the person that my friends could go to.
If I happened upon someone who was having a hard time, I would jump in and be like, oh my gosh, let me help you, let’s talk about it. But if I had a quieter friend who might be going through something but may feel like they don’t want to bother me, you’re so busy, right? And then I’d be like, no, please bother me.
But of course, if you have someone who’s never available, why would you go to them, right? And so I realized that by keeping myself busy all the time, I also wasn’t enabling myself to be a person that seemed like someone that people could go to because they don’t have space.
And even with my own kid, you know, I’m really good at doing activities with them and getting them from place to place. But my roommate is really chill and they’ll often just sit still and be quiet. And that enables my daughter to be able to just talk about whatever is on her mind or whatever she wants to do.
There’s someone just sitting doing it with her, whereas I would be like, I’m busy, busy and busy. Okay, let’s play. It’s time to play now. And then, if my kid didn’t want to play, then let’s write but maybe she doesn’t want to write. And after a while, I had to kind of acknowledge that being busy all the time was even making my own child look at me like, okay, mom’s not available. She’s not someone who is present with me, right?
And that, you know, that doesn’t mean that I’m not a good parent in other ways, that I’m not having strikes in other ways. But I was realizing what it was costing me.Everything that you say yes to, you say no to something else. You can’t say yes to everything without it costing you, whether or not you’re acknowledging that cost.
So for me, it’s really a balancing act of starting from a place of values and being like, what do I want to say yes to? And that can make it easier to say no to things, because I think when you’re a fast brainer or you’re a chronic overcommit or you’re someone who likes to be busy, having to say no to something is almost physically painful. Like it’s really hard to let go of the idea of doing something you really want to do. You could do it even if you know you shouldn’t do it. It’s hard not to do it just because you could. I can’t explain it, but what has helped me to kind of bring a bit more balance is recognizing that there are things that I value that I’m not prioritizing by being busy all the time.
Optimization isn’t always the thing. It’s about figuring out how to value the absence of things and how to value empty space. I’m getting a bit zen here and a bit like a Buddhist, but I do think that’s part of it because I think we’re often doing more and more and more things to try to achieve the life we want to have.
But for me, if I’m not careful, it’s like, Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”. If you don’t look up every now and again, you’re going to miss it. If I’m not careful, I could have days, weeks, or even months go by where I feel like I haven’t even been alive. I haven’t poked my head up to notice what’s going on.
Because if you’re not, the only reality that exists is the present moment, right? And if you’re not present in the present moment, because you’re always and I guess, you know, this is true for big brain or fast brain, if you’re always up here or you’re always doing, doing, doing, you’re always in the future or you’re always in the past, really, you’re not alive, right? You’re not living. This is all we have – this moment.
So learning how to do both those things, optimize time, be as busy as I like to be, but also remember to come into the present moment and hold space for other people to access me has been really the big challenge.
[23:48:02] Asher: That thing you said about presence is so interesting because as somebody who is primarily big brain, I, like you, can experience days or weeks going by. The biggest difference being what’s consuming my time is up here in my head rather than the actions that I’m taking, but to the same outcome where I’m not really present and I’m not really living my life in an intentional way.Once I worked through my people pleasing tendencies, I actually became somebody who said no way too often. I think that big brainers can discount our ability to do or to show up, to make and honor commitments. And so from the opposite end, that is what I have been working on, is diversifying what I say yes to and making room for more in my life.
And like you, from a place of intention, right? You talk about thinking about what you value or putting intention behind your choices. Recognizing that your time, your bandwidth, your ability to do things is limited, and making decisions from that place. It’s really interesting that when you bring it full circle, the challenges don’t look that different.
It’s just what’s happening within that challenge. For me, very little is how I can look at you and go, oh, you do so much and I do so little, but we can be having that very same internal experience where we’re not being present in our own lives in a meaningful way, even if it looks like you’re doing a lot and I’m doing nothing, the the net experience is the same.
And I think that’s really interesting.
[25:41:08] Dusty: Yeah. And I feel like the whole big brain, fast brain thing, there’s sort of complementary approaches to both. I feel like everybody should be in a team of one with the other because I’m good at making things happen. I’m good at getting things done. This is what people often say about me.I feel that I’m able to get projects off the ground and get things started in a way that other people don’t. And it’s been a very frustrating experience for me to say beyond the board of directors of organizations, because I find boards of directors are all about talking everything to death without ever actually settling on a plan of action rather than doing anything. It just drives me totally bananas.
But at the same time, I realize that one big shortcoming of mine is never doing anything to the quality that it could have been if I had just taken a bit more time to plan. And I wonder if that’s almost maybe a coping mechanism.
I used to think that I was really good at making decisions. And I know that we talked in the last episode about how much decisions cost you when you’ve got ADHD, right? They’re very mentally tiring. But I realized that I would just go with my gut and I would make a snap decision, even if it wasn’t the best decision, because I found decisions so overwhelming.
I sensed that impending perfectionism. If I think deeply about this, I’ll never decide. There are too many options. How can I decide? And so my sort of autonomic coping mechanism was to just go with my gut, pick one at random. Even if there was a better choice, don’t regret it or just try not to acknowledge that.
And so I’ve really had to work at learning how to slow down and weigh options carefully, which is very hard for me to do because it’s hard to do that without slipping into an endless sea of possibilities. How can I ever decide? Let me just procrastinate on this forever. And so I think that in a lot of ways I’m helpful.
You know, just like, we don’t need to decide on this forever. Let’s just get something going. But I benefit from working with or partnering with people who are better at considering all the options or being able to play in that hypothetical space with well, it could be this, or it could be that. Even just thinking about it makes my skin crawl like it’s, it’s so hard for me to do.
But, I think that there’s benefits to each and there’s coping mechanisms with each that can help each other out. You know, like you were saying before, with clients who are constantly iterating, getting them into action is a challenge. And then with clients who are more like me, who are who are almost going to the action too fast, figuring out a way to slow down and feel better about the choices that you make, and feel more pleased with the end result because you took your time is really challenging, and I have to say, I’m still figuring it out.
Here’s a good example: I wanted to repot my plants this summer, and I didn’t want to do a fast job that I really enjoy. Speaking of going into the present, I really enjoy gardening and plants and stuff and it’s one of the only things I do that isn’t a “productive hobby”. It’s like one of the only things I do that’s just for the sake of doing it.
So I bought all these different kinds of soils because I make my own, like bespoke soil. And I was like, okay, before I repot each and every plant, I’m going to look up information about this plant and I’m going to make the right soil blend for it. I’m going to be really careful but I have so many plants.
I got about halfway through my plants and then I left them outside in the sun for like the majority of the summer and a bunch of them died because they shouldn’t be in direct sunlight. And then I ran out of dirt so then I needed to get more dirt/soil before I could finish a third of them. So only about half of them made it back inside.
And then the yard was a big mess because they were just sitting there. And then I was like, when am I going to get back to this? And then ultimately a bunch of them got spider mites from being outside, so now I’m treating them for spider mites. So it was like a bit of a test and I was like, I’m going to do this carefully, I’m going to do this the right way. But I think the scope was just too big. And I’m almost not really sure what would have been better, I guess maybe just choosing half of them to repot or bringing only some of them out at one time. But then I worry that I would have forgotten which ones I did and even in talking about this, I’m not exactly sure what the right thing to do was, but at least I tried, right?
And I’m still, I think, in many areas of my life, trying to figure out what that process of slowing down and making a more careful and conscientious choice that I can feel good about at the end is. I will say that the plants that did get repotted definitely have the perfect soil for their plant type because I did that. I just killed some of them along the way.
[30:15:10] Asher: Dusty, I want you to hear how you kind of swung too far in the other direction. If we think of big brain and fast brain in a car’s gearbox, because big brain is often stuck in neutral and fast brain is often stuck in fifth gear, and you had an experience of trying to move out of fifth gear and ending up in neutral.I will say, in my years of experience coaching ADHD clients, I don’t think anyone is 100% one or the other. I think that all of us can exhibit the challenges of both, even if we primarily have the challenges of one over the other. And you just exemplified that, right? Your primary challenge is slowing down. But in slowing down, you can start to exhibit some of those big brain traits that exhibit with ADHD where instead of being in fifth gear, you’re now in neutral and nothing is happening and you’re not sure why or what to do about it.
Really, what we’re looking for here is how do we start to find this space between. So if you’re somebody who is often stuck in that fifth gear, what does it look like to find a lower gear? You don’t have to stop. But what is slowing down? Being a little more careful, being a little more intentional. And if you’re stuck in neutral, how do you find a step?
How do you find a meaningful step forward to get you out of that place where you’re on a logo for many, many months, which again, I myself have been guilty of in the past, getting stuck on the how it looks and making no meaningful progress towards the actual project and what it’s supposed to be. So listeners, if you take anything away from this episode, that would be what it is.
Whichever way you feel is more aligned with your struggle, what does it look like to find some space between those two places? Dusty I think that’s a good place for us to wrap for today. So until next week, I’m Ash.
[32:26:19] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.[32:27:15] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
