In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty discuss the concept of a “season of struggle,” especially as it relates to living with ADHD during difficult times. They highlight how external factors — such as cold, dark months, global stressors, and personal health challenges — can compound the usual difficulties faced by people with ADHD. Both hosts share personal experiences about recognizing lowered capacity, managing expectations, and the importance of being kind and gentle with oneself when productivity dips. They emphasize that sometimes the goal shifts from forward progress to simply managing daily life and preserving mental health.
The conversation also explores practical strategies for navigating these tough seasons, such as focusing on small wins, adjusting commitments, and using tools like running to-do lists that capture accomplishments rather than just tasks yet to be done. They reflect on the mental shift needed to trust one’s future self to handle tasks later and to avoid harsh self-judgment in moments of executive dysfunction. Overall, the episode provides compassionate guidance for anyone with ADHD facing periods of burnout, encouraging listeners to balance logistics with mindset shifts to maintain resilience.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:21] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:04:09] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:05:12] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. Dusty, we’re back. [00:10:17] Dusty: We’re back. We did it! We did it. It felt like forever. [00:14:21] Asher: It did feel like a long time. And actually, today’s topic is going to be relevant in part to our unexpectedly long break. We’re going to be talking about ADHD and a season of struggle.Before we do that, though, picking back up on our monthly events, I will be doing a coaching demo on Wednesday, February 25th at 8 p.m. EST for our Patreon subscribers. So look either on Patreon or in Discord for the information to join that zoom call.
And if you are a Patreon subscriber and you are interested in being coached, shoot me a message either via Discord DM or via Patreon.
Dusty, as we jump into this topic of a season of struggle, I just want to acknowledge that I have been in a huge one myself.
So much so that I’ve let things go that I don’t normally let go. So, there are several of you who’ve reached out for coaching back in November/December. By the time this episode airs, you will have heard from me and my apologies that you have not heard from me sooner. I am at the intersection of my own personal context and my ADHD, which is what we’re going to be talking about today.
[01:32:27] Dusty: Ash, when you say season of struggle, can you define what that means or what that looks like to you? [01:39:06] Asher: Yeah. So Dusty, in coaching we talk about this concept called an opening for change. Is there an opportunity here for meaningful growth, for sustainable change, for forward progress? And to me, a season of struggle is a time when that may not be possible due to a number of factors.Number one, this is a tough time of year for a number of people – the January/February time of year. It’s cold. The days are really short. There’s been some pretty nasty weather across the country. For me, the end of January through February is always a difficult time in terms of expecting more than the bare minimum for myself, and that’s true for a lot of my clients.
Number two, there’s the state of the world. It’s a tough old world to be living in right now, and it is impacting every single one of my clients. As people with ADHD, we are highly empathetic. So there’s that layer of impact. I have clients in academia and in science based professions that are being directly affected in terms of what types of funding are available, whether or not their jobs or their departments are still going to exist, how they can cobble together the funding they need, which in and of itself becomes a greater tax than it used to be. There are just so many global factors at this moment in time that I’m seeing struggle as a theme in a lot of my coaching right now.
But then there’s also individual context. I already have a tough time during this part of the year and already have a tough time in the world. And then if your own context is tough on top of that, it might mean that now is not the time to look for growth or forward progress, but to look more towards managing ADHD and being kind to yourself.
[03:39:27] Dusty: I totally agree and I feel like a lot of the content that I’ve been seeing on some of my social platforms lately, like heading into winter, has been about how winter is a time of rest. So it’s like, oh, you know, this is a season of rest in nature, and we’re not meant to be productive.And, I really tried to take that to heart this year because I did need a lot of rest, and I took a lot of rest, and I was like, this feels right. It’s rare that I give myself permission to be as unproductive as I may encourage some of my clients to be because I like to say that I only need to sit down about half an hour a day.
I like to be busy, but there are times where I can feel that I need to slow down. And I felt like I really did that at the end of last year and I’m still in that a bit. It’s been hard for me to gear back up. And so it’s been really helpful to proactively manage commitments and expectations of myself so that I don’t end up behind.
Because once you feel behind, you can’t benefit from rest, right? You can’t get that restful feeling if you’re feeling overwhelmed because every minute that you sit down and try to rest is coming at the expense of eventual stress later.
[04:59:08] Asher: So, Dusty, I actually kind of want to challenge what you just said, that you don’t want to get “too far behind”, because when we’re talking about a season of struggle, sometimes you don’t have control over the fact that behind might just be necessarily where you have to be. That’s kind of the conversation I had with a client I met with earlier today.So she is in academia, so with the state of the world – stress – it definitely applies. The seasonal stress definitely applies. And on top of that, she’s got some chronic health stuff and actually had a surgery last fall that looked like the results were going to be really good. And so far it seems like they have been good. It’s trending in a good direction.
So I was feeling optimistic and hopeful on the physical health front of having some meaningful progress there. But recently it had some brand new, different setbacks that she doesn’t have answers for yet. So her doctors don’t know what’s going on. But she’s having these symptoms that make it physically impossible for her to work when those symptoms are flaring up, and she doesn’t yet have a plan of action in terms of how to manage or treat or have a better experience with those symptoms. Nor does she even know if that’s possible.
So we’re talking about a very unknown day to day situation right now. And so part of the conversation we were having, she kept using language like, “I want to get back to”, because a lot of the work we had previously done was around building routine and structure in different ways so that she could attend to all that was required of her.
She has this job that’s very multifaceted, so she could be kind of spinning all of the plates often enough and or attending to what she could delegate or let go of. But the conversation we’re having now is capacity itself. It is different right now, and it isn’t always going to be something that is predictable.
I think a trap we can often fall into in moments like these as people with ADHD is exactly what you were just saying – I have to stay caught up enough. I have to do this stuff first. And when we can’t, then we also deny ourselves the things that might fill our cup or bring us some amount of joy. So then we’re just kind of doubling down on the misery, right? Well, I can’t do these things. I’m not capable of doing these things right now. I’m denying myself these other things.
So you’re kind of living in this no man’s land where your time’s not only not going to anything productive, but also not to anything joyful or enjoyable. It’s just there.
[07:54:13] Dusty: Yeah. I think we are saying the same thing because when I say I don’t want to get too far behind, what I’m saying is I want to limit how much I’m committing to for that reason. Right? I have a tendency to assess what I can do at my highest capacity and engage in a lot of best case scenario thinking.And I’m aware of that and it works out pretty well for me some of the time. But I’ve had enough times where I did way overload my plate, like at a buffet when you’re mostly full but then there’s so many good looking foods so you put too much food on your plate. Once you go sit down, you’re like, oh, why did I put all this food on my plate? I’m not hungry. And then it’s a burden to eat it.
So what I’m saying is, because I don’t want to get too far, I don’t want to have that feeling of being too far behind. What that looked like for me was managing what I was agreeing to do, how much I was committing to so that I could spare myself having to even navigate that feeling.
[08:55:15] Asher: Okay, now I see what you’re saying. And yes, I agree, that’s absolutely one great strategy to deal with any time of struggle. In fact, it’s exactly the conversation my client and I were having today. Her practice from a couple of weeks ago was with this brand new set of symptoms and not having any answers was, what can I do to sort of mitigate future challenges, to set myself up?And interestingly enough, today she was saying, oh, I’ve been sticking my head in the sand. But when we checked in on that practice, there were 5 or 6 different items in terms of things she could check in on, people she could talk to, questions she could answer for herself, things she could set up for herself in advance if she needed to employ them because she was very suddenly not feeling well and she had done all of them.
So often in a time of struggle, we can fall into that all or nothing thinking, because I’m not showing up as well as I have before, because I’m not being as successful as I was before then. I’m not doing anything. I’m reverting back to old behavior and sticking my head in the sand.
And there was a time for this client where that behavior might have been very true, where she might have actually stuck her head in the sand and just lalala, this doesn’t exist. But that’s not the experience she’s having now.
So in addition to sort of evaluating what’s on your plate, evaluating what your actual capacity is right now, notice the self-talk and take a moment to celebrate the wins, which can be really hard to do in a time when negative emotion is more present, right?
We’re so emotionally driven as people with ADHD. Dusty, before we hit record, you were saying so often you’re having this experience where it’s 9:30pm at night and you don’t feel like you’ve done the things that you committed to whether it’s to yourself or others for the day. That’s part of your own season of struggle.
In that moment, the story you’re telling yourself is failure, right? Your emotion is taking over and telling that story. Another strategy that has worked really well for a number of my clients who are kind of going through this experience of getting to the end of the day and not feeling good about the day is taking a moment to sit down and capture what actually did happen, because this breaks the all or nothing thinking.
Even if you didn’t do everything you hoped to do or expected of yourself in a day, did you really do nothing? Did you really accomplish nothing or is that a story? So, rather than letting emotion tell the story, take a moment to sit down and celebrate what wins you did have whatever they were, no matter how small they were.
I found myself celebrating when my dishwasher broke a couple of weeks ago. It just adds to an already challenging time in my own life, and so I find myself regularly celebrating that I did the dishes because it is really, really hard to keep up on the number of dishes that myself and my child produce.
But, I’m doing it. I’m washing them all by hand. I can name a dozen other things that I haven’t done today that I would like to attend to. But I did the dishes and that’s not nothing.
[12:45:23] Dusty: I agree, we often talk about this in the format of a done list. So people listening, if you haven’t heard of a done list, it’s the inverted form of a to-do list. A to-do list is a list of things you should master or have to do. A done list is a running list, and I prefer that clients physically write it down, so they can visually see the number of items at the end of the day that you did do.I often will encourage clients to not just put the big things on there, but almost everything. I did the dishes, fed myself lunch, took the dog for a walk, etc. because you’re right, it makes a huge difference on how you feel about your day when you look back and you go, oh, I did all this stuff. It can help because it can be like, well, no wonder I didn’t get this other stuff done.
I’m not sure how this happened, but a podcast just came to me from the ether the other day. I’m not even sure where it came from. I was randomly listening to podcasts on whatever podcast app is on my phone, and I don’t even know what podcast it was. I wish I could find it again, but it was some woman talking to a Canadian guy who’d just written a book. It’s about productivity, like he’s some productivity expert or researcher or something. So he’s talking about his book and in his book he said, I don’t know if it was based on his research or what, but that basically most people have about four productive hours a day. That’s it. You got four good hours a day on average. And so if you’re a person going through burnout, that might be two good hours a day.
And if you have two good hours a day, then you have to think strategically about what is the most important thing, what’s the biggest ball I can’t drop? How do you set up your day in a way where when that productive focus time hits, that you do the things that you most need to do?
For me, that time is very unpredictable. Sometimes it’s in the morning, sometimes it’s in the evening, sometimes it’s in the middle of the day when I already have commitments. It can be quite frustrating for me because I can tell that suddenly I’ve hit the time where I could get a lot of stuff done but I’ve got these preexisting commitments. And so that can be like a source of tension for me.
But generally in this season, like my season of struggle, which you know, I’ve been very, very busy and very tired lately. I’ve been trying to really use that time for the things that will pay the most dividends.
So like you said, I think you kind of mentioned this but some things just have to wait. Some things just have to get dropped. Some things are just going to have a way slower turnaround time than I would like them to have. Sometimes the laundry isn’t getting put away. It’s clean and I’m going to wear it out of the pile on the bed that I’m sleeping with for the week. And that’s good enough for this week, because the more important thing, like the if I can get one thing done a day because I’ve got you know, two good hours or something, I’m going to do the thing that’s going to pay the most dividends so that it keeps building capacity in that kind of doubles and doubles and doubles. Does that make sense?
[16:06:13] Asher: Dusty, that absolutely makes sense. That’s actually why dishes as simple as they are were my example that I gave. Because especially without a dishwasher, if I don’t do the dishes every day, it can very quickly become an overwhelming task, especially since I have a small kitchen, so there is only so much counter space to hold dirty dishes.There is only so much counter space to hold clean dishes. So if I let that go too long, it compounds on itself and becomes not just a problem of doing the action itself, but it becomes a logistical nightmare, right? Where the task gets exponentially harder the longer that I let it go. And so, yes, kind of paying attention to what’s going to help me the most today, what’s going to serve me well today?
Getting out and shoveling my driveway after we got eight inches of snow was one of those for me. I super did not want to do that task. It was very bitterly cold outside. I hate being outside in the cold, but I knew that I was eventually going to have to start driving my child to school. School is not going to be closed forever.
And if I waited until school was announced to be open again, then it was going to be my back’s against the wall and I’m dealing with whatever circumstances which were, by the way, much colder and much harder than getting out and doing it while it was fresh and light and fluffy.
[17:42:09] Dusty: Yeah. It sounds like you and I, coach wise, have a lot of similar recommendations or ways like that we might give or encourage clients to manage through a season of struggle, which it sounds like we’re also going through. And from what we’re talking about, I’m seeing that there’s two parts.There’s the logistics of what do you do in a day? What do you commit to? How do you structure your day and your tasks? And then there’s the mental part of how do you make sense of this time and how do you talk to yourself about it?
For me, I think it was a real victory over this past holiday season that I was able to really give myself permission to rest, there were some days that nothing got done and some days that I just took it so slow, which is very unusual for me.
I like living in fast forward. But, I just really felt the need to slow down, sleep in, be sleepy, be cozy. It was so nice. And now, you know, things are ramping back up. School is back and I’ve got work. I’ve got projects that I’m working on. There are some things that are out of my control and my capacity is not quite there yet.
So I’m in a slightly different season now where I’m having to negotiate that with myself in terms of what is the most important thing for me to get done today if I can’t get all the things done?
And so, just the other day, I actually made a TikTok about this. I just let the house be utterly filthy. All the kids were home from school, they made a huge mess. And I was like, no, I need relaxation time. So I sat on the couch and I read a book amidst absolute insane chaos and clutter. The kids know where the snacks are, I wasn’t fixing meals. You guys can get your own food.
I’m going to sit here with a cup of coffee and my book, and I’m not moving for 20-30 minutes. And those are the kinds of little things that I’m noticing have been really important to keep myself in a regulated place and to be able to just keep moving forward. So I’ve kind of gone on a bit of a tangent, but I see that there’s two parts of this, right? There’s the logistics and then there’s the mindset. Would you agree?
[20:05:01] Asher: Yeah, Dusty, I agree. And just as a reminder for each of those things, like with the logistics, the important thing here is recognizing that lower capacity. And you talked about some ways that you’ve recognized lower capacity, the idea of you taking that much rest time for yourself, knowing how much you like to go, that’s a huge win.If you were my client, I would really be celebrating that win, because I know that that’s hard for you on multiple fronts, but you’re tuning in and you’re listening to yourself. You’re recognizing that capacity is different. Same with the tidying up. I know that even though your life is chaotic, meaning you have a lot of people in your household and there’s always a lot of action, staying on top of that is very important to you.
And so being able to let that go, being able to adjust and take rest anyway, I think that’s such a struggle for us. Right? The “shoulds” are always going to be there and they’re never louder than when we’re struggling. And so being able to truly set down the should and take meaningful rest is huge, is absolutely huge.
And then on the mental side, I always say to my clients, and I believe this to be 100% true, even though my season of struggle has been very, very, very, very struggle – all that success and struggle go hand in hand. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. So even when struggle is really, really, really high, that’s the opportunity to keep looking for the wins, to keep celebrating where you are being successful.
A decade ago, this season of struggle would have had me on the couch doing actually nothing, just watching my life slowly fall apart and being truly unable to take any meaningful action in that direction. I know that because I’ve been in that place before, I’ve talked about it on this podcast before. I talked about the early days of Cam being my coach and being in what we called “Hoth”, which I’m not going to re-explain here for the sake of time, but more or less just being in a completely frozen state, truly, truly frozen state.
The headspace right now feels really similar. Like I feel really stuck. I feel really frustrated with my inability to engage as often as I would like, or to engage with the things that I need or want to engage with. But the difference is much more than nothing is happening. I’m not completely stuck on the couch. I have learned some things along the way about my own ADHD, about how to take care of myself, about how to give myself permission to take good care of myself in times like this, to strike a different balance.
Is it the balance I want to have? No. But can I recognize that it’s the balance I’m capable of right now? Yes.
[23:14:19] Dusty: Good. Okay, here’s one more example from my life personally. With my clients, I often talk about the framework of hard and soft versus gentle and firm. And this is a concept that I learned from the book Rewriting the Rules by Meg-John Parker, which is a book about relationships. But this chapter was about the relationship to the self.And I found it a really, really helpful framework to explain to clients how to shift your self-talk to be more empowering and to stop getting into your own adrenaline response cycle.
The example from my life that I will often tell clients is, one time during Covid, when my daughter was quite young, I was having a day. It was more towards the evening, I was feeling tired, lots of executive dysfunction and I needed to sweep the kitchen floor. But for whatever reason, my body was like no, I do not want to sweep the floor. And I was like, okay, you need to sweep the floor. No, I didn’t want to.
And so I was sitting there, bullying myself, trying to get myself to sweep the kitchen floor and being very hard on myself, saying a lot of mean things like, come on, what’s wrong with you? What kind of adult are you? How are you going to ever keep the house clean if you can’t even sweep a floor? It’s not that hard, just go do it, dummy.
I was being very mean to myself. Eventually, I got up and I started sweeping the kitchen floor, but I was weeping. Full on weeping. And then I stopped. I don’t know what happened, but I was like, wait, what the f***? I had this moment where I was like, wait a minute. I know for a fact that I have swept the kitchen floor before and it didn’t feel this hard, like it doesn’t always feel this hard to sweep the floor. But something feels hard about it right now.
I just had this little, like, come to Jesus moment where I was like, is it possible that tomorrow it won’t feel this hard to sweep the kitchen floor? Is it possible that tomorrow’s Dusty will be more similar to past versions of Dusty, who didn’t find it hard to sweep the kitchen floor and maybe I can just leave it to her?
So I just put the broom down and went to bed and lo and behold, the next day I walked into the kitchen and I was like, oh yeah, got to sweep the floor, sweep, sweep, sweep. It was done in five minutes. And I was like, oh, okay. If something feels really hard and I know this is a slippery slope, I’m not advocating for ongoing procrastination, but I’m just saying sometimes, and this is being gentle versus hard because I was being hard on myself. And the price, the cost of sweeping the kitchen floor was not worth it because it was coming at the cost of my nervous system. I was bullying myself. I was crying, and so that’s where it was important for me to be gentle on myself and to say, it actually doesn’t matter that I do this right now.
Does it matter in the long run? In general, on a larger scale, I like to keep the house in a state of, you know, enough sanitary ness that it’s accessible and usable. But is it important that I see the kitchen floor right this very moment? No. That can be a problem for tomorrow, Dusty. And it’s starting to recognize where you actually can push things down, or where you can let go of standards a little.
Because when I was crying and trying to sleep, I was like, I need to be gentle on myself. The floor was not more important than my well-being. And I was right, it wasn’t as hard later. And I think that that’s a really unique thing that happens with ADHD is we get into this all or nothing thinking, and the more you’re exactly right, the more we’re experiencing executive dysfunction, the greater uptick we’re going to have in ADHD symptoms such as black and white thinking and lack of nuance.
And so as my capacity goes down, how hard I am on myself tends to go up. The worse I’m feeling, the less executive function I have, the higher I start thinking oh, I have to do this, I have to do that, this is so important. Everything’s important – this is life or death.
Like sweeping the kitchen floor is not life or death, but it often will feel that way when I’m not in a good headspace. And so it’s very unique, I think, to experience that when we’re at our lowest, we’re also putting the most pressure on ourselves and things are feeling the most intense. It’s very hard, I think, to get to that place where you start to recognize that just because things feel everything feels really important right now, just because everything feels life or death doesn’t mean that’s actually true.
It requires this really sophisticated ability to get out of the moment, to get out of that, I’ve heard it called “emotional permanence”. Where how you are feeling now feels like it’s colored all the ways that you’ve ever felt forever. Like, if I’m feeling like life is terrible in this moment, I will recolor the past with that mindset of life has always been terrible. And then I’ll look to the future and I’ll go and life will always be terrible. That’s a horrible, hopeless, sinking feeling that’s really hard to navigate.
But that tends to be what happens. When I’m feeling happy, life is great – always has been great, always will be great. When I’m sad, I feel terrible about myself, I’ve always sucked and I’m always going to suck, right? It’s this emotional permanence where everything becomes the same.
So to get out of that and get my head above the water, or for a client to get their head above the water and be able to look to the past and say, actually, I know that I have not felt this bad in the past or this hasn’t felt that this hard or whatever the case may be.
So let me forecast that and remember that the future is probably going to be different so I don’t have to panic. I don’t have to put this pressure on myself. I just have to wait out this feeling and that’s on distress tolerance, which is hard.
[28:55:06] Asher: Dusty, when we’re doing growth and change work in coaching, especially in ADHD coaching, we are so often talking about things like taking care of your future self, right? Because with ADHD, if we can’t see the immediate results, for example, with something like exercise or eating differently, you don’t necessarily see the results after doing it once; but, over time you start to see those results.You see how it paid your future self some amount of dividends, and that kind of reinforces the behavior. What I love about what you just said is it kind of contextualizes, okay, in a time of struggle when there’s not that opening for change, how do we think about the future self? And what I heard you say is, let’s trust our future selves.
Let’s step back and distinguish. And again, this is not the same as permanent procrastination, which is certainly an ADHD challenge. But being able to step back and say, okay, today we can’t do this, but some version of me will be able to do this. And I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but that’s certainly what my self-talk largely looks like.
Yes, things are hard and bleak right now, but there’s also a trust that they’re not going to be hard and bleak forever, and that I will eventually get to these things. Instead, the ship will be righted and beating myself into the ground about not being able to do it right this second is not going to help me get there.
Taking as good of care of myself as I can, and doing what I can do to make it less hard on my future self by keeping up on what I can keep up on and moving forward, what I can move forward. That’s what I can do right now.
[30:49:04] Dusty: That’s exactly it. It’s trust in the self. That’s it. You nailed it. That’s exactly it. [30:55:29] Asher: Yeah. So kind of flipping the script so maybe you don’t have to take care of future you at this moment in time, even if that’s the work you’ve been doing. [31:04:04] Dusty: Maybe this future you is going to take care of you. [31:06:27] Asher: Yeah. In a season of struggle, let future you take care of you and you put your focus on how you can be present with where you are right now. I think that’s a great place for us to wrap. Dusty, what do you think? [31:20:29] Dusty: Hell yeah buddy. [31:22:14] Asher: All right, well, listeners, we are so happy to be back. And we should be back on a relatively consistent recording schedule. Dusty has got some personal things that may just run for the next couple of weeks. So if we don’t, if we don’t nail it right away, don’t worry, we are back. We might miss a week or two here or there in the coming weeks. But for the most part, we are back and we are not looking at another huge gap. [31:46:03] Dusty: Yes, we have a baby coming so I will do my darndest to be consistent. And also, I might be in the middle of helping to deliver a baby when we’re supposed to record. So we’ll see what happens. [31:57:07] Asher: Yeah, yeah. But this is related to positive life transition rather than season of struggle stuff. We are here, we’re back. So be looking for us moving back towards a weekly schedule. Shortly. So until next week or the week after, I’m Ash. [32:17:20] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[32:18:03] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
