ADHD Specialist WARNING: "93% of ADHD women won't know they're addicted to THIS! | Serena Palmer

0:00Serena Palmer:You will hear an ADHD girl before you see an ADHD girl. With boys, you will often see before you hear. We used to think of this ADHD being very physical for girls. It tends to be audible. Most women in particular, they've got a lot of issues around societal norms, expectations, the do's and don'ts, and then low self-esteem. And we're just in a mess. Serena Palmer is an ADHD specialist. And author with a focus on ADHD's alarming connection to addiction. Equipped with her own late ADHD diagnosis. She's on a mission to help you change your habits. And optimize your ADHD. A lot of ADHD women take really big risks with romantic relationships.

0:42And there's something there about self-esteem. There's something there about I must feel lucky if somebody is going to show me the attention. That self-belief that comes through all of the stuff in childhood. But then there's an equal dollop of risk-taking and excitement. You know, I've been chatting to a guy online. He says, why don't you meet me in a car park behind Sainsbury's at 10 o 'clock? Why would a rational human being do that?

1:10Serena Palmer:Quick one before I get distracted. I just wanted to say a very brief thank you to all of my listeners. Thank you for tuning in and thank you for subscribing and following the podcast. It really, really helps. At ADHD Chatter, my mission is to ask the world-leading experts the hard questions to give you access to the most pioneering advice the world has to offer, and with an aim to help you feel seen. Following and subscribing helps me on my mission to book these incredibly insightful guests and to give you these incredibly insightful interviews. Remember, you're not broken, just different, and you have always been enough.

1:47Serena Palmer:Serena, thank you so much for joining us. Hi Alex, thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Absolute pleasure to have you. Honestly, ADHD and addiction, something that is hugely personal to me, being an all or nothing person, it affects me in interesting ways. If I want to start a diet, I will eat everything in my flat that night. But I'll leave one cream egg, which gives me an excuse to carry on my eating the next day. Or with alcohol. Once I have one drink, I can't stop. Yeah. It's, I have one drink, it kind of triggers this compulsion inside me that sets off the brakes and there's no knowing where that is going to end.

2:30Serena Palmer:Before we get into all of the sort of complexities of ADHD and addiction, Serena, what's your mission in the world of ADHD and addiction? When I reflect on my own personal journey and then after getting my diagnosis and then also after getting sober and the people I've met since then there is something that stands out to me that is just intolerable and it is the enormous sense of shame that people carry particularly those of us who were unaware of our neurodiversity we're always wrong I think you know there's stats out there around the level of criticism that undiagnosed neurodiverse kids get versus neurotypical, you know, so we're always wrong and we have a shame about that.

3:25And then if you layer on top of that an addiction and whether that's an addiction to something like alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, whatever it might be, the fact that you became an addict means that you should have an additional layer of shame. And what I know to be true is that shame kills people. Shame kills people, no question. Shame will be the reason why somebody doesn't ask for help. Shame will be the reason why their family don't step in because there's something called secondary shame. So we're shameful. We have an alcoholic in the family, etc. So we don't discuss it and we brush it all under the rug and we etc etc and then on top of that is society's shame and all of that together will result in somebody taking longer to get the help that they need maybe never getting the help that they need um and not being able to admit that that help isn't working um and because once you're given help you should be fixed um and if that's not the case have another dollop of shame and I can't stand it because it's such an ignorance and I particularly find it around alcoholism.

4:43I talk publicly about that a lot. I hear a lot of preconceived ideas about what an alcoholic is or isn't and none of which are true, accurate or helpful and And I don't think in the UK we have come to terms with how alcohol is interwoven in our lives. You're expected to drink if it's a birthday, wedding, etc. But not too much or don't drink like that. And then if you have a problem, let's all remember that alcohol is an addictive substance. Then you should be ashamed of that. It's nuts. so I guess that was a long answer but you know for me the two things go hand in hand so clearly undiagnosed ADHD leaves you vulnerable to self-medicating and you don't always know that that's what you're doing in fact I would probably hazard a guess it never starts with a conscious thought of I'm now going to self-medicate it's seeking to relieve yourself from overwhelm pain etc so the more i talk about it the more the conversation is had the education grows and what's remarkable is every time i've spoken publicly about any of these things i will always get messages people who who i know who i sort of sort of know acquaintances and total strangers and telling me their story talking to me about friends family etc we're opening the door we're have to do it a little bit at a time because frankly people can't cope when you go full in but that doesn't stop me right so I have no shame associated to my neurodiversity or my alcoholism I have a lot of shame associated to the things I did the behaviors that came from addiction I regret them and some of them are very painful but I cannot be ashamed of something that is an illness.

6:47Serena Palmer:Incredible. Inspiring. But it's heartbreaking, isn't it? When the shame is compounded by those early criticisms that so many ADHDers experienced in their early years. You alluded to a statistic. I think it's 20 ,000. 20 ,000 more micro-criticisms. Stop fidgeting. Why can't you just do that? Stop being lazy. Stop being so sensitive. All of these little tiny comments that might not seem like much individually, but if you add them all up and compound them over a childhood, they create this adult that is so full of shame. And then you add on top of that, a desire to seek dopamine in perhaps unhealthy ways and a type of brain that has an inability to stop.

7:36Serena Palmer:And it's a boiling pot of tragedy. I mean, just rowing back a bit before we get into all of that do you think because i've interviewed 250 people on this show and i asked them the question what is adhd and i get a range of answers from the sort of the textbook definition of it being a neurological disorder to from with traits of disorganization to being an emotional condition full of shame how would you characterize adhd um i i would say um i characterize adhd as hypersensory, extremely engaged brains who are seeking constantly answers to millions of questions. And if, you know, ADHD on a good day, I think I've never, I don't think I could be more interested in anything than I am when I'm me on a good day.

8:40um you could show me any topic and i will want to know absolutely everything it's this innate curiosity it's but it's also a hypersensitive um so we're able to um perceive the world in a way that neurotypicals don't um but we live in a world that's built by neurotypical people and there comes the pain so um that that to me is how i would summarize it you know my daughter is um also an adhd um and but she has a very she her her traits her most dominant adhd traits are very different to mine so we present differently but the where we come together and you know i work with a lot of neuro diverse leaders and in a coaching capacity um i think one of the the most sort of common areas is an awareness of many more things that they need to be thinking about that their brain wants to think about, but no capacity to do it.

9:39Serena Palmer:Incredible description. I've always described it as having like 10 highly caffeinated squirrels barreling around in your head, each one pulling you in a different direction, with a different thought. And, well, we know the overwhelm that can create, right? All these different thoughts pulling you in a different direction. And some days that can be really bad. That can physically paralyze you. And, of course, that... exposes you to comments like, why are you so lazy? In those moments where you just can't move, get off the sofa, all you want to do is scroll social media because the overwhelm is so bad, those squirrels are causing so much internal chaos.

10:17Serena Palmer:If you were to imagine the typical ADHD girl, how would you see ADHD manifesting typically in a female? Yeah, I think I see it differently in different age groups. So if I would say sort of like primary age, you know, the younger child, for girls, I definitely see it's the same curiosity. They want to know everything. They will come up and go, you know, it will be the girls that are saying, you know, Miss, why don't your shoes match today? You know, because they've noticed and then the teacher's mortified. They've put two odd shoes, you know, that it will be that girl. They're also, they want conversation mostly, you know, so they're chatty, they are very talkative.

11:10And then the flip side of that is zoning out and daydreaming. Whereas I think what we used to think of as ADHD being very physical for girls, it tends to be audible. So it's difficult, right? It shows up and there's different types of ADHD. but when really generalizing, I think you will hear an ADHD girl before you see an ADHD girl. And I think boys are different. So I think with boys, you will often see before you hear.

11:42Serena Palmer:Yeah, totally. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think with boys and girls, it's almost like you have this internal critic constantly playing out inside your head that you're about to let someone down, whatever you're doing, and that you're not trying hard enough or any attempt you have to relax or have some downtime is you falling behind and that won't be tolerated. And I mean, it's, I think, exhausting is a word that sort of summarizes the ADHD experience. Do you think with a diagnosis, men and women, it gives you an understanding of yourself, of oneself that can help you defend against addictions?

12:25yes if but it has to be early and and i think so you know addiction is curious because i i don't know how we will ever get to who is going who are people born addicts are people born alcoholics is is a question um that some research has been done but how do we get the answer because when do you start if you had two babies born on the same day you know then you've got to how do you map it through um but what we do know is that you can have a predisposition to addiction so if we then compare that to an adhd brain what we know to be true and um is is the science and this is what i will say to any newly diagnosed adhd client um who's working with me on oh my god i've just had this diagnosis, the first place I will send anybody to go is in their own way, research the hell out of it from a science medical standpoint.

13:27So whether that is TikTok videos, I don't care. If it's Instagram or if you're going to read a white paper written by a university professor, whatever floats your boat, however you want to find out, find out about the maths, the science the medical perspective because when you know that we have interrupted and less access to dopamine and serotonin chemically then then you look at your brain in a different light so we we seek those chemicals because they are mood enhancers and regulators they bring us happiness and joy they feel good right they're the feel-good chemicals and so we use them to be a functioning, happy, content human being.

14:16And if our brains are inefficiently accessing those chemicals or accessing them in huge volumes at strange times, then we're likely to seek out things that can do that for us.

14:32Serena Palmer:I guess we have a lower level, a lower baseline level of dopamine. Yeah. So we're more drawn towards things that give us a hit of dopamine. And for many people, we get to a certain age, we realize that might be alcohol or other stimulants. But before we discover alcohol, I remember when I was a kid, I used to play computer games all the time. And I look back and I was almost addicted to computer games. And I wonder if that was an early sign of what might come later on. Do you have any experience with early signs of addiction in kids? Yeah. Yeah. So for me, partly through the environmental factors again, this is where it's hard to know, right?

15:19I grew up, my mum was extraordinarily health conscious and still is. And she has a very strict diet and sweets, crisps, biscuits was banned from the house, right? So my first access to that would have been at other people's houses, kids' parties, that sort of thing. And I have very vivid memories of going to extraordinarily big lengths to get hold of all of the sweets and all of the chocolate. Sugar, you know, again, we know now how addictive sugar is, but sugar showed up for me really early. I couldn't have one. I could never the in fact the the thought of having one biscuit would have been such a joke that it was it would it's hilarious why would anyone in their right mind have one biscuit if you could have all of them you know and I would steal them I'd steal sweets and chocolate from other people's houses I'd do that at my grandparents house you know that there was all sorts of sneaky kind of behavior like that and hiding things um so that and that's you know that's that's going quite early back because it made me feel good but also it had the added part to that where it was banned so it was risky behavior and just risky behavior is addictive not necessarily substance you know yeah this might be a controversial question are there

16:47Serena Palmer:good addictions versus bad addictions so it's a controversial question because it's sort of playing, I guess, with the word addiction. So I think where I would start on that. So if we look at what is the definition of an addiction? So an addiction is a chronic brain disorder, which results in compulsions, uncontrollable compulsions that have a negative impact on your life so it's basically being in the under control of something you can you no longer have power over that it controls you to act and do and behave in such a way that is having a negative consequence on your life so if we take the definition as it is and then think can you have a good addiction I guess the answer is no right um because it's not it can't be good if it's having a negative impact but we can have good compulsions we can have good obsessions we can have good habits um you know all of those types of things and I think it's just you know with language people say oh my god I'm so addicted to married at first sight I just thought of that because we mentioned earlier you know I'm so addicted to it but you're not because you're only accessing it when it's broadcast or maybe you're watching it you know back to back you know whatever but it's not having a negative impact on your life in a destructive way and actually there are controls around it but I think when it comes to can can we have good obsessions yes certainly so you know with hyper focus for example there are you know there are extraordinary things that individuals can achieve in a what may look like to the outsider a bit of an out of control hyper focus um and it probably is an out of control hyper focus but you know myself included i've i've done extraordinary things in that space that it would take a neurotypical person months to achieve um we can get obsessed with things that are good for us but we can't be addicted to them if we're because if I'm watching a TV program that I really like, the idea of being on TV tonight generally makes me excited.

19:13Serena Palmer:Sure. Like gladiators. I physically get excited. Yeah. So I'm not addicted or getting excited by the program. I mean, the thought of the program is giving me a chemical. Yeah. Right. Which is making me excited. Yeah. Could I get addicted to that chemical? Yes. Yeah. So, so you, And then the addiction, the active addiction is then finding the thing that produces that chemical. So you'll run out of TV programs. I literally cried the other day because the show that I've been obsessively watching, it was six seasons and I got to the end of it. And obviously I'd watched them in three nights, you know, so I've got until two in the morning.

19:59And a friend came over and said, oh, how's that show that you're watching? and I burst into tears because it had finished.

20:07Serena Palmer:Binge watching a show, is that the same compulsion and inability to stop as binge eating a whole 12 pack of crisps? Yes, and it does have a negative impact, right? So, well, particularly if you're doing that on a night that you know the next morning you've got to be up at 6 o 'clock in the morning, for example, then it may have a consequence. If you're binge watching a show where there's no time restraint, and okay so you stay up till two or three in the morning because you just want to finish it that's fine but the chemical that we're talking about that feel-good chemical that hit of dopamine um you know that there is also um so a lot of my coaching clients talk to me about this they talk about an addiction to stress um so these are often senior professionals leaders who have recently had an ADHD diagnosis and they will have come to that point because on many levels they were not coping.

21:07They've sought help and then they've had a diagnosis. And it's really common for me to hear people talk about an addiction to stress. I'm addicted to stress. And I think what they're talking about is a combination of the serotonin and dopamine of fixing problems so adhd is are often very good in a crisis we're often very good at solving problems um with the people that you go to when it's all kicking off um because we love to fix we love it under pressure it's got everything there but then you also get flooded with cortisol which is your stress hormone and that can also the when that's combined that's what we're looking at stress and that feeling so now I've got this sort of like it's almost like an alcoholic cocktail they've mixed you they've got the dopamine serotonin and now we've got cortisol stress hormone makes me makes my breathing go up here makes my heart race it's the adrenaline and I know many people and I put myself in this bucket who are deliberately getting themselves there getting to that point of stress they're deliberately doing it on an unconscious level

22:19Serena Palmer:Well, from my experience, many people with ADHD, you can't start the task unless that stress is present. Unless you get to that deadline, that adrenaline is released, the stress of letting someone down activates, and that's what you need to start the task. And the reward you get from actually completing the task, that can feel amazing. Because not only have you done the task, you've distanced yourself from the criticism and the rejection of now not letting the person down who's relying on you to have that task submitted. So I can kind of see how stress as an addictive ingredient can crop up. I mean, it's almost hacking ADHD management.

23:00Yes.

23:01Serena Palmer:Because if you think of ADHD medication, it's a stimulant. But adrenaline is almost putting your own stimulant into your own body by artificially putting stress into your life by leaving it to the last minute. Yes. so where exactly yes um so there is there is a technique um i'll just chuck it in i developed this accidentally and i now share it with anyone i meet with adhd who's suffering this exact thing i can't do something until it's almost too late um and the crisis of that and the stress that it puts on their friends and family and people that live with them. It can be really hard. So this is something that I always, I share with people and I say, but you have to make it your own.

23:53You have to experiment with this because you need to make it uniquely yours. So if you had a to-do list, Alex, in front of you with all the millions of things, and by the way, it's perfectly fine for, so my task list will have things like remember to eat food eating food is a task in the same way as write a presentation is a task uh have a shower you know all of the stuff is has equal weight as a task put everything down onto a piece of paper in random order scatter them around and then get three different colored pens and create a key like on a map so red for example uh the color red and then you have to name that am i allowed to swear on here yes okay uh so you have to name that uh the name that you genuinely have in your brain when you think about the worst of those tasks the worst ones okay so for me it was fucking bastards okay so the fucking bastard tasks were red right then create a i realized when i looked at the list there's some that i have no emotional reaction to at all none so they were like amber and I call them meh because I don't care about them they're nothing and then there were some tasks on there that I actually like and I called those brain ticklers okay these are the names unique to me right but basically what we're doing is associating an emotion to the task right so that we don't always have to get to the oh my god I'm gonna have to work all night and my family going to hate me just to write a presentation or whatever the thing is so if we associate the emotion because we know with adhd it's always it's it's always going to be emotionally driven over how important somebody else might feel about it yeah and interest led right totally so it's it's so that's why the brain ticklers the green category for me are beautiful so once we've circled everything on that messy task list with its allocated color you know exactly which ones are the bastards which ones you're going to quite enjoy and which ones actually have no response they're just what they are then you can pick and choose what's working for you so some so for me I will often not always often start with a task because it gets the cogs turning and it makes me sit down and if I sit down and I've done one thing I get a small uplift in dopamine and I reward myself now with a brain tickler task so it's a little hack to get over the procrastination

26:28Serena Palmer:hump you sort of you do the low-hanging fruit first yeah to get the reward to give you the motivation the momentum to do the more challenging tasks yeah yeah what's the the swear word one called the fucking bastards yeah the the fucking bastard tasks you know that they will be like i've got a small water fountain in my garden it's been broken for three months it i literally just need to clean the filter i can't yeah it's a fucking bastard task yeah it's like emptying the dishwasher or emptying the washing machine which we'll get onto later like there's tasks that need to be done but there's so much friction um yeah and if you're a teacher or a parent listening or watching you might want to rename the yeah it has to be uniquely yours right i won't there are worse words out there but how you use it so your unique combination right so what one of my clients she's like i've okay i've got her own unique names very very sweary but the names are important because the names have to so the fucking bastards makes me laugh i find that even though i hate the task there's a bit of my brain that finds words funny and there's a sort of irony that's at play in my head and I've actually reduced some of the fear around the task by calling it that but it has to be yours it has to be expressive but she's like I don't start with a one of my meh categories she's like I go straight in for the bastards I get three of those done and then I allow myself unlimited time for my brain tickler activity if i can indulge and go into it's always for her it's a piece of research she needs to learn something she doesn't know and if she takes the clock off the wall and says right i've done three of those bastards now i can do something i'm going to love and no one's going to stop me oh my god and she's still doing the task what's it called when you find a word funny we were talking about it earlier yeah so um well i find words funny and then they repeat and that's the issue yeah it's called echolalia so yes it's basically echo is is the the word bounces up and down and around and around it's just one of the constants i always have a song somewhere in my brain and i've always got a word that's quite funny um but for me um a real sign of overwhelm is when that word becomes agony.

28:55And, you know, I've had times where I've, it's been about five or six days where I've gone to bed praying as I walk up the stairs, literally praying, please let that word be gone tomorrow. Please let it be gone. And I wake up with it. And that was one of the symptoms for me that became really problematic. It was a real sign of emotional overwhelm and overwhelming in everything. And I was heading towards a real crash moment when that would happen.

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30:08Serena Palmer:A simple voice prompt when you have to plan something or a task pops into your mind and the new AI planning assistant hears it and smoothly transcribes it into an easily digestible list of instructions to guide you through. Give it a go and use the link in my bio for 30 % off. Just a note though, this code is only applicable on the web browser, not the smartphone. Back to the episode. How much of a problem do you think ADHD and phone addiction is? Yeah. Do you think that's quite a scary prospect considering the phone use is on the rise? Yeah, I actually do um I find it really scary um I find it scary uh you know part of my story is I I checked into a rehab to get sober and I was there for a month and I was talking to one of the therapists there and I said you know what do you notice having worked in this space for so long you know you see people come and go all the time you know what what trends are and they said two things in the last five years so I was there in December 2023 came out January 2024 and um they said in the last five years the age of people coming in to rehab was getting younger and younger they were seeing much more um younger people with combined addictions and they were already noticing phone and phone addiction as becoming associated with other addictions um so a bit like cigarettes and alcohol they were going together um i i'm genuinely worried about that and i don't think our brains um i so there's always a paradox with adhd you mentioned earlier that when in your overwhelm, you lie horizontal and scroll on your phone.

32:07That doom scrolling. So it's almost like overwhelm me with noise, pictures, but also more things to be interested in. It's more like a distraction.

32:17Serena Palmer:Yeah. It's not adding more. It's distracting me from that monologue inside my head that is just getting so frustrated and almost full of self-loathing. Yeah. Because I can't start the list of tasks that I know I need to do. Yeah. And rather than kind of sit in that feeling of hatred, self-hatred and feeling useless, I distract myself by an easy dopamine source, which is a video of a cat falling down, you know, someone falling down a staircase or something on social media, like Instagram, doom scrolling. Yeah. So for me, it's more of a distraction. Yeah. Yeah. But it's interesting. I guess when I think about neurotypical people listening to that, they would say, if you're so overwhelmed, if the noise in your head and you can't get started, you should be lying quietly.

33:10It's that paradox that we can't be quiet.

33:14Serena Palmer:We find that hard. I wish I could lie down and be quiet. Yes. You have to have something to mute the chatter inside your head. That's why I call the podcast ADHD Chatter. Yeah. We look like we're doing nothing sometimes, but the chaos, the horrible things we say to ourselves. Yeah. I say stuff in my head that I wouldn't say to my worst enemy. Yeah. And unless I have a source of distraction, i.e. that doom scrolling on Instagram, I just attack myself inside my head. So for me, it's very much a distraction when I'm on the social media. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I do exactly the same. But it is the paradox of we seek, restlessness seeks peace.

33:57We struggle with peace.

33:59Serena Palmer:What do you think the most common addiction is in ADHD women and ADHD men? Yeah, I definitely, with women, I would 100 % say it's alcohol. So if we look at how we've behaved in society over the last, I don't know, 20 years or so, um the i guess maybe i don't know the last time and it's you tried to buy a birthday card from an online birthday card company no i go to the supermarket at the last minute i'm not even a giant i do supermarkets tend to be better because they know that they've got to provide for every eventual possible so they tend to be kind of bland but if you go if you go onto an online card company and do the search criteria woman over 30 you know maybe it's the 30th 40th birthday, try and find one that doesn't have Prosecco on the front or gin o 'clock or, you know, mummy's medicine, you know, all of this kind of stuff.

34:59So this whole culture that has been surrounding women with alcohol is playing a part. And I think ADHD women, we're seeking exactly the same relief and we we don't know what why we're so overwhelmed and we can't we struggle to be ourselves um and alcohol in society is pitched at us um whether you know it could be like i said mummies you know it's it's mummy's special time gin o 'clock all of this kind of narrative um i definitely see that playing out yeah it's harder for adhd women than neurotypical

35:43Serena Palmer:women to kick an addiction because the disco ball there, it represents it quite well, is one of the ADHD items. It kind of represents people with ADHD. We have so many more snapshots of the world. We're living in a constant state of fight or flight. We're always scanning for danger, perhaps because of those 20 ,000 negative messages we had as a kid, right? We're always anticipating an attack so we're always like an owl wide-eyed and therefore do we see more of these messages that are encouraging our addictions than someone who might be neurotypical i would expect so uh i think because we are we have such heightened uh sensory responses so um what we're taking into our brains and the things that we think about at two o 'clock in the morning um fragments of things that we've been exposed to and I think for an ADHD brain we are seeking to normalize all the time so I remember being a young teenager maybe about 14 or 15 and a big row with my mom and saying I don't know the rules and she was like what do you mean that you don't know the rules and I can't remember what the specific thing was and I was like but I but as soon as I said I don't know the rules I remember this enormous overwhelming feeling of like I don't know the rules to anything I don't know what the rules are for anything so I seek to normalize and I mimic and I mask and so if you think about how an ADHD woman is positioned in society with booze and how all you deserve it you know and how it is on social media in films tv etc it almost feels like a socially acceptable thing to do but over beyond that it's almost like an expectation um and i would say that for any person regardless of your gender actually to not drink in the uk is you you are the exception to the rule it's a cliche but it's it's the saying and it's true right alcohol is the only drug you have to justify not taking and i feel like justifying not doing something is quite combative.