Emotional regulation — and yelling — as a mom with ADHD (Patricia Sung’s story)

Patricia Sung was diagnosed with ADHD in her first year of college. It wasn’t until she became a mother, and other people relied on her, that she realized just how much ADHD affected her.

Patricia now hosts the Motherhood in ADHD podcast. Join Patricia and host Laura Key as they talk about managing emotions with ADHD. Patricia explains the concept of “raging” — that moment when you go from 99 to 100 and emotions boil over. She also shares strategies that can help. 

Related resources

• Building self-compassion skills

• ADHD and anger

• Patricia’s podcast, Motherhood in ADHD

Timestamps

(01:10) Patricia’s diagnosis story

(06:16) How “ADHD” changed for Patricia when she became a mom

(09:09) ADHD mom challenges

(21:47) Acknowledging realistic “wins” for women with ADHD

(26:41) How you can join Patricia

Want to share your “aha” moment? We love hearing from our listeners. Email us at ADHDAha@understood.org.

Episode transcript

Patricia: I think the true "aha" moment came when I became a mom and realized that all of the strategies and skills that I had, weren't cutting it anymore and I needed to do something different. And that's really when I dove in to figure out how do I live well as a mom with ADHD and be the kind of mom that I want to be and be able to raise the kind of kids that I want to release into the world one day?

Laura: This is "ADHD Aha!," a podcast where people share the moment when it finally clicked that they have ADHD. My name is Laura Key. I head up our editorial team here at Understood.org, and as someone who's had my own ADHD "aha" moment, I'll be your host.

I'm here today with Patricia Sung. Patricia is an ADHD coach for moms with ADHD — maybe I'll call you later about that — and the host of the "Motherhood in ADHD" podcast. Patricia, welcome to the show today. So happy to have you.

Patricia: Thank you so much for having me. I'm just, I cannot wait to dive in this conversation.

(01:10) Patricia's diagnosis story

Laura: Let's start with when you were first diagnosed. I know it was not recent, which, you know, it's always interesting with women with ADHD because so many women with ADHD are diagnosed later in life, especially these days. So, tell me about your diagnosis.

Patricia: So, I think technically I would still call myself a later diagnosis because I was diagnosed in college. I was diagnosed in the year 2000, so my freshman year of college. And I went from being like an excellent student, I was on the National Honor Society, I was at Tulane on a merit-based scholarship, and I got there and fell apart. And I almost failed out my first semester because all of a sudden I was in charge of all the things and I didn't actually have the strategies in place that I thought I did.

And then when all of a sudden was on me to show up to 8 a.m. class on my own without my mom there waking me up and it was on me to figure out how to get 300 pages of reading done in two weeks with no one to break it up in chunks for you like they do in high school. I think all those things that, the way that like, high school prepares you, like I didn't realize that I hadn't internalized most of those systems.

So, I fell apart. I almost failed out and thank goodness my doctor recognized it, which I know like immediately is like really lucky that she saw me and was like, "I think you have ADHD." And I was just like, "What? Huh?" Like, I didn't even know what it was. I didn't know what it meant. So, thankfully, she referred me to the student services center at school and they did the full shebang battery workup on me.

And that was a, it was like a wake up call. But at the same time, it wasn't it because we didn't know as much back then, we didn't realize all that comes with it. And so, it was really just like, "OK, well, here's some medicine to help you study and you need to go into some study skills. Good luck." We didn't fully understand, like all of the emotional regulation and the anxiety and the depression, like all those underlying things that show up when you have ADHD.

So, it was a, I guess, technically a late diagnosis, but I've known for 24 years at this point. But I do like I look back and I'm like, "Poor, like poor little Patricia." Like, I wish ten-year-old me had known. I wish 13-year-old me had the skills like socially to be able to adapt. Like I got both ends.

Laura: Paint a picture for me of what you mean by fall apart. That's a term that you used twice.

Patricia: I think that I didn't realize how hard I was working to hold it all together when I didn't know that I had ADHD and I didn't realize how much I was like duct taping things and like white knuckling things and trying to hold on as tightly as I could in order to keep it all together. So, when I got to college, it was all the stuff that I was already dealing with and then on top of it are all these new experiences and all these new responsibilities.

And like the culture shock of moving to like, I grew up in Ohio and I went to Tulane, which is in New Orleans, like it's a completely different like culture-wise. And here, like you don't have your family system. Everything was different. It was like all that white-knuckling that I was doing to hold it all together, I couldn't do it anymore.

So, when I fell apart, it's like it wasn't just that my grades suffered, it was that emotionally I was a mess. Socially, I was falling apart. It was like all of a sudden every level of me was not at a good place. And I was like, "What is happening with my life?" Because I had such a different concept of myself, of being a very put together and organized person until that moment when all of a sudden I was very not organized and I was not put together. And it's like I lost part of my identity as well.

Laura: So, I'm noticing some similar threads between your story and mine, one of them being that I didn't realize you were from Ohio. I'm from Ohio too.

Patricia: That's so exciting.

Laura: Where in Ohio are you from?

Patricia: I grew up in Brecksville, which is a tiny town between Cleveland and Akron.

Laura: I know where that is. We grew up about 15 minutes away from each other.

Patricia: Weird.

Laura: That is so funny. I'm from Copley.

Patricia: No way. That's crazy.

Laura: Yeah. So, there we are, two little girls growing up in Ohio in between the city and the country. And I remember having a similar experience when I got to college and I didn't have someone who spotted ADHD symptoms in me, but I had gotten straight A's all through high school, and whatnot. I continued to white knuckle through college. I somehow managed to continue to get good grades, but like, I was struggling.

Patricia: Yeah.

Laura: Were you able to reflect back even on your high school years, your middle school years, and be like, "Oh yeah, I was struggling with the stuff back then."

Patricia: No. I didn't fully understand what it meant to have ADHD. Pieces of it made sense, but really just in the sense of school. Like for example, my sophomore year biology class, the teacher was very much a lecturer, but like when he would say something, I would write it down. But whatever he said while I was writing, I missed. So, it's like I was getting like half the information.

That I could reflect back and see why that made sense and why that was a struggle. But like, I couldn't have put into words like, "Oh that's because I struggle with audio processing." But like, I knew like, "OK, I have ADHD. So that meant biology was hard when it was a lecture format."

(06:16) How "ADHD" changed for Patricia when she became a mom

Laura: When did you start to put it together that this isn't just about school?

Patricia: I would say it really kicked in when I became a mom. So, my oldest is nine and I had a really rough transition into motherhood. I had awful postpartum anxiety. I had D-MER, which I most people have never heard of, but it's when you're breastfeeding and your milk lets down, the hormone surge causes feelings of anywhere from, like, despair all the way to, like, suicidal thoughts for some people. Hormones are crazy y'all.

But, like that time period was just so hard. And all of a sudden I realized, like all the strategies that I had worked really hard to set up in the last, trying to think like, how, well probably 15 years between I got diagnosed when I had my first kid, all those strategies suddenly didn't work well because I wasn't driving my schedule. I wasn't the one deciding when I go to sleep or when I eat lunch.

Like sleep deprivation is a torture tactic for a reason. Like not getting enough sleep is really hard on everyone. It is especially hard for people with ADHD. But it really wasn't until my oldest was out of that newborn stage and was able to kind of get my wits about me and be like, "OK, this isn't working. What do I need to do?" And that's where like it doubled down.

Laura: Yeah.

Patricia: It was like, "OK, this is serious. I can't function as a mom with ADHD with what I've been doing. What am I going to do differently?"

Laura: Was it something that you thought about a lot, the fact that you had ADHD up until then, or was it something that in this fog of sleep deprivation and like all of the hormones and everything that goes along with being a new mom, that popped back into your mind?

Patricia: Well, that's a good question. When I think about the time from when I got diagnosed till I had my son, the way I looked at my ADHD was like a thing that I had to bandage up and cover up and support as much as possible, but like try to hide. I didn't tell people about it. It was a "Hide this information about yourself because it's a defect and figure out how to do everything so that nobody knows that you have it. So you can try to live the most normal life and pretend like everything's fine."

It was like, if I was like, sum it up in a general feeling of what I was trying to do. As I was researching, like, how do I support myself as a mom? I don't know where, but the thought came into my head of like, "Hey, maybe this has something to do with it." And that's when I started down the rabbit hole and realizing there really wasn't much information out there.

There are some wonderful women who have been pioneering. My Google search did not find them, unfortunately, because I sure wish it did.

Laura: Right. Right.

Patricia: But I really couldn't find much then. So, that's even like that's how I ended up starting my podcast. Like I'm probably like three years after that because I wanted moms to know that there are resources available and you don't have to struggle like this. It's not necessary.

(09:09) ADHD mom challenges

Laura: What ADHD challenges do you feel like you struggle the most with as a mom with ADHD?

Patricia: D, All of the above. Name a few, one would be the concept of time. I don't know, I don't know anything about time. If you stuck me in a room with no clock and like, no windows, like I couldn't see the passage of time, and you came back a few minutes later and be like, "How long have you been in here?" I would have no idea if I was there 15 minutes or 4 hours. It is really hard when that affects your kids. It was hard before, but it only affected me.

Then, like when I got married, then it affected my partner, which is a problem. But when I had kids and all of a sudden you're running late to swim lessons or you're running late to school, there's a whole another level of guilt and shame that gets layered on.

And then I'd say the second part would be the energy regulation of just knowing, like when I can go hard and when I have to rest and knowing that, like, I can't expect myself to be a unicorn that does all the things all the time, I have to manage my energy levels, especially as someone who's recovering from a chronic illness that thankfully I'm doing much better. I'm in remission at this point.

And then the third thing would be emotional regulation, is that I'm a yeller when I'm not in a good place. When I'm not taking care of me, I'm a yeller. And I don't want my kids to grow up with an angry mom who yells all the time. So, I've had to do a lot of work for myself to be able to keep myself out of chaos and overwhelm and burnout and take care of me so that I can show up well. Like, I don't expect to be perfect, but those are the three that I think are the hardest for me.

Laura: Can we stay with the emotional regulation and in particular, the “I'm a Yeller." You might even hear a change in the tone of my voice because this is something that I've struggled with for a while with my kids. We have, our kids are the same age, by the way. So, we're living mirrored lives.

We're both from Ohio. We're both podcast hosts, moms with ADHD, and we both yell a lot, it sounds like, and we're laughing, but my God, it is so painful in that moment right after you yell and you realize that all of your irritability and all of the things that you're personally struggling with then have transferred onto your family and onto your kids. God, the guilt and the shame. Tell me more what's happening in your brain and maybe what you've heard from people you've talked to on your show.

Patricia: So, when we look at emotional regulation, this is one of the things that's not talked about enough, in my opinion, because a lot of the symptoms that we are looked at when you're looking at like the DSM-V for a lot of quantitative things, like they have to be able to measure it. What is not as clear is this idea of emotional regulation and being able to adjust your actions and feelings based on the situation and the input coming in.

And when you have ADHD, we just struggle so much with filtering out a lot of the things that are coming in. To me, and like I don't have an attention deficit, I have too much attention and I struggle putting it in the right place and things that I don't want to enter in, enter in, and I need to keep them out. I do a lot of that work with my clients too, of like, how do we keep other people's emotions out? Because we tend to be emotional sponges. And so somebody comes in in a bad mood and all of a sudden we're in a bad mood and we have no idea why.

But when we are struggling, if you think about like your stress level as level 1 to 10 at the top, everything's great. And as you start to struggle, you move down the ladder and you're at level five. As my therapist always says, "Nothing good happens after five" when you start moving down and all of a sudden you're at a ten, that's when the explosion comes.

And I call her Medusa mom because like, all the snakes come out and she starts yelling at everybody. Like if anyone looks at her, they're dead, like, that kind of level of explosion is down at the bottom at ten. And when we are underground and we are underwater at ten, we're not functioning in the way that we want to. We are full on. We are past fight or flight. We are in the depths of stress response. And in that moment we aren't able to use all the tools that you have accumulated.

You forget that you read all the books and you listen to all the podcasts and you went to all the therapies. All these tools are out the window because at that point your brain is not sending the resources to your logical thinking part of your brain. It's in survival mode. So, as moms, when we have ADHD, it's like all day long there's input coming in. Your toddler gets mad because you gave them the purple cup and they wanted the orange cup and there was traffic. And your shirt it's kind of itchy and you need to cut the tag out, but you forgot. But you can't do it now that you're wearing the shirt.

And then somebody side eyes you and you're like, "Why are they mad at me? They may be mad at me. I think they're mad at me. What are the things that I said to them in the last six months? Maybe they're mad at me." And we all of a sudden get to the level of this medusa mom level explosion is because all day long all these things were coming in and they were bringing our stress level to the point where we weren't able to control it.

So often we hear with people that have ADHD it's like "Well, they went from 0 to 100. I don't know why." Wrong. You just watched 99 to 100. But all day long, that 0 to 99 was happening. And a lot of us aren't aware of the signals that we're getting from ourselves. Whether that's somatically, like feelings in your body, whether it's your thoughts. We don't realize that 0 to 99 change and it's not until 99 to 100 the explosion happens and they were like, "I don't get it. Why did I yell at my kid because he spilled the water? It's just water."

Well, that's because 0 to 99 already happened. So, how do we deal with the 0 to 99 before it gets to 100? We have to be able to work with our stress levels. Like if you feel like, my gosh, I think I'm at a level seven, I'm already getting really irritated. How do we get ourselves to a six or a three so that we have the capacity to make it all the way through the day? Because no, you know, spoiler alert here for moms, the hardest part of the day is usually homework, bedtime.

That end of the day, like got to get all the care in before we go to bed. And that is also the time we are the most stressed, we are the most worn out. We have the least amount of energy. So, a lot of the work that I do with moms is figuring out how do we know that we're getting stressed, how do we alleviate that so that we don't hit 100 and explode with everybody?

Because we can't control the fact that there is traffic and we can't control the fact that our toddler wanted a different color cup, but we can control how we react to it. But when we don't know that we are extra susceptible to those swings, then we start to blame ourselves thinking that like, "Oh this is my fault. I'm an awful mom. How can you be so, like, insensitive? What's wrong with you?" But that just makes us more stressed and, like, adds to the problem.

Laura: Yeah.

Patricia: So, it's like this, like, vicious cycle that doesn't totally improve.

Laura: Totally. Patricia, that might be the most insightful, thoughtful, empathetic explanation of that 0 to 100, which is actually "No, you're just seeing 99 to 100" that I've ever heard. So, first I just want to say thank you for that.

Patricia: Thank you. I worked hard on that analogy.

Laura: I really appreciate it. It's extremely resonant in my life, even right now. It can be hard to explain to people, even your partner "Like what just happened?" And I'm like "It's not what just happened, it's what's been happening all day. And I just want to sit down and go experience analysis paralysis on the couch by myself." Have you ever, have you or your guests ever used the term raging?

Patricia: I mean, it's not a frequent word of mine, but I know what you mean.

Laura: Yeah. What do you think I mean when I say that? I think maybe I'm looking for someone else to explain it to me.

Patricia: The way that I would think of raging is when you hit that level ten stress or you went from 99 to 100. In that moment, your body is looking for a release of that stress. And just like we think back to like I'm sure a lot of us have heard that saying of like, "Well, you're, you know, when there's a tiger chasing you in the jungle, you're, you know, you're in that level of stress." It's like, yeah, unfortunately, mine was caused by my nine-year-old rolling his eyes when I said, it's time to practice piano. But like, so I don't have a tiger but I got a lot of eye rolls.

Like, when you hit that point, I like to think there's a kind of an out-of-body experience. Like I'm watching myself go totally off the rails and it's like my body's like, "I have to get this stress out of my body. I cannot contain this anymore. I cannot hold it anymore. I cannot carry anymore. And it's like this runaway train just takes off.

Laura: Yeah, like the watching yourself really resonates. Yeah.

Patricia: It feels very out of control until that stress gets out of your body and then you're able to go back through and, like, get back to, like, a normal homeostasis. But, like, the thing I always tell my clients is like, "If you're in this really overcharged state and you go down to go back to like, I call like the green level, like you were at red, it was terrible, to get back to green, you have to pass through yellow."

And that is a very uncomfortable place to be because, you know, you just yelled at everybody and you're embarrassed and you feel guilty. You have to come back through and your body has to reset down if you're able to. Not everyone can. And that uncomfortableness is where all that guilt and shame gets stirred up.

Laura: Totally.

Patricia: That's the part where, like, it starts to get more into your control. But that's the point when you're like, "Oh my goodness, what is wrong with me? And also, how do I stop this?"

Laura: That is the painful part, because now you are aware you're not just on autopilot anymore. And sometimes I don't know if if you relate to this, but sometimes I will subconsciously, I don't know, stay in that out of my body place or that raging in place because I don't want to go through that yellow, because it's too painful.

Patricia: Yes.

Laura: Especially because — and maybe this is me, you can tell me if this is an experience you have — when you get to green, you have had that release. And even though emotionally you may feel like crap because of what just happened, physically, I feel better. I feel more regulated. But everybody around me is reeling from me. It might be one of the most, like, painful things that I personally experience as a mom with ADHD.

Patricia: My goal is how do I get moms the skills to be able to get that released feeling before we hit the overload.

Laura: Let's talk about that. What have you figured out?

Patricia: I mean, it's different for everyone. Everyone has their own preferred ways of regulation. And I think one of the harder parts is right now, a lot of our culture moves to like technology and devices to try to avoid hitting that red zone. And usually the technology just delays it. It doesn't repair. It doesn't get you to a less stressed state. It just helps you, like zone out so that you're not still moving up. But it doesn't actually solve anything.

You just get to like step off the ladder for a second and be like, "I'm going to distract myself." Which sometimes we need. Like not to say that's a problem, but we're not actually repairing anything, we're not resolving anything. And so, everyone's going to be different. I mean, obviously there's for some people it's "Do you want to throw your kids in the stroller and go on a walk for a little bit?"

Just being in nature, is that going to help you? Moving your body, is that going to help you? Like if you're a musician, can you go play a song? If you're an artist, can you go paint? But, you know, most moms are going to be like, "I don't have time to paint."

Laura: Totally.

Patricia: But these ways that we take care of ourselves, sometimes it's like, "Oh look, it's 3 p.m. and I never eat breakfast or lunch. I just had three soggy goldfish that my toddler handed me." Like sometimes it's just eating a meal.

Laura: Oh, you just said a mouthful, no pun intended. That's like one of the first things that goes for me is like, "Oh no, I can't eat right now. What do you mean, eat right now? I have to go do all the things," right.? "I got to go do the laundry" or whatever it may be. "I got to get the purple cup for my toddler."

Patricia: There's that saying, HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, thirsty. Just those simple things that we as moms put on the back burner for ourselves every time. If we're looking at what needs to be done, our, whatever we need is never at the top of the list. It's not even in the middle of the list. It's usually at the bottom or we forgot about it and it didn't even get on the list. Like these little things that we do to take care of ourselves are not luxury items. You can't ignore your basic needs and then expect that things are going to go well. As much as we try as moms, like it doesn't work.

(21:47) Acknowledging realistic "wins" for women with ADHD

Laura: Why don't we talk about some more realistic wins for women with ADHD? For moms with ADHD. Like, I'm trying, I'm trying so hard, and often failing, but trying, I'm getting there, to acknowledge the wins that I do have.

Patricia: Yeah.

Laura: Like, here's an example from yesterday. I've been having a crappy week. I'm just going to say it. And I've been wanting to crawl under the covers so that I don't go raging on my family, frankly. And I got home from work the other day, and I just wanted to go be alone for like an hour. And sometimes I disappear and I feel guilty because I disappear. I disappeared for, like, 15 minutes. And then I came back and I sat down at the table with my kids.

And rather than turn on the TV with them and just like, sit there and zone out, I got out this giant atlas that we got because I love maps and I wanted my kids to see like maps and look at like, what's the state flower of Arkansas or whatever it may be. And they were really interested. And that was ten minutes that we spent together. And it was over really fast. It's not a big deal, but it felt like a huge damn win for me. So, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

Patricia: I think it's really important that we celebrate those tiny things. Sometimes I've heard someone call them like the glimmers.

Laura: I like that.

Patricia: The little moments in time that, like, really shine. That's what we're looking for. We're not looking for this giant difference. I think a lot of times when we have ADHD, we think like "Tomorrow's the day. Tomorrow's the day I'm going to be a new person and I'm going to wake up at 5 a.m. and I'm going to do sunrise yoga and I'm going to do some quiet time and I'm going to journal and then I'm going to do this and do this, and I'm going to go to the gym and I'm gonna go to bed early and like, I'm going to spend quality time with my kids."

Like, we think we're gonna wake up and be another person tomorrow. We could get there eventually, but for us to wake up and expect to do something utterly and entirely different from what we've always done is a really unrealistic burden to put on ourselves. So, we want to make these changes in really tiny ways. I call them baby steps, like just one little thing that will make tomorrow easier.

So, it can be something like if you want your morning to be better tomorrow, can you do one thing? Like can you just like, can you pack one lunch? Can you make sure the backpacks are ready to go? Or you actually looked at the calendar tomorrow to see what's going on and be like, "Oh look, there's a field trip tomorrow." Let me make sure that you've got what you need. Like one thing that makes tomorrow better. Let's celebrate that.

If you want to work out, can you just get your yoga pants on instead of your pajama pants? Like, even if you don't even exit the house, if you made the change from pajamas to yoga pants, you made one step in the direction so that a week from now or a month from now, you see the difference. When we celebrate those tiny things, then we see the progress we're making and our brains start to notice that. Like it's confirmation bias, is the neuroscience term for it.

Like when you see the little things happening in the direction that you want, your brain continues to look for confirmation that that's where you're going. Whereas if you're looking for like, "This is so hard, I really suck. I never do anything right in the world," like, then your brain keeps looking for examples of that. So, we have to do something tiny that's doable and start moving in the right direction.

Laura: Tell me an example of a glimmer that you've had recently.

Patricia: I have worked really hard on apologizing to my kids when I mess up and going through that repair process. And it is a lot, I got to eat crow a lot, man. It's hard.

Laura: I feel you.

Patricia: But the other day, my oldest — he had gone upstairs to get ready for bed and he started reading a book instead — and I got upstairs with his younger brother, thinking that he was already going to be like 2 or 3 steps in, and here he is on his bed reading his book, which, you know, is lovely because, you know, a lot of kids don't like to read. And yet still my child is not ready for bed. My husband's out of town. I'm like, "Can you please just help me out?"

And I didn't yell. And I was like, "You gotta, you gotta put the book away. We got to get moving here." It was like, it was still my grumpy voice, but I wasn't yelling. I'm like, OK. And I put the younger one to bed first. I show up in his room and he goes, "Mom, I'm really sorry that I read my book instead of getting ready for bed." It was everything I could to, like, hold it together of like, not only did I hold it together, but like he recognized his mistake and apologized for it.

Laura: Aw, these little babies.

Patricia: And it's so innocent of like, "I'm sorry I read my book."

Laura: I know. I'm like, "Oh, honey."

Patricia: Like, I don't even want to be mad at you for reading the book. Like, but that moment of like, oh my gosh, how far have I come that I was able to hold it together on a rough day? That all the things are like stacked against me yesterday and I still figured out how to use my skills, how to hold it together, and then to know my kid learned from this huge work that I've been doing in trying to apologize for things, which is like not my strong point. Like, that was a really awesome parenting win.

(26:41) How you can join Patricia

Laura: That's beautiful. Patricia, what's coming up for you? What's going on with your show and everything else?

Patricia: So, I am like, first of all, I don't know if you're able to see me, but I have my 1 million balloons behind me. My podcast just hit a million downloads this summer, which was a huge celebration. When I first started, people told me there weren't enough ADHD moms out there for this to make a difference and I should change what I was talking about. So, like, woohoo, we are out here and strong and that makes me really happy.

And then I have my annual retreat coming up in October. It's a weekend for ADHD moms to get away and I take care of everything. And my group coaching is kicking back up for the semester. So, helping moms learn how to emotionally regulate and all the stuff that we talked about today, how do we gain those skills so that we can be the moms that we want to be.

And then I have a community where we meet every Wednesday. So, if you want that community support, that's there too. So, I have so many resources available, you can go to my website. It's my podcast name for everything motherhood in ADHD. There's an awesome toolkit on there where you can download a bazillion things for free and check it out.

But please come join something, like do something. You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to be by yourself. You don't have to struggle on your own. There is coaching available, there's community available, there are check sheets. If you're like, "All I can do is a check sheet right now." Cool. That's there too. Do something for yourself that moves you in the right direction because you don't have to suffer by yourself.

Laura: Patricia, thank you so much. This conversation was really meaningful to me. I'm going to carry it with me today and beyond. Maybe I'll listen back to it when I need to be reminded of some things. So, thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate you.

Patricia: You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.

Laura: Thanks for listening. As always, if you want to share your own "aha" moment, email us at ADHDaha@understood.org. I'd love to hear from you. Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode. We have more resources and links to anything we mentioned.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give. "ADHD Aha!" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli. Jessamine, are you there?

Jessamine: Hi everyone. I'm still here.

Laura: And Margie DeSantis.

Margie: Hey, hey.

Laura: Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also mixes the show. Ilana Millner is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. Creative and production leadership from Scott Cocchiere and Seth Melnick. And I'm your host, Laura Key. Thanks so much for listening.