ADHD, Stress, and Men's Health With Liam Danger Park

This week on the Men’s ADHD Support Group Podcast, ADHD Coach and Men's Group member Liam Danger Park joins Operations Director Shane Thrapp to discuss physical and mental health for men with ADHD.

Together, we explore the interconnectedness of mind and body - and why practices like sleep, nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness are just as critical as medication and therapy. Liam provides practical tips for starting small, like short workouts or mini mindfulness sessions.

We share guidance for overcoming decision overwhelm around health changes. And discuss how to build self-awareness by examining your ancestry. At its core, this empowering episode reiterates that you are worthy of health and happiness - and offers tools to make progress one step at a time.

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Welcome to the men's ADHD support group podcast. This is Shane Threpp, operations director for the nonprofit men's ADHD support group. And I am joined today by Liam Danger Park. Liam is a certified ADHD coach who focuses on mindset changes in healthcare to help people with ADHD, find a holistic approach to managing their ADHD.

Thanks Liam for coming on, man.

So, first off, let's talk about you. What got you into ADHD coaching? Yeah,

I always, I was always a little strange. And I didn't know why. I had no idea. Like, I got good grades, so I knew, like, things seemed to be working fine in my brain, and I was kind of similar to my parents. You know, I had this, like, Impulse to do a thousand things.

And that just seemed normal in my household. And, but, but it wasn't normal in like my social settings. And so for most of my life, I just accepted that, okay, I'm a little quirky and there was no, no label attached to it. It's just like, okay, a bit weird. And then. As I was growing into adulthood, like in my early twenties, I noticed I was going through these cycles that were really quite debilitating and painful.

Like I'd get really into something super hyper focused for two weeks to two months. I'd be like, this is my life. This is my path. This is my journey. And then it would just crumble apart into this existential dread. And I'd, I'd feel broken. I'd have nothing to show for all the late nights I spent working on whatever it was, whether it was music or writing, there's, there's no product.

And I'd be depressed and I'd be freaking out and then I'd pivot. I'd be like, no, no, it's cartooning. Cartooning is the one, right? And then I'd go into that. And luckily one of my persistent interests through there was like psychology. And at a certain point I thought, well, this seems to be an attention thing.

What is ADHD? Cause I never bothered looking it up. And when I finally looked it up, I was like, oh, that's, that's me. That makes sense. And so that helped me start to like. Figure out how to do things. And I'd always been interested in personal development. So that gave me a new lens to approach personal development that would actually work for me.

And and at some point my mom shared this link. She's like, Hey, there's this ADHD coaching certification. Maybe you should look into that. And when I did it, it was like the first time an educational program, like really. felt aligned with me. Like there was no fluff, there was no extra baggage. It was like practical, useful information that I wanted to apply.

Cause also not just being weird. All my favorite people were weird. And now in retrospect might match diagnostic criteria for ADHD. Yeah. So I think that's sort of how it started.

Yeah. So how long have you been a coach?

Since 2020. So that's almost four years,

right? Looking back and kind of focusing on your methodologies.

What do you focus on when it comes to coaching?

Yeah, I find people come with me for all kinds of reasons, and I'm happy to receive them. What I often find is one of the biggest reasons is sort of hidden from people. And it's sort of they're like. Framework, it's how they perceive the world and how they think about the world, because a lot of us, especially with ADHD, but pretty much anyone who's been indoctrinated through this school system that we've been using over the last 200 years in the, in the West.

It creates this fixed mindset where. You associate your self worth with these outcomes instead of the effort. And so a lot of people feel like crap. They don't feel productive. They don't feel useful, but mostly because they've been judged on the outcomes, their whole life, instead of the work that it takes to get there.

And so a lot of it is helping people reframe so they can start to feel a measure of success just by trying things just by the learning and the growing, even if it means they don't necessarily do the task they hope to do. But then also I do help people with tasks and a lot of that is focused on physiology and practices because your mental health is really tied to your physical health.

Like if you're not sleeping well, that's a very common one for people. If you don't have a good sleep habit, guaranteed your ADHD is going to be worse. You need sleep. And so helping people with that or movement exercises shown to be as effective as meds in a lot of contexts for a lot of people still helping people integrate that into their life to have a more holistic vision of health.

And then that all ties to like practices which is just the things we do every day, which are hard like it's hard to get consistent it's hard to develop a planning habit, but it is possible, not you don't have to have a stack of empty planners, you can actually have a stack of full ones. Thank you. If you approach it with the right you know, mindset and methodology.

You know, that's actually a really good segue into what we wanted to discuss today is ADHD and men's health. And what are some of the most common mental or physical health issues that you see alongside ADHD with a lot of the people you work with?

Yeah, I think if it's not remedied, if it, if people don't know how to manage it and they don't have, especially if they don't have physical health practices, it can create so much shame, anxiety. I think a lot of people who think they have ADHD and anxiety or ADHD and depression are just like depressed and anxious because they're not managing their ADHD is not like.

It's this clinically isolated thing that comes with it. It's like, if you can manage your ADHD better, you're not going to be so anxious. If you can manage your ADHD better, you're not going to be so depressed. But a lot of people who don't have the tools or the history of managing these things, they don't necessarily, I don't know, yeah, they might feel depressed.

They might feel defeated.

I mean, it's super frustrating, especially when we look at our formative years between the age of two to 12. And so many people show us that they don't believe in us. So much of our psyche is developed from the external sources from around us because of our lack of self perception, our, you know, our inability to really read social situations very accurately.

So much of our perception of who we are comes from other people's input that they give us. Right. We're never good enough. It seems we actually see this in a men's group of a lot is people talking about how badly their imposter syndrome is telling them, you're never going to be good enough.

You're never going to find another job. You're never going to amount to anything. And what that is, is the, the voices of all those people in their past. Shutting everything that they wanted to do down instead of building them up and encouraging them and giving them the structure and the things that they needed to succeed.

Like you said earlier about our education system, the goal is the testing. The goal is passing the test. The goal is meeting the certain criteria. And with our developmental issues that we have from ADHD, we may be two to four years behind our peers in social, behavioral, cognitive functions, and obviously executive functions.

So, what you do is building up that mindset, changing those different thought processes, giving the practical applications is a big way into that. When you look at like that impact to kind of touch on that, What's some of the worst aspects that you see for people who are undiagnosed or untreated ADHD?

Like the worst like the biggest challenges they face. I think a lot of it is like this selective blindness. Like you don't understand why you're struggling to get ahead. And that's so exhausting because. Like you talked about those critical developmental years, you said the two to 12, but like, I, I'm interested in the work of gabber mentee and he talks about like gestation and like the first nine months even as being said, really critical for your brain development.

And so like point out what he talks about where he thinks ADHD comes from, which is somewhat controversial, but I think he makes a strong case with a lot of it. He thinks like, for example, the emotional dysregulation, say you're a tiny infant, you're just born. You have no idea how to make sense of the world.

We communicate this emotional sort of way with our primary caregivers where we smile and they smile and they frown and we frown and we have this interplay with our, with our faces and our emotions. But say you're born into a really stressful situation or mom's sick and mom can't properly have an interplay with you.

As a tiny developing critter, you realize you have to hide a part of yourself because you know if you get sad and maybe mom gets even more sad, you know that that's not really good for you. So you suppress your emotions, you learn to suppress your emotions as young as like being a tiny infant. And that.

Echoes through your life where like things are going wrong and part of it's because you're not acknowledging these emotions you're experiencing if that's a huge part of it is like your emotions were forbidden to you don't even notice when they're happening now because you've learned to push them down and I think that's one of the biggest issues is that we, because we will judge ourselves harshly for certain behavior because we learned that those behaviors are not well received, we actually suppress our ability to acknowledge Those things, because we know we'll punish ourselves.

And we don't want to punish ourselves. So we just, like, it's kind of abstract, but are you getting what I'm

saying? Yeah. I mean, it's overwhelming. I mean, and you know, I agree with you as far as what you were talking about from the zero to nine months, because the moms may be dealing with postpartum depression.

The fathers may be frustrated from a lack of sleep because, you know, babies, right? I have twin toddlers, you know, they're four years old. Now I can definitely remember that my sleep pattern was destroyed when they were children. And now the parents are reacting to you crying, and you don't know how to communicate.

There's no communication channel for you other than to cry. And there's certain pitches that you can hit that they react. And now you're, okay, I have to hit that pitch to get them to pay attention to me. And, but after a while though, reactions turn into physical or screaming. And, oh, this person who I'm supposed to trust the most in the world hurts me when I make that noise.

Ah, okay, don't do that.

Yeah, better just bottle it all up.

Right, you know, just like, mm, I'll be over here. And for kids who are ADHD or autistic or have the genetic predisposition for those kind of situations, With the developmental issues that they're already dealing with, especially in certain circumstances, when we see like in underprivileged neighborhoods you know, rural neighborhoods with lack of health healthcare and health resources.

It's really a big struggle for a lot of people. And most parents are doing their best as far as that's concerned, but they're frustrated. They're overworked. They're not able to give the support that a child may need, especially a neurodivergent child. Thank you. Yeah, that's part of it. And I just want to acknowledge there's also this huge cultural factor because I, I heard from my mom, she was telling me about when, when I was a baby, I was pretty sensitive.

I'd cry a lot. And my mom, she read psychology today all the time. She was interested in psychology and she learned in all the infinite wisdom of the psychologists of the nineties or whatever, that if I'm having like a temper tantrum, what she should do is get to leave the room until I can calm myself down.

Which would teach me resiliency and maturity and whatever, but to a tiny developing child's mind, that means my emotions are inconvenient. They are unacceptable and they will lead to my isolation. And now like echoing into my adulthood, when I am stressed and overwhelmed, I retreat, I don't know how to ask for help because I learned, Oh, that's not good.

I better run away.

Right. We take too much on.

So yeah, there's like this cultural baggage too. In addition to mom and dad being stressed, there's also like a narrative that the proper way to raise a child is to isolate them when they're when they're upset. Instead of showing them how to be present with that anger, that sadness, that big feeling, just be with it until it passes.

Acknowledging it, comforting, giving the space to feel the feeling. You know, you know, supporting, Hey, you are really frustrated now. Let's figure out what's going on. What, what do you need? And one of the things that I learned because my kids were preemie, right. They were born at 27 weeks. And so we have a leg up on a large number of other people because in the state of North Carolina, if you have a child, that's a preemie, they put in place a program from birth on to teach both parents.

And the babies how to communicate with each other effectively. And since babies can't verbally speak, they don't have the cognitive functions to do so at that point. They often learn better by doing things like sign language or pointing at pictures or having different methodologies to like where they are directing the parent.

And we put in place picture boards. We put in place a sign language and started really teaching them from. Literally six months on how to communicate effectively together. But it wasn't just the therapist talking to the children. It was to us as well as parents and. That was one of those things where we really learned that our children are much smarter than we assumed, right?

You know, we look at children and we're like, oh, they're helpless little things. But when you have an 8 month old who can sign language that they want their bottle or they're hungry or they need their diaper changed, that makes things significantly easier. And, you know, to what you said earlier, that follows us all the way through our adulthood.

Where, from a young, early age, we did not learn to communicate the feelings, we learned to repress a lot of the feelings. And we didn't learn to ask for help, because anytime we asked for help, we were often shut down. So, how does this apply to physical health, though?

I think, one of the greatest benefits of many physical health practices that I'm into, like, I'm into, like, breath work, cold exposure, exercise.

All of these things are sort of proxies for mindfulness, right? Mindfulness is so, so good for us, but oh my God, is it ever hard to just sit with your legs crossed and focusing on nothing for like 20 minutes? Like it's good for you. If you can do that, do that. Like I've been to a couple of silent 10 day retreats and I've done it.

I know it's possible, but it's really hard, really hard and not accessible. And, and if you're really struggling, like that's a huge leap. Whereas if you can learn to get into an ice bath, or you can learn to build an exercise routine, all of these things teach you to be more aware of what's going on inside your body.

And that's like, the more aware of you, you are of your physical body, the more you start to realize that your emotional experience is reflected in your physiology and you can be more attuned to like, are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed? Is there something you can do to regulate this? Cause if you don't notice those cues, you don't respond like for a lot of people with sleep.

That's a huge one. I encounter like people stay up so late doing projects. That's a big ADHD thing. I've been there and I talked to people about it and I asked them to think about what did it feel like in the moment before burnout? Like think about put yourself in the shoes of your late night crafting self.

Now, like, what did he feel in that? moment. And most people, if they reflect on it, they notice there's sensations, right? You might feel a tightness in your stomach or prickling in your skin, or my blood kind of feels like syrup when I'm too tired. And by being conscious of these cues, it becomes easier to respond more proactively and more readily and in a more healthy way, rather than just like pushing yourself to burnout and falling asleep at your kitchen table.

What is burnout?

Burnout? It's like It's just like, that was like what I was doing with ADHD all the time when I was undiagnosed and didn't figure it out. I'm still struggling with it, but burnout is like when you cannot manage your energy effectively and you are just going and going and going. And it's wearing on you, but you maybe don't give space for that.

You don't take breaks. You don't rest. You don't have recharging habits or rejuvenating habits. And you keep going and you keep going until, until you hit like a psychic spiritual wall that just shuts you down and says, Nope, you've done enough.

I've always compared burnout to being that, that sports injury.

You know, you're, you, you feel the kind of twinge in your knee when you're running and then you're like, nah, it'll be okay. I'll tough it out. Right. A lot of us, if we were in sports, especially in the South, like our coach is like, ah, I'll walk it off. You'll be fine. And then like, we keep running on it. And then a few weeks later, like it's really bothering us.

So we pop some towel and all, and then we keep going. And then eventually we get a torn hamstring or torn ACL and like, it's serious, this is a serious injury. And that's how I've always seen burnout is like that point when now your leg is up, you don't got a choice in the matter, you've got to rest and relax, there's no getting around it.

Yeah, and, and then like to add to the metaphor that sort of like a scar tissue develops sometimes, where if you've burned out enough times, it erodes your self confidence severely. And it's sort of like if you have a bad knee, you might avoid certain movements, if you've burned yourself out a few times.

You start to doubt your ability to do whatever it was that led to that.

so I want to kind of go over some, some facts and figures that are out there. And, you know, I'm a big science person. One of the biggest ones out there that I see that a lot of people don't quite understand about how significant ADHD can be for men, especially.

Dr. Russell Barkley talks about a few years ago in a study that he had. That the average man with an undiagnosed untreated ADHD loses 13 years on their life. 13 years. This is a combination of physiological issues, mental issues, things like that, but one of the other ones is suicide. We're four times more likely to deal with suicidal ideation.

Because all of these factors that we play into what we're discussing today really underscores how painful ADHD can be. And when we stack on top of that the cultural expectations that men have to face, the gender stereotypes that men face in different situations, the work ethic we're supposed to have, the, you know, the unrealistic expectations we have in being a Husband, being a father, being a, you know, employee, all of these come together and we deal with these mental issues that then turn into physiological issues, our entire physiology is affected by this.

How do we stop that cycle? How do we start to move forward in a more healthier way to start taking those steps that we need to take to get into a better place?

I think it really starts with acknowledging your successes, especially the small ones and giving yourself the opportunity for stacking success, right?

If you, if you're like, you know what, I'm going to take care of my health now. I'm going to work out every day. I'm going to do a 60 minutes a day. And like, you know, maybe you do 60 minutes day one, but life's crazy. And then you're doing a half hour. You do 45 minutes, you do a half hour you've done like.

You know, you, you see yourself as a failure because you had this expectation 60 minutes a day, five days a week. And then, like I said, that sort of burnout echo happens and you're like, maybe this isn't for me, but if, if you're totally new to the fitness journey and you give yourself credit for. Showing up at the gym, if, if the gyms where you want to work out showing up, or if you're working out at home, like putting on your workout clothes for a lot of people, that's a big enough win to just get started.

Cause say you put on your gym shorts and then you're like, Hey, I'm already wearing them, might as well do some workout. You did a half hour, the same half hour you would have done if you told yourself you were doing 60 minutes, but now instead of being like, ah, I fell short of what I said I was going to do.

Now you're like, I went so far above and beyond what I said I was going to do and it changes the psychology and it makes it easier to build more habits.

Now, this is a ongoing battle for many men with ADHD and I fully acknowledge what you're saying as far as like the, you know, having to build those habits. And we do have to really change our mindset about acknowledging the success that we have, right? Like, the goal for many of my clients that I work with them is to do things more often than you don't, right?

Like, if you do it three times a week, that was three more times than you did it the week before. Right. If you do it one time a week, that's one more time than you did it the week before. And, you know, but what about people who are dealing with physical ailments such as chronic fatigue syndrome bad backs overweight, like severely obesity, severe obesity diabetes, different issues like that, where there also has to be a medicine.

You know, there has to be a medicine, you know, part to it, there has to be a consistent watching how you eat, what do we like, you know, one of our biggest issue is self care and a lot of those fall into self care, how do we start actually making the changes that we need to make there?

I think for the cases you're describing, like, like for, for a lot of my clients, for anything, one of our biggest challenges with the ADHD brain is decision overwhelm.

Like there are so many decisions and the people you're describing, it gets a lot more complicated and there's a lot more decisions. Like if you've got an injury and you work out with the wrong form, then you hurt yourself more. And of course you're not going to want to work out. So I think in those cases, if you can afford it, absolutely get like a trainer, someone for accountability.

Or like focus on again. Yeah. Figure out what the bare minimum for you is. Cause it might not be, yeah, get your gym shorts on. It might be like, if you're serious, severely obese, take a walk, like up and down the stairs.

That's actually one of the things that my, my wellness coach, she works with me she's a psychiatrist and she was like, look, just walk through your house and I'm like, Well, that's dumb.

She's like, but no, look, if you're sitting in your chair all day and you're doing all your office work all day, then you're not really doing yourself a lot of good. Stand your desk up and stand and do your work standing up. That's, that's a small step. But then she got me into doing these exercises and I'm telling you right now, and if y'all make fun of me out there in a crowd, fuck off, I don't give a shit, but it's called infant developmental exercises.

And it patterns itself on the exercises that babies do from as an infant all the way through toddler. From taking the steps from going to laying on the floor on their back to rolling over on their stomach to sitting up on their their hands to sitting up on hands and knees to like rolling over to then getting up on their knees.

And everything is about building up your core. Everything is about building up your natural proclivity for movement. To the point that you're actually standing up now, obviously, you don't take years and years to get through this. It is literally a workout from, you know, on your back to rolling over to moving to standing up and it's different core exercises that you work into their.

And I felt super stupid for a really long time until I started feeling my abs. Now granted, y'all look at me. Yes, I am obese and I 100 percent understand it. I've got fucking abs of steel, dammit. They're just padded. Just hidden a little. Right, they're just hidden a little bit. But the other side of the coin was, she was really big on, she was, don't.

Don't worry about so much what you eat, worry about how much you eat. She's like, look, you know, one of my biggest issues is because autistic tendencies for food textures and stuff like that, there's a large number of different foods I can't, won't eat. And it's not a matter of powering through that. That's actually what gets us a lot of food trauma for being kids.

And it's about making sure that what I'm eating fairly healthy, right. That I am eating more of the vegetables, raw foods, stuff like that. But if I am eating anything, pay attention to my portion control and just manage that. And she's like, look, if you slip up and you have some candy, cool. Just don't eat all the candy, right?

She's just like, just be smart about it. You know, don't drink so many sodas. And she's like, look, if you really can not do that, don't buy sodas. By the way, this saves us a ton of money every month by not having to buy 12 packs for 10 now. And I thought that that was super interesting whenever I started actually seeing the results of the exercises that I'm doing now.

I'm still overweight. I still haven't lost the amount of weight that I want to lose. But I'm feeling better, right? And just because you're severely overweight does not necessarily mean that you are unhealthy. My cholesterol is super low. I do have to manage my blood pressure with medication. But all of my, like, I don't have any diabetes.

I don't have any precursors for diabetes. My A1C is great. Feeling better. And my test results are showing that my body is healthier. And I guess that's just the biggest indicator as to... Success in my eyes is what I got to look at.

Yeah, I think feeling is grossly neglected, right? A lot of people are so obsessed with these.

Vanity, these numbers of like how much you weigh or how much body fat percentage you got, but to me, like fitness is about, do I feel good? Can I move the way I would like to? And I think another piece of this for most people who are trying to get started, right, especially these people who you're describing who are struggling with their obesity or diabetes or what, whatever, like get clear on your why and your purpose.

Like what, what is on the other side of this? Because. A lot of people have been through some incredible body transformations, people with, without limbs, people with lots of body fat, like all kinds of people have achieved incredible acts of athleticism. So if you wanted to be fit and healthy, what would motivate you to that?

And for a lot of people, it's like being a good parent who can like play with their kids, or it could be aging. Well, like a lot of us have elders in our lives who we've seen slowly deteriorate and it's not. Pleasant increasingly available. Thanks to social media is like this alternative way to age. We see that some people.

actually age, they're like 85 years old and they're, you know, running races and lifting weights and stuff.

Climbing one of the, climbing one of the mountains in Ecuador. That's like, you know, 8, 500 feet. I saw a tick tock of this old man, 81 years old climbing a fucking mountain. And I'm like, yeah,

you got time to get there.

You got time to get there. You got another, I don't know how many years.

I mean, you know, but my both sides of my family, like very, as far as their health is concerned, right? Like my, like my dad's side of the family, like most of them went to 90 unless they had like, My uncle died of snakebite when he was 74, you know, so like just like random shit like that.

I'm gonna kind of switch gears here. How can men advocate for themselves to get the proper diagnosis and treatment from their medical professionals in their lives?

I wish I had an answer for that. I don't know if you know, like, there's always this debate about health care stuff, right? I'm in Canada, you're in America, Americans are like, I wish I had free health care. But let me tell you, in Canada, it feels like we get what we pay for, right? You know, like, It is really hard for someone to get a family doctor here.

It is a three year wait list or a whole lot of money to get a psychiatric evaluation. And so I think I really believe in radical personal accountability. Like if you can get help from a doctor, cool. If you have way better connections than me, but a lot of my peers in Canada do not have access to good healthcare.

So you need to take ownership of your health. And thankfully we have YouTube web MD and we have, Like Andrew Huberman's podcast,

Andrew Huberman's podcast. I love him so much. I'm going to link to his ADHD podcast in the, in the comments below, because he's got, two good ones that I've seen, unfortunately, two and a half hours long each, yeah, they're, they're along, but at least break them up into small pieces.

Yeah, there you go. Now. You know, personal accountability is key and, you know, we know that in the United States, 11 percent of people with some sort of mental health issue do not have access to health care at all, right? There are a big chunk of that percentage of people and, you know, we see in the NHS and Canada, 2, 3, 4, sometimes 6 years wait to get to see a psychiatrist.

You know, there's so many resources out there to at least determine if what you have is related to ADHD or autism or something along those lines, to at least have a direction to go, right? And the thing about mental health... If you're doing the things, if we're talking about physical exercise, getting the right amount of sleep, eating better, making sure that you're working on mindset, doing mindfulness exercises, if you're doing those things, regardless of if you have ADHD, depression, anxiety issues, PTSD, or anything along those lines, these will help.

And if you at least start in that realm, that, that personal accountability. Working with your friends and family, you know, how do you communicate, though, to your friends and family that you need their help? Especially considering what we talked about earlier, the struggle with asking for help. How would you, how would you work with people to help them communicate that to their friends and family?

Yeah, communication is this whole like huge topic that I'm really interested in that I, I could probably go too deep on, but I think there's a lot of like really good communication tools to just put in your toolbox to have. As I get your default arsenal. And so one of the big ones is asking permission, right?

Like a lot of us with ADHD, when we do finally have an opportunity to share, we can like overshare and maybe be overwhelmed the people around us, which. It's vicious because a lot of them do care, they do want to help us, but if we just launch it on them, it could really, it could make a bad tone. So a big thing is asking permission.

If you can remember, like you have something you want to say, you want to process, ask like, Hey, can I talk to you about something? Or do you have the bandwidth to chat with me about this? Because if you give people like the opportunity to at least like say no. A lot of time they won't say no, a lot of time they'll be happy to say yes, but it will be so much better to see than if you just spontaneously burst onto them with like, here's all the problems in my life and here's all the things that are going crazy and I really need help and I don't know what to do.

It's a lot. So just be like, Hey, can I talk to you about something and respecting when they say no. Because how bad does it feel for you if someone just like launches all that on to you, screws up your day, like sometimes you don't have the bandwidth to take care of it. And so sometimes. You're going to have to accept that they don't have the bandwidth to hear you out.

You know, that reminds me of something Brene Brown talks about in relationships with, you know, spouses. And she's like, I hate the 50 50 myth. I hate it. Because no relationship is ever 50 50. You know, especially in today's society. Somebody's going to be at 25. The other person may not be at 75 to step up for them, but they could be.

So, ask. Hate. I'm really low today. Can you help me? Are you, do you have the bandwidth to help me today? No. All right, cool. Let's just, let's just be miserable together. Right. Let's just like, let's just like turn off, you know, turn off all the lights, snuggle in a bed and just sleep. Right. And, but then at the same time, by giving people that permission to not feel up to it by respecting their, you know, their, their word of saying, I don't have the bandwidth.

When they do have the bandwidth, they now have the willingness to help, right? Because you didn't pressure them. You didn't bash them. You didn't hurt them for not being free and vice versa, right? That, that mutual support means that working together to find those spaces where you have the mental energy to step up and eventually y'all start seeing each other moving further and further up the thing so that both people are sitting at that 75 to a hundred percent together, right?

You know, both of them being equal parts of the whole. And I just always thought there was a lot of value to that. And that works with other relationships that you're in. I constantly have to ask permission, you know. Because I get really excited about a subject, especially when it comes to ADHD and neurodivergence and my coaching business and the men's group, right?

I will go off on hours. I'll fuck my life. I'm doing a podcast on it. You know what I mean? So, like you said, there's a lot of value in that, asking for permission. How can we get past the rejection feeling though? Cause that's so hard. I mean, you said just like respect the, the no, but we got told no a lot.

How do we get past that rejection feeling?

I, I practice like this sort of like radical empathy and it is a practice, which means you get better at it the more you do it. But to realize like,

here's a metaphor, like my, my mom has given me a thing, you know, sometimes she calls someone, leaves a message, hopes to call back and they don't, and they don't for a long time. And it's easy to be like, they must hate me. But what she, what she imagines is, well, maybe their dog died. And like, as ridiculous as that example might be, is like, you don't know what other people are going through.

And so. If you try to imagine, well, like, could they, could they be struggling? Could they have a real reason that they can't help me right now? Because the answer is probably yes. And so, yeah, I think that's a big part of it. It's just like acknowledging that everyone's going through things. And if someone doesn't have the bandwidth to help you, that's not personal.

I highly recommend the four agreements as a book. It's very short, very easy to read. And one of them is do not make assumptions. And so when I've noticed in my life that I'm making assumptions like so and so can't help me because they don't like me, it's like, Oh, that's an assumption. Maybe actually they can't help me because they have a sick family member.

They have 10 projects on the go. They just have over committed themselves. It's not personal. I can't know if it's personal. And even if it's personal, like it's up to them to decide whether they like me or not. And then like, beyond that, I think I haven't gotten deep into CBT, but I think it's sort of similar to other things I've done, which is like part of the benefit of mindfulness is recognizing that your thoughts aren't necessarily you.

So if you have a thought that says like, I'm being rejected because I suck, you might notice, Oh, that's an interesting thought, but it just arose as naturally as a cloud in the sky. It's not. It's not true. You can challenge that thought. You can evaluate that thought. Is this true? Am I really such a bad guy?

Or am I maybe just processing something? Yeah, so realizing your thoughts aren't personal and you can't control them and they're not even necessarily you.

I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with imposter syndrome. All of the different people who have told us all of our lives that we are...

That we're a burden, that we're difficult to parent, that we're not worthy, that we're not good enough. You know, we've got to remember that we have to start learning to recognize our own mindset and what is our message to ourselves versus what have we been taught through the unrealistic expectations, the social expectations, the cultural expectations all of our lives.

That has zero to do with who we actually are. We're supposed to be, you know, providers were supposed to be fathers. We're supposed to be, whatever cultural expectation they have us. We're supposed to be successful, professional businessmen. All of these different things that may not fit our values. They may not fit our strengths.

They may not even fit our mindset for who we actually are. So a lot of what we're talking about boils down to knowing who we are. And finding out where in our minds that voice is. And listening to it. And understanding who we are is a big part of it. Which is obviously something we all struggle with because of self awareness issues.

So, just to briefly talk about the self awareness thing. The self awareness piece is kind of interesting because a lot of times we perceive self awareness to mean like your awareness of yourself. And I think that's That's valuable. It's like, know what you're good at, know how you behave. But I think one of the problems we really face, especially in North America, is we lack this, like, ancestral self awareness.

We don't know what we're made of, because we don't know our ancestors. And so I think it's kind of interesting to explore history, to study history, to do some deep dives into it, especially in regards to your own personal ethnic background, because wherever it is, you're going to find it. You're going to find heroes.

So you're probably going to find villains in any family tree too, but you're going to find people who faced adversity and overcame it, and that can be so powerful and reassuring to have in your toolbox to know that they are me. Like I am, I am the benefactor of what they were genetically materially. And so if they could, like, if my ancestors could like leave Scotland or whatever, with nothing show up, fight in the American civil war, move to the middle of cold, cold Alberta, and somehow like build a beautiful and incredible life with a giant family.

Thriving and surviving. Well, I should be able to get to work on time or something. Right.

You know, you say that and I, I find that a fascinating thing and yes, it could be 100 percent entirely new episode. But my family came from Scotland through Iceland, through Nova Scotia. Through Canada and then moved all the way across the Alaska.

Oh, I don't know. Like, I don't know if they were just like hunting for the coldest place to live because they just literally, they just went like, they went all, they go down all the way to Indiana and then they go straight back up to Alaska. And I'm like, ah, Indiana was too warm. Okay, cool. That makes sense.

And like. Watching it, looking at my genetic history and going through all of that different stuff, you know, part of my family's from Germany, part of my family's from Ireland, part of my family's from Scotland, but literally the entire movement of the migration of my family from all of the different parts of it go from Germany to Ireland to Nova Scotia to Scotland, Ireland, to Iceland and then to Nova Scotia.

And I'm like, Oh, yeah. All of my people like the cold. Oh, this is why I wear shorts in the winter.

Oh man. All right, man. So we've covered a lot today. What is your number one takeaway when it comes to physical mental health, ADHD and managing holistically?

I think it's just like we've been raised or indoctrinated or enculturated into this idea of mind body dualism.

That's the idea that your mind and your body are separate things. The mind exists in your brain and, and your body is just the carrier for that. And it's, as far as I'm concerned, the total lie, right? If you think about it, you've got neurons that stretch all the way to the soles of your feet. Neurons are brain cells.

Your body and mind are united. So a lot of doctors now who are calling it the body mind without a hyphen. And I think that's really important for us to understand because. Your mental health and your physical health are totally intertwined. And so if you're not sleeping appropriately, breathing appropriately, moving your body, your mind is not going to function as well as it could. And if you're in a deep, dark place, obviously you're not going to get everything totally optimized overnight.

But starting with the fundamentals. We didn't really touch on it much today, but breath work is huge because your breath controls your mind better than, than your will controls your mind. Cause your will is in your mind, but you can control the patterning of your breath. You can change your physiological state.

You can change your autonomic arousal. You can calm down or focus better just by changing the pacing of your breath.

I almost asked you about that earlier when you brought that up. And I think, you know, I definitely want to have you on again, because I think we're talking about such a huge subject that there's a lot of value in covering different aspects of it.

So I really appreciate you coming on Liam. You've been a part of the men's group for a very long time. We appreciate a lot of your input, a lot of the work that you've done. And we thank you so much. Again, thank you for coming on.

This has been the men's ADHD support group signing off.

Men's ADHD Support Group

ADHD, Stress, and Men's Health With Liam Danger Park

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