Breaking the Cycle: Holiday Self-Care for the ADHD Brain

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In this episode of 'Organizing an ADHD Brain,' host Megs, professional organizer coach, dives into the importance of self-care, particularly for women with ADHD. Megs discusses the challenges of maintaining self-care amidst the chaotic holiday season and offers practical tips on how to prevent burnout while staying organized. She emphasizes the importance of setting intentions, creating routines, and taking time for oneself. Megs also shares her personal self-care routine and encourages listeners to find what works for them. She ends the episode by inviting listeners to share their self-care practices on social media and look into her holiday card planning and coaching services.

YOGA and your Nervous system

01:06 The Importance of Self Care

03:14 Challenges of Self Care with ADHD

03:52 Personal Stories and Reflections

06:11 Strategies for Effective Self Care

14:05 Setting Intentions and Manifestation

19:05 Daily Routines and Practical Tips

26:55 Community and Engagement

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Transcript

0:42

Hey, welcome back to the podcast. It's officially December. I'm your host megs, and you're listening to organizing an ADHD brain. If you're new here. Welcome. I'm a self-proclaimed former clutter bug. I used to live amongst clutter. I didn't realize there was a life beyond it. And I am now a professional organizer coach with ADHD, for women, with ADHD who want to learn how to have less in their lives. My biggest goal in this world is to help you believe in yourself and to understand that just because you have ADHD doesn't mean that you can't be organized. It just means that there's a little bit more that you have to learn. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I learned. So that I can teach you. If you want to work with me as a coach. Absolutely. Check it out. My calendar is in the show notes below. I'd love to chat with you more. Otherwise just listen along. I would love to share with you what I've learned so far. And stay tuned because I'm going to continue to share as I continue to learn. For those of you that have been listening long. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'm so happy to see you back here. This week, I want to talk about self care. Self care can get sometimes a bad rap, especially when it comes to the ADHD community, because we are always go, go, go, or we get to the position where we're. Catatonic. We can't do anything at all. And then we're feeling so overwhelmingly awful because we are catatonic and we're not doing all of the things that we know that we're fully capable of doing. So let's talk about that and how it relates to the holiday season. But Megs, what does this have to do with organizing freaking everything? Because here's the thing. You cannot burn yourself out to the point. That you're now organized. Okay, let me rewind there. You can, you can burn yourself out when trying to be organized. You're going to get there by trying to do it all on weekend. Trying to do things that you don't necessarily know how to do. Challenging yourself or complicating the systems in way that no one could ever stick to. Because we love to overcomplicate everything. So, yeah, you, you could absolutely do this by burning yourself out, but what if. You didn't. What if you took care of yourself to the point that you can organize, but you can also take care of your kids and also be a good spouse and also live your life the way that you want to live it and work and have fun and do all of these other things. Can you have it all? This episode is not about having it all. Although I do believe that this is a piece of the puzzle. Is learning how to take care of yourself. Hilariously, I already recorded this podcast episode and I did it with my mic muted. So. my words are forever not captured. So this is a retake of my podcast episode and I'm excited to be redoing it. I did take some time to take care of myself in between recording. My non captured podcast episode and this one. So thank you for your patience. As I release this podcast episode today. I saw a video on Tik TOK the other day, about a woman who said. She was annoyed that she kept telling her husband that she couldn't take a bath and slow down and, relax. Because it was just not part of her brain. It wasn't part of how her brain works. She can't enjoy taking a bath with ADHD. And I thought that was really interesting. Because as someone with ADHD, I've worked really hard to get to the point where I am taking time for myself on a regular basis. So I'm living proof that it's absolutely possible. But there's some things I'm going to address about that today. When I was a kid. On Sunday nights. I remember always wanting to watch the movie that would come out. I believe it was on CBS. Or we'd be watching touched by an angel. Those are my mom's favorite things to do on Sunday night. I remember my dad saying, where's your mom, go get your mom, go tell your mom to sit down. What's your mom doing in there? Are you helping her with dishes? Well, and then I would go and ask my mom and say, Hey, we're ready. We're ready to do these things with you. And she'd be like, oh yeah, I'll be right there. I just need to do this and this and this and this and I see that now. And I'm like, oh, well, it makes so much sense. There's could be some undiagnosed ADHD there. And. She likely didn't have a ton of help. And there's always something to do. As moms as women, there's so much that fall on our backs all the time. There's so much that we're responsible for that. It's very hard for us to ask for help. Especially if we don't have a plan, especially if we're not taking care of ourselves, because we're just following the breadcrumbs to get us to the next thing that we have to do. But in those moments, we also couldn't yell at my mom and tell her to come here. We were on one side of the house. She was on the other side of the house. So sometimes we would just start watching the TV without her hoping that she'd eventually show up what she did. And she was also deaf. And so, you know, even if we tried to communicate with her one way, it wouldn't necessarily always come across in the way that we were trying to say something. Nevertheless. I remember seeing that and thinking to myself, How could I show up as a mom who. Could sit down with their kids and watch a movie. How could I do things differently because I wanted my mom so much to be there. I wanted her so much to stop doing all of the things. And I wanted her to sit down. So I asked myself, how can I do that? Because now I'm the one responsible for all of those things. So I think back to that video that I had mentioned about the woman who said that she can't sit down and take a bath because she's got all these other things going on. And then our brains, our brains are very hard to turn off. And especially if we see a breadcrumb, we're going to follow it. We're going to follow the breadcrumb until all of the breadcrumbs are done, except that we know that that's not possible because there's always another project. Around the corner waiting for us to take on. But what if we don't know how to take care of ourselves? What if we don't know how to self care. What if we don't know how to take a break, how to turn off our brains and what if we've never given ourselves permission to actually slow down? What if, because our brains work the way that they do and our brains go so fast. And now we're trying to mimic our brains by making our bodies go the speed of our brains. Right. We've got these keys to a Ferrari and we don't necessarily know how to drive it. What if we just don't know how to have that conversation with ourselves. Could that be the reason why we don't know how to take care of ourselves. And part of this comes back to people pleasing. If you're anything like me, you've spent your entire life trying to make other people happy. Because ultimately that's what fills up your cup. You feel really good about making other people happy. It, it makes you happy because you make other people happy, but instead of focusing. On yourself first. You always put other people before you. And you rarely take the time to ask yourself, what's going to make me happy. What's going to allow me to slow down. And do something that I want to do. Even when I'm sitting down to watch TV at night, I think about the TV shows that I want to watch, but most of the time I'm just trying to figure out, what would my husband be happy watching with me too? He's also doing the same thing with me. So then we ended up compromising on a show that we both. Ultimately want to watch, but it's hard for us to start new things because we're just trying to make the other person happy. So let's think about this holiday season, because I'm so curious about how we can make. Self care during the holidays of real thing. A thing that we can actually do because we're trying something new. One way to do that is embracing the chaos. And saying like, okay, life is going to be chaotic. I know that not only do I have to do all the things that I'm already planning on doing, but now let's add on all of the extra holiday festivities on top of it. Birthday parties events things that you have to attend at your children's school. Shopping planning meals making magic. Not only are you living your regular day to day life, but now there are things that are added on top of the holidays. That make it even more chaotic, not to mention. If you're going to be having people over and you constantly live in a state of chaos, chaos standing for can't have anyone over syndrome. So one thing that I commonly hear when it comes to taking care of yourself, and I'm sure you've said this is, I don't have time. I don't have time to take care of myself because not only am I living my regular life, but now the holidays are on top of this. And I've got so many other things that I need to now take care of. I am definitely in this group of people, because one of the first things that I let go. When I get very busy is my yoga practice. And then the other thing that I let go is my morning routine. And then I wake up later. I never take care of myself. And then I go through the days without having planned my day, because I've lost the time that I normally do to do that. And then I feel even more chaotic. What's interesting though, is that it takes me a couple of days or even a couple of weeks to start to recognize this. To get back into a routine where I am prioritizing myself. But it takes me living this chaotic life to look back on it and say, oh my gosh, I stopped going to yoga. I stopped journaling. I stopped moving my body. And those are the things that I know I have to do to live a better life, to show up as the best version of myself. But where do we come up with this concept of, I don't have time. You do have time. It's just that you've now decided that other things take priority because you are sacrificing yourself in order to get all that other shit done. This is the norm, right? Didn't we see our parents do this and we see our moms do this. Our sisters do this. Don't we see the world do this. You need to sacrifice yourself to give to others because that's what will make the most sense. If you've ever taken a flight before. Flight attendants before any takeoff. We'll go up to the parents and say, Be sure to put on your oxygen mask before you put on your kids. Why did they do that? Because they know that parents. Will do anything. For their children, because you are so responsible for them. But what if you put on your kid's oxygen masks and you run out of oxygen. You die. Okay. I know that's a little morbid, but hear me out for a second. I'm trying to make you like, truly understand this concept because if you don't take care of yourself first, You sacrifice yourself. For others. You make others happy at the expense of yourself? But let's turn that around. What if. You filled yourself up. What if you took care of yourself? You made sure that you drink enough water, you eat healthy. You took a damn bubble bath. You went for a walk. You listened to your favorite playlist on a regular basis? What if you did that? What, if you did those things. To fill up your cup. What if you were then filled up to 100%. What would it look like to then show up for others? Because we think that because we're filling up our own cup, that everyone else misses out, that everyone else is losing now because you are filling up yourself. So how selfish of you, how dare you fill up your own cup? Because now everyone else is. Being sacrificed. Except that that's not the case. Because you're filling yourself up. You get to show up for others at this exponential level that benefits everyone else. I used to joke around with my daughter Charlotte who's seven. I would tell her, you know, mommy's a better mommy. When I go to yoga. And so now when she sees me a little stressed out, she says, mommy, I think maybe you should go to yoga. But how freaking cool is that? Then I start to think about how, you know, I saw my mom and my sister sacrifice themselves. To benefit others. And. That didn't work out really well for them. But I saw that. So now I think that that's what I need to do as well, because that's what women are supposed to do. But what if I broke that cycle and showed my girls? That look mommy's taking care of herself and guess what? She's a better mommy. After she goes to yoga, she's a better mommy after she goes and has a coffee with friends once a month, twice a month, however many times a month. And she comes home and she shows up for you that much better because she's taking care of herself too. What if. You took care of yourself and then you're not as snippy to the people in your life because you're literally taking time for yourself to self-regulate. To take some deep breaths to D stimulate yourself. Un stimulate. I don't know. How would you go about saying that. Have less stimulation. You get what I'm saying? Okay. Over the last couple months, I've been talking a lot about manifestation. And part of understanding, manifestation is understanding where your beliefs lie. So, if you believe that you're supposed to sacrifice yourself, To show up for others. Then there's not a lot that I can say to make you not believe in that. If that's what you want to believe. Then that's what you are going to believe. that's what shows up in your thoughts. That's what shows up in your words. That's what then shows up in your actions and manifests into the life that you are now living. If you believe that you should be taking care of yourself, first thing, continue to think. That you should be taking care of yourself first. You may not know how to do that. So start to look for ways to do that. Think about how could I take care of myself? Is it having a sip of water? Is it. Not talking to anyone. First thing in the morning as you drink your coffee. Look, if that works for you, then totally cool. You get to allow that to work for you. Think about that and then start talking about it. And then put those thoughts and words into action. But the thing with this is that. If you don't know how to take care of yourself, you don't know how to slow down and you're going to continue to run alongside of your brain. Like a little hamster and a cute little wheel. If you believe that there's no way to slow down your brain. Then again, There's no way I can convince you, otherwise, you get to choose to believe that way. And trust me, there's plenty of social media out there. That's going to fuel that. That's going to tell you while we can't slow down, like I can't take time for myself. There's no way I can do that. I have to be moving every single day. In fact, don't slow down or don't sit down. If you sit down, then you're going to lose all that momentum and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just because you have ADHD doesn't mean you can't learn to take care of yourself. I'm living proof of that. Okay. I'm not someone who doesn't have ADHD. Who's trying to preach that to you. I'm just telling you that if you want to believe everyone else out there, that's not taking care of themselves and that's the way that you want to live, then that's the way that you're going to continue to live. And if you want to learn how to slow down. And how to take control of your life. You can also freaking do that. You just have to make a decision. Part of it comes back to the intentions that we are living on a regular basis. We talked about. Setting intentions earlier this year and what it actually means to be intentional about the things that we're doing now, when you are setting an intention, like my intention is to drink more water. Does that mean that you're automatically going to drink more water? No, it means that you say it one day and that's a goal, but then you're like, oh, I forgot all day. You say it the next day and you're like, well, maybe I'll set a reminder. And then the reminder goes off and you're like, oh, I did it right. But then you have to keep doing it. You're putting your body in tension because it goes against what you're used to and what you're used to is what happens without you innately thinking about it without you figuring out what comes next, it just happens. Right. If you're trying to drink more water, you're putting your body intention where you have to specifically think about these things that you want to do to change your life in a more positive way. Which means that it's full of tension. And what's cool is that life is full of change. Change is actually the only constant we can count on. And I'm sure I've said that multiple times on this podcast, but change with change being the only constant we can count on. We can either affect change by being purposeful and intentional about the changes we want to make. Or we can just go along for the ride and kind of be pissed when life doesn't necessarily treat us with the kindness that we want and deserve, because we haven't been intentional about the changes that we want to make. I'm curious about what some of your intentions are for the upcoming year, because if you're listening to this podcast, you're curious, you are curious about taking care of yourself. Because you saw self care and you were like, That's interesting. I wonder if it's real. I can't tell you how to take care of yourself because only, you know, what's going to be truly beneficial to yourself. I could tell you to go get a massage, but I know a lot of people with ADHD, don't like massages because they're like, I can't turn my brain off. And then all I do is think about how they're touching my body and it's weird. Okay. That's real for me, fricking love massages. I also can't turn my brain off, but I like also know how beneficial it is to my body. So I'm like, yes, let's do this. But only, you know, what's going to be beneficial to you. Here's what I will tell you. This is how I take care of myself. I take care of myself by. Getting up early. I've never been a morning person. Until I decided to be a morning person. It's not as simple as I'm saying, but I read the 5:00 AM club years ago now, and it just made sense to get up early. And now I love getting up early. I get up at 4 45, 5:00 AM every morning. At every morning, I have a routine. I write in my journal. I talk about anything that's going on. Whether it's something that's frustrating me or something I'm really happy about. Regardless. Whatever's ruminating on my mind. I write about my journal so I can get it off of my mind. After that I write three things that I'm grateful for every single day and every single day. They're different. And I try to really feel that, what am I truly grateful for? I write my affirmations. Sometimes I write them sometimes I just read them and I really try to read them with feeling. I try to vision every single morning. What does the future behold and what do I want my future to look like? Because without a true vision, what are you aiming toward? And what kind of steps are you taking in that direction? It comes back to manifestation, but I can't know what steps to take if I don't know what my future looks like. Otherwise, I'm just taking steps and hoping for the best throwing spaghetti at the wall. From there. I try to move my body. I'm doing yoga at home, or I have a yoga practice planned on the schedule. And this is so important to me. And yoga is really good for people with ADHD because it taps into both your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, which can be very beneficial for people with ADHD. I'll try to link an article about that in the show notes. So you can do some additional research if you'd like or read a couple articles, Make your own decision. On what that might look like for you. And then I read a book in the morning by read a book. I mean, I'm listening to it on audible, but I'm doing something else at the same time. I'll either be coloring or maybe I'll be cleaning the kitchen or doing something to get ready for the day. As I'm listening to a book. By the time my kids get up, I've already done so much pouring into myself that I can disconnect from that. I can put everything to the side. I can set down my phone and then the rest of the morning, I'm solely focused on my kids. And not worried about anything else. And I've set a rule for myself. I'm not allowed to worry about work during this time specifically because my kids come first. And if I'm trying to do something for work and also pay attention to my kids. I'm not giving either thing my sole attention, which means I'm distracted. I'm frustrated because I can't hyper focus on anything. And my brain is like, what the heck is happening. So I'm just focused on my kids. Then once they leave for school, I'm back at it. I'm getting into the routine, getting into the things that I need to do for the day. And I'm planning ahead when I plan ahead and I time box things, it helps me so much. I write it down. I actually put it on my schedule so that I can see what my plan of attack for the day is. Once my kids get home from school. I try to put down my phone again. Now I'm not always successful in the afternoon, but that's what I'm working on right now. And what's really cool is my husband. And I really love to focus on the girls during this time. This fall we decided not to do any extracurriculars, which has been really beneficial for our family. It's just been really nice to take a step back. And say, like let's spend some time together. Let's really just enjoy who we are as a family. Let's get to know each other a little bit more. It's not to say that everything is perfect all the time. There's still meltdowns and there's still anger and there's still life that's happening around us. But we have a system that we work within. And it's really nice. And then after the kids go to bed at night, my husband and I like to spend some time together. Sometimes we're reading a book together, listening to a book on audible, or maybe we're reading our own individual books. Maybe we're watching a TV show, but we're always trying to do something together. I would love to come up with a better nighttime routine. That's that's a goal. That's been on my list for a little while now. I just haven't really sat down and planned it. And planning is half the battle when it comes to this ADHD brain, because I've got some really good intentions, but without a plan in place and something to remind me of what I want to do on a regular basis. It's hard to stick with it. One thing that I've been using pretty often, that's been helping me with some of the tasks that I want to complete are Google tasks. So if you use Google calendar, if you go on the app in the bottom right corner, there's a little plus sign. You can add an event like if you're planning something that day, maybe it's a meeting or something, but you can also add a task. When you add a task, you can add a recurring task and you can put a description in there of your routine or of the things that you want to do. I have a friend who told me the other day that she lists all of her affirmations in a task that she then has recurring every single morning at the same time so that she can read her affirmations every morning and then mark it off as a task complete. But it's cool because she said it one day marked it as a recurring event. And then made sure that she could go in there every single day and do it. There's just so many really cool things out there that can help you maintain some sort of normalcy in your life. I think for so long, I just thought I was so broken. I was just like, I don't understand how people can do the same things day in and day out where my brain takes me on this train ride into. I don't even know, like all of these things are leading me down this tunnel of craziness, where I don't even know what I'm aiming for. I'm just trying to complete everything on my to-do list. But once I started to understand my brain a little bit more, I understood that I needed reminders. And having. Regular reminders every day was something that I needed to survive. I needed. To ensure that I could live a life. Where I could follow a routine on a regular basis where I could take care of myself, but I also realized that I had time to take care of others too. There's a lot to be said for that. That's my routine. I just wanted to share that. Not because I want you to adopt what I'm doing, but I want you to get an idea of how people can take care of themselves. How you have permission to take care of yourself too? If you start. If you believe it, if you think you can. You're right. And if you think you can't. You're also right. Because it all comes down to your beliefs and what you believe you should be doing versus what you believe you shouldn't. When life gets busy, it's hard for us to make a plan because we don't think we have time to even make a plan. We are so focused on just going in and conquering the day. And we feel like a day with no plans means that we're going to get so much more done, but reflect on that. Have you ever gone a day where you've done so much, but you look back on it and you're like, I've done nothing. This doesn't make any sense in my life. How could I have possibly done nothing today? When I did everything? But when you start to break things up and have a plan for how you're going to attack the day and how you're going to get things done. Things start to make sense in a completely different way. Where, you're not just following the breadcrumbs. You're following. What you actually want to do? This week, I have a challenge for you. I want you to share with me on social media. What you did to take care of yourself this week? And again, I'm going to remind you that this has everything to do with organization because. When you start to take care of yourself and you remind yourself to slow down. And you remind yourself that you're allowed to slow down. If you start to practice it. But you might not be good at it right away because you're not practicing it. So share with me on social media, what you did, you can DM me. You can share it in a post, whatever you want. Tag me at organizing dot and that ADHD dot brain. Oh, that's a lot. But let me know what you're doing. And then maybe we can even compile a list and we can share with each other. What makes sense, what works for one person might work for another person, but what might work for me might not work for you. Regardless let's share because that's what we can do and grow together. There's such an amazing community of people with ADHD out there. And the more we learn from one another, the more we can grow and live a life that's worth so much more than just trying to get everything done on a freaking to-do list. I'm just so done with trying to get everything done. It's frustrating and annoying and not a life that I want to continue living this way. So if you're with me, Let me know. I have six more classes left in my planning, your holiday cards this year. I'm super pumped because I ended up planning my holiday card. I got my entire list on and I was able to order cards less than a hundred bucks for 50 cards. And that's it. 50 people are getting cards this year. That's it. I'm pumped and guess what? The program that I'm using addresses all my cards for free. Not the return addresses though. And that's okay. If you want to learn more about how to plan your cards, get a template so that you can use it every single year to make your life easier. Check out the holiday card planning for the ADHD brain in the show notes below. I love teaching. I, I get so much joy and passion out of it. Plus you get to meet me and you can ask a ton of questions. We have questions at the end. I also put together a body doubling session. So after you're done learning about all of this, I've scheduled it on Friday of each of the class weeks so that you can come and get done. Some of the things that you've learned how to do and continue to ask me questions. Also I, this black Friday weekend, I ended up selling a bunch of stuff on Facebook marketplace and made a couple of hundred dollars. I'm curious if that's something that people are interested in learning more about, because I've thought about it for a while of putting together a class. But then, because I had stopped selling things on Facebook marketplace. It wasn't at the forefront of my mind, but I know a lot, I've been doing this for a while and it's something that I'm really passionate about because, you know, especially for those of you that have a ton of stuff in your home, And you do want to make a little bit of money. There's a way to do it without trying to do it all, but especially for the holiday season, I'm curious if any of you need to make a little bit of extra cash right now. And if that's the case, I'd love to show you how. I can do a small class where it's very inexpensive. So shoot me a message. Let me know if that's something that you're interested in doing, because I have a template put together. I just haven't put it out there yet. I'd love to hear if that's something that you're interested in. Obviously I'm a coach would love to work with you. Something that's up in coming is, I'm going to create a membership. I'm so excited about it. Regardless. You'll hear more. Go sign up for the dopamine menu in my profile. MindfulMegs.com. Fill out your dopamine menu and put it on your fridge, also share on social media, what you've done for self care this week, whatever the hell it is, even if it's a minute or five minutes or 15 minutes, however you show up for yourself. Praise yourself. And let me know, because I will sing your name. I will tell you how proud I am of you. Let me know if no one else is going to do it. I'm so happy to do it for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. I can't wait to see you next week. Have a happy, happy December. And let's continue talking. You're not fricking broken. Your brain is amazing.