ADHDifference

S2E15: Optimising Brain Health & Thriving with ADHD + guest Chris Loper

• Julie Legg • Season 2 • Episode 15

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Julie Legg welcomes Chris Loper, a Habit Coach and educator, to explore how lasting change starts with brain health, not just willpower. Chris shares his own late-ADHD diagnosis journey and the pivotal realisations that followed, including how lifestyle foundations like sleep, nutrition, and movement support focus, emotional regulation, and motivation.

From designing a brain-friendly morning routine to building focus with what Chris calls “bicep curls for the brain,” this conversation is full of accessible strategies and grounded encouragement for anyone looking to thrive with ADHD. So, whether you're newly diagnosed, supporting someone with ADHD, or looking to build better habits without brute force, this conversation is full of permission, strategy, and hope.

Key Points from the Episode

  • Chris’s personal journey to ADHD diagnosis in adulthood
  • Why lifestyle, not just medication, is foundational for ADHD brains
  • The critical role of sleep, nutrition, and movement in managing symptoms
  • How improving brain health impacts focus, motivation, and emotional resilience
  • The problem with relying on “brute force” and how strategy changes the game
  • Why he calls focus “bicep curls for the brain” and how to train it sustainably
  • Morning routines that prioritise cognitive fuel and reduce stress
  • Coaching lessons from working with students, adults, and parents
  • Rethinking ADHD through an evolutionary and strengths-based lens
  • Encouragement for those newly diagnosed or feeling stuck

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JULIE: Welcome to Season 2 of ADHDifference. I'm your host, Julie Legg, ADHD advocate, author of The Missing Piece: A Woman's Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD, and an unapologetic doer of many things. This season, we're turning up the volume with a global lineup of brilliant guests bringing their lived experiences, insights, research, strategies, and resources. And of course, along with a healthy dose of humour and humility. Whether you're neurodivergent yourself or just curious, there's something here for every curious brain. Let's dive in. Today, I'm joined by Chris Loper, an ADHD coach, educator, and writer who helps both adults and students better understand their brains. Chris not only works in this space professionally, but he lives it personally. As someone with ADHD himself, he spent years refining a practical compassionate approach that blends neuroscience, mindfulness, and real-world strategies. It teaches that thriving with ADHD starts with taking care of the brain itself. Welcome to the show, Chris. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. [Thanks, Julie. Me, too.] Yay. We're going to explore your insights on ADHD and brain health. But I'd like to start with, you've said that you've had ADHD yourself and now you dedicate your work to helping both adults and students understand how their brains work. So, can you take us back to when you first began to recognize ADHD in your own life and how that's reshaped your approach? 

CHRIS: Yes. It was something I figured out in my late 20s, early 30s. It didn't get recognized in childhood because I was a very bright student. And so I did well in school despite my ADHD and being just like a world champion procrastinator in school and kind of getting away with doing very little work. So had I been less bright, we probably would have recognized it when I was a child because I would have had bad grades. But as such, I did fine until my late 20s when my world kind of fell into a downward spiral of depression and anxiety coinciding with a bunch of injuries that kind of took me out of my ski bum lifestyle and forced me to finally grow up. I had spent my 20s kind of delaying adulthood, which meant like it didn't matter that I had ADHD and didn't manage it. I was just having fun. And then I started... I stumbled upon information about it because I was learning about education and the brain and was like, "Wow, that's me. Okay, that's new. Didn't never thought to think about that." And since then I have I resolved to design my own life in such a way that I could thrive with it, get the upsides of it without suffering too many of the downsides of it. And so that's been a great deal of like lifestyle design and healthy habits and kind of a unique career choice that's allowed me to do really well with adult ADHD. 

JULIE: After your diagnosis, has that helped you reframe your own life to date? You said that you went through this stage of feeling that you needed to grow up. Did the diagnosis help you make that decision? 

CHRIS: I'm not sure. It was kind of part of like I was at the same time overcoming a marijuana addiction. And anytime I tried to quit marijuana I would just swap it out for drinking and I just realized I was like very prone to depression if I didn't manage myself. And so it all those things kind of came together at once when I was 30 where I was like, I need to be clean and sober for the rest of my life. I need to kind of go all in on self-improvement and physical and mental health to stay out of depression, to manage anxiety and stress and to manage ADHD. And so it was kind of a I do all this at once. And which seems crazy. And like I didn't actually just, you know, start doing 40 healthy habits all at once because that's not how you change your behaviour. But over the course of a few years, I went from kind of being a train wreck to thriving by building up a bunch of habits. And being aware of my ADHD was definitely part of the motivation to get all my stuff together. 

JULIE: And you've worked with both students and adults with ADHD in your Becoming Better coaching, which gives you a unique perspective too. And I'd love to hear about some common threads that you see across the ages. 

CHRIS: Yeah. So I work with three different cohorts. One is tutoring and so elementary, middle school, high school as a tutor and academic coach, and loads of my students have ADHD. So I see it and engage with it there in sort of a school work style of setting. And then the second category is adults who are trying to change their habits. Most, maybe two-thirds of my adult habits coaching clients have been adults with ADHD. They are struggling to get their life in order as they also try to be an adult in the world. And then the third group is college students where I blend habit coaching and academic coaching, and pretty much all of them have been students with ADHD, who are having a hard time at university and need extra support. Is with all three of those groups, the theme is they feel like there's something wrong with them, like they're broken and deficient. And that often goes hand-in-hand with having a diagnosis as a label, but not having any tools. Like in America, I don't know how it is in New Zealand, but in America, the most common thing is you get diagnosed at some point during childhood and then we give you medicine and that's it. We don't teach you skills. We don't dial in brain health. We don't do any of the things that you could do on top of or instead of medication. We're just like, the easiest thing to do is give you meds and they move on with their life. And it helps for a little while, but it also messes up their sleep and their food, and it's not great. When my students and adult clients try to get their act together in the traditional sense of like, "Well, I know I need to stop procrastinating. I know I need to study more. I need healthy habits, etc." Their approach is brute force willpower to change their behaviour and to focus. Just brute force mental grit to stay focused on the work they have to do because nobody ever showed them that they could do it strategically and lower the amount of effort required to make it easier to do the work. And so my job across the board is really to come in with strategies and be like, "Hey, look, millions of other people have dealt with these same problems. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. There's a bunch of good techniques out there and a bunch of good tools. Let's start trying stuff and see what works." In the end, you can't tell kids or grown-ups that like you need to do this and then it will be better. They have to experience it. And so the breakthroughs in a sense are when they've had an opportunity to engage with some strategies and felt success come to them as a result. Then they buy in and they go, "Oh, strategy is actually good. This is the way." And then as they encounter problems in the future, as they move forward, then they'll be more likely to reach for a tool kit rather than like just brute force your way through it. 

JULIE: I agree. And in New Zealand, it is the same with regards to after diagnosis. There isn't a clear pathway to guide people. It they can flounder a lot until they find their own path. But yes, the go-to appears to be medication. I haven't been medicated myself and that was through choice but partly I probably wouldn't have a choice anyway due to other medication that I take. So yes, it's great to know that there are non-medication tools that we can use and which brings me on to my next question because you said your number one strategy for thriving with ADHD is optimizing brain health. So why is it such a crucial foundation and what does it actually look like on a day-to-day basis? 

CHRIS: Yeah. So your brain is the most complex organ in your body. It's at this point it's the most complex or object in the known universe until we discover alien intelligence with something more than ours. It's the weirdest, most complicated thing we've got. And so, of course, it's incredibly sensitive to changing physical inputs. Like, you're like, "Well, when I don't eat well, my gut doesn't feel good or I feel tired. Maybe my heart doesn't have enough going on because I haven't been exercising." Your brain is more sensitive than everything else in your body to changes in nutrition, oxygen, blood flow from exercise, sleep is huge. So that's why it's so important to dial in brain health. The thing the part of your brain that does the heavy lifting for focus, decision making, executive function is the prefrontal cortex, the kind of big part of your brain right behind your forehead. That is the first part of your brain that shuts down when you are tired, hungry, and when it feels like we don't have enough resources. This is the most expensive thing we've got. We're gonna power down and just keep the most essential functions running. And so that's why you're like, "Wow, I really can't struggle. I'm just struggling today." Like if you got a bad night of sleep or if you haven't been eating well. So if you're anybody really, but if you especially if you have ADHD, optimizing your brain health should be a top priority. And this is true whether you're on medicine or not. Physical exercise is incredibly good for your brain. Most people exercise because they think, "Oh, I I'm supposed to or it's going to be healthy. I'm going to live longer. I'm going to look better." That's all great. The most important thing is that today, if you exercise, you're going to have better mental endurance. You're going to have more focus. You're going to be sharper. You're going to feel better. and be happy. So, that's the real reason to exercise every day. Same thing with nutrition. People are like, "Well, I only eat well because, you know, my doctor said so or because supposedly vegetables are good for you." Well, yeah, sure, long-term health, great. But today, you're going to have better brain function if you eat healthfully. You know, you're going to have increased focus, reduced anxiety, if you're giving your brain high quality fuel. So that means lots of vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, avoiding sugary foods and processed foods, eating healthy fats. So, you know, that's a big darn deal. And you know, you're fighting an uphill battle in the modern world diet, but it's very, very worthwhile. And the other really big one is sleep, that sleep problems and ADHD tend to go hand in hand. So they and they kind of feed off of each other where people with ADHD tend to also have disordered sleep. Like they have a hard time going to sleep and then they'll have to get up early because the world wants them to get up early, school wants them to get up early, jobs want them to get up early, maybe they have kids. So then they're sleep deprived chronically and that just destroys brain function and so they're just operating at 50% all the time because they haven't been getting their sleep dialed in. 

JULIE: What is the best sleep duration? What should we be aiming for every night? 

CHRIS: It varies by age. If you're an adult, it's like 7 to 9 hours. It's a little more if you're younger. I'd say if you're an adult and you're not getting at least 7 hours, you're chronically sleep deprived. 

JULIE: My trouble with sleeping is that my mind is wide awake at about 4:00 in the morning. Wide awake. Yeah. And if I try to sleep, I will toss and turn and actually frustrate myself so much, I might as well just get up anyway. So, I'm early to bed, but very early to rise. And unfortunately, I'm not always hitting that 7-hour mark. 

CHRIS: You can make up for that in other ways. So, and that kind of pattern is normal as people enter their gray hair years is like "I go to bed earlier and I find myself waking up at 4:00 or 5 in the morning no matter what I did." It's like, well, great. Yeah, that's normal. And as you get genuinely older, like seniors, I think, need less sleep than adults. So we kind of go through a steady decline in our sleep needs as we age. But you, you know, you can still make up for it by taking a short nap at some point during the day. Some people are much better for at bi-phasic sleep. Sleeping you know, a chunk in the night but then you know they get up, and they get up and that's fine, and then but then they take an extended nap at some point later and that's actually totally healthy and normal. We just don't think it is because we've been told you're supposed to just go to bed and stay in bed, you know, and if you can't then there's something wrong with you. 

JULIE: It's great to know that there are different rhythms I guess when it comes to sleep patterns. Yeah. You describe focus as a muscle which I love. So can you explain why that's true and how people with ADHD can start to strengthen that muscle in the brain? 

CHRIS: Yeah. So I love the metaphor that your brain is like a bunch of muscles. All the different abilities that your brain has operate very similar to the different muscles in your body in the sense that if you use them, you strengthen them and if you don't use them, they atrophy. They get weaker. And so you can think of ADHD in part as having a naturally weaker focus muscle. And that is more or less the prefrontal cortex of the brain and its ability to direct your attention at a desired thing, which is, let's be honest, usually something boring that you just are supposed to do. It's not really what you want to do, and that's why it's hard to focus. Anything you can do to deliberately practice focusing will train that muscle. The most classic and well-studied is mindfulness meditation. So, this comes from Buddhism, but it doesn't need to be religious at all. You just sit somewhere comfortable, close your eyes and try to pay attention to your breathing. Like point your brain, your mind, at the physical sensation of air going in and out of your body. And that sounds really simple and it turns out it's like the hardest thing in the world. You will stay focused on your breathing for 1/2 to two breaths and then your mind will wander off and you'll go what? And at some point, possibly minutes later, you will realize, "Oh, I'm just like thinking about stuff and daydreaming. I was supposed to be focused on my breath." And you bring it back. You bring your attention back to the sensation of breathing. And it lasts for a breath or two and your mind wanders off again. And the whole game is noticing that it wandered off and deliberately bringing it back. It goes away. You notice it. You bring it back. That's like bicep curls for your prefrontal cortex. It is cultivating an actual awareness of what your brain is doing and choosing to direct it and it's crazy hard. So most people try meditation and they think I'm just supposed to sit here and not think. No, it's not possible. You're... that's going to make you feel like a failure. Like the game is the struggle. The whole point is it's really hard and you're just bringing it back, failing, bringing it back, failing, bringing it back. And the whole time you're being nice to yourself about it. You're being gentle with yourself because there's no reason to be upset. Like this is just what brains do. And over time it gets better. However, meditation is only one way to train up your focus muscle. If you like to do art, art can be a great way to force yourself to focus on something. Reading can be a way to practice focusing. Yoga is basically like meditation with movement. And so many of the same benefits. 

JULIE: Great to hear. And I love the idea of bicep curls for the brain. I love that. That's great. That's proper exercise. Really nice to know that again there's alternatives to say the standard meditation which can be quite scary for the likes of me that struggle to even with the concept of being in one space for a period of time, concentrating. So, I love the art and I love your other suggestions. When it comes to the work that you do, supporting others, I'd love to know what works for you. You know, is there a specific strategy that you personally rely on to keep yourself balanced and thriving well? 

CHRIS: I have for the last 10 years started every single day with a routine of self-care. This is part of the going all in on brain health that I do. And so I when I wake up in the morning, my phone's in airplane mode and I try to keep it in airplane mode until an hour or two after waking up. And so and I begin my day with movement, meditation, reading some wisdom to kind of feed my brain smart ideas that will help me throughout the day. And then some kind of genuine physical exercise, and then like a healthy breakfast, and then I may be ready to engage with the world and you know check my phone, check email, etc. Better if I can avoid that even longer and do some writing or work on something creative because I'm going to be much better at that be if I've avoided inputs. So, I highly recommend trying to delay engagement with the digital world right after you wake up and instead give yourself some time to prepare your brain for the day. 

JULIE: And how long would you set aside for your self-care routine in the mornings? 

CHRIS: Well, now it's maybe an hour and a half, two hours, depending on what kind of a workout I'm doing. Some days it's "This is 5 minutes of abs," and some days it's like "I'm going to the gym for an hour or I'm going on a long bike ride." Yeah, but I didn't start with, you know, a big long elaborate routine that I have now, and I didn't start by dedicating all that time. I started small with, you know, like one small habit that I could commit to doing every day when I woke up. And after that became easy and automatic, I layered on a little more. And so over time I've built it up to be this thing that would feel impossible if you were trying to start it tomorrow. So I certainly recommend start small and easy build up gradually. 

JULIE: Sounds great. And I think you know like setting any goals to make them achievable which encourages us to keep going because they're doable and we can tick that off as achieving that specific thing in a day. So that's great advice. What are you currently working on at the moment? You know, what's lighting your fire and what projects are ringing bells for you in a positive sense? 

CHRIS: The work I'm doing with college students which is through smartcollegehabits.com is has been turned out to be just an amazing fit for my skill set. Having done so much time working with academics and so much time working with habits with adults and bringing those two together for young adults who are still in school but really eager for the big picture support. And especially like figuring out brain health and technology addiction and you know navigating the world of academics. You know, having a basically a mentor who's got some knowledge and some wisdom but who's going to talk to them not the way they're used to being talked to like by their parents. You know, someone who's not going to judge them and I have really, really enjoyed that work. So that's my latest and greatest project. 

JULIE: One of the most empowering parts of your message is about living a fulfilling life with ADHD, not just managing it. So, how do things like career choice and hobbies or creative pursuits fit into that picture? 

CHRIS: Yeah, that's a great question. Most careers, traditional 9-to-5 careers aren't a great fit for people with ADHD. And so if you have the ability to choose a career that's a better fit for your brain, please do that. You know, extreme example like I couldn't be an accountant. It's just too boring, right? There was a period of time when I got a job as a receptionist because I was in between things and hadn't figured out what I was going to do and I could get hired. I was so bad at it that I got fired. Like my job was just to sit there and greet people when they came in. But I was up and about. Like I was away from the desk walking around. I got in trouble for laughing too loudly. So like not a great fit. So like I don't do one thing. I do multiple things. I, you know, I'm a tutor and but being a tutor means every hour it's a new student and it's a new maybe a new topic and so there's lots of variety. Keeps me from getting bored. But that's not the only thing I do. Like I have to run my business. So, there's accounting, there's you know, email communications, there's marketing. I have a few different websites that I run. I write two different blogs. I do habit coaching with adults. I do college success coaching. And so from a work standpoint, I just decided like I don't have to do the standard 9 to 5 one kind of thing. I get to have a variety, and that's a great fit for me. And then, whether you have that kind of work or a more traditional job, cultivate hobbies that satisfy your desires and are good for your brain. So like I ski and hike. Spending time in nature is very good for me. The exercise is good for me. I'm really into board games. Playing heavy strategy games has actually been really good because they're both fun, but they're also executive function training because you have to make a lot of difficult decisions and plan ahead. And they kind of work out the brain muscles that are kind of naturally weaker if you have ADHD, but in a way that's fun. [Are we talking Dungeons and Dragons?] No, that's a role playing game. I'm talking about like modern board games that are long and complicated. [Have you got some suggestions?] I mean, if you want something very complicated, I like Terraforming Mars. It's a game about turning Mars into a habitable planet. On the lighter end of things, Wingspan is very good. It's a game about birds. We actually got into birding after we got into that game. And birding has been an excellent ADHD hobby because it's an excuse to go out in nature. You're learning new things about what you see in nature. And if you have ADHD, your head's on a swivel. You're constantly like noticing new stimuli. That's birding. And it makes you really good at it. And so then you're like, you know, I pick up on sights and sounds that a neurotypical person might not notice. And so then I'm like with my binoculars, ahh I found it, you know. 

JULIE: Wonderful. Well, that's brilliant. I love that. I must try that myself. And for someone Chris who is just beginning to understand ADHD for them and maybe a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. What would you most want him to know?

CHRIS: That you you're not broken, like there's not something wrong with you. We've really done a bad job with the labeling. You know, ADHD the two D's are like deficiency and disorder. So I love the title of your podcast where the last D just it becomes difference. It's like no, you have a different brain. And we've actually discovered through genetic research that your brain is more well adapted to a hunter gatherer world rather than the modern agricultural and industrial world. And so you have a brain that evolved to do really well the way our ancestors used to live. Walking around in the woods, looking for food, avoiding danger, you know, exploring new territories. That's the kind of brain you have. It's just that the modern world that we live in mostly doesn't align with that by default. But you can be strategic about how you take care of yourself so that you get fewer of the downsides of ADHD while keeping the benefits of more creativity, sense of humour, energy, the things we don't really talk about that are actually great about ADHD. And you can deliberately design a lifestyle where you get to thrive because, you know, you don't have to join the traditional rat race. You get to go, you know, go live how you want to live.

JULIE: Great, great words and I'm sure they'll fall on very appreciative ears for the ADHDifference podcast listeners. Chris, thank you so, so much for joining me today. I'm going to have all of your links in the show notes for people to find you and to reach out and say hello. So, thank you for your words of wisdom. They've been wonderful. [My pleasure. Thanks, Julie.]

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Julie Legg

Host
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Jel Legg

Co-host
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Chris Loper

Guest