Is It ADHD? What Women’s Brains Have to Do With It

Johanna shares a Dr. Daniel Amen episode on ADHD in women — Chronically overwhelmed , anxiety, relationships that keep falling apart, working twice as hard for half the result. If any of that sounds familiar, this one’s for you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🤓 Dr Daniel Amen

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/change-your-brain-every-day/id1178337794?i=1000741007826

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Swinging through the ears with regular owners. Midlife carg and honey, where nobody's pulls. Got the fire side where I'm another shine. This is our time. I'm feeling so divine. Oh, it's old and free. Women old in midlife. Just away and see.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Mode Live. I'm your host Joanna, and today I want to share an episode with you from Dr. Daniel Eamon, who is a well-known psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher, and self-help author. He's most famous for promoting the use of SPECT S-P-E-C-T brain scans to evaluate and treat mental health conditions. The subject is about ADHD in girls and women. And before you scroll past thinking that's not me, that's literally what his wife said when he told her he thought she had it. She thought it was not all nonsense. ADHD didn't really exist. Well, it wasn't nonsense because she has it. I was inspired to look more into ADD and ADHD after a walk with my friend. And she was telling me about her ADHD and how she was diagnosed as an adult, which I I'm hearing more and more women are finding out that they have ADHD or ADD as an adult, especially like when once you start getting past your 30s and 40s and going into midlife. So I find that very interesting. But I never really knew that much about it. And she was telling me how she wished that she was diagnosed as a child, as it would have made her life so much easier. She now has children of her own, and she suspects one of her daughters may be suffering from ADHD herself, as she's displaying many of the symptoms that she had as a child. So this episode really helped me to understand it more thoroughly, and I wanted to share it with you. So on my deep dive into learning more about what it is, I have come across many other episodes. So over the next few weeks, I will be covering how ADHD and ADD, they will explain that in like the episode that I share, how there's two different names for it. But how it affects girls and women, and how many women are not diagnosed until midlife or misdiagnosed as a young girl, and also how it can affect relationships and your sex life. So let's begin. Here's the thing that's really talked about. I know I didn't know this. ADHD in women and girls looks nothing like the hyperactive little boy bouncing off classroom walls. In women and girls, it looks like, say, being chronically overwhelmed, procrastination that makes you want to cry, taking three hours to do half an hour of homework, relationships that go from intense to chaotic and then fall apart over and over, or anxiety that you've just accepted as your personality, feeling like you're always trying harder than and everyone else and just getting less out of it. Being constantly late. Well, Dr. Amons talks about how the female brain is actually wired with stronger impulse control than the male brain, which is why women and girls with ADHD often fly completely under the radar. They're not acting out, they're just quietly underachieving, frustrated, exhausted, wondering what is wrong with them. And here's the part that really got me. He says that some women get diagnosed in their 40s and their first reaction isn't relief, it's grief. Because they think, if I had only known this when I was seven years old or 15 or 25, where would I be now? What would I have been able to achieve? He's also got some really practical stuff in the episode. Simple things that you can start doing today, like what you eat for breakfast, exercise, taking omega-3s, etc. Things that actually move the needle on focus without needing a prescription. So I'm sharing this because I think a lot of you are going to recognize yourself or your daughter, your best friend, or even your own mother, because this runs in families. That's what he's also discovered. He said usually it's a mother bringing her son in saying I think he's got ADHD, and the doctor starts he starts talking to her and thinks, Yeah, Mom, maybe you've got it too. So that's really interesting. And I was just, I just think it's worth hearing from the person who's been scanning brains. I think he's scanned like 260,000 brains over his career. So he's been treating this for decades. So be sure to check out next week where we talk uh more about how it affects your relationship and sex life. That's really interesting. So hit follow so you don't miss. It'll let you know when the latest episode is available and it'll pop up in your podcast feed so you don't miss it. I'll link the Amons episode that we're talking about right now in the show notes so you just scroll down and hit it and listen to it. And please share my show with your friends. It will help my audience grow and get all of this valuable knowledge out for more women. You can also please go and subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can catch up on all my videos. They're quite fun and interesting too. All the links are gonna be below. And thank you so much for coming back week after week and supporting me. I truly appreciate you. So until next week, I am Joanna and this is Not Your Mother's Midlife. Bye bye.