Ep 13: Understanding AuDHD - Executive Functioning and Daily Life: ADHD, Autism & AuDHD (Part 2)

🎙️ Episode 13: Understanding AuDHD – Executive Functioning and Daily Life (Part 2)
Episode Summary
In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist Aaron Howearth moves from explaining executive functioning to exploring practical ways autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD people can work with their brains in daily life. He looks at how differences in working memory, processing speed, time perception, self-monitoring, and motivation interact with anxiety and self-esteem, and why our capacity to start, continue, and finish tasks can swing so dramatically from day to day.

Aaron describes how an ADHD-style “problem-solving brain” can flip into a “problem-finding brain” when worry and rumination take over, especially in generalized anxiety. He introduces worry postponement (also called worry time or the worry chair) as a structured way to park worries during the day, revisit them briefly in a time-limited “worry window,” and reclaim attention for the people, tasks, and moments that matter. Read more about worry postponement here: 

https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/~/media/CCI/Mental-Health-Professionals/Generalised-Anxiety/Generalised-Anxiety---Information-Sheets/Generalised-Anxiety-Information-Sheet---05---Postpone-your-Worry.pdf

He also shares neurodivergent-friendly tools for time blindness, task initiation, and follow-through: externalising time with alarms, visual timers, and apps; body doubling and social accountability; reducing visual clutter and sensory load; and building routines gradually through habit stacking rather than overwhelming, all-or-nothing life overhauls. Throughout the episode, Aaron reframes “disorder” not as something inherent to autistic or ADHD traits, but as a mismatch between our brains and inflexible environments and expectations, inviting a more compassionate, neurodiversity-affirming way to understand executive functioning differences.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Executive Functioning & Self-Concept – How repeated struggles with organisation, planning, and follow-through shape self-esteem and internal narratives like “I’m a failure.”
• ADHD Problem-Solving vs Problem-Finding – When a fast, creative brain shifts into scanning for everything that might go wrong and filling the gaps with negative assumptions.
• Worry Postponement – Using scheduled worry time to note worries during the day, revisit them briefly later, and reduce rumination while still letting the brain feel heard.
• Environmental Accommodations – Supports like written instructions, reduced visual clutter, sensory adjustments, and breaking tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
• Time Blindness & Externalising Time – Making time concrete with timers, alarms, visual countdowns, and short, structured work blocks (e.g. Pomodoro-style sprints).
• Body Doubling & Accountability – Using co-working, study buddies, supervisors, therapists, or friends as external anchors while respecting strong drives for autonomy.
• Habit Stacking & Routine – Attaching new behaviours to existing habits so helpful routines become more automatic and less dependent on motivation in the moment.
• Redefining “Disorder” – Viewing diagnosis as a description of mismatch between person and environment rath

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

HD Psych Podcast. I'm Iron Howe with Clinical Psychology, and we are different, not defective. Well, thank you to everybody who's tuned into our past episodes and everyone who follows our Instagram account, which is our primary social media. If you haven't already, please like, follow, and subscribe us, and please share any of our content with friends who you think would take value from it. We would really appreciate that. Well, last week we spoke about executive functions of autism, ADHD, and Audi HD and how they can look and impact us in daily life. And this week I wanted to build on that more specifically with some ways that we can address the difficulties that arise out of those executive functioning differences. Now I hasten to point out this is not individual therapy, and I can't provide you individual therapeutic support. This is generalized ideas about how some people are able to manage those executive functioning differences and more broader the difficulties that can come, but don't always, but that can come from our differences. So just a quick recap on last week. We spoke about ADHD being underpinned by impulsivity and inattention. I probably touched on the ADHD often sees difficult in the application of working memory in daily life. With autism, we sometimes see processing speed can be different. We talk about cognitive rigidity in autism. We have difficulties self-monitoring when we're neurodivergent. And sometimes we have difficulties with motivation. The difficulties that we have across our life often lead to an impaired self-concept or poorer self-esteem than the average person because we're not average and we're trying to fit into an average world. So considering those different impacts that can be had by our neurodivergent characteristics, obviously for ADHD, we have stimulant and non-stimulant medications that can be a really effective for helping us anchor our attention and manage our impulse control. And if you have ADHD characteristics, I recommend having a chat to a psychiatrist to see if those medications are right for you. They impact everybody differently. And so for some people, the costs are worth the benefits, or the benefits outweigh the costs. For other people, they don't. And some people choose not to take medication. And all of those are valid. So I guess moving on from the medication, which is not my field, I'll talk about different behavioral or environmental or internal ways that we can challenge the difficulties that we have with our neurodivergent characteristics. And sometimes some of our neurodivergent characteristics can manage the difficulties that we have in other areas. Now, in past episodes and reels, I've talked about what I really think of as an Audi HD style of brain. And that is it's a combination of autism details orientation. If I have all the details, I understand the system that I'm engaging with, I know that it works, and I can feel safe. Whereas ADHD is tangential in many ways, that inattention can lead me to bounce from idea to idea that might seem unrelated to an outsider. But when we sit there and look at it, often what seems like tangential conversation or tangential idea linking is actually linked semantically, in my experience, or emotionally linked. So why does that matter? Because often I see in myself and in people that I chat to that our Audie HD brain, when we apply anxiety or anger or sadness, any of the unhelpful emotions, those emotions that can be unhelpful in certain contexts, when we apply that to it, instead of being the great problem-solving brain that it can be when we apply it to our work, it can be a problem-finding brain where I look for all of the missing information, but my anxiety, for example, is overlaid on that, and I'm filling it in with negative projections, negative assumptions. That's obviously problematic because it negatively impacts my experience with myself, with my world, in my relationships. And a strategy that I really enjoy to try to manage that is worry postponement, or sometimes called worry time or worry chair. What this is, is it's a way to manage rumination and worry. We can say that rumination and worry are underpinned by the metacognitive belief that worrying keeps us safe. Our brain thinks that if I consider all of the stressful things, I can protect myself against it. But what it often does is keeps us stuck in a rumination cycle. And that Audi HD brain I just described really strongly aligns with the style of thought that we often see in generalized anxiety disorder. And worry postponement is a really good strategy for many people with generalized anxiety disorder. Now, hasten to point out, uh I use the language disorder purely because that's the diagnostic label. I don't think we're inherently broken. I think we're just different and trying to fit into a typical world. Worry postponement, the reason I love it is it's it's simple, not necessarily easy. What I'm doing here is if my mind thinks worrying keeps me safe, I'm giving my brain a little more permission to let go of the worry. What I do is I take a note throughout the day of the worries that I have, and then I allocate a short specific amount of time at some point in my day where I can actually let my brain worry. What I'm doing there is saying to my brain, now's not the time, but I'll come back to this. So if we think of our brain as a counselor, you know, somebody who's giving us guidance, their guidance might be a little overly conservative, a little bit worrying. And we're just saying to it, we're not ignoring you, we're gonna come back to you later on. So I take note of each worry as it comes up and I commit to coming back to it at a given point in time. I set my alarm and my alarm goes off, and I have my 10 minutes to do it. I suggest to people 10 minutes and perhaps no longer. When we get to that time, we prioritize the worries and we allocate time appropriately, ensuring that we finish up after 10 or 15 minutes. Otherwise, we're still worrying as much. It's still taking as much away from our lives, and the strategy is not really changing that. We want to reduce the amount of time we spend worrying. Why do we do that if we're just postponing and putting it off? Because it means that I can engage with the people that I'm with when the worries come up during the day. It means that I can better engage with the work that I'm doing, or just being mindful of my daily life. So the quick summary for a postponement is just I track my worries as I go through the day. And when I notice that I'm worrying, I note them down on a list in my app. Some people might do it just internally, and then I do my best to let that worry go. We're not going to be perfect at it, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be. But if I gain an extra hour and a half of not worrying, where previously I would worry for four and a half hours of my day, now I'm only worrying for three, that's a win. That's an hour and a half I have back to focus on the things that bring value into my life. So I've said it before, and I'll say it again, and that is the disorder that we diagnose is not central to our characteristics as neurodivergent people or authority HD is. The disorder when we diagnose autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder is a conflict or a mismatch between the characteristics that I have and those that the environment requires in a typical world. The world is built by the people in the world. And so most of the systems within that world are going to cater to the majority, which means that it doesn't necessarily cater to some of our characteristics. Why does that matter? Because if we change either the environment we're in or our expectations of ourselves in the environment, we can change whether or not disorder uh is experienced. How can we do that? So many of you will have uh will already understand the notion of environmental accommodations and make uh if I if I have impairment in my eyes, like difficulty seeing, one accommodation that I can make for myself is to have a walking stick that in front of me lets me know if my path's blocked. That's a change in my context in my environment that compensates for my difference in sight. I can do the same in the workplace. If my working memory as an ADHD is a bit impaired andor perhaps overloaded, I can have my instructions given in a written form, not verbally. Uh I try to give all of the important instructions that I need to give in a workplace by email. That way people can refer back to it. And I can't forget that I've given that instruction. And I did the same in the Navy. I gave all direction primarily in written form as well as verbal form, but the differences in the way people process information. I process information really well conversationally, not so well by reading it. We can ask people to break things down into chunks for us so that we're not trying to process big chunks of information, we're processing smaller chunks, and that can compensate for both uh differences in working memory. And if we have a slower processing speed or a mind that's processing a lot more information than the average person, so the new information coming in, I've got less to process there or less capacity to process there, then I can have information given in smaller chunks that accommodate for the way my mind works. I can be given, if I'm a student, a bit of extra time on tests because I process information at a different rate. Now I hasten to point out slower than average processing speed is not central to neurodivergence. Often differences in processing speed are, and I know personally my mind processes information really, really quickly. And I point this out because that's one of the strengths that I have that's born out of my neurodivergence. And our characteristics are differences, not inherent defects. So me being neurodivergent comes with probably a smaller capacity for working memory than my other skills, but a much greater capacity for processing information quickly. If I do process slower, I can ask teachers to slow down. I can ask managers to give me information in a more staggered way. I can ask for extra time on exams or for task completion. What else do I have on my notes here? Oh, I'm so glad I asked. So with our cognitive differences, especially those of working memory and processing speed, despite the fact that you can see all the clutter behind me, one of the things that I think is really important is clearing up visual clutter. The more visual clutter I have in an environment where I need to maintain attention or I need to process information, the more visual input I have coming in. And so the more my brain is dealing with just as a baseline. So in workspaces or spaces where I have to do important things with my mind, important thinking, learning, work, etc., I recommend clearing up as much of the visual clutter as we can, having nice clear desks, clear benches, or having visual clutter, visual distractions out of my field of view. For anyone who has worked with me, some people may remember that I used to have a large TV as my second monitor. The problem with that was I sat further back from my screen. So my range of vision included more, including I have a lovely window behind the camera that looks out across a park and towards the bay here in Melbourne. And that was all a part of my eyeline, part of my visual field. So I was often distracted from my work. So I have, and let's see if I can show it here. I have shifted to just, for those of us on video, I've just shifted to a couple of monitors. So I sit much closer to my monitors and I have less visual field to be distracted by. That's just me making an environmental change that helps manage my distractability, likely because my working memory has less space than I would like. And so the more things that I have tying up that working memory or that capacity to process information, the more likely I am to have difficulty staying on task. So, and just with that working memory, when we're giving instructions to employees or to our clients if we're therapists or to our students, we want to keep them as clear and succinct as possible. We want to keep them simple and where possible, scaffolded. So starting with a baseline level and then building on that so it's easier for people to network into memory. Another thing that we often see, and I don't think I touched on it in the first part of our executive functioning and daily life episodes, but another thing that we often experience with being neurodivergent is differences with our interactions with time. So for all my time in the Navy, I had this uh theory that I didn't count time at sea or what time when I was away from Australia, because my friends would say to me, Oh, do you remember when we did that thing? And I would experience it internally as having happened a year ago or two years ago. And my friends would remind me that no, that actually happened five years ago or eight years ago. And so the most logical thing for me was, oh, I mustn't count time when I'm not in Australia. But actually later I found out that's a really common experience for many neurodivergent people. We don't track time, we don't experience time in the same way that other people do. So when we hyperfixate on something, we don't notice the passage of time. Or when we're really not interested, when our attention is not anchored on a topic or a thing that we're doing, time can really drag out. But there are ways to manage that. One of the ones that I particularly love for if I'm doing the thing that is not inherently interesting or an inherently an intentional anchor for me, I love methods like the Pomodoro method or my version of it. I don't use the standard version because that's not right for my brain. For me, about uh a timer that goes off in 20 minutes, so 20 minutes of work, I know that there's a time frame that I'm working to, and that brings in some challenge. And then I have a little break, a little bit of mental downtime for three minutes. What that does is I've got set time boundaries. I've got an external reminder when the bell goes off that says, oh, that's the end of my work time. I'm not setting myself an unrealistic expectation of working for five hours. I'm like 20 minutes of work and then a quick break. Um, and then I'm having a bit of mental downtime to refresh. When my three-minute timer goes off, I reset it for 20 minutes and I go back in. So that's one way of managing that time blindness and bringing in a little bit of challenge for me to pay attention to things that aren't inherently interesting to me. Another thing is just having timers more broadly. If I'm doing something really interesting and I know that as an ADHD, my self-monitoring is not amazing, or as a neurodivergent person, my self-monitoring is not at the level that the average person's is. I'm not going to notice that I've hyperfixed and gone on three tangents while I've been reading the thing. But if I set an alarm and it goes off every hour, I can check in with myself with that alarm. Or I use uh an app, I don't get paid for these product placements. I say it because it's the one that I use. I use an app called Calm, primarily because I really like the person's voice who does the mindfulness, guided mindfulness, excuse me. But in the space of self-monitoring and time, what I do is they have an untimed meditation, and you can set how regularly the times or the bells go off in that. And I'll have it, depending on how how attendee or how focused I'm feeling that day, I'll have the bells go off anywhere from every five minutes, just as a little reminder to keep myself on track, um, to every one minute if I've had a poor night's sleep or if I'm feeling a little under the weather. And that's just a little reminder for me. Every time the bell goes off, I think, what am I meant to be doing? I look at my to-do list, which I have written up in front of me. Okay, I'm meant to be writing a letter back to a GP for somebody. What was I actually doing? I was thinking about adjusting my plans. Actual happens. And that's my little my little chime is the trigger to bring me back on track. So with uh that externalizing time is what we're doing there. That also lets me know. And again, for those of you on video, I've actually got a little timer here that I'm just showing to the camera. As I turn the timer around, it shows a little rainbow. And then as it gets down, the rainbow gets smaller and smaller, and when it finishes, it doesn't make a noise, it flashes at me. So it's really good for people who don't like sudden unexpected noises. And it also gives us something to look at so we can visually glance and see exactly how long we've got left or get an impression of that. That means that I'm always aware, because that sits in my field of view. I'm always aware of how much time I have left, for example, to finish recording a podcast today. So externalizing time is really helpful. Let's do this without even realizing it in our lives. When we have friends or partners that keep us on track. Hey, come on, we've got to have a shower and get ready to go to the thing. Um, or a quick text message, hey, I'll be there in an hour and then we can go out for dinner. We just inherently do these things. But when we recognize that and then apply it in a different way, we can optimize other areas of our lives. So I've just spoken about using timers and I've just spoken about using a visual timing aid. Another thing we can do is just set reminders and um schedules. We can tap into some of our autistic characteristics where we like the rules, set a schedule, use timers and reminders for us to move on to the thing. Having those visually displayed can be really helpful also. So having my daily or weekly plan sitting on the wall in front of me lets me know what I've got, when I've got it, when it's going to happen, and when I need to start that sort of mental transition. I'll come back to mental transitioning. So we call it time blindness, and this helps us manage our time blindness. Looking at my notes, why is that helpful? Because a lot of the anxiety that we have are around being able to do things often is due to that time blindness. I don't realize that I'm running out of time, or I think I've got all the time in the world to complete the assignment that tiles the report. And then suddenly, because I don't track time in the same way that everybody else does, and that influences my ability to organize and plan, suddenly it's two days before the big assignment is due for my course, and I haven't started it because I kept thinking to myself, I've got that in a month, three weeks, two weeks, a week, ah, ages. And then suddenly it's due, and I'm in crisis. I am anxious, I'm trying to get the thing done. And when that happens across the course of our lives, we start to get in many cases, and I hear this a lot. One of them is I can't get it started until it's the last minute, because we just start to believe that that's the way, the only way we can get things done. Pardon me. And two, the other is the other end of that spectrum, and that's oh no, it's okay, I can always get it done at the last minute. And that reinforces the difficulties with time management because I have that belief that I can get it done at the last minute. So not only do I not track time, I also, when I think to myself, oh, I should get that started, I have this belief, oh, that's fine, I'll get it done at the last minute, like I always have. And I certainly fell victim to this while I was studying. So one of the things that uh I don't know whether I've touched on in the past or not is the idea of body doubling. Sometimes, regardless of our neurodivergent characteristics, or some of our neurodivergent characteristics, we can manage them by doing things with other people, either in person or online, by body doubling. So body doubling taps into social accountability, which arguably we could say taps into the way we as a species of mammals have survived. We've survived by fitting in with the group around us and not being, you know, the person, the animal picked off by the lion who's on the edge. What does that mean? It means that when we're around other people, we want to fit in. So if we put ourselves around other people who are working, we're more likely to be able to pay attention to the thing. If we tell other people, I'm going to do this, X, Y, and Z, that gives us external accountability and that helps us achieve those things. You know, I'll use the example of my own master's thesis. I was diagnosed with ADHD a few weeks before I completed my master's program. It may have been a month or two. I can't recall now because ADHD. But I had inherently learnt the strategy of setting unrealistic timelines for myself to manage my time blindness. And so I said to my research supervisor, um, I gave a ridiculous timeline. I can't recall what it was. It might have been that I'd have my first draft ready two or three months before it was due. And I failed to meet that timeline. Um, but I didn't beat myself up too much about it because I knew it was still ridiculously early. I think I got it in a month later, so still very early. I got feedback, I incorporated that feedback, and the 47-year-old ADHD submitted their master's thesis, I think, two or three weeks early, which is unheard of for me. I think the best slash worst I ever did for an assignment was it was due at midnight, and I submitted it three minutes to midnight. So for me to be able to submit a master's thesis three weeks early by rolling in social accountability or body doubling was amazing. And that was simply, I knew that somebody else was expecting the thing at that time. And even though I knew that they knew that that was really early and wouldn't mind, it was just an extra motivator for me to get that work done. So external accountability can work in so many different ways. We do it with physical trainers. If we want to get better, we go and have them encourage us. We can do it by coming along and seeing a therapist who could not only guide us, but also Also be that external accountability. For the clinicians listening, for a lot of neurodivergent people, that can also be a fine balance to walk because a lot of neurodivergent people have it's often referred to as a PDA profile. I particularly like the language a primary drive for authority autonomy, primary drive for autonomy. And that is we resist being told what to do. Great example of that for me. If you ask me, oh, do you want to go roller skating impulsively last minute? I'll be like, yeah, that's fantastic. If you tell me we have to go roller skating, I will have a very different experience on the same day when I'm doing the same things. So as clinicians, we want to really be careful about the boundaries we put on some neurodivergent people, because if I struggle with being told what to do because of the experiences that I've had, the minority stresses of being a neurodivergent person, CBT homework can be a bit too much of a demand. And we need to really balance whether or not that's actually helpful for this person in their context or whether it's pushing that person away from engagement in therapy. So that was a side dark quest, and I will bring myself back on track. Body doubling and external accountability. So we can do it in many ways. We can do it by setting goals and having other people involved. I use my research supervisor. We can use partners, friends, classmates. It's anyone who is happy to be helpful in that way, and someone who's a positive or a helpful person to be the reminder. Obviously, we can engage in coaching, therapy, and professional supports to manage our executive and function differences. And often our therapists and our coaches can assist with environmental accommodations in other areas of life. Often we can actually write a letter to your workplace or your school stating the impact of your differences and how they can benefit you or how you can be benefited by simple and reasonable workplace accommodations, a place where you can work without noise, without bright lights, if that's one of your sensory differences. Coaching and therapeutic intervention, the behavioral change and the self-concept change, management of our executive functioning, cognitive functioning, and broadly neurodivergent differences, they can be really helpful for many people. And I strongly suggest if you haven't already, just have a little look and see if there are good therapists or coaches in your area. What else do I have on my note here? I guess with the external accountability and rolling into our time blindness and time difficulties, having a really good structured routine can help with that. As an ADHD, I'm not really good at motivating myself for different things. But if I've got a nice structure in place, my autism is like, well, this is the way this flows. I guess for a lot of Audi HDs, our problem is to put those routines in place can be really, really hard because it's a lot of new things. We might say, Oh, I'm going to structure my day by half hour. And if it's too big a change, it can be too overwhelming for us in the context of not being able to enact change in our lives in the past. So I would suggest uh CBT for ADHD. Thank you, Mary Salantou. And the mantra, if you're having trouble getting started, the first step is to be. So what we want to do is break it down and make small changes, consolidate those. Often we don't remember to do the change. So I may have used this example in the past. When I'm making change, I innately do what I now know is called habit stacking. And that is, I pick a habit that I already do, whether it's rolling out of bed, whether it's having my morning coffee, or my third morning coffee, or my anyway, and then I attach the new thing to that. So I'll use the example of walking my dog. I have a gorgeous dog, Yoda, and he is nearly 16 now, but he's always been quite high energy, loves a walk, and obviously needs a weed first thing in the morning. I struggle to motivate myself first thing in the morning before I've had a shower, 15 coffees, and my breakfast. But he needs to go to the bathroom regardless. So I haven't stacked taking him for a walk onto waking up and getting out of bed. And my routine there is my eyes open or my alarm goes off, my eyes open, I roll out of bed, I basically throw yesterday's clothes on, and we go straight out for a walk. So he gets a walk first thing in the morning in a wee break. Because I've been doing that so long, I've attached it to something that's just a part of my daily routine. It was easier for me to start the new routine of early morning walk. And once I'd done it for a little while, I no longer had to think about it. I had stacked a new habit on top of an old habit. And so the motivational difficulties that we often have doing things like going for a walk festing in the morning, that evaporates because there is no cognitive function required for me. I'm rolling out of bed into my standing routine, then I come back, make a coffee, start my day. So having a routine and trying to build that routine gradually or as gradually as needed for you, because your experience will be different to mine and different to your best neurodivergent friends. Building it at the rate that's right for you and habit stacking can really help us both manage our time because I'm just doing the things automatically, so I don't need to go into crisis when I realize I haven't done them earlier. But also, we've got those routines, um, we've got that sort of external accountability of knowing what our routines are. Have we done them? Pardon me, in that case, we could even argue that a little bit of body doubling came into play because there's yoda there, and I know Yoda relies on me. So that helps me be able to get out and take myself for a walk every morning, which improves my physical health and well-being. Now I'm just having a quick look at the time, and I should probably wind up fairly shortly, but what I do want to do is just touch in about self-concept, emotional regulation, and stress regulation. So I may have touched on it in the past, or I may have touched on it in therapy with somebody recently. Um, our emotional experience impacts our cognitive functioning and vice versa. If I have a limited impulse control, my emotions get big. I have limited capacity to control those impulsive emotions and the impulses behaviorally that come out of those. But also, my cognitive function influences my emotions. If I am attending to the thing that's really interesting and you're being cruel to me, I'm not going to notice it. So I'm not going to have an emotional response to that. Why does that matter? Because they influence one another, and that's really powerful to know. My history of experience that I have noticed is likely to influence the idea that I have of myself, my self-concept, who and what I believe I am, and my self-esteem. How worthy do I believe I am compared to other people, compared to the benchmarks that I set for myself? And that influences the things that I say to myself. If I've had a lot of experiences of failing tests, my internalized narrative is probably that I'm an academic failure. Then when I go to do something academic, write a research article, start a new course, I'm probably going to experience anxiety. If I'm already distractable because I'm an ADHD and all of the things are pretty and interesting, and I overlay anxiety, which is an inherent distraction and motivator, I'm more likely to bounce from idea to idea because I'm anxious, have difficulty doing that academic thing, learning the new information, which increases my anxiety, feeds back into my narrative of, oh, another thing that I failed. Look, I can't pass academic things. And so my self-concept, my history, my internalized narrative, and my emotions are all interlinked. And if that's the case, then my cognitive differences are going to be amplified or reduced. If I use a breathing technique, mindfulness to downregulate my anxiety, that's going to improve my ability to control and apply my executive function, which changes my experience and that internal narrative that I have. Instead of my old narrative, I failed year 12 twice, I can't study. I then studied and learned something new. And now my internal narrative about learning is I used to not have the skills to learn with my brain. Now I understand my brain. I'm able to apply it and achieve more than I ever thought I could. I've learned that that narrative that I had that led to anxiety. That anxiety led to me avoiding actually studying at university for decades, was incorrect. Now I have an updated narrative. I engage much more in the things that are aligned with my values and the goals that I set for myself in service to community, in trying to improve the lives or contribute to improving the lives of other people and leveraging that privilege that I do have. So I guess the final note there is if we can address some of our difficulties, we can change our internal narratives about ourselves and we can actually positively impact the way our neurodivergent characteristics express in our world. And when we do that, we can actually really live the fact that we are different and not effective. Well, thank you very much, everyone. I've enjoyed my little monologue this morning. And what's my timer telling me? 35 minutes. I think I did reasonably well. Um, if you have any questions or comments, please comment on your streaming platform or ask us a question via DM on Instagram or any of our contact details. We really look forward to hearing from you. And please do like, follow, subscribe, share our information because the purpose of this podcast is just to get the information out that we are different, not defective. We are humans who have strengths, weaknesses, and neutral expressions of our characteristics. And that's not good or bad. It simply is. We're humans, we're valid, and we're worth it. Thank you so much, friends. I will chat to you next time and have a lovely day, week, month, year.