The Unregulated Brain with Matt Raekelboom

Oct 24

Join Pete and Nikki as they welcome ADHD influencer and educator, Matt Raekelboom, back to the show! Matt's known for his videos on ADHD behaviors and neuroscience-backed tips, and today he's diving deep into the unregulated ADHD brain.

Ever feel like your brain's a runaway train? Matt breaks down what that experience really feels like and how it impacts everything from emotional regulation to executive function. He shares his personal journey, highlighting the profound difference between an unregulated and regulated brain and how simple lifestyle changes can lead to extraordinary results.

No, it's not about becoming an Olympian (unless you want to!), it's about finding the power to "do the thing," no matter how small. Matt, Pete, and Nikki explore the hidden costs of an unregulated brain, the myths surrounding self-care, and the importance of understanding the "why" behind healthy habits. Get ready for a dose of real talk, actionable advice, and a whole lotta hope!

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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on True Story FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Hi, Nikki Kinzer. How are you?
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm doing great. How are you?
Pete Wright:
Feeling good, feeling very strong. I'm very excited about our guest today because I hope just a lot of his online mojo just rubs off on me today. I just need some juice. I need some juice from our guest today. I'm excited about it.
Before we introduce him and talk about the unregulated ADHD brain, we head over to Take Control ADHD and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to us and our mailing list, and we'll send you a new episode each time it releases. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD, but to really connect with us, come hang out in Discord with us y'all, water is warm. Discord is super easy to jump in and connect with the community, and it's a community that's just focused on ADHD. Really, really great. Takecontroladhd.com/discord. That'll get you over to the general invitation. You can come in and hang out in our public channels.
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Okay, here we go. This is it. This is the big show, the really big show. Matt Raekelboom is an internationally known keynote speaker, influencer, and educator known for his videos on the behaviors of those with ADHD and neuroscience-backed tips on how to thrive with an ADHD brain. Matt has a personal mission to change the world's views on ADHD and the extraordinary minds associated, and he's back with us today to talk about the unregulated ADHD brain. Matt Raekelboom, welcome back to the show.
Matt Raekelboom:
Thank you so much, Pete and Nikki. I'm so excited to be here. It's so great to see you guys again.
Nikki Kinzer:
Great to see you.
Pete Wright:
It's great to see you, and I want to start with a question that I think the internet has been wondering about you. When I saw the headshot that you submitted for this show, I thought, "Damn, is he fronting Coldplay all the sudden? That dude is in a field of gold and staring longingly off into the middle distance." So handsome Raekelboom. What are you doing right now? You win the internet.
Nikki Kinzer:
You win the internet. You win.
Matt Raekelboom:
I don't know what to say.
Pete Wright:
There's nothing. We're all just starstruck by that awesome headshot, best headshot anybody has ever submitted. You win the headshot battle. Didn't even know there was one until you won it.
Matt Raekelboom:
Thank you so much.
Pete Wright:
You posted a delightful thing this morning on Instagram that you were coming here to talk about things you're really excited about. And jumping into our outline, talking about this unregulated ADHD brain experience, talk to us a little bit about what that means. Paint a picture. What is an unregulated ADHD brain feel like for you?
Matt Raekelboom:
Well, there's so much talk around the ADHD brain that I find is so based around the unregulated ADHD brain that everybody thinks that that's just what we are. When we talk about the rejection sensitivity, when we talk about the paralysis, the executive functioning skills that we lack in our day-to-day lives, a lot of the times this happens from realistically not having those neurochemicals inside of our brain that are controlling our concentration, our motivation, and our pleasure. These things are unbelievably important and something that's so well known in the ADHD world today amongst those that are reading the current books and not those that are reading the books from let's say the '90s, the '80s, things like that, is that the ADHD brain is very possible to become regulated. It's very, very possible to omit out things like concentration, motivation, and pleasure, which are obviously going to be things that I'm going to talk about many times and I'm going to repeat that multiple times over this podcast.
Because of these things, a lot of us feel like we're stuck. We feel like we're broken. We feel like we're not allowed to have those kinds of feelings where we're allowed to feel motivated and excited about our entire lives. And I always think back to this from when I was a child, when my parents would look at me and they go, "He has anger issues, he has concentration issues. He will explode at any moment," and I look back to that moment-
Pete Wright:
Right, and define that lesson. Define that lesson. What did you learn as a child about your brain from the adults around you?
Matt Raekelboom:
Oh, it's my favorite thing is to psychoanalyze myself because when I look back on my old self, I was told all of these things about myself, but I also had two bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast every single morning.
Pete Wright:
As you do, Cinnamon Toast Crunch number one.
Matt Raekelboom:
Yeah, amazing. I had an unholy amount of medication that I was on as a pre-teen, like it was nuts. I was on, we said this in the last podcast that we were into, I'm not going to get too much into it in this one, but I was on over double the legal limits of Adderall at the time. It was unbelievable the things that it did to me, not to mention my lunch usually consisted of spaghetti, chicken fingers, the generics. But we got to understand that when you create a healthy brain, you create a healthy mind.
And while this is true for everybody, this is not an ADHD exclusive thing, I think it's so unbelievably important for the ADHD brain because when we get a healthy brain, all of a sudden rejection and sensitivity actually becomes simpler to process in our brains. Our emotional dysregulation issues become simpler. And I'm not trying to say that these things are easy and that they just don't exist anymore, but they do become more simple. We actually feel a little bit less of that all or nothing, and we feel a little bit of that 20, the 30, the 50, the different percentages of strength, adequate, everything like that for us.
And that has been what I've dedicated my research, my speaking to for a very long time now is just optimizing the ADHD brain. While we all look at coping mechanisms, I find that very few of us are actually focusing on what water does for you, what having very, very good amounts of healthy protein and fiber in your stomach consistently regulating does for you, what a good amount of movement, not exercise, movement does for the ADHD brain. And this creates someone that I don't even want to say something as generic as we're allowed to go outside and we're now typical and allowed to interact with others. I think it makes us extraordinary. When you have a brain that thinks as fast as we do, when we have the creativity skills that we do, when we have the coping skills that we do, when we're in a regulated brain, there is nothing ordinary about us. We become the extraordinary Michael Phelps, Paris Hilton, Adam Levine, Warren Buffett, Gary Vee, unbelievable names that have ADHD. These are people that are regulating their brains, they're finding their thing and they're doing it. And there's unbelievable amounts of people out there showing that this is real.
Pete Wright:
Okay. I would push back on unbelievable amounts. I think there are celebrities, but I think I can imagine sitting in the audience of this very show and hearing this and saying, "Okay, but the messages that I'm getting on social media are also incredibly varied."
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
And it's so noisy about it because what you've done, first of all, one thing I love, healthy brain, healthy mind. That challenges the healthy body, healthy mind trope, and I think for ADHDers, it works really, really well. It certainly connects for me, right, that sure, a healthy brain is an avatar for a healthy body, but the truth of the matter is separating brain mind as a processing function of the organic matter that is the brain is pitch perfect. I love it.
But getting to the healthy body thing is as confusing as figuring out the right resources for my ADHD right now. I know consciously or subconsciously that probably Cinnamon Toast Crunch is not a great way to start my day, but it is easy and it gives me one less thing to think about when I'm starting my ADHD morning. That is a cognitive dissonance, and I'm curious what your research and what you're seeing in your community, how you address that cognitive dissonance for people.
Matt Raekelboom:
Right. So one thing that is very apparent that a lot of people don't realize the severity of is 86% of our neurotransmitters are derived from our gut health. Now, this is not me saying when I say a healthy body, I think that the miscommunication that a lot of people see is when I say a healthy body, I'm not talking about a six pack. I'm not talking about-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you're not talking physique. Right, right.
Matt Raekelboom:
No, no. And that's where a lot of us go to. Same thing with movement. The amount of people that go that, "I don't have time go to the gym for an hour and a half every day."
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. I noticed when you said that, and I love that because it wasn't just about exercise, it's about movement, and I think that's really important.
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely, it's about physical strain on the body. Science has proven time and time again that something as simple as scratching your hand has the ability to create dopamine inside of the brain. That's how simplistic physical strain on the body can be. Now, that being said, for all listeners, do not try and scratch your hand into a healthy brain. That is going to take forever, you're going to have a big old welt on your hand. That part's not [inaudible 00:10:09]. But to understand that that is the basis for what we need to go to. We don't need to clean and jerk 280 pounds in order to be happy in life. You need to find the ways to pull on your arms to stand, to sing, to move, to optimize your ADHD brain because I think that there is a massive benefit to this that a lot of us are forgetting about because we all think that's too simple.
In our incredibly fast-paced minds, a lot of us just become uncomfortable with the ideas of doing the simple things because we think it's not enough. Most of our lives are not enough. It's so frustrating, and that is one of the areas that could help tremendously.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. And Matt, what I love about what you're saying too is it's more than just strategies and tips and tricks. We're going back to the how do you take care of you as a whole person, and that starts with your health, your mind, and all of these things that you're saying.
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's really important, yeah.
Pete Wright:
As much as we ... Before we get into a few more of the talking specifically about what the reaping of the regulated brain, let's talk about the cost of the unregulated ADHD brain. So when you're looking at consequences, we have to talk beyond just sacrificing productivity and success. We know what not being productive looks like. What do you see in terms of the knock on consequences, the things that we ADHDers might not be recognizing is happening to us, but really might be taking an additional toll?
Matt Raekelboom:
Right. So there's something incredibly aggressive to be said about the differences between the regulated and the unregulated brain. And if I may, I'd like to start off with a little bit of a story behind this.
Pete Wright:
Of course.
Matt Raekelboom:
I come from-
Pete Wright:
Let me get my blanket.
Matt Raekelboom:
I come from a bad background and by bad, I don't necessarily mean because of my family or because of who did things to me, but I will say that I got into drugs at an early age. I got into heavy amounts of drinking at an early age. I got into McDonald's at an early age. And these things became the regulating coping mechanisms that I used throughout my life. And I will tell you that more than anything else, we will talk about ADHD specifically, but when I wasn't taking care of myself, especially with this brain that relied so much on getting some proper gas for my vehicle so then that way it can drive properly, I thought suicidal thoughts much more than ever compared to now.
I thought about hatred-based thoughts. I thought negativity. I thought that everything was hard, everything was not for me. Life was happening to me, not for me. I was willing to think about, "Oh, screw this guy. He's offering me something. He's obviously planning on getting my email and spamming me and trying to steal my credit cards at the end of this. You don't look at life with the glass half full mentality, you look at it as the glass half empty. And looking back on who I used to be compared to who I am now and the difference is, I'm not trying to make this sound simple, but I just want to talk about the main most biggest changes in my lives so that I go for a walk now, I drink some water, I regulate my brain any way that I can. I took a blood test, I took a genetic methylation test. I found out what my body and brain were low in, and I figured out how to regulate those things.
And I will tell you that I wake up and I see sunshine even in the clouds. I wake up with happiness on my face, my entire face, if anybody goes onto my Instagram account, you can look back as to what I used to look like. I find that my entire face changed shape when I started just looking at the positives. I find that my mind started being able to remember things that I couldn't remember before. I stopped going to those negative places so unbelievably fast. And something that I found with my own personal clients and people that I've worked with for years now, one of my favorite compliments that I always get from my clients, and I don't know, I'm sure that you guys can relate to a degree, my clients would always say, "I've been working with you for a year now, and I love it with all my heart. And whenever people say, 'What do you work with Matt on when you work with him for a year?' And they go, 'I don't really know.'"
Nikki Kinzer:
"But it feels really good."
Matt Raekelboom:
Exactly. The reason being is I believe that at the end of the day, we could talk neuroscience, we could talk behavioral therapy, we could talk about all of these amazing things, but if you have somebody that just hangs out with you on a weekly basis and goes, "Did you have a good week? Did you have a bad week? Why?" And when somebody says, "Well, I didn't drink a lot of water this week and I ate a bunch of ice cream and I watched a bunch of Netflix and I didn't go outside and I got into a big fight with my partner and all this kind of stuff." And then you say, "Well, how was the week?" "It was bad."
And then when you look at the people that are like, "Okay, so I did what you said and I drank two liters of water today and I ate some good protein and fiber with every single meal that I had, and I made sure to get some sunshine in my eyes the second I woke up in the morning." "Okay, how was your week?" "Amazing. It was great." And you know what I hear consistently from my clients is they always go, "Thank God I took care of myself because I had a tough week." And then I always say, "You know, you had the same tough weeks even when you weren't taking care of yourself. The difference is you really notice how well you're handling things now."
When you regulate a brain, zero to 100 is not what's going on. When you regulate a brain, emotional dysregulation is not what's happening. Executive functioning skills, of course, are always going to vary. Of course, the paralysis has the ability to set in. We are not talking about cures here, but we are talking about management of something that when managed can perform astronomically better. I'd just like to make a very, very simple correction really quick Pete with what you said. When I talk about extraordinary minds, in my mind, I don't think about extraordinary as you're going to become an Olympian or you're going to become an amazing rapper or artist or millionaire, billionaire, whatever these things are. I think extraordinary is doing the thing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Matt Raekelboom:
I think extraordinary is going, "I want to lose some weight," and you can start losing weight. I think that extraordinary is, "I want to open a book and read something new," and you open that book and start read something new. I think in the world that we live in today, it's not the ADHDers that are struggling. It's all of us. Now, we all have individual struggles of course, but if you can do the thing that everybody says they're doing and is definitely not doing, I just straight up told you guys right before this podcast started, I have a book, I haven't even started reading it yet. I'm looking at it right now. It's there. It's beside my desk, and if I open that book today, I will tell you that I'm doing something extraordinary because it's not ordinary to me anymore. If I haven't read a book in a month and I read a book today, that's an extraordinary feat for me, and I love regulating the brain that way.
Pete Wright:
I think that's an absolutely fair assessment, and I think it gets to those with that silent struggle, right? And we talk about this all the time. When you get a diagnosis and you figure out what your brain is doing, whether it's ADHD or autism or OCD or whatever you're living with, whatever your thing is, and your world doesn't open up for you the way you thought that having a diagnosis and having words now to describe what it is that you're living with, it becomes that sort of silent struggle, that thing that now feels maybe even more impossible to unlock.
Matt Raekelboom:
Yep.
Pete Wright:
Right?
Matt Raekelboom:
I don't know the exact statistic, but if you guys have ever heard this before, I believe it's over 50% of people that got autism diagnosis, diagnoses-
Pete Wright:
We're going to leave it at, that all stays in.
Matt Raekelboom:
When they get an autism diagnosis, they actually experience more symptomatic traits of autism, not less, and there's something incredibly important to understand. This isn't an autism thing. This is everybody in the world. If you pay attention to why you're sad, you're going to notice that you are more sad. It's that color theory where if you look around your home right now for the color green, you're eventually going to find the color green no matter what because that's what you're looking for. But if the side note was you were supposed to be looking for brown and you didn't know that, you can't recall how many brown things you saw when you were looking for green.
Pete Wright:
This is why punch buggy works, right?
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely, yeah.
Pete Wright:
This is the same. It's the same thing. I didn't have a sibling [inaudible 00:18:27]. Yeah, no, I didn't have a sibling, so I just punch myself in the back of the car and punch buggy slug, I'm a very dark child. Sorry, Nikki. What were you going to say?
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't know what that is. What is punch buggy?
Pete Wright:
Really?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, is it when you see a slug bug?
Pete Wright:
Yes, slug bug. That's another word for it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay. My kids used to play that all the time. All right. Unfortunately.
Pete Wright:
You didn't play that? You have a sibling.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. Oh, I know, but she was four and a half years older than me, and that wasn't a thing.
Pete Wright:
Just means she punches harder.
Matt Raekelboom:
Yeah, my siblings are 10 years older than me, just the bruises were darker.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, no, that didn't happen in our childhood, but it did happen in my kids. And my daughter unfortunately got more of the brunt of it than my son did.
Pete Wright:
Again, younger. Okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
All right, so bringing us back around to the silent struggle, right, it really feels like there's a second stage of awakening that if it isn't natural to you already has to come next, which is the now I know I have ADHD and also the best things that I can do for my ADHD might actually not be in my brain at all. They might be in my body. I have to convince myself that like slug bug, I do have enough available resources to be able to start taking care of myself. I can take a walk and I don't need new dumbbells, barbells, whatever, to actually do the things that are good for me.
Matt Raekelboom:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Where do you start debunking myths like that in a way that connects with people? What sort of success have you had?
Matt Raekelboom:
In my personal opinion, I think the power of why is the most unbelievable tool that anybody can understand. If you want to know why you feel a way, the research is done that. It has been talked about on a podcast, it has a YouTube video. It has something going on because we're talking about genuine general brain nutrition when we're talking about this. You can use ChatGPT for something as simple as this, and I'm not trying to make people think, "Oh God, he's just going to start talking about ChatGPT." But if you're talking about what are the mental health benefits of drinking water, instead of just sitting there and going, "Everyone tells me to drink water and I don't know why and it doesn't taste that great," it's like, "Well, why does everybody want me to?"
Because when you find out that water has the ability to clear up your cloudy brain, it has the ability to make you fall asleep better, it has the ability to make you wake up earlier in the morning, has the ability to clean up your skin, make you more hungry, make you digest your food better, all of a sudden the taste of it becomes less important and you go, "Man, if I'm going to be sad, I might as well be sad and hydrated."
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Matt Raekelboom:
When we understand the why's behind things, even when we feel bad, we know what to do next. And this is where I actually think that especially in the ADHD industry, I feel like we skip over that step and we tell people to recognize their emotions and to feel okay. But instead of just telling somebody to stop having so much pressure on yourselves, instead look at the ways that you can create less pressure on yourselves. What does 10 minutes of stretching do? You don't even have to stand up to do that. And these things can alleviate up to 33% of your overall cortisol levels. That's insane. That's insane that we're not doing that. Have you ever seen what two minutes of heavy breathing does for your brain and body? It's unbelievable.
And this is something that I find is so overlooked is for those that can't get off the couch don't, but look it up when you're curious about something. Something that I always love giving people as an anecdotal kind of thing, imagine if being hungry was not known as to why that is. If you started to feel uncomfortable, you started lashing out, your stomach was gurgling, you might think you're dying. Imagine if you had access to the internet and they say, "Whenever you feel those feelings of your stomach is empty and you don't know what to do, that means that you have depression. That means that you're just a crappy human being," and I'm sorry to use more aggressive language. Imagine if the internet and Twitter and whatever source, because there's too much information out there, way more misinformation, think about the sad culture that is out there of people that genuinely brag about how sad they are. They talk about when their stomach is empty, that's just them being not as good as everybody else.
But imagine if some prince came along, imagine if there was some unbelievable person who came up and they said, "Put some toast in your mouth and you'll feel okay." Now all of a sudden when you're hungry, what happens next? You're willing to go get some toast no matter how hungry. In fact, if anything, you're more influenced to do something like this.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because you know you're going to feel better.
Matt Raekelboom:
And that's where I think the regulation ... Absolutely.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Raekelboom:
This is where I think that just simple reading can do unbelievable things for yourself. There are simple things. I have this little product that I created a little while ago for only $10 on all my platforms, and it's called Choose Your Character. And what I did is I used neuroscience back tips to show people how to get into certain moods. I teach them how to become playful, how to remember more, how to wake up easier, and it's literally, I have in little point form things, drink some water, sing to three different songs, pull on your arms for five minutes. And then if you want to, I have a separate sheet that goes into heavy detail as to why you should be doing these things and how it's getting you into that proper mindset.
The brain, it's a game. In my mind, this is all a game, and since I opened my mind to this, it's a game that can be won. It's a game that is understood. Your brain ... Sorry, I could see that you want to say something. Just kidding.
Pete Wright:
No. Yeah, I do. Finish your thought because I'm very curious.
Matt Raekelboom:
I gave a speech at Harvard University a little while ago and it was one of the heights of my career. It was amazing, and the thing that stood out to all of them the most and something that they pointed out to me is I said, "When you are depressed, when you are anxious, when you are uncomfortable, when you're not feeling your best today, when you're not remembering things, the answer is not because you suck."
And that's the thing that I think many of us forget about. When you have a rejection-sensitive-based mind, when you have an overthinking-based mind, many of us just go to, "I suck more than most." And what all neurobiology, positive psychology, everything that we know about the brain is that you're just wrong. That there is something that can be helped. There is more that you can be doing. And the fact that we are just thinking, "I suck so there's no point in even figuring out what that thing is," is only a disservice to yourself and you have no idea the potential that you are neglecting in yourself, the "extraordinary" side to yourself that you are just letting go just because you're not willing to look it up because everyone told you you suck so you probably are.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm so inspired by listening to you. I just.
Matt Raekelboom:
Oh, thank you.
Pete Wright:
It's one of those things. This is why I like having you on the show because you're a fount of optimism that just plugs right into my brain. It's really, it's delightful.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. It's so lovely. Yeah.
Matt Raekelboom:
Thank you guys.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm so excited. I'm so excited about ADHD.
Pete Wright:
Well, that's why I want to look at the dark side because what we're talking about here is stuff that sounds in our internet economy, we'll say attention economy, too easy. And I have to imagine that ... I mean your platform is the internet. Every day you bring this message of, "Do these simple things dummies and things will change," to a bunch of animals who look at you with skepticism. And I'm curious how audiences, it sounds like Harvard went pretty well, how audiences react when they react skeptically. What do they find hardest to believe, hardest to trust in your message?
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely, and it's the most common thing that you could possibly think of. People think that I must be wrong because it can't be that simple.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Matt Raekelboom:
And I love-
Pete Wright:
That you somehow have to be a charlatan because it's too easy to say those words.
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely, and what I always love to say is I go off the Alcoholics Anonymous quote, which is, "It's not easy, but it is simple." I want everybody to understand that when you are depressed, I'm not saying you're just going to go, must drink water. It's not that simple, but you do have to understand that drinking water is going to get you out of depression that much faster. Getting sunlight in your eyes is going to get you out of that depression that much faster. It's going to get you out of those moods. We're destined to have bad days. That's a part of being a human being. That's your body fighting for it to be in states of homeostasis. You need sadness so that you can create happiness. You need rain to create sunshine. We need this in our lives.
We need to understand those parts of ourselves, but we live in this world where everybody is saying, "All right, you need to do three back flips a day and you need to eat six pills of ginger that cost $100 more than any other type of pill that's ginger just to feel okay," and it's just not true, man.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because it really can just be simply drinking a glass of water or having a water. Yeah. You know what I love about the message is I think it empowers you to take some action, and that's the simple part, right? It's not easy to take that action because we know that that's an executive function, getting started is very difficult. But if you're saying getting the glass of water, I can do that. I don't have to drink two liters today, but I can certainly get an extra glass of water into my system and start that process. It empowers you to make a difference where when you're in a depressive or an anxiety state, you can feel so hopeless, like there is no options or no solutions to this, and what you're saying is, "No, there is. There's hope. There is something you can do and empower you to do that."
Matt Raekelboom:
You look at, and I might get screamed at for this, you look at every religious event in history, you look at every historical event in history, and what do many people only have is hope and knowledge that things are going to be better. There are people that go 40 years of poverty just to go for that 41st year of knowing that they're going to be okay and they're willing to go through it. You need to know that you're going to be okay. We're losing hope, losing motivation. Once again, that's a part of being a human. That is not a bad ADHD trait, that is not exclusive to the depressive. We all have the ability to lose hope. We all have the ability to lose that motivation, but my goodness, we all have the ability to get a little bit more hydrated.
Your brain is wet. If your brain is dry, that means you're in the ground. It needs to be wet, and if it's not wet, it's not working correctly. Your brain needs fuel. That fuel comes from the tummy. When you eat stuff in the tummy, you concentrate better. You do. It's science, and that is the thing that I love the most is we live in this world of, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." And for me, the greatest privilege that I ever had was the day that I heard anything science related that made me go, "Oh crap. We know that part. That's in the guide, that's in the manual. You're allowed to find out the answer to this." You want to know why you're depressed, there's an answer. You want to find out why your executive functioning skills are killing you today, why you're in a state of paralysis, why you're overly emotional. There's a reason and it's out there.
It's not being gate-kept. You don't need $130 to be able to get this. You don't need to sign up for a coach for the next six months. You need to understand that when you, once again to go back to the original point, when you have a healthy brain, it creates a healthy mind. When you start going towards that positivity, it all starts with the knowledge that you're going to be okay. And I think that's what a lot of us are terrified to understand. We all think that we're not supposed to be okay, and if you look at our world politically, if you look at our world based on overall happiness, people under 30, what is it? 87% I believe is the stat of people under 30 are depressed right now. That's crazy. That means that if [inaudible 00:30:49] your depression, you're in the top 13% just by default.
You got to play this game and you got to understand that this game is worth being played because life is beautiful. Life is incredible, and I'm not saying this to be toxically positive. I'm not saying this to be spiritual and let's go, "Ohm," about this and be excited. And by the way, nothing wrong with spirituality, I'm just being playful, but you got to understand that the science is there. Your brain can be more healthy than now.
Now, can I tell you that you'll remember everything for the rest of your life? Of course not. Can I tell you that you're never going to cry again? Of course not. But can I tell you that you can be better than you would've been otherwise? Absolutely. And I think that's the hope and the knowledge that many of us just forget about, man. It's crazy.
Pete Wright:
When you talk about making that transition to having a regulated brain, right, making ... Let's just say I got up and I had six more glasses of water today than I did yesterday and I took a walk for a half hour in the sun. Do you have a sense of what that transition looks like from unregulated to regulated? Do you remember your own coming from a very dark place?
Matt Raekelboom:
Well, there's an interesting thing. Oh God, I wonder if I can remember this on the fly. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Andrew Huberman out of Stanford University, he talked about this once.
Pete Wright:
Beardy McBeardfaced, we called him, yes.
Matt Raekelboom:
He talks about that addiction in the brain is incredibly solvable, but the thing that nobody understands is it's solvable for 24 hours. When he said that, it made me go crazy with my own thoughts because it's unbelievably true. The transition of bad to good that I had from six years ago until now, no, no, no. There was 1,000s of days in there. Some of them were good, some of them were bad. I'll tell you that if I was to wake up this morning, if I was to talk to you guys right now, which by the way, you don't know this, I'll confirm with you that I do, but I could be here with no pants on. I could have woken up half an hour ago and just went, "Oh, I'm unshowered, I feel terrible. Let's go talk to Pete and Nikki." I could have done that, and the reality is I would not be talking this confidently right now. I would not be this focused. I would not be able to sit here without my legs bouncing off the wall and my fidget spinners almost ready to spin themselves into the next realm.
Nikki Kinzer:
Into the next room, I can imagine.
Matt Raekelboom:
Yeah, seriously.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, true.
Matt Raekelboom:
This is a daily thing, and this is not meant to make people feel like, "Oh my God, I need to focus on this for the rest of my life." It's eat and pull on your body for 10 minutes every so often. Drink a glass of water while you're doing something. Don't even drink the glass of water. Have it next to you. Make it a fidget of yourself. You know what is so socially acceptable in the world? Take it a sip of water. No one's ever going to look at you on a video call or even in person and go, "Why are you drinking water? We're talking right now."
Nikki Kinzer:
True.
Pete Wright:
They're totally distracted with hydration.
Matt Raekelboom:
Absolutely not. So let's do it. Let's start regulating fidgeting with good quality things in our lives. This is how possible this is. We just have to incorporate these things in my life. I'm not asking you to add four additional hours into your day. Parents, I'm not talking about neglecting your children so then that way you can go chug water in a corner somewhere. Seriously-
Nikki Kinzer:
Drink water with them.
Matt Raekelboom:
Yeah, do what you've got to do. Have a little contest, get little cups this big. Take shots with your kids and just see, "I could drink it faster than you." Watch the kid instantly go, "No, you can't." You guys are having fun together. General health is simple enough that it can be incorporated quite literally anywhere except for concerts. They make you dump out your water. I hate that rule.
Pete Wright:
Concerts, play, TSA. How do they stay hydrated at all?
Matt Raekelboom:
Oh, God.
Pete Wright:
Just throwing out water.
Matt Raekelboom:
And then I got to drink a $6 Dasani. Do you know what? I'm not going to get on that rabbit hole. This is a positive [inaudible 00:34:52].
Pete Wright:
Nobody knows this. Dasani actually dehydrates you. It's so strange. It looks like water. It sucks the water out of you when you drink it. This episode not sponsored by Dasani.
Matt Raekelboom:
And never will be.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, yeah. Oh, this is great.
Pete Wright:
It is great. I think it's really fascinating and it's something that just delivered with your fount of enthusiasm and optimism is one thing, but just the reminder too that it comes with, again, the simple not easy parts of making your brain a little bit more wet. You're welcome. That's gross, but I said it. Your brain's wet, I'm putting it on a T-shirt. You say, "That's a wet brain." No, delivery doesn't work there. Anyway, Matt, tell us the last time, I don't know how many, it's been two years or so, you probably had a 100,000 Instagram followers back then. Now it's what, 220? How's it going? What are you working on right now?
Matt Raekelboom:
So right now, I'm proud to tell you I actually have about 700,000 followers across all social media platforms. I reach now about three to five million people a month with my educational content, and I'm incredibly proud of that. That is-
Pete Wright:
Outstanding.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wonderful.
Matt Raekelboom:
Since we have last talked actually, I've actually started a very promising career in being a keynote speaker. I've traveled to 27 states last year. I did three provinces in Canada last year. I spoke at the Autism Social Summits. I spoke at VidCon. I've spoken at Instagram, Meta, YouTube, and lots of other amazing places, most notably Harvard University, which I'm so unbelievably honored to have them. And not only did I have them, but now I actually have two of the faculty in the HR department are actually clients of mine. Very proud of that.
Nikki Kinzer:
Fantastic.
Matt Raekelboom:
I was so proud of that. Very, very cool. I have found out that no matter how much virtual stuff that we do, when you are in person speaking the way that I am to somebody, you impact them in a way that I leave half my audience crying with every speech that I do. I get unbelievable amounts of hugs. I always tell people at the end of every single speech, "If you need a hug, you don't ask. You come over to me and you grab me. I don't care. I might make a noise, but I'm into it. Come and hug me. Come and see that I'm real. Come and see that I care because I do."
And I think that there's something unbelievable here. I want to be on the biggest stages in the world telling people that they're going to be okay. We could tell people to be motivated and go make a million dollars a year and go attack the beast and all this kind of stuff, but I think the general speech of, "You're going to be okay," goes so much further than anybody will understand, and because of which my first time ever on the stage, actually amazingly, it was Facebook of all places. Facebook was the first people to ever hire me, and it was right when the Oculus Rift II came out. And they had me do a virtual speech and just in the virtual speech-
Pete Wright:
With no legs?
Matt Raekelboom:
Yes, it was wicked.
Pete Wright:
Oh my God, talk about not wearing pants.
Matt Raekelboom:
I know, I didn't even have to have feet. But in that moment I realized you could see people's hands, and that was the difference for me compared to just having a bunch of floating heads telling you that you can do this. I saw the hands and I saw people crossing their arms and staring at me, not willing to look away, and I went, "These people are getting it. They're understanding." And I found out that I have a speech that people will listen to. I have a presence that people will see, and it's created the most unbelievable life for myself.
I just recently actually moved to Vancouver BC, which in my opinion is the most beautiful place in all of North America.
Pete Wright:
That's incredible.
Matt Raekelboom:
I'm living a very, very beautiful life here, and I'm so happy. I've only been here for about a month and a half now, and I'm going hiking constantly and swimming and paddle-boarding and just all these beautiful things to keep my brain happy. And what I'm doing these days is I'm just trying to spread the awareness, spread the understanding, that the ADHD brain is unbelievably possible, and it's been a beautiful time for me.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, you are a beautiful light in the world. I just have to say, your presence is wonderful. I love your message, and thank you for doing what you're doing.
Matt Raekelboom:
Thank you so much, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a beautiful life.
Pete Wright:
Well, I'll tell you, Matt, you are a role model for those ... All of us in the ADHD community consider ourselves students of ADHD with up days and down days, and I think you are just really at the top in terms of being a role model for what it means to be a constant student exploring the world of our complicated brains, and doing it with such goodness. We really appreciate you coming and sharing a little bit of that with us today.
Matt Raekelboom:
I really appreciate you saying that, Pete. That means a lot to me.
Pete Wright:
Well, it's absolutely from the heart, man. It means a lot. It is ADHD Awareness Month, and I'm hoping that we can close a little ... I'll just say real quick, you want to find Matt, look in the show notes, I've got links to all of his profiles in there. We don't need to litigate them. They're everywhere, and so you'll click on them in the notes, just scroll down a little bit. But because it's ADHD Awareness Month, we want to give you an opportunity as we're sitting around the giant table of the neuro-diverse, for you to raise a glass and offer us a toast for a good October.
Matt Raekelboom:
Amazing. A part of me just wants to do the Homer Simpson quote and say, "To ADHD, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems." But maybe I should change it up just a smidge though. Maybe we should raise our glasses and I should say to ADHD, God's most unique curse that has such an unbelievable blessing provided that we learn how to care about ourselves.
Pete Wright:
Matt Raekelboom, thank you for joining us today.
Matt Raekelboom:
Thank you guys so much for having me. It's such an honor.
Pete Wright:
We appreciate all of you for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're going to be heading over to the Showtalk Channel in our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Matt Raekelboom, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.