ADHD Duos • Overwhelm, Executive Function, and the Fight to Stay Present with Tamara Rosier & Brooke Schnittman
There’s a moment—maybe you’ve lived it—when the email goes unanswered, the dishwasher remains unloaded, the phone rings but your hand doesn’t move. You’re not tired. You’re not lazy. You’re just… stuck.
We call it overwhelm. But what if that word is too small? What if what you’re feeling is your brain's way of saying, This system is not working for me?
In this episode of our Duos series, we bring together two people who have spent their careers listening to the quiet, misunderstood signals of ADHD: Dr. Tamara Rosier, author of Your Brain’s Not Broken and You, Me, and Our ADHD Family, and Brooke Schnittman, author of Activate Your ADHD Potential.
Tamara talks about emotional flooding—those tidal waves of feeling that hit before a single task is done. Brooke explains how to pause just long enough to choose a different direction. Together, they unpack why ADHD-related overwhelm isn’t a sign of failure, but a clue. A trailhead. A door.
Because maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that your brain is broken. Maybe it’s that the world was built for a different kind of mind. Maybe the first step isn’t pushing through. It’s listening.
📚 Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
It almost became a Monster Truck rally just then, Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know, right?
Pete Wright:
You bought a seat, but you'll only need the edge. It's the ADHD podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
Pete Wright:
Sunday, Sunday.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
I am very excited about today's show, Nikki. We're talking about overwhelm and executive function. It's just going to be so great. And we've got two great guests. Shh, I'm not telling you who they are yet. But we're going to get started post-haste. Before we do that, head over to takecontroladhd.com to get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list right on the homepage. We'll send you an email each time a new episode is released.
You can connect with us on Blue Sky, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Pinterest at takecontroladhd. But to really connect with us join us on the ADHD Discord Community. It's fantastic and super easy to jump in the general community. You just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you will be whisked over to the general invitation and login page.
If you are looking for a little bit more, particularly if this show has ever touched you or helped you to understand your relationship with ADHD in a new way, we invite you to support the show directly through Patreon. You know the drill, Patreon is listener-supported podcasting. With a few of your dollars each month you help guarantee that we continue to grow this show, add new features to our community, and invest more heavily in all that we do. It supports the whole team. There's a whole bunch of us behind the scenes that make this thing happen, and we couldn't do it without them. And that means all of us couldn't do it without all of you. Thank you for your support. If you're already a supporter, we love you so much. If you're not yet, maybe today's the day, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.
It's Monday morning, you've already missed two deadlines. Your kid can't find their shoes. You're in box, it's a battlefield. You're not lazy, you're not broken. What if that feeling, the one that tells you to shut down, isn't failure but feedback? Today in the second of our duos series we sit down with two of our very favorite ADHD experts who believe that overwhelm can be a powerful signal to pay attention to. Dr. Tamara Rosier and Brooke Schnittman.
Tamara is the founder of the ADHD Center in West Michigan, and the author of Your Brain's Not Broken, a book that doesn't just explain ADHD, it explains me quite literally. For follow up, you and me and our ADHD family asked what happens when a combination of ADHD brains live under one roof and how we can all live a little more peacefully together?
Brooke Schnittman is a nationally recognized ADHD coach and the founder of Coaching with Brooke. Her wonderful book, Activate Your ADHD Potential, is a roadmap for high achieving ADHD-ers who are tired of running fast and not going anywhere. These are two people who have spent their careers helping others navigate the messy, misunderstood experience of ADHD, and we are thrilled that they are here today to show us how to move through overwhelm. Tamara, Brooke, welcome back to The ADHD Podcast.
Tamara Rosier:
Thanks for having us.
Brooke Schnittman:
Thank you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
I'm surrounded by you.
Tamara Rosier:
I know.
Pete Wright:
Incredible.
Tamara Rosier:
I have the same thing.
Pete Wright:
Oh, great. We're surrounded.
Tamara Rosier:
Mine's right there.
Brooke Schnittman:
Wait, Pete, can you do my audiobook, please? I've been so overwhelmed. I was going to have Amazon use your AI voice, but can you? I know, right?
Pete Wright:
You're so kind. You're so sweet.
Brooke Schnittman:
Even how he described my book, I'm like, dang, that's better than what I did.
Tamara Rosier:
Exactly.
Brooke Schnittman:
Good. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wait [inaudible 00:03:59].
Pete Wright:
Stop. This is about you today.
Brooke Schnittman:
Stop, please.
Pete Wright:
Stop, please.
Brooke Schnittman:
Go on.
Pete Wright:
Come on. Let's talk about this overwhelm executive function thing. From your experience working with ADHD clients, how does overwhelm show up in day-to-day life? What are the physical, the emotional, the behavioral signs that people might not even recognize as overwhelm? It's kind of a jump ball, but I introduced Tamara first. So Brooke, it's yours.
Brooke Schnittman:
Oh, okay. I was going to...
Tamara Rosier:
Ooh, he took a left turn.
Brooke Schnittman:
Oh, man. All right. So funny enough, I walked onto this call feeling overwhelmed because I was so excited to be here, one. Two, I happened to be preparing for something else right before this with people who might activate me or I don't like to use the word trigger. It activates me, so that's overwhelming, right?
I was doing a lot of little tasks and things that were very emotional, very detail-oriented, which is not my strong suit, that overwhelmed me, things that I should delegate. I also get overwhelmed when I'm underwhelmed too, because I'm seeking things to do because my underwhelm then tells me, oh, I'm bored, I need an exciting new idea. I'm unproductive. I create these stories. I need to be doing something.
So then I get overwhelmed that I'm not doing something even though I was underwhelmed because I was so overwhelmed before that I burned out. So that's just how it might show up in a day-to-day situation.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That hits me in the chest, right. It's the deflationary spiral that feeds on itself. I'm a snake eating my overwhelmed tail. Tamara, I-
Tamara Rosier:
So I want to build on what Brooke said though, because Brooke just described a freeze response, and you have very sophisticated listeners, but I'm going to say this again. Those of us with ADHD have a very active limbic system, which means a lot. If you see our brains in action, like in an FMRI, the limbic system, and those of you who might be watching, I'm kind of cupping my ear, because that's where your limbic system is, that little amygdala is a little twitchy. Brooke just described the twitchiness of it.
And overwhelm, anxiety, all these words that we use, it's all overwhelm. And so it's a freeze response, and what we do in a freeze response is our body's like, hey, let's get the heck out of here. Let's shut down. And let's go sort out our sock drawer instead of doing this. And so we're just trying to freeze or flee. It's not a fight response. Overwhelm is kind of below the window of tolerance.
So our bodies get so used to this that we remain in this fight or flight state. And Brooke, you articulated it perfectly. We're constantly in the spiral of looking. And so what I work with clients to do, is how do we interrupt this pattern? And how do we become comfortable with discomfort? And we work on parasympathetic stuff.
Pete Wright:
Before we dig into some of the specifics, I want to talk about the vulnerability that comes from overwhelm, because what you just described is a state that seems like it puts us into the raw nerve experience, when we're overwhelmed, what are we vulnerable to next in terms of our executive functioning? What fuel are we running out of when we're constantly in a state of that sort of anxious overwhelm?
Brooke Schnittman:
Sure, sure, absolutely. So if we're constantly in a state of overwhelm, our amygdala is firing, like Tamara said, and because of that, there is so much more emotional sensitivity that we're subject to. So our rejection sensitivity is so much higher than it is on a day-to-day basis. So you could say something that is just a comment or someone can say it, and you can take it as if it was even more of a rejection-sensitive fact or story.
So I think your listeners all understand at this point what RSD is, but you are so heightened that every little thing that is being said to you or someone talking to you or doing something, it just feels exhausting. It feels like you're overly on a next level hypersensitive. Your dopamine levels are whacked at that point, even though our baseline generally is lower. We're probably not sleeping well, because we're not taking care of our hierarchy of needs.
So that on top of that is dysregulating everything. We're probably not connecting with others. So we're in this shutdown phase of almost like a depression, anxiety. We isolate, we will cut people off when they're talking to us. We just don't have the capacity to connect. So there's so many ways that this can show up, but you feel like you just don't have the capacity to do the things that you used to do, joke, laugh, be happy, connect, actually engage and listen and feel like you're happy.
Tamara Rosier:
Brooke, that is so... I love what you just did there, because you described, hey, here's what it looks like when we're overwhelmed. And yet you also gave the other side. We do have options, psychologists call it relaxed alert. And when we are relaxed alert, in my second book, I talk about the window of tolerance. That's a way of talking about relaxed alert. And so you just said, we're able to engage. We're able to actually look and understand and be who we want to be in that window of tolerance. And that's what we hope for. Pete reminded me of us seeing each other at the conference, and I had forgotten about this. So I went to the conference-
Pete Wright:
I was not going to bring this up.
Tamara Rosier:
It was rude, Pete. It was rude.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It was not rude.
Tamara Rosier:
I've got a beef now.
Pete Wright:
Oh, stop.
Tamara Rosier:
But no, I'm teasing. Guys, I'm just teasing, Pete, because I love him dearly. But I'm one of the co-leads at the conference, so I'm just running around like a chicken with her head cut off. And it's so funny, Pete, I just saw in your eyes, for a second... You're like, who is he? I should know him. And I saw that panic. And when Pete brought that up, I'm like, you know what? I can picture myself being in the window of tolerance more than I actually am.
So I think I'm actually kind of just walking through the halls of the conference like a lioness, just slowly moving. Instead, I looked like a chicken with her head cut off, which is a gory image. So for those of you who have a weak stomach, just picture something else. But I'm just run around squawking, blood spurting out everywhere. That's who I am. And so my body has gotten so used to being in a state of overwhelm that even when I think I'm okay, and I really worked at the conference to be in my window of tolerance. But there's so much for me to process that it kicks me out into overwhelm quite a bit.
Now, if you guys are asking why do you do conference leadership? I don't know, maybe I like that. No, I do love working with the conference people and it's a great team. But I love what you did there, Brooke, because you're like, here's overwhelm and here's this window of tolerance. You can't really be who you were. I love talking to Pete and Nikki. Every time I see them, I'm like, you guys are so cool. I couldn't even recognize Pete, because I was in such a kind of a fluster.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And I think that gets to exactly what this conversation... You're targeting in on this, what I want out of this conversation, which is how do we open my window of tolerance just a little bit more every day, right. Because I totally relate to that experience, just feeling like... I know what my window of tolerance looks like. I've internalized it. I get it. And running around a sharp-edged corner and realizing, oh, my window's not even open. I didn't even see it. I just ran-
Tamara Rosier:
Frickle frackle I'm out again.
Pete Wright:
I ran straight into a... It's that meme of the kid running through the house and running straight through the screen door, because it was closed. That's what I feel like often.
Tamara Rosier:
Great metaphor.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And so I love getting to this idea about how we're wired differently, that our ADHD influences our nervous system in a way that allows us to, or that prevents us sometimes from recognizing our existent window of tolerance and its degree of openness, am I butchering the metaphor?
Tamara Rosier:
Oh, no. The window of tolerance, by the way, isn't new and sexy. I wrote about it in my second book, so I didn't make it up. Someone thought I made it up. I'm like, nope. It's cited. It's old. It's been around for a while. It used to be used for trauma, but now we know that people with ADHD and Dodson will say, we have a different nervous system, and we have to respect the nervous system that we have. And that means just accepting our window of tolerance is a tiny window.
And so you're right, Pete, we're not helpless. We're not like, well, great, that's it. I'm doomed for overwhelm. No, we can try to keep opening up that window of tolerance, and it just means it's a wider area before I feel the overwhelming discomfort. So quick example, today, I was early. I was early showing up for this podcast. I did all the right things, I'm all set up. And then no one else was here. So I started panicking, and then my brain brought up all the memories of when I screwed up things in the past. I'm like, you probably screwed it up today. Even though you guys had the name of the episode and my name is in the episode. I'm like, I screwed it up somehow.
Pete Wright:
It's a different Tamara.
Tamara Rosier:
I pushed myself. Right. It's a different Tamara Rosier we're talking about. Emotional regulation. I pushed myself out of the window of tolerance just with my thoughts. And so our thoughts often have a powerful effect.
Pete Wright:
So we talk all the time about how sometimes the ADHD experience allows us or prevents us from taking agency in our own lives, from asking for accommodations, from asking for our needs. And you just described how powerful our own agency is for continuing this deflationary spiral. Let me drive, let me drive. Wait, good God, don't give me the wheel.
Tamara Rosier:
Don't let me drive. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.
Tamara Rosier:
That's exactly. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I have a question, because Tamara, I watched your presentation at the last conference and you talked about the window of tolerance and you talked about the hypo and the hyperarousal. And I know the last time that Brooke was on the show, she talked about overwhelm and underwhelm, which are very similar. So I'm curious, Tamara, can you give us just a little bit of an explanation of what both of those things are and how that connects?
Tamara Rosier:
Sure. So I'm going to ask your listeners to envision a window and pick a window in your house. And the reason why some people are quite literal, when I say window of tolerance, it doesn't have to be a window, but if you look at the space over your window, that is what we call hyperarousal. Again, metaphorically, your ceiling is not hyperaroused. But hyperarousal is a state of overwhelm too, and it's a fiery state, where I've got to hurry, put all these fires out. I am just not doing this well.
And below the window, that area is called hypoarousal, meaning without arousal, that's when you just shut down, sink into your couch and play three hours of games and wonder what the heck happened. Try not to swear today, folks. And within that window, that is what Brooke was referring to, of you're relaxed, you're calm, you're communicating. There's this... For those of us with ADHD, it almost feels like a magical time, because we're like, dang, bro, I'm actually who I want to be right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.
Tamara Rosier:
Right. It feels wonderful, because we're just in the flow.
Nikki Kinzer:
Tamara, do you feel like you could be in hypoarousal when you're shut down though too? I find that when we get overwhelmed and go through all of the stages of the ADHD disruption spiral, you compare yourselves, you have RSD, emotional dysregulation, then you finally get to burn and shut down, then your body takes some time to come back to it. So can you be hypoaroused when you're burned out?
Tamara Rosier:
Just like the gap from the bottom of the window to the floor, you can go really, really low to abort burnout, or you can be just below the window too. I don't feel like folding the laundry. I think I'll just sit here and play on my phone. Does that make sense? So we have degrees. All of it though, stems from, I believe how we manage our sense of overwhelm. I think it's all overwhelm.
So I try to help my clients to find their window, and now I'm kind of going to break our metaphor, but those of us with ADHD have tiny little windows to peek out, and our goal is to make the window larger and larger. And I can tell you, you can do it, even though I just confess pushing myself out the window today, right before this podcast. But you can do it and you can learn to return too. So we don't have to go hypoaroused beneath the window to hyperaroused above the window, many of us do. We can learn to return to the window.
Pete Wright:
The metaphor is now fully broken in my mind. And when I think of myself, I think of a wall with 500 windows in it, and they're all different sizes, and most of the time I'm just trying to find a window. Just any window.
Tamara Rosier:
Any window, okay.
Pete Wright:
A tiny window, a big window.
Tamara Rosier:
Stop breaking the metaphor, Pete. That's not going to help anyone right now. So guys, just find one window of tolerance. Focus on that, okay? Don't listen to Pete. Pete's leading you down a bad road.
Nikki Kinzer:
Too many windows, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Not the first time I've been told-
Tamara Rosier:
Shut all the windows.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. All right.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So all right, I want to talk about some techniques, right? I want to talk about how we can, as you've already said, how we can interrupt the pattern, that is an old favorite. The pattern interrupt. I just love the whole idea. Any repeating pattern, like maladaptive pattern. I just want something to jerk me out of it. So Brooke, I want to turn to you because I want to talk about a couple of things you've offered.
Brooke Schnittman:
I was ready for it.
Pete Wright:
I know you're ready. This is going to be a slam dunk for you. So first of all, we've got the air method. You teach this technique called the air method. You sent us some information. I want you to tell us about that, and the IFS and visualization. This is the first time I've thought much about IFS, and I want to hear about, internal family systems.
Brooke Schnittman:
Systems. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Brooke Schnittman:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
So tell us, what is your strategy for breaking patterns?
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah. So the first and most easiest pattern interrupt is the air method, which would be to acknowledge your feelings because that gives yourself time to kind of just settle in to what's happening without responding. So acknowledging, name a detainment, claim a detainment. You've heard all of those sayings before. So what is it that I'm feeling? Where am I feeling this in my body? What am I... Like, what's actually happening right now? Why am I blank?
And then after you acknowledge the sensation, then you're going to interrupt it. So you can interrupt it by moving, breathing, stimulating, like splashing cold water on your face, a fidget, stretching. Then from there, after you get that pattern interrupt, asking yourself, is this urgent, this thing that I'm thinking about? Or is it just loud? Right? What's really happening? What am I not attending to?
So now you have to do a little bit of a deeper dive. What am I not attending to? Now that you've got the oxygen in your brain and your nervous system has slowed down a little bit and you're acknowledging your feelings, now you can look at your ADHD hierarchy of needs and say, okay, have I not eaten? Do I need to pull from my dopa menu? Do I need a nap, reliable sleep? Do I need more things to help with a physiological stress that I'm dealing with right now?
Pete Wright:
I'd love for you to reflect, and both of you, if you have some thoughts, this is a sidebar, excuse me, may it please the court. I'd like to approach the bench. My hunch is, and if you've seen this with people you're working with, that if you have never tried a sort of somatic reset, you talk about breathing and moving and all those things, it's real easy not to trust or not to believe that those things will work.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Right. How do you convince people, or at least make the case that you've got to try a somatic reset. You've got to try the interrupt with your body, and get them to believe it.
Brooke Schnittman:
Well, you think about, okay, well what has worked for you in the past? Has it been nothing? Or can you think of an experience that has worked.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Brooke Schnittman:
Well, if nothing that you're thinking of is working, what would it take to try something like this? How about we try this interrupt right now when your nervous system may or may not be calm and just try it proactively. And then while we're coaching together, as Tamara was saying, our window of tolerance is so small that we're constantly in hyper and hypoarousal.
So once they get activated in the session or emotionally charged, use this technique live on the spot. Okay, let's interrupt for a second. I notice the energy shifting in this session. How about we acknowledge what's happening right now and try this interrupt? Okay, so here are a few. Which one sounds best to you? Okay, let's do this breathing technique.
One breathing technique that I just learned that I've never heard before, but I learned from Jefferson Fisher was a two-second in through your nose and an additional one after the two, and then coming out slowly for six seconds with your lips pursed or through your nose, and doing that several times. So same effect as the four-box breathing and all the other breathing strategies. But this one I liked a lot, because it slowed down my body significantly more. And also I was interested in [inaudible 00:24:21] now.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Also, it's fun.
Brooke Schnittman:
It's fun. You're like, I must have sinus problems, right?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah. Right Tamara might not be able to be a candidate.
Tamara Rosier:
I have chronic sinus problems, and I'm like, oh, now you guys are just bragging. Right. Well, we girls [inaudible 00:24:42]. This is such a RSD moment, we're purposely... It's absolutely fine. I know who I am. I know I struggle.
Brooke Schnittman:
Good. So maybe you need that cold water splash or just-
Tamara Rosier:
Exactly.
Brooke Schnittman:
Going outside and looking at the trees.
Tamara Rosier:
Right.
Brooke Schnittman:
So that would be your interrupt. But then after that, we want to go to the R, right? So now that you have acknowledged, you've interrupted, we want to redirect. So we've already discussed what am I going to do for myself right now? What would my future self thank me for? What do I really need to attend to in myself that I haven't been attending to? And you also at the same time want to do a 1% action towards what has to get done. Because if you leave the have to get done for never being done, you are going to continue down that ADHD disruption spiral.
So what's that micro action that you can take for yourself at that point, since you've oxygenated yourself, you've calmed your nervous system? And then also what's that 1% action that you could do towards something that really needs to get done?
Nikki Kinzer:
So can we expand a little bit more on that 1%? It's so interesting to me how the universe works, because I just was talking to a client yesterday and she mentions that, that one of her focuses for the week was to 1% and then what she was going to do. And I loved it, because I was like, that's fantastic. You just coached yourself, yay. So excited for her. Whenever I hear something more than once in a three-day period, I pay attention to it. And so let's talk about that, because I think a lot of ADHD-ers are... They're not going to do 1%. They want to do a 100%.
Brooke Schnittman:
Oh, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So what does that look like? How would you describe that?
Brooke Schnittman:
So real life example from start to finish with the air method and then the 1% is like, I'm paralyzed. I've scrolled for two hours, right? Tamara was talking about that before. Playing video games, scrolling for two hours. My to-do list will never get done, right? You've never heard that before, I'm sure. So we're acknowledging I'm overwhelmed, my brain shut down. So you're interrupting by doing any of the techniques.
The 1% thing would be to take one of the things from your to-do list, right? Break it down to the smallest sub. So maybe that 1% is you're emailing someone back, right? Maybe that 1% is to just reread the email that was sent to you and create one sentence back, to at least have the tab open. And when you're ready, if you're mid-sentence in that one sentence, your brain automatically remembers to come back to it.
So it gets you started in whatever that glooming and dooming task is. So you're picking one thing from your list that really needs to get done, but you're only doing a part of it. And with the hopes that you'll get into it and do more of it, or you'll come back to it before the end of the day. Because you've at least started it and you realize it's not as scary, and you can do it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Brooke Schnittman:
Or maybe you set a timer for five minutes and you say, whatever I get done in that five minutes, is it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Did enough.
Brooke Schnittman:
And that email is not going to be... Exactly, it's not going to be an A+, it's going to be a C-. And oh, well.
Pete Wright:
It's really interesting. It reminds me, Nikki, of Kourosh Dini, the visit, right? This whole idea, what you're describing to commit just a bit, to just even looking at the materials-
Nikki Kinzer:
Just being in it.
Pete Wright:
Of the thing that's hard. Just touch it, right. And [inaudible 00:28:26].
Brooke Schnittman:
Commit just a bit. That's going to be the new saying. Instead of 1%-
Pete Wright:
Oh, my God.
Brooke Schnittman:
Commit just a bit. Just a bit.
Pete Wright:
Just a bit.
Nikki Kinzer:
Are you having a visceral reaction right now?
Pete Wright:
Oh my God, you guys. Oh my god.
Nikki Kinzer:
He's spinning gold today, guys. He's spinning gold.
Brooke Schnittman:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right from the top of the show, he was... He's going to write us a new book. And he's going to audio it.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Okay. Back to reality. I want to transition to another tool. Tamara, you've got some experience with tapping, right? EFT?
Tamara Rosier:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We have had questions about what this is, how it works.
Nikki Kinzer:
I have questions.
Pete Wright:
The question's from Nikki. Nikki, please ask your question.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, it's so interesting to me and we've never had anyone talk about it. And I know, again, when I watched your presentation at the conference, some of the techniques that you shared with us had to do with tapping. And I'm fascinated by it. I've never done it before. I remember watching somebody, it was at the Olympics, and I don't remember the sport that the person was doing, but they were tapping. And I was like, there's that tapping. And I'm just so fascinated by it. So if you can just give us kind of a general explanation of what it is.
Tamara Rosier:
Now before I do, I do want to say, whenever you're overwhelmed, sometimes the interruption... Brooke, just said this so beautifully. Sometimes the interruption could be more cognitively behavioral, and it could be, what am I believing in this moment to be true? And I know there's good somatic stuff, but a lot of times my beliefs are screwed up. And if I can catch the belief and go, yeah, I believe that, but if I'm willing to let that belief go away and flutter like a butterfly, that is kind of my interrupt too.
So I just wanted to add that. I know it's a bit of a nerdier approach. Sometimes people need body, sometimes they need spirit, sometimes they need brain. We have to have a lot of different interrupts. And so I just wanted to add that a nerdy cousin to all the great things that Brooke said.
Brooke Schnittman:
Oh, thank you. But I feel like, what am I making this mean? But it has to come after... I feel like what am I making it mean would come after you do an interrupt of some sort. Because if you're acknowledging the feeling and you are activated, that story is going to be hard to break unless you have some oxygen-
Tamara Rosier:
For many people. Yeah.
Brooke Schnittman:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Otherwise, you just end up cynical. This will never work.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah. So for me personally, that is my interrupt. Last night I had to work late just getting things done, and I was starting to get a little... Just kind of growling at the world, in reality, my daughter and husband. But it felt like the world. And I just stopped, I'm like, what do I believe is true right now? My life does not depend on getting these done. Tamara, you would like to get these done. So how about we proceed? This is a preference.
And so that was my interrupt to go. It was a reality check that I wrote to myself and I cashed it. So for me, it was an interrupt. And some of my clients need the cognitive, we lead with cognitive, some lead with the body. And so I just wanted to add that as a quick thing. But tapping, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Tamara Rosier:
So first of all, I wasn't excited to learn about EFT, but like you, it kept coming up on my radar. And anytime the Harvard boys get involved in investigating something, I tend to pay attention. And so I'm like, okay, this keeps coming up, I've got to pay some attention. And so one afternoon in February, I purchased the Tapping Solution, it's an app, like book.
Nikki Kinzer:
I have the book, but I've never read it.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to do it. And it was almost like spinning a wheel. I don't even care what I tap on. And sure enough-
Pete Wright:
Just don't tap on the book. That's not going to be very effective.
Tamara Rosier:
Well... And so tapping is... So it came up with, you are enough. I'm like, well, that's a stupid one. I would never have to deal with that. Okay, guys, that's my biggest thing I have to deal with. So I started tapping, and you tap on the meridian points. So you start tapping, it's called the karate chop point. And you tap there. And that's where you just kind of get out the negative crap that's swirling in your head.
By the way, your listeners, don't try this at home. Find a video, tap with someone. Okay? That's how you learn to tap. But then you tap through the meridian points. And so I'm tapping through going... And I'm not even believing this at this point. This is stupid, but I'm going to say the words and tap, whatever. And I got done. I'm like, see, I'm going to go on my merry way.
Well, we have a leather couch that... I love my dogs, but they scratch on it. And so I purchased the special leather dye to re-dye the scratches. I know it sounds weird, but it's what you do in February in Michigan. And I spilled the bottle on the carpet. And all of a sudden I could feel in my chest, my chest started tightening. I started having an asthmatic response. And all of a sudden I heard, you're having this reaction because you hate yourself. And I still get a little bit emotional. It was a breakthrough moment for me. I can't believe I'm sharing this publicly, but it was a breakthrough moment. And I looked at my husband and he's like, we can get a new rug. You're fine. You're fine.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Tamara Rosier:
I'm like, no, no, no. You don't understand, I just heard the voice. I hate myself. And I'm sharing that because a lot of us with ADHD, we've kind of learned, I wrote about this in Your Brain's Not Broken. We learned to kind of shame ourselves into submission, self-loathe ourselves. And so tapping, unbeknownst to me, got beneath my layers of cynical thoughts, and really started to go, no, Tamara, this is a true belief you have.
So from then I'm like, okay, you've got my attention tapping. So I even dug deeper into the research. So it's been studied for about 20 years. People could argue that the studies aren't rigorous and that it could be a placebo effect. I do want to suggest a placebo effect is still an effect.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Tamara Rosier:
Okay. And that's kind of what a lot of the studies... Okay. A lot of the studies have shown reduction in anxiety, depression, overwhelm, and all of this. So the Harvard professors that I referred to earlier, they pretty much said, "yeah, we know a difference. We have no idea why. We don't know why this works, but it does." So again and again, we're finding evidence that, yeah, it does work. A lot of people still consider it pseudoscience, and I'm like, yeah, go ahead. I think gravity was pseudoscience at one point too.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Tamara Rosier:
So that's cool. But I really encourage my clients to use it. I tap, use emotional freedom tapping most days. If my day isn't going well or if I have that interrupting thought like, ugh, he just really ticked me off and nah, nah, nah, and I just want to get stuck in that rut, I'll find a tapping.
And even though I'm an experienced tapper, I usually tap with someone. Because sometimes the words they use, plus I get distracted in the middle of the tapping, you usually do three rounds of it. I'll be like, what was I doing? So I usually tap with someone, meaning YouTube or that tapping solution, that app that I mentioned.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, you have inspired me to find the book. I don't know where it is, but I'm going to find that book and download the app. Because I've always found it very fascinating, especially because with my own anxiety that I have, that's where I first learned about it, is on managing anxiety more than ADHD. But thank you for that. I appreciate you sharing your story too. I really appreciate that. I'm sure our listeners do, because they can relate to that.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah. One last comment on this, for those of your listeners who know what EMDR is, it's a kind of therapy that is used with trauma. And it's highly effective for ADHD people, especially with trauma. I call it tapping like a poor man's version of EMDR, because it kind of functions the same way. You're using a physical stimulation. It's a little bit of exposure and cognitive refinement.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's great. Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Okay, we're getting toward the end, but I already teased-
Brooke Schnittman:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Brooke, you're going to give us just a tutorial on this next part, IFS and visualization. And I am fascinated by this stuff, so help me, help me understand more, better. You're muted. Oh, there you go. You're muted again.
Nikki Kinzer:
Still muted.
Brooke Schnittman:
Okay, muted? Not muted?
Pete Wright:
You're good.
Brooke Schnittman:
Okay. So it's funny, following up on what Tamara said, I actually was interested in EMDR. I had seen one of her specialists do it at the conference, and I was like, oh, I've got it. I've got to do this. So I hired someone to help me with EMDR. But what I noticed is while she was doing EMDR, she did IFS, and I was like, stop it, do EMDR. I was told that EMDR is what I need, so do that.
So we did a lot of IFS and it's from Dr. Richard Schwartz, who is... It's in our child's work, and it's basically acknowledging the part. So we have lots of different parts. So your cheek can be a part, your hand can be a part, and they all work together and your parts are always going to be there. So when you have this sensation inside of you, you have to acknowledge where you're feeling it, right?
So the chest, let's say, is a apart and it's outside of you. So you're acknowledging that part. And you're asking it, what do you want me to know? What do you want me to know? And you're saying it to yourself. And I also encourage that if you're going to do this for the first time that you listen to Dr. Richard Schwartz say it through the prompts, so you don't have to ask yourself, because our working memory obviously isn't the greatest. So it would be helpful for someone else to say it and you listen to it. But what do you want me to know? And then give yourself some time to think about that. Maybe it's like, I'm not okay right now. I need a break. I need connection.
And so you're acknowledging it. Then you also then bring it to the child's piece, and what would your younger self say? How can you use your younger self to help you in this situation? And then you're kind of letting it go. So you're acknowledging the feeling, you're asking for what you wanted to know, and then you're doing the work to just accept it and do the thing that it's telling you to do.
So this is an ongoing practice that you have to do. So I did it with my therapist and it was great while it was happening, and then I stopped doing it. And I'm like, oh, I need to do it again on my own. So Dr. Richard Schwartz actually was just on Andrew Huberman's podcast a couple of weeks ago, and if you go to one hour and I think 27 minutes, if my memory serves me correct, Andrew asks Dr. Schwartz to do it for the public, the general question. So you can just press play and close your eyes and listen to it, and have that somatic experience and it's a practice.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
I'll put that direct link to that minute in the show.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Everybody, you should be listening.
Brooke Schnittman:
I hope I'm right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
We'll figure it out.
Pete Wright:
I do too, because your reputation's on the line right now with that, Brooke. I don't know if you knew that.
Tamara Rosier:
It's [inaudible 00:41:55]
Brooke Schnittman:
I do have a fan.
Pete Wright:
This is amazing stuff, you guys. It's incredible and such great tools. You've given I think a lot of resources for people to investigate and consider. And I just want to reinforce for anyone listening who's never tried any of these somatic interrupts, and are skeptical about them, to just do what Brooke said, ask yourself. Well, has not trying it ever really worked? Has not doing anything ever really supported me and my mental health and my neurodivergence? And give it a shot.
It doesn't have to work for you. It absolutely doesn't have to. But the other thing I'll put in here, I think it was an episode of this American Life, something about the defense of ignorance, and there is a story specifically on the power of the placebo effect, and how you can even know it's a placebo and it'll still work on you, because human organisms can be phenomenally simple creatures. And we can play ourselves for benefit all the live long day and it's great.
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah. I'm really getting into belief work lately. And our beliefs shape our reality.
Pete Wright:
For sure.
Tamara Rosier:
If I believe I'm a constantly overwhelmed person, can I change that belief?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Powerful stuff you guys. Thank you so much.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Thank you for being a part of this duos experience. You're the second in our little trilogy, and so far it's been so fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's been great.
Pete Wright:
Thank you guys.
Nikki Kinzer:
So fun.
Pete Wright:
Some of our favorite people you are. And so I'm just glad you are here sharing this. I'll have links to books and websites in the show notes. Anything specific you want to plug right now, let people know they can go check out, Brooke?
Brooke Schnittman:
Yes, thank you. Thank you for calling my name and my turn because it would've been really... Again, I wouldn't have known when my part is, so I appreciate that.
Pete Wright:
Absolutely.
Brooke Schnittman:
Thank you. Yes. So we are doing a training on the 3C Activation program, which is our signature process that talks about how to get through the ADHD disruption spiral through 12 steps, which is also in my book, so at a low cost.
So we're starting that April 15th, and it's a 13-week program with ICF credits and PAC credits. And we're going to be talking about the ADHD neuroscience. So if you're interested, we have a webinar Q&A coming up April 3rd and April 8th, and you can find it on our website Coaching With Brooke.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding.
Nikki Kinzer:
Great.
Pete Wright:
Tamara?
Tamara Rosier:
Yeah, I'm involved in a lot. But I want to leave people, your listeners with, be kind, be gracious, and really focus on who you want to be. And maybe that's where you start with the overwhelm. And check out the cool things everyone has going on. I love what Brooke's doing. I love what both of you guys are doing. So I'm sorry, Pete, I never answer the question right away.
Pete Wright:
You-
Nikki Kinzer:
Guys, it was great.
Tamara Rosier:
Maybe tease [inaudible 00:45:14].
Nikki Kinzer:
[inaudible 00:45:15] you just answered it, the right...
Tamara Rosier:
Right. We need [inaudible 00:45:17].
Pete Wright:
Somebody outsourced the answer to this question. Well, I don't care. I think you're both fantastic and I love everything you're doing.
Tamara Rosier:
I'm sorry.
Pete Wright:
Thank you so, so much. And thank you to you listening out there, that's you. Thank you for listening to the show. Thank you for your time and your attention. We so appreciate you. And don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel with our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast.
On behalf of Tamara Rosier and Brooke Schnittman and Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you next week For our final duos episode. It's Dodge Rea and Sharon Saline right here on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
