The ADHD Gallery

In the season one finale, Karen begins by checking in on how she’s feeling to have come to the end of the recording process for this season. She then describes the concept of second brains and extended mind theory and why creating external systems can be a life-changing approach for ADHDers.

Do you love getting a peek into someone’s planning process? Karen describes the planning process that took forty-two years to build, how she’s very intentional about planning in a way that supports her ADHD, and her love of the “Today” button in G-Cal.

Do you have a love/hate relationship with meditation? Have you felt shame or pressure to meditate “the right way”? This episode is for you. Karen shares her long and complicated history with meditation and offers suggestions for reframing this relationship to better align with our ADHD brains.

Many ADHDers don’t fit into the world’s boxes. Karen discusses her unique career path that is sometimes best described as “various, various.” She chats about the importance of work values and creating a career that works for weird and wonderful brains.

Karen tells the story of dropping out of a doctoral program, due in part to her undiagnosed and raging ADHD, and how she’s (kind of) made peace with that decision.

Time to get super sciency about our ADHD! In this episode, Karen talks about Hallowell and Ratey’s description of what they call the “glitchy switch” of ADHD, which is a dysfunction between the default mode network (DMN) and the task processing network (TPN). Karen describes her experience of having a glitchy switch and how naming and noticing that helps her to recover.

Too many people have never heard of RSD, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, a common symptom of ADHD. Karen breaks down what RSD is, how understanding RSD has helped to diminish hers, and offers suggestions for providing feedback to people with RSD.

Karen tells the story of publishing her book, 99 Tips, at the start of a global pandemic. She goes into detail about her writing process and how she was able to write a book alongside the gifts and challenges of ADHD.

Karen talks about how she’s come to embrace the realization that she’s never going to be a superuser. She’s a minimalist who likes to keep things simple and sustainable. Identifying as anti-fancy helps Karen to reduce some of the pressure and shame associated with her ADHD and to do her best work in the world.

Karen talks about how this podcast came to fruition, overcoming the fear of pushing publish, the origin story of the podcast’s name (a dream!), and what you can expect from upcoming episodes.