25 ADHD (or VAST) terms you might like to know

Including 4 new letters that may become as familiar to you as ADHD as Drs Hallowell and Ratey’s potentially less stigmatising VAST model (Variable Attention Stimulus Trait) becomes better known…Which of these 25 terms resonate most for you?Which ADHD (or VAST) terms had you hoped to see included? Comment or reply to let me know for a future episode.le grá (with love),EveiFULL TRANSCRIPTI remember part of the training involved the recognition, both through our own practice and through working with others, that often if, for example, someone is working with anxiety and they start practicing mindfulness, it's not uncommon for them to report feeling more anxious. In reality, they've normally been experiencing those physiological symptoms and the mindfulness practice makes it more conscious and helps us get better at making choices that alleviate the anxiety. Hi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and welcome to The Feel Better Every Day Podcast.I am so excited to be sharing new trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly ideas for you to help you take better care of your Self, that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself, as well as the basic self-care, which we all know can be so challenging at times. I really appreciate you tuning in. If you want a deeper dive, you'll be getting bonus content each week if you sign up to The Sole to Soul Circle.You can do that for free or from as little as eight euros a month and you can also find more ideas in the book. 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing. Welcome to episode 53 of The Feel Better Every Day Podcast.Today we're deconstructing some of the jargon around ADHD. It's not quite an A-Z, but there's a lot there and I'm smiling because I remember I used to feel completely overwhelmed by all the jargon and over the past few years some of it still makes me laugh because it's not very intuitive and other bits are completely of course. When I learned to practice and teach mindfulness well over a decade ago, I remember part of the training involved the recognition both through our own practice and through working with others, that often if for example someone is working with anxiety and they start practicing mindfulness, it's not uncommon for them to report feeling more anxious.In reality they've normally been experiencing those physiological symptoms and the mindfulness practice makes it more conscious and helps us get better at making choices that alleviate the anxiety and that help us regulate and help us make changes to our lives. Similarly with the ADHD jargon, I'm never a fan of jargon, but I have felt like it's been learning a new language the past few years and some of it is so helpful when I realise it's not just me. I do occasional newsletters called ‘Is This Me or ADHD?’ because I think like so many people with the diagnosis, whether it's self-diagnosis or official, it can be like well tick tick tick tick tick, I feel really like, ‘Yep this is all me’, but I thought they were personality traits.So understanding that they're traits and symptoms and then also recognising that ADHD presents differently in different people obviously, so getting a sense of which ones feel most resonant for you and finding ways to support yourself through it. I just sneezed, I hope I don't need to edit that out, I tried to pause it in time. We're going to start with ADHD burnout and it's different to regular burnout but it can be a real problem. I know that I'm constantly amending my schedule in order to minimise it because even now more than 20 years into being my own boss, being in the really fortunate position to be able to control my own schedule, I will still do too much, I'll hyperfocus, that's coming later and then I'll be fit for nothing for days. It's really useful as with everything to notice for yourself when you feel it, what helps you when you're in it, what helps you recover more quickly, what helps you prevent it, the more awareness you have the easier it will get for you to actually prevent this endless cycle by building in more rest, taking more off your plate. Progress not perfection as with everything but it's a practice and just even recognising that you're potentially more prone to it can help you recognise that you are worthy of the extra supports and accommodations in your own life and if you're your own boss or if you're working for someone else, really advocating for yourself and knowing you're worth it. The second term is convocoaster which is not a clinical term but it's for when we go off on a bit of a conversational rollercoaster. The people who know and love us might be patient and wait knowing that we will come back eventually.I remember my housemates when I was at Bangor University in the ‘90s talking about me being a bit like a runaway train and that if they kind of hung on I would get back to the point eventually. I had no idea about ADHD back then but being patient with yourself, being patient with loved ones, recognising okay there is a point and you will get back to it and also supporting yourself if you're in a meeting or if you're in a situation where you want to be as focused as possible and making brief notes for yourself. Number three, we've got Glimmers, a term coined by the delightful Deb Dana who has helped make Polyvagal Theory accessible to more people. We're all so familiar with triggers and how something that others might not notice can have a pretty debilitating effect on the nervous system. Glimmers are their opposite.It might be the way the light looks on a puddle, it might be the way it can be all kinds of tiny things, larger things but getting to know your glimmers and creating an environment for yourself, creating a schedule for yourself where you are likely to experience as many glimmers as possible is going to contribute to your ventral vagal wellness and overall wellbeing.It's a wonderful way to help alleviate some of the suffering and to really enjoy the way things look or feel or taste or smell or sound, just let yourself feel glimmery and set playlists for yourself, really enjoy it, really indulge yourself as much as possible. Number four is moving on to hyperfocus and for Half Moon members (that's the free subscribers, you can subscribe at evemc.substack.com or selfcarecoaching.net) you'll be getting an email newsletter with a video around hyperfocus and how you can support balance and harmony in your life by working with your own hyperfocus a bit better. Hyperfocus is one of the many reasons why ADHD as a name is not loved by so many. I'll get on to that later but we don't have a problem focusing when we're interested in something. When something grabs us, we often have difficulty unfocusing. So often, people ignore bodily sensations like hunger or thirst or needing the loo or sleep or whatever it might be. Becoming aware of your areas of hyperfocus, becoming aware of your energy levels, of your interests, of the things that need to be done and finding ways as much as possible to make it work for you.Like I said I'll go into this in more detail for tomorrow's bonus content, the deeper dive, but you can just think for yourself, when did you last hyperfocus? Was it a joyful hyperfocus? Was it a stressful hyperfocus? It can actually be really enjoyable building time in to go down random rabbit holes, something you may never have heard of and all of a sudden it's the most fascinating thing in the world and we live in an information age and it's very easy to research and find out more and it's I think really helpful to recognise the joy in that and put supports in place and also to recognise the things that you perhaps need to be doing. I've recently completed a massive revamp of my website and it's taken a year and a half because I initially hyperfocused and then I got distracted by lots of other things and I wanted to complete it but there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff. It's an enormous site and I was creating a library and my virtual assistant helped a lot but it just took a really long time and then in the last few weeks recognising I was near the end, I let myself go into hyperfocus.I scheduled days in where I could work. I didn't have sessions those days and working around the clock but in a planned way. I'm not advocating working on the clock, it's something I'm still working on myself but in this instance it was such a joy to get it done and then I built in some time off afterwards.Know that you're going to get hooked into things, knowing that certain things are going to produce more dopamine and you're just going to get really enthusiastic about them rather than beating yourself up for the way your brain works. Work with it as much as possible. Moving on to impulsivity (number five), it makes me laugh that I didn't realise that I was impulsive until I got my diagnosis (combined). Once I realised it, I realised of course I am. I can remember going back decades, certain things I did. A couple years ago I leaped onto a conveyor belt at an airport because I thought that my luggage was being taken away without it being labelled.It was the middle of the night in Norway, it had been a stressful few days, my uncle was dying and there were no humans around. I saw my suitcase disappearing and I just leaped onto the conveyor belt like a thing possessed. I'm surprised I didn't fall and hurt myself.Suddenly there were loads of humans around and they were telling me off because I shouldn't have done that but it's that...