ADHD, trauma and the Solstice: Find your shine without burning out

Do you wish you could help heal the world but find yourself overwhelmed? Learn to Feel Better, Be Better and DO Better. Subscribe for trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly self-care ideas every Tuesday.Are you navigating trauma and ADHD? This episode is for you. As we approach the Summer Solstice, it's a powerful time to reflect on what you're giving your energy to and how you allow yourself to shine.But what if you don't feel ‘shiny’? Or have the energy you wish you did? Learn to honour your current capacity, especially when living with a trauma history and an ADHD brain.In this episode, you’ll learn:How to release the pressure to perform and embrace self-compassion, even when your energy feels low.Practical, trauma-informed, and ADHD-friendly ways to help your nervous system rebalance, including simple breathwork and mindful movement.Why allowing yourself to rest and simply be (even when hyper-vigilance or performance conditioning makes it challenging) is essential.How regulating your own system helps you contribute more effectively to the world without burning out.Why embracing community and collective action is especially important when you feel the weight of global challenges.Empower yourself to Feel Better, Be Better and Do Better.The Feel Better Every Day PodcastLearn from the self and Self* care practices the professionals depend on.With a mixture of solo and interview episodes, your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham (author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing) shares trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly self and Self* care ideas to help you:• Feel Better (regulate your nervous system and do the things that help you create a life you don’t need to retreat from)• Be Better (accept yourself completely with love, compassion and kindness – you don’t need to do a thing) and• Do Better (turn what hurts your heart into action to support your family, organisations, communities and the world at large)Thanks for listening or watching.New episodes come out every Tuesday morning (Ireland time) and if you subscribe (via your favourite podcasting app or by joining the Sole to Soul Circle), you’ll be notified about each new episode.Sole to Soul Circle members get deeper dives each Wednesday morning.Want to work with me?• There’s the book – 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing – and all the book bonus videos.• All the free resources (for trauma, ADHD, menopause, solopreneurs, anxiety, sleep, confidence, resilience, finding purpose, meaning and joy and more) across my platforms and the library of self-care ideas and practices at https://selfcarecoaching.net• You can join the Sole to Soul Circle on Substack https://evemc.substack.com and get bonus interviews and content specially designed to help you dive deeper into each week’s theme.• If you want to support my work but don’t want to commit to a membership, even for a month, you can choose any amount at https://ko-fi.com/evemc• While my private practice for one to one work (trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly therapies, Self care coaching, clinical supervision and supervisor’s supervision) is almost always at capacity, if you’re based in Ireland or the UK, it’s still worth completing the short form at https://selfcarecoaching.net/contact to book your free telephone consultation in the hope that we can find a mutually convenient time to work together.Want to connect with me on social media?You can find me almost everywhere – please say ‘Hi’ and share your questions and comments:YouTube @evemenezescunninghamSubstack @evemcBluesky @eveimcTikTok @evemenezescunninghamInsta @evemenezescunninghamFacebook @FeelBetterEveryDayAnd if you’d like to leave a review and/or rate this and other episodes you’ve enjoyed, your feedback and support helps me help more people (of all genders) with trauma histories and/or ADHD take better care of their whole selves and create lives they don’t need to retreat from.Chapters(0:02 - 5:27) – Introduction to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast and Summer Solstice(5:28 - 14:00) – How to work with your nervous system to feel better this Solstice and let yourself shine. Feel Better and Be Better(14:01 - 18:58) – Moving into Do Better to improve things not only for yourself but your family, teams, communities and world(18:59 - 20:55) – Finding the courage to speak up for others and an invitation to the Sole to Soul Circle(20:55 - 21:22) – How to join the Sole to Soul Circle at evemc.substack.comDisclaimerThe content I share is not a replacement for one to one trauma therapy (etc). While you can do an enormous amount to support yourself, please always seek appropriate medical advice.Thanks for listening. Please subscribe / follow and share with someone who you think will benefit from this episode.#TraumaInformed #ADHDSupport #SelfCare #NervousSystemRegulation #SummerSolstice #PodcastForADHD #TraumaRecovery #EveMenezesCunninghamFull transcriptHi, I'm Eve Menezes Cunningham and you're listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Every Tuesday I share trauma-informed and ADHD-friendly self-care ideas to help you take better care of yourself and your Self with that uppercase S: that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant and miraculous part of yourself. The idea is to help you feel better every day, creating life you don't need to retreat from.You can find out more at http://thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com And in today's episode, we're celebrating the Summer Solstice. So in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the 21st of June. I mean, it's the 21st of June everywhere, but it's summer here.If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, you might be celebrating the winter solstice. And I'm kind of laughing because I live on the west coast of Ireland and it's been quite wintery even in June right now, which is perfect for this episode because the Summer Solstice.When we're working with the Celtic Wheel of the Year energies, it's a wonderful time to think about your public self, that part of you. It's a great time to think about your commitments and what you're giving your energy to.It's a wonderful time to think about letting yourself shine. And you think of summer solstice, you think bright sunshine, sunflower energy, glorious warmth. And that's not always the case.And that's also not always the case with yourself. Sometimes our energies are aligned and in tune with the seasonal energies, whether the lunar cycle or the Celtic Wheel or whatever you follow. And other times they can feel like there's a bit of a mismatch.So if there are lots of things you want to be doing, lots of contributions you want to be making to the world and you just don't have the energy, that's fine. It's about honouring yourself and letting yourself be.Really just noticing for yourself now, you might want to grab a journal and think for yourself, what do you tell yourself when you feel like you should be doing more? When you feel like you should be your shiniest, happiest self and you just don't feel like it?Maybe you have high hopes for what you'd like to be doing, maybe in your life, in your family, in your work, in your community, in the world at large, all these ideas and just struggling to manifest them, struggling to make them a reality?I'm really encouraging you today to connect with your energies this Solstice and to think about how you might feel safe and secure enough to step out of your comfort zone, let yourself be seen and heard, let yourself be more visible and recognise that that is going to be scary for your nervous system. Any time we expand, there's that part of you that's going to be afraid. Working with it rather than denying it means you can support yourself through it and still make the kind of contribution you want to make to helping create a better, fairer, more equitable planet for everyone and also in your own work, in your own life.But we need to recognise where we are, we need to start where we are. There's no point thinking that you've got all these brilliant ideas if you do or feeling overwhelmed. There's so much in 2025 to feel hopeless and overwhelmed by, but that doesn't help anyone.For the Feel Better portion of this episode, so the Feel Better element is for those times when you have the motivation, the energy, the bandwidth to do the things that can help change your state, that can help resource you. We're going to be working with the nervous system and just recognising that we might be quite sophisticated beings in some ways, but our wiring is ancient and we just aren't equipped for everything that's going on.The best thing we can do is not argue with reality and build in as much downtime as possible so that our nervous system can do the lift, lift, lift, sympathetic activation that life and all its excitement and all its stress and all its horror can bring. But the last thing we want to do is burn out and just go into that collapse mode. By building in times in which we can actively rest, actively rest, I make it sound like such hard work…With trauma histories, with ADHD, rest and relaxation can feel like really hard work, but it's about countering what's normally happening. You're on the go at work, you're on the go at home, you're on the go with your unique brain wiring, thinking about a million things, a million causes you care