We're chatting with Maddy De Gabriele, an Australian science communicator who's turned her personal journey with ADHD into a mission to help others. Through her Adult ADHD Starter Kit and corporate workshops, Maddy breaks down ADHD management into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces.
In this episode we dive into specific tools that can become part of your everyday toolkit for managing your ADHD. We discuss timers, headphones, pillboxes, blankets and more in this episode. If you’ve been wanting an episode that goes into the actual tools that I and many others use in their day to day ADHD life, then this is the episode - Maddy brings the goods.
William Curb: You emailed me originally to talk about this ADHD toolkit idea to help people get into managing their ADHD. So can you tell me a little bit more about that idea? Because I think that's something that people like. I want to start managing my ADHD but I don't know where to start.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Absolutely. I was really excited and interested to hear you talk about the idea of a toolkit to manage your ADHD because that's an idea that I really landed on myself over the last few years. Like quite a few of you listeners I imagine. I was diagnosed as an adult so I was 29 when I was diagnosed and I was diagnosed with ADHD because I was having problems with my ADHD. Almost by definition you only get diagnosed with ADHD if you are struggling with symptoms of ADHD. And for me obviously getting proper medical care, and medication for me personally has been a real game changer and there's a whole range of medical therapies that I've worked with with professionals that have been really life-changing.
But I found that I still had all these really practical, logistical, organizational challenges in my life that didn't need medical solutions or didn't necessarily have medical solutions but I still needed support and help. And once I knew I had ADHD I found I could actually start identifying gradually and through quite a lot of trial and error tools that were ADHD appropriate that helped me with all these different areas of my life.
And at the time I found myself really wishing that I didn't have to find this out through trial and error. I was hoping that everything that was ADHD appropriate came with a label that said ADHD appropriate. I could just run through those things and try them all out and see what worked for me. That didn't exist at the time which was the inspiration for me behind starting my company Cognition and starting running workshops about understanding ADHD. Almost an intro, a starter kit like you said, a starter kit for adult ADHD. Here's just some basics, some practical basics.
William Curb: Yeah because that's basically like a lot of the same thoughts when I started this podcast. It's like okay where do I need help with ADHD and where do I get started with it because it's hard.
Maddy De Gabrielle: It's really hard and it's not clear. There aren't a lot of resources and there especially aren't a lot of resources designed for adults. I mean resources that do exist for kids with ADHD are so important and they're so incredible that they exist but they're mostly designed for kid problems like homework or they're mostly designed for the parents of kids with ADHD to help them. And it's like I'm my own parent with ADHD you know I'm 32 I have a mortgage I don't have someone running my life for me I'm running my life.
William Curb: Yeah I mean and I think that is like the biggest thing is because a lot of the strategies to help with ADHD do require this executive function to get started with them and I mean I think that's why I always recommend medication with people because I'm like that makes doing the strategies to get your ADHD under control so much easier because the medication on itself won't get you where you want to be usually because you have a lot of bad strategies you're using but to fix your strategies you need a kick start.
Maddy De Gabrielle: The point about lifting yourself up by your bootstraps is that it's literally impossible to do. You need extra support into the system to change anything you cannot actually pick yourself up by the bootstraps.
William Curb: Yeah it's funny how that phrase got changed to what people imagine it now.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yeah yeah it's an interesting one that's why I reached out to you to say that I just really resonated with that message I really appreciated hearing that idea from someone else because I chimed with it so well and then I also was just excited to talk about some of the things in my toolbox because I love talking about it and I love hearing from other people what works for them because I feel like we're all a lot of ADHD people we're really smart we're really great creative problem solvers but we're all working in isolation we're all sitting by ourselves reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again and if we could just pull that knowledge and share a bit more it would have saved me a lot of time personally so I've got to believe that it's going to be helpful for other people out there as well.
William Curb: Yeah now before we get into the specific tools here I do want to also slow down be like can you tell me when you envision an ADHD toolbox is there a physical thing or is it just like a kind of mental checkbox what are we envisioning here?
Maddy De Gabrielle: Well it's a mix of things quite a lot of them are physical items I in my head refer to them as these are my medical support devices or my health support devices which just helps me remember that they're important it's like a kind of pretentious name to give like physical things like clocks and lists and whiteboards and whatever but it helps me remember that I need to take them seriously because they might seem trivial but my life will fall apart without them and then it helps me also explain to other people why they're significant so that you know I'm saying I need a clock on the wall and someone doesn't want to hang a clock there.
For some reason whatever that would be I can bring to that discussion this is how important it is for me because I have time blindness this is a support device for me is there any way that we can make this work or something like this work because this is what I need so a range of physical things mental things one of the items in my toolbox I've bought along is actually some vocabulary that I use with my partner in my household that has been really really helpful for both of us so it's it's not one kind of thing but it's just a range of really flexible tools that are designed to be flexible designed to be adaptable and to support me where I'm at so another list of chores I have to do or tasks I have to manage it's whatever is happening for me that day I've got extra help and extra support the really important things.
William Curb: All right and so it is not going to also just be like a toolbox that we carry around with us either it's you know the things that are just in our life that help us.
Maddy De Gabrielle: The things in our life that help us that said I love DIY I love carpentry I love craftiness and I have an actual tool belt that is just so good that sometimes after I'm finished working in the garage I'll just keep wearing it around for a while because I have eight pockets basically strapped around my waist and I feel like most people would appreciate something like this because it's great I can bring all my things with who doesn't want more pockets yeah I mean I also still lose things but whatever at least I'm not going to juggle 15 things every time I go from room to room.
William Curb: Exactly all right well how can we jump into some of the items that you use in your toolbox to help manage your ADHD.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Absolutely all right so my first one is my favorite thing this is sleep headphones so obviously this is a podcast it's not a visual medium but I am still holding it up on the zoom camera so that you can see that I'm sorry for all your listeners maybe I'll see if I can supply a photo to go in the episode notes this is just a soft stretchy gray headband that has a little bluetooth controller in the front and it has two flat little speakers sewn into the headband itself that go over each of your ears and these are headphones that you're really comfy to wear while you sleep and I wear these while I fall asleep I want to say every night and these have been a game changer for me because like the vast majority of people with ADHD I struggle with sleep and for a lot of people that might be like delayed phase sleep disorders it might be whatever it is.
I really struggle to lie down and go to sleep because nine times out of ten lying quietly in the dark with my eyes closed is too boring and my brain becomes more and more and more awake and so I'll start to you know think of things and day dream and like plan my day or ruminate on something and I would become more and more focused on that and my whole body just becomes more and more awake and then it's two in the morning and I'm just going go to sleep go to sleep and that's really unhelpful loop for me to get stuck in so I use sleep headphones I fall asleep listening to podcasts audio books anything at all like that that's just interesting enough for me to drift off to it and it's really changed my life and that I think was really significant me just because sleep is so important and it was something I struggled with so much.
William Curb: We could do an entire episode just on the sleep toolbox because there are so many things that I know I personally need to get to sleep it is something that is important to be like yeah these are tools that help me and I know if I don't have good sleep everything else in the day is going to be a for lack of a better word tragedy for my productivity I will just sit there and stare off and I will find any way to not do what I want it's probably the number one thing for managing my ADHD it's getting good sleep and so yeah there's going to be a lot of tools that I need to help like personally I use like a weighted blanket.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Love a weighted blanket.
William Curb: Took me years to find the one I like which is like a there's like really like chunky knit blanket so it doesn't have any actual weight in it.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Oh it's just a heavy blanket yeah oh my gosh that's so cozy.
William Curb: Yeah because it's like this big like weave of things it's got all these like air holes in it so it's not hot either.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That sounds perfect it sounds like you're describing one of Chris Evans gorgeous sweaters in knives out.
William Curb: Yeah something like that it's just this.
Maddy De Gabrielle: big chunky table knit yeah love that music cozy is the brand of sleep headphone that I use I'm not affiliated with them in any way it's one of the five million brands selling these on amazon I think it cost me 30 Australian dollars that music cozy headphones they were so important for me because that also helped me realize that why I needed appropriate sleep help and advice because I found that pretty much all the the traditional received advice around getting sleep and there's a lot out there a lot of people talk about sleep hygiene it's so important and foundational for all of us a lot of the neurotypical advice or how to have good sleep hygiene doesn't work for me just fundamentally doesn't work for me I need to almost flip it on its head I don't need gradually winding down before bed not eating anything before bed gradually turn off all lights and stimulations and slowly relax into into sleep does not work for me.
Last night I wanted to make sure I got to sleep reasonably early so about 15 minutes before I was in bed I was on my treadmill walking at a really brisk pace listening to a podcast and playing a game on my phone I was doing the exact opposite of what you would do for someone neurotypical who wanted to go to sleep really soon and I was using my body I was moving around I was engaging myself I was making sure that I wasn't going to be feeling restless in bed or bored I was making sure I wasn't going to feel like a chore I was going to keep listening to the same podcast as I went to bed you know it just completely different from a normal sleep routine but it really worked for me.
William Curb: Yeah I think that's also a great point too is that yeah there's going to be a lot of things about neurotypical sleep that don't work for us there are certain things like yes you're still going to want to have a very dark room you're still going to want to have things that are going...
Maddy De Gabrielle: Do you need it to be cool yeah and comfortable.
William Curb: Yeah but then like the amount going to bed is boring.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That's so boring I'm having a different chemical reaction to boredom than other people it was really important to me because people talk about like discipline and management and I'd spent so long failing at received wisdom and common sense advice or it felt like I was failing because none of it worked for me and then I felt like well maybe I'm just bad at going to sleep like bad at going to sleep maybe I'm just badly disciplined or something but it just wasn't working for me it doesn't work for my brain these are the things that work for my brain.
William Curb: And I think that's the key with this toolbox idea too is that we go okay let's find the things that work let's have a place that you record the things that you do you do find that works so that you know like in a year I might be like man I used to have this good routine what was I doing and I can like oh yeah I was using these headphones and they really worked I should try that again.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Oh my gosh for later when we talk about I guess vocabulary I will grab a little flowchart that I actually made and printed out and stuck next to my bed and it's for when I'm having like a really bad morning and it's just a flow chart of steps of like are you stuck do I need to be anywhere yes or no and then it was like if yes then it's like okay am I running late you need to do this and then text someone and then someone and so forth and it's just a little visual reminder of a bunch of those tools I have for when I'm in like a real paralysis analysis paralysis or executive dysfunction moment.
William Curb: Yeah and I think that's such a good point too is that we do forget those things we're not feeling well.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yeah you have ADHD you short-term memory problems just by definition that's something that you have you're going to struggle with recall and struggle to remember things that you know.
William Curb: There's been like morning I'm like man I am having such a hard time waking up like usually it's just like I'm having my coffee and I'm like hey I didn't make coffee this morning oh my god how did I forget that.
Maddy De Gabrielle: I know these habits they don't stick actually that is a really nice segue on to my next item because it's morning for me as your listeners can hear I'm Australian so this interview is happening at 9 a.m on a Wednesday morning for me which means I've just done most of my morning routine so it's really top of mind and the second thing in my ADHD toolkit is a days of the week medication dispenser which again I'm holding up even though your listeners cannot see and I will supply a photo if you like but it's just a clear plastic hill dispenser with little things that pop up and each one of them has a letter on it for the day of the week so SMT Sunday through Saturday and what that does for me is I have it on my bedside table I take a variety of different pills every morning and I always struggle to remember if I've taken them or not so I can just look over and if the day that it is so Wednesday has pills in it then I'm like oh I haven't taken them and then I take them and then that's my reminder for the day that's my week by week reminder and it's one of the only things that's helped me actually remember to take medication every single day.
William Curb: Yeah I know in our pre-interview we discussed that the pill cap timers aren't available in Australia which is what I use because I have like multiple reminders on my phone it's like take it and then like one half an hour later like asking hey did you do this and then I can just like look at the bottle and see if I took it because that is one of the scary things too when you're like I don't know if I took my medication today.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yes absolutely and I think this is what people really struggle to understand about ADHD whether you have ADHD or not very confusing but in effects your short-term memory and that apart from being you know things that you're just talking about things going on in your day is literally the last 10 minutes of what you have seen and heard is your short-term memory and if you have ADHD your short-term memory statistically speaking is likely cut in half you are not recording in your memory it is going in and going right back out again of have you taken your hand from the pill box to your mouth or did something happen to interrupt.
That you're just not retaining any of that information so I don't know unless it's right I need a visual reminder and I need to not have to do anything to recall that information because I started by trying to keep a diary or a little notebook next to my bed where I would mark whether or not I would take my ADHD medication but then I couldn't remember if I'd taken my medication and forgotten to make a mark about it or just forgotten to take my medication and not made a mark about it the making a record was an extra task yeah just adding a task to the task that I was already struggling to do.
William Curb: I know exactly what you mean there where it's just like yeah that's another thing that I can forget if I did because I've definitely like taken my medication then come back and been like oh I need to do that and I walk over and I'm like see that the thing is like we're setting like oh I have no memory of having done this how can I have zero memory of this.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That's the thing I think a lot of really well-intentioned advice around for people for ADHD or that people with ADHD we've often heard I think the advice doesn't quite understand what the weakness is or the challenge is happening cognitively so they give you advice that requires more executive function I think that's also true of a lot of advice for parents of kids with ADHD and why it doesn't translate very well you're assuming that the parent has more executive function yeah and that's often true but you can't then just transpose it to an individual as an adult trying to look after themselves.
One of the things about this medication days of the week that I really like or that I think is kind of significant is that this cost me about eight dollars at my local chemist and it's not cute there are a lot of really cute like pillboxes out there days of the week they're metal or enameled this is just kind of clear plastic it's slightly ugly it's got really big bright green tabs on it for opening each day of the week because it's designed primarily for older people who may be in care who may also be struggling with their memory for a variety of reasons because people with ADHD are not the only people who struggle with memory in a variety of ways but because many people don't really think of ADHD as a medical problem.
Often I have not been directed towards these existing medical tool that would be really helpful for me or are really helpful for me so this is something that this pill holder is cheap easily available simple works really really well has no battery requires no input from me to make it work except for putting my pills in once a week but my doctor didn't say hey you might find this useful if you're struggling to take your medication because I think people often put people with ADHD in a separate mental category to for example disability or chronic health conditions especially if you're someone with ADHD and you happen to be young or generally able-bodied or not necessarily present with many kind of physical manifestations people really struggle to remember that ADHD is chronic health condition.
William Curb: Yeah one of the weird tools that I've picked up recently is just a grabber bar you know where you can squeeze the trigger and it like closes and like using that for cleaning stuff up off the floor makes it so much easier to do it that I actually clean stuff up off the floor like it solves an executive function hurdle for like picking up my kids toys.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Oh my gosh that's such a good idea.
William Curb: Like for whether it makes it a little bit more fun but it's the like oh I don't have to lean over and do this I can just grab things go around and even my kids enjoy doing it more like oh you can use this while cleaning your room they're like yeah it does not work every time.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That's such a good example.
William Curb: Yeah it is not a typical tool that would be assigned for ADHD but it is a great tool to have.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That is such a good example and like you said what you said just there it doesn't work every time. But you probably don't need it every time as well. But sometimes it's helpful. That's why it's a toolkit. It's not like a prescription. It's not that you have to do this every day. Sometimes this is going to be useful for you. Sometimes it's not going to be necessary or it's not going to do the trick. It's fine. It's hard for a range of things. You have kind of already stuck around your home or organized around your life.
William Curb: Yeah. And I mean, it is specifically helpful for my household because I have children and picking up toys is always going to be on the floor. I'm cleaning up a counter. Not as useful. But still.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That's a good point. I just had a mental image of myself trying to use it to clear off my forest of empty coffee mugs off like the side of my bedside table. And that is going really poorly.
William Curb: Yeah. I've definitely been like, I'll just grab this. I'm like, that wasn't even that hard. Why did I do that?
Maddy De Gabrielle: You know, we love trying new things. One day it is going to work for something and you're going to have invented a million dollar industry.
William Curb: Exactly.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Next item in the toolkit is a little clock, which is this is a great time for it because right in the middle of the interview, right about that time, I was just trying to remember how much time has passed because I'm really enjoying this chat, which means that for me, no time has passed. I could keep chatting to you about this for six hours and it wouldn't really register until maybe I needed to go and get a drink or something. So this is a little clock that has been incredibly, incredibly helpful for me with my time blindness. And this is my shower clock. It does not hang in my shower, but it hangs just outside my shower where I can see it from anywhere in my bathroom.
It is waterproof, steam proof, and heat resistant. It's designed for all bathrooms, just a little digital clock. And it helps me keep track of how long I'm in the shower for because I forget almost every time when I'm in the shower, I am not keeping track of the time mentally. And that's just something that creates a lot of stress when I'm getting ready in the morning. Many times in my life, I've zoned out in the shower and then suddenly had to be running late in a panic.
So it makes me kind of anxious. I also sometimes find showers really boring and kind of painful to start just because I'm just not in the right headspace. And I just don't have a lot of executive function and really don't want to have to stop doing whatever it is I'm doing. So it's really helpful for me to say, okay, I'm going to shower for 90 actual seconds. And that's fine. Just commit to that, get in the shower, see how you feel.
And then I can actually have an objective tracker for how long that is, which might sound really silly. And I think it's also something we don't talk about a lot. But that for me is something that ADHD, like really bad executive dysfunction affects. And I think it happens for a lot of people.
And it's really easy to feel just a lot of shame or confusion or resentment for why a really simple, necessary daily part of life is tough. Getting that shower clock for me was something really practical. So it helps a lot. But it was also a way to support myself without shaming myself, if that makes sense.
William Curb: Yeah. Personal hygiene is hard. Because it is, again, boring, not fun. Repetitive. Yeah. For some people, like having a shower radio or having some like the little Bluetooth speakers that can play podcasts in the shower.
Maddy De Gabrielle: I also have Bluetooth speakers that I wear with a shower cap. They are great. They're not one of my tools, but they absolutely could be. They've got little over E hooks. And I wear them under my shower cap. And I just keep listening to my podcast. Or I listen to like, pump up music.
William Curb: And it is funny like showers. Yeah, because like the worst part of the showers are getting in the shower, followed by getting out of the shower. Right.
Maddy De Gabrielle: It's transitions. I hate them. And I'm no good at them.
William Curb: And it's like both it's like, I'm going to be, I don't want to get wet. And it's like, like, now I don't want to go get dry.
Maddy De Gabrielle: And I don't want to get cold. And so I like, I will turn on the shower and let it run for a few minutes, like 30 seconds while I get ready to get in, like, you know, get undressed or whatever, which in Australia is a little bit verboten, because we are a drought prone country.
We have national education campaigns about not wasting water. And so that's something that by default, I don't ever do. But I realize that for myself, it just makes such a big difference for the water to already be warm and there's steam in the air. And it's not such a big temperature transition that I realized that for me personally, this is a, again, this is a health support thing.
This is something that significantly improves my quality of life and daily hygiene to be able to run the shower for 30 seconds extra. So I'm just going to get over that mental work and I'm going to make that choice.
William Curb: Yeah. And then you have the clock there to remind you not to take it too long.
Maddy De Gabrielle: So it's fixing, you know, absolutely, absolutely.
William Curb: Yeah, I think it's a fine solution. And I think that's also a great mental thing to be like, Hey, this is important for me, like, so that I can function as a person, like, a lot of times we like overlook a lot of these aids because we're like, well, that's, you know, maybe it's a little wasteful or ifs, I'll frequently have these like tomato soup sippers for lunch. And part of me is like, man, I should just make a really big pot of tomato soup and then I could have that all week and I wouldn't have to be wasting it with this. I like it, but I won't do that. I just won't eat lunch for that week. And is more wasteful, but it does let me function as a person way better.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Something that was really helpful for me and transformative for me was realizing that really often when we have these general conversations about waste or needfulness, people without ADHD are often using very different mental standards.
So for example, when they are saying something isn't needed, what they mean is it's equally easy for me to make a big pot of tomato soup or buy them pre-packaged. Those are pretty comparable level tasks for someone with executive dysfunction, cooking and organizing and timing and remembering to put things away in the freezer before they go moldy and all the rest of it. That is excessively difficult.
That is an outsized level of difficulty. And that's kind of not really what we're talking about in general conversations about is this necessary or is this useful or is it lazy to go for the easier route? It is so much more difficult for us to do this that going the easier route is never lazy. I believe that really, really passionately, literally never lazy. We always need to make things easier, simpler, and less moving to treat medical conditions.
William Curb: Laziness isn't really a thing. Laziness doesn't exist. You're just, when we're being lazy, we're just currently meeting ourselves where we're at. Absolutely.
Maddy De Gabrielle: I also think that's true for absolutely everybody. I think it's especially true for neurodivergence. I think you have to work really hard and take a very unkind interpretation of events to find a lazy neurodivergent person.
And I thought of myself as lazy for a decade. I'm just really important, a big part of my self image of myself. But that was because I had the most unkind possible interpretation of myself because I was judging myself by all these other standards.
William Curb: Yeah, standards that even neurotypical people probably weren't meeting. Yeah, probably. We just make those imaginer heads like, oh yeah, I'll just work all the time and breaks are for never.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yeah, yeah. I will always be productive. I will have very weird thoughts about self-discipline and this will be a Protestant work ethic and it'll be fine and capitalism isn't broken. Exactly.
William Curb: That's a bit of a swing. Yeah.
Maddy De Gabrielle: And then we may be drifting off topic, but I would also love to come and have that podcast episode with you sometime.
William Curb: Oh yeah, the things I've written about capitalism in my own journals. All right, let's move on to our next tool though.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Absolutely. AirTags. AirTags, tiles, Bluetooth trackers. I have them attached to my car keys, my house keys, my headphones. I have them attached or near virtually every significant thing in my life or I have another form of Bluetooth tracking.
So for my phone, I use a phone case instead of a wallet and that's got my ID and my credit card and my public transport card in that wallet so that I can find my phone to find those things. And my gosh, transformative, if you do not try to store the location of important items in your short-term memory because you can't, you just can't. You have maybe three or four slots in your short-term memory available for chunks of information and they are too busy remembering the time you have to leave the house and have you fed your kids, pets, self and one other piece of information. There will never be a spare room to remember where you just put down your car keys. They will never be, get it off your slate, stop trying to remember it, attach a Bluetooth tracker to it. You can share them with the other people in your household so that they can also find the keys that you left in the cupboard or the fridge or wherever you left them and then you're not having arguments about it. You can set up location tracking between your devices so my phone buzzes me when I leave my keys behind somewhere that isn't my house. Oh, I like that.
It's the best. I use iPhone things, but tiles are not Apple specific. Tiles work with androids and iPhones so that you can, you know, share them between people with two different kinds of phones. Whatever Bluetooth trackers you can attach to things, get them set up and ask someone maybe for help to set them up because I struggle to set up like finicky settings and things like that. I'll get bored or distracted and stop halfway through, ask someone to help you set it up and it is a bit of a surveillance state. My privacy, as much as I ask apps not to track me and I, you know, use ad blockers and all the rest of it, I was like, it doesn't really serve my privacy to be locked out of my home for the third time this month.
William Curb: Yeah, I mean, I remember in my first year of college, I lost my keys to my room for three weeks and I just happened to show up when people were coming into the room at the same time as them.
Maddy De Gabrielle: That's a more reasonable solution for ADHD than either not losing the keys or organizing replacement for the keys.
William Curb: Yeah, turned out they were in the bottom of my laundry basket and I just hadn't been doing my laundry.
Maddy De Gabrielle: So that is classic. That is a classic. I don't have a solution for the laundry thing. I just have a division of labor where my husband does basically 100% of the laundry in my home and I do 100% of the cooking and that works really well for us.
William Curb: One question I have about the devices is do you have a reminder to change their batteries or replace them when they are going out of service?
Maddy De Gabrielle: The air tags and the tiles that I use, they both have a little app to download on your phone and pair with and they both, those apps give you notifications when you have to replace them. So that tells you when the battery is running low and then when you open the app and look at it, it'll give you a little battery metric. So there's a lot of warning and they don't use specialist batteries very much.
I mean, they use little round watch batteries that you can just get at the supermarket for about $10. So anything that requires a specialist or like specific upkeep or maintenance, I know that once that maintenance or repair or whatever replacement time rolls around, I'm not going to do it. So it has to be really easy to keep going. Otherwise, it's probably not going to be a useful tool for me.
William Curb: Yeah, I can see that because I, yeah, I know I had a long time ago, I had a flat tile thing that I could put just like attached to a book and then it eventually ran out of battery and I'm like, I'll get another one of those.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Never happens. Actually, I think with the tiles, I may be making this up. I believe they may have a little special premium subscription thing you can do and they will just send you new ones or send you new batteries.
William Curb: That could be handy. Yeah, because that was the one I had five years ago now.
Maddy De Gabrielle: So again, I use Apple things. I find the air tags work really, really well and really intuitively. Those are the ones that can do all the kind of matchy Perry with my phone. So if I'm out and about, it knows that I've got my iPad and my Ipods with me and will ping me if I leave them behind somewhere. And that has saved my butt a number of times.
William Curb: I can imagine because the places that I have left my phone and been like, have to go back like an hour. What am I doing with my life?
Maddy De Gabrielle: Oh, God, it's just such a bad feeling. And the thing is, it doesn't make a difference where you leave them. It doesn't make a difference if I've put my phone down on top of my chest of drawers while I'm getting dressed in the morning, or if I've left it on a train, which I took three hours ago. It doesn't matter because once it's out of sight, it is out of mind and it is out of my short term memory and I have no record of it. There is no difference based on the ridiculousness or the unlikeliness or the novelty of that location. It's exactly the same mental thing that is happening, which is it's out of sight and it's out of mind. So stop beating yourself up for not being able to find your stuff in your own home. Catch your tags to things that you like.
William Curb: And especially I like when I ring it and I'm like, oh, it was next to me.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Right next to you sitting on top of a pile of books. Yeah, I found I used to find my device to find my AirPods this morning and they were behind me.
I just turned around and was like, oh, there they are. My life got so much better when I stopped trying to improve my memory and it said I treated myself like someone who had a memory problem.
William Curb: Yeah, because ADHD is a memory problem.
Maddy De Gabrielle: So it's a memory problem and it's a movement problem. Almost everything I'm talking about is either things to help you remember or things to help you keep in motion or get in motion. It's my top advice to work by.
William Curb: All right, well, let's get into this last tool, which I believe you said was vocabulary.
Maddy De Gabrielle: This one is a bit more abstract, obviously, unlike those other tools which are, you know, very concrete. But this is just a way of referring to a few kinds of ways of talking about common issues or challenges, especially that I started using with my husband. And it just really, really helps us kind of communicate exactly what's going on.
I think it is so, so valuable and useful to have these conversations with the people that you live with or the people that, you know, are close to you, just to help both of you really, clearly communicate. Because from the outside, I mean, ADHD is invisible. You can't necessarily see what's going on inside someone's head. Also, when you have ADHD, ADHD is also difficult to understand.
On the inside. So, these specific examples that I have, I asked my partner and said, hey, what are the things that, you know, you found that you appreciate since I was diagnosed a few years ago? And he immediately said a few kinds of key phrases. One of them was, I'm stuck. So, I think like a lot of your listeners probably, I have problems with getting like physically stuck, like on the couch, in the bed, wherever I am, I just, maybe there's too many things to do and I just don't know where to start and I'm really overwhelmed or it's something that I don't really feel equipped to do. Or I haven't eaten for eight hours because I've forgotten.
So, now I'm just really hungry and dizzy or I haven't drunk water. Whatever the reason , I'm having a really hard time just standing up and getting started. So, for me, just being able to say, hey, I'm stuck.
And what that means is I don't necessarily need him to come over and solve my life or solve my day. Often, I will say, hey, I'm stuck. Can you give me a hand? And what that means is you'll literally come over and hold my hand and help me stand up from the couch. And that helps incredibly with getting a hand. So, that language around stuck is really, really helpful for the immediate there's a road bump here that I just need help with really quickly if you can.
Another one is phrases around climbing the wall versus staring at the wall. And that's something I got straight from an excellent YouTuber called How To ADHD. I recommend her channel very much. It's got tons of practical videos.
William Curb: Yeah, that's the model from Brendan Mahan.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so Brendan Mahan and I saw it first through How To ADHD.
William Curb: Yeah, she has a great video on it.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Absolutely. It's cartoons. I recommend it. Watch it with your family, with your friends, anyone you can track on the bus. And it talks about task initiation and organization for ADHD is often like a wall where each individual step of it is a brick. And sometimes it looks like you're doing nothing, but actually, you're mentally climbing the wall, you're mentally getting over every working out how you're going to solve a problem. Sometimes you're just sitting and staring at the wall. It's a really good way to quickly check in with my partner if he's seen me kind of just physically not start a task, be staring blankly at your physical wall in my house for a while, like standing in the middle of the kitchen halfway through a step with half a cup of coffee in my hand, just vaguely staring into the middle distance.
He can say, Hey, are you climbing a wall? Are you staring at a wall? And what that means is, are you thinking and should I leave you alone? Or are you a bit stuck? And do you need a hand?
Maddy De Gabrielle: Really, really useful, clear ways of communicating where we're at. That has just made our lives a lot nicer. I mean, easier, less frustrating, and more easy to be loving and supportive of each other. And we started to use that language back both ways because he doesn't have ADHD, but people with ADHD can also get stuck, can also have trouble getting things started or thinking through a problem.
William Curb: Yeah, I mean, I love that the wall of awful language is so great for just communicating everything and being like, Hey, yeah, this is everyone's going to have issues with doing this.
And we all have similar ways of trying to climb it or stare at it or break through it or do any number of things. I was trying our best.
Maddy De Gabrielle: Yeah,
William Curb: Is there anything you want to leave the audience with before we sign off?
Maddy De Gabrielle: Absolutely. So if this episode was helpful for you or useful for you, you can come and find me online because I talk about this for a living. I run online workshops called the adult ADHD starter kit. You can find that at cog nation dot com. That's cog like COD nation like the country dot com dot au because I am Australian and check out my newsletter, check out maybe a workshop, we're running online workshops that just run through some of these ideas and some really practical tools and are a space to do a bit of kind of collective problem solving.
So come and check me out online at cognition dot com dot au, cognition au on all the socials. But thank you so much, William, for having me on and having this conversation. This was really fantastic. I had so much fun.
William Curb: I had a great time. Thank you for coming on.
This Episode's Top Tips
When we’re looking at what goes into our tool kit we need to be thinking of both the physical and mental items that can assist us throughout the day.
It’s important to work on getting past the idea of how we “should” be able to do certain things and look at what tools will let us actually do those things.
It’s important to work on understanding and accepting ADHD as a chronic condition. We need to recognize ADHD's impact on our daily life and work on employing practical tools and strategies to mitigate those challenges.