Retraining Your Nervous System with Dr. Ute Liersch
My guest this week is Dr. Ute Liersch, a Chartered Counselling and Coaching Psychologist with over a decade of clinical experience and author of A Minimalist’s Guide to Becoming Resilient. Dr. Ute specializes in helping adults navigate anxiety, ADHD, and burnout.
Her therapeutic approach is integrative, drawing from modalities such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and mindfulness-based therapies. Beyond her clinical practice, Dr. Ute is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and holds a Fellowship in Higher Education.
In our conversation, we explore the nervous system beyond the textbook fight-flight-freeze model, including how our nervous system shapes our mood, motivation, and even the way we see the world. Dr. Ute explains why so many of us with ADHD find that our sympathetic nervous system is permanently on edge and how we can work on rewiring that response. We also talk about perfectionism, attention types, and what resilience looks like in real life, breaking it down into actionable steps that fit into our schedules and ADHD brains.
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
William Curb: Well, I'm so thrilled to have you here with us and a great place for us to start would be to be talking about the nervous system. But more specifically, I have a feeling that a lot of people like the nervous system, I know what that is. But then if you ask them to explain it, they'd be like, it's the nerves.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Love the question, because yeah, it is true. I do hear that, oh, well, I heard all about this. I know all about that. I often agree that I say you probably have had the information, but you might not have had the chance to actually investigate what this means. If we look at the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system, so that's the autonomous nervous system. So that's where we actually, as people have very little control, that's the system. I mean, it's so hugely and widely discussed. Of course, it's linked to fight flight freeze, and half of the people already stopped listening because we know it. I would say we don't, because what we do not understand is how complex that system is and what it actually does in a sense of how it affects our mood, how it affects our internal hormones, how it actually affects how we see the world.
When I talk to people on my personal history around ADHD, or people who are really neurodivergent, also people with autism, but the message is very often, since you are on this planet, or since you have been thrown into the world as high diggers, is that how you do stuff is wrong. So it doesn't matter how much you try, it doesn't matter how much in German we would say blood, sweat, and tears you put into a piece of work, what you will probably get back is not good enough. Over time, of course, what we are linking with doing a piece of work, so for example, let's say writing an essay, yeah, becomes linked with this understanding is not going to be good enough. And that's of course a threat, correct?
William Curb: Yeah.
Dr. Ute Liersch: This means over time, we don't need the external world any longer to threaten us with is not good enough. We are internalizing that threat. And that means that from a nervous system perspective, we are consistently working on a much higher threshold. And when we look at it from that perspective, it makes absolute sense that people with ADHD have a lot of anxiety and when they are finished with fighting that anxiety, when they are done with running away with it because we are so depleted, this is when sadness sets in and when depression can set in.
So we need to understand that how we are interacting with the world has immediate effect of how the nervous system reacts to it. And thus, it's autonomous, the sympathetic, so that's the one that is triggered when we are calming down because we cannot really interfere with it. What happens over time is that the sympathetic nervous system gets much more active. We are much quicker in getting angry, we are much quicker in being anxious, we are much faster in feeling really low mood and the parasympathetic, so the relaxing cooling system actually gets rather lazy because it's not nurture.
William Curb: That makes sense. Yeah, a lot of things with our brain I have seen is like we use it or lose it and yeah, if we're not ever letting ourselves relax then well, that feels very profoundly sad to think about.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah, interesting that you say it's sad. I think I can walk with you that it can have a very sad effect on lives. I think why this information for me is so important and why I give this to people I'm allowed able, allow me to say bless the quite often to work with is because the moment we know that we can start doing something with it.
William Curb: Yes.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Because to me, whilst I understand sometimes ignorance is bliss because we don't have to think about everything, it can also be devastatingly disabling. And the moment we know that we are probably living our lives with a sympathetic nervous system that is on high alert, that means that picks up threats much quicker and makes elephants out of small little mosquitoes also because it's high club. The moment we know that we can actually start working with it and indirectly we can start pushing that sleepy parasympathetic nervous system through training. I know I'm a psychologist and I know I do therapy, but I believe me if I say very often I substitute the word therapy with training because a lot of stuff I do is training.
William Curb: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me because it feels to me that many of the things we do is just the history of our habits and everything that this is what we're used to doing. And undoing habits isn't simply just talking about them, it's the repeated action of figuring out, creating new ways of doing things.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah, as you say, habit, habitual behavior, automatic stuff we do. It's not intrinsically wrong. I mean, if we would have to learn everything and you, we would never be able to cycle or drive a car or walk. Remember stuff. We need to of course have the ability to do stuff on automatic pilot. The problem arises is when we are not noticing when automaticity kicks in and we are doing the same old, same old, same old, same old. Another example, especially in ADHD, we are told all the time we can't focus and we cannot be attentive, which is of course nonsense. We can.
We do it differently and we need to train in a different way in order to reach focusing and attention abilities that are needed in 2025, but it doesn't mean we can't do it. But of course, when you have this narrative and if it's just told often enough, it becomes a habit that we say, of course, look, I can't focus. I can't do this. So if you're able to read, let's say one page and afterwards you notice, oh, I'm three pages down, but I have no idea what I read because my brain was somewhat different.
I don't know if any one of you listen, that's notes that I know that very well. You have a choice here. One choice is to say, okay, look, this is evidence that I'm incapable of doing it. Another choice is to say, okay, I can do one page. Now let me train to do one and a half because three clearly is not in our skill set today.
William Curb: This is also a place where I before my diagnosis would obviously be like something that I'd be like, oh, I just need to keep pushing through here. I need to buckle down and just try reading the pages again, of course, reading them again, revise the same result and then I'd do it again. It never worked out in my favor, but it was what I thought I had to do.
Dr. Ute Liersch: I remember when I did my exams, I was given either 20 minutes longer to do exams or half an hour. I forgot at university, so I was only diagnosed really late in life. This is something which I find really interesting because, of course, on the one side, giving more time, we have more time to work on something. But on the other hand, attention is more difficult, so I don't actually know whether I was able to focus on the essay with the extra time given.
William Curb: I've done tests with the extra time and I'm like, that's not exactly what I need. Sometimes it was great, but most of the time it was like, I still finished within the same amount of time that I was supposed to, it's just...
Dr. Ute Liersch: I think, or at least, that's my experience. I'm just going to share this. Maybe this works or this resembles other people's experiences also. What I noticed is the theoretical explanation of stuff quite often wasn't really helpful. I had to have a lived experience of something in order to understand.
William Curb: That explains a lot of my writing style when I'm doing the monologue episodes for the show, where I will look up a definition of something to be and I'm like, I can see what that is. But what does it really mean to have this idea of whatever concept I'm trying to talk about? In the process of shifting that into a concrete example, I feel like that's where I get a much better understanding.
Dr. Ute Liersch: I believe that my learning style is like a Rubik's Cube, not that I have ever been able to do it through that flipping around. I've done, I've taken the whole thing apart, stuck it together again. I want to say with that my lived experience and the experience of many of the people I work with, although I've confirmed that, is we have to really take something apart into its pieces. We have to look at the pieces from all different angles. We then pop it together again and then we understand.
William Curb: Getting everything to go to fit together and it's hard to get that back far enough to see the full picture of how that would work. Because often I find that's the fric with even doing something like that where I'm like, I'm so focused on what's happening right here. I can't see what's happening elsewhere as well.
Dr. Ute Liersch: When we look at attention in ADHD, attention is quite often spoken about in one word, but that's actually not true. We have focused attention. So where we literally say, we go onto this particular thing, we have selective attention where we look at the horizon of life and we select what we are attending to. We shift attention. And I mean, it's quite often a big problem when you are focused on something and somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, oh, do you want a cup of tea? Gone. Could actually, I don't want to sound aggressive, but at this moment you could murder that person because they've taken you away. Of course, you were able to shift to them, but that's kind of a different neuronal charge that's going on here.
You're not able to shift back any longer. Again, I find it really helpful in this moment to what type of attention is the one I'm struggling with. We probably struggle and I mean struggle in comparison to other people who function on a different level in the world we are living in now. The reason why I say this is because the ADHD brain in the hunter-gatherer world is the brain of the leader because the qualities we are showing to the world at that time, these were all the qualities everyone needed. You didn't need somebody who is detail-orientated all the time, but you needed somebody who shifts very quickly, who has attention everywhere, who sees over there is the problem and oh, let's just get everyone together and go people.
We needed people who didn't need a lot of sleep, who were attentive to the whole group, but were not really understanding of, okay, over there is Olaf and over there is Peter because we can't remember these bloody names, but we can remember other things. So when I say the problem with, I want everyone to understand, it's not an intrinsic problem, it's a problem that arises that because we are living in 2025 and the qualities we are having are not gelling very well with the demand the world puts on humans.
William Curb: Yeah, well, especially when if you're viewing things as this community-oriented, everyone has their job in place, but when we go move that into a everyone is an individual and they all need to do these various tasks. It's one of the greatest things I've done with doing this podcast is having someone that helps me do my editing and I have someone that is a producer and helps me with emails and all the booking guests and all this other stuff and I'm like having this community people that are working with me is so much better and it took a long time for me to accept that I didn't need to do everything individually.
Dr. Ute Liersch: The sentence that comes in my head is this is kind of a curse of our lives because quite often our strengths are not really seen. We try to do right in everything. I have yet to meet somebody, so I'm not working with children, I'm only working with adults. Sorry, I should have said that. I see people who come to me at the age of 70 and they say, you know, what is something is wrong? I don't know. I just don't get it. When the diagnosis is there or when they come with a diagnosis, what comes onto the table in the very same moment is profound sadness because the opportunities that were missed because the strength was not seen, but I have to be able to do everything was very much pushed and is simply not possible.
We are good in some things and we suck really badly in other things. So if you want to, if me, I don't do my invoices in my in my private practice. I have somebody who does that because I would make mayhem out of that. I promise you, I remember every story people tell me because that's how my brain works. It took me years to acknowledge that it is okay. I'm a worthy person and I'm a good psychologist. If I am doing that what I'm good at and if I'm outsourcing the things, I just today I say, I don't want to do because they do not give me joy and I don't excel in them.
William Curb: Yeah. It's amazing how things that are so inconsequential to are overall successful as a person can internally make us feel like we're like, I can't keep my car clean. And you're like, well, I'm terrible as a person because of this. And it's like, what does that have to do with the things that you're good at and that you're the amazingly bringing to the world? Whereas, and what bad does having a bad car bring to the world? Well, it's smelly for me to drive in sometimes. This is a place where I can 100% blame my children, which is fantastic escape.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Love it. I think what we often do, at least what I realized is when we are talking about something that we don't want in the other person or we actually want to help the other person to get better, we are quite often using the words you are so a form of to be. So what we start to do is we critique or criticize or feedbacking the person. Whereas, where I'm sitting today as the woman I don't think I can feedback critique or criticize the being at all, but is always up for grabs is behavior.
So in my previous life, I worked with children and I had private learning Institute, the whole school run on four rules. And the first rule was we can always talk about behavior and behavior can be helpful or hindering behavior can also be good or bad. The person can't. And when we bring this into the world, the differentiation between throwing food on the floor is unacceptable behavior, rather than it makes you a bad person. Then we have a very different way of communicating, of bringing standards and rules and discipline into life as a supportive scaffolding and mechanism, rather than a destroying of the human being on the other side.
William Curb: Yeah, I mean, it sounds to me just like this differentiation between guilt and shame of like, I did a bad thing versus I am a bad person thing, whatever.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Shame is such an interesting thing. I mean, both concepts are interesting because like everything, they're not intrinsically good or bad. They have a function. But if they are used as the thing, as the go-to, I've messed up an exam and shame comes immediately always. Then we are probably back in what we already discussed, automaticity.
William Curb: Well, and yeah, there's like aspects of like, yeah, I should feel shame about things where if I'm acting racist, I should feel shame about being racist. That's not just a I did a bad thing. I am holding bad beliefs. But if I can move on from those beliefs, then I don't need to feel shame about them. I used to. That's in the past.
Dr. Ute Liersch: To me, the question is most of the time, what's the function of it? What is that thing? I'm either feeling or what is the thing I'm doing? What is the thing I'm thinking? What is this in service of? And is it helping me to actually live a life accordingly to what I think my purpose is, what my value is? Because what we then realize very quickly, then there is not a single thought. There is not a single emotion. And there is not a single behavior that is in its core, either good or bad. And what we then notice is, if people buy into that, I did some vertical commas with my fingers for all the listeners, because I don't like the term buy into it. But if you think that's an interesting concept to look at, what it will help us to do is asking the question, is this what I'm doing right now?
Actually a value based action that supports my life or is it an automatic action that is depleting my life? When you drive a car and you come to a red traffic light, I think you would stop, right? It's a good rule. It keeps us safe. So we would actually say it's a brilliant rule, 100% true. But what happens if you're driving an ambulance and you come to a red traffic light? This rule could be threatening the life of the person who is on the stretcher at the back. So I haven't done nothing else, but I've changed the situation. And only to show the same rule on the one side keeps us safe. So we don't crash into each other. But there are other possibilities where it actually can take a lot.
William Curb: Yeah. And it can feel like the, I was like, well, for a lot of us, it can feel like, well, that's the obvious exception. But it's not, we often don't apply those things to ourselves where we're allowing for that grace or that, hey, yeah, this makes sense that I don't, that this is the way that I chose to make this action.
Dr. Ute Liersch: You know, if the rule is you have to be on time out of whatever reason, then for many people, it means, okay, it's half an hour traveling. So I'm going to leave half an hour before because it works for me. But this is not going to work for somebody with ADHD. Because time for us is not the same concept as for many others. We do not really have this intrinsic understanding of what time is. I have been known to sit at home and missing the flight because I was very clear about the flight only leaves in an hour.
Totally, totally disregarding the fact that I actually had to travel for over an hour. And when people then get very quickly quite upset, but you know that and why don't you do that? It's because the way my time environment works for me, the meaning of time, how I experience time is probably not the same to other people. The moment I accepted that, I knew we back in acceptance, right? I was able to work time differently. But that's my scaffolding. And if somebody takes this away, I feel very insecure.
Yeah. But I need to have this to feel secure so that my sympathetic nervous system is not going even more through the roof every time I go for a flight. So I respect my own needs here. And if other people can't do this, then we make different travel arrangements. But I can't do it the way a non-ADHD person travels because it puts me in a place of despair.
William Curb: You know, like I've also known ADHD people that are like, yeah, I get so anxious about things. I don't even think about it. I just day of I put everything in my suitcase and I like I don't want to plan anything and I just go and I'm like, like, that would be horrifying for me. And it's like, it's, it gets, it's very like, we need to be individualized to how we're treating what works for us and what doesn't.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah. And for that, we need to go away from that narrative we are wrong. Right? Because that's, I would say that's a death argument. Because if you are buying into I'm wrong, there is not a lot of curiosity to understand how am I actually? Because I'm wrong, right? For people who who listen and who say, I am wrong, right? Who have this intrinsic belief, which has been planted and fostered over time.
If we come to a place where we are willing for a moment to entertain the idea, if I would not be wrong, what would I need to feel safe? Not even doing it, not actioning it, not changing anything, entertaining the idea of willingness. I think this can help us to get to know us better, because then we can link into functioning on a very different level.
William Curb: I think this is a good transition point because it's making me think the idea of resilience, which is also your new book, A Minimalist Guide to Becoming Resilient. But how about you tell me a little bit about the book first, and then we can jump in from there.
Dr. Ute Liersch: So I started to give talks around resilience because I was not always a psychologist, right? I worked in the hospitality industry in hotels for many years, 12, 15 hour shifts, sometimes 24 hour shifts. And if the moment you got tired, people told you, well, just got to be a bit more resilient. Now in my life, I work a lot also with people who are in very demanding jobs. And when they are angry or when they're anxious, what the corporate world happily says, well, it's just got to be a bit more resilient.
So I got an excuse, my language really pissed off with using words which are not accurate in order to get something from people a system wants. So I started to do talks which are called progressive resilience, and it's about understanding the difference between being resilient and driving a demolition derby. Because resilience is sold as what toughness actually is. And if we are looking at the origin of resilience, resilience comes actually from material science. And what they do is they clamp this sheath of metal between two hands and then they stress the metal with the weight. And then the metal bends. And the resilience measurement is the metals ability to come back once the stressor has been released.
When I read through it and when I looked at pictures, certain concepts came to mind. Number one, in order to become resilient, life needs to stress you. Life is never stressful. You will never have to be resilient. Number two, that stressor, that weight must be heavy enough that you cannot stay the way you are. You need to move. Again, if you just have a little stressor and you can stay the way you are, you don't need resilience. Information number three I drew out of that was we need to yield.
If life pushes us hard, we need to yield in order to A, work the pressure and B, work resilience. And that was the first idea of the talk. And this has built up over years. And the book is basically the book form of all the talks I've given. It's very, very short because again, I have yet to meet a person who goes for a self-help guide when they feel very happy. You know? You're not buying a book on how do I manage, I don't know, depression when you are on your honeymoon being happy? That's not happening.
And what I thought is, or what I know is our ability to focus when we are stressed is even less there compared to when we are not stressed. So let's create a book that is minimalistic. Very short, if you're a five minutes a day, you can get a whole chunk of information and training in. And it's built modular. So you can build, you can listen to parts of it. There are some audio trainings in it. It gives you a very evidence-based in-depth theory in 200 words.
William Curb: Okay. And a lot of books are too long anyways. It feels like you're like, well, the last 60% of this book is padding for this idea in the beginning.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Can I just say it's, it's, it wants my heart that you say that. I tell you why. I wrote on the structure of the book for over a year. How do I structure it? What works? What can we read? What is fitting in our lifestyle? What can my brain take? And of course, like everyone, I thought, I have to need an agent and need a publishing house, blah, blah, blah. And then you have to write to specification. So a self-help book specification, I think a minimum is 40,000 words, plus sometimes up to 60, 70,000 words. And the self-help books I read, I felt quite often the last two chapters were fillers. And I don't want to take anything away from, from, from the authors. I just want to be very clear. I admire the work and the effort they put in.
However, to me, the last two chapters often felt like fillers. And here again, I'm really holding up the flag for everyone who has a brain that works differently, rather than succumbing to, well, you know, that's the deal of the industry. That's what you got to do. You have to tick these boxes. I said, I'm going to self publish. I'm going to go the Kindle route and I'm going to print on demand for people who want it because it allows me to write a self-help book that has actually 25,000 words, plus the other 5,000, this bibliography and, and, you know, the index and all of that. Unthinkable to get this printed and into bookstores.
William Curb: So funny thing how that works where they're just like, yeah, this is, and it's a lot about meeting expectations. People will like be like, well, this is a short book. So in my experience, I'd be like, no, that's the one I want because I know when I'm doing my writing, the most important, one of the most important parts is making things shorter. It's very easy to make things long. Making things shorter and concise. That's a lot more work.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah. I, so I agree with it. I believe it was most, I think it was George Bonnard Shaw. Apologies for the long letter. I didn't have enough time to write a short one. Mm-hmm. It is incredibly difficult to bring things concisely into something. And you also got to own that you can't do everything. But you know what? For that, I have a bibliography. So if you're interested in a concept, I don't have to do everything, do I?
I can happily refer to people who are masters in the Polyvagal Theory, because that's what they research. Don't need me for that. I have to tell you where it is helpful to use that theory in order to have training that makes you more resilient. That's my job.
William Curb: So bringing this back onto resilience, if people wanted to start building more resilience into their life, what are some of the approaches that they might want to start thinking about?
Dr. Ute Liersch: I'm very body focused. Like our body very quickly tells us when, when we come into a dangerous zone, or the better word is when we are stressed. And when we build resilience, what we need to do, of course, in one side, we have to broaden our repertoire to calm us down. Back to our beginning. How can I start interacting with the parasympathetic nervous system? And there is one beautiful exercise. Allow me to say that it's a very old one. It's called Jacobson relaxation technique. It's not as sexy as mindfulness, because it's physical. And very often when I work with people who are stressed and who know over time, they feel that their body is tensing up. And when we are in that state of physical tension, what we don't know any longer is how does it actually feel when the muscle relaxes.
But because the tension has become the norm. And what the progressive muscle relaxation does, it takes you through the body. And it starts in and it's an exercise where you tense all the big muscle groups one after the other. You count to 10, they even start checking, you might have a little pain. And then you relax. So for many people, this is the first time that they actually notice how it feels in your body when you go from a state of tension, fight flight freeze, danger. So the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system to a state of relaxation, which is the physical presentation of the parasympathetic nervous system. It's an easy exercise. If you want, got an audio, I can send the audio to you, you can link it in. It takes five minutes.
William Curb: Just thinking about all the tension in my body right now, I'm like, I know what I'm doing after the conversation. So try that out.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah. And this is of course not, it's not that now I'm resilient. Because the problem of course with resilience is that we are using a noun. And the noun has immediately in our linguistic network, what it says, this is one thing. And it's like, it's a static thing. That's one sense that there are a couple of things that should not exist as a noun, right? Because it gives us the wrong impression. We should only use it as a verb, as a doing word in German or in when you let your child, a verb is called a doing word. I think this is beautiful because it actually describes what it is.
Resilience is a doing word, right? So progressive muscle relaxation is one tiny little building block, which can help you when you get really frustrated to bring the frustration into the muscles and then to bring relaxation into it. But what it does on a more meta-analytic understanding actually, it will give you the ability to start looking after yourself too. You start thinking yourself seriously, right? You know, tools are good and well. We need tools. But we also need to be able to allow ourselves to use them.
William Curb: Yeah. And one thing I'm thinking too about how the resilience comes where it comes from is it requires that you don't just keep adding more tension. So it sounds like this is something where we should also be thinking about perhaps lowering our load a little bit, even though that's can be a very scary thought.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah. Especially again, I mean, I don't have to go through the, I think the brain theory, that our brains are looking for stimulation left, right, and center because the under dopamine brain theory, which we are having around ADHD. So we then might say, okay, I now have to do five, six, seven, eight, nine projects. I believe it is true that we are probably not good in running one thing alone. But we also need to understand how many things we can actually do that it helps our brain to be stimulated, that helps our body also to do it in a way that it's not exhausting. And some of the things we do at once, but be careful that this is not eager. And when we notice that we are depleted, we have to do what you've just so beautifully said, we have to sometimes say, no, is it comfortable? No, it's not comfortable. If it's healthy, that's actually the choice we might want to consider.
William Curb: I do like the idea of you're looking for how much can I do without going over. But we also have to, if there's not enough, that's a problem for us too, which is sometimes a hard concept to get your head around. It's like, but being like, I know everyone with ADHD is just like the idea of being like, oh, yeah, we're gonna have nothing on your schedule, you just get to do whatever you want. And they're like, that's not I need to have at least something.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is okay. I mean, I don't read one book, just want to be very clear. I normally have probably four to five books, which I read simultaneously.
Works very well for me. But don't ask me to have a book ready after a month, because that's not how I work. That's not how my brain does things, right? So, of course, when you are a student, it's incredibly difficult because you need to get that stuff into your head. So what you need to then do as a student, you have to work to a different schedule.
It is incredibly important to have that schedule. And what many do is, of course, procrastination is a big thing, right? And then we say, okay, today I didn't do my 10 minutes, so tomorrow I do 20. What is if your brain doesn't do 20 minutes? Because it starts puking, my brain pukes. I'm sorry to say that, but when I was a student, or when I wrote my thesis, I often said it feels my brain is puking in my skull.
I don't know how to do this any longer. Right? It was tension, unbelievable. And we need to understand what we can do and got to stick with it. It's not going to help if you don't have stimulation. You're going to get this stimulation, but you're going to get the stimulation with stuff that is solidly built to keep you attention and talking TikTok, and talking Reels, regardless, but they don't actually take you any.
William Curb: I was laughing because this was a writing me of something where I had to write like a 10,000-word essay or something. It was a very long essay. And I had a couple of weeks to do it, and I'm like, okay, I need to write 500 words a day, and it'll be easy. And then it was like, okay, well, I need to write 1,000 words a day, and I'll get there. And eventually it was like, I need to write 5,000 words today, but 5,000 words tomorrow. And it was still like I wrote like 2,000 and then 8,000. But...
Dr. Ute Liersch: Nightmare, right? And what it takes away is the joy. I worked with one student, ADHD, and they said the following, and sitting in front of the empty page for hours, if I don't get it right from the beginning, everything is wrong. Many of us have that, right? If the first sentence isn't right, the whole project is wrong. And we worked for a month on the following skill. Write a paragraph, whatever it is. And we started to write the paragraph always with the same sentence. This is a shitty topic. I don't like it.
I've written stuff that way. Right? This is a shitty topic. I don't like it. I would rather do Instagram now. And so it was like that. And I said it needs to be a paragraph. And then once you've finished with a paragraph, start carry on writing. And you know what it did? It took away the hurdle of beginning. It was like, it could simply run.
William Curb: Often when I'm writing for episodes, I'll do this thing I call pre-writing, where I just write out what are the questions I want to answer. Let's copy and paste some quotes. Let's write some ideas down. And then sometimes I'm like, just end up writing the episode in the pre-writing thing and then kind of just tweak it and move it over. But a lot of times, it's the removal of this. This is going to be the thing I'm making that has made it so much easier to get started.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Write something where you know you're going to delete it. Because then what we can actually do is we can overcome a hurdle before we go into the academic work or the performance part. We can work with all of these. But what if I don't do it right or if the first sentence is not correct? I mean, I've known people who have, when we still had pen and paper, I mean, I've done this. If the first letter on the page wasn't right, I tore out the whole page. Yeah.
William Curb: I've never done anything like that. Oh yeah, maybe apparently quite a few times.
Dr. Ute Liersch: I told you I'm correct. And I did this again and again and again and again and I didn't get the homework done because it wasn't perfect and it doesn't need to be perfect. Once you are in that automatism that you've got to be better than we are because clearly how we are is not good enough. Writing down the first letter, even though to the outer world, it's just a word. It's simply a whole different ball game.
William Curb: Yeah. And it's hard to get past that. But there's things, I think the important part to take from there is that while it is hard to get past some of that internalized perfectionism, it's something that we can do things about. There are ways that we can fight against it. As we were saying talking earlier, once we have that knowledge that, hey, there's something I can do, so much better.
Dr. Ute Liersch: I refuse, I'm very feisty sometimes, I refuse to not shine.
William Curb: All right. So I was wondering if there were any final thoughts you wanted to leave the audience with?
Dr. Ute Liersch: There are so many. Look, the most important thing is to start believing in your own worth. And the moment you allow your worth to be seen, what you will notice, many of these so-called mental health issues are gone. And I can really encourage everyone to take out this idea of when I make a mistake, this is evidence of not being worthy. When you make a mistake, this is evidence of learning. And hope has got a lot to do with being worthy.
William Curb: That's great. All right. And if people want to find out more about you, about your book, where should they go?
Dr. Ute Liersch: I was able to set up the pre pre-order on Kindle, me. I'm very proud of myself. Awesome. Four outs. Apparently takes 30 minutes, but hey, hope. So the book is called The Minimalist Guide, Becoming Resilient. It's on pre-order on Kindle, and they can find me on your website. And if they Google me, they find me. And if you want, I'm happy to send you links around ADHD. Masterclasses, they're just on YouTube, so people can just access them. I've just filmed one last week around attention, what different types of attention there are, and how we can actually start looking at them.
William Curb: Well, I think people really appreciate that. And thank you so much for your time today. This was really enlightening.
Dr. Ute Liersch: Thank you so much for having me, William. Thank you.
This Episode's Top Tips
1. Our parasympathetic nervous system can get stuck in a permanent state of “go time.” To help move our PNS back to a relaxed state, Dr. Ute suggests progressive muscle relaxation, where you are tensing and then releasing muscle groups one at a time so you can physically feel the shift from tension to ease.
2. Many of us have internalized the idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we work, think, or exist. Dr. Ute suggests replacing this assumption of personal defect with curiosity: “If I weren’t wrong, what would I need to feel safe?” This slight shift can open up room to problem-solve and tailor strategies to your actual needs.
3. We often talk about resilience like it’s a fixed trait—you either “have it” or you don’t. But Dr. Ute points out that resilience is about what you do, not what you are. It’s built in small, repeatable actions that teach your nervous system and your mind how to recover from stressors. Resilience isn’t about holding it together forever; it’s about giving yourself enough space and recovery so you can keep going when you need it the most.