thank you to understood.org for sponsoring this video carrying the mental load is exhausting if you feel exhausted by this you are correct the mental load that people are expected to carry nowadays is ridiculous for a neurotypical person like everybody's stressed out so that was kind of one of those things of many that were obvious to my wife and she didn't know at the time that ADHD was sort of behind a lot of that you just want this space to just unload everything that's happening in your brain to me I would be open to that too oh you have no idea what you just [Music] invited hello brains today we're really excited to have Laura key she is the host of the ADHD aha podcast as well as in charge of content over at understood.org which is a website I have been obsessed with for years and about a topic that is currently very near and dear to my heart as a new mom which is the mental load in other words why I can't keep my together for safety a lot of times what researchers mean by a term and what we mean by this term when we use it colloquially are two different things colloquially generally refers to like the cognitive and emotional labor of running a household but you could also have a heavy mental load at work but it's more about like all the things you're trying to manage whereas in the research World mental load is specifically the the load on your working memory or your other executive functions but working memory is the big one so they're very similar but they're not exactly the same thing we'll explore this more in another episode but I just want to point out it's a complicated term it has different meanings depending on who you talk to right now what we're talking about is the mental load colloquially as being the enormity of all of the things that you're trying to manage but I wanted to get Laura's perspective on it too so Laura introduce yourself to our audience yeah my pleasure I'm so excited to be here Jessica and especially talking about this topic it comes up all the time on the podcast that I host ADHD aha ADHD aha is a podcast that is run by a nonprofit called understood.org maybe you've heard of it if not check it out um I head up content strategy and editorial there and I have ADHD myself and I am a mother of two oh yeah I'm a huge fan of understood.org by the way if you haven't checked that out it's it's a fantastic resource for just understanding your ADHD and other learning differences a little bit better the ADHD aha podcast is also fantastic uh I might be a little biased I got to be on it recently I will link to that episode in the description below so you can go check that out I'm going to go listen to it too cuz um I'm very tired and I don't actually remember what we talked about but I I heard it was great I mean I can't even IM like your mental load right now Jessica as a new mom it's got to be just off the charts I know we're going to be talking about this in general today but I just want to say if you just want this space to just unload everything that's happening in your brain to me I would be open to that too oh you have no idea what you just invited first I want to get everybody on the same page so what is it that we mean when we say mental load what are we talking about here when I'm talking about the mental load I'm talking about thinking work and let's emphasize the word work thinking is work right like there's a lot of thing that has to happen in order to plan your day to figure out what you're going to do next to remember what you're going to do it's not the execution of the things that you need to do which is already really hard and a lot especially when you got lots of stuff going on but like the thought process of what needs to happen and the best kind of cartoon example that I have of what is the the mental load is it was someone looking in the fridge saying hey I can help out I can make dinner tonight and then saying what's for dinner that what's for dinner is actually the mental load that so many people are carrying around especially often we know women yeah so I think this this term got really popular um colloquially we talk about a a heavy mental load or what the mental load is as all of the cognitive and emotional labor involved in typically running a household right like managing and planning and prioritizing and and keeping everybody on track so a lot of times The Stereotype is that the wife the mom or whatever is is Tracking not just her schedule but everybody's schedule she knows what time Jimmy needs to go to soccer practice and what night what time Emma needs to start practicing the piano and what time uh Susie needs to go to sleep and she's also like you know scheduling her doctor's appointments and her husband's doctor's appointments and stuff and that's a huge huge mental load right like there's a lot to manage I think it's really important to understand that anybody with too heavy a mental load is not going to perform very well well like we know that it impacts our ability to get stuff done if we're all also trying to hold a bunch of stuff in our heads like we're not going to perform as well but for people with ADHD that disproportionately impacts us because we already have executive function challenges including relative area of weakness in working memory like impaired working memory so if our working memory is already impaired and then we're trying to manage all of this stuff with an already impaired working memory it's going to disproportionately impact us right right exactly like how do you relate to this personally and then we'll get into like what you hear from people on your podcast but just personally you're a mom yeah yeah I am a mom I am a mom of two I have a a 9-year-old and a six-year-old so there are lots of things to remember they're both like heavily involved in extracurricular activities right now and there's just so many things to constantly be thinking about I'll give an example of how this has impacted me recently and it's going to seem small but like when you add it up times a thousand choices that we have to make every day or things that we have to remember it's just so much my son is in is in summer camp right now and they're doing this Junior Olympics thing uh on Friday of this week which is so cute they're going to dress up as like certain countries and whatnot but I'm not sure if you got an assigned thing he has to wear my husband's been really helpful this week I'm lucky to have a partner who is so helpful um and he's been doing all of the drop offs and pickups this week the execution of the things that were planned because I haven't been able to make it I've been I have had to come into the office every day and so I said to him when you drop off our son can you please ask the the coach at the camp what is the outfit that he's supposed to wear on Friday right what's the outfit and my husband forgot to do that I'm not mad at him that he forgot to do that he just he forgot and my husband is neurotypical but like he's doing a bunch of stuff too and I got really really mad because I'm like now I have to remember to remind you again to ask about what is what is he going to wear on Friday and I don't know if I need to order something on Amazon or something like that I don't know and so I got really really frustrated and here's the thing it's so exhausting to carry all of this around and as a person with ADHD and a woman with ADHD it's like it's just constantly overflowing that you just snap I just snap sometimes I snap during morning routines I snap during bedtime routines because there's just too much to remember to prep for tonight or the next day and all of that it's a big part of my life right now that I'm really coping with a lot yeah so that was that was the part that I found really interesting is it's not just that we're having a harder time actually managing Our Lives because of this heavy mental load on top of the ADHD impaired executive function that makes it even harder to manage that mental load it's also how we react emotionally to that right like totally it is that we're being pushed to our limits and we're frustrated and we're you know sometimes aware of the fact that we are failing or we are behind schedule and we snap and then ADHD emotion disregulation comes into play right because now now we've got these big feelings about the fact that we did just snap at our kids or we did just snap at our partners or co-workers or whatever and now we're ruminating on that and we've got those emotions that we're dealing with um and the emotional impulsivity also makes it you know so we're not only push past our capacity but we're also more likely to react with raw emotion we know that we're more emotionally impulsive um and then we're also more likely to have trouble regulating our emotions after the fact too and like getting back to Baseline um so it's just this kind of perfect storm right I try to think about you know when kids with ADHD come home from school after a long day and they fall apart right and they fall apart because they've been carrying around all of that thinking work and all of these executive function tasks that are so hard for them and then they kind of collapse and we don't really give ourselves space to do that as adults we feel like we're not allowed to but we're human too yeah and we we do experience it we're just not supposed to I guess supposed to but I love there's a term for that which I love which is after school restraint collapse have you heard this term yep I've heard that term yeah yeah I I feel like we need to we need to introduce after work restraint Cass I've kind of implemented that in my own life in a way like just like well the opposite of like trying to build in strategies to give myself space to have that in a private space where I'm not hurting anybody's feelings essentially you have this fabulous podcast people come on and talk very openly about what they're struggling with like what do you what do you hear people talking about on your podcast in regards to this this challenge with um the metal load being a little too heavy or a lot too heavy well should say that more often than not I hear women talking about this it's not that it's something that men don't struggle with but I think that you know that's part of what we're talking about here today too like this is you know women doing 75% of unpaid care giving across the globe you know it's not a surprise that this is a bigger challenge for for women and that it could be harder um harder for us and what I hear very very often like the word if I had to make a word bubble of all the things people are saying it would be exhausted an ADHD coach who came on named Emily Weinberg was talking about how gets so exhausted by all of the choices and the thinking that need to happen during the day that she looks lazy she's laying on the couch all the time and people think she's just not doing anything and then she's feeling guilty about appearing to be not doing anything but she's just trying to gather up the strength to make a choice maybe we'll hear a clip from her I have never felt that part the analysis paralysis so strongly is you when I had my kids their nap times were like torture for me because I think every single nap time they had I immediately went into that analysis paralysis exhausted can't do anything didn't do anything just like spin cycle it's like they' go to nap when they're really little you have no idea how much time you're going to have so that's like your first challenge right do I have 20 minutes do I have 40 minutes you're exhausted you just want to sit down for a minute but sitting down for a minute for me meant sitting down for the remainder but not relaxing not taking an intentional I'm tired I need to do nothing while they nap so I'm sitting here on the couch it was not an intentional decision it was I would like to sit down for five minutes and then do something but the five minutes of quote unquote rest turns into are they going to wake up in 20 minutes do I have 2 hours do I have laundry to do should I do the dish should I organize stuff I really relate to that cuz I'm I'm in the thick of it right now I've got a 5-month-old and when she naps I do not know if she's going to nap for 5 minutes or 20 minutes or two hours and so trying to figure out oh okay like I have an opportunity to get some get some stuff done but but then what do I do and what do I do that depends on how long I have to do it well I don't know how long I have and like you you really get stuck and then yeah you're also exhausted from dealing with all this mental and emotional labor all day and so it's hard to think clearly and then here's another thing that ADHD makes a little bit difficult we know that ADHD impacts sleep a lot of adults with ADHD have Sleep Disorders as well um I have I personally have restless leg syndrome a lot of people have delayed sleep phase syndrome there's a uh sleep apneia is really common with ADHD there's a lot of sleep difficulties but then on top of that if you have a really heavy mental load when you go to sleep at the end of the night and you realize like how much stuff you haven't gotten done or you're trying to get ahead on essentially this this mental and emotional labor for tomorrow and you're thinking through okay what do I need to do tomorrow what what's going to happen like what's my schedule like you're now doing more work as soon as you try to go to sleep or you're trying to catch up right you're like oh shoot I actually forgot to you know pack the lunches and I didn't do this and so you're you're using this time that you need to be sleeping to get caught up on all the balls that you dropped right and then you don't get enough sleep and then tomorrow is even harder the mental load we talk about it a lot when it comes to women but if you have ADHD it can impact you regardless I I will say my partner has been really great too and helping with the baby and stuff but the set shifting has been really tough we're both out of our normal routines and so there there's a heavier mental load when you're essentially in what I call manual mode where nothing's automatic you're having to think through every step of your day because you're out of your normal routines and so that's already a heavy mental load and then set shifting having to adjust on dime right and so it's weird how it how it comes into play because I will say like oh shoot I forgot about this hey babe can you do this and now he has to do extramental work of adjusting to what now needs to happen when he already had you know he had done the mental and emotional work of like okay cool I'm I'm going to go do this thing and then I threw him off track so now he has to do something else and we can kind of inadvertently like create more mental work for each other um so I I want to I want to say like it's not unique to women to have that extra mental load it it shows up differently so there are a couple of places that ADHD memory tends to be impaired um working memory and prospective memory and both of those have a lot to do with this because working memory is the the primary thing that the the mental load is heavy on right um we're having to like hold things in our head while we work with it but also perspective memory this is something that's new for a lot of people um I know Jesse J Anderson was on your podcast talking about this and let's hear from Jesse Yeah so that was kind of one of those things of many that were obvious to my wife and she didn't know at the time that ADHD was sort of behind a lot of that I didn't know that I had any memory issues before I got diagnosed like I knew that I struggled with time I knew I had like difficulties with anger and I knew that I was distracted by things I didn't know it was adg but I kind of knew about those things but the memory I had no idea that I had a problem with memory I think that just as humans in general we take for granted how many choices we have to make every single day the human brain wants to be efficient it wants to be as efficient as possible but we're already at this depth we have this deficit as people with ADHD men and women right who are struggling with executive functioning to your point this is a working memory issue this idea of like managing the mental load and then metacognition this close relative of executive functioning that's all about um you know remembering to remember thinking about thinking um planning to plan like um I'm thinking of the movie Office Space right now that like planning to plan in the background but yeah and it's exhausting to that point we're talking about the kid coming home from the end at school at the end of the day day falling apart we do this too as adults of course we do right it makes sense our brain is on overdrive and trying to do extra extra do more more more and it's it is a lot of things happening that people just don't even realize underneath the surface yeah and I think uh another huge part of it here is that we're trying to hold ourselves to neurotypical standards because the world tells us that that's what we're supposed to be able to do and because we can maybe do it sometimes we expect that of ourselves too right there's so many things that can make us have good brain days or bad brain days but we're holding ourselves to these these really unrealistic standards at least they're unrealistic to hit them consistency consistently right totally and I don't know about you Jessica but for me like this is where perfectionism often comes in like trying to live up to these neurotypical standards and this is where self-awareness is can be really painful right if you've worked hard to have self-awareness of what you're struggling with and you know that you're working on it you also know that you're struggling with it and you want to do it perfectly right there's this little voice in your head that's like no no no I don't want to I don't want to inconvenience anybody and I don't want to I don't want to be a burden and I can do this just as well as somebody else this is something that mallerie ban talked about in in her interview on ADHD aha making any type of mistake that just like wasn't an option ever not because that's what my parents said I was actually putting these expectations on for myself you had to be perfect and if you weren't well bad things were going to happen someone's going to find out and someone's going to figure out other characteristics about you of oh you're not perfect and you're really annoying because you don't ever stop talking and you don't know how to take turns in a conversation and your legs always bouncing and you often have really big reactions to things it just depended on what it was but then it was sort of a domino effect where one thing led to another led to another and I didn't want to be exposed as here were some traits that were maybe different or that I guess rather I was n really comfortable with or didn't understand that like in the ADHD world that's really normal I love that I love the end of that quote in the ADHD world that's really normal it is completely normal to be struggling with this stuff when you have ADHD it would actually be weird if we didn't the mental load that people are expected to carry nowadays is is ridiculous for a neurotypical person like everybody's stressed out like a lot of people are burning out this is this is too heavy a mental load for most people but if you have adhc of course you're going to struggle what's the question that people ask you most often when they know that you're struggling and they want to help you how can I help right and then that's more work it's more work for you exactly I was talking with somebody on the team recently and they suggested you know you can ask somebody yes I actually do need help but can you give me a choice of what you could do to help would you rather answer answer a multiple choice question or would you rather write you know a a long a short form essay to answer a question when you're kind of under duress when you're stressed out so like the example I talked about earlier with like the the dinner and the cartoon it's like if that person had said okay um I'll help out I'm going to make dinner tonight do you want spaghetti or do you want tacos imagine how much easier that is to cope with as the person who has to like who's been bearing that mental load people often are like oh let me know however I can help and they're just trying that's just a nice thing that you say but if it's somebody who you trust and you really like I really do need your help but I need you to give me options no that's great and because like yeah advocating for yourself and saying this is what I need because a lot of times um it's really easy to say like no it's fine like I I'll handle it because it is more work it is more mental work on top of your already crushing mental load to try and come up with the things that you need to help yourself so it's easier to just say no I'm fine I'll take care of it um but being able to say yes I do need help can you give me choices and not like 50 Choice like can you give me a couple of T yeah give me an A or give me a true false test yeah and like a lot of times Jessica we my emotional disregulation comes in is when I get asked that question and every it's like the people it's asked with the best of intentions like a lot of kindness It's people truly mean it like I want to help you how can I help you and my reaction is I don't know and that's where the crying comes in it's kind of like when you're trying to hold back tears and then somebody gives you a hug and then you just that's when you start crying you know it it's really hard to to regulate at that moment because I'm like I do need help and I don't even know what I need because I can't think about it what else can we do to lighten our mental load I think externalizing as much as possible I mean there are different ways that you can externalize what I mean by that is like literally the act of writing down what's in your brain as one kind of you know standard example of that writing it all down and seeing you know is there anything that we can offload that like even the thinking power that's around that it's kind of a boring example but having like a whiteboard in your house where you write down things so that you don't have to remember it in your brain yeah the white the Whiteboard is a a very common example I'm sure people have talked about this on your podcast yeah Jess Anderson talked about it and he had he had a great example of like chores and and like how they manage all of their family's you know mental load on a whiteboard or as much of it as they possibly could right so there's this other way of externalizing things that I do that my husband kind of makes fun of me for in a loving way you know everybody always says you know lay out the clothes that you want to put out you want to wear the next day that helps you avoid having to make that choice and whatnot um you know get the bags ready yes yes to all of that there's something else that I do that saves me absolutely zero time when it comes to execution but it is a comfort to my soul and to my to my brain to my ADHD brain which is I just move objects from one place to another to the place where I know I'm going to look in the morning it's like my kids my kids vitamins right every morning they have to take them but I won't remember if I don't put it on the dining table and take it away from where they are now like by the toaster I'll just forget and I always say to my husband I'm like hey can you set up for the morning and I'm like but you didn't put out the vitamins he's like they're right there there's nothing to prep and I'm like but I won't remember them unless they're right there on the table right so it's like this object thing like sometimes if I'm having trouble falling asleep and I'm like I I don't I don't want to have to carry this thought anymore I will take like a bobby pin out of my hair and I'll put it on my nightstand and be like that bobby pin means that I need to schedule a hair haircut tomorrow and that allows me to fall asleep because yeah it's like this weird trick I don't know if that would work for everybody but it works for me I I I mean nothing let's be real nothing works for everybody with ADHD even things that work for us one day are not necessarily always going to work the next but visual cues are really powerful so next time your husband's like there's nothing to prep the visual cue is what needed prepping the weirder the better too sometimes Dr Patrick La who's uh who's a researcher that we work with a lot um have worked with for years and uh is a mental health professional that reviews all the videos on our Channel um if anybody's wondering why we had that like blue Banner Dr Patrick l account uh has a great strategy for laundry he puts a sock on the door knob like on the way out so that he will remember to change the laundry before he leaves I need to do that how much I have so many like my La my washing machine is so disgusting because of the all the wet laundry I've left in there overnight on multiple occasions one of my big um strategies is and this is definitely not something that works for everybody but have less stuff to manage that's also a way to reduce the mental load is to just not be doing as much and that doesn't mean we're not going to accomplish as much just not be trying to do as much at the same time um there's a saying that I really love in the adhc community if you want to do more do less and it's because if we're carrying this enormous mental load of all the things that we want to do the possibility that we'll actually get to all of it not great right and so if we just deliberately get some stuff off our mental plate ahead of time that frees up some me mental bandwidth to actually get the things done and then we can always add stuff back on our a plate and I a way that I really love doing this is you have your your to-do list that's like your wish list like all the stuff I'd like to do but then you have another to-do list that's the stuff you're actually going to do so that you're not cluttering up your brain with all of the things it's just you just have to focus on the things that you want to do and I'm not really great at actually writing out to- do list for myself but I'll do a mental list which is probably not great for the mental load but it's I can't find pens ever paper so another issue I've got to figure I've got to solve that problem but that's not today's problem today what I do is like three things like what three things if I get those things done will I consider today a success and I got that from Dr Dr Patrick l I love that and it's gamechanging right because now you've defined success by a measure that is actually doable right and then anything else is a bonus do you know what kinds of things kind of always seep in and really distract me and amplify my mental load but there's there's nothing productive about it are the things that I'm like oh next year I need to remember to make sure that I scheduled this kind of appointment for my child but it's not something I can do for a year yeah right it's not something you can you can take action on yet right there's nothing there's nothing actional about it and it just takes up so much space in my brain and like I I've started to do this thing where I will like set a date in the future in my Google Calendar and just be like okay and I will invite my husband to it and just be like okay talk about X on January you know 31st of 20 28 or whatever so hopefully we're all still using like Google Calendars by then or else all of these thoughts will be lost I I suspect so yeah but yeah that's that's a great way to do it too i' I've done that about big things that I'm worried about before I remember thinking about like oh I want to have kids but like I wouldn't even be with anybody and I'm like okay this does I'm not in a place to have kids right now so this shouldn't be taking up mental space so I would just set a date on my calendar in the future I'm like think about whether or not I want to have kids or maybe freeze my eggs right and like you put it in the future because I'm so scared and I think this is one of the reasons why we hold so much in our heads I'm so scared I'm going to forget and so my brain keeps reminding me like oh don't forget about this don't forget about this don't forget about this because I don't have you know don't always have these trusted systems but if you do have a trusted system that can remind you it's a good way to like get your brain to stop popping up this alert hopefully one of my favorite favorite strategies is if you need help rather than delegating single tasks because you're still carrying the mental load for that right you still have to think about like what is it he needs to do ask him to do it follow up on whether or not he did it it's it's actually sometimes a heavier mental load than if you just do it yourself and that's a lot of what we come to right it's like it would have been easier if I just did it myself that is true for a lot of individual tasks right but if you delegate an entire area of responsibility now you're not just delegating the execution of that task you're delegating the mental labor rather than saying hey could you empty the dishwasher you can say hey can you be in charge of the dishes right so you don't have to think about like what dishes need to be done have has the dishwasher been run does it need to be empty did they actually empty like you don't have to think about it and so we actually just started doing a system called fair play and we'll link to that in the description um there's a great book uh about it it is it is highly gendered it assumes that you are the bagu woman in the relationship that's been doing way too much you can skip past that part if you're already on board like yes I would like to divide up you know chores and tasks in my home in a way that's Equitable you can just skip to the part of the book that talks about what the cards are how to do it but there's a book and then there's this card deck and I love it because you you have all of these cards that represent areas of responsibility in your home um so dishes laundry tidying and organizing um you know Pet Care all all of these things right and you divide up the cards so that you're each getting an equitable amount of cards and then you are responsible for she calls it CP so cons ception planning and execution of these tasks so it's not like you're responsible for conceiving and planning and then you a you ask your partner to help with the execution because then what happens is what happened with your husband of they don't have context for the for the situation they just know this random task came at them out of nowhere and like they were supposed to do it but then they forgot to do it and now like they feel bad you're frustrated it is gamechanging so there are areas of my life that I don't even have to to think about because that's that's my partner's job and he's got the card but let's say let's say you did snap at your kids let's say you did uh emotionally spiral out and now you're at work and you're ruminating and beating yourself up over stuff like do you have any strategies for um regulating our emotions when they do get the best of us I mean this is the hardest part right because there's so much that we can do to avoid triggers like in the moment itself when you are in the middle of that emotional kind of I don't I don't know if I like the word SP because it sounds so like uh submissive I don't know to be part of that but you know what I mean like you're in the middle of like this rumination to your point it's so hard to get out of it it takes a lot of practice to treat yourself the way that you treat other people and to be kind to yourself um like can you be Robin Williams and Goodwill Hunting to yourself I guess is a question that I would ask like can you say to yourself like it's not my fault and this happened and we are going to move on and we're going to cope from this it's not worth my energy right now to just keep going and keep going and keep going right something that I often do when I get in these moments is like I get so fixated on what I snapped and then the fact that now this moment is ruined and now the fact that like how do I how do I stop this how can I erase this I just want to erase that this happened because now I've ruined the day you didn't ruin the day you can't erase it I know that sleep is really hard for people with with ADHD and like this is all it's all part and parcel of all of this whatever you can do to get to bed the effect of like the physical body on our emotional health and our emotional well-being to your point like if you don't get enough sleep it's just going to be worse tomorrow maybe you'll feel equally bad tomorrow but without the sleep you will feel even worse yeah I feel like without the Sleep we're more likely to to lose it or snap and it's harder to regulate our emotions afterwards so yeah prioritizing sleep that that actually makes a lot of sense there's something I like to say which is um if the entire if it looks like the entire world is on fire get your face out of the candle sometimes you're just a little too close to it and you kind of need to step back and get a little perspective like okay this was one moment in an entire day did I actually ruin everything um you know yeah and you talk about this all the time I think there's a misconception about people with ADHD you know people might think like people with ADHD are just being lazy or they're not trying very hard I think that we try so hard especially when you're self-aware and you know what you're struggling with so like to your point earlier Jess about about you know can you do fewer things can you set lower standards for yourself I know that sounds weird if you take it out of context but can you just be okay with the fact that you're going to lose it sometimes I mean maybe it's just going to happen it's unrealistic to expect yourself to manage your symptoms perfectly yeah our executive function challenges make it harder for us to use the strategies that we need to use so it's just it's not realistic it's not realistic to be perfect at anything and that includes managing our symptoms by I think that by like lowering the standards of what we expect in terms of our own emotional regulation sometimes that eventually it will lead to more emotional regulation right because like that it's that gripping right of trying to do it all perfectly that I think sometimes leads the leads to the explosion a big breakthrough moment for me as a parent getting so frustrated in the morning and at night with my kids and being like why won't you just do the routine the way you're supposed to be doing it I had this realization through my therapist and I took my husband aside into a corner like we were telling like some amazing secret and I was like they're not supposed to be well behaved they're kids like having that realization it just totally flipped the script and I was like magically a little bit more patient and if you can do that with yourself too that's amazing trying to control what can't be controlled is part of what puts us on edge is part of what's going to make us not only carry a heavier mental load than we need to but also make it harder for us to emotionally regulate this is amazing there is so much good stuff um I'm excited to listen to more of your podcast if people want to uh listen to the ADHD aha podcast we will put the link in the description below also probably a pin comment let us know in the comments below um what what is making your mental load so heavy and what strategies if any you have found to lighten your mental load even if you do have a lot to manage how do you make it so that it's not all sitting on your brain at once let's normalize this and uh and talk about it and support each other with strategies and uh and empathy I think is the big one is there anything you want people to take away from this like if if nothing else like is there one takeaway that you hope that people get from this carrying the mental load is exhausting if you feel exhausted by this you are correct is what I will say you know there's nothing wrong with you if you have ADHD and you are like why am I falling apart why am I so exhausted by making decisions by thinking by Planning by remembering correct it makes sense I feel like you just graded our paper like corre correct and be kind and let's yourself know that that is that is what happens when you have ADHD it's part of it it's not your fault and you we can cope with this I love it we'll be exploring this a little bit more on the channel we're going to dive do a bit of a deep research dive into like how do we really lighten that mental load how does it impact people with ADHD but I think this was a really really important conversation a good place to start and if you'd like to hear more conversations like this check out the ADHD aha podcast we'll link to it in the description below thank you so much for for being here Laura I this was so valuable I I just I knew that it was hard to to have a heavy mental load but it didn't occur to me that the emotion disregulation piece was also a factor in it and that was gamechanging for me so thank you for that thank you for all the insights you've brought thank you so much for having me for coming on the show and it's so funny to hear you thank me for that Jessica because I feel like I learned so much of this from you so thank you thank you to my brain Advocates and all my patreon brains for supporting the channel allowing us to do things like this thank you to understood.org for sponsoring this video yes and brains don't forget to check out Jessica's interview on ADHD AA too you called them brains like subscribe click all the things and we'll see you next video bye brains [Music] w [Music]