hey everyone hello attitude listeners i'm susan kaufman i'm here for attitude magazine thank you all so much for joining us this week for our adhd experts presentation building executive functioning in adults with adhd this is this will be podcast episode 359 for our podcast listeners um you may be wondering what executive function is and it is the critical ability to plan to take action rather than procrastinate and to stay focused today we're really pleased to have dr laura hannes webb to tell us about the emerging science of attention management and most importantly to identify the six super skills that help us complete tasks and avoid distractions um dr hanus webb is a clinical psychologist she's the author of 26 scholarly articles as well as numerous books of which perhaps you may know the gift of add and the gift of adult add her newest book six super skills for executive functioning was published just that last year she is widely featured and quoted in newspapers around the country such as usa today newsweek the wall street journal and many others um for credentials let me just say this web completed postdoctoral research at ucsf university of california san francisco and where she's also been an assistant professor please check out her website it's www.addisgift.com um before i hand over the microphone to dr honest web just let me say a few housekeeping items those of you who are tuned into the live webinar may download the slides right now by clicking on the event resources section of your webinar screen some people like to print them out if you are interested in a certificate of attendance option you'll receive instructions in an email about an hour after the live broadcast so wait for that for those of you who are listening to the replay or to the podcast cast please visit attitudemag.com and search for podcast number 359 to find the these slides and the webinar replay and the certificate of attendance options so even if you're not a live attendee those are all available to you by searching podcast 359 on the attitude website and finally let me just say if you support the work that we're doing here at attitude to strengthen the attitude community we would love it if you would visit attitudemag.com subscribe and sign up for attitude magazine for your family for yourself to share with the teacher or anyone who could benefit from greater adhd understanding we would be so grateful um the sponsor of this week and we are so grateful to our the sponsors of our webinars is inflow inflow is a new and it's the number one app to help you manage adhd it was developed by leading clinicians and it's a science-based self-help program it's based on the principles of cognitive behavior therapy you may download the inflow app now on the itunes app store or on the google play store so um with that i want to thank dr johannes webb again for joining us we're so grateful for your time and turn it over to her to start her presentation thank you so much susan and so we'll just jump right into the basics of executive functioning and i will elaborate on these as we go through so we'll just kind of start with the bullet points but first i like to start with inspirational quotes um and i really like this one as capturing executive functioning it is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles then the victory is yours and i think that the idea here is that executive functioning is about this self leadership and if you can manage yourself and lead yourself that you can win those battles and that you can you know work through all of the messed up situations that all of us face every day in our lives i also really like this quote discipline is freedom by jacko wilmick and the thing that's so interesting about this is so many people think of discipline as being disciplined getting in trouble and we certainly tend to think of discipline as not a pleasant thing but jocko is a navy seal and he's really pointing out that the more you master your executive functioning which we'll sort of say is similar to discipline that you have the freedom to set your goals and get your goals to get started to get your projects behind you to overcome procrastination and that's freedom so i think this positive association to executive functioning which we tend to think of kind of a neuropsych term will help us to really be motivated to master some of the basics of executive functioning and so here the components that we'll talk about today and we'll go into more depth is attention planning and organization flexible thinking emotional regulation and impulse control so again i'm going to take it down to what does it really mean and i really like this word self leadership so many of us want to be leaders and play a role in shaping our environments rather than just kind of going along with the flow and i think that when we think in this positive term that if we want to be leaders in the world really the place we have to start is being able to lead ourselves and this can mean the difference between choosing long-term benefits over immediate gratification and reflection about our actions in fact that would be sort of the opposite of impulsivity and the integration of the parts of ourselves our thoughts our feelings and our behavior so for example our thoughts might be i really can't wait to get this project done i can have it behind me and our feeling might be like i'm not good enough i can't do this and our behavior might be to procrastinate so that's the idea of the opposite of executive functioning and that to really bring in this executive function is to integrate those different parts and you're going to be learning some very specific sometimes like two-minute things you can do to begin that integration some people might even think of it as good judgment that you're making choices that will benefit you in the long run and just another quick tip i'll just show throw in here you know i really think that one simple way of improving your judgment is to have people who's had success in an area that you want success and to ask people for help or tell them what you're thinking and ask them for feedback and then really in principle executive functioning is about going from goal setting to goal-getting i mean just think about new year's eve how many people create this long list of things they want or maybe even just a couple big things and how long does that last it tends not to persist past february it seems like sometimes uh that's really the overall view and so when i talk about the six super skills i want to say a couple things that first of all what i really mean this is these are the skills that will help you achieve your own goals and i just don't want anyone to hear that as you know if you have if you try harder you know that will somehow cure your adhd or that you should try to be normal and in fact as we're going to talk about achieving your own goals if your goal is that you want to sign up for clown school and you know maybe with a long-term goal of going to children's parties and earning a couple extra dollars you know on your weekends that's a fine goal and still you know it's going to take a lot as fun as that goal might be it would still take a lot of executive functioning to go from setting that goal to getting that goal and so i do want to tell you a little bit about where these come from the six super skills it's not some sort of um you know like literature review of several books it's not a you know marketing you know strategy it really comes from my work in what i have determined to be some of the most helpful interviews over the last interventions over the last 15 years at the end of sessions i like to ask clients what was the most helpful and what was the least helpful and really the reason i do this is to be responsive to that client and it's just fascinating that the most helpful thing for one person could be like the worst most unhelpful thing for someone else and that's what responsiveness means but what i did was i came up with what i call the kind of top 38 most helpful interventions and you can imagine that doesn't quite roll off the tongue and it's not it's kind of unwieldy so i really over the years distilled them into what i'm talking about today the six super skills and so i'll list them here and as we go through we will be elaborating this so number one is finding gifts number two is setting goals number three is chunking number four is boosting motivation number five is managing mood and number six is the science of attention management and so when we talk about gifts i want to start with the why and i think that this is a really powerful motivation for finding these gifts in that depression and anxiety are caused by a stable over time negative internal global which means all areas of the self beliefs about the self and so in case you're wondering you know what that means so for example we can be bad at a lot of things but when we begin to think that it's going to be it's constant over time that it defines who we are and that it affects all the areas of our life it's basically a recipe for depression and anxiety so for example um i turns out i'm not a very good cook and you know in fact one of the things that my kids like to say is nothing's better than mom's cooking you can hear that two ways and one of them is pretty negative but the point that i want to make is that that doesn't affect every area of who of my identity it's not global maybe it's stable maybe although i do think someday i'll get good at it but it doesn't define who i am at all and in fact one strategy for being more successful in life is to choose certain things in your life to be bad at and this really comes from steve jobs and he said that if you try to be excellent at everything you'll be mediocre at everything and he really and as you can tell by his products that he just really wanted to optimize a couple elements of technology and not and not being excellent at every area of it and so really this tells us that the even having some of our negatives we can think of as almost strategic but i only have so much time in the day and if i try to be good at everything i'm just going to be a mediocre at everything so and what we also know particularly with adhd and executive dysfunction is there this consistent pattern of negative feedback and low expectations that can contribute to these comorbid diagnoses in fact even when i work with adults they often have these memories of being screamed at as kids and kind of a steady stream of negative feedback um and so what finding the gifts does is we we began to uh remedy these things that can lead to depression and anxiety and in fact one study found a 77 psychiatric comorbidity with adhd including substance use disorders depression and eating disorders so i've written about in my books about what i would call five gifts of adhd and of course there's a lot more than that but these are ones that are repeatedly observed and noted and with creativity there is experimental research that adults with adhd are more not are more divergent thinkers than adults without adhd and but when we think about creativity we also can think while it gets kids in trouble in school as an adult it is really one of the most important skills for being an entrepreneur an artist an innovator an inventor so obviously important and when we think about empathy we can say that empathy interferes with attention so imagine you were on a zoom call and you know all the faces are up like the brady bunch and you're kind of tuning in to people think god that person looks like they're really tired i wonder what's going on with them and you could do that for five ten minutes and all of a sudden you haven't actually listened to any of the content so empathy can actually disrupt our attention our focus emotional sensitivity so if your emotions are more like big waves on the ocean instead of small ripples on a pond then they're going to interfere with your attention and focus and um and then going on to exuberance this is really the same word as hyperactivity and the way that this can be a gift is that if you've ever taken a class on how to be more successful or most of the you know best-selling performance enhancement books are use a single word we'll use the two words massive action and then that's this formula for success you have to be taking a lot of action and even if you're failing keep going keep trying other strategies and so the same word of massive action corresponds to almost it's almost the same word as hyperactivity so again here's how it can be a gift and then nature smart is we you know think of the poster child of adhd being a kid who's sitting in the classroom and he's not listening but he's you know looking out the window staring at the trees and in fact as we'll see later that nature has been a science-backed powerful strategy for increasing attention and it also increases health and a lot of other things in fact the wall street journal recently had an article that said two hours of nature a week is the new ten thousand steps and that it has so many powerful benefits and um that has you know increasingly been emerging into the mainstream and i know it sounds kind of northern california speak which is where i'm speaking to you from today so i'm going to even circle back to that and show you more evidence and so how to find these gifts and we're just going to go through some quick tips here i want to give you some strategies where you're just taking a few minutes and you're changing the channel you're shifting your focus um what successes did you have this week what are the three biggest successes in your life when did you feel most appreciated and write out five interests that you have and i also just want to pause and know that i do think you know as a culture we have an appreciation deficit disorder and this is based on my observation that these questions are consistently hard for people to answer they're not remembering successes that they had and i'll often have to start asking questions well what about you know socially what about at work what about with your family and um the one that tends to be the hardest is when did you feel the most appreciated people have a really hard time with that and so i want to know that while these are simple questions they're sort of like a quiet revolution in how you can begin to um they affect your mood and they affect your motivation so it's going to affect um the real basic components of executive functioning uh some for assessment so if you want to figure out how can you find these for yourself and there's plenty of them out there i'm just going to note too because there are you know you can find them online and take them yourself the clifton strength finder is essentially used in corporate settings although they do have um sub for teens and uh you and i think you can take the i think the cheapest one you can find online is about 40 and some of the examples of the strengths that they find are empathy strategic deliberative futuristic communication and for values and action inventory of strengths this is online and it's free and an example of some of the values that they will identify and there's a lot more than the ones i'm showing here i just want to give you a flavor for it you know creativity bravery teamwork and leadership hope you know one thing that's really interesting about this if you met anyone who had you know like let's say these qualities creativity bravery dream teamwork leadership hope you think that's an amazing person i bet you they're really successful but again if you think about it how many kids in school got all this negative feedback because really they couldn't focus and pay attention or they were hyperactive those same kids may have been really creative and brave and capable of teamwork and leadership and hope in fact you know one of the things that i hear a lot when you ask how do adhd kids become successful adults one of the most important things that i hear is that it really is they had a lot of problems with memorizing and as soon as their work becomes about problem solving or it's conceptual or they're working on group projects they tend to actually thrive so we'll talk a little bit about the importance of setting goals and this is simply building the executive function of planning and so i do recommend that you do this in multiple areas of your life because you're building the planning in these other areas in fact for parents i sometimes recommend that you help your kids particularly as we're in the summer here to set goals that don't have to do with school because what happens is there's so many control battles that happen between parent and child about school but you can build this capacity for planning if you have them build relationship goals health and fitness goals or bucket list goals but back to um being adults um our school and vocational goals can be include something like learning new technologies to be more efficient and of course everyone across the planet this last year had to learn how to use video conferencing and so you can imagine how that's optimized in some ways our life and introduced us to new possibilities there are so many new technologies out there that can similarly help to make our lives more efficient and more successful relationships you may you know as you're coming out of kovic you may be thinking i really want to find some friends who have shared interest and a positive focus you know maybe you've people have gone through this year with a lot of um kind of catastrophizing and sharing our shared trauma frankly um and and you're really thinking that for your mental health you really want a different focus i want to have some particular interests and you know finding healthy pleasures can be a really powerful way in social in the context of social relationships for being a very legitimate um support and treatment for depression and anxiety if that has you know something that has happened to you over the last year health and fitness goals it could be take an exercise class to work out and meet people bucket list goals could be planned a weekend at the beach and so as you set the goals what's really important is that you write them out and one study showed that 70 of people who wrote down their goals made progress on those goals and 35 percent of people who didn't write out their goals made progress and write out the purpose of your goal this is really important in the sense of this is the why this is where the motivation comes from so again let's just say let's take that sort of funny idea that your goal is that you want to go to clown school and the purpose of that goal may be that i want to surround myself with funny people i want to learn some new skills i want to maybe be able to make some extra money down the line spending weekends at kids birthday parties and again this isn't really an easy goal i mean you have to learn juggling and makeup arts and performance arts and gymnastics and improv so you would want to write out one action step and it could be as simple as going online and finding a local resource for taking some of these classes one thing that's really important when we want to see how interconnected all of these super skills are is that research shows that setting attainable goals increases happiness and well-being likely because it gives us a sense of control so we all can probably figure out happiness that that being that getting happy being happy and being successful makes us happy but really this research is showing that setting the goal before you've achieved it increases our sense of well-being and happiness and i believe that it really shifts our focus like changing the channel from our fears about what the future will look like or a sense of hopelessness to setting a reasonable attainable goal means that the future could look differently and that in itself gives you some hope and this when we think about you know the purpose and benefits of an attainable goal it really leads us to our next super skill which is chunking because a chunk is in some ways it's one the next step but it's also a very attainable goal and so when we look at chunking i want to say this is the most powerful skill with immediate progress on my observation and what i mean by that is when i said you know i you know asked clients what was the most helpful and least helpful today that this would be like the billboard number one top hit this people it just shifts their perspective i think you know when you set a goal it sometimes can feel like this big black blob of unknown and as you begin to say well what is the simple next step all of a sudden you realize there's a sense of oh i can do that next step and um and again in terms of progress that people make it's usually you know a simple example is uh i haven't i can never get my car clean and so if we say how about this next week you spend two minutes every day just cleaning your car you know taking stuff out and putting it in the garbage um and people usually come back and you know it's not pristine but they've made progress and when you make when you see a small amount of progress it boosts your mood and so again what i'm really also kind of making the point is all of these super skills are related to the other if you make a small amount of progress you feel more motivated and really kind of the trick here is a lot of people just keep going and some and so they'll put in a lot more time than they planned but also just that sense of progress uh really you know can shift that sense of negative self-talk okay you know i'm making progress this is good um you know the one drawback that i do here is that people say well this is too obvious i've tried that before and so you know if that's you what i would say is you know try to think of it in some different ways um you know for some of the people who have said that to me one of the things they hadn't thought of was that the first step can be to just preview the assignment and so for example if i someone has a project that they have to do and i say on a scale of one to ten what's your level of motivation to get started 10 being really high they'll say you know two and i'll say well on a scale of one to ten what's your level of motivation to get started if you're just gonna open up you know the file and preview the assignment so that you have some clarity about what actually you have to do let's go oh yeah i mean i can do that that's a seven or an eight so you know within seconds you can really get boosts in motivation with this step and um and then the next step after that is once you have a sense of the assignment you can say okay is this actionable and then you either take an action or you might just put it on your schedule but what often happens is step two is that i have to ask for help and or i have to you know delegate something or i need to order something i need something that's going to take a week to get here before i can even start and that's really one of the benefits of previewing that it may take you two weeks to start and then all of a sudden you realize you have to ask someone for help and they're on vacation so preview is really key and this really you know can be people who think that they've done it before can be a way of kind of realizing the benefits the other thing that people find really helpful is that if it's something that requires documentation or if it requires writing is just to do a speech to text brain dump and what and that's step one and the idea is just get it out there it doesn't have to be organized and so what people will find and it could be something like google voice typing or other applications that as soon as you just kind of talk through you know adhd of course one of the symptoms is talk too much so this can be a good a good release is you just kind of talk through what the project involves and you kind of meander around what steps need to be done and who nee who you need to ask for help and who else has to be involved and then once you get it out there you've done step one chunk one and then step two is going to be to go through and organize it and then create a plan so that gives you a sense of um you know while this is such a small thing and so many people think it's so obvious but can have powerful impacts and so what's really important is how we talk to ourself and so um you know this is almost like if you had to take a course of antibiotics you wouldn't just take one pill and then do okay yay i'm done um you would have to administer it daily and so self-talk is kind of the method of you know continuous administration and so these are some things that you can say to yourself what's the smallest amount of time i'm willing to put in now so if you're feeling if you're looking at something you're saying i don't feel like it okay you shift that and it could even be i'm just going to hit a single or a double so often we come to it thinking we've got to hit a home run or we have to be you know fully you know optimum concentration but just you know just try to hit a single or double you can also say many of us use um entertainment screen time as a procrastination and one way to kind of reverse that is to use that entertainment screen time as a reward and even at the lowest level you can say i can just get started for 10 minutes and at least i will see some progress i might enjoy netflix more without that guilty feeling of this project hanging over my head and of course one of the tricks is you know you may work longer than 10 minutes but even if not you've gotten in 10 more minutes of progress some people like the expression walk not run which is again so much of our procrastination and resistance has to do with um you know just imagining it to be like climbing a mountain versus just you know walking up a small hill it's really important to notice the research on multitasking and chunking one thing at a time can be an alternative to multitasking in fact we don't really multitask we switch tasks and what that means is that we're going back and forth between work and technology and the research is really clear that this switch tasking it slows you down it increases the likelihood of mistakes and multitasking over a long period of time can diminish working memory i mean i remember this one time i was in my office and i was um you know doing my schedule and doing some notes and i had my cell phone there and i got a text and i realized that that text was from someone who i might i carpool my kids to soccer with and so i picked up the phone and i said i can drive the kids to soccer today and she texted right back and said i just said that the soccer game was canceled and it was such a perfect example of how you know i didn't even read it or i just saw the word soccer and you know just you know didn't even process the information and it's an example of how bad the mistakes that we make are when we're not really paying attention because you can't pay attention to two things at the same time and you're going back and forth and so one recent literature review showed that in half of all the studies on multitasking heavy media multitaskers are significantly underperforming on tasks of working memory and sustained attention and that none of the studies found any benefits to multitasking so we're going to talk about boosting motivation which is one of the super skills and here i'm going to talk about the treatment approach motivational interviewing from miller and rolnick but how we can apply that to ourselves so the big idea here is that you want to develop a discrepancy between procrastinating and taking action and you almost want to imagine these you know the road two roads divided and which path do you take and if you do follow that path you can say okay if i procrastinate there's going to be hanging over my head and then i'm going to have less time to do it i'm probably more likely to make mistakes whereas if i take action then i'm going to make some progress and i'm going to feel better about myself and then maybe i'll feel more motivated really key here is going to be support self-efficacy what that means is task specific confidence the simplest way to build self-efficacy is to list your past successes so for example so many times when people say i can't get started on this and i'll say what are you saying to yourself and they're saying i can't do it and i say well when was the last time you had success at this and sometimes it's kind of like fishing like i don't know i can't really think of any time i had success with this but as i kind of you know pull out more they've had in the past very you know powerful successes in the past but our mind tends to default you know to the negatives um particularly if you have a history of getting negative feedback um you know because of adhd executive dysfunction um there's one of the principles is rolling with resistance where you're not bullying yourself into getting started like what's wrong with you why can't you do this that's not going to be helpful that's going to decrease your mood and it's going to decrease your motivation so you can say something like you know what it's up to me i'm the one in charge where you're kind of not you know putting this bullying type self-talk to yourself and self-compassion can be very powerful and that can just be instead of saying what's wrong with you saying god this has been such a hard year and i've been so stressed and um you know but i know that this is going to be hard but i also know that it will be worth it and so those are the sorts of things that you can say to yourself that are really going to shift your motivation to get started and so again some very specific ways that you can talk to yourself to limit screen time because in terms of getting that motivation the distractions of screen time are really one of the biggest causes of procrastination so it can come down to i can do hard things and then it could be i will review my goal list as a reminder of how important this is to me and that time is limited progress not perfection and so i kind of talked about helpful and unhelpful interventions and if i were to say in terms of self-talk this is again like kind of the billboard number one chart topper for things that people say to themselves that end up being very very helpful every time i say i don't feel like it i postpone goal getting and this really has to do with putting you know the actual consequences of procrastination right there and how good will i feel when this is done and this has so much to do with we think uh how much we don't want to do what we have to do and if we could just shift our focus hop over that and say but god it's going to feel really good when i get this done that increases our motivation so as we move into the super skill of managing mood i want you to notice that motivation is going to be closely related to managing mood these are all connected research shows that emotion regulation can be the underlying cause of poor time management and i'm just going to go through you know three studies one show that the practice of self-compassion reduces procrastination one shows that empathy for your future self helps to overcome procrastination and so that one's kind of easy if you think about imagine a year from now if you you know sign up for clown school how good will you feel and they may think about a whole new circle of friends all these they you know can even if they don't become a clown they can entertain their kids with juggling or you know um doing some improv and then the third half research shows that happiness leads to success and so i just want to be clear we you know again we can guess that successful people that makes them happy not always of course there's plenty of reasons that people that are successful are not happy um but really that even boosting your mood is going to make you more likely to be successful and so i'm going to go through of course you know psychotherapy is very helpful for emotional regulation of course medications but for the purpose of our talk today i'm going to give you some exercises that take minutes and may be helpful in shifting your mood so here is a just kind of a checklist of emotions that you can go through and you can do this several times a day it just takes a few minutes and so you go through and you say i feel angry that i feel sad that i feel anxious that i feel guilty that i feel happy that i feel grateful that i feel excited that and i feel secure that and so part of the idea here is there is a kind of a method to this madness is that for the negative emotions there is kind of a principle in psychotherapy that you have to feel it to heal it so we're not talking about repressive coping being in a positive mood is not repressive coping you really need to feel it to heal it but you need to be able to have the resources to comfort and soothe yourself and so you can change the channel by remembering the times that you are happy remembering what you're grateful for things you're excited about in the future and things that make you feel secure and so this is really kind of almost giving you a dial um or maybe you know like a clicker to change the channel you know if you were watching cable tv and you got to the golf channel and you don't really like golf and you just found yourself sitting there watching it for 15 minutes you know you could just change the channel and i i want you to think that could be a metaphor for our emotional regulation um some new research in terms of emotional granularity which is a big word but it really just means that more precise language regulates mood and so again i'm just going to give you something that takes a few minutes to do if you're feeling sad uh you could go online go to the merriam-webster dictionary and put in synonyms for sad and you know again the research says that the precise language for whatever reason helps us to manage it and it could be that one reason is is that it gives you a much broader perspective so for example if you went here and you read this and you might say you know as i look through this i i guess you know it's not that bad i mean i'm not you know depressed i'm not inconsolable i'm just feeling a little bit blue and it can really give you a different perspective that may be one of the mechanisms by which this works but this is a research supported strategy for becoming more effective at managing your emotions so a simpler way of saying it is you can turn the channel and so in those times when you're not feeling motivated and you're procrastinating and you are thinking either i don't feel like doing this or i can't do this you can think about your past accomplishments and how i have been able to persevere through challenges in the past and i think the idea here is that every time we hit you know these really hard situations we forget that how many times in the past have we been in situations that seemed you know that they were dire and yet we were able to overcome some of them or survive them and that remembering that gives us this ability to focus on finding some hope another one is what i call flexible thinking now and um i'm kind of playing off of george costanza um his father in seinfeld used to say serenity now and you know the humor was that his eyes were bulging and he was screaming out loud um but you know so for us for our purposes flexible thinking now is just a way to say to yourself let's try another perspective on this emotion and it could be if someone was observing you what would they how would they see your situation if you were going to tell if your best friend had the same problem what would you say to them and importantly what would your future self say to you and so sometimes that can be really deep it can be about all the changes in your life that could happen if you um you know if you can change your mood and get motivated and take action but sometimes people will say like you know a month from now this won't even matter and it was like someone at work said something negative to them that has no impact at all for the rest of their life but they can't stop thinking about it and so when you think what would your future self they say they would say just forget about it move on you know and so taking the broader perspective is really the key overarching strategy for mood management and i think the key here is you want to focus on your resources and your resourcefulness for um solving problems you know all of us have a kind of non-stop series of messed up situations that we face and we can't pretend like oh why is this happening to me you know really it's happening to everybody and um and but what are our resources for solving this problem it can be asking other people for help it could be your education it could be a lot of things and i do think that also focusing on your resourcefulness and i do think that executive functioning is really an example of building that resourcefulness it is a part of our resourcefulness and if you think of you know these six super skills as a capacity for mind building meaning just as bodybuilders you know go to the gym and they become stronger building these super skills is going to make you a mind builder will increase your resourcefulness and think about it this way if you're a bodybuilder how hard is it for you to lift up you know 20 50 pounds if you had to you know carry groceries or whatever it was it's not really that big of a challenge our problems are as big or small as our resourcefulness can handle them it's our strength and so building these super skills will help to not only solve those problems but to manage your mood and then in terms of mood management you know of course cbt therapy is very helpful the quickest tip in terms of a self-help application of cbt when if you're saying i can't do this or i'm no good at this or you have some negative thoughts would be as simple as saying is this true and is it helpful and that's a quick tip and then so finally when we look at focus there is a lot of science about what increases attention and what decreases attention and i will go through these before we take questions and i'll just zoom in on two of them obviously interest increases attention when you ask adults who are successful how they overcame their adhd most often the answer is they found something that was interesting sleep stress management exercise time in nature attention restoration and that can simply mean um you know a 10 to 20 minute nap is boost attention um but taking breaks you may have heard of the pomodoro technique where you work for 25 minutes and then you take a break for five minutes many people with adhd find that they need you know either smaller work times or bigger breaks um happiness we've already talked about that also not only does it help us be more successful but it also helps us find focus and then limiting technology even having your cell phone in the room with you in a bag research has shown depletes attention and i just want to highlight the power of the research behind some of these in a you know harvard article they wrote that sleep deprivation negatively impacts our mood our ability to focus and our ability to access higher level cognitive functions combination of these factors is what we generally refer to as mental performance so this is one area that's going to be very important for you if you're having trouble focusing to see some improvements and i also just want to emphasize the nature as medicine only because i know it sounds very northern california speak but actually the research on this is very very solid one literature review reviewing a wide range of articles about the impacts of nature on cognitive functioning came to this conclusion nature is a therapy that has no known side effects is readily available and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost many have suspected that nature can promote improved cognitive functioning and overall well-being and these effects have recently been documented so here's just the last slide which is just some references on it that's for you to have in your handouts but i think this would be a good time to open to some questions um great thank you so much that was fascinating there's lots of questions here so let me just jump in by asking you to expand upon chunking um some people were not clear on what chunking was and would like a more specific or more expanded um example and others um wonder whether the act of chunking itself is a form of can become a form of procrastination so some lots of interest in chunking as a concept okay so chunking means taking a goal or a project and breaking it down into a sequence of steps and so for example um let's say that you have um like you have a report to write and you know most of us will think like okay i have this report's right i'm going to give myself maybe it's an hour it's a two hours on this day and this time to do it but really it's a sequence of steps and you may need to before you write that report review some documents you may need to have communications with other people you may need to you know find some references and so the process is you start and you say what's the next step what's the first step and you break it down into a sequence of steps and the way that that helps with procrastination is that you your goal then becomes just taking the next step and people's level of motivation becomes much higher when they see that there is really they don't have to do the whole thing in one time and that they may actually need to take some steps before they can actually solve the problem or get the final product and so uh you know so for example if you had to um you know like you know on a zoom talk you had to you know present a summary of the work that you've done in the past week you know then you may say okay well i'll do that at the last minute it may be that you have to open up your calendar and review what you did you may not remember it may be that you have to get clarity about um you know who else was involved so you can give people credit you may have to also have some kind of recommendation to offer and then you have to get clear about that and so much of procrastination comes from knowing that there's a lot of things you have to do but not being clear about what the specific steps are and what the sequence of those steps are okay that's great um here's another question i thought was interesting um can you talk a little bit more about setting goals specifically one person person's asking how are these different from a to-do list okay so for example um she said do they have to be major or could they be minor like my goal is to clean the kitchen so is that is that it to do or is that a goal and and how how how would you uh describe how goal and did you recap how goal setting helps um with executive functions okay so when you set a goal um so cleaning the kitchen um you know i guess that depends on you know might for some people just be a to-do list um but is it so generally one way to think about it is kind of the new year's resolution model um but i mean in some ways those fail for specific reasons and so it can be that it's usually a little bit broader and it can be i want to get a certification um and truthfully you get to define this yourself and one of the guidelines for setting goals is that and this is why cleaning the kitchen may not fit into it is that it needs to be specific measurable attainable relevant and time-bound and and so that there's usually a lot of thought that goes into that process and it may be that cleaning the kitchen is maybe a step and a bigger goal which is to create a home that feels comfortable and organized or your goal could be find ways to motivate other people to help clean the kitchen but again the idea is that it usually is aspirational and something that you want to have to create a different life if it's something that you have to do every day that does seem more like something to be on the to-do list okay that's so that i think that's helpful so uh and sort of an aspirational larger a larger a larger topic than safely in the kitchen unless that's part of something um larger um interesting so these questions are so fascinating when you have so many things that seem like priorities and they all seem to be need to be done now sometimes setting goals and making progress is really challenging how do you how do you i guess this is a question about prioritization and overwhelm you know when you when you feel like there are just so many things on your to-do list and your goal list that it's hard to know where to start how do you tackle that well i mean you may want to you know create like a a kind of an overall list of what your priorities are and and then kind of within those see um are there things you can get help with are these are there things that you can delegate are there things you can defer so it may be that you have a goal to take a trip to greece but you're just going to defer that for a couple years because that's not a priority right now or it seems like travel is a high priority in terms of your values but it's just not realistic in the moment so are there things so maybe create categories of what things should you defer in your priorities what things can you get other people to help you with and then once you come up with what are those immediate um priorities because you really you know i think that's true you can't have a dozen priorities for the next week and then begin to think about your next week and then hopefully that will um you know limit that okay um um a number of people say that the task of chunking or planning their day seems to take up so much time that it keeps them from getting things done so um let me see if i can find another example of that question um but that's the general tenor of it a number of people have asked that question have said that they feel like they're they're spending so much time planning things and addressing their to-do list that they're not actually doing things so again that may come down to like one of the strategies that people talk about is called eat the frog and figuring out like what's the most urgent and then you know for that particular day figuring out what the most urgent important task is and getting that done and then it may be that after you get that one frog done you can spend a little bit more time in terms of looking at what's left on your to-do list and on your goal list and again it may be that what you end up doing is scheduling out some of those things in terms of deadlines and priority um and so that you may again defer out to other um weeks maybe other months depending on what it is and then again always asking this question you know is this my job is this any way i can get some help with this and is there any way i can automate this you know some technologies allow for automation and it and in some ways that becomes another goal but it may be over time worth it to figure that out okay um here's a great question which i think is so common for a people uh attitude readers um finishing tasks seems to be our son's biggest challenge even when he chunks out the task what would you recommend to finalize the task to get over that you know that final that final hurdle well i think that one thing you can do is come to the self-talk and one of the things he can say is part of his self-talk is focus on completion focus on completion the other thing is it really again has to do with shifting where you're putting your attention and it can be think how good i will feel when this is complete and i understand that sometimes with kids when we use rewards you know that it becomes depleted because we're using it so often to get them to do things but um it may be that if it's if you haven't exhausted rewards that it and you combine it with the self-talk which is focus on completion think how good i'll feel when this is behind me i'll have it off my back and if a parent you might want to say tell yourself to focus on completion tell yourself that how good you're going to feel because that helps them to internalize that language to become their own self-talk okay um here's a great one also what would you say are the best tools against perfectionist highly self-critical thinking and behavior perfectionism is such a problem right for procrastination yeah um i mean i think that's what i mentioned in the talk that that self-talk phrase of progress not perfection is the number one kind of billboard top hit for things that shift people's attitude and um that shift their motivation and so for many people it can be you know for example they'll they have to come up with maybe their own metaphors for that you know like hit a single or double you don't have to get a home run um this idea of you know you can walk you don't have to run and beginning to shift that self-talk and also maybe listing the benefits of perfectionism and lifting the cost of perfectionism that's inherent that's inherently the motivational interviewing approach and if you listen if you you know list the benefits of procrastination it may be you know that when i get started i'm able to do things at a really high quality level what are the cost of procrastination if the cost of procrastination so you're not getting started and you're not making progress and you're not actually finishing everything you can sort of say i'm willing to just get started and just make some progress okay um let me see you mentioned cbt and cbt therapy and a number of people asked for did not know what cbt was and were wondering um what cbt is and and and if you could explain again how it would help okay so cbt is cognitive behavioral therapy and what it means is it's a treatment and this is a therapy approach this is something that psychologists and are trained in administering and basically the idea behind cbt is that we all have distorted thoughts and you know we do tr tend towards anxiety and depression because we our nervous system evolved to be nervous if we wanted to survive you know we had to be vigilant for all the possible things that could go wrong but cbt is really about flexible thinking and it asks you to challenge those distorted thoughts so like if you say oh you know i can't do this um you know and you're thinking about some past failures okay what were some successful times you're using your cognitions to challenge your thoughts and as i had put in there you know that it's a very involved treatment but a simple way you can ask yourself give yourself some of the benefits is to say is what i'm thinking true because a lot of times you know when you say i can't do it you you know it's not you can find reasons where you've had past successes and is it helpful when you say i can't do it it's not helpful you're really decreasing your motivation so those two questions just kind of are like the shortest description of what cbt is frankly and it's about that our cognitive processes are often distorted and that we can challenge those distortions by magnifying the positives and minimizing the negatives and depression and anxiety we're magnifying the negatives and minimizing the positives okay um i just wanted to tell the listeners that several people have um suggested a an app called ultra dot works like cycles which is really helpful for chunking apparently um so um just want to pass that on ultra dot work slash cycles um and in terms of apps and bullet journals and planners um dr honest web do you have any suggestions in terms of have you seen any do you recommend any um tools or apps that that you think are that you've seen be helpful um sure you know there's so many of them and i actually find you know again that some people love some of them and some people hate some of them i mean i think the quickest entree would be um you know for example an app like calm has um you know and also headspace they have a lot of free stuff and if you pay for it you get a lot more material i think that is actually the starting point with all of this because as you practice um breathing is the quickest way to manage your stress and as you practice noticing your thoughts and labeling them you're gaining some ability to question your thoughts and cognitions and you know on netflix right now headspace has a animated video about how to meditate i think those are the simplest easiest entrees into into beginning to the starting point of executive functioning but sure there's lots of journals out there that are helpful and you know i see what i see in my clients is some people hate some and love some and it's really i can't you know predict which one will work for you yeah that's so true isn't it each person's one person's great tool is another person's anathema um i can't thank you enough this is filled with fascinating information i'd like to point out to our audience that we have upcoming webinars next week complex adhd which is about comorbidity some of you have asked what comorbidities are they are related conditions to adhd which are extremely common as you probably know everything from learning disabilities to depression to anxiety to ocd and others so we'll be doing an overview of comorbidities and adhd and then on tuesday june 29 michelle novotny will be taking us through who is a a very well-known adhd coaching psychologist how to actually make habit changes is something that i think we all who we all would like to know more about um i want to thank dr honest web again it's just we really appreciate the amount of time that you gave to us and to all of our listeners and listeners please sign up for attitude webinars attitude dot com mag.com webinars just be sure you don't miss our future webinars or articles that might be on whatever topic you choose to sign up for or any important research updates so with that let me thank all of you and wish you a happy day for the rest of the day thanks everyone