Looking for ADHD support this summer? My entire 'ADHD Women's Wellbeing Series' is on offer this July. Head here to learn more about the workshops and use code JULY to get 35% off.

Now that summer is upon us, it can be both a vibrant and overwhelming time, and can often feel like riding a rollercoaster for your nervous system when you are ADHD or neurodivergent.

This season brings a whirlwind of social engagements and activities that ramp up our energy and excitement. But for many of us, this relentless pace leads to overwhelm and burnout if we don't balance that activation with necessary moments of calm. In this episode, we delve into understanding our nervous systems and recognising when we're becoming overactivated.

Activation itself isn't the problem; joy, excitement, creativity, travel, and meaningful work can all be activating. But staying in this energy for weeks can lead to reactivity, snapping, disturbed sleep, and emotional exhaustion. Kate shares her tips for bringing balance into daily life through micro mindful moments, rather than waiting for burnout to force you to slow down.

You'll hear how you can proactively weave grounding practices into your routine, whether it's a few minutes of breathwork, a walk in nature, or simply pausing to check in with yourself.

In this episode, we cover:

• How summer's whirlwind of social activities can feel exciting but overwhelming, especially for those of us with ADHD
• Why understanding the difference between nervous system activation and regulation is key to managing our responses during busy times
• Daily moments of regulation aren't luxuries, but necessary maintenance for our well-being
• How grounding activities like yoga, breathwork, or time in nature help us recharge and prevent burnout
• Why listening to our bodies is vital, and how ignoring signs of fatigue often leads to burnout
• How to find a rhythm between activation and regulation, rather than staying in a constant state of high energy or anxiety

🌟 The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Live Event Audio Experience is here!

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Alongside three neuro-affirming experts, we spent four hours exploring the questions that matter most to women diagnosed late in life with ADHD. Get lifetime access here!

Links and Resources:

• Find my popular ADHD workshops and resources on my website here
• Follow the podcast on Instagram: @adhd_womenswellbeing_pod
• Grab your copy of my book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit here

Kate Moryoussef is an author, podcaster and women's ADHD lifestyle and wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed women with ADHD find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity, and clarity.

Foreign.

Welcome back to a More Yourself episode here on a Monday.

And today I'm going to be sharing with you a voice note that I left for my More Yourself community, which is my membership space for all of you lovely listeners, late diagnosed ladies who are wanting to understand themselves better, learn from different people, connect with each other and really lean into your authentic selves.

And once a month I leave a voice note alongside.

We have different workshops and we have a guest workshop and we drop in, you know, different messages within the community.

And I particularly love voice notes because for me, I love sharing verbally and I love sharing things that come to mind, especially with what's going on in my life and relating it back to the community because I always say I am just one of you guys as well.

And this is a voice note which talks about this sort of nervous system activation that we're feeling in these, these summer months here in the UK and across the Northern hemisphere.

And understanding the difference between nervous system activation and then finding ways that work for us to regulate this activation and leaning into why summer for so many of us can feel especially busy.

You know, we've got more social plans and it can often feel fun and exciting and dopamine filled, but it can also feel quite overwhelming and overstimulating and exhausting.

And I talk about recognizing the need of learning how to switch off what works for us.

How do we find those grounding calming moments when life is feeling a bit more hectic, especially for those of us with kids who are breaking up from school and it's all about really understanding that there's no good, there's no bad, there's no I shouldn't be over activated or I should be resting more.

It's really about finding those daily practical regulation tools to help ground us.

Whether it's leaning into a little bit more yoga or stretching or breath work or just being in nature and just trying to just calm things down a little bit without thinking of our to do list and constantly thinking we should be doing more.

And I genuinely believe that regulation shouldn't be a luxury.

It should be daily sustainable maintenance and not something that's sort of saved for a two week holiday or a weekend.

I really hope that you enjoy this voice note.

It's something a little bit different for this episode and I'll see you all very soon.

Today I wanted to talk about the difference between activation and regulation.

And I always feel that summer that although we've been waiting for the sunshine and the lighter evenings and the warmer weather, we can actually, it can actually be one of the busiest, busiest times of the year for us.

And for those of us who are parents, there are the sports days, the school events, there's holidays, there's birthdays, social arrangements, maybe there's weddings, barbecues.

There's just.

It's just a lot going on and it seems to be all at once.

And I know it's lovely to have this, but it can also feel quite overwhelming.

But it's also a lot.

And it feels like the world is speeding up.

And even that if you don't have all of these things going on, it can just feel quite charged, quite activating.

Just being in this sort of like busy, light energy.

And although I am, you know, my birthday's in June, I'm a huge summer person, it can feel like we don't have any moment to switch off and the whole world is sort of speeding up around us and we're noticing that maybe people have got more energy, maybe there's more opportunities.

And there's often this unspoken pressure to make the most out of the summer and this time at this time of year.

And if we have got ADHD or we're neurodivergent, this often leaves our nervous systems feeling constantly activated.

And I think there's an important distinction here.

Activation isn't the problem.

Our energy isn't the problem.

Having lots of curiosity and enthusiasm isn't the problem.

The issue is staying in this activated state.

So it's not just being activated, isn't just stress.

Joy activates us.

Excitement activates us.

Creativity can activate us.

Seeing our friends can activate us.

Traveling, doing things actually we enjoy and doing the work that we love activates us.

And our nervous systems are designed to experience this activation.

We're not meant to be in this sort of low activation state the whole time, but that also our nervous systems also need to come back down again.

And this is where regulation comes in.

And this is why I wanted to talk today about the.

This difference between activation and regulation.

And the problem is, without awareness, so many of us stay switched on for weeks at a time.

And then we wonder why we're feeling more reactive, why we're snapping more easily, why our sleep feels disturbed, why we feel overwhelmed or emotionally exhausted.

And I've definitely noticed it myself recently, I don't think I'm sleeping as well, maybe waking up earlier than I normally do.

And for me, June has been full of birthdays and lots of wonderful opportunities and community and work commitments and things that I've really, really enjoyed and love and lots of exciting Opportunities.

But alongside all of that, I've noticed my nervous system, which is quietly telling me we need to slow down.

Can we slow down, find a way to slow down?

And I know I have two choices.

I can ignore it.

I can keep pushing, overworking, over committing.

I can keep telling myself I'll rest later.

And version of me, that version of me that's sort of almost on this kind of juggernaut, this roller coaster, is just wanting to carry on.

But through all this work, through this understanding, I know that that is not a good place for me to be.

That's, you know, that's something that can often lead to.

Whether it's, I can almost feel it now, like twingy back, exhaustion, overwhelm, that kind of thing, or I can listen and I can just stop and I can pause and I can intentionally create more moments of regulation before my nervous system forces me to stop.

And I think so many of us understand what that means now.

When many of us have experienced burnout, many of us have seen these cycles and now we're able to almost press pause before we get to that over activated state.

And I often picture it like being whitewater rafting.

So life is carrying us downstream and it can feel out of control.

And there's rapids, we're going over the bumps and all of that.

And this can include the plans and the people, the commitments, the work, family obligations, incessant emails, social media, whatever obligations that we've got.

Everything is moving so fast, everything is moving so quickly.

And our instinct is just to paddle harder, maybe like try and, you know, stop, use our oars.

And then we get flung out of the raft.

It's this kind of like, we have to keep up.

We have to keep up.

And the adrenaline and the cortisol, that's like pumping through our veins just to get, get to the end of the rapids.

But sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is just choose to climb out of the raft or, you know, row to the side of the river and just take a few minutes, sit on the riverbank, put our feet on the ground, take a breath, let our body remember what safety feels like, that it's okay, that we don't need to live in this constant cortisol state.

And it's not about withdrawing and it's not about saying no to everything, but it's about creating more of a rhythm.

And that could be setting more boundaries.

And it's about allowing the ebb and the flow and moving gently and softly between activation and regulation, between this expansive energy and to More restorative, calm and grounding.

Because if we never step out of the current, eventually our nervous system will do it for us.

And I often think of it like driving a car.

You wouldn't expect to drive 100 miles without stopping to refuel or maybe have a drink or a toilet break.

And yet so many of us treat ourselves that way.

We keep going until we're running completely on empty, until burnout becomes the thing that finally makes us stop.

And I'd much rather we become more preventative in our life, more intentional, more conscious.

And it takes practice and it takes awareness and it takes presence.

But if we're checking in with ourselves every day instead of waiting until we become completely exhausted and burnt out, those little sustainable check ins are the things that can lead to this over activation.

So I don't want to kind of make it too complicated.

It really isn't.

It's not about doing lots of big things.

It's about simplifying this, what I would consider daily regulation tools.

So this can look like grounding.

So whether it's grounding your hands and feet on grass, it's yoga, it's breath work.

Maybe it's prayer for you, maybe it's speaking out loud to God, the universe, whatever that might be, and allowing yourself to listen and to hear and to have a conversation that doesn't involve a podcast or insights or a book and just allowing yourself to hear the wisdom from within.

Maybe it is just some gentle breath work, a walk.

Maybe it's just a walk around the block, few minutes without your phone really being intentional with not having anything incoming, just leaving things just to be.

Maybe you can just sit in the garden and just look at the trees, listen, listen to the birds, doing something to remind your nervous system that you're safe.

And this isn't a luxury, this is daily maintenance.

And I think it's a shift that so many of us need to do, myself included.

And not seeing something like a weekly yoga session or a weekly walk and then the rest of the time is just go, go, do, do that or something we say for a holiday, you know, like we look forward to our summer holidays for two weeks of the year or whatever that might be.

But the rest of the time it' on consistently.

And we wonder why many of us suffer with pain or inflammation or autoimmune or chronic stress or depression, anxiety, anything like that.

We are not taking these micro moments to practice every day.

And it's not stopping life because when we're regulated, we're just simply creating a little bit more space between what happens and, and how we respond.

So we're feeling less reactive.

We're in a place where it doesn't feel like we are about to snap at any moment.

Maybe there's more clarity.

We're feeling like we're able to make decisions and we're not having to question ourselves all the time.

Our nervous system isn't feeling so hyper vigilant that it, you know, we fear all the many different things that could go wrong and we're able to, like I said before, listen to within.

We might be kinder to ourselves and maybe the people around us, maybe there's more compassion and we always have to show ourselves, ourselves, the compassion before we show other people that compassion.

And we're able to have the energy and have the insights to pause before reacting.

And that enables us to respond with more intention instead of impulse.

And so much of this work I do is not about biohacking.

It's not about doing big, expensive, groundbreaking things.

It's just about sustainable daily well being to help an already over sensitized nervous system and brain and body that is holding a lot, holding a lot of things from childhood, sensory differences, we're already holding a lot.

And then we have a very, very overstimulating world and brain that is contributing to an exacerbation of stress.

So we have to go against what that looks like.

And I truly believe that this helps us create a more meaningful, exciting life with enough moments woven through our days.

This moment of regulation that our nervous system is almost like the prioritization for us.

It's our companion that is helping us experience the world in a safer, more connected way.

So I hope that resonates with you today and it's something I have to remind myself every day.

Thank you so much for listening to this more yourself episode.

And this is more my chance to bring you additional wisdom to help you step into more authenticity with this new understanding and awareness through a more neurodivergent lens.

So I really hope that you found today's episode helpful and you can always find more resources on my website, which is ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk uk you'll find free resources, workshops, different things that to help you along your ADHD journey.

Whether it's nervous system regulation, whether it's help grounding or understanding your potential.

I've tried to include all the different areas of ADHD within this ecosystem of how it manifests in everyday life.

And you can also find more content on my socials as well.

So always go onto Instagram.

Instagram, which is ADHD Women's Wellbeing Pod.

You can find me on TikTok and you can find me on Substack and LinkedIn.

I will see you on another Thursday episode where we always have a fantastic and inspirational guest expert helping us and guiding us and supporting us on this late diagnosed ADHD journey.

Take care and I'll see you all very soon.