In this episode of More Yourself, I’m inviting you to pause and come back to the present moment.

We explore what happens when you’re stuck in the cycle of feeling not enough, constantly doing, comparing, and striving, until it becomes clear you can’t keep living this way. It’s about recognising when you’ve reached your limit, and trusting that you can sit in the silence.

Inspired by the book Present Over Perfect, this episode is a gentle reminder that you don’t have to prove yourself through productivity. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is stop, get quiet, and come home to yourself.

My new book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit, is now available. Grab your copy here!

What I Discuss:

• How emotional roller coasters and dysregulation show up for ADHD women.
• Why stillness can feel so uncomfortable yet is so powerful for change.
• The grounding power of books to bring us back to the present moment during times of overwhelm.
• Letting go of the pressure to be more, do more, or prove yourself and finding safety in simply being.
• Reaching a tipping point and realising you can’t keep doing life the same way anymore.
• Moving away from external validation and hustle culture, and reconnecting with what feels authentic.
• How slowing down, decluttering (even your books), and tuning in can lead to powerful self-awareness and change.

Timestamps:

• 02:55 - Embracing Your Authentic Self through Books
• 04:17 - Emotional Dysregulation and Finding Stillness
• 06:14 - Shauna Niequist's Book Excerpt
• 09:18 - Reconnecting on The Journey to Self-Awareness
• 10:20 - Creating Your Authentic Space with More Yourself

Join the More Yourself Community - the doors are now open!

More Yourself is a compassionate space for late-diagnosed ADHD women to connect, reflect, and come home to who they really are. Sign up here!

Inside the More Yourself Membership, you’ll be able to:

• Connect with like-minded women who understand you
• Learn from guest experts and practical tools
• Receive compassionate prompts & gentle reminders
• Enjoy voice-note encouragement from Kate
• Join flexible meet-ups and mentoring sessions
• Access on-demand workshops and quarterly guest expert sessions

To join for £26 a month, click here. To join for £286 for a year (a whole month free!), click here.

We’ll also be walking through The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Toolkit together, exploring nervous system regulation, burnout recovery, RSD, joy, hormones, and self-trust, so the book comes alive in a supportive community setting.

Links and Resources:

• Find my popular ADHD workshops and resources on my website [here].
• Follow the podcast on Instagram: @adhd_womenswellbeing_pod
• Book mentioned: Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living by Shauna Niequist

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

Foreign Hi everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of More Yourself here on the ADHD Women's well Being podcast feed.

This is your Monday episode where I'm just bringing you probably more of my coaching, my teaching stuff that's coming up for me.

Anything I think will be helpful to you because it's helpful to me and I'm just going to be sharing that and it's going to be very fluid and flexible and I hope that whatever comes to me in these episodes, you will find something that can help you in your week, in your day, wherever you are.

Now.

I had a bit of a realization, and I may have mentioned it in a previous episode, that I was doing a massive clear out with all my books.

I get sent so many books doing the podcast.

I'm so grateful.

But I also buy a lot of books.

A lot of them are secondhand.

I don't own a Kindle, which everyone says I should.

I love a book.

I love opening a book.

I love the feel of a book.

I love seeing books, I love the colors.

I am a proper book fiend.

But the other, the other day I really felt this need to purge and get rid of books maybe that I've read or maybe books that I have kind of like served their purpose and they can move on and I want other people to find them.

But while I was doing this I was flicking through them and obviously ADHD style, I kind of ended up getting, you know, lost on a tunnel.

And what could have should have taken me, or I'm not going to say should because I hate that word, but what maybe would have taken someone else a shorter time took me a longer time.

And that is because I was flicking through them and finding pages of wisdom and insight and re reconfiguring my actual bookshelf which is in my library of my office, which I get a lot of inspiration from.

However, I, I realized how much wisdom I have in these books and one of my favorite things to do if I'm having a bad day and anyone that's been part of some of my programs and things like that know that I have sort of a much more spiritual side.

I love gaining wisdom from books wherever you open them up on that day.

So sometimes I am feeling a bit lost.

I'm feeling like I need a bit of guidance.

The noise in my head is just too much And I open up one of my books and most of them, you know, it might not quite work with fiction, but anything non fiction.

I have so many sort of self development, spiritual coaching, teaching you know, books, I have so many of them and they all give me a little bit of something and they, they, there's always a pattern to them.

It's always about trying to find purpose and dig into that truthful, more authentic, you know, version of ourselves.

And there's a lot of different well being and health and spiritual and emotional angles.

But essentially it is, it's part, it's embracing that real you.

And I guess which is why the subtitle of my book was embrace your authentic self and harness your true potential.

Because I genuinely believe that that is my passion.

And in the last few chapters of the ADHD women's wellbeing toolkit, that really, really comes alive.

And if you've read the book, you probably know that there was a lot of passion there as well.

So I really love using books as wisdom.

When we feel energetically depleted or perhaps we just feel burnt out, the noise in our brain is just too much.

We're feeling overwhelmed, self doubts and self criticism and fear and discomfort and feeling so out of alignment, which many of us can feel every single month, several times a week.

However that works, you know, with our mood, whether our hormones, whether we've slept well, whether we are feeling exhausted, burnt out.

So many different factors can make us feel like we are top dog one day and right at the bottom of the pile the, the other day.

And I have this all the time.

It's a roller coaster of emotions and moods and many of us with ADHD feel this, you know, this emotional dysregulation and it can be really, really hard.

It can feel like we're swimming upstream all the time without any kind of help or flotation device or map.

And that is why I always come back to a book.

Because sometimes it is just a sentence.

It's, it's a paragraph, it's a page.

And so today I've taken one of those books that was on my bookshelf and actually this was a book that really helped me at the time.

And I'm going to tell you the book because I think it's so important that we cite the books and the authors and maybe one day I'll do an ADHD women's wellbeing book club because I do have a lot of books, but I'm not going to put that on my list for now.

But if anyone's listening and you like the idea of that, drop me a message and I'll put it on the never ending list of things that I want to do but don't have time for.

So the book is called Present Over Perfect, and the subtitle is Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living.

And it's by Shauna Nyquist.

I think I pronounced that right.

It's a New York Times best seller.

And it's also got a forward by Brene Brown, who I love, and I opened it up randomly on a page, and I'm not going to read the whole page, but I'm going to read a few little lines and sentences which I hope will resonate with you today, wherever you are, whatever you're doing.

Completely offside.

I have got an invisalign brace in my bottom teeth, so if you're noticing I'm lisping more than usual, I'm going to have this for a few months.

The bottom of my teeth were crossing over.

Apparently it's a hormonal thing, and they were getting worse and worse, and I really pushed back and I didn't want it because of the podcast, but unfortunately, my dentist said to me, they're going to keep crossing if you don't do something about it.

So, side note, if you can hear me lisping, that is why for four months I'm going to be having this bottom invisalign brace, and hopefully I will have straighter teeth and my jaw will feel a bit more aligned.

Okay, so I'm going to read this little bit, and I really hope that it resonates with you.

It used to be that I was my most anxious, jittery, frantic self when I was alone and still.

And that makes sense to me now.

Essentially, I had a hollow core, and that emptiness became deafening in the stillness.

So I ran and ran and talked and talked and spun circles around my life, avoiding that emptiness.

What I found now, though, is that that stillness is where I feel safe and grounded, and that the frantic living spins me away from myself, from my center, and from my new and very precious awareness of how deeply I'm loved.

I return to the silence to return to love.

I can't hear the voice of love when I'm hustling.

All I can hear on my own feet pounding the pavement and the sound of other runners about to overtake me beat me.

But competition has no place in my life anymore.

That stillness reminds me of that.

She goes on to say, the longer I practice this new way of praying, of listening, of dwelling deeply in God's love, the more I began to feel truly present instead of being hijacked a thousand times a day by my wild mind.

I feel all here, collected Together in a wide eyed and able way.

Simple presence, wholeheartedness, patience, lack of paralyzing fear.

So I love this because actually it's really helpful for me and I talk about this a lot in this space is this feeling of never being able to be present of our brain and our mind and our thoughts just completely taking over.

And with that comes the comparison and the self self doubt and the self criticism and this voice of telling us that we're never doing enough, we need to do more.

The perfectionist voice, the people pleasing voice, this voice that we're constantly being told that you need to keep going, that there's something that you're not doing, there's something you're not achieving.

And this book is very much with that and it's really, really helped me actually the present over perfect book to be more self aware.

And as she says that she is, this stillness reminds her of that.

And she goes on to say, most of my regrets center around getting overwhelmed or stuck in my own head, worried and catastrophizing, endless loops of proving and shame pushing and exhaustion.

I'm thankful for that day weaving through the tunnels with my precious boy, when the violence inside me became profound enough to shake me into new solutions.

That's how we grow, it seems.

That's how we submit ourselves to the miraculous by swimming through the tunnels.

So I'm going to stop that there.

But I truly believe that we do have these moments, these life changing moments, these moments where we just feel that we can't do this anymore.

The overwhelm and the burnout and the exhaustion just gets far too much.

And something, that inner knowing, that inner nudge, that bathroom floor moment or that illness, whatever it is, that moment where we just say we can't do this anymore, there has to be something different.

And this is why I wanted to create these podcast episodes with More Yourself.

This is why I've built a more yourself space.

So we can hold each other in this space and we can recognize and help and support each other and be able to be open and vulnerable and say I'm having a bad week or this self awareness is much harder than I thought.

So yeah, I'm here for it all.

I'm here because I don't want to carry on being in this juggernaut of overproductivity and busyness and needing this external validation to keep doing more.

And I'm going to put my hands up and say that social media for me is a massive catalyst to feeling like this, that I'm not doing enough That I need to keep creating more, that there needs to be more likes, more shares, more messages, whatever that is.

It's almost like this badge of you're not doing enough.

But actually I am really, really leaning into what feels authentic, that feels aligned for me and that is stripping everything back doing this podcast.

But now my only offering, apart from a few one to one clients, is creating this more yourself space.

A revolution for more women to step into more of their authenticity, to be more and to do less.

And I really believe that the more of us come into this energetic space, the more collectively we can start helping each other find ways to be, as this book says, present over perfect.

So I'm delighted that you are here.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for listening to these and do share, share this podcast, share this episode if you think this is going to resonate with, with anyone else.

This is all about wholeheartedness.

This is about stepping in and creating new foundations, building from the bottom up and not feeling like we are sort of flapping in the wind without sort of substantial values of all foundations.

So yeah, if you think this community and this space feels aligned to you, you feel like you do want this accountability, that you feel that you want to be part of a like minded community somewhere where you don't feel that you have to do anymore and you don't have to feel overwhelmed.

Come and join me in the more yourself space.

It's all on my website, ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk I put the link in the show notes.

Join wherever you are.

This is just going to be come in, find us wherever, whatever we're doing.

There'll be stuff going on, there'll be, you know, lives happening and just dip in and dip out wherever it feels good to you.

This is so accessible, this pricing.

I've tried to make this really as accessible as possible.

So it feels that you're going to get your money's worth.

Whatever you do in that month, you're not going to be behind, you're not going to have to catch up.

This is just your space to really be part of, whether it's the mentorship, whether it's just listening to some audio notes, it's just, you know, coming in and joining a live.

I promise you I'm going to try and give you what feels authentic and allied to me, what I'm ready and able to share with being part of this ADHD space for such a long time, but also where we can grow and expand and evolve together.

So thank you so much for being here.

And I will see you for the next episode.

Take care of Sam.