If you'd love to manage your ADHD using routine, resilience and mindfulness instead of medication, this episode is for you.

This week's guest is ADHD advocate and powerhouse entrepreneur Joseph Pack, whose journey from leaving school with no qualifications to founding a successful marketing agency with clients such as Patagonia, Adidas and the NHS is truly inspiring.

After severe burnout and a life-changing ADHD diagnosis, Joseph went on to co-own a fintech startup and establish drugfreeADHD.org, where he shares practical tools to empower people with ADHD.

This unmissable episode is packed with real-life advice on managing ADHD, as Joseph discusses using lifestyle changes and structured routines to transition from chaotic, impulsive days to a balanced, fulfilled life.

We delve into strategies for overcoming impulsivity, self-criticism and comparisonitis, and highlight the impact of awareness, acceptance and community on your ADHD journey.

Get ready for actionable insights you can apply to your life right away!

You'll learn:

• How a morning routine – think cold showers and meditation – can help you manage your ADHD.
• How cold exposure helps to build resilience and the ability to take on daily challenges.
• The power of meditation and mantras for awareness and impulsivity management.
• The importance of starting small when it comes to creating a successful routine.
• How understanding ADHD helps you take control and make empowered life choices.
• The strength that comes with finding self-acceptance and compassion.

Timestamps

• 04:27: Building a morning routine for ADHD management
• 10:20: Meditation techniques for ADHD
• 19:15: Laying the foundations for change
• 23:28: The journey to acceptance of ADHD
• 28:25: Embracing antifragility
• 33:37: Cultivating awareness

Tune in for practical strategies and insights to support you on your ADHD journey!

Connect with Joseph on his website, drugfreeadhd.org.

Get VIP access to exclusive content with Kate's new Apple podcast subscription, The Toolkit.

Save 15% on supplements from The Herbtender, using code kate15

Kate's 'RECLAIM YOUR CALM WORKSHOP'

A two-part LIVE online workshop introducing the power of EFT tapping to help you break free from emotional overwhelm, calm your ADHD mind, and reclaim your peace – any time, anywhere. Click HERE for more information.

Find Kate's popular online workshops and free resources here.

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. 

Follow the podcast on Instagram.

Follow Kate on Instagram.

Read Kate's articles on ADDitude magazine.

Takeaways:

• A morning routine can significantly impact your day by establishing healthy habits.
• Cold water exposure builds resilience and prepares you for challenges throughout the day.
• Meditation is essential for developing awareness and managing impulsivity in ADHD.
• Using a mantra during meditation helps to quiet the mind and focus attention.
• It's crucial to start small when building a new routine to ensure consistency and success.
• Understanding ADHD allows individuals to take control of their lives and make empowering choices.

Links referenced in this episode:

• drugfreeadhd.org

I just wanted to let you know about a brand new workshop series that I've got coming up.

It's called Reclaim youm Calm and it's an introduction to EFT tapping to help you regulate your emotions and thrive with adhd.

This is a two part live online workshop, so it's introducing you to the power of tapping to help you break free from emotional overwhelm, calming your ADHD mind and reclaiming your peace anytime, anywhere.

I really want to empower you with some simple and practical ways using EFT to help you find more calm, more groundedness, especially when we are facing them in everyday life.

There's all these stresses around us and I know with ADHD that we do find it hard to regulate ourselves in these heightened moments.

So if you are struggling to stay grounded in the chaos of life or you're experiencing these big emotional reactions to what other people would perceive as small triggers, perhaps you are sensitive or fearful of rejection, we see that in rsd.

Or you are craving more calm and stability with your nervous nervous system.

I really want to share with you ways to use tapping, whether it's a couple of minutes a day, whether it's using words or perhaps just breath work to bring more of this regulation into your life.

Now, I will be teaching you this over two hours and what I will be bringing to you are tools for daily life, but you can also share them with children, teenagers, partners, friends.

I'm really going to be teaching you the basics because as we know with EFT we can use it for quite complicated situations like trauma or ptsd.

So I am really excited to be able to bring this to you.

It's going to be happening on the 4th and 11th December at 6.30pm UK time.

It's all going to be on Zoom and it is 80 pounds for the two workshops.

Now I have a discount code for you.

If you use it this week it is EB Calm, that's E, B, C, A, L, M.

Use that discount code and you can get ten pounds off.

Go straight to my website is ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk that's ADHD womenswellbeing.co dot UK and you will see on the homepage, click through link, go through there.

And I really hope that you'll find this workshop series as helpful as I do with regards to using tapping pretty much in everyday life is perfect for the ADHD brain, is perfect for the ADHD nervous system and I want to share all this knowledge and wisdom with you.

Now back to today's episode welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef and I'm a wellbeing and lifestyle coach, EFT practitioner, mum to four kids and passionate about helping more women to understand and accept their amazing ADHD brains.

After speaking to many women just like me and probably you, I know there is a need for more health and lifestyle support for women newly diagnosed with adhd.

In these conversations, you'll learn from insightful guests, hear new findings and discover powerful perspectives and lifestyle tools to enable you to live your most fulfilled, calm and purposeful life wherever you are on your ADHD journey.

Here's today's episode.

So hi everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

And I'm delighted to welcome back a guest I had right at the very beginning, actually must have been about two years ago.

His name is Joseph Paak.

I'm just so happy to have him back.

You may know him as the guy, I mean, I know him as the guy on LinkedIn, the founder of Drug Free ADHD.

And I'm so excited to have you back, Joseph, because we spoke, you know, back when I guess we were both newly diagnosed and we were kind of uncovering lots of things for ourselves and we're a few years down the line and you were just telling me, you know, since our last conversation conversation that a lot's changed for you.

So I'm excited to hear more.

Welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, it's very exciting to be back again.

I've said to you before, I think that that was the first interview I ever did on adhd.

So it's great to come back like full circle now and I love what.

You'Ve done since we, we've spoken because you've really taken your, I guess your core foundational beliefs about managing your own adhd, the drug free method.

You embrace modalities such as cold water, breath work, nature movement, working with your brain, working with your energy, morning routines, all things like that, like everything that is just like my, you know, I absolutely love and I know that's why we've got so much synergy between us and you have, I guess made it, you know, you've gone deeper and deeper over these, you know, couple of years.

Tell me a little bit about, I guess first of all, I'm going to say to the listeners, if you haven't listened to the initial episode, I'm going to go back and put it in the show notes.

So if you really want to hear Joseph's background, understand, you know, what led him to his ADHD diagnosis, the health crisis that, you know, helped him sort of change the way his whole lifestyle was.

Go back and listen to the initial episode.

But I guess I want to ask you what is different in your life now, you know, over these past couple of years since we last spoke?

Well, to begin with, I think there are many days where I struggle to find where ADHD even is in me.

And I'll get into.

I find myself getting lulled into a false sense of security though.

I feel like it's gone.

And then what I'm saying here is I'm talking about the negative traits of adhd, so impulsivity.

In fact, I genuinely don't remember the last time I did anything impulsive.

It must be over a year ago, easily.

And to just contrast that beforehand.

Yeah, there was a lot.

2017.

And I was a 26 year old man at the time.

I shouldn't be doing something, I mean, no one should be doing something so ridiculous.

But just to give an indication of the level of impulsivity in this and the seeking of excitement and danger that was present within me as a teenager and then as a into my mid-20s was just, it was obscene.

So to be the way I am now is a shock to me.

And it's actually only, I suppose, in interviews like this where I start to actually think deeply about how much I've changed.

Something that you do very well is you curate a lifestyle, a daily lifestyle.

And I know no one's perfect and I know people can, you know, depending on whether we've slept well that night and all different variables.

But I know that you are a big proponent of a morning routine and I just wondered when did you get that awareness to kind of think, you know, what if my morning starts well, then there's a knock on effect and maybe we can have a little chat about your morning routine and see how the listeners might be able to, you know, take some of those things and apply them to their morning.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, a morning routine is like you say, it's absolutely essential because we start the day off on the right footing.

And for me that is doing something hard, doing something that is that where there is a lot of resistance built up inside.

So that could be getting into an ice bath or more regularly for me is getting in a cold shower.

So I'll usually get in the cold shower, finish the cold shower, then I'll do some exercises to warm my body back up again, then I'll walk straight into my office and do meditation and breathing.

I run a meditation accountability group at 7:30am every single day.

So 365 days a year, and that is 25 or 30 people on it this morning, all with ADHD, all that have learned to meditate, that all do it almost every single morning.

People are very consistent with it.

And what that entire routine is doing is it's I walk into the bathroom and I see the shower and all I want is a hot shower, but if I take the cold shower, I've done something I don't want to do, which is very, very important.

And I have a poster on my wall back there.

I don't think you can see it.

It says the Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

And what that is.

It's the first line of the Third Zen Patriarch, a poem from the 12th century, the Zen Buddhist poem.

And the whole point of the poem is that basically the reverse of that for people who have strict preferences for how they want their life to go, they will suffer.

Now this goes all the way back to Buddha.

When you look at his noble truths, the first two noble truths, number one, all of life is suffering.

Number two, all suffering is caused by desire.

Well, desire is another word for preference.

If you flip that on its head, instead of saying no preferences, you could say the great Way.

And that means enlightenment, which is not what we're necessarily aiming for, but at least complete contentment, peace, happiness, whatever you want to call it isn't difficult for those who prefer everything.

What does that mean?

It just means if you can go through your life being open to every event, then life will become easy, genuinely easy, because you're not trying to control what other people say.

You're not trying to control what other people do.

You're not trying to control what happens to your outcomes.

Life becomes easy.

Okay, why is that important for a morning routine?

And why is that particularly important for a cold shower?

I don't want to get even to this day, I don't, I'm not going to lie, I do not want to get in that cold shower.

I've been doing it for years, but I do it because it builds grit determination for the rest of the day.

I'm beginning my day by doing something that I don't want to do.

I have a preference to not do it.

I'm breaking that barrier.

And then once I've done that, I then go and do breathing and meditation.

So then I'm, I'm so ready for the day at that point.

This is key.

But of course, building a morning routine isn't easy.

So we have to take, we have to do that steadily.

So you can't just go start tomorrow going, I'm gonna.

This is what people with ADHD will do all the time.

Right.

I'm having a cold shower, I'm gonna breathe, I'm gonna do meditation.

No, I absolutely do not recommend doing that because it will last a few days and then you'll hate it.

You won't want to do it anymore.

So you're saying that we just, we start with just the one thing and we do that for a few days?

30 days, most likely.

It's probably best.

Yeah.

And would you recommend if someone struggles with that cold shower, to say, right, if you have a warm shower and then you turn it down and do the last 30 seconds cold and then kind of like build up to that until you can just have the cold shower.

Yeah, normal hot shower, just as you always would, then you say, yeah, 30 seconds even less.

20 seconds is probably okay.

The first time you do it, maybe even for the first week before you're about to turn to cold, start breathing a little bit more deeply.

Just start getting the breath ready for the cold that's about to hit your body.

And then when you're ready, just turn it fully to cold, no hesitation, and just rinse the whole body as quickly as possible, then get out and then get the towel wrapped around your body.

So what you're saying, I can handle the cold water.

That to me is like, I can do that.

But when you say to me, 7:30 meditation, there was something in my body that just was like, that was, there was resistance there, like massive resistance.

Because for me, 7:30 in the morning is bus, kids, breakfast.

It's just like an adrenaline fueled kind of half an hour, 45 minutes.

And I don't have time, or I say to myself, I don't have time to meditate at half seven in the morning.

I could meditate at half six in the morning for sure.

But I choose not to.

And I'm going to put, you know, my hands up here that I struggle with my phone because I'll turn it on off airplane mode quickly, you know, See, and I have to Use so much self restraint and kind of strength to then not go into the depths of Instagram and reply to messages.

And before I know it, I've just like, my brain's just been sucked into that horrendous social media juggernaut.

So I'm really interested to know what type of meditation you advocate for ADHD people.

Because if someone can say, right, I can do this meditation, I just can't do it at half seven.

Where do people start with ADHD friendly meditation?

Well, the interesting thing about what you've just said there is that if we meditate a lot, say every day, once a day is enough, but twice a day would be fantastic.

We develop awareness, more deeper awareness.

And as our attention span increases and our awareness increases, because it's not, it's not just because you could have a.

I mean I historically have had a very good attention span.

That's never been my issue.

I've always been able to focus on things.

I've just focused on the wrong things for eight hours solid and then not got what I was supposed to get done.

So attention isn't enough.

We also need awareness, the awareness spot that we're doing something we shouldn't be doing and break out of it, which is like for example, scrolling through Instagram as an example meditation.

This type of meditation I'm about to talk about will build that awareness.

So you could be 30 seconds into it, scrolling through Instagram and go, oh, you catch yourself.

Okay, I'm going to just put it down.

You feel the discomfort in the body of putting it down because really you want to keep scrolling.

And then you just sit with that discomfort for a minute or so and then it will go away on its own, but it only goes away on its own by doing nothing about it.

Okay, we can come back to that.

So the technique to get you there again, I understand why it's difficult to meditate at 7:30am every single day if you want to do it in your own time.

Meditation is really very simple, is all about creating an object of attention.

So in lots of Buddhist types of meditation, you'll focus on your breath.

So and sometimes it can be very subtle, like you actually focusing on the breath as it touches your upper lip.

It's like an extremely subtle sensation.

Some types of meditation, people will hold beads and run them through their fingers.

So they're just concentrating on that feeling of the beads running through the fingers.

Other types of meditation, again, people will light a candle and they'll just stare at the flame flickering again.

It's all about all three of those are different objects of attention.

Well, with ADHD that's quite difficult because the mind is so frantic.

It's incessant chatter that by using an object of attention that is not mind, is not in the mind, it gives the incessant mind chance to just go more crazy, really.

So the antidote to that is to use a mantra instead.

And a very specific type of mantra, because that's another thought.

So actually a mantra is just giving the busy mind something to compete with.

And another mistake I think that a lot of people think about meditation is that it's about having an empty mind.

It's about clearing your thoughts.

No, that is a recipe for disaster.

It's never going to happen.

And in fact, I would say that with most neurotypical people, they're not even achieving that, that empty mind state.

Empty mind is something that's reserved for the Buddha or for a Buddha, which would be an enlightened person.

And that's not to say that any, you know, some people listen to this may one day get there.

They may one day it's available to everybody.

Forget quieting thoughts completely like they are not present in this ADHD friendly meditation.

So basically we repeat this mantra and you could just use something as simple as, I can handle this, I can handle this, I can handle this, I can handle this.

Repeating that silently in your head at the same time as you are willfully repeating those words and the busy mind will kick in.

Oh, this is boring.

Oh, I really don't want to be doing this.

Oh, I've got to get the kids here.

Oh, I forgot to do this.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Continue repeating the mantra.

Keep doing it.

Don't try and make those thoughts stop.

Every time you notice that you're being pulled into the busy mind, just acknowledge that's happened and gently guide yourself back to the mantra.

You may have to do this 30, 40 times in one meditation session.

Each time you do it is like a bicep curl for your awareness, a bicep curl for your attention.

Keep doing that every single day.

In a month it might be 15 times that you get dragged into automatic thoughts.

It'll never be zero.

There's always going to be some chatter going on in the background.

In fact, the mind can chatter for the whole meditation session so long as the mantra doesn't stop.

And you will still get huge benefits from it.

So, but if you keep doing this again, say for six months or more, and you're very consistent, all of a sudden a Shift occurs.

You who are in there aware of the busy mind, is now further away from their busy mind than you were six months ago.

So it doesn't matter what it says.

You know, it's not you.

And you don't take anything it's saying seriously.

In fact, things that used to upset you now make you laugh, literally laugh out loud.

I've been just walking down the street and laughed my head off at the things it says.

To me, that's a turning point.

That's a realization that, in fact, does that mind ever need to be quiet?

And in fact, I've heard some genuine enlightened yogi masters say that their voice in their head is still not quiet, but they're enlightened.

But the reason they're enlightened and I'm not is because they know definitively that the voice in their head is not them.

It's just a passenger that lives with them.

Basically, they've had that opportunity through the meditation to detach from the mind that we have been conditioned to believe is true and is part of us and to not.

Not have any separation from.

So we've just believed that everything that we hear and think is the truth.

It's the absolute truth.

And.

And from what I understand and know from meditation, from my own experience, is that we can have that detachment and we can question it and get curious, like, as to.

You know.

And like you say, we can start kind of going, I'm not sure that's true.

I want to go and go really practical with your meditation, because first of all, it's amazing.

Are we sitting down?

Lying down, stood up?

Can we move?

Like you say, can we have something in our hands?

Like, what are the rules?

Are there rules?

No.

Well, sitting down on a chair is fine.

Sitting down on a chair, backs of your hands on your laps, palms facing the ceiling.

Why would we do that?

Two reasons.

One, it opens the chest, so immediately means it makes the breathing deeper just automatically.

But the other thing is it's an open posture.

You know, like if you closed off, you know, you feel a bit down.

You close immediately.

You just feel yourself closed.

You can just turn your palms over so your palms facing the ceiling stay open like this.

No matter how uncomfortable it is.

It's just like you're being more receptive to the experience.

It makes a.

Seems like nothing, but it makes a massive difference.

And having your spine very straight with your arms relaxed makes a huge, huge difference.

Raise your chin.

Feet on the floor.

Feet on the floor.

You can do it.

Cross leg, leg.

If you want?

I don't, I don't think you need to, but you can.

That just depends.

Whatever you feel like.

So either sitting on the floor cross legged or sitting on a chair.

But don't do it standing up, don't do it walking around.

You want to be completely still.

And how long would, if someone's saying, right, I can do this and like, where would you say, what are the benefits?

Can you do it for five minutes and get a benefit?

Like, what's the kind of, the optimum length?

We do 15 minutes on the meditation session in the morning, that's fine.

I think 15 minutes is probably optimum.

You can go much longer if you want.

I think I found that the first seven or eight minutes are a settling of the mind.

Like it's really busy.

But when I get into like the last six and a half minutes, I'm really settled.

In the last three or four minutes I can be getting to the point where there's really nothing going on in there.

So do you think changing our daily routine and even starting from our morning routine can take us from that place where everything just feels chaotic and out of control to like what you said, where you said, actually you're not quite sure where your ADHD is now?

It feels like you're not being driven by all these impulses.

Well, the morning routine is like a circuit breaker really.

It's the perfect place to begin if you're really not doing too well right now.

And there could be a myriad of reasons why you're not doing well, but let's say perhaps you're very, very impulsive, you're drained, perhaps experience burnout from a job or something like that, but you're not doing any of these things like meditation or breathing or eating well or exercise or whatever it might be.

Selecting one very, very simple thing to do tomorrow morning could be the like laying the foundations for building the next chapter of your life.

Which is why I recommend picking something very small.

Like I would genuinely, if you want my advice directly for almost anyone here, is do 15 to 20 seconds cold water at the end of a hot shower tomorrow morning.

And don't worry about doing anything other than that for a month, 30 days.

So start off with 20 seconds.

When you're comfortable with that, go to 30 and 40, 50, 60, keep going up, aim for about two minutes in cold by the end of the month.

By the time you get to the end of that month, you'll feel quite different.

You'll have gone from a person who would think, well, I'm Never going to have a cold shower to someone who's actually enjoying it.

I tell you, when you get, you know, almost everybody who gets to two, two and a half minutes in a cold shower, they say they really enjoy the process, that they still hate getting in.

It's a funny thing.

The first 10 to 15 seconds is brutal, always brutal.

A minute in, you are alive.

And then after two or three minutes, someone's just come and turn the lights on.

The entire, like the entire room changes.

Everything changes.

What.

So that's why I recommend cold.

And it will then make it so much easier then for the next month to bring something else in which I would recommend breathing, because breathing techniques, something like, you can go and Google this parasympathetic breathing where the only thing that matters is the exhale is significantly longer than the inhale.

And what that will do is it will reduce your heart rate, reduce your blood pressure and reduce your cortisol, cortisol being stress hormone.

And you'll realize I've just done two things that have completely changed the way I feel.

And I didn't have to ask anyone's permission to do these things.

They didn't cost me anything.

It's all completely in my power and I'm now taking full control.

So then you start to get all these side benefits coming in.

Like, I can do this, I'm in control, I can handle this.

And yeah, it's a game changer.

I mean, what you say then about, yeah, I can handle this, because we, I'm going to speak sort of collectively here, that many of us feel like we've been derailed by our undiagnosed adhd.

And we've had a lot of self criticism and shame and guilt and blame and all of that thinking that we had.

We should have been able to control this.

Like, we should have been able to do better, be better.

And we have got, had personality, you know, defects and flaws.

And then they get the diagnosis or they get the awareness and go, okay, so now it's adhd.

I can understand what ADHD is like, like how it shows up and manifests.

And then we're able to bring in these tools that you're talking about to enable us to have even more awareness and to start noticing.

And it's, it's kind of giving ourselves that confidence, isn't it, of going, actually, I do know what's best.

And maybe with the cold shower that kind of ignites it a little bit.

That gives us, like you say, that grit and that resilience to say, actually I'm not as defective as I thought I was.

I'm not as, as terrible and all over the place and disorganized, whatever we want to call ourselves.

Like, I actually do have ways and options, like you say, that are free, that I don't have to go to a therapist.

I don't have to pay loads of money for a course.

Like, I can do this.

That's incredibly empowering, isn't it?

Big time.

And it even got to the point lately, I mean, maybe six months ago where I said to my wife, and this was my decision, not hers, I'm now no longer going to or allowed to use ADHD as a reason why I've done something now that was a big thing because I've been defaulting again and again and again and again, saying, I made that mistake because I've got adhd.

I did this wrong because I've got adhd.

I missed this appointment because I've got adhd.

You know, that might actually be the reason why I was doing those things.

But it got to a point where I was so aware of it.

I was so aware, like, I knew I was starting to default back to the comfort zone of using ADHD as the reason why it wasn't happening.

I said to her, look, I'm still probably going to make some of these mistakes, but I promise you, I am never going to use ADHD as a reason.

And you are allowed to tell me off if I do, for my own good, not for hers.

And since I stopped doing that, I think that's probably when I started to disconnect from that ADHD diagnosis.

And I was a bit like, I don't even know where it is anymore.

It was like.

And that's, that's where we can get to.

I'm convinced of that because, oh my God, I can't even tell you how different I was.

I can't tell you how different I was.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because, like, immediately I'm kind of like, am I triggered by that?

I know, I get it.

What does that mean?

Because we've probably like had many, many years of our life not understanding why we've done certain things.

Then we get the ADHD diagnosis.

It's.

It's an explanation.

It gives us some self compassion.

It allows us to forgive ourselves for lots of things.

But I really do agree with you, Joseph, that, you know, I try very hard for myself.

Like, don't fall into this victimhood mentality.

And also with my clients, like, I don't want you to start feeling that you now have ADHD as something that you can just use for everything.

And that's why I love these empowering conversations where you've got real practical strategies that we can lean into to improve and help ourselves thrive, because there's no reason why we can't thrive and live much better lives knowing now that we've got ADHD and, you know, using things like the breathwork, using the cold water, and the meditation of lessening the impact maybe that our ADHD has in our life.

I wonder what you.

You know how we said at the beginning of our conversation where you said you're not quite even sure where your adhd, like you've kind of disentangled or maybe just accepted that you are just who you are and your brain just is the way it is.

Maybe you can explain.

Well, first thing I'll just quickly say is I would never have got to this point if I hadn't been diagnosed.

Yeah, I would.

Who knows where I'd be?

It's impossible to say.

But the diagnosis put me on a trajectory to this point.

My wife on the next point.

My wife and I talk about this a lot.

I feel genuinely continuously disconnected from the ADHD diagnosis.

If we think about it as a disorder of attention, of hyperactivity, I don't have either of those issues anymore.

However, what we also say to each other is I'm neurodivergent.

I am neurodivergent.

So there's no doubt about that.

I mean, I think even the way I ended up getting to this point today, the obsession with meditation, the obsession with learning about all the yogis from history, studying stoicism, like we're talking about the history of Peloponnesian War, all this kind of thing, that is a.

It's just a seeing the world in a very different way to the average person that I meet, which sometimes and quite often still to this day, makes me feel an outsider, even in my own friendship group.

But the difference between me now and a decade ago is I'm very comfortable with that.

A decade ago, I was pretending to be like them, getting myself in all sorts of problems because I'd make jokes that weren't funny or were a little bit too harsh or whatever, because I never really understood the boundaries of it.

Now I'm just like, look, I don't really fully get what they're talking about.

This just sounds boring and mundane to me.

But they're good people and I'm an outsider and they know that, and I'm okay with it.

And that there was a bit in.

Because we spoke about Michael Singer on the last interview we did, because I know you like him too.

And there's a thing he said where he's like, meditation is really important, but what matters a thousand times more is what you do when you're not meditating.

And I thought about that for about a year.

Like, what does he mean?

And I realized about maybe 18 months ago what he's saying is if you meditate in the morning, you sort of center yourself so you're calmer.

Then you come out of the meditation and then all of a sudden life slaps you in the face.

You know, the kids are misbehaving, maybe they're going to be late for school.

There are things with work that aren't going so well, blah, blah, blah.

All these things are very uncomfortable.

Can we handle those?

Can we let go of our attachment to how they should be?

Can we have fewer preferences about how they should be?

If we can continually do that every single day we do what he calls surrender.

He talks about it in the Surrender experiment.

And all of a sudden we just change.

It's very difficult to explain, but we just.

It's.

It's like I don't even want to use the word stronger.

I don't think that's it at all.

I don't even think the word resilient is right.

It's almost like we become antifragile.

It's like this is a word that I'd.

Well, word coined by Nassim Taleb.

And what he meant was that in nature there are things that grow from stress.

So in a man made structure will never grow under stress.

So even like a picture, like the strongest bridge you could ever imagine, a huge bridge that is an extremely robust structure, but it will break under the right pressure.

So if a bomb hits it, for example, it will just break and it will.

Yeah, but even under some stress it won't get stronger.

The human body gets stronger under stress.

Look at weightlifters.

They tear their muscle and it builds the muscle up.

The exact same thing happens to our psyche.

And that's where ice baths, breathing, meditation, and surrendering, letting go of our initial reaction to things in the middle of the day help us get stronger.

Yeah.

And I think about post traumatic growth, we talk about PTSD a lot.

But actually the post traumatic growth is where you see these amazing people who move of the most horrific situations.

And they are the ones that are inspiring and leading people and their resilience and their inner strength is helping people navigate Much less traumatic things.

So, yeah, I love that.

I think it's so important to recognize, like, how strong we are as humans and how.

How much stronger we can be if we do things.

It's literally the meditation.

I keep thinking about this meditation.

Actually.

I've never looked forward to meditation before.

The only time I enjoy meditation is when I'm maybe doing some yoga and the Shavasana at the end.

And I can.

I wouldn't even call it a meditation.

I just quite enjoy, like, the feeling of the stillness.

But I'm actually going to tomorrow morning and I'm going to do this.

I'm going to find my mantra and I'm going to give myself not even.

I'm going to do three minutes.

I know you said 15 minutes, but for me, if I went straight into 15 minutes, I would find that really, really tricky.

So I'm going to try three minutes and I'm going to see, you know, if anybody else who's listening to this and you want to message me and say, I'm going to try the three minutes as well.

Can we just get back to the mantra?

I like details.

I like.

I like to just understand things.

I can see that.

That's good.

Yeah.

Can we choose anything that works for us?

Is there something specific that works with our brain that's better?

I usually give beginners.

I can handle this.

I can handle this.

I can handle this.

But that's not a spiritual mantra.

So a spiritual mantra needs to have some vibratory quality to it.

All spiritual mantras have some vibratory qualities to them.

So the mantra that I usually give.

And you need to be careful with this because this can sometimes be very uncomfortable for some people.

Some people can feel a little bit sick doing it.

Some people can feel a bit dizzy.

You know, maybe 5% of people will feel a bit sick or dizzy.

And sometimes it can sort of agitate discomfort in the body.

There's some like.

Like blocked trauma or something.

It can agitate that.

So be careful.

But it's basically a mantra you repeat silently in your head.

And I'll repeat it now.

Sounds a bit weird, but it's the sound.

I am.

I am like this.

I am like that.

So it's like a chanting.

Yeah, but you're chanting it silently.

You hear the voice in your head saying it.

Okay.

Because normally it's that when you say the vibratory.

Because I do a bit of chanting through yoga and it does something.

I feel like it's like a cellular shift or something on the.

When you can Hear it.

So I mean, could you chant it out loud?

You could, but I would use an OM chant for that.

So, like, if you do an I am, what you're trying to do is create a very, very subtle object of attention and you'll be.

What you'll feel is like with an OM chant, like an O, the ah is in the throat, the is in the chest, and the M is in the belly.

So it's vibrating like the chakras basically.

And it makes you.

That's why you have this cellular.

You just feel so unbelievably calm and like vibrant when you do that.

Yeah.

So that's one thing that can be done.

And I do do that quite regularly.

That the I am mantra is an even subtler that goes to a deeper part of you.

And because it's so subtle, it can send you into these.

I mean, the only way I can describe it to a person who hasn't experienced it, it is the feeling just between awake and asleep.

So you are awake, you're awake, you're aware that the mind shuts down.

Now the interest.

We're going very deep with what I'm about to say next.

So thing is, if the mind shuts down but you're still there, then you start to realize that the mind is an inessential part of you.

The only thing that's essential is awareness.

And when that happens to you for the first time, you will never be the same again, ever.

Because you realize, I love this.

I've been taking advice from a crazy person, which was the voice in my head.

And actually I'm not even that voice.

I'm something else altogether.

And actually that voice isn't essential to me.

It's all.

Don't even really need it to be there.

So again, I am, I am like nice and long, focusing your attention on it, not worrying about the busy mind, that I can do whatever it wants.

Because remember, it's not you See, because it's not you.

You also really have no right to tell it what to do.

You have no right to make it shush.

You have no right to even make it say nice things.

In fact, that would be fighting with the mind, which every single yogi ever has warned against.

They say never, ever, ever fight the mind.

And what they mean by that is we don't want to try and make the mind say nice things.

We want to turn our attention away from the mind so it learns that we're not interested in what it's got to say.

And then funnily enough, it will start to say nicer things to us.

So when we've done this, you know, we've spent say an hour doing the different things in our morning, we're feeling less reactive, we're feeling a bit stronger, a bit like more resilient.

We feel like we have kind of reclaimed a bit of, I don't even know, controls the word.

We are recognizing.

Yeah, we've gained awareness.

We're recognizing that we don't need to listen to like you say, the mind because very often it can spew all sorts of crazy things.

You know, with imposter syndrome and telling us that we're not good enough and con parasitis and with anxiety and all that.

So this, what I'm trying to say is like if we suffer from that every single day, this little bit of our morning routine can really have a knock on effect on it for the rest of the day.

Are you doing anything else the rest of your day that is profound as your morning routine?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you just mentioned that imposter syndrome.

What did you say?

What was the other thing?

Compare, comparison, comparisonitis, Whatever else you want to call these things.

Each one of those is mind.

So each one of those is the mind.

Every single bit of it.

So therefore if I'm not mind, like we solve the problem of all those things in one by then identifying with awareness rather than mind itself.

So we begin our day to like disconnecting from the bit that's causing the problem.

And then of course the day then begins and then we, we hit challenges and the voice comes back and the comparisons come back and the everything imposter syndrome comes back again.

So I do things like I just do perspective shifts quite a lot.

So like before this podcasts began, I got into a habit of doing this with all podcasts and all calls.

I'll just quickly imagine myself as a tiny little speck on earth and think about that there are 8 billion other people all trying to do things and I'll try like zoom my awareness out again and look at the earth just as this little marble in space, that kind of thing.

So it's just like a total.

Why would I do that?

Because then I'm not thinking about myself.

It's just, it's just as simple as that.

There's nothing more complicated about it.

Just about not thinking about myself.

I'll do breathing all day.

Even during this podcast I've been doing it.

Just a breath in, nice long breath out.

Just one is fine.

Things like that.

And then there's a.

This is very Hard to explain, but for anyone listening, you've probably looked in the mirror today, right?

So when you looked in the mirror, you saw your face, you saw your body wearing clothes, whatever.

And it was, it was today.

You saw that image today.

Ten years ago you looked in the mirror and you would have seen a different face, a younger face.

You'd have seen different clothes, a younger body.

Maybe you were in a different room, maybe the room was decorated differently.

When you were 10, you looked in the mirror and you saw a 10 year old wearing 10 year old's clothes in a 10 year old's bedroom.

Three different humans, but the one who was looking in the mirror is exactly the same.

The same person is looking in the mirror, but they're looking at a different body.

Go to that place within you.

Go to the one who is looking in the mirror.

So I'll even do this in the middle of coaching calls with people if I can.

If I notice my mind's getting distracted by some personal stuff that's not important and certainly isn't important for the client, I'll just quickly recognize, go to the one who's looking in the mirror.

I'll even like say that to myself.

Do you understand?

This is really like weird, but do you know what I'm talking about?

Is it trying to help you?

I mean, the way I'm kind of like analyzing it is that first of all, we all evolve and we all shift and we change.

And that person, that version of me 10 years ago, 20 years ago, is an evolved version.

But also it's allowing me to recognize that I'm not, I'm not that person.

So I don't have to align to that.

That version of me.

It goes even deeper than that.

It's that we who are aware.

The one that's aware of the voice speaking.

The one who's aware of the voice speaking.

Okay, you can hear.

So if you say hello in your head five times now, you can hear that?

Yeah.

So how do you know you could hear it?

Because I could.

Because it was me.

Because you're in there.

Yeah.

Because that, that could hear it isn't any different at all from the one who could hear it 10 years ago or the one who could hear it at 10 years old.

What it's aware of has completely changed.

But we as human beings identify too much with the bit that's changed and not enough with a bit that doesn't change.

This is we.

This is such an extremely deep subject that we can't go into in this short period of time.

But for anyone who happens to be interested in this, go and search for Rupert Spira S P I R A on YouTube and go and watch some of his videos talking about this.

I think what you do is brilliant, Joseph, because you are.

I would say you're an ADHD philosopher.

I feel that you bring in these big concepts and help us connect the dots into why we have the brains that we do, the wiring that we do.

Because we're divergent thinkers.

We are.

And we don't want to do what we're told to do.

And we see things differently and it's okay for us to do that.

Like you say, when you're around your friends and they're talking about different things and you kind of recognize they're good people, but actually you want to do and think differently.

And so we should.

And we should be able to express that.

And I think there's going to be a lot of people listening today who kind of think, I want more of this.

I really love these.

These big conversations and these philosophies and bringing these kind of.

I would say, yeah, they are philosophies to my.

To my daily life.

How can someone join your meditation group?

How can someone work with you?

Let's direct people to the best ways for you.

Right now the best thing to do is just go to drugfreeadhd.org and then on the homepage you'll be able to subscribe to my newsletter.

And in my newsletter every week there'll be a link to join something like the meditation group or have one to one coaching with me or come to a retreat or workshop or something like that.

Definitely the best way to do it.

And you can also have a search round on the website anyway for other things that you might want to do.

Like for example, join the meditation group now.

And last question, because I think people will be asking this.

Can they work with you if they do take medication?

They can, but the re.

But most people come to me to get off of medication.

Okay.

But they can work with me.

The only thing that's a little bit of a concern is cold exposure because it's certainly an ice bath.

I would not recommend getting in an ice bath on medication.

Okay.

Because that's really powerful.

Blood pressure is already raised.

You putting yourself at risk got quite serious risk.

So just be careful that you definitely want to speak to your doctor.

Yeah, I think we do.

Is brilliant, Joseph.

I'm so happy that we had this second chat.

I feel like we'll always keep coming back and then chatting and kind of evolving even further.

I want to come and do one of your retreats so we can talk about that.

And yeah, thank you so much for sharing all your big thoughts and very practical, helpful strategies.

It's great to have you back.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much.

It was great fun.

If you've enjoyed today's episode, I invite you to check out my brand new subscription podcast called the Toolkit.

Now this is where I'm going to be opening up my entire library.

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