In this wisdom episode of The ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast, we’re revisiting one of this year’s most listened-to conversations with ADHD coach Meredith Carder, all about redefining what rest really looks like for our ADHD brains.

The holiday season can feel especially intense and overwhelming, so this Christmas Day replay is a gentle reminder that you’re allowed to slow down, honour your needs, and choose rest that actually works for you.​

Together, we explore why traditional ideas of “rest” often don’t work for ADHD women and how you can start redefining recovery, energy, and self-care in ways that feel more authentic and sustainable.​

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

Key Takeaways:

• What rest can look like for ADHD beyond just lying on the sofa
• Different types of rest including mental rest, active rest, and energising activities that help you reset rather than shut down
• How to experiment with what truly recharges you instead of defaulting to what you think you “should” be doing
• Why building confidence and self-trust is essential so you can give yourself permission to rest differently and honour your own rhythms
• The role of self-compassion in navigating low days, burnout, and motivation dips without spiralling into shame or self-criticism
• Challenging societal expectations about productivity, careers, and “how life should look”
• Honouring your needs to live in a way that genuinely supports their wellbeing
• The impact of common ADHD co-occurring conditions (like anxiety and depression)
• How releasing shame and judgement around your needs, work, and pace can create more space for your full potential to emerge

Timestamps:

• 00:08 - Acknowledging Challenges During Festive Seasons
• 00:57 - The Importance of Rest for ADHD Brains
• 04:50 - Redefining Rest for ADHD
• 08:10 - Trusting Ourselves and Challenging Norms
• 09:59 - Building Self-Trust in ADHD Recovery
• 12:36 - Navigating Career Challenges with ADHD

The More Yourself Community 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
• Check out Meredith's Instagram @hummingbird_adhd

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. 

So hello everyone.

Welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

This is coming to you on Christmas Day.

So I wish you all a lovely Christmas Day festive season celebrations, but also acknowledge that this time is also quite difficult and quite challenging for many of us.

Overwhelming over stimulating.

And I am just sending love to people who are also struggling a little bit over this time.

So I know that it can come with lots of emotions and just hope that that today's episode might be able to help you.

Maybe you need to go and have a little walk or you need to get out the house or just kind of get your head out of all the family dynamics.

But on today's episode I wanted to focus on, I guess, rest and whatever this time looks like for you.

So I'm delighted to bring back a clip from Meredith Carter, who has 20 years of experience working with running businesses and psychology.

And she's also a multi passionate ADHD advocate and she has created incredible supportive community spaces for her clients through Hummingbird adhd.

And she also has a brand new book which is called It All Makes Sense now, which offers validation and practical strategies for thriving with adhd.

So in today's clip you're going to be hearing a lot about why rest actually is so vital to our ADHD brains and noticing how our ADHD is, how it shows up and the ways that we can work with it and change as we move and evolve through the different stages of life.

So this is about letting go of shame and practicing more self compassion.

I talk about this all the time, especially on the days where you do feel low, where the days do feel more challenging and giving yourself that space to work with your own patterns, including hyper focus, if that's what it looks like.

So this is about trusting yourself to choose what works for you, even if it doesn't match other people's expectations.

So I really hope today's episode helps you wherever you are and I will see you for the next episode.

You've been obviously you've been working with ADHD for so long, you're so entrenched and you've just written this book.

Do you still get derailed by your own adhd?

Oh, of course, yes, absolutely.

I would say I don't get my train doesn't go quite as far off the tracks anymore.

But it definitely, there are days where it's very, very hard still.

I feel like ADHD evolves with time and whatever life phase you're in.

You almost have to recalibrate and switch up your strategies and evaluate, but my symptoms are absolutely still there.

I definitely have not, you know, conquered life with adhd, but I will say I'm living my life completely differently than I was before I was diagnosed.

A lot of what you just talked to around understanding my patterns and getting rid of that feeling of shame when I'm having a low day.

It's kind of both, right?

It's taking the steps to prevent those low days from being so, so, so low.

And it's taking the steps to build self compassion so that when I am having a day where I need more recovery, I'm not also having a script running through my brain about, you know, how I messed up and how I put myself in this position again and I should know better and all of those things that we could say to ourselves that make that, that low day feel even worse and I think harder to recover from.

I have gotten better at truly being able to rest, to know my patterns, to recognize when hyperfocus is a good thing and when it's starting to derail me a little bit.

And I've put a lot in place to help with that.

So the symptoms are there, but I look at them differently and I accommodate myself better now than I ever did before.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned rest and I know that many of us really struggle with rest and we've had this very stereotypical way of what rest should look like and that is lying on a bed and trying, trying to go to sleep.

And when we have got these brains that don't stop moving and going and we go from maybe from a very hyper focused, extreme stimulating place, we can't just then, right, go and lie down on a bed for 20 minutes and try and close your eyes and rest.

That just doesn't work for most of us.

Some people can, some people can literally just crash and fall asleep.

What does your rest look like?

And I guess maybe we can talk a little bit as to like, what can ADHD rest look like when we have been in that place of over productivity and overworking and over delivering?

Yeah, I think rest really does need to be redefined for us and I think it's different.

We might need different types of rest depending on where we're at.

We might need that physical rest in Our body, we might just be needing more sleep.

And that's really important to honor when we can.

But I also think we need mental rest.

Sometimes we need to disengage from work, from the pressures of life.

Sometimes I think we need more active rest.

Like we need to be out in nature, walking or hiking or something like that.

That's my favorite way to unwind on a weekend is doing something that's active in nature.

That's when I feel like my mind actually calms down.

And then we also need, you know, some of our rest time needs to be dedicated to learning and growth, especially if our job does not provide that for us.

So if we have a day to day that feels a little bit more mundane, that our job is kind of the same every day and you know, it's, it's bringing home a paycheck, it's providing for us, but it's not really lighting our brain up.

Then some of our rest should be learning something that's interesting to us to kind of give us that dopamine, to have the motivation to do the rest of the things.

So we really do have to get to know ourselves and know what we find.

Re energizing versus just defaulting to that narrow view of rest.

Yeah, I love that.

I like to be able to give these suggestions because we, when people, you know, if they're just saying, well, I've been told that rest is, you have to lie down and you shouldn't be moving and you should have your eyes closed and rest, you know, is, is sleeping.

But I agree with you.

I'm the same.

If someone said that to me, I would make me more anxious and I probably would not be any more rested than I would be if I was running around the house.

But if I go for a walk with my dog and I get outside, I can breathe, get rid of all the computer and the tech and everything, I, I feel much more re.

Energized and rested as well.

And emotionally I'm calmer, my body's calmer, like everything is calmer.

And we don't, we're not told this and I think it's really important that when we're neurodivergent, we can reframe these very sort of neurotypical ways that we've been told to do life.

So if we are wanting to, like you say, to learn and to grow, many of us find that learning with ADHD is like, it feeds our curiosity, it feeds our creativity.

But someone else would say, oh my God, the thought of, you know, sitting and reading books and doing a course is just totally the opposite.

But I agree, like, if I can learn something different, that is not my day job.

I feel more fulfilled and I feel content.

And it probably feeds into my emotional well being.

It is trusting ourselves, isn't it?

It's trusting that even though we've been told one way to do life and to show up and that's what life should look like, it's okay for us to challenge and it's okay for us to query and to lean into what works for us.

And I think many of us have gone through life kind of intuitively knowing what is good for us, what does work for us, but society and our conditioning and old beliefs and all of that have kind of like dampened it out.

And that in itself is exhausting, isn't it?

Because not trust yourself this whole time to constantly be like, well, I feel this, but then someone's telling me that, and then we don't have this.

We, we don't know.

We don't know what's right, we don't know what's wrong.

And that's what I love about these late in life diagnoses, because it's this validation of actually, maybe I did know better, maybe I did.

If I had listened to myself, if I hadn't, you know, gone down the route of whatever that was, like say university or college or the degree, and I actually did the thing that I really wanted to do, maybe, you know, life would have turned out differently, whatever that might be.

We can't change the past, but we can start putting things in place now for the present and for the future, where we can lean more into what feels good to us and hopefully change the path and the, and the journey for others behind us.

Yeah.

Are you finding that a lot with, I guess the people that you're working with, the people who were being diagnosed later on in life who are just getting these understandings.

Yeah.

I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're experiencing in your community.

Yeah, absolutely.

I feel like that self trust that you spoke about is so, so, so critical.

Oftentimes I think people realize they have ADHD and they're looking for the life hacks, right?

They, they want to hear what are these little tiny changes and I love that life hacks, I mean, visual timers like those changed my life.

They, they can be really, really helpful for us.

But when I'm working with clients, I really do stress that getting to know yourself, understanding your brain and then allowing yourself to do the things you know, are right for you to operate differently and building the confidence and the trust that you can do things differently.

Because self trust is actually the number one thing.

I think people that are diagnosed later in life, or maybe they weren't given a lot of psychoeducation about ADHD when they were diagnosed, rebuilding the self trust is really, really important because we've been reading all the things, most of us have been trying very, very hard to figure out how to exist as a neurotypical person our whole lives.

We are usually people that have consumed a ton of self help.

We, we've tried a lot of things.

It's not for lack of trying.

So it's easy to see how our confidence gets eroded over time and we have to rebuild that and be able to start there before any of those hacks are going to help us.

And it's really, really important to, to spend the time on that piece if you want those lifelong changes, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think that's so crucial for people to know because I agree with you.

Those, those hacks are great.

You know, these little tips, those, those reframes, you know, there's certain things that just make life easier.

But unless we are coming from like deeply, intrinsically within us where we can say, actually I don't want to do life like that anymore, like that's not working for me.

And you can look back and there's evidence there of burnout, health issues, gut issues, autoimmune problems, mental health conditions that potentially yes, we all, we do know now that ADHD is the root of many really debilitating, you know, health crises.

But I wonder if we are able to remove that shame and the self criticism and we can start replacing that with more of the self forgiveness and the self compassion that when we make life easier for us and we remove that judgment, so many things start falling into place a little bit more, you know, especially if maybe we.

Let's talk about careers.

If we've struggled in our career, we've struggled to find a place that we feel fulfilled or we feel that we're kind of like hitting our purpose or our potential or whatever that is.

I would say potential.

And then we get the ADHD diagnosis and we can say, actually this is why working in an office environment hasn't worked for me.

This is why I come home and every night I have a migraine because of the artificial lighting or I can't get outside.

And when we make those changes and we lean into, actually I work much better on my own at home or I work better when I'm outside.

And then we see ourselves kind of almost blossom and bloom.

And I would say my biggest hope that with all this awareness and everything you do and I do is that we're getting diagnoses earlier on.

We're getting more people standing in like self empowerment and knowing how to advocate for themselves, ask for what they need.

No longer feeling that they can't ask for certain accommodations or they shouldn't work according to how their brain wants to work.

All these different things that we don't see this anymore.

We see people living up to their amazing potential.

If this episode has been helpful for you and you're looking for more tools and more guidance, my brand new book, the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit is out now.

You can find it wherever you buy your books from.

You can also check out the audiobook if you do prefer to listen to me.

I have narrated it all myself.

Thank you so much for being here and I will see you for the next episode.