If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by advice to “hack your dopamine,” or wondered why traditional approaches feel incomplete, this interview with Dr. Miguel Toribio-Mateas, “The Creative Scientist,” delivers refreshing insights and compassionate tools for thriving as a neurodivergent human. 

ADHDers often spend years trying to “fix” themselves from the outside in—through medication, planners, routines, and hacks—only to discover that true thriving might come from learning to listen to and trust their bodies. 

Dr Miguel introduces the concept of embodied neuroscience and explains why ADHD is far more than a brain-based disorder, unraveling the complex interplay between our nervous system, gut health, hormones, and emotional regulation.

Get ready to rethink what it means to support ADHD—from the inside out.

Episode Highlights:

• It’s Not Just Dopamine: Sure, dopamine’s part of the story. But Dr Miguel reminds us it’s just one instrument in a much bigger orchestra of brain and body chemistry. ADHD isn’t just a “brain disorder”—it’s an embodied experience, affected by everything from our gut health to our hormones and daily rhythms.
• Stop Trying to “Hack” Yourself: Instead of endless hacks, planners, and productivity tools, what if we tuned into our internal signals? Think: listening to hunger cues, taking movement breaks, honoring our need for rest—a holistic approach that begins on the inside.
• Self-Trust Is Everything: If you’ve ever struggled to trust your thoughts, feelings, or impulses, you’re not alone. The conversation offered hope: as we learn to regulate (and accept!) our unique internal ecosystem, intuition and awareness can flourish.
• Bringing it Back Home: Instead of survival mode, Dr. Miguel encourages us to “come back home” to ourselves—filling our cups with connection, nourishment, movement, and acceptance, rather than burning out on outside fixes. There’s no quick hack for radical self-acceptance, but embracing all facets of our ADHD is a powerful start.
• ADHD as an Advantage: Messy, complex, and beautifully curious—these traits can be assets in business and life. Don’t let anyone oversimplify you! 

Meet Our Guest 

Dr Miguel Toribio-Mateas is a clinical neuroscientist, applied microbiologist, and nutritionist whose work bridges brain, body, and lived experience. For over 2 decades, he has explored how the gut, nervous system, and microbiome shape mood, focus, and emotional balance. Miguel is an Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology and lectures in nutrition at the University of West London. His forthcoming book, “ADHD Body and Mind” (Jessica Kingsley Publishers) will be published in 2026. 

 Website - LinkedIn - Instagram - Substack - Thrive With ADHD Course 

Make it Practical: 

Practice Tuning Into Your Body: Notice and respond to basic bodily needs (hunger, thirst, bio breaks, rest, or movement) instead of ignoring or suppressing them during hyperfocus or stress; and pay attention to signals of over- or understimulation 

Shift from External Fixes to Internal Awareness: Take time to notice what your body and emotions are asking for and explore activities that help you feel grounded and present (e.g., walks in nature, nourishment, movement, or connection).

Work on Rebuilding Self-Trust: Reflect on ways to start trusting your instincts, signals, emotions, and intuition around food, rest, motivation, and needs—especially if you have a history of doubting yourself due to ADHD-related experiences.

Let Go of Perfectionism and Pathologizing: Recognize that ADHD is messy, complex, and unique to each person. Practice self-compassion and radical self-acceptance, instead of striving to“fix” yourself.

Integrate, Don’t Eliminate: You don’t have to choose between mainstream (medication, structure) and holistic (nutrition, mindfulness, nature) approaches. Blend what serves you best as you tune it to your unique needs.

Was this episode THE ONE that is prompting you to leave a 5-Star rating and review?  Do it!  Here’s the link for Apple or Spotify:  https://lovethepodcast.com/adhd-ish

© 2025 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops  / Outro music by Vladimir /  Bobi Music / All rights reserved. 

H: I have told people, you know, they really shouldn't call it an attention deficit disorder, they should call it a dopamine deficit disorder. But once I started following you online and learning from your body of work, that really misses the full picture. I mean, dopamine is a feel good chemical and it does make us want to persist at whatever we're doing. So it helps with curiosity, it helps with motivation, and it does need balance. But it's not just a feel good chemical, it's actually a regulator. Instead of trying to fix our dopamine or hack our dopamine or increase our dopamine, we should be listening to it and responding to it in a variety of ways, which might include rest, rhythm, and nourishment.

G: That's absolutely right and one of the key things that dopamine actually does is involving wakefulness. So it wakes us up, which in a way makes sense because if you are on stimulant medication and that makes the body make more dopamine, or retain the dopamine that you're naturally producing for longer in the space between neurons, so it's there and actually doing more what it should be doing, you're likely to feel more awake. And in fact, if your dose is not right, you're likely to experience sleep issues as well. Or if you take, you know, a top up dose too late in the day, you might feel like it's actually difficult to fall asleep at the right time.

So natural dopamine will wake you up in the morning as part of your natural rhythm, as part of your circadian rhythm, the rhythm of day and night. That makes cortisol, another molecule that people talk about a lot in the context of stress. Work with dopamine and norepinephrine or noradrenaline. And it's almost like we tend to talk about dopamine as if it was like a solo recital with just instrument and in fact, it's more like an orchestra. And the brain and the nervous system are the conductors or the maestros leading this orchestra.

And there's all of these molecules that each are playing a different well, they are playing the same music, but they are playing it in slightly different variations. So they all kind of merged together in beautiful synchrony when we are aligned with how we feel inside and what is surrounding us.

H: So how do you feel about this idea of like a dopamine menu, for example? Because that's something that I have recommended clients when they say I don't feel motivated. For example, something I teach my coaching clients is that mood, energy, and motivation all tend to track together. So whatever increases our mood or whatever increases our motivation or whatever increases our energy, they tend to pull these others up with it. So I've helped people figure out ways that they can predictably access dopamine. But it sounds like that's not really maybe good enough because dopamine is just one of the chemicals that's part of that cocktail, if you will. But there's more to it than just hacking your dopamine or increasing your dopamine, because dopamine rhythms are unpredictable, right?

G: They are unpredictable, and they are unpredictable in ADHD, particularly, because it could be that you wake up with a good amount of dopamine as a baseline, but it runs out really quickly and if you're medicated, that may be supported somehow but again, everybody reacts differently to medication. And there are different types of medication as well, even just the stimulant medications, where, whether you're on the more amphetamine base, which is going to be more of a double effect on helping you make more dopamine, but also retaining that dopamine. Or the methylphenidated kind of like Ritalin and so on, that it simply allows you to retain more of the dopamine that you're making as opposed to actually make you make more dopamine.

But rather than actually making it more complicated in terms of like bringing in more names. I think what you're saying is a beautiful way to help people get in touch with ways that they can regulate those aspects. Mood, emotion, motivation, which are really important. But I feel that there may be a little bit kind of external, so you're giving them the menu and kind of like asking them to look out for things that may be outside of them. Whereas what I feel my angle differs from that in the sense that I'm asking people more to see or try to ascertain how they feel inside. So try to get in touch with that, that body feeling. And it may be that the impulsivity is your body actually telling you that you need to burn some of the energy. So you're not missing energy, you're actually having almost like too much energy.

That means that you could do with actually taking an exercise snack in the middle of the day. And it doesn't mean a full blown workout or you know, an expensive gym. It could be that it's literally just if you have a dog, a 20 minute walk with your dog in the middle of the day. Or it could be that if you have a place where you can swim easily, you know, a 10 minute swim. Or it could be just a jog up the road and back or if you're just walking. Walking is wonderful because it takes the ADHD mind in different, kind of into different spaces.

And it helps parts of the brain, like the default mode network for example, which is the kind of daydreaming part of the brain and some other areas of the brain, like the precuneus as well. Again, like daydreaming machines within the brain, it allows you to look at things and think kind of a wow, this is beautiful and disconnect from your thoughts a little bit. Not in a disassociating kind of way, but in a way that you're enriching your thoughts by looking at what may be around. And if you're in nature, that actually enhances even more the effect. Because by just being out in nature, you bring in down stress and regulating your blood pressure and regulating your gut health as well. There's loads of emerging science around that.

So for me, rather than actually trying to fix the dopamine, it's more about noticing what might be going on inside and whether you feel that you are overstimulated and where that overstimulation might be coming from. And rather than actually trying to fix a problem that is quite kind of a like the single angle around dopamine. How can you look at it more from a take into account what's going on inside and take into account what might be going on around you as well and bring some rhythm into that. And we're probably going to talk about food as well and nutrition soon so yeah, I think that is in a way how I feel my angle is slightly, slightly different.

H: No, I absolutely agree and it was one of the reasons why I was so excited and eager to have this conversation with you because I think historically we think about ADHD as a brain based problem, a disorder, a deficiency, and yet anyone who actually has ADHD or is ADHD, depending on how they identify with it, will be able to easily say, well, there are some things about it I really like and enjoy. The creativity is one that's often mentioned and then there are things I don't like so much. Your approach, Dr. Miguel, is really instead of a outside in looking to things outside of us and how can we fix ourselves or optimum performance or overcome our challenges or deficits or limitations. You are really helping people understand that there is a way to support their ADHD from the inside out, rather from the outside in.

That these are not just like hacks or lifestyle fixes or tools or even treatments, but neurobiological levers that we can use to recalibrate our internal ecosystem. It's the term that you use in a lot of the work that I've seen online is embodied neuroscience. So you're bringing together neuroscience, nutrition, the healing arts, but in a very practical, holistic way. And I think what I love most about it is that so many people with ADHD just don't trust themselves. They don't trust their thoughts, they don't trust their emotions, they don't trust their impulses. And I think when we are in a more regulated state, we can be extremely intuitive and extremely aware of both our internal and our external world. And I think when we are not tuned into those things, we are most symptomatic.

G: I agree completely and just as I was saying about dopamine being a single instrument and the whole of ADHD being more like an orchestra, we have a whole kind of mind, body system experience going on at any given time as a human person anyway, as a human being, but in ADHD even more so because those fluctuations in dopamine and in other brain chemicals and nervous system chemicals make us sometimes a little bit more sensitive to what might be going on in our environment. And that might mean rejection, but it's not the only thing that happens again, another thing that we tend to talk a lot is RSD and, you know, rejection sensitivity dysphoria. And it comes to a point that sometimes you scrolling through your feed on social media, follow, you know, looking at what people who you follow are talking about ADHD and it's all RSDRC, RSD.

And I'm thinking, well, there's a lot more than that, there's a lot more than just rejection this. And it makes sense that there's a lot more than that because there's a lot more than just the brain, this nervous system with different branches in the nervous system, covering the gut and covering your sexual organs. And again, some people talk about hypersexuality, maybe some people are hypersexual because they are two in their minds, and then they don't feel their libido so there's all of that going on. But there is, there are hormones at play so females, hugely complex rhythms of hormones according to what phase of your cycle you might be in, and whether you are premenopausal or going through the menopause or post menopausal, all of which have their own challenges as well.

So, you know different hormones going up and down compared biological males, a lot more binary in a way. You know, yes, and no response to things because the hormones that we have are compared to the biological a woman or, you know, much more reduced in complexity and levels. But there is such a thing as the connection between the gut and the brain as well, which is something that I've been exploring for the last few years. And the mental health aspect of ADHD as well, which a lot of it is determined by the integrity of the gut and the integrity of the nervous system that in a way cables the gut, that innervates the gut and connects what's going on in the gut, which is again, another really complex ecosystem with what might be going on in the brain. So those are just a few of the points of this kind of like, system of.

It's almost like a network of systems that are interconnected and are all affecting our ADHD experience. And we do have some tools that go beyond a productivity app or an ADHD program that you can sign on, you know, you can sign up and, you know, and do it for a month and use it again like a hack or like a biohack. Biohacking is really trendy at the moment. People talk about supplements I'm doing the X, Y and Z diet for my ADHD and my symptoms have, you know, really improved. Is that something that you want to be doing for the rest of your life? As somebody who's lived with funky eating and behaviors around food and eating that are quite typical for an ADHD-er and a neurodivergent person. There's loads of disordered eating kind of behaviors around ADHD, autism or ADD, you know, whichever flavor of neurodivergence you might have. Working on trying to tap into what might be going on inside and trusting those signals that you were talking about, the self trust and the lack of self trust that we have.

And again, it might be because we've been denied opportunities from early age, we've been rejected, we feel that we're not good enough. We feel simply, sometimes it's not so much rejection but like that we don't really fit in. So then we kind of like build all these coping mechanisms to, to try and prove that we fit in. But then we never feel part of the group. So sometimes for us it does take a while to actually tune into those signals and just trust simple things like when are we really hungry as opposed to bored or just dealing with emotion that might be difficult to deal with, or stress or anxiety, but still we're going to eat something that then makes us feel shameful later because we were not hungry in the first place.

A hunger cue, a hunger signal is just a very typical example of something that can have a really powerful effect on the whole of your system, including your gut, your brain, your mental well being, your mood. You know, it affects the whole experience of your mind, body, ADHD and you might mistrust it or you might misinterpret it on the basis that you don't trust it, you don't really know what your body is telling you. And it takes a while for you to start talking the same language as your body's actually talking to you. And this is not mambo jumbo, it's not wooo, it’s not you know, Dr. Miguel is talking about all this kind of like woo woo science. It's interoception. You know, there's a lot of science on interoception.

The body sending complex signals throughout the nervous system to your brain. Your brain is making sense of them and you know, and just knowing something silly as well, like I could be sat in front of my computer and really need a P or a number two. But I'm thinking, oh, that's just so boring compared to what I'm doing now, which is so fascinating. And I'm so hyper focused on my document right now and I really need to send it and I've got two minutes before another meeting and I'm going to do that and then I'm gonna go on my next meeting and I'm thinking, oh my God, I really need to go to the toilet.

But I'm holding it because and I'm thinking how ridiculous is it that my body's telling me like with urgency that I need something as basic as, you know, I need to go to the bathroom. But I'm just choosing to ignore that signal, which is quite overwhelming on the basis that it's not even mistrust, it's just my ADHD taking over and the hyper focus taking over. So it's just sometimes we just need to retrain the brain at that kind of like basic level. Are you happy to go to the bathroom when your body is telling you that you need to go to the bathroom? Because that is a very basic signal and sometimes it's more about intuition and trusting people.

But that's like a sixth sense compared to simply eating when you need to eat, sleeping when you need to sleep, moving when you need to move as well. Because sometimes we were talking about fidgeting. I'm doing this with my, you know, with my crystal ball. I'm fidgeting, I'm stimming and it's not something I'm ashamed of. I realize my body needs to move. I mean, I'm moving my knees or moving my fingers or tapping. I'm trying not to do things that make a noise right now, but my body tells me it needs movement and that's a way to regulate.

And I think if we understand what the body is telling us and instead of actually doing it with shame, we do it in a way that we respect it and we integrate that with kindness and accept it as part of what the lived experience of ADHD is and science is just catching up with that. It's just, you know, probably in the next 10 years we'll see a lot of this coming through in science. But at the moment it's very kind of, it's not as holistic as, as it should be. So I'm talking about things that probably will be emerging and coming up in science in coming years.

H: Well, you are definitely at the forefront of this because for a lot of people, the understanding that ADHD is not just in your head, that it's literally an embodied experience. And believe it or not, everybody wants to find the right medication, everyone wants to find the right planner, everyone wants to find the right project management system. What morning routine should I use? And these are not wrong and they're not bad and they are helpful up to a point. But your call to action for all of us, Miguel, is to not look out exclusively, but to also look into, turn in. And when you think about the average person with ADHD, the average adult, if you are born male, you're more likely to find out when you're young that you have ADHD.

If you're born female, you're probably more likely to find out well into your life. And by that time you have had decades upon decades of feeling different, of being told you're different, of being told you're not thinking, feeling, perceiving, acting, behaving, desiring the way you should be. And so all of the self talk around how we need to change how we are really needs to, in a way, be released, unpacked, and let go of so that we can reorient ourselves to. I think biofeedback is the term I use for really paying attention to our basic biological rhythms that we seem to forget. I love that you brought up how common it is for people with ADHD to be hyper focusing on something that they're doing and they realize they need to go, they need to go to the bathroom or they're really super thirsty or hungry or what, need a nap, whatever.

G: Exactly.

H: We just blow past those things and it's really part of what we need to return to is this, you know, trusting ourselves, paying attention to ourselves, listening to ourselves, believing ourselves, because we were, we are culturally conditioned, starting in family life and in public education and in the business world, that we're not doing things the right way. So if you really take that to its most logical, fundamental conclusion, you don't know how to do life, you don't know how to be a human being, you're not doing it right. And yet our nervous system, our operating system if you will, is more sensitive, more finely tuned, and in many cases more aware of what's going on in and around us than a neurotypical person. But we have to find our way back to paying attention to that and believing it and honoring it and respecting it and trusting it. And that may be a process, I think, over time right.

G: It's absolutely a process and I love the fact that you mentioned going back because what I feel is that people especially I'm talking from my own experience as well in terms of being diagnosed at 47 and then going on these kind of oh, how do I tackle my ADHD? Kind of, how do I fix myself, so you basically go outside and you go into a journey that can actually be quite stressful because you think now I need to be part of an ADHD community. Sometimes the ADHD community can be wonderful. Sometimes it can feel, you know, for somebody who's not found safety inside their own body and their own mind for a long time to then try and find safety as part of another community. Even if it's a like minded individuals, it can be tricky and it can feel weird to just try and find that safety outside.

So it could be that you go into again things that we've talked about already about. It could be that you go into supplements, you go, oh, I don't want to take medication, I'm going to go into like taking 20 different supplements, I'm going to go into different diets, I'm going to go all in for exercise. But because I'm going to focus on that, I'm going to burn out three months later and I'm not going to do exercise again for a year because I did too much and I injured myself. You know, all of these things that happen. And I find that rather than actually going on a journey, you need to come back home to you and find yourself back, find that safety in your own body. And again, sometimes you need to fail to recognize that what you need to do is to turn back and actually look inward at the same time you are looking out.

So it's not just an introspection journey where you just like navel gazing and nothing else, which can be a dangerous thing as well. You don't want to completely just ignore what's going on outside. But it's that mix between being aware of things that could potentially help you from the outside, but also knowing that you need to reestablish that self trust in your body when it comes to food, I think that's massive anyway. So that kind of like interface between the gut, the body, brain, based on food first, and of course some supplements if you want to take them, but also making decisions around your medication, whether medication is for you or not, they're all decisions that you need to make from a point of, you know, from a vantage point of safety. Because if you make those decisions from a place where you don't really know what you're doing it's just going to be tricky to carry them into the future.

So yeah, and then what happens is that you can actually go into a massive stress journey as well. Kind of trying to survive the journey as opposed to thrive through the journey. So you're going more into this survival mode that people go into and there's the burnout that comes with that because you're trying so many things and spreading yourself so thin that you get a sense that you're doing a lot. But what you're doing is actually you're not filling your cup in a way. You're actually depleting your energy even more and then you end up more tired than you started and it can be frustrating.

So I think a lot of this is about going away from this kind of like survival mode, stress mode that takes you out of your body and into trying to find solutions outside of your yourself. To trying to see, how am I feeling today? What do I need today? From the basics, like actually, do I need to go to the bathroom or not. That's like 101 to what are my emotional needs? What do I need? Do I have a partner? Do I need a cuddle? Do I need a kiss? Do I need sex? Do I need to talk to my mom and dad ecause maybe I haven't talked to them in a while. Is family important? Are friends important? Have I neglected my friends for a long time because I've been hyper focusing on other things?

All of those things are so important and they are part of this safety that we building around our body and the connection between the body and the mind that I feel you know, we don't talk about. We don't talk about them as much as we talk about or planning your wake or, you know, hacking days or hacking your dopamine. Again, maybe less sexy because a hack sounds like really sexy and something like really shareable on Instagram, whereas the real work is never sexy because, you know, that's where you need to spend months or years actually, just trying to fine tune what your body and your active mind actually need.

H: It's so true, and I'm so grateful that you're saying so many of these important things because it's true. The typical thing that I see is people find out well into their adult life. Oh, wow, son of a gun, I have ADHD well, I always knew I was different. And we've gone over the years through all of our attributional theories. Oh, it's because of my childhood trauma, oh, it's because my parents didn't really love me. Oh, because, you know, whatever, whatever. All the different things. I didn't get on the right path, I didn't go to the right school, I didn't make the right friends. I didn't have confidence. We go through all of our theories and finding out at some point in life, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond, that we are actually built differently. And after the initial shock and disbelief, a lot of people feel a sense of relief and then grief and then they want, I almost think of it as like the stages of grief and loss model.

First shock and disbelief, then they want to start bargaining, then they want it. But after they realize, okay, now, boy, it would have been nice to know this sooner. But now that I know I'm really not just lazy, crazy, stupid, broken, weird, whatever, there's actually something different about me now. I'm going to learn everything there is to learn about ADHD and now I'm going to fix this shit once and for all. And because I'm finding out so late in the game, I have got to do it in record time. I guarantee you and you already know this, every single one of them is going to burn out on trying to figure out and fix their ADHD. So if we are listening to this conversation, and that's exactly where we are, this is, well, time to say, actually, it's both easier and harder.

What Dr. Miguel and I are talking about is reorienting your relationship to yourself, to your ADHD, to your unique, different, beautiful, confusing, frustrating and brilliant way of experiencing this human life. It is both harder and easier than we're making it. It's harder because radical self acceptance is such a bold and audacious decision to make and no one can make it for you. You have to make it for yourself. But once you do, and you come from the place of. Actually, instead of trying to figure out how to fix myself or find someone that can fix me, or what supplements or meds or whatever I need to do to figure this out, if I can decide, I'm gonna not waste one more moment of this precious human life, short as it is, hating myself, shaming myself, blaming myself, hiding myself, masking, I'm going to accept who I am and how I am, and then I'm going to listen. I'm going to listen to this body, I'm going to listen to this gut.

I'm going to learn how to trust it. And it's probably going to tell me I’m enough, and I should be doing less, not more. Everybody's struggling with capacity now. I know this doesn't surprise you. Five years ago, everybody was talking about scaling their business. Now they're talking about sustaining it. They're talking about their bandwidth. They're talking about wanting to work with their capacity and not get burned out. They're not talking so much about how do I grow this bigger and faster. They're talking about how do I stay in business, not get bored, not want to burn it down and be still doing this five years from now. Going from that thriving or striving to actually thriving in our own bodies. I think it's both harder and easier.

G: When I was first diagnosed, I went on medication straight away. My doctors were so worried about my appetite and my weight, and they were asking me all the time, are you hungry? Are you eating enough? Are you losing weight? Actually put on, like, you know, I don't know in pounds, but, you know, I put on like, about 20 kilos. It's like what's that…

H: That’s quite a bit.

G: Yeah, yeah. Because there was so much that I hadn't tapped into, and I think the diagnosis and it was the context as well. It was Covid, you know, a lot more introspection because of the lockdowns and everything else and then my childhood trauma came into play. And I know that you mentioned trauma and all of a sudden decades of thinking, I'm fine. I know I had trauma when I was a child, but it never affected me to get to, like, my late 40s and not stop thinking about it. And I went through the phase of, like, oh, I'm just going to tap into my spiritual self and I'm going to go into, like spiritual retreats and do, like do psychedelic therapy and all of this kind of, like, stuff, because I'm going to cure my ADHD naturally.

So I went into that kind of like, thing as well and I'm not gonna need medication because that medication actually has made me put on weight. It's not regulated my emotions, but obviously there was so much crap under the surface that I wasn't tapping into properly because I just thought is the odd drugs just going to like, take everything away that, you know, I'm just going to take like magical tablet in the morning and I'm going to be sorted completely. I'm going to be fixed, you know, everything for 12 hours a day. My lif is wonderful.

H: It is an appealing, you know.

G: Yeah, I mean, I did have fewer overlapping thoughts, but the drugs were not sorted my whole life. And you know, so I stopped my drugs, my ADHD drugs, and I went on to this kind of like, you know, natural, you know, golden goose change. And, and I came back full circle, like years later thinking, and this is what I'd like to tap into. It's not one or the other, you don't have to choose black or white. You don't have to choose mainstream versus holistic. You don't need to choose. You need to choose you and if it makes sense to actually get the teachings from the experiences that I had where I actually tackled my trauma and I got peace from that and it was very healing. They were very nourishing, but they didn't fix my ADHD.

They maybe gave me an illusion that, you know, I was less hyperactive maybe because I was more in my body because I didn't have this kind of a overwhelm that was driven by the trauma and the trauma had been tackled somehow. So I had a layer less to worry about and by no means, it's all gone. But, you know, I did do some deep work that allowed me to tackle some of that. So it may be that's helped me, but that wasn't going to cure my ADHD. You know, microdosing wasn't going to like cure my ADHD. You know, same as the meds are not going to cure my ADHD. My ADHD is there and it will be for the rest of my life. But just integrating all of these practices, whatever they might be, maybe like a hot bath, because you need that safety and you need the warmth and you need the kindness that you deserve.

It may be a nice nourishing meal, it may be time with friends and time in community. Play an instrument, have nourishing bonding sex with your partner, have a lovely walk with your dog have a cuddle with your cat or with your hamster, you know, with your chinchilla or whatever, like, be in nature, listening to the birds, all of those things. You don't need to choose one or the other. And I think we live in this society that makes it all so trivialized and simplified. It's almost like everything needs to be. Everything can needs to fit in an Instagram carousel. And if it doesn't, it's like too much to cope with. And we are messy people we cannot simplify ourselves. You know, tell an ADHD to make things simple. It's impossible, we are not simple people. We are complex. We are beautiful, complex beings with loads of interest that might be overwhelming for somebody else. We have emotions that can be overwhelming for other people as well. We feel a lot, we love a lot. We are a lot and that's fine. So we can absorb all of that lockedness and make it our own and make that messiness.

We need to own it, basically. We need to own that messiness that we've been told too many times, oh, you're too messy, you're too late, you're too much. You do this too many times, you're too loud, you, fine, absorb it. Make it your own and make it work for you. And it can take a thousand, a million different shapes. It could be like, you know, like, there's never a perfect diamond. It's got so many facets and we are like diamonds. We shine light in to our own life and to other people's lives in ways that are unexpected and that's beautiful. And I think, you know, we need to allow for more of that as part of this kind of grounding process to come back to ourselves, I believe.

H: It's such a beautiful message of self acceptance and just hearing, you know, your own journey coming to this diagnosis late in your 40s and thinking, oh, well, I'm gonna fix this, and I'm gonna try this and I'm gonna try that. I almost wonder, Miguel, if it isn't necessary because we're so curious, because we're driven, because we like solving problems. We like complex things that we almost have to go through these various evolutions of our own relationship with what it means to be ADHD, what it means to have ADHD and eventually reach the conclusion is, well, I've tried all these different ways to not be who and how I am.

Maybe at the end of the day, I could just learn to live with myself a little better. Maybe at the end of the day I could learn what you call self compassion in action. Maybe we have to go through all of these ill fated attempts to change or fix or correct or cure or heal what isn't actually broken or sick or wrong. It just needs a little bit different approach. Not so much outside in, but more inside out. More love and less management, more acceptance and less structure. Yes, we know not as much as we think we do.

G: Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And I think we pathologize a lot of the traits, you know, and again, I was just saying before, just as an example, like rejection is real, but everybody faces rejection. And when we talk about rejection in ADHD because we feel so intensely, it can feel very intense. But it's not all about rejection, it's, it's a complex thing and, and if we make it into such a big deal, it almost feels like that is the whole pathology of ADHD is about negativity and rejection and intrusive thoughts and so on. And I don't deny anybody's lived experience because we all different and I do feel that as well. And sometimes I worry sick because I've sent an email and I think oh my God, like she's not responded immediately and like oh, she must hate me and I do get it.

But I also feel that in a way we can rewild our, not just our gut, which is something that I talk about by bringing in different nutrients and different colors and kind of eating a rainbow of different plants and so on that we can rewire our whole body and spirit in a way by bringing in all of this knowledge about ourselves, about our failures. And if you've gone onto a journey that meant that you've spent years trying to fix your diet for ADHD and you failed and you go full circle. And like I've been on so many of these like diet journeys for like you know, 30 plus years. And I'm with a bit of knowledge as well as a scientist can write, you know, extra curiosity. That's probably been a double edged sword, to be quite honest.

And then I feel now I'm kind of like thinking I just eat what I want in like quantities that make sense for me as opposed to just open the fridge and just binge completely until I feel sick. And that's been a journey for me to learn that that's how I should eat and that's been my journey of discovery. Everybody will have their own journeys of discoveries around relationships, rejection, food meds and I think we should integrate it all as part of this like, beautiful meadow where it's not always going to be completely colorful and like a rainbow of different colors. It could be that a part of the meadow is just regrowing because it's just had the cows lying on it and it's just been flattened.

So it's not as pretty as the rest of the meadow. It's still part of the meadow. It needs a little bit of a rain and the right environment for it to grow and be like wonderful again. And I think that we just need to accept that sometimes something goes really well in our lives, but something else could be a bit more crappy and it's all developing and it's always going to be developing. It's never going to be completely perfect. We cannot just hack everything.

G: Well, I think the same thing that can actually bring us down, which is our complexity can be a beautiful thing in business because if we embrace it and we embrace the fact that we can be messy sometimes, but we're so curious and we can be so talented for something that we had no idea about yesterday. But all of a sudden we hyper focus on it for a few days and we become experts in a record time that we astonish people who've been working in that area for, like, years, and suddenly, you know everything there is to know about it. You. You become obsessed with it. And so we have that ability to just grab something and go with it and get so excited about it and bring so much enthusiasm to a team that might be kind of a flagging or might be plateauing in terms of enthusiasm about a project.

And suddenly you come into the project and everybody's enthused because of the energy that you bring about it and the angles that you're making about. You know, you're connecting different things that people haven't thought about before and the way that you're expressing them, that may not be like the most scientifically sound or the most kind of technically sound ways, but they have their own value because nobody else has made those connections before. And people kind of like, grab that and they get enthused by that insight. So all of those, for all of those reasons, I think that embracing your hot messiness, embracing your complexity as opposed to being ashamed of it and not simplifying yourself.

You don't need to simplify yourself to fit into an Instagram photo with a little bit of text because it's never going to be enough for an ADHD. So, you know, be happy to be a whole carousel of 20 images on Instagram. If you had to define yourself in 20, 20 bits of text with like 500 characters each, that's, you know, and people might think, oh, my God, that's overwhelming. But, you know, fine, let them think, whatever, you're never going to please everybody, but at least be happy in yourself that you can bring that to an organization and enthused a business to thrive. So I think that's wonderful.

H: I love that. In true ADHD fashion, I asked for one thing and you gave me 10. Thank you so much. And until we have you back again, continue to be your delightful self and the light that you shine in the world that reflects so beautifully on so many of us. Thank you, Miguel.

G: Thank you so much. Diann. It's wonderful to be here with you. All the best.