Hacking Your ADHD

Hey Team!
We've all had those moments where we walk away from a conversation and immediately spiral into a "self-regulation hangover," wondering if we said too much or if we were just being "tolerated" rather than included. Feeling like maybe this whole friendship thing maybe just isn't for us.
This week, I'm talking with Caroline Maguire, a veteran social skills coach and the founder of the Social Excellence training program. She holds a Master's in Social Emotional Learning and is one of the few experts who approaches social skills as a "muscle" that can be built, rather than an innate talent you either have or you don't. Her first book, Why Will No One Play with Me?, became an instant staple for neurodivergent families helping children struggling with social skills to make friends. And with what she learned from that book she is now bringing to her upcoming book, Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults: A Guide for the Anxious, Uniquely Wired, and Easily Distracted.
In this episode, we're looking at the mechanics of friendship through a neurodivergent lens. We talk about the importance of proximity and "shared interest fuel" in bypassing the awkwardness of small talk. We also touch on the "rejection lens" and how our history of being bullied or marginalized can often color our current adult relationships. Caroline also walks me through some of her most practical frameworks, including the "Ice Cream Scoop" method for building trust and why having a "third place" is essential for creating low-pressure social friction.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/285
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
ADHD impulsivity often leads to "oversharing," which creates a "self-regulation hangover" of shame. The shift here is to view sharing as taking one "scoop" at a time, waiting for the other person to match your level of intimacy before offering more, which protects your trust and your energy.
Our brains naturally hang on to negative social stories like Velcro while letting positive ones slide off like Teflon. Recognizing this biological bias allows you to challenge the "rejection lens" and realize that a friend's lack of a text might be about their own hard time rather than a reflection of your worth.
Making friends isn't a 1-2-3 prescriptive step; it's about "social friction" and proximity. By prioritizing showing up at the same place consistently, you allow people to get used to you, which lowers the barrier for entry into community and future friendships.
Remember, deep friendship doesn't happen instantly and takes work. Don't be discouraged if you're first attempts don't work out, keep at it and build up those friendships over time.

Is it possible to take ADHD off "Hard Mode"?
We often hear that living with ADHD is like playing a video game where the difficulty slider is permanently stuck on "Hard." But while the challenges of executive dysfunction are very real, we sometimes make things even more difficult for ourselves by insisting on doing things the "right" (read: hardest) way.
In this classic monologue episode, William Curb explores the concept of Easy Mode. What would it look like if your morning routine felt effortless? What if your workspace didn't feel like a barrier to your productivity?
By utilizing the "Focusing Question" from Gary Keller's The One Thing, William breaks down how to find the lead domino that makes every other task easier—or completely unnecessary.
In this episode, we discuss:
The "Easy Mode" Vision: Defining what a low-friction life actually looks like (and why a perfect life might actually be a bit boring).

The Focusing Question: Learning to ask, "What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

The Domino Effect: Why focusing on small, strategic tasks creates the momentum needed to tackle the big ones.

Environment Design: Using the three parts of a task (Setup, Doing, and Cleanup) to reduce the cognitive load of starting.

Progress over Perfection: Shifting the goal from "fixing" your ADHD to simply sliding that difficulty scale down a few notches.

Mentioned in this episode:
The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

The "Walls of Awful" concept (shoutout to Brendan Mahan)

Checklists & Automation: Tools to make remembering "unnecessary."

"Sometimes life is hard because our ADHD is making it harder, and sometimes it's because we're choosing to do things in the hardest way possible."
Find the full show notes and transcript at: hackingyouradhd.com/191
Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/hackingyouradhd

Hey Team!
We often talk about the "internal" struggles of ADHD, the messy desks and the forgotten appointments, but we don't always talk about how the outside world reacts to those traits. I'm joined by Brooke Schnittman, an ADHD coach and the best-selling author of Activate Your ADHD Potential. Brooke has worked with thousands of individuals to help them develop sustainable systems for focus and emotional regulation, but today, she's here to talk about a global study she conducted on the link between ADHD and bullying.
So in today's episode, we're talking about how this study was conducted and what we can garner from that data. We also discuss the "invisible disability" penalty, where our symptoms are misinterpreted as character flaws, and how "masking" can actually prevent us from progressing because we're too busy being chameleons. And we also cover some practical ways to identify safe people and build a "reciprocal" support system that helps buffer against the impact of chronic criticism.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/283
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD
This Episode's Top Tips
When faced with a threat or bullying, the ADHD brain often experiences a physiological "freeze" where the parasympathetic nervous system takes over. It's important for us to understand that we're not always in control of this shift, and not to be self-critical about how we react in the moment and give ourselves grace to do better in the future.
To effectively manage a bullying situation, we have to understand the framework: repetition, power imbalance, and harm. Recognizing that a power imbalance can be "social status" or "neurotypical norms" rather than just a boss-employee hierarchy allows us to identify why a situation feels "off".
Many ADHDers stay in bullying situations because the executive function required to leave (interviewing, onboarding, starting over) feels more overwhelming than the bullying itself. Shifting the perspective to "body data"—how your nervous system feels around that person—can be a more reliable indicator than your internal pro/con list.
Since bullying often triggers a survival response that shuts down your executive functions, you can't rely on logic in the moment. To combat this, Brooke suggests focusing on nervous system regulation tools (like EMDR or grounding) to help your body feel safe again. You have to train your brain before the situation occurs so that "doing X when Y happens" becomes a more automatic habit.

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what it says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Improvement of Anxiety and ADHD following goal-focused cognitive remediation: a randomized controlled trial." This study investigates goal-focused interventions and looks at whether they can improve executive function and emotional well-being for adults with ADHD. There's not too much to the intro, so let's get into it.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/282
https://tinyurl.com/56rvt9fr - Unconventional Organisation Affiliate link
https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk - YouTube
https://www.patreon.com/HackingYourADHD - Patreon

If you only listen to one episode this year to ground your understanding of ADHD, make it this one. We are dipping back into the archives to bring you a masterclass from Dr. Stephen Faraone, a world-renowned expert ranked in the top 0.01% of scientists globally.
In a world of 60-second TikTok "diagnoses" and viral misinformation, Dr. Faraone joins William to discuss the ADHD Evidence Project. They strip away the noise to look at what 208 internationally supported research statements actually tell us about the ADHD brain.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/202
What's Inside This Encore:
The "Pyramid of Evidence": Why a charismatic story on social media isn't the same as a peer-reviewed meta-analysis.

Debunking the "Modern Invention" Myth: Did you know ADHD was described in medical texts as far back as the 1700s?

The Truth About Environment: From "Screen Time" to "Bad Parenting" and what actually causes ADHD (and what definitely doesn't).

The Medication Gap: A look at the real-world costs of not treating ADHD, including the staggering statistics within prison populations.

The "Default Mode Network": A fascinating look at why the ADHD brain struggles to flip the switch between daydreaming and "Executive Mode."

Why We're Re-Sharing This: This episode serves as a vital "BS detector" for anyone navigating ADHD. Dr. Faraone reminds us that while ADHD is a significant part of our lives, it doesn't define our entire identity: it's just the operating system we're working with.