 Hi, there's an important message that I'd like to share and it's really my belief actually that mental health diagnoses do not begin to explain the impact it has on someone's quality of life. So let's take ADHD as an example. ADHD is a neurologic psychiatric disorder that is characterized by hyperactivity and or inattentiveness that significantly impacts someone's quality of life. It's a mouthful, right? Like, what does that actually mean? How does that actually manifest in someone's academic? Their social, their work life, and so on. So that's essentially today's aim, to talk about ADHD and to really understand what ADHD might actually feel like for someone who experiences it. I'm Monica and I'm today's host for the Ask an Advocate series. I am so lucky to be joined by Jess who is a full-time content creator and mental health advocate. I'm going to introduce you all to her now. Hello, Jess. Hi, how's it going, Monica? Hello, everyone. Great. Thank you so much for being here. It feels like such a big honor. I have always been such a big fan of the Psych2Go channel and to be here is just a dream come true. So thank you for having me. Of course, and thank you so much for agreeing to share your story. Can I just ask you if possible? Like, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself and to introduce yourself to the Psych2Go community? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Hello, everyone. I'm Jess. I also go by BB Blue online. I'm a ex-flight attendant turned full-time content creator. It all started when I was laid off from my flight attendant job of full career of over five years during the pandemic. At the same time, this was also the mark and the end of my two-year-long distance relationship. This definitely stunted what I felt was progress in my life. I was a lot. I was really lost as to whether I wanted to go back to school or to take a trade. I ended up taking the opportunity to try live streaming on Twitch with the help of my friend to set up my discord and also my just on my overlays on Twitch itself. COVID left me with a lot of time to think during this period. I recognize that I had a lot of unhealthy relationship patterns. From this, I decided to attend therapy weekly and document what I call now my happiness journey on stream for the world to see. Little did I know I opened up Pandora's box and it was faced with a lot of my very trauma. I've learned a lot about myself and it was also when I was officially diagnosed. I hope to use my platforms to advocate for mental health and hope that it will allow people to feel less alone and possibly have the courage to reach out for help. I'm excited to share my personal experience with ADHD and HSP, also known as highly sensitive person. Thank you so much for opening up. I know it's not easy and to really have the courage to share your whole journey like breakups are not easy. COVID was difficult for so many of us. So to really document that takes a lot of courage and we need more people like you. So thank you so much. No, thank you. I'm glad I'm able to share this with you guys. Love to hear about more about your experiences with ADHD and what that might have been like for starting a new career as a content creator and navigating challenges. So in ADHD fashion, I was very hyper fixated in trying something new, anything to get my mind off of my long term relationship and the end of my career. I was really at a loss. So I've come to realize that ADHD really affects my attention span organization and pulse impossibility every single day. I have a general routine that I built for myself. However, I still struggle with consistency, especially in the form of cognitive function and time management, just doing things that I have planned for my day. There are a lot of self reflection and obtaining more knowledge to therapy and research. I've learned how to better cope and most importantly to be less critical of myself. That's great. And you did mention earlier on I picked up on what you mentioned a highly sensitive person. Do you mind elaborating what that experience is like for you? So essentially being a highly sensitive person is a personality disorder and it amplifies my sensitivity to external and internal stimuli. From this, I've become hyper fixated and learning about what could be the cause. Applying this knowledge to my past has been both a relief and a source to my continuous confusion as I move forward in life. It really has helped validate my sensitivities when I was younger and dysregulated. I always thought I was or I've been told I was a cry baby as a kid and I never really understood that and was being quite critical of myself. On the other hand, it also makes me especially aware of other people's energies in the same room. It really sounds like you put a lot of introspection and thought into your whole journey. And I wonder whether there was kind of a moment when you realize that, oh, I might have symptoms of ADHD and I identify as being someone who is a highly sensitive person. Was it really a moment or was it sort of kind of over time? It was definitely a gradual process. It didn't happen overnight. I got into a lot of trouble, especially in school and at work for being forgetful and late. I would rationalize that it was a product of depression. This whole time I thought it was just depression that led me to have the symptoms that I did. I came across the symptoms of ADHD on the internet one day and it really resonated with me with some mixed emotions. As for being HSP, I noticed my sensitivities to sounds and smells in particular were oddly high. Was this something that you decided to pursue formal diagnosis for in terms of ADHD? I never came across a term of highly sensitive person until I read more about the literature around it. I think it's not formally clinical terms, so it's something really new to me and it's also a great learning point for both me and possibly the community. Oh, absolutely. I do believe it's fairly new. I also just learned about this diagnosis through my own therapist as well. It was really interesting and deep diving into it. A little bit more about HSP I wanted to add was that this included my emotional sensitivity. I thought I was maybe perhaps on the spectrum of being an over empathizer because my heart can't handle consuming too many triggering topics such as death, abuse or violence. I really have to be mindful of my states of mind before engaging in these certain parts of life, especially with consuming media and the process of seeking diagnosis for ADHD and HSP. During the therapy session, I discussed my complicated childhood with the guidance of my therapist. Honestly, the best person ever that has made such a big difference in my life and I will always advocate for going to therapy. I asked her if my current symptoms may be rooted in ADHD. At that very moment, I was able to connect the dots and I had an epiphany that perhaps it was my untreated ADHD that influenced my depression. It's common that there's a lot of comorbidity, so overlapping conditions and that one could mask another or that one could really exacerbate another. Sometimes it's really hard to know what the root cause really is. I wonder if there was a process for you to really find out or for you and your therapist together to find out that it was really ADHD at the core of it. After our first session, she had asked me if I wanted to do a test and just sit down and look at a PDF with her and go through all the questions. She carefully explains the meaning of every question and when she put up back all the scores, it was very present that I had ADHD. That's also when I learned that ADHD came in different forms. It wasn't always hyperactivity, which is what I thought was the definition of ADHD at the time. Yes, I think that's a really good point that you brought up because speaking about medical misinformation, something I'm very passionate about by the way, I always think that children who have the idea or anyone actually who has the idea of ADHD, they think of like Tigger and Winnie the Pooh, right? Someone who's always like jumping, so happy, full of energy. Yes, that is part or can be part of it, presenting as hyperactivity, right? But there's another form in attentiveness or mixed, right? So just like you mentioned, there's many different types and it's important that I think people know of it. So it's not always people can making that connection between, oh, someone who's going bonkers all the time equals ADHD, you know, as an example. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so that really turns my world upside down because what I thought I knew about ADHD is very, very different from the truth. Right, so in terms of kind of that process of learning about more about ADHD, were there any resources you found were particularly helpful in kind of psychoeducation, in terms of teaching yourself and in addition to teaching others who might be around you, caregivers and so on. Oh, yeah, so aside from learning more about myself and learning about CPT, which is cognitive behavior therapy techniques for my therapist. I also look to books, art programs and online resources. Two books that I would recommend are You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy and The Five Second Rule. The first book is really great in trying to teach you how a person with ADHD's brain works and to have a lot more compassion towards yourself. And the second book, The Five Second Rule by Mel Robbins is really amazing for helping you jumpstart better habits because I feel like personally for me, I struggle with a lot of cognitive function where I just can't get myself to get up and do what I need to do. And so she teaches us this meta-cognitive behavior where you count from five all the way to one backwards, kind of like a rocket blasting off. And it's just something so magical about it. And it really launches you to do what you need to do. Like for example, getting up on time instead of using this button multiple times. Yeah, and then a comic artist named Pina, I really enjoy. They created a visual representation of how it feels to essentially be a ADHD alien. Oftentimes if my friends or my peers don't understand what I'm going through, I find that linking them to a small little comic book image helps them visualize and understand a little bit better where I'm coming from. Recently, I subscribed to an online workshop on this app called Inflow created by a doctor who has ADHD themselves. It provided courses of all sorts of topics and it's very, very ADHD friendly in that it assigns you a coach to keep you accountable. And it not only provides text courses, but also an audio portion and you can control the playback speed. I don't know about you, but on YouTube I watch majority of my videos at like 1.5 or 1.75 playback speed. Oh, absolutely. Ever since kind of realizing the power of two times feeding everything, I've only just watched things on two times feed like lecture videos. Now I can watch things two times as fast and get two times amount of information at the same time. So yeah, definitely with that. And another thing I wanted to say is that I love how material these days in terms of like psychoeducation comes in so many different forms. So you mentioned like comics. Love that. I still love comics. I still read Calvin Hobbes. I know it's a side tangent, but I love it. Love peanuts comics. Love how their comics related to mental health now. I really love how there's also things being created by people who experience ADHD themselves because it's really great to know that this is something created by someone who gets it, you know. Oh yeah, it feels so much more relatable in that sense where it's not just books, it's also YouTube or even Tik Tok and for example, some online research that I personally enjoy. I know you guys had the opportunity to interview him, Dr. K from Healthy Gamer, GG. And then there's also just gum, it came from how to ADHD and then eventually I found you guys like to go as well. Amazing. I know it's also like on the other kind of, I think spectrum of materials available. I'm someone who loves to read kind of like textbook heavy things. So for viewers who also are into that kind of stuff, the DSM is the Bible for psychiatry. It's currently the diagnostic and statistical manual for mental health disorders or mental disorders. And I think it's currently at the fifth edition, like fifth revised edition or something. So if people are really keen on reading really dense texts that psychiatrists use or clinical psychologists use and that's also another resource. But I will say there's a lot of jargon in there and sometimes it's not always accessible. So having these options as well that you mentioned are really great. That's amazing. I feel like I'm going to hyper fixate on this and just go into like a binge reading everything. It's always such a great thing to do, though. I feel like I definitely go into rabbit holes. Like just when I have moments when I really focus well, right? And then moments when I don't, but in the moments that I really focus well, I like really dig into a topic and I love that. It's really a fulfilling process and yeah, I would encourage everyone to do the same. So you also mentioned I picked up even before our chat a little tangent about the DSM and resources that some of the challenges you faced were things like organization and you mentioned some sort of like things related to cognition as well. I would also know if there are any other challenges you might face, especially with relation to being a highly sensitive person and to having ADHD as well. So I would have to say it's very apparent in my daily life. There has been an improvement of quality in my life since discovering my diagnosis and I'm still taking it day by day and I'm still working on these challenges. It was a never ending journey for me to learn more about myself and how other people cope as well. Is there anything specific that you think that you learned in CBT that is such a great resource, for example, you think it's worth sharing? Yeah, I believe having a lot of grounding practices such as meditation and making sure that you allow yourself to have the space to feel what you need to feel in that moment because I feel emotions on such a strong extreme level. It gets very frustrating and my first instinct previously was just to blow up or cry. I believe that now that I can recognize these symptoms from the very, very beginning, my therapist calls it like the green light, the yellow light, the red light. If I ever sense the yellow light symptoms, that's when I take myself away from the environment, really breathe and truthfully I had difficulty with meditation because I couldn't concentrate long enough. So what really helped me start with meditation before that was the Wim Hof method where I just focused on breathing very, very quickly like in a certain method where I just inhale, exhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, exhale and that helped me a lot with my emotions. For ADHD, it really helped by using resources such as setting alarms to remind myself to use a toilet, eat food. And every single time I feel like I'm burnt out, I just go back to the basics, my basic needs and that's to sleep enough, get my hours in, have proper nutrition because you are what you eat. As your stomach really produces all the serotonin that your brain needs to have a happy brain, physical activity, it doesn't have to be much, just 30 minutes a day and of course mindfulness. And mindfulness, if meditation is not your thing, I find journaling is very, very helpful. Definitely agree with that and I also find it really fascinating how you're able to adapt kind of how you use mindfulness to work for you. Because classically we think of mindfulness as, you know, focusing on the moment, right? And there's also actually a common misconception that people think they need to be focused but what I've learned and I think what the literature generally says, it's like, it's just being aware of the present moment. So whether that's having thoughts that are so, I don't know, distracting or whatever, it's kind of like calmly bringing those thoughts back and like really centralizing yourself rather than feeling like you need to focus on one thing per se. But yeah, it's just to say that there's different approaches to different psychological approaches to better feel grounded in the moment. And thank you for sharing those. Of course. I also wonder if there's, I know with many psychological and neurologic conditions that pharmacology is also a whole topic in of itself. And I frankly believe that is very important. So we previously mentioned lots of different psychological techniques. So things like mindfulness, things like journaling you mentioned. For me, I actually find it really helpful to have a calendar. I plan like every minute of my day. But yeah, what are your thoughts on kind of pharmacology in terms of treatments for ADHD? I'm all for it. Previously, I was personally very skeptical, not skeptical but very cautious about medications because I don't know how my body would react to certain symptoms and of course the side effects with anything. There's always pros and cons. And so I think it's very important to talk to a professional when it comes to medication, but I'm all for it. Personally, for me, I have taken Wellbutrin and essentially in Canada specifically is prescribed for depression and for ADHD. But in America, it's specifically for depression, but awfully label for ADHD. When I was first starting this medication, I didn't know what to expect. And I think I'm one of the very few lucky people who did not have any bad symptoms such as sensitivity to the sunlight. I had friends who would break out in rashes from sunlight. But to me personally, although it doesn't cure all of my symptoms at ADHD, it definitely really helped get me into the right mindset to go towards the right direction. So I'm all for medication. I believe that your mileage may vary. You shouldn't give up. If it doesn't work out for you, be very mindful of what the side effects may be and keep on trying. If it's not for you, there are other ways around it too, like supplements, for example. There's so many studies about what supplements are really good for people with ADHD. For example, I believe taking iron supplements is really good, magnesium, calcium. And one main one that has proven studies to help improve with ADHD symptoms are Ginkgo and Ginseng. I have never really heard of alternative ways. I've just been more familiar with the classical ways, the textbooks ways of treating ADHD in terms of pharmacologically. But I really believe that there's just so much variation out there. For example, how do we classically treat ADHD? So there are two kind of classes. There's stimulant medications. You think of things like methylphenylate. It's an example, Ritalin, Concerta. You think of other sort of stimulants like, what is it called? Vivants, a pro-drug. And then there's non-stimulants. So things like anamoxetine, which is known as stratera. These are classically medications that will increase norepinephrine in your body, dopamine in your body, and try to help you focus more. But not everyone responds to them, hence the need to look at other sort of alternatives, whether it's alternative medications, vitamins, psychological things, so on. So I think it's really great that there's so many options out there. And I think I really wanted to bring up this point of pharmacology just as a way for people to be aware that there are options. So it's like, if one thing doesn't work, which I will say it's frustrating, but I would encourage to keep trying because it's a whole journey. And it will be a rewarding one once there's a moment when you feel like there's something to do about it and that just hope. Oh, 100%. And I also went to the point that Manaka was making, but I feel like a lot of people may feel some sort of shame when it comes to taking pharmaceutical approaches. And I really don't want you guys to get trapped into that bad feeling. At the end of the day, it's your personal journey, and you know your body best. And if you've done all the research and you've contacted a professional, I don't see anything wrong with trying to make the quality of your life easier and better. Exactly. I think one way that I think about it is that if you have a cholesterol problem, your doctor is going to probably prescribe you like a statin, like cholesterol, lower in drug. You're not going to feel like, oh, I'm not going to take it because like I've got like a cholesterol problem. Similarly, similarly, if you have, let's say diabetes, you're not going to stop taking your medication or like taking your daily glucose level checks because whatever reason, like, because you feel bad. I think mental health conditions, neurological conditions are, they are the same. They are, they are medical conditions and they warrant the same kind of care and the same sort of attention. So just to really second what you just said there. I'm also wondering and just as a kind of, I think a holistic perspective of how do you feel that having ADHD as a HSP highly sensitive person really has changed your perspective on life after, you know, seeking help after kind of making these adaptations to improve your quality of life. How has it all gone? How has it been? It's definitely been a roller coaster of emotions. I guess at one point I was just really confused and lost as to where it even starts dissecting where I can improve the quality of my life. At the same time, by learning more about these symptoms and what's considered normal, I've become a lot more compassionate towards myself. I believe that a lot of people with ADHD, including myself and others can relate to the feeling of being especially tough on ourselves when it comes to the daily life and just the daily tasks that you need to finish. It's given me the ability to also be a lot more open-minded towards other people too with other neurodivergence mental illnesses. And that's why I started just documenting everything online. I really want to use my platforms to show that you guys are not alone and there's no shame in trying to find out more information about yourself. Amazing. And just wanted to highlight for everyone watching, your links, Jess's links are in the description. So after this episode, please take a moment to support her and to follow her journey because it's really a journey after all with any sort of medical condition, physical or psychological. It is a journey and it's an important one. So just to finish off today's interview, I wanted to ask you if you had one takeaway for someone who might have ADHD or for someone who might be supporting someone with ADHD, what would that takeaway be? I would say it takes a lot of self-awareness to recognize that you experience the world differently. And I really like to applaud your confidence for that. Good on you for making it this far. I know I've been wandering around lost in the dark for a long time before my diagnosis. I never ever want you to fall into the stigma of not being quote-unquote normal. And although there's no harm in doing your own research, my advice would to be to speak to a professional and get a formal diagnosis if possible. I know therapy can be costly. However, I believe it is worth the investment. There are so many resources available with affordable options. Don't be discouraged as there are communities that you can seek for support. Most importantly, remember that you are not alone. There are resources available to help you navigate on your journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance. I am proof of that. And there are so many successful people out there with ADHD, such as Justin Timberlake, Trevor Noah, Einstein, Emma Watson, and our wonderful host, who's a med student, Monica. Yes, thank you so much. And yes, if I were to also add to that message you were saying about, you know, seeking help, seeking therapy and all that, really, you are an investment. And I would encourage everyone as well to, if they feel comfortable to seek help and do something about it, because there's just so much to, it's a whole journey. There's just so much to experience, and it's really a learning process. So that's all I have to say on my end. Thank you so much. No, thank you. And thank you everyone for tuning in. I really appreciate this opportunity. Yes, thank you to all the Psych2Goers as well. Thank you to Jess. And if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, please leave it in the comments. I'll try to get back to every one of them. Bye. Bye, everyone.