(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
It's not always. So for a mum listening, I would leave you with the takeaway to investigate your own self with as much energy, if not more, than you would your children. We know that we have an opportunity as mums to do things differently, especially if an opportunity to be diagnosed and take medication.
But I see a lot of women take the medication and then not move forward. They don't know how. So I would start to really look at when you felt okay, what that's looked like, and strip back what that is, and then change your to-do list.
Strip back your values, change what you do every day, and have a think about when you felt okay. That would probably be my biggest takeaway. Welcome to the ADHD Families Podcast.
I'm your host, Sharon Collin, an award-winning credentialed ADHD coach and consultant and mama and wife to a very ADHD family. I am seriously obsessed with making life easier for people with ADHD and those that support them. My business, The Functional Family, provides life-changing support and strategies for ADHD.
I particularly love anything that saves time, decreases conflict, and creates space for fun. Do you want a life with your beautiful family that is more functional, fun, and full of joy? Let's explore together the wonderful and sometimes wacky world of family life with ADHD in the mix. Are you a mum with ADHD drowning an endless to-do list, feeling like you are failing at the simple things other parents seem to nail so effortlessly? Do you feel trapped in a cycle of burnout and overwhelm? In this raw, unfiltered chat, I sit down with the incredible Jane McFadden, creator of the ADHD Mums Podcast.
We expose the brutal truth about mum life with ADHD. Jane brings both lived experience as a mum who has ADHD and autism herself, is a mum of three, and has professional expertise. Known for her unflinching approach to motherhood, Jane validates the unseen work of mothers and calls out the system that fails neurodivergent families.
Together, we deep dive into the reality of mum life burnout, exploring why perfectionism plus ADHD equals a cycle of insanity. We look at practical strategies for managing overwhelming to-do lists without losing your mind, and the crucial importance of making decisions based on your values, not what you think you should do. If you're tired of feeling constantly behind, always overwhelmed, and never quite measuring up to some impossible standard of motherhood, this episode offers both validation and a pathway forward.
Let's do it. Welcome, Jane. I am so excited to have you on the podcast again.
Yes, it is always lovely to talk to you, Sharon. We are like-minded peas in a pod. We do the exact opposite, but the same all at once.
Oh, I always find our chats just so energizing and can't wait to share your amazingness with our audience if they haven't listened to the previous podcast. I do recommend you go back and have a listen to that as well. But today, we're chatting about mum life burnout.
Now, this is such a big topic in our community, but before we get too far into it, I'd just love for you to tell our audience your story and how you experienced mum life with ADHD. Oh, great question. Okay, so I was diagnosed at a number that I can never remember, but I would say it would be around 35.
And it really happened for me when my eldest child hit PrEP, and I had three under four years of age because it was very impulsive. Let's just have kids. It seems really easy.
My eldest daughter was developmentally delayed, which means that she walked late, didn't really jump into things like some ADHD kids do. She was more kind of sitting, looking at the wall, interested in her own thoughts. She was pretty low maintenance, to be honest, initially.
So that gave me a really false sense of children and toddlers. And I was probably one of those mothers that thought, oh, it doesn't seem that hard having a two-year-old and a baby because my second baby actually slept really well. So I had quite a decent run early, which led me into a false sense of security, which is why I had three under four, and thought that I had it all sorted.
It all blew up, of course, when I got pregnant with my third child. And then suddenly, I had an explosion of developmental delays. My second child started crying.
He started crying from 10 months old, and he cried for about two and a half years, and he cried for about six to seven hours a day straight. So it began to get tricky really quick, and I kind of just gritted through it until my daughter hit PrEP. And then I had this real sense of awareness for the first time that really there is something not quite right.
So for example, I found that I was the person that was always running in really early or really late, and I absolutely never had the T-shirt. I never knew the library bag. I never had the seesaw login.
I didn't have any understanding of what a reader was. There was all these folders. It seemed very simple.
And I would open the PrEP homework book and be completely unable to read the instructions. And I was thinking, what is wrong with me? But yet all these other mums are walking in fairly well, fairly well-groomed, looking pretty good, and they seem to have everything sorted out. Whereas I was the woman that would be arriving so late, for example, one day, I would walk in, put my head through the window, arriving 20 minutes late, see all of the kids dressed in princess or prince outfits or whatever it was, realize I had forgotten the princess day, run back to the shopping center with my daughter and my other two kids, get her a princess outfit, because I had so much pressure on myself to be that mum that I wanted to be, to arrive back with her dressed in a princess outfit, to realize that at that point, they'd only put on princess outfits for some kind of like thing for 10 minutes.
I just happened to see it. Then she's in a princess outfit. I still haven't started work.
I'm running two businesses, three Airbnbs. Then I realized I'd left the school uniform in the car. I have to get it rechanged again.
It's like 10 o'clock. And I'm thinking, how did this get to this point? And why am I still and always feeling behind, overwhelmed? It's these simple little tiny things that would get me. Instead of ever getting ahead, I was always behind.
I went back to therapy, which I'd been in and out of for 20 years for burnout, stress, anxiety, depression. Eventually, a psychologist who specialized in women who'd worked in an assessment clinic said to me, I'm very confident you have ADHD. It kind of at the end of a session, which is probably a bit of a, it can be really tricky for a psychologist, I think, to throw that out there when you're already stressed, burnt out, overwhelmed, that can really throw someone into more of a spin, or it can really change their life.
So you've really got to pick your moments as a psychologist, I think, to say that. But for me, it was life changing. And I was really excited that there could be an answer.
And I think when you get diagnosed with ADHD, or you think you have ADHD, it's also really exciting, because you think, this could be the answer. And there's a medication. And what if this actually helps me, because I had treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and it was always in this cycle, I couldn't get out, I was really excited.
So I went off and of course, got medication as soon as possible, because you can't wait. I've been waiting for 35 years to try and figure out what was going on with me. And when I first took medication, I just felt like the world stopped.
And I felt like I could breathe. And I mean, look, it wasn't an instant, I'm sorry. I did try medications that didn't work.
I did have results that weren't there. I did feel really let down for a good six months. So it wasn't an easy process.
And I don't want to minimize that. But I do think it's important to keep trying. And I eventually found something that worked.
And that was life changing for me. And of course, typical ADHD style, I wanted to tell every single person in the world about it, which I did. And then I ended up recording some of the some of what I was talking about, because I had so many people wanting to meet me for coffee, come and meet me for coffee.
I didn't have time because I'm so stressed out. And so I ended up making up these small audio clips, put them online, and then have still not told my family or anybody that I even run this podcast, if people find it, that's fine. But I never put it on my personal social media or anything like that, because I never actually really wanted anybody to know about it.
I actually did it for other people. And what happened was a lot of people in the Facebook groups, the big ADHD ones would then share the episodes on this woman, because it was the first ADHD mom podcast out there. What I would do is interview other women about their experience and share my experience.
And we would have a rant, a cry, and people found themselves in it, it validated their experience. And that's how the whole podcast ADHD mom started, whereas I suppose me just feeling so excited thinking, Oh my goodness, what if there's other people that don't know this? Oh, that's such a wonderful story. And I know that your podcast has impacted so many and also really validated their experience, because on your podcast, you let it go to the gritty stuff to my kids.
It's a very real podcast, which I think is what we need. Well, you know what? It's funny you say that, because I'm very confident that's why it was successful. And the reason I think I have been so outward and vulnerable is because I'd never expected people I know to listen to it.
And that I think has really allowed me to share, there's a particular rejection, sensitivity, dysphoria episode where I cry, it's so raw. I always want to take down that episode, but the response I get from it is where people are so impacted by it that I leave it up there. So I actually think having it being non-professional, having it be something that I was never expecting anybody to listen to has meant that I've shared hard and vulnerable.
And then other guests have done the same where, and I mean, particularly the I hate motherhood series that I did was really successful. The reason that that came about was because so many moms on the Instagram and Facebook, I think I posted something and said, I actually just cannot feel any joy. I cannot feel any joy.
I haven't felt joy in a few weeks. How can we get joy back? And people wrote back. I mean, I had like 20% of people that said they'd accessed joy in the last month as mothers, but of course we love our kids.
It's not about that. And so then I had a few people message me and say, can I come in and talk about how I hate motherhood? I hate doing the washing. I love my kids, but I just want to talk about how hard it is.
And so some of those series where you have women that really go about how hard it is, how it feels and how ADHD women are not really made for motherhood in terms of all of the things, all of the memory, all the things you've got to remember, all the things you've got to have done, all the little shitty boring tasks that no one wants to do. We're not made for that, but yet we're driven to perfection. So it's like a cycle of insanity.
You just touched on something there, which is what I want to ask you about. So let's talk about perfectionism. A lot of women that I work with with ADHD really have this kind of all or nothing approach, which I know we've had to talk about.
Let's talk about the challenges of perfectionism. If you can give us some practical strategies that you've found to embrace those imperfections. That is a tricky one.
I'm a real perfectionist as I know as a lot of neurodivergent women are. And as I said, when we talk about the cycle of insanity, my personal definition is being an ADHD woman who's also a perfectionist. There is absolutely no way I don't believe personally that you can live like that and have a lot of joy unless you make changes and you really look at yourself.
Because for example, let's just go real practical because I know that's agreed you and I that audiences really love the practical advice. So let's go really practical. I am a person with ADHD and perfectionism who will do, for example, I will open up a cupboard.
Let's say after I finished this, I'm going to the toilet, I open up a cupboard because I'll get sidetracked and I see that it's all a mess. And I think, geez, if I had some labels, this would be better. And I either skip lunch or skip any breaks or get completely sidetracked and reorganize that cupboard.
Or my personal favorite, which drives insanity is I put it on my list. I put things on my list very intensely because I know that I won't remember. And I'm a perfectionist and I can see that job needs to be done and I want to have it done.
Okay. But that means my list is really long because if I'm putting in all of my little tasks that I must get done on my list, I'm then living by my list. And I've lived by lists for 20 years, 25 years, probably even longer.
And I can see my daughter living by lists already as well. This is a very neurodivergent perfectionistic trait. So now I have a huge list, which means if my kids say to me, do you want to play Uno? I can't because I'm doing my list.
The problem with my list is that I think we get into this picture where we think that it might end. When I finish my list, I'm going to sit down and be present and I'm going to read my book. Just got to finish my list.
But if we're putting everything possible on the list and we're doing all of it all the time, it means that our self-care can get down the toilet. You don't even think about that. And then we're also on ADHD medication, some of it.
So I get into this cycle where I take ADHD medication, which suppresses thirst, food. I've got an impossible list of things that I need to do. And then I berate myself at the end of the day, if I don't get 20,000 things done.
And also I think that school or parenting, the way that you were brought up can impact that too, because there's a lot of this, try your best. But for a very literal brain, I'm very literal. So someone says to me, do my best.
I'm thinking to myself, I've got to do 150%. I have to not eat, not drink because I'm getting all of it done every single day forever. So then we're in this whole thing, whereas women and mums, I hear so many say, we can't sit down.
We can't be with our kids because we've got the list. So I have done some really deep thinking, and this is about three years that I have really delved into how I can live with this, because it is not possible for me, and I hope it's possible for other people who are listening. It's best case scenario that you don't put things on your list.
That is best case scenario. If you can not put it on your list, take a breath, learn to center and not put it anywhere and let it go. I think power to you.
That is the best case scenario. I've tried that. Personally, I am not able to do that.
However, I wrote a values and workbook planner that I released in January this year, and it is not about getting another app. It is not about getting another workbook. It is not about paying money for anything.
This is an attitude change that I've worked on for a long time with perfectionism and to-do lists. It is about using whatever system you've currently got, which could be a notebook. It could be G drive.
It could be a task list. It doesn't actually matter what your system is, and look at hiding the tasks that do not need to be done. So I have, for example, tempting but don't do it list, and that is where I would put my cupboard list, right? And I hide that list.
It is not in front of me every day, or I have a follow-up list, or I have a brain dump list. Whatever it is, think about what will stop you from doing it. What I've found, which has really been life-changing for me, is when I go back to that follow-up list, and I do, so don't trick yourself into thinking you'll never go back to it, because if you're a perfectionist with ADHD, you will actually want to go back to it.
But if you worry that you won't, put a reminder on your calendar for once a month to look at your list so you feel safe. You won't forget. Go back, and you know when I look at that list, I actually think to myself, I'm so glad that I play Udun with my kids, and I didn't clean that cupboard, because it didn't matter.
So really have a look at the way you set up your lists, because a lot of us do live by lists, and that's okay. But I do find a lot of the ADHD planners that I see out there that are really geared for ADHD brains, they're not geared for a hyperactive, perfectionistic ADHD mom. They're geared for an inattentive person with probably not as many things on, because if you actually increase all of the accountability with some of these ADHD-friendly calendars that I'm air-quoting, I look at them and feel like there's too much accountability.
We actually need to strip back, and that's where I really feel passionate about. So I, for example, would use a today, urgent, this week or next week, and then hide it. I think the trick is to really just pick what is manageable, and I think we really need to be aware of our brains.
So in the beginning of the day, if you take ADHD medication, you may feel like a superwoman. And power to you, a coffee, 8.30, the kids are dropped off, you've got your meds there, if you take medication, you may feel like superwoman. But we've really got to think in those moments that we probably can't.
Maybe for you, you set up that task list the day before when you're tired, your meds have worn off, you're a bit more realistic about time. Think about setting it up more realistic, and think about celebrating the wins. If you are somebody that doesn't eat lunch, you don't drink water, you may have to set that up as a task.
I do. I have to set up as a tick sheet, got tape dog for walk, and I'm talking 15 minutes. And I really have to make sure that I actually do those things, because otherwise, all I want to do is do the tick sheet.
And I have a to-do list of when my kids get home filled with things that I know I'll feel good about. Play cards with kids for 10 minutes. These are not long things.
Speak to child about day. And that may sound like something that you should do naturally. But as an ADHD woman, I'm going to admit it, I don't.
I would much prefer to work on my list and do my cupboard. But I know at the end of the day, you may not value your family on the number one. Let's be honest, just because we have a family doesn't mean we do.
We may think we should, but privately, we may not. Career may be really important. A lot of women I know who really value health and fitness as their number one priority.
Is that okay? Yes, I think it is. Maybe having a family is in your top five or your top 10, but it's not actually at the top. So when we make decisions about how we want to live, what we want to put on our task list, we need to strip back as to what is actually important to us.
Because if we are living by someone else's needs or someone else's values, then we are going to be unhappy, but we won't know why. For example, I see this trap that women, ADHD women fall into a lot. For example, we think that our values should be family and should be our children.
But if we are actually honest to ourselves, it may not be. We may have health and fitness or career or friendships or timeout or yoga or art, reading, creativity. We are not just mothers.
Let's stop operating as if we are. We are actually human beings and people that had a life before children, and we will have a life after our children leave. I don't want to be a lost mother when my children move home and follow them around and ask what they're doing all the time and have no sense of purpose.
I don't want that for my life. I don't want my daughter to think that's what motherhood is. So if we strip back values, I see women all the time make this kind of decision and then wonder why they're not happy.
For example, they may be in, let's say, a job in insurance, and they may say, oh, okay, their boss might come to them and say, would you like a promotion? Now, this promotion is going to get you $10,000, $15,000 more a year. It's going to require you to work this to this. Would you like that promotion? If that woman is a solo parenting, that's a decision she has to make with child care in her own setup.
If that person is in a relationship, I'm sure they would go away and probably make that decision with a partner or an extended family, however it works. But when they're making that decision, I see a lot of women make it from a place where they don't realize what their actual values are. So they will say, oh, I feel like I must be at home with my children because they're under 10.
So I'm not going to say yes to that. Their partner was probably just going to support them with whatever they want. So they're guessing to see what their partner wants them to say.
And they may go ahead and make a decision that's not actually based on their values. So they could take the promotion because they think that they want to make the money to have the holiday, right, once a year. And they plan that money with the $10,000 and they feel good about it in that moment.
But yet every single day when they pick up that child from after school care, it kills them inside. And that is not their value. Their value may be being present every day after school.
Or the other way, you sacrifice it. You don't take the promotion. You do pick your child up from school and you watch other people overtake you in your career.
And you just think, I wish I could, I want, but I don't get to. And you're passed over for things. And it's in those moments that I wonder if that's why we struggle to access joy, where we don't make the decisions based on values.
We make the decisions based on what we think we should do. And then that perfectionism, that want to get it right, that's where I think it comes back to. Your version of motherhood and what you think you should do, being the perfect mother, being the perfect wife, it all ties into that.
But actually, as people, if we let some of that go, what do we really want? I love how you talked about the shoulds then, because I am trained as an ADHD coach to constantly look for shoulds. And I find it comes up in, it just comes up so frequently for women in particular. We're always going, I should do this.
And even when we're doing well, we're comparing ourselves against something else, this should, should, should. But I love it how you brought it back to actually what the individual values and acknowledging that that's different for everybody and that's perfectly okay. So going into know that all or nothing thinking, shoulds, perfectionism, our self-criticism, for example, which we see a lot of mums do, we're very hypercritical of ourselves, contribute to burnout.
Why is burnout a common issue for mothers with ADHD? And can you talk a little bit about your experience that you mentioned at the start? Typical burnout can get really confused with an autistic burnout. And I think we really need to be clear about what that is. The reason we need to be clear, and people talk about labels and labels being good, labels being bad.
Well, I think labels are great because it actually gets us to see what it is that we're looking at. One of the reasons that getting diagnosed and being aware, even if you don't want to take medication is really important is because it's really influenced by the therapy that you receive. I had a woman that I helped one-on-one.
I was friends with her father and he asked me to help. What happened with her was they were unaware that she was neurodivergent. I spoke with his daughter who had very significant anorexia and some self-harm issues.
And when I spoke with her, it was really clear to me that she was neurodivergent. I believe that she should go under an autism and ADHD assessment. The reason that I suggested that was because I was very confident that she was in autistic burnout and the therapy for that is very different.
Putting her in an eating disorder clinic in a hospital setting can be very tricky for an autistic woman who's in burnout. And her experience with rigidity and being inflexible with eating, is it AFRID? Is it autism? Is it burnout? What is it? And I was talking to a father about if we can actually figure out which is which, we can actually use a better therapy, which will impact her eating disorder. So getting really clear about what type of burnout is really important.
Yes, neurotypical people burn out too, but we know that neurodivergent people burn out harder, for longer, more often. I also question very, very, very heavily on children and burnout and the fact that it doesn't seem from a parent's point of view that the child could possibly be burning out. Because from a parent's point of view, we have so much more on.
We have adult responsibilities. How could this child that we do everything for, it feels like, possibly be burning out? So do we need to, as neurodivergent people, have burnout protections from the beginning? Yes. For me, as a mother with ADHD, I teach my children who are all under 10, who are all developmentally delayed, so I think you can do it at any age, about energy accounting, about what does it look like to protect our energy? I think we need to look at those protections on burnout early.
We need to teach our children those now. And I talk really openly with my children about, this is what burnout looks like. I'm so exhausted.
I used all of my energy from tomorrow yesterday, and now I can't get up off the couch. And I think that is a really important thing with burnout, because we need to be aware, as neurodivergent people, we are going to burn out more often and more consistently. And if we know that's going to happen, what can we do today to protect ourselves? And how can we teach our children to set up their environment where they're not in this circle of burnout? When I'm talking about burnout to some of my clients, I often view it, and I want to see if this resonates with you, like a wave.
So the wave builds, and then it crashes, and that's the burnout part. Everyone's riding a burnout wave, neurotypical, neurodivergent, we're all riding a burnout wave. But for neurodivergent people, the waves are coming in quicker, the sets are closer together.
And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to recognise the burnout wave and catch it on the incline. We're catching it as it's building. Most people, and I want to see if you resonate with this, don't clock it till the wave is breaking, right? They're on the incline, it feels productive, it feels like they're doing things.
And then it rolls, and it's about to break, and they clock it then. And often then it's too late to do anything, you are on the downhill, right? But if we're noticing it, or we're aware of it, like just what you said, you're making your children aware of what they're going through and clocking it here, and having some strategies as it's building on the incline, that can often just even slow down that progression of the sets that keep coming in. How do you feel about that analogy? I completely agree.
The only thing that I would add, which you probably would add, but you've only given a very simple overview, I love that. I think one, that reminds me of a meltdown, doesn't it? The wave, and identifying it as it goes up. So one, I think that analogy is perfect for a meltdown as well, but two, the only thing I would probably add to it is when it's going up, and I completely agree with having a look at it, but I wonder if we can be detectives for ourselves and figure out for our kids, is it going up because we've added in this? Do we know that our kids can only do... One might be able to do two sports a week, or two things.
One might only be able to do one. One child might not be able to do any extracurriculars. We might know that after school care can work for that amount of time, but after that, we've got to get a babysitter in to pick them up and bring them home if we're working.
So I think we've got to have a look at what are the common elements to when that starts to come up for us as mums, us as a family. If we had a Christmas, for example, that went really well, and you had a great time, I would actually document why that happened, what happened in it. And yes, stars, moons align, and everyone changes, it can be general mood, but it's always good to keep an eye on that wave, and what were the common elements to it, and actually say it to your kids, instead of just clocking it in going, that child can only really do one sport.
Talk about it openly with them, because neurodivergent kids are really, really emotionally intelligent, a lot of them. And also, what a beautiful thing to... How much pain could we help people avoid if we all just started talking about what our capacity is, essentially, like, maybe it looks different for each person, but we all kind of assume or we're comparing ourselves against markers that we don't know what their capacity is for different things. Like, you know, when you're talking about after school activities, everyone is so different with how much they can, how much they have capacity for.
I love that so much. Oh, totally. I remember as a kid, my mum always said to me that my like, my anthem, my favourite song that she was like, Oh my God, all she says is, it's not fair.
And if you have a child that says it's not fair, they have a very sense of social justice, which might be an autistic trait, but I have a lot of it's not fair in my house. I've had to let that go and just be really open and straight with the kids. You're right, it's not fair.
That child can do more than you can do, because they can cope with it. They're older than you, they're younger than you, it might not be fair. We all have different challenges.
That's okay. I have one child that just really struggles to eat dinner, one that struggles to eat lunch, and one that struggles just generally with overall sensitivity and running off and crying. So it's not fair.
You're right, it's not fair. But that is because we have different things we're working on. And that's okay.
You all get this, because actually I have one that can't cope with that. And I have one that needs that can do more that wants to do more. And we've had to have really open discussions around everybody's at different places.
So this developmental thing where we have with ages and what they can do doesn't always match, but I am really open with my kids around how that is.
(This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at TurboScribe.ai to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.)
