The One You Feed with Eric Zimmer

0:00Welcome 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. Hey, team. This week I'm talking with someone who has an impressive 12 years of podcasting and over 800 episodes. Eric Zimmer is the host of The One You Feed podcast, taking the name from the parable of the two wolves inside you and asking which one grows. Well, it's the one you feed.

0:34After struggling with heroin addiction and homelessness in his twenties, Zimmer became deeply interested in how people make lasting changes in their lives. Drawing on both behavioral sciences and his own experience with addiction and recovery, Zimmer's work focuses on exploring behavior change, meaning, and what helps people build better lives. And Zimmer is also the author of How a Little Becomes a Lot. In our conversation, Eric and I talk about why lasting change is usually built with the small, unglamorous days after the big moment, and not in the moment itself.

1:12We explore how structure can reduce the need for willpower, how it can help separate deciding from doing, and how change becomes easier when we treat it as a skill to practice rather than a test of character. And while Eric hasn't been diagnosed with ADHD himself, we still get into topics like time blindness, using tools without shame, and why a little bit of something often beats a lot of nothing. If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page, you can find that at hackingyouradhd.com/317.

1:46All right, keep on listening to find out how to separate deciding from doing. Yeah. all right. it's a pleasure to have you on the show. And I guess really the best place to start here is just hearing a little bit about your story, because I think that's plays a lot into what we're gonna talk about today. Yeah. I could introduce myself as what I do today, or I could talk about the story that begins my book, which is the story of my addiction. Where d- where do you wanna start?

2:17yeah, let's hear about what you did today and then kinda how you got here Yeah. today I am the host of a podcast called "The One You Feed," which has been a, a-- We've been around for about 12 years and have done pretty well. I'm also the author of a book that just came out recently called "How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life." I'm also a speaker. I do one-on-one coaching with people. I lead lots of different workshops.

2:42So that's what I do today. in order to understand how I got to a place where I wanted to do this sort of thing, it is important to go back to what is the origin story for me, which is that at 24, I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed 100 pounds. I was jaundiced, and I was yellow from hepatitis C. the prosecutor told me I was facing up to 50 years in jail, and I was generally a fairly broken person at that point. And so I was fortunate enough at 25 to find my way out of that and into recovery.

3:27And from there, I just became very interested in how do people change? Why do people change? Why do some peop- why do some people not change, right? obviously 'cause I was interested in it for my own life, but also because I was seeing people around me. Some of those people got into recovery, and they're with me today, and some of those people that I was close to are dead today because they were unable to make that change. and what is it? So as I just watched that I began to see it in my own life too post-recovery.

4:01why sometimes could I stick with an exercise routine and yet otherwi- other times I just, no matter what I did, I couldn't. Why sometimes could I be really productive at work and other times procrastinate all the time? So just this idea of these things were always in my mind and I, nav- I navigated my way into the software world. So I had a software career for a number of years. I had a solar energy company that I ran for a few years. But about 12 years ago, I just got the idea to start a podcast where we would talk about what it means to live a good life, and I would interview people who were writing books on that topic.

4:43And I started it because I kinda needed it. I was in a marriage that was not going well. even after addiction, I've had depression challenges. There was some of that going on. And my best friend was an audio engineer, and I thought, this would be great for us to get to spend some more time together." So I just launched it on kind of a whim, 12 years ago, and now I've been fortunate that's been what I've been able to do for the last number of years for a living.

5:12Awesome. Yeah, it's-- I to- totally relate to the, following that, your own itch there where it's like, "I need this." that's very much how I started this podcast where it's like, "I need to be doing something more, but I Just doing it, having the structure of the podcast really let me follow through with that desire Yeah. if-- I think a lot of people have benefited from my podcast, and I say that without being arrogant, right? I've just, over 12 years, I've gotten, at this point, thousands of notes from people about how the podcast has helped them.

5:42But it has helped no one more than it has helped me. I am the biggest beneficiary of it of all, because I just got to swim in ideas and in the water of mental and emotional health. And I also am… If you take a Big Five personality test, it's one of the b- you know, one of the most standardized known personality tests out there, I score very high on the conscientious case, which means that I kinda, it's hard for me to not do what I say, right? uh, I… And so since I'm on this podcast talking about all these things, I feel that, to be talking about them all the time but not living them to the best of my ability is-- it causes an internal contradiction that is very hard for me to live with.

6:36So it's caused me to behave in a way to live up almost to the person I'm being in the podcast, if that makes any sense. Oh yeah, absolutely. I've, I do a lot of like monologue episodes for the podcast, and I cannot write about something that I can't do myself. it just does not work 'cause I'm like… And if I don't have a clear image of what I'm writing about, I'll just sit there and stare at that blank page and just be like, "I feel like I have an idea here, but it, I can't manifest it yet."

7:06Yeah. Yep So Looking at the, title of your book, just like how a little becomes a lot and this idea, "The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life." And like the idea of small changes is something I find a lot of people have almost more trouble with considering than having a big change. Like they always wanna take that big swing to make a change, but I know in my life when I've tried to do that, it's usually does not work out well. there's times when it has, but more often does take those small changes Yeah.

7:46my book starts by me describing walking into a treatment center 30 years ago at this point, and I say, "If you were filming the movie of my life, there would be a moment there that you would see where I go into the treatment center and they say to me, 'We think you need to go to long-term treatment.' And I say, 'Ah, no thanks.' And I go back to my room, and I have a moment of, clarity where I see clearly, I'm gonna die or go to jail if I leave here.

8:12And I go back and I say, 'Okay, I'll go to treatment.'" That would be, like, the big moment. the camera would spend a lot of time there, and the music would swell triumphantly in the background. And that moment is important, but it's only important because of the thousands of little off-camera moments that happened after that. If I didn't keep taking the small little daily actions that led to my recovery, that moment would've been just another of my attempts at getting sober that didn't work.

8:45And so on one hand, you could say going into treatment is a big step and a big change, and it was. I'm not saying that sometimes we don't need to try a big change. But even when I looked at the big change, I was like, "Oh, it still boiled down to, day by day, I stayed in treatment. I did what they said," right? I just did all these little things. And if we look at any sort of change that we make, particularly any sort of change that we wanna make that's long-lasting, it is a matter of there's lots of unglamorous little things that we just keep doing.

9:20And I wanted to write about that because we know that on some level. We'll say Rome wasn't built in a day, or, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. We know it, but it's really hard for us to kinda buy into. And to your point, we often try and make the big change. And look, if you can make the big change that you wanna make and do it and stick with it, please have at it. You do not n- you know, my book is probably not the thing for you.

9:48My book is for the people who feel like, "I keep trying to change, and I'm not," or, "I start out good, but I just don't keep going," or, "I can't figure out where to start or what to do." that's what the book is really pointing at to begin with, is how do we make change lasting, and how do we actually make it meaningful? How do we take what we've learned about behavior science and apply it not just to the things that we do that help us to be a little bit healthier, exercising or eating right or, meditating, but also how do we apply it to becoming wiser?

10:29How do we apply it to working with our thought patterns? Yeah. And I see it a lot too in the sense of especially with ADHD, this like, we have this just like allergy to consistency. but it's I think sometimes it's really about redefining what being consistent means. Because like for a lot of people, yes, they're like, "Every day I have to do, hit this one spot to be consistent." But if we like zoom out and we're like, "Oh, okay, if I'm doing, I'm being, relatively consistent on a weekly basis or a monthly basis," that's where you start seeing that kind of snowball effect.

11:14Yeah, a concept that is in the book is this idea that structure liberates. We don't think of it that way. We think of structure as imprisoning. And structure can be imprisoning. I'm not saying it's not, but there is a way in which structure liberates. However, the degree of structure, the type of structure needs to be right for us. There isn't a right answer for what structure will, in your case, help you feel more liberated, more free. But part of what structure does is it can stop us from having to decide everything all the time.

11:57Because if I have a day-- Some of my hardest days are weekends And it's because I wake up and I have no idea what I'm doing today. I can do anything that I want. That's a har- for me, that's a hard riddle to solve because I'm like, I could do this. Yeah, I pr- should probably get some exercise, but, I also, I work hard during the week. Maybe I should lay on the couch, and I could go over to my friend's house later, but I gotta do laundry." and this just goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on, and it doesn't make for a very enjoyable day, 'cause even if what I'm doing is trying to relax, I'm not inside relaxed. If on the other hand I go, "Okay, you know what?

12:40I am just gonna allow myself here for, for till noon I'm gonna just lay on the couch and read and let myself do that. But at noon I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna take an hour walk. I'll come back, I'll put the laundry in, and then I'll go to my friend Chris's house." Like, all of a sudden, my day feels much better to me because I gave it a little bit of structure. B- I stopped because I was n- I now don't have to spend every minute of that day deciding.

13:08And so there's this idea of, if we can separate decision from action Because when we have to decide what to do and get ourselves to do it in the same moment, that's asking a lot for some of us Yeah. And often it can be, especially with like ADHD, following impulsivity down the track you don't really wanna go down, but just seems, "Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be productive by rearranging my spice cabinet right now." And it's like, that was not what I wanted to do with my Saturday."

13:43E-e-exactly. And in the book I talk about this idea of, there's two elements to us being able to make change of some sort, and the first is structural. It's, what am I doing? When am I doing it? How am I doing it? Why am I doing it? Where am I doing it? Who's gonna help me do it? It's setting up my environment for this stuff. It's the sort of things that James Clear's book "Atomic Habits" talks a lot about. it's that realm, and it's a really useful and important realm because behavioral scientists will agree on one-- they might agree on more than one thing, but one of the things that you hear again and again if you pay attention to the literature is they say, "Don't rely on willpower or self-control any more than you have to."

14:34That's why the structural can be so beneficial, right? A lot of times we-- what we might call procrastination isn't even quite to procrastination because I haven't even actually decided when I'm going to do it, let alone to get to the point to procrastinate it. So by filling in the structural, we give ourselves a better chance. Once that is the case, the structural gets us to a choice point, right? It's a moment where we decide, "I'm going to do this," or, "I'm going to do that," right?

15:09And in that moment, structural is valuable, but then more of what we might think of as a term self-control comes into play. I don't love the term willpower, self-control, but there is an element of it, right? There is a, "I'm at this point and I could choose to either do what I said I was gonna do, which is, go see my mom for a couple hours, or I could be distracted by the spice cabinet." If we find ourselves going the direction that the best part of us wishes we hadn't gone in those moments, then the second part for us is to analyze, what was I saying to myself?

15:48What was I thinking in that moment? What was I feeling right at that moment? And how can I learn to rescript that or to talk to myself differently next time so that I can kinda make the choice that I wanna make? And so when you get b- a lot of books focus on one or the other of those things, but when you get all of it together, that's m- that's for me how the basics of change occur. Yeah, 'cause it is often W- we, we don't exist in a vacuum, and so there is we did get distracted, but what was going on that led to that distraction?

16:27what was the thing that made us go down the path that we didn't? And understanding that is key to being like, if I don't wanna do that again, how do I change the circumstances?" Exactly. And distraction is real for everybody, and obviously even worse for people with ADHD And that's, for me, I have a lot of-- I end up with a lot of things like alarms and reminders and all kinds of different things because I just get lost, I think the term I've heard is time blindness, right?

17:03I have it, I've never been formally diagnosed with ADHD, but I ha- I have some of the characteristics for sure, and time blindness is one of them. if I'm gonna sit down on the couch and start, say, reading Substack or something, I've gotta set an alarm for when I wanna get off the couch and stop reading, because otherwise I could be there for hours Yeah. And it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm just gonna do this for…" And even for me, it's always like these like very small things where I'm like, "Oh, I'm just gonna do this for five minutes and then I'll get on." And I'm like, "It's half an hour.

17:33That's, that was a… Now I'm gonna be late." This was-- And it's a repeatable thing that I see often. it's also making me think of, something I'm dealing with my son right now where I'll have him like, "Okay, go get dressed," and then like I'll catch… And he's like trying to read a book while getting dressed. I'm like, "This is why you're getting distracted each and every time. You are trying to do two things at once, and one of them's way more interesting."

18:01And I think a lot of us do have-- fall into that thing where we're like, "Oh, I…" It-- I, I do it when I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna put a movie on while I'm cleaning the house," and then I'm like, find out I'm watching the movie instead of cleaning, and I'm like, "That w- that was a clear mistake for me." Yeah, and look, we've lived in, we live in a world that has made all of this harder. I will be like, I will be like, "All right, I'm gonna pick up my phone to do X." I pick it up, but there's a text.

18:33So then I look at the text, and that sends me down some different path that, before I know it, I'm, I've suddenly decided that I need to buy a cologne that smells like clementines, and I'm like, how did I get here?" Because I just… It was one thing after another that just kept showing up in front of me. and that, that is, that can be really, really challenging. I think for-- I think everybody is challenged by that, and if you have, d- distractibility as a more of a, common factor of your life, it's even worse.

19:06Yeah. And yeah, the phone is just such a hard thing to deal with 'cause it's a requirement for modern life, but then setting up your digital environment so that it's not going to be distracting, it's like it is not designed to be that way. That's right. And that's the structural element that I'm talking about. That all falls into the structural element. It-- Years ago, and I just… Sometimes failing so completely at something is a f- is good. And what I realized, it's been probably, 13 years, 14 years, when I realized that my ability to remember much of anything was just not very good.

19:53And I started realizing if I wanna be able to remember anything, it has to get put somewhere. And I started with Evernote 13 years ago, and anything that happens that I need to remember for more than five minutes, I trained myself just to put it in there because I was so fundamentally unable to do it otherwise. And that's why I say, being really bad at it to that degree, I think was really helpful because I just surrendered and I went, "You know what? Okay." And I see a lot of people resisting using digital tools to help us manage our digital life because we think we shouldn't need them Yeah I tell over and over I tell people, I'm like: it, you need-- I- if you wanna be able to get X, Y, and Z thing done, you need to have this blocker on your phone and this blocker on your computer, and you need to set this thing, and you… like we need help.

21:03And people consistently, I just see it again and again, don't do it because they keep thinking, "I shouldn't need to do this." But we do, right? I do. I've just learned to be like, "Okay, here's what I need." I wrote a book, which is a thing that takes a lot of focus for a lot of time. And if I had not figured out for me what I needed to do to create a writing container that would work, I couldn't have been able to do it, right? I just, I knew myself well enough to know "Okay, here's the, here are the elements of the structure that I'm going to need to be able to make this work."

21:49Yeah. Yeah, and I, and this falls right into this, the conversation about willpower too, 'cause there's so much stuff where people are like, "I should just be able to do this. I don't…" and feel like it says something about them when they need to use a tool I agree. it's a myth that we've got in our culture around willpower or discipline or self-control, and we don't-- We, when we f- when we don't succeed at those things, we conclude that it's a character trait about us.

22:24says something about who we are, and so we try in order to be good enough to keep doing it. But my point is, if you ask 'em, all the behavioral people who study this stuff, they'll say, "You're gonna lose at that more often than you're gonna win." And the people who seem to have it, motivation, discipline, self-control, they've lear- they know somehow. It may be instinctive. They may have learned it somewhere, but they know how to navigate those things.

22:57And so one of the key ideas that underlies my entire book is that change is a skill Meaning we can get better at it But most of us think that it's there, that there's something fundamentally wrong with us. And this is where diagnoses like ADHD or depression or addiction or pick your one are, get tricky because the, the diagnosis is often very helpful in explaining why we're often the way we are. But if it becomes limiting, at least in my experience as a person who suffered with depression, as a person who suffered with addiction, that it's helpful to a point, but at a certain point it's not.

23:47If I take on the mantle of being a person who is depressed, then it makes it much harder for me to be able to make certain changes to that. It's not that I don't have depressive tendencies. It's not that there may not be something specific going on in my brain. I'm not trying to say, I'm not like, "Oh, it's just, it's all in your mind." That is not what I am saying in any way, shape, or form. But we have to open to the fact, we can get better at these things.

24:19We can learn and, and that's… And anybody listening to this show probably already is sold on that or you wouldn't be bothering to listen to a show like this. Yeah. I always find the diagnosis piece very helpful in just being, going if I am just, I'm just bad at time management versus I have ADHD and that makes time management much more difficult, then I can be like, "Okay, there's something I can do about time management with the ADHD piece." But if I'm just bad at time management, it's usually just trying harder I agree 100%.

24:52And like I said, I think this is a, uh, it's a subtle point around when diagnosis is really helpful and helps alleviate shame and helps us learn what to do and gives us tools, and when we allow it to define us completely. And that's kinda all I'm saying. Oh yeah, and everyone has their own baggage they ha- bring along with these kinds of things. 'Cause I've known people that, they really just don't want the diagnosis because of exactly what you're saying with, it just would define who they are.

25:19And so that, that's, they don't want that. They just want to be able to figure out their own systems without having a label. Yeah. I identified and still identify as an addict and an alcoholic because there's a usefulness to that for me. And I know other people who hate that label, right? They just don't want it. And so I'm like, "Okay, w- ultimately all of this stuff, there is no one-size-fits-all prescription for any of us." And unfortunately, the self-help world likes to sell those, right?

25:54And I just don't think they exist. There, there are useful tools. I hope my book is a useful tool. your podcast is a useful tool. But there's still a certain element of always what works for me?" Because I'm not the same as you, and you're not the same as Bob, and Bob's not the same as Sue, and on it goes. Yeah. And it, when, especially with, 'cause ADHD is this, everyone has different symptoms and different ranges of symptoms that they experience, and I could tell people exactly what works the best for me, and there's a good chance it won't work at all for you if it's, 'cause I, like I've been talked, numerous times about I don't tend to be, I'm not late to a lot of things, but that comes from having anxiety and having anxiety about being re- late.

26:42It's not a good system to keep on time, but it's what I've lived with, and I've been working on it, be, to be like, "Okay, let's not be stressed out all the time about being late." Yeah. depression's a similar thing, right? And people who study, who think deeply about things like anxiety and depression and other mental health conditions, you start to kinda go, this is very interesting because these things present very differently in people." they, oftentimes you end up with multiples of a diagnosis.

27:26And at a certain point you start going, is there a commonality? Is there something underneath all this that we haven't yet figured out or discovered? Or is it truly that these things are just multi-variant conditions, that there's no, there is no common underlying theme because there's so many different causes and condi- conditions?" I think addiction is that way for sure, right? Addiction, people end up in addiction from a whole lot of different places, and a whole lot of different reasons, and a whole lot of different whys, and solving it is also a slightly complex thing.

28:04And my experience has been the same with a lot of mental health. I just think, obviously I think about these things maybe more than is useful, but Yeah, it w-- 'cause it's… as you were saying in the beginning, you're thinking about why change works for some people and it doesn't for others. And that's a big aspect is that all have to approach it differently. And if we do try that, one-size-fits-all solution, it's probably not gonna work. And the, the news of me caring about and asking this question and studying it and ask, interviewing, over 800 of, incredibly smart people over the years about it, is the answer is there is not an answer to that question, right?

28:47There is not an answer to why people change or don't change. There are a lot of different answers. there are patterns. There are different things, but it just, you can't reduce it to something simple. you can't reduce it to a five-second rule, to quote somebody who's d- doing very well in the self-help space, right? it's not that s- life doesn't work that way. But it doesn't mean that the five-second rule can't be useful to you in some aspect. Now that's, I'm also not saying that.

29:17Yeah. and it's, certain things work in one situation and not in another. I've heard people talk about, they've written multiple books. In their first book they did this one thing, so they were like, "Oh, for the second book I'll do the same thing," and they're like, "It did not work at all." Yep. Yeah, that's a fascinating thing, right? And I think you may, you've probably experienced this and probably most listeners might too, is like you find something that does work for you for a while and you're like, "This is great." And then it ceases to work and you're like, "Oh, for crying out loud."

29:44Now, that can be a frustrating moment Yeah. Yeah, and it's one of the things I find too is that I don't… When that's happening, I'm often not considering what's changed in my life. I'm like, "Oh, th- I'm just doing the same thing." But, if I look at "Oh yeah, I did this thing 20 years ago and that worked great for, training for this like half-marathon I did." And then I'm like, "Yeah, that wouldn't work now 'cause I have kids and do a completely different life and I, am not exercising every day like I used to." So that's like I have to do things completely differently if I want it to work.

30:13Yeah. It's why life never gets figured out. It's a myth we all have. We want life to get figured out, but it doesn't happen because life just keeps changing. We keep changing. It's like as soon as I figure out what it's like to be 50, I'm now 55, and I'm like, now what the hell do I do? It's different." And life is like that. It d- it doesn't sit still long enough for us to solve it, which can be frustrating, but it's also liberating to go, "Oh, yeah, that's just the way it is." There's nothing wrong with me that, that I can't quite get it figured out.

30:47It's 'cause it keeps changing Yeah. And I think it's-- That's such an important message too, for people to be like, "There is nothing wrong with me." for us to get caught up with "I can't do this, and so there has to be something wrong with me." Yes. Yep. I do think that, I've spent a lot of time in the self-help and also spiritual world, and that is a w- there's a, there's an idea that we can fix being human. There's an idea that we can fix life being difficult.

31:20There's an idea that there's… And you can't. even at the most basic level, we're all gonna get old, we're gonna get sick, and we're gonna die. Not to be morbid, it's just gonna happen. There's no fix for it, and that's the way life is, and as long as we keep thinking that w- the fact that it's not fixed, we don't know how to fix it, there's something wrong with us, that's where we suffer a lot. And we can be very freed by "Oh yeah, okay, life is difficult.

31:50Of course it's difficult. Yeah. I'm having a challenge right now. Yeah." That's, that is what it means to be a human being Yeah. And I, I was, cleaning my office the other day and came across, a note from a long time ago, which… And all it said was like, "You will always suffer." And I'm like, "Oh, that's terrible." But then I was also like, yeah, but there was a reason that was on there. Or I guess it wasn't, no, it wasn't suffer. You will always struggle.

32:14And that was, even if I fix all of my problems I have today, tomorrow there'll be a new problem. And so it isn't like a, "Oh no, I'm gonna always struggle." It's like, "Oh, I'm always gonna have to be finding new solutions. I'm always going to have to stuff, and it's up to me to choose how I react to that." Yes, 100%. I've spent a lot of time in, in studying Buddhism, and a lot of people sometimes think that there's a bleakness to Buddhism 'cause it starts off with, suffering is a fact of life.

32:46But when I first heard that, I found it enormously liberating. I was like, finally s- first somebody's telling the truth about the way things are." The, the… there is struggle in life. there's also great beauty and joy. we, i- in, in, in Buddhism, there's a discussion of, the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. That's our lives, right? That's our lives. We just want 9,999 joys and one sorrow, but unfortunately… and our lives just f- are flowing between those things, and there's a way to be more at peace with that when we don't resist it.

33:26Yeah, and yeah, 'cause it's all about our own interpretation of events. The, the worst day of our lives might be so much better if we just accept it how it is and, go with it and figure out how to… It doesn't mean it's not bad, it just means that we can make it so much worse It's so funny that you say that because I've joked that the title of my next book is "Just Don't Make It Worse." Because we do, right? we are so capable of making things worse, whether that's the way we react outwardly or the way we react inwardly.

34:09and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about perspective, like how we see the world. We think we see it accurately, but we never really do. There is no accurate view. Every view is influenced by our previous causes and conditions. But the more that we can just be asking ourselves like, "What am I making this mean?" And then what else could it mean? And then finally, like a third question would be, which of those meanings, which of those interpretations is most useful to me?

34:50So I'll give you an example from my own life, right? When I started writing this book, I had so much self-doubt. I haven't had that much self-doubt in a long time because I interview people who write great books. I've interviewed a ton of New York Times bestseller… these people write great. And so I'm sitting down and starting my book, and I'm looking at it and I'm going, "It's not that good. It's not bad, but it's not that good," right? So I'm go- having all this self-doubt about me as a writer.

35:19So I sit down for a day, I write. At the end of the day, it didn't go well. I come home and I say to myself, see? You c- I knew you couldn't do it. You're not meant to be a writer. You don't have the skill these people have. You don't have da, da, da. l- all those people that are bestselling authors, they all went to Harvard and Yale, and you never even went to college," and blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's what I'm making it mean. I could also say, "You know what?

35:48You were just tired today. You didn't sleep great last night. Everybody has an off day. just get back to it tomorrow." Which of those is more true? Neither. Neither of them is more true at that moment. I don't know the future. I don't know whether I'm gonna write a great book or not. I don't know any of that. But I do know that one of those interpretations is far more useful if I wanna write a book, right? And it's not the one that says I can't write.

36:17And so when we realize that what we're doing is making all this stuff mean something, then we can start to question those meanings, and we can then try and say, if I don't really know, right? If it's interpretation, can I interpret this in the most useful way to me?" It's not about making stuff up. It's not about lying. It's not about, positive mental attitude. It's recognizing that we really don't know in a lot of cases. But the brain is never happy with, "I don't know." It always wants to make a meaning Yeah.

36:54I always, whenever I'm really struggling with something, love to fall back on the phrase, "What is the story I'm telling myself?" There you have it. That's it. Yep Ah. 'Cause it's so often I'm like… And then when I'm like, if I like, like doing notes or something and I like write it down, I'm like, "That's a dumb story. I really shouldn't be going with that one." Yeah. And sometimes, look, things seem-- Our interpretations seem incredibly real to us.

37:19They really do. And so sometimes all we can do is just open up a little bit of space, right? Just a little bit of what else could it mean? For me, even if I still 90% believe the interpretation I came up with, if I, 10% of me is "Okay, maybe that's not it," it, the, I can work with that And I think this is also something When we're talking about consistency and talking about, building our systems and all these things, we're also like every day we don't have a consistent energy level or something.

37:55if I had a bad s- night's sleep before, and so if I like, I go out and write and it's it's crap. It's like, what led to that day? Was it a day where I was like, "Man, this is-- I've been having a great time and I'm doing everything," and I was… then maybe I should examine why I can't write when I'm really happy or like what's going on there. But if it's more often than not, it's oh yeah, I couldn't write 'cause I, you know, had two hours sleep the night before and had a k- fight getting the kids out the door and I was just stressed and oh yeah, that, that explains a lot of why I struggled that day.

38:25A-a-absolutely. And that's why structure is valuable but within structure we have to have flexibility, right? W-we have to f- we have to have a way of saying okay… And a phrase I use all the time is that a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing And I rely on this one a lot, because I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna work out for an hour at noon." And at noon, somebody calls me, and the next thing I know I'm on a call for 25 minutes. I've only got 35 minutes left, and I'm like, I can't… I couldn't go to the class I was planning to go to." But then I'm like, you know what? I could just walk for 15 minutes." a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

39:08And that's the way we have to be able to roll with the fact that life doesn't sit still, meaning we can make really good plans, and as the famous, battlefield axiom is, right? they don't survive first contact with the enemy, right? You make a plan and it works sometimes. when I'm working with a coaching client, we'll build a great plan. we'll get really specific. "Here's what you're gonna do. We're gonna go da, da." And then I'll say, "Okay, now what's gonna go wrong?"

39:38And we start working through, "Okay, you plan to work on your novel after the kids get on the bus in the morning to go to school. What are we gonna do on the days that the kids don't go to school?" And then I say, what else could go wrong? what's gone wrong in the past?" And they'll say, yeah, if I don't get a good night's sleep, then it's very hard for me to stay on task." I'm like, "Okay. what do we wanna do on those nights? Or on those days?" The answer might be you say, "You know what?

40:04I'm just not doing anything today. I'm not gonna feel bad about it." The answer might be that you, instead of writing, you just read for that time. you, you think about what's gonna happen, and you can't plan for everything, but we can plan for a fair amount of what we know is likely to come. But most of the time when we build a plan, we're building a best case scenario, and those plans are you know, you're very dis- we're very disappointed by those very quickly Yeah, it's, so quickly where you're just like, "Man, I did not think about a lot of things that are involved in this."

40:40it's like, and especially because the best case scenario is something I came up with that like, it's like I can't fall asleep, I'm just gonna think about tomorrow and have this 2:00 AM like grand vision of what life is gonna be like. It's like, no, that's than unrealistic. Yeah. the other version of that is, the rested, caffeinated version of me comes up with a plan that the after-work, at-night p- version of me has to carry out, right? we have to take that… We have to take, who's actually showing up at that time and what is that person's capacity, not who am I at 9:00 AM, right?

41:18my capacity at 9:00 AM and my enthusiasm to do things is radically different at my age than it is at 9:00 PM. The 9:00 AM me will sign up for most anything. The 9:00 PM me is like, "Nope. Forget it. we're not doing that." All right. we're coming up on time here, so I was wondering if you had any final thoughts that you wanted to leave the audience with? I would just come back to what I said earlier, that change is a skill, right? And that we can learn skills, right?

41:47If I asked you, "Could you get better at playing guitar?" You probably would say, if I practiced at it, I would get better at it." can you get better at, I don't know, pick your thing. yeah, if I practiced at it, I could. And I think that's the mindset we need to take when we, when it comes to making change. I can learn how to do this. And oftentimes we end up, we show up with a lot, with a lot of previous failure And it's important to realize okay, this time can be different.

42:23I'm learning new things. I have new skills. I'm trying a new approach. I'm not the same person that I was. we just-- it's hard not to carry the failures of the past into the current attempt that we don't wanna learn from those, 'cause we do. But we don't wanna limit ourselves. when we start saying, "I'm just the kind of person who…" kind of thing, that's when we come back to change is a skill. It's a skill. I can learn it. I always, with people I'm working with, I say, "All right, let's think of this as a puzzle.

42:56We don't know how to solve it yet. We're gonna keep playing around with moving this thing over here and seeing if this piece fits here and seeing if that piece fits there. But we can solve it." and that's the spirit I think that makes us more able to keep moving in the direction of becoming the people we wanna be, is with that spirit of "I haven't figured out, it, I haven't figured it out yet. but I'll, I'll get better at this." Yeah. And you don't have to learn the entire new skill all at once.

43:27I remember learning how to juggle, where it was like, oh yeah, you start with like just two, and then tossing them back and forth, and it was like a set of s- things. And I'm like, at the end I'm like, "I can juggle now. This is… I wasn't even close when I started." I-- and everything's that way. You can't learn, you can't solve next Thursday's problem today. y- you can do things today that are gonna make next Thursday likely to have a better outcome, but you can't solve next Thursday's problems today.

43:54I c- I can't jump nine steps ahead in my ability to play guitar. I wish I could, but I can get better and do get better by trying. All right. thank you so much for coming on the show. I think there's just so much in here that people are really going to enjoy I hope so. Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for sticking with us all the way to the end, and thanks again to Eric for coming on the show. And also be sure to check out his book, How a Little Becomes a Lot.

44:23But before you go, let's go over this episode's top tips. One, change is a skill you can get better at, not a trait that is set in stone. While it can feel impossible to change at first, it is something that we can get better at. It just takes practice. This doesn't mean that the process will be easy, just that if you keep at it, you can make progress. Two, when possible, make the decision about what you're going to do before you're in the moment of having to act.

44:54By giving yourself a little structure, you're not asking yourself to make a fresh decision every minute. And while you still have to make the choice when the time comes, you've already made that choice at least a little easier. Three, often our plans are built on best-case scenarios and can break down when we hit the real speed bumps of life. So it's important that we remember that a little bit of something beats a lot of nothing. this means that we want to decide the minimum version of what we're doing instead of relying on that best-case scenario.

45:28All right, that's it. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear what you thought of this episode. Feel free to connect with me over at hackingyouradhd.com/contact. If you'd like links or to read this episode's transcript, you can go to the show notes page at hackingyouradhd.com/317. And if you'd like even more Hacking Your ADHD, be sure to sign up for our newsletter, Any and All Distractions, which comes out every other week. In it, I give out my best distractions of the week, be they what I'm reading, what I'm watching, what I'm playing, and everything in between.

46:00I also try to give out a few bits of actionable advice in each newsletter, although your mileage is gonna vary there. If that sounds like something you're interested in, head on over to hackingyouradhd.com/newsletter to sign up. And I also wanna let you know about Patreon, which you can find at hackingyouradhd.com/patreon. You get access to behind-the-scenes content and early access to all the episodes. It's a pay what you want model, meaning all levels of the Patreon receive the same stuff.

46:28Uh, and you can also go check out the Hacking Your ADHD Discord, which you can find at hackingyouradhd.com/discord. And, and also don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/@HackingYourADHD. And finally, if you'd like another way to support the show, the best way to do so is to tell someone about the show, especially if you think a particular episode would resonate with them. Just click the share button on your podcast player.

46:55And now for your moment of dad. I was just laying back and looking at my ceiling, and it's certainly not the best ceiling I've ever seen, but it is up there