E27 - Recharging - ADHDifference

Julie Legg and Jel Legg chat about ADHD and Recharging – the need to re-energize our ADHD energy battery. The method used to recharge batteries really doesn’t matter, but the outcome does.

Living with ADHD often involves a constant search for dopamine, which can be exhausting; taking breaks helps prevent burnout and emotional dysregulation. They highlight “planned” and “unplanned” downtime, from taking quiet Sundays to micro-breaks during a busy day, and underscore the importance of activities that allow them to relax. Recharging looks different for everyone. They stress that it’s okay to seek personal downtime, especially as it ultimately benefits their relationships and productivity.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Recharging is Essential: Regular recharging is crucial to prevent burnout and emotional dysregulation for those with ADHD, which can arise from a constant search for dopamine and high levels of mental activity.
Physical and Mental Rest: Recharging isn’t just about sleep; it includes mental downtime to avoid exhaustion. Activities that don’t demand much mental energy help ADHD minds recharge.
“Me Time” and Boundaries: Taking time for oneself, even if it appears antisocial, is vital. Recharging can involve alone time, simple pleasures, and activities without deadlines or demands. Establishing routines, like reserving certain days or hours as downtime, helps create a rhythm of rest.
Planned and Unplanned Downtime: Planned recharging includes activities like gardening, light exercise, or intentional relaxation days. Unplanned breaks are also valuable, as energy can suddenly drop, making it difficult to accomplish tasks. Accepting and responding to these “forced” breaks is part of managing ADHD. For those who can’t set aside a whole day, micro-breaks, like a quiet drive or taking five minutes away from work, are helpful in managing energy levels.
Mindfulness and Presence: Simple mindfulness practices, like people-watching or enjoying nature, provide calming, low-pressure ways to recharge. Activities that feel relaxing rather than like tasks allow ADHD individuals to let go of pressure.
Communication and Flexibility: It’s okay to ask for personal time, as this recharging ultimately supports family relationships and personal productivity. Flexibility in recharging methods, such as mixing up activities, is effective and refreshing.

LINKS

Julie is the author of THE MISSING PIECE: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD (Harper Collins, 2024)

TRANSCRIPT

JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52.

JEL: And I’m Jel Legg, diagnosed at 55.

JULIE: Welcome to ADHDifference. In today’s episode we’ll be talking about recharging and how important it is for us to recharge our ADHD batteries. It’s … how you recharge your battery, the method, actually really doesn’t matter but the outcome does. And, if we think about a regular battery unless it’s regularly recharged it will go flat when you least expect it. So keeping on top of it would seem like an ideal thing to do but it’s often better or easier said than done.

JEL: Yeah. So ADHD – dopamine deficiency, so we seek dopamine. That’s the key, one of the key things if not the key thing, that separates us from those folks that don’t have ADHD. But what we do share in common with other people are bodies, so regardless of where our mental recharging needs to happen our bodies need to recharge too. So that’s a good thing I think to keep in mind through this chat is that we’re not superhuman. Just because we’re constantly running around looking for dopamine hits doesn’t mean our bodies can keep up. So sometimes our bodies will tell us we have to recharge. They just won’t keep going anymore. They’ll just flop. The muscles don’t want to move they just need to recharge. And we’re not talking about sleeping here, we’re talking about waking up on a Sunday and thinking “I’ve got so much to do. I mean I’ve been … these projects and I can progress another day,” and suddenly you just mentally have no capacity to face doing what you’re doing, no matter how much of a buzz it is and how much you want to do it. Whether it be go out and play that game of football, whether it be continue building that project you’re working on, or whatever you’re doing, or renovating the house, all sorts of different things. So, the idea that our minds can just stop and not seek dopamine seems counterintuitive but it isn’t if we go through some thoughts we’ve had on it and why.

JULIE: I agree with you. It does sound counterintuitive. I think first of all, this space of recharging, it’s not as frantic you know, it’s quite a calm space, a time where we just get to literally … it’s re-energize ourselves really, and a lot of it involves ‘me time’. And for people that don’t have ADHD, or for partners of, that don’t fully understand where our brain is at, it can be or can appear to be selfish or quite antisocial just withdrawing from the hectic life. Just for a moment, just to in internalize some things and you know, without deadlines and without people demanding anything of us. And without us demanding anything of us too. It’s quite a … it’s quite a peaceful space.

JEL: Yeah, and it doesn’t, it’s not something you can categorize and put in a box: on Thursdays we go shopping, on Saturdays we clean the bathrooms. You can’t necessarily be regimented with it. It can sneak up on you when you least expect it and suddenly your brain just doesn’t want to do anything. It just needs to blob and go from what we call … we sort of divide the world into producers and consumers, we tend to be producers. Most of the time we’re producing something whether it’s writing, whether it’s words, or books, music, or building, or creating or … it’s a whole creative process. But when we have those down times we don’t create, we consume. And that’s when it’s brilliant to just turn on Netflix and blob out for a few hours. Or, I love actually Facebook for this, and I’ve mentioned this before with the various inane groups I’m in, they just feed me information. And I don’t have to think about it. It’s not even reading the online newspaper, and I’m a bit of a news addict, because that’s processing sometimes quite complex large geopolitical sort of situations where I’m thinking about it. Whereas Facebook’s brilliant because it just serves me up pictures of inane things that I’m interested in. I don’t have to think about too much. So we can’t necessarily plan when these things happen. That said, that said, over time we have trained ourselves to regard Sundays as sacrosanct. They’re days when we really do switch off from all the busy things we’re doing and try to do something else. It’s not always blobbing on a Sunday and this weekend ironically, for the first time ever, and it is Sunday as we record this … we’d usually record this on a Saturday but we just hit a brick wall yesterday and we flipped it around and made Saturday our Sunday, where we/I went in the studio, not with the intention of achieving anything but I haven’t been in for a month. So there was lots of catching up to do with upgrading software and so on, and learning a couple of new things, and that to me was quite a low dopamine driven exercise. It was quite relaxing. So now on Sunday I’ve woken up with a lot more energy than I normally would have ready to spend the afternoon probably painting because the sun’s out.

JULIE: As I mentioned earlier too, it’s not necessarily the method of how you recharge but the outcome and so for some people that could be reading a book. Often for me, I have you know, that sounds ideal, but for me personally I have to think a lot and concentrate when I’m reading and so I don’t use that particular method. It could be just listening to music. It could just be sitting under a tree being mindful and listening to the birds, whatever it takes. And/or and it could be exercising. Some people may re-energize going for a run. To me that sounds exhausting but for others, we know that exercise is really good for ADHD and dopamine, but some people really might find with the sun on their face, and/or taking the dog for a walk.

JEL: Yeah, I was just going to say. I think pets are a fantastic one. We don’t have pets currently. I imagine when we’re older we might have a dog when we’re more settled. And we’ve had a cat, a couple of cats over time, and I can see taking the dog for a walk. Or just going in the garden with a ball and playing with a dog, and stroking the dog, and just having some time with a dog, paying it lots of attention. I can really see that working. [Absolutely.] There is a comparison. So I worked for a number of years with a big karate organization in the UK and the athletes involved in that, and they were many of them, and the people training the athletes, the coaches, all competed at very high international levels. And what I learned from that because I’m not a karate person, I’ve never really actually physically done it, I just worked with them, is some people would advocate training seven days a week. They’re obsessed with training and if they didn’t train, they just felt they would fall behind and not reach their peak. But the very best of the coaches taught me, or I learned through them, that they would insist their athletes would take two days a week off. A good two days a week where they didn’t train and didn’t do anything because if you keep training, and keep training, you never give a chance, your muscles a chance, to recover. So you increase the likelihood of injuries and you can. You don’t reach your goals quicker because the process of how it works. And I always remembered that and always thought I think our minds are like that. Our minds are constantly on the go and so this counterintuitive thing is, how do you sit there and say with an ADHD brain, you can just switch it off on a day and not be seeking that dopamine? You’re not in control of it. That’s the whole point. Well I don’t know that we switch it off. I think it’s a bit like say you’ve got an injury, you’ve pulled a muscle and it’s an injury. You’ve got two choices with that injury on a given day. You can find somewhere comfortable to relax and just let it heal and it doesn’t go away, it’s still there but it doesn’t agitate you so much. Or you can get up and you can walk through it, and go off and carry on doing things, and then wonder why at the end of the day you’re moaning. You’re in more pain, and it still hurts, and you probably slowed down the recovery and the healing. So I think, whether this is right or not, I think my ADHD brain of capable of having a day of not seeking dopamine but it doesn’t mean the ADHD goes. It just is I’m giving that injury, that pain, that thing, less chance to send signals to me to react in a way that sends me off seeking dopamine. So it’s still there. Let’s not pretend you can switch it off for a day, can’t make it go away.

JULIE: No and I think it’s quite tiring. It’s quite tiring. Our brains can go at a million miles an hour and I think sometimes it just needs a rest. And I was thinking it’s all very well for us saying “Hey half a day on Sunday and that’s a day of give you old brain a rest,” but there are times when it’s not that easy. And so I wanted to talk about you know, sort of micro breaks or times that you can re-energize in the company of others. Now I say this as a parent of young boys. Not anymore, but at the time I remember coming home from work, and they’d let themselves into the house but not long enough to cause any damage. But, you know, that’d be firing questions at me and “I’m hungry” and all of those things. And I remember thinking “Ah I just … no, I’ve just walked in. Can I … I haven’t even put my keys down yet,” and I remember that being quite a stressful time, arriving home. And so I made a point of, this was undiagnosed, made a point of using the drive time from work to home as my downtime. And I just wouldn’t think about anything except for driving. I wasn’t trying to break any speed records. I just used that time to psych myself up really, that it’s okay, re-energize and when I get through the door, I’ll give all my love and energy to the kids. And then there were times of course as parents, when kids are running around the only time you’re likely to get some downtime is if they are too. And so I ended up flopping on the floor with them and watching a movie because we were still. And while the movie may not have been of any interest to me was beside the point. We were together and all those demands of parenting were pushed aside for an hour. And that was a really nice way.

JEL: And that’s totally true. My entire life, with or without kids at the other end to come home to and family life, I’ve always found driving to work in the morning relatively stressful because you leave as late as possible to try and get there and not waste your own time. You get there on time. It’s very stressful. You know, skipping … now I wouldn’t say skipping the lights, but timing them and getting grumpy with people who didn’t go fast enough. But the drive home was always far more relaxed. Until such a time at various points in life, I really wanted to maximize that time outside of work to often develop skills to change into a different career. So you’re running two jobs, careers, at the same time. And that’s when, yeah, you sort of … you can push. [Your downtime was just as busy as your work time really, wasn’t it?] Yeah. You’re rushing to get home to get on to something, and stay up until midnight knowing you’ve got to get up at 6:00 or 7 the next day. It’s burning the candles at both ends. Now it’s all very well for us to sit here in our 50s talking in a certain way, but we’ve been through our 20s and 30s when we were very ambitious and didn’t really create a lot of downtime. Didn’t take those moments because we were driven. And we still are driven, it’s just with you know, from our perspective yeah as you get a little older and circumstances change you do begin to have the maturity or the experience to find you need to give yourself a day off a week. No matter how inefficient it sounds, it can actually help you repel yourself forward faster. It’s not always possible when you’re younger and you don’t necessarily see it. And we’ve been guilty of that for years. Oh good heavens, I remember you used to stay up to 1:00 every night building that super big website once didn’t you, and then get up to go to work and be a mother. You couldn’t do it now. You’d burn out if you did it now.

JULIE: Yeah yes. So people re-energize in different ways and there’s no right or wrong, whatever works for you. And sometimes you need to mix it up because what may have worked last week probably may or may not work again for you this week. So just to have a little, a few little recharging tools in your tool belt will help, but there are different ways. For example, some women in the book explained their situation. And they would just find they just need to lock themselves in the bedroom, you know “Partner please look after the kids just for a bit,” just to … just to be, make sure that the noise was minimal, that they had absolute control over their downtime. And it might have been just scrolling on social media but it was their chance. And so we’re not talking about days to recharge. At times you know when you’re at work you might for 5 minutes an hour, if you can make it, just to even to walk out outside and feel the sun on your face. Or walk around the office to move, or just to do something different, rather than inanely staring at a computer screen if you’re in the office. But just capturing little moments and take those re-energizing wins when you can.

JEL: They’re the planned moments. Up until now we’ve talked about the planned moments but of course we don’t always get to plan when those moments are. And this is why sometimes I think we wake up on a Wednesday morning and we have no energy and we can somehow blag our way through the day if we’re at work, or whatever, or whatever our circumstance is, and achieve very little and get just get nothing done. And you know, you can’t beat yourself up over that. It’s just your brain refuses to engage in the way that it normally does. It needs to rest.

JULIE: But just like a battery you know what I mean? A rechargeable battery otherwise you’d bin them and buy a new one. But you know if you don’t recharge it will go flat. [Yes.] When you least expect it and it’ll be very inconvenient. And when your energy is that low, what’s going to happen? It’s your emotional dysregulation that’s going to flare up, your impatience, your impulsivity it’s yeah it’s not a good … it’s not good to be that flat. And you know, and burnout for example, when you’re just running on adrenaline and dopamine all day long, for years and years on end. Yeah the body’s going to go “mmmm, no.”

JEL: Basically, if I were describing ADHD, now I look back on my entire life with it and going forward, today and going forward, if I would describe it to someone I’d say “It’s very tiring.” It really is. I can’t imagine not having ADHD so I can’t … I can try to but I can’t to be honest. But I would describe it as really tiring because when you’re aware of it, and when you’re in tune with it, and when it’s there present and it’s driving you, it consumes a large amount of energy looking for the dopamine hits and then falling down and needing them, and feeling drained, and then back up again. So we often talk about this thing which I can’t do, I can’t do meditation. I’ve tried it but I get bored. But this mindfulness, I guess I do meditate by blobbing out and zoning out and as I said, you know, I’ve said before for me it’s just “Feed me lots of inane rubbish.” No, I mean it’s not that. I like it. It’s interesting. But feed me stuff that just relaxes my mind and that’s for me where yeah social media can work actually. And I’m not someone that takes it at all seriously. It’s just it … there are ways, but this mindfulness is just calming the waters. And so I can see how mindfulness, listening to birds, sitting under a tree, or meditating, absolutely can see how they work. It is being present in a situation but not responding. Just almost putting a filter on, just a … you know. And so Facebook may feed all sorts of interesting things jumping all over the screen, but I’m not responding to it. I’m zoning out really.

JULIE: I just thought of … I just pictured myself in the veggie patch which I must do next week, I’ve got to plant my seedlings out. Any which way, when I can go into the garden to recharge because I’m pulling up the parsnips, and checking the silver beet, and getting rid of a few snails, and for me it’s just there’s no particular speed in which I need to achieve that. It’s just really nice and I can recharge. Yet exactly the same thing with pressure becomes a chore. When I need to go out there and water. I need to go and do this. You know, all of a sudden that becomes … the same function or the same action in two different scenarios. One can be stressful and the other one can be re-energizing. Yeah it’s really interesting.

JEL: I was thinking as you mentioned earlier about going for a jog. I can, I used to jog a bit when I was younger and I can see how jogging and riding a bike and going for a bike ride could work. Because for me it works spending about an hour and a half, two hours riding … there’s a ride on mower and lots of grass to cut. But I have a little routine and a certain direction I have to go in to be efficient and actually I find in that time, I do blob out quite a lot because it’s a repetitive process. There’s not a lot of thinking involved and you can’t have a conversation, you can’t really listen to music too easily because it’s such a noisy old thing, but it works. [But even that too …] It’s quite relaxing in a way mentally not physically, but mentally, yes.

JULIE: Yes, it is if you’re doing it at your own pace. [Yeah.] Now I tell you that there’s a thunderstorm happening and that there’s going to be a …

JEL: That’s different then. It’s the relationship to the same task. [Yes, exactly, then it’s stressful, isn’t it?] Yes. Actually I used to cycle to work and I used to, when I was a young man in my late 20s, I used to cycle a ridiculous amount. It was 26 miles a day, which is about 40 km a day there and back, and that took an hour and a half, maybe two hours. I can’t remember each way but boy, that was a really good time. There were lots of country lanes and there was hardly any traffic and much to think about, but that was a really good way of mentally zoning out so I get that. Yes recharging the batteries.

JULIE: Yeah so it’s not agitating our ADHD. It’s just no pressure, no deadline, no guilt. You’ve just got to work hard on that. It’s okay to recharge. It’s okay to do it. It’s okay to have ‘me time’. It’s okay to ask for ‘me time’ too if you’re in a family unit or with a partner. It’s okay. And if you explain why you need it, that doesn’t sound like a terrible ask either, you know. And you’re going to come back recharged. You’re going to be smilelyer. You’re going to have the patience to spend more time with your family and partner.

JEL: I think that’s yeah, if you’re really struggling to get off the treadmill and the … if you’re really trying to get something done and you’re struggling to get some downtime, it’s going to take weeks to get it done you know, just trust us that if you take half a day or a day off and properly recharge you’ll come back faster and more efficient. And so you’re actually one step behind, two steps forward. You’ve got to avoid this burnout. And it’s so easy for us to fall into that place. There was another thought we were talking about, yeah sometimes, there’s an old … every week I seem to find an old expression which comes from my/our parent’s generation so it goes back a long way, but I always grew up with another expression which is “A change is as good as a rest.” And I always thought that was an odd thing as a kid, but as I’ve become older I realized it, that really works too. So if you’re stuck in a space where you’re doing the same thing all the time sometimes, and this is again probably the opposite to what we’ve been saying for the last 20 minutes or so, doing something different even if it’s not just sitting and doing nothing, can be just as refreshing. The expression “A change is as good as rest” I think comes from the idea of in the 19 … I’m guessing 30s 40s forward, a lot British families had structured holidays in Britain where they could go and do something that was full of activity. I’m thinking the Butlin’s actually. And I’m pretty sure it comes from that idea that you would work work work, week in, week out, you get a week’s holiday and you take the kids and off you go to Butlins. And there were 101 things to do every day, everything you could imagine. And then when we used to go away as kids on these holidays, we’d come back and “Did you have a nice holiday?” My parents would say “Yeah but I need another one now to get over that one,” because they were worn out. But really it’s that huge change can sometimes recharge you. So, it’s just doing something different and that kind of leads to the question if someone says to me “Right, you’ve been working hard all week now what do you want to do today? Do you want to blob or do you want to go to a theme park?” Oh it’s really a struggle because you go to a theme park you’ve got all this dopamine hits, all these things going on. It’s a change and it can actually be relaxing but, at some point, you’re going to have to have that blog time. And as Julie rightly said, if you can’t find a day for it, or you would struggle to even think of spending a day doing it, find it an hour here, an hour there and those moments, yeah? I love that one when you come home from what you’ve done, you’re in the car for half an hour or an hour, and that’s you put the radio on and you … we can’t switch off too much because you’ve got to concentrate on driving, but you come home and buffer. There’s the word I was trying to think of. Having these little buffer zones between two activities. Yeah, I can definitely remember even as adults going on holidays, especially when we took the boys away. You’d come home knackered. You’re entertaining them, and playing games all the time, and doing things.

JULIE: Yeah, interesting, in different ways. We’ve talked about exercise too haven’t we, and maybe a casual stroll with the dog might be someone’s idea of recharging. Going for like a proper run might be another but the same could also be said for socializing. Yes. You know, and we’re not you know, we’re not necessarily talking about going to a rave, but if you spend a lot of time by yourself or in your own space, sometimes it’s really nice just to pop out and socialize. Even talking to the checkout person at the supermarket, stopping on the street and having a natter, or leaning over the fence and chatting to a neighbour. Sometimes that change also is re-energizing too, just to have a human conversation as well.

JEL: Another good one I think is people watching. We both like people watching. So on a nice day if you go to a cafe and treat yourself to breakfast or lunch or something, try to make sure you sit outside and just watch the world go by. And you don’t have to overthink about anything that’s going on in your life, your job, your work, your family, anything. Just sit and go “Oh, they look happy. Oh, he’s not talking to her. I bet there’s a grump on there.” It’s just inane. It’s like watching a soap opera but it’s not so intense. It’s just watch the world go by.

JULIE: Again, it’s kind of this distraction which we often talk about. It’s distracting yourself from the busyness and yeah, and the hectic side of the ADHD by doing something else, yeah.

JEL: Because in the peak of ADHD when it’s, you know when you’re really aware of it, it is very tiring. That’s something I’m repeating I know, but yeah, we get that. ADHD is tiring.

JULIE: And you know, usually we around other people particularly, we’re really high energy and well, we can’t help ourselves. And we’ll be busy busy busy, having a great time, and then go home and *sigh*. And sometimes we’ll over-commit too, won’t we. And we’ll say “Yes, we will go to that barbecue,” and it was a great idea at the time. And then as soon as we’re there, if we haven’t already cancelled, come home go “Oh gosh, now I need some time out just to recover from that.” So it is this energy level, not just a busy mind but yeah a physical energy, as you alluded to earlier.

JEL: There are ways of doing it. Either you can choose and initiate that and find strategies, or it will just relax and you don’t get to control when that is. It’s usually on a day when you’ve got to get a lot done at work. It just goes “Opppps, no thank you. Shutting down.”

JULIE: Shutting down indeed, in fact given the day, I do believe we probably need to recharge today as well. So, from us, thank you for listening. This is ADHDifference.