Welcome to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast! Today I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Tracy Otsuka, host of the ADHD for Smart Ass Women podcast and author of the book by the same name.

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Tracy was one of the first voices I discovered on my own ADHD journey, and her strengths-based, neuro-affirming approach has been truly transformative. She’s a former lawyer who boldly celebrates the brilliance often overlooked in ADHD while being refreshingly honest about the challenges.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why ADHD is an identity problem, not just a productivity issue
• Exercise supporting and sometimes replacing medication for managing symptoms
• The power of finding your “sweet spot” where executive function challenges disappear
• Revenge Bedtime Procrastination and the most creative solution I’ve come across
• The 43% of ADHDers with excellent mental health that nobody talks about

Chapters

0:00 – Introduction to Tracy Otsuka and her work

2:51 – Personal impact of Tracy’s podcast and book

4:02 – Finding Tracy and her programmes

4:41 – ADHD as an identity problem and building on strengths

5:46 – Ideal self-care practices

6:19 – Exercise and medication experiences

8:13 – Morning routines and dopamine

11:26 – Reading, hyperfocus, and slow dopamine

12:13 – Gardening, tapping, and somatic practices

13:12 – Sleep and managing bedtime resistance (Revenge Bedtime Procrastination)

15:20 – Strategies for easier evening routines

18:55 – Advice for younger self and understanding ADHD

21:07 – Self-expertise and navigating medications

23:42 – Following interests and creating meaningful work

24:51 – Music, piano, cello, and doing things your way

26:25 – Singing, family, and supporting creativity

27:29 – How you can find Tracy

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I can’t wait to introduce today’s guest. She’s someone who has helped me enormously on my own ADHD and now AuDHD journey. Hers was one of the first podcasts I found when I started going down that rabbit hole.

The very fantabulous Tracey Otsuka, host of the ADHD for Smart Ass Women podcast and author of the book ADHD for Smart Ass Women.

Her podcast is really working with the brilliance that is often overlooked with ADHD. She’s very bold, very dynamic, former lawyer, and really confident, honest about the challenges, honest about the disabling aspects, but really it’s probably one of the most strengths-based neuro-affirming approaches I’ve heard.

And I just love her guests. She is wanting to draw awareness to the 43% of ADHDers with excellent mental health. So I hope you enjoy our interview.

I’m really looking forward to talking to her. And I hope that without any kind of toxic positivity, without any negating of the struggles, you too will be able to own your challenges, know that you deserve support for your challenges and make space for your brilliance. Let me know what you think.

Welcome to Episode 85 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. Every Tuesday, I share new episodes helping trauma survivors, ADHDers and AuDHDers take better care of yourself, create a life you don’t need to retreat from, and help build a world in which everyone feels safe, welcome, and loved, able to thrive. So literally working with your nervous system, your energy, and it’s a very holistic approach.

You can subscribe if you haven’t already, and you’re very welcome to share. I do a lot of free content because I know not everyone can afford one-to-one work. I’ve got another group event coming up, and there’s always the Sole to Soul Circle.

But if you check out selfcarecoaching.net, there’s information about the book, more about the podcast, loads of free resources around different areas and conditions. And you can also visit the www.thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com. I hope you enjoy today’s episode, and thank you for listening and watching whatever you’re choosing to do. So welcome, Tracy Otsuka.

I can’t believe I’m talking to you because you are such a huge influence on me befriending my own ADHD and now I understand AuDHD brain. This is the first time we’ve spoken, like we’ve just had a brief chat now, but I’ve listened to so many of your episodes, your book, and I recommend it to so many people. I mentioned it in the Irish Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, an article I did about late diagnosis, and I love your strengths-based approach.

I love that you don’t gloss over the challenges, like you’re human, we’re all human, but even the idea that, is it 43% of ADHD is experienced good mental health?

No, no, not good, not good. Excellent. Excellent mental health. And no one ever talks about that. Why have I never heard or read about this other than that one article? Actually, there’s a few articles on that one study.

Yeah, I absolutely love it. So I’m so grateful for your work. Where can people find you and what are you working on at the moment?

Probably the easiest place that they can find me is on our brand new app called AOK Mind, and you can find it in the App Store or Google Play.

Wonderful.

And there’s tons of free resources there, so a lot of the trainings that I’ve done over the years are in there.

You also have your patented programme. Do you want to mention that?

I do have my six-step patented programme. We call it Your ADHD Brain is AOK. I think my camera’s a little crooked. And so I don’t believe that ADHD is a productivity problem. I believe it is an identity problem. We’ve spent our entire life trying to be who they want us to be at the expense of figuring out who we really are. And so the reason why this is so important is if you can build that foundation of what is it exactly that you value? What’s truly important to you? What are the strengths that are just natural born? You can’t help but practice them. You’re practicing them now. What are the talents that you’ve built skills around and turned into superpowers? What of the many passions? Because that is one of our challenges. We have sparkly syndrome where we try this, we try that, we try little bit of this, then we go down here and try more of that. And so it can make us feel like we’re all over the place. And then of course, our purpose. So if you can figure out what that sweet spot is, that is your foundation and do work in that sweet spot.

You will have none, if not very, very few of the executive function challenges that you have in most other areas.

Yeah, wonderful. And if you were to think, because I know you’re a great proponent of the things that you talk about exercise and the things we can control, even when they might be more challenging, what would be your ideal self-care practices, both in terms of like basic self-care and that uppercase S, the highest, wisest, truest part in your spiritual practices, and also collective care? You’ve mentioned your group, but what would be your ideal? So my ideal and I try my, there’s certain things that are non-negotiables and you know, the number one for me is exercise. Unfortunately, and I know I have developed this reputation. I’m not sure how that I am against medication. I am not against medication at all. Are you kidding me? If I could use medication for the things that are difficult for me to get done, like anything to do with numbers or frankly, memorising anything, I would use medication in a heartbeat. It does not work for me, however. And so when things don’t work for you, you have to develop other workarounds.

And so I’m so appreciative that medication didn’t work for me because if it did, I may not have gone out and developed the other workaround. So what we know, number one, my number one strategy is OK. 20 minutes of exercise at 70% of your high heart rate studies have been done about this is as effective as a course of Adderall and Prozac. Even if you are taking medication, it is going to make your medication work better and there are no side effects. So I work out every morning. I used to work out in the evenings.

I’ve always worked out. There was something that my brain just knew I felt better. Um, so I’ve always worked out, but I used to work out in the evening.

And when I discovered that I had ADHD, I realised, OK, I need to change this up because I feel like my brain is like an airplane on a runway and I need to get it off the runway. And what gets it off the runway first thing in the morning is dopamine. That’s, you know, what’s going on with our brains.

We don’t know is that we make, we don’t make enough of it, or is it that we process it differently? They don’t know for 100% certainty what it is. And so I know I’ve got to get that dopamine up in the morning. And if I can do that, everything is better throughout the day.

The first thing I do is I literally get up. It was hard initially, but at this point I have trained my brain (neuroplasticity) to the point that I get up in the morning and I’m like a robot. I never thought in my head, I don’t want to do this. It’s cold. It’s, it’s just so odd, but I think it’s because I know this is my medication and if I don’t do it, I’m going to feel bad.

I would say it’s that, and then getting it out in nature. So I will do, we have two dogs, Teddy and Mo and I will take a walk with my husband. And then if I get up early enough, I really like to do some sort of reading in the morning rather than picking up my phone and scrolling, you know, which is fast dopamine, which 15 minutes later makes us crash.

It doesn’t help us, versus slow dopamine, like reading a book where it’s a little hard to get into it, but you know, hyper-focus once we’re interested, we’re locked in and then we can’t put it down. I read, I’m not a fiction reader at all, but a friend of mine who I adore wrote a fiction book. And so I thought I’m a crappy friend. If I don’t read this book, I did not want to read this book. I had no interest. And I picked it up at 10:30 on Saturday morning, hyper-focus. I finished it at 3:30 in the morning. You know, but it was because it was so well-written and it was so interesting. The Covert Buccaneer, by the way.

I was going to say, do you want to plug the book in the author?

It’s so good. I wish I had it sitting here, but I don’t, it’s called The Covert Buccaneer. And it’s kind of this dual timeline where you’re talking about the present tense, which is really kind of, it’s a story about her life. She’s a lawyer that fought for caregiver rights. And then it also has, she found this manuscript from her great grandmother. No, was it a great, great grandmother? And who was a suffragist, suffragist, is that how you say it? You know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

And so, you know, we do things like that, right. Where when we pop in, it might be hard to start, but then we pop into hyper-focus and granted I spent the whole day doing that. I never, ever, ever do something like that. Not for fiction. I mean, not for nonfiction and certainly not for fiction, but there was something about, I was like proud of myself. I was like, wait a minute, I can do this.

So again, it’s about interest, right? We have ADHD brain is a brain of interest. When we find something that is interesting to us, even if in our mind, we’re like, I don’t do fiction because the last two fiction books, the last one was Anna Karenina. It took me eight months to finish it because I had to, you know, because I’d forget what I had read and I was just honest to God bored.

Those are the three things that in an ideal day, that is how I start my morning out. The first two are non-negotiables. The third one, it’s when I can get up early enough, we have daylight savings time flipped back.

I have an extra hour so it’s been a little bit easier, but the downside to that is I can never get myself together before 9:30 in the morning because it’s, and I get up early, you know, but it’s just all of these things that I need to do to make sure that when I show up for someone like you, my brain is working, you know, maybe not as best as it can, but a lot better than if I didn’t do it. Yeah.

And, what about like kind of later in the day or like once a week, like, is there anything else that you would love to fit in?

I love to garden. Again, that’s nature. And I don’t know what it is about gardening, but that it is one of the few things that I can do and I’m not thinking about other things. I don’t know why I I’m just not, I’m just in it, you know, it’s, you know, it’s somatic kind of all about somatic therapies and when I’m struggling, I would say my number one thing is tapping. Yeah.

I do. Yeah. It’s fantastic.

So, what if you could only do… this feels evil because I depend on many myself and it’s like, take any of them away. Like, I start with like, kind of, I’m not going to do all I’ve done in other episodes, but all the things I’ve trained in, they’re all essential to me. They were all to save my life before I knew I had ADHD.

Yeah. If I were to be evil and say that one thing, what would that be? The one thing out of all the things that I’ve mentioned. You know, the other thing I need to mention, because I was such a sleep denier, I don’t need sleep.

I literally wake up… most people, they wake up at 5:30 in the morning and they’re going to get up at six. They’re, they’re thinking, Oh, I want more time. I am literally, I don’t want to go to bed.

And I don’t, I, so if I wake up and I wake up early, I am the kind of person who it’s like, Oh, please don’t make it too, too late. I mean, don’t make it too early because then I’m going to have to go back to bed again. I just, and I don’t need sleep.

So I thought I didn’t need sleep. Right. And then I heard that the quality and quantity of your REM sleep is directly proportional to your lifespan. And once I heard that, I was like, Oh crap, you better start paying attention to this, especially, you know, as we’re aging, as we’re getting older. So I would say sleep is so important. I’m still not perfect, but I am so much better than, you know, four or five hours a night, which I was doing for years.

Yeah. And what helps? Cause I know it’s really hard. Like sleep is one of my specialisms.

I used to be an insomniac as a small child, but I also know with the hyper-focus I can get obsessed with like reorganising my closet in the middle of the night or working until three in the morning, just because I love what I do, but also a lot of different angles to what I do. What helps you? I have reminders on my phone, like time to stop work, Evie Cat? Cause I use the rescue cats to illustrate polyvagal theory.

And it’s like, I have to do it as a question mark to not have the pathological demand avoidance and like Time for bed, Evie Cat? at 11. And like, if I can, and then I might read, Oh, like do lots of things, but the friendlier I can make it, but there’s still that like teenage and toddler part of me, like, no, I want to do all the things. Revenge, bedtime procrastination.

Right. Totally. A couple of things. I, it’s about removing the resistance. Right. And so we know for our ADHD brains, if we can make something fun, challenging, social or urgent, we can get it done.

Let’s scrap urgent because that does not help our nervous system. Yeah. One of the things that I just hate doing and it prevents me from going back to the bedroom is taking off my makeup and washing my face and brushing my teeth, flossing.

And I just hate all of that. So what I find is if I can do it throughout the night, it’s much easier for me to go to bed. So I have, you know, toothbrush, you know, those wipe things I have, you know, cleanser, in our guest bathroom, because that’s actually the bathroom that I’ll use, you know, if I’m sitting on the couch and I’m reading, or if I’m watching a program or whatever.

And so whatever you can do to remove the resistance. So I’ll grab one of those wipes, I’ll bring it into the family room and I’ll be getting rid of, you know, the first coat while I’m sitting there, just anything to make it easier. And then the other thing I did for Additude Magazine, I did a webinar for them on Revenge Bedtime Procrastination.

And the first thing, when I heard about how important our sleep is, the first thing I did is I thought, OK, how can I make it fun? And so I have an A L E X A, do they have those in Ireland? The Alexa. Yeah. Yeah.

Mine will go off. So sorry, I don’t, I realised why you were spelling it out, what it is, right? Yeah. You’re trying to not activate it by saying.

It’s a nosy little thing.

Yeah. And so what I initially did was I thought, OK, Cinderella, you know how she has to get home before midnight. Otherwise she’ll turn into a, or the, I guess the carriage will turn into a pumpkin.

So I played a game with and I set up my A L E X A to play church bells. And so minutes before I, so I am not, and you know, if I can get to bed by midnight, that’s good for me. So at 11:50, I set off the church bells and that was the cue to get up off my seat and to start, you know, closing windows, locking things.

And, but I had to be out by, you know, by 12 o’clock when the clock struck midnight and I would find myself running around the house, like laughing at myself, but it’s kind of what you were saying, right? You have to make it fun. Yeah. And I, I only had to do it maybe three times and it kind of got in my brain that, OK, you know, we’re going to be in bed by midnight.

And sometimes I get bad and I start slacking, but then I remember, OK, no, this is what serves you. And you really have to pay attention, right? Because we forget how we feel. So when I go to bed late, how do I feel in the morning? Usually I’m not able to do any reading.

I’m running through my workout. I’m running through the, you know, the walk with the dogs. And so things just feel again, it’s all, and you know, this, if anyone knows this, it’s all about nervous system regulation, right? So if you can start your day out calm and feeling in control, it’s always going to work better than if you’re running through everything, just trying to tick it off of a box.

Yeah. I love it. And, um, what advice do you have for younger you? What do you wish you’d known earlier? What advice do I have for younger me? Well, I wish I knew I had ADHD.

A couple things. I wish I knew I had ADHD. I wish I knew that the ADHD brain was a brain of interest. And so maybe that’s why I shouldn’t have started studying dentistry in college. Oh, wow. So you went from dentistry to law and then this.

Yeah, because I didn’t know. So, you know, I was, I have a tiger mom and a tiger dad, my father’s Japanese American, and my mother’s German. And, you know, we got up, we were required to get up every morning at 6am to play an hour of our instrument.

And if we didn’t - classical instrument, of course, I hated it. You know, I just absolutely hated it. But I was raised, what was the question you just asked me? What you wish younger you had known, like what advice you’d have? Oh, OK.

So the instrument is an example of, OK, that’s what my parents wanted for me. That is so not what I wanted for me. But I didn’t know what I wanted, you know, given the choice today, I would have said, OK, you want me to do something...