BITESIZE | Neuroscientist: "THIS is the perfect ADHD morning routine"

Hi ADHD friends. I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas period. Just before we jump into this week's Bite Size episode, I wanted to share some exciting news. My brand new book, entitled Now It All Makes Sense, is available to pre-order. It really is my proudest work and I can't wait for you to receive your copy. I truly believe the tools within this book will change your life.

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You can find the links to pre-order and to join the exclusive ADHD Masterclass in the description of this episode. Thank you so much and enjoy this week's Bite-sized episode. What does the perfect morning routine look like?

Effectively anything that just feels like a little bit of engagement of effort and I understand this is hard. I woke up every day from like 10 years old whenever I got an iPhone and went on my phone. So I appreciate it. It's a difficult thing to do. I do think for an individual with ADHD, it's the single most important thing you could possibly change in your life is how you start your morning because your brain wakes up with this abundance of dopamine and it's like, okay, how can I use this to attack my day?

hunting, find the food or whatever it may be. And then we just like used all of that to open it up inside the phone. If you were to wake up, the best thing I think you can do is immediately go to the bathroom and start brushing your teeth. Just get the toothbrush, start doing it. Even if you feel sleepy, just start doing it because it's going to be something that's effortful, that's going to begin to wake you up and like the idea of having to do it for two minutes is a bit annoying and you get yourself through the brushing of the teeth.

Then slash cold water on your face, then come back and try and make your bed. Appreciate its effort that these kind of things are significant. And then your whole goal is to get outdoors as quickly as possible. Sunlight has a huge impact, specifically the bright morning sunlight on the rise of this dopamine chemical. So interesting. Apart from the phone, what are the readily available sources of dopamine, sort of easy, quick fixes are best to watch your usage of?

And the frame what you always want to have in your head is, is it making me feel really, really good really, really quickly? So something like when you go to the gym, you don't walk through the gym and think, oh my God, I feel amazing right now. But you'll feel good eventually once you've been at the gym for a while or once you've finished. If you take something like TikTok, you'll notice immediately you feel good. Something like vaping is a really, really big one to watch out for because it's super addictive, huge pleasure spikes, which is why you want it. Especially a lot of people might wake up in the morning, start scrolling TikTok and have a hit of their vape, which is fair, but something that's going to be really difficult.

Vaping, social media, you've then got pornography, massive, huge monumental spikes, more than those two, huge spikes, and then sugary food, super significant. A sugary breakfast is going to be something that's really important to avoid.

I just think like, and I might be wrong, but in the history of humankind, I don't think we've ever been able to reach into our pockets and pull out a source of instant dopamine. I can pull go on my phone and I can pretty much guarantee I can go on TikTok or Instagram. And within 10 seconds, I can be hysterically laughing by a funny reel or a bit of content. Do you think social media should come with a health warning in the same way that cigarettes and alcohol do?

100%. I think social media is probably more destructive for the human being than alcohol and cigarettes in terms of the scale of the impact it's having and whilst it's really clear that like something like alcohol and cigarettes immediately can make you feel kind of crap like when they wear off.

The big thing with social media is the frequency of how often we engage with it. And whilst, yeah, you might get drunk each evening, which really is not going to be very good for your dopamine system, social media, you could spend 10 hours a day scrolling it, whereas you're unlikely to just wake up and drink all day every day because it's going to be too detrimental. And with these dopamine spikes and crashes, if you're really frequently always engaging, always engaging.

you're just like burning out the engine. Like if you got in your car every morning, if you had a manual car and you didn't put it in gear and just held down the accelerator, if you did that for a week, the car engine isn't gonna work anymore, you'll burn it out. And obviously that's what so many of us are doing. We're just burning the dopamine engine out. If you get low dopamine levels, you get into this state where you procrastinate, you feel depressed, you can't focus on anything, you get really excited about stuff and you feel really crap, it's like this really volatile place, it's not good to be. What is effort dopamine versus non-effort dopamine?

The big difference is, are you having to engage some kind of challenging hard work feeling in order to earn the experience of dopamine? And it's so important that over the hundreds of thousands of years we were evolving, that whatever created us, God or nature, whatever it might be, deeply programmed into us, the idea of working hard, because it was just not easy. Like, actually imagine sleeping outside every day for 300,000 years. It was a lot of hard work.

So it was designed that if we did things that are effort, eventually dopamine would rise in our brain, it would reward the effort. And now we over the last few hundred years, we invented cigarettes, even something like brothels when they were originally invented. That was like taking the effort out of trying to have sex for someone. And then you have alcohol got invented and then you have social media and you have sugar and ultra process food. And all of these things require

absolutely zero effort for your brain. And then suddenly you have these huge pleasure spikes. And effectively, the effort leads to a slow curve of dopamine increasing. No effort just means massive spike, big crash. After the morning routine, is there any other things people can do throughout the day to get natural, healthy dopamine hits?

Yeah, for sure. One of the simplest way to constantly be maintaining your dopamine levels is with discipline in your home environment. And it's something that those ADHD like myself included, it can be really easy to just put off those tasks and your house gets messier and messier. And you'll know that

Occasionally, maybe when the house gets messy enough, there has been moments where you've been like, all right, I'm going to do it. And then you end up actually cleaning more than you even intended to clean because you start actually getting a dopamine hit off cleaning itself. And individuals that really prioritize it, waking up, making sure their bedroom is organized, making sure the workspace that they're working out is organized, keeping their surfaces clean. When you eat your lunch, immediately washing it up, putting it in the dishwasher, little moments of home discipline is actually going to be something that's constantly raising the baseline throughout the day.

And if you're someone who might do all of that, but then struggle to unwind in the evening and struggle to sleep, is there a routine that someone could adopt as they approach bedtime that will give them an easier time falling asleep?

The biggest thing is understanding melatonin. Melatonin is an alternative chemical here. Melatonin is built by serotonin, one of the dose chemicals. And melatonin, when it comes into us, it creates the deep desire for sleep effectively. It begins to put the body into a state of rest. And in the evenings, evening sunlight is the biggest thing that's going to create that experience. And for most of us, we kind of come home from work and we spend the whole evening inside. That is typically how we do things.

If you go for an evening walk, it's something that's going to be extremely beneficial. It's basically kickstart in the system because our brain's been a long time outside. And when it saw the evening sunlight come, it'd be like, OK, prepare for sleep. And on the other side, the morning sunlight was, OK, prepare for action. So evening sunlight is massive. The other side of it would be maximizing your serotonin, which is all about your nutrition. So things like a high protein dinner followed by a nice evening walk. That's going to be optimal.

Are there any other dopamine hacks that are sort of easily accessible? Someone could do in the house that would help them with their focus? The cold shower thing is very significant. It's not just some trend online. Putting ourselves into cold environments is something that really scientifically has a massive impact on dopamine. Having a cold shower is obviously an annoying thing to have to do. But that is the whole framework of this chemical. It is all about effort. It's not about quick, easy, pleasurable wins like social media is.

If you have your normal shower in the morning, warm shower, if you put some music on when you get in the shower, then once you've washed, wait for like a chorus of a song that you really enjoy to come on, as the chorus comes on, turn it to cold, and just do all you can to stay in that water. Just like fight the fact it's painful, realize that humans are designed to cope with extreme physical pain.

Some cold water on you each morning isn't that bad, relatively speaking. And then what you discover is you suddenly start feeling a little bit more driven, a little bit more motivated, a little bit more focused in the mornings, and that itself drives you to continue to have the cold shower.