With us today is Mattia Maurée and we’re going to be diving into the experiences of living with both autism and ADHD, also known as AuDHD. I was recently on Mattia’s podcast, AuDHD Flourishing, to talk about subclinical autism (which I was diagnosed with in 2022) so if you want to hear more about that head on over to their show, links in the shownotes.
In our conversation today, Mattia shared their story and the insights they've gained through their journey. Our conversation aimed to shed light on the similarities, differences, and unique challenges faced by individuals navigating both conditions.
And just for a little background on the connection of ADHD and autism, we do see quite a lot of this comorbid condition, with about 50% of people diagnosed with autism also getting an ADHD diagnosis (and just as a note, that percentage doesn’t go the other way because of the difference in population sizes, there are a lot more people with ADHD than those diagnosed with autism). Also interesting to note that before 2013 the DSM didn’t allow for a dual diagnosis of autism and ADHD. And that just gives a little insight into how recently the idea of the two of them being intertwined became and because of that there aren’t a ton of resources out there for AuDHD individuals.
So I hope this episode can help start bridging more of that gap.
Be sure to check out Mattia's Podcast AuDHD Flourishing
William Curb: All right, well, it's great to have you here. I really enjoyed coming on your podcast. It's the AuDHD Flourishing podcast. We're here to talk about AuDHD, which is autism and ADHD combined, which is very common and is a complicated topic because there is so much overlap in the symptoms, but also it makes things so unique. And so can you tell me a little bit about what that overlap is like for you?
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, so like a lot of folks diagnosed later in life, I was diagnosed with ADHD first. It's usually an easier diagnosis to get if, like me, if you have a master's, a graduate degree. You know, if you can do things sort of muddle through in life, you usually won't get the autism diagnosis. So for me, getting the ADHD diagnosis first explained a lot, but then after a few years, it was like, why am I still struggling so much with so many things? And why do I feel like my peers are passing by me in every metric and just feel like I'm kind of stuck back here and I can't tell why? Like a lot of times I would look around thinking, OK, I'm doing exactly the same activities or I'm trying the same methods that other people are using and they just don't work for me.
So that's a huge part of my experience is feeling like just autism, just ADHD, or in my case, just complex PTSD or whatever other diagnoses I've garnered along the way. None of them fully explained my experience. And Audi HD for me really does. And I think a lot of the way I experience it, and I hear this a lot from other folks as well, is basically it almost feels like two parts of me want two very different sets of things. Like, yes, there's a lot of overlap and, you know, yes, they affect each other and impact each other. But, you know, a huge part of me wants novelty and interest and a huge part of me wants certainty and for plans never ever to change. So there's this real dichotomy almost in my experience. And yeah, it's just just been a huge part of my journey is managing and balancing that because it doesn't feel good if I just let one side of me completely drive the bus.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. Because I was just listening to someone else use a similar metaphor recently talking about them, feeling like they were in a free-legged race their entire life, racing against people that are just in a regular race. And they have their one side that wants to do something and they have to figure out how to work together with the two parts of themselves to actually get anywhere.
Mattia Maurée: And then the other explanation that's been really been helpful for me since I learned it last year is monotropism. So the idea that and it explains everything about autism. It began as a theory about how can we explain what the medical model doesn't about autism. It's basically a more narrow focus of attention. And most people with ADHD will hear that and be like, oh, no, that's not me. My attention is all over the place. But within an attention tunnel, your attention can still be bouncing around between things that feel connected to you. So what's really interesting, I think, about being very monotropic, which AuDHD people tend to be, is that I can feel like I'm bouncing around a lot. But that's just because I actually had no idea how polytropic brains worked.
And when I started hearing people be like, oh, yeah, no, you can interrupt me. It doesn't matter. I'll just go right back to what I was doing. I'm like,
William Curb: Oh, Jeez.
Mattia Maurée: What? I had no concept that anyone could function like that. And I just assumed my functioning was more or less average. And it's not at all. I'm on an extreme end of the monotropism scale. And there's a quiz you can take online, et cetera. But what's interesting when they've started looking at it so far is that ADHD people are more monotropic than neurotypical people, whatever neurotypical means. And then autistic people are more monotropic than that.
And then AuDHD people are the most monotropic. To me, that's incredibly interesting. Like, what is it about the combination of those two that pushes you toward these narrow attention tunnels, really loving being in flow states, being extremely interest-oriented. It's basically impossible to get myself to do anything I'm not interested in without ADHD meds. I can, but it's a real awful feeling process.
William Curb: Yeah. And it's where we have all those other strategies like involve with like, have to be like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to do this if I don't have the accountability behind doing it. And of course, that leads to a whole series of like, why am I doing things that I don't even want to be doing?
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, exactly.
William Curb: So that's your reasons. It's one of those things like, oh, yeah, this is, why am I even doing this? Yeah, I don't want to do this. And if I don't do it, I was just doing what I was supposed to. But no one is checking in on me to make sure I do it.
Mattia Maurée: I was so blown away when I learned that a lot of people, and by a lot, I just mean the, again, I don't know what neurotypical means, whatever, but in theory, if you don't have an interest-based nervous system, so if you're not ADHD or autistic, you do things, like interest is just one of four or five things that motivates you to do things. And one of the motivating things is just expectation, like thinking you're supposed to do this thing. And that's actually motivating to a lot of people. When I learned that, I was like, again, no, that can't be right. There is no way. But I also have the PDA profile, the very fun, the clinical term is pathological demand avoidance.
The community term is persistent drive for autonomy. And that has been a huge part of my journey because it's a nervous system disability. I like that description of it. Basically, your nervous system going into fight or flight around demands. So it's more extreme than just most neurodivergent people have demand avoidance pretty strongly, like, oh, I need to protect my energy or, you know, no, I don't want to do that thing right now because I'm doing something I like more, right? Like there can be lots of neurodivergent reasons around it, but the kind of extreme version of it that I have, it's gotten a lot better as I've healed my nervous system significantly from trauma work and somatic work and all that.
But it is wild how small a demand can just trigger my nervous system into full-on fight or flight. And that happening regularly is not only destabilizing and stressful on the mind-body system, et cetera, but it just wastes so much time. So that's another term or thing that I tell people to look into if you're just like, why am I struggling so hard? Is that if you have really extreme demand avoidance, I mean, in my case, it was so severe that the constant nervous system triggering led to some chronic illness very young.
William Curb: Yeah, I've been reading about low-demand parenting recently.
Mattia Maurée: I just got the book in the mail yesterday. Yeah.
William Curb: And one of the things that was occurring to me while going through the book was like, man, I need some low-demand adulting in my life. Because I think one of the key proponents there is what we just talked about, like, why am I doing this thing? And for the book, it's like specifically like, why are you trying to get your kids to do a certain thing? What is the underlying need that you're trying to meet? And I'm like, oh, that's also great for like just why am I doing certain things?
What needs am I trying to get out of these interactions or task them to? And then sometimes it's like, yeah, okay, I'm doing the dishes because I really want that space in my house to not be gross. And I want to be able to use our dishes and stuff. And look, there's good reasons there why I'm doing those things. And actually just exploring that why makes it a little bit easier too to be like, oh, I want to be doing this because I have this is hitting my values and stuff.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah. And that's that whole process of making it feel like a choice. That's like the autonomy piece that's so huge for me is I have to feel like it's a choice. Okay, this is a really small, silly example. My partner and I have been making French press coffee. And so when we've made the coffee, then the thing is just sitting there with the beans in it, right? So I don't know, a week ago, my partner said, oh, by the way, if you want, it wasn't even a direct demand. They were just like, I've been leaving this little spatula in the sink that you can use to clean this thing out. And I got so mad at just, to me, that felt like a demand of like, this is how you're supposed to do this thing.
I also have like specific kitchen trauma from my mom. So that's like a whole thing there. But this morning, so I literally, I think at least a week later, maybe even more, I actually did use the spatula instead of doing what I normally do, which is put a little water in it, swished around and just throw that in the trash. And I had to like manage my nervous system reaction around that. I literally, I'd had like anger coming up of like, I'm doing the thing that somebody told me to do. Like that's how extreme it is.
And this happens every day in various forms. And again, like some, there are things that used to be demand avoidance triggers for me that aren't anymore, because I've like really worked with them or kind of found a workaround in my brain. But it's so interesting how little things like that that again, I just always assumed were kind of normal or a part of everybody is typical is a better word that they were just typical. And a lot of people were experiencing them just realizing, Oh, no, this is in fact an extreme reaction that my brain is having. Most people don't experience rage when they do a task in the way someone else has shown them how to do the task.
William Curb: Yeah, I remember when I got my diagnosis, my clinician was like, so do you think you have ADHD? And I'm like, I think this is how everyone's brain works. But apparently I'm wrong. And that's why I'm here. So maybe, but it was such a weird question for me because I'm like, it's weird to think that my brain doesn't work like everyone else's.
Mattia Maurée: Exactly. Yeah. And I was doing stuff at ages 234 that in retrospect were so over the top obvious. One of my favorite examples is one of my earliest memories is we had a game of risk, and I would dump all the pieces out, line up all the pieces in a row by color, and then put them back into their respective boxes when I was like three years old. So I was doing really over the top autistic play that again, if anybody around me had known what that was, would have been a pretty easy diagnosis, pretty young. I was also hyperlexic, which is apparently common.
If you have a fantasia, more common, which I also do. So anyway, there's just all these things, but I was also homeschooled. So I never got any kind of traditional, there was nobody in school to go like, Oh, hey, you, you are struggling with such and such or, you know, having trouble with such and such. And both my parents, my dad is AuDHD and my mom is ADHD. So that was part of why we were homeschooled because they both hated school. So my schooling was very open-ended, pretty much unschooling, I guess is what people, even though they were calling it that, but it's more popular now.
So kind of do whatever you want, pick subjects you're interested in. We didn't really do traditional curriculum. And then I ended up doing an early anxious program for college. So I went to college really young, moved out really young, which was great, except I didn't know until after grad school what was going on with my brain. I kind of was aware of ADHD by the end of grad school. I was like, okay, this explains some things.
But the other piece that I think is worth mentioning is that if you're also quote, gifted again, whatever that means in IQ is awful. But if some academic things are very easy for you, or if your brain can do certain things that are valued in society, that spiky profile, having things where, you know, you're at one end of the bell curve on some stuff, and at the other end of the bell curve on other things like that, the range of standard deviations from the mean basically is part of what indicates ADHD in diagnostic testing.
So I got through school basically through pure adrenaline anxiety, stress ball, like I was so unhealthy, and I had horrible, horrible health problems, because I think in part because of the PDA nervous system, constant activation, because I've often wondered why were my health symptoms so much worse than my siblings? And that's the one thing that's different. Well, and also I was the oldest, so I kind of got the worst of some of my parents in certain ways. They were also really young. So there's that whole thing. They had six kids in eight years, so they weren't going to do a good job. They were not good at it.
And then at the end of college, I actually got diagnosed with bipolar. And I know that's a really common misdiagnosis. I mean, I am non-binary, but I identified as a woman at that time. I know it's really common misdiagnosis. It also ran in my family, but I'm saying that with the caveat of now that I'm looking around, I'm like, oh, y'all might have been misdiagnosed also, you know, looking at family members who might also be autistic.
That was really interesting because the bipolar meds did calm me down. They did help with anxiety to a large degree. But the other thing that was happening was I wasn't bipolar. And I know some people are. So obviously, some people get the diagnosis and they're autistic and they actually have both. That's totally possible. But for me, I was having meltdowns and they were calling that and depression kind of alongside that.
But I wasn't really having the ups. It's more this cyclical energy thing that I think a lot of ADHD people have where it's like, oh, everything's kind of working today. So I'm going to just get as much done as I possibly can for the next 48 hours while my brain is on and working and doing that and then having meltdowns. And part of what was negative about that misdiagnosis, besides just being on lithium for years without apparently needing it, not great probably.
So there was a useful side of guess the meds did help calm me down a bit and it got me into more psych care. So I had a psych team for the first time, which was useful. But then what was harmful was that basically because the treatment wasn't quote working because that's not actually what I had, right? They were treating the wrong thing. Because I kept having meltdowns and kept having these cyclical energy spikes. I really felt like I was unfixable because I was like, okay, I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do and they're not working.
So I must not be fixable. And that particular feeling I feel like is incredibly dangerous for neurodivergent teenagers, adults, et cetera, to just be like, well, this is what they're telling me I have and I'm doing everything I know how to do and it's not enough. So that made me feel that I had a lot of suicidal ideation in that period of time because I was just like, okay, well, I'm not getting better despite everything. And then I actually the ADHD diagnosis helped a lot, but they wouldn't give me meds at that point because I still had the bipolar diagnosis technically.
So that was a very interesting, they were like, well, yes, you have a lot of ADHD traits and like, yes, we're seeing this spiky profile thing, but we can't give you any meds. So I think I took beta blockers for a while, which technically, which was like for anxiety, but that also can help some with ADHD symptoms. So I had a couple non stimulant medications that kind of helped. But starting to reorganize my brain around the neurodivergence paradigm helped me a lot. Because I was like, okay, there are elements of this that are just features that are not going to go away. I don't need to keep trying to fix this.
This isn't just trauma or mental illness. This is how my brain is. And then about five years ago, I had a therapist who has an autistic kid and we kept having these moments where she would either say something her kid did or I would say something and she'd be like, oh, my kid does that. Like there were these. And I think she was doing that on purpose now in retrospect, I think she was kind of trying to get me there. And she suggested I look into autism, you know, I started researching it and I was just like, oh, shit, yeah, this explains everything else that the ADHD doesn't explain basically.
So that therapist recommended a specific neuropsych tester who I think is autistic herself. And she said she's really good with diagnosing not men. Like if she thinks you meet the criteria, she will give you the diagnosis as opposed to just writing it off for all the social cultural reasons.
William Curb: Yeah, that is an interesting piece of getting a diagnosis is that it really matters who is doing the diagnosis of whether or not they have their pre-perceived ideas and stuff. And that's going to influence how they do that diagnosis. So it is important to have people that really know what they're doing.
Mattia Maurée: Exactly. And that they have the cultural knowledge within the autistic community to know that, for example, about one in five autistic people, one of their special interests since childhood has been people and social stuff. And so, you know, like I used to read books on body language, and I learned it in this very bottom up, you know, okay, I see this, that means this is happening, right? I was very methodical about it because I didn't understand what was going on. And I heard people talking about body language. So I like, I read books about facial expressions and books about how the FBI does lie tests.
I'm trying to learn as much as I could about people. I read about poker and how it's just like all these things where I was just super interested in how people's facial expressions and body language came out in various contexts. And I started reading those books when I was like eight years old. So by the time I was in college, I had, you know, some awareness, even if I was guessing wrong sometimes, because also it turns out a lot of the body language stuff is kind of bullshit. But,
William Curb: Yeah, apparently being people are really complex. And the other issue with getting that late diagnosis too is how much you have started embodying your mask because that's a huge piece where you're like, Oh yeah, I've been masking for 20, 30 years now, that's going to impact like if I'm not taking that mask off during the assessment, they're going to be like, Yeah, you're masking really well.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, exactly. I think that's really, really common. I definitely have and do mask. I probably learned masking less than most people because of being homeschooled by neurodivergent parents. And my parents don't mask well, my dad especially, he's just a weirdo out there doing weird stuff, freaking people out. So that's kind of what I was raised with. And my parents were proud of being weird in a certain way. So there were things that I probably would have masked more if I'd had people modeling that more.
William Curb: Which is great because masking not always the best thing. But can't help you fit-in in certain situations, which it would be nice to have.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, it did make me mostly unemployable. It was very, I had a real hard time getting through job interviews without giving red flags. I had to like learn what not to say because my parents really didn't prepare me for seeming like a normal person at all.
William Curb: Yeah, there's like all those things, you're like, look back, man, why would I do that? I mean, why wouldn't I do it? But also, I can see why people would not like that. Yeah, I think sometimes I've like gone way too far in the other direction where I'm like, well, I'm going to present to myself to these people as if I have zero personality.
And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, that's not good either. So one of the interesting things we talked about before this too is on your journey, the different meds you're taking. And you were talking about how the currently the ADHD meds you're taking are helping with autism symptoms. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, yeah. So this is something that I haven't talked about much publicly yet, because I've actually only been on stimulant meds regularly since like last fall. So, you know, less than six months. And they've been very, very helpful to me. But I also was like, okay, I want to really sit with this for a while and not necessarily give a bunch of details about like my personality. personal current medications, for example. But the thing that I've really, really noticed, and especially with the regular use as opposed to sort of sporadic or as needed use, is one of the overlaps between autism and ADHD obviously is difficulty with executive function.
And it's different for every person. So that's why it's so tough to really figure out exactly what each person needs in terms of supports, because there's executive function covers so many things. But autistic folks have trouble with executive function as well. And so what I've noticed is the ADHD meds help with executive function kind of across the board, whether it's coming quote from autism or from ADHD, whatever. I don't know that I could piece that apart from my own brain, but I've been incredibly grateful that I have ADHD and that the meds are available because there is no medication for autism. And that's one of the things that I needed help with was the executive function tasks. And it's really interesting talking to my autistic friends who don't have ADHD, where sometimes the things I would think of to suggest I'm like, Oh, right, this is something that's easier for me because of meds specifically. So I'm not going to suggest that.
And then the other thing I really notice is around actually, it's probably partly the PDA stuff, the extreme demand avoidance is that some of it is energy management, and just trying to protect my own energy so that I have energy to do what I want to do later and not just waste all my energy on stuff other people told me to do now. And literally having more physical energy with, again, stimulants helps me, like even if it is say, wearing off by about the end of the work day, and I'm tired later, like that's fine. If I know I can kind of get through what I want. So that that autonomy piece, I think makes a big difference. And the other big one I noticed is transitions between tasks, which is again, maybe under the executive function umbrella.
But for me, that part has been one of the hardest things to fit into kind of regular life is needing a lot of transition time between things and potentially needing a particular warning isn't quite the right word, but kind of, you know, knowing what's coming that often isn't available in a lot of situations. But the ADHD meds make it so the transitions are easier, they don't feel like they take as much energy. And because I have that little additional piece of energy, and because the transitions are easier, if plans do change, it doesn't feel like my whole day is ruined. I can just figure it out and move on in a way that I just couldn't before or that took an enormous amount of emotional regulation skills before.
William Curb: Yeah, it is that change in plans is like always because the more you've built it up in your head, and you're like, I'm gonna go do this thing, it's gonna be great. And it's just like, I remember well before I was doing anything to manage my ADHD at all, like a time was just having like a meltdown about I was gonna go make breakfast and the pans I wanted to use were in the sink dirty and I had to clean them and that just didn't work. I was like, I went and lied down and just like, I can't do any of this.
I'm like, and it was equally frustrating being like, not understanding why is having a sink, a pan in the sink, such a detriment to me being able to do something. That is just so frustrating to like think back. I'm like, yeah, if I had known all this stuff, I could have been like, there are things I can do to make it so that this is not going to ruin my day.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah. And one of the things I've worked on in therapy quite a bit is grieving what feels like a lot of lost time because of not knowing those things and because of just being in the spin cycle for such a huge part of my life, just feeling terrible and feeling really stuck a lot.
William Curb: Yeah, it is one of the things with being an neurodivergent is when we don't know, it just feels like we're wrong. And it can be really dark for us. And it can just be like, why is everything so hard for me? And I just see other people like, oh, yeah, that guy just sat down in the library and did work for two hours straight and came out and he was done with the project. And I'm like, I went to the library for four hours and I got 10 minutes of work done.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah. And that for me is that huge piece around how much energy and time my brain needs to do stuff, which again, learning about monotropism really pushed me in that direction. Because I already kind of knew that about myself. I was like, well, okay, if I have trouble with transitions and if I need longer to do things, sure, maybe it's useful to block three days for a big project. And just know this is all I'm doing for these three days. But that didn't feel interesting enough or novel enough sometimes.
That's the other problem. But learning about monotropism has really helped me realize, oh, okay, it's not that nothing else can happen or that I need to just literally sit here and try to think about this thing for eight hours a day. It's that I need to do what I can to help my brain sort of stay in the attention tunnel, even if I am doing other things, even if I'm taking a food break, I need to minimize the decisions that I'm making around food and clothing and hygiene, for example, on big project days for myself.
Again, being an extremely monotropic person, I need to just kind of minimize everything else that my brain feels like it needs to deal with. I have all these filtering rules in my email. So a lot of email just doesn't come to my inbox anymore, it goes to specific folders. Because I don't even want to see it. And then when I log into my email, I use an extension that blocks the inbox. So I actually don't see the inbox either. I log in and I can just search for what I'm looking for.
So that's the kind of thing where, again, you wouldn't think to do that. But once you start decreasing the inputs and decreasing the demands on your attention, I have not reached a point where I've taken away too much. Every time I decrease what's in my schedule or every time I decrease demands, I just keep going, oh, this feels so good and so relaxed. And I just want more. I just think.
William Curb: Yeah, that sounds great.
Mattia Maurée:Yeah. But it's hard to move toward. It's not how our world is oriented at all.
William Curb: Yeah, not. It is amazing how the, like, I look at stuff for the podcast, I'm like, oh, how am I going to make this grow? And I'm like, do I want to? Like, what? Like, what?
Mattia Maurée: Yeah.
William Curb: Like, I'm like, I don't want it to not grow. But it's also like, oh, I don't have to do all these things that I don't, that's not the goal for me.
Mattia Maurée: I've had that exact same thought about my podcast because I've had a lot of organic growth since it started. And that's great. And I'm like, of course, I want people who need it to find it, right? Because I get messages all the time from people who are like, this is the first time I've heard my experience described. That's amazing. I want everybody like that to find it. But I don't want to market it for no reason. And I don't want growth for no reason. So like, like you're saying that, that why of like, why am I doing this? What's the actual problem I'm trying to solve as opposed to just doing what everybody says you're supposed to do in this situation?
William Curb: So one thing I want to jump back to that you mentioned just a minute ago is that this energy management idea, which is something I keep coming back to in everything I'm doing is because it's time management is great. But when I'm like, oh, I'm gonna put all these things in my day. And then when I get to them, I can't do like I'm exhausted, executive function is down, it's frustrating. Because I'm like, Oh, why can't I do these? Like, oh, because it's not just doing things at the right time, it's doing things or it's not just having things on my calendar, doing them scheduling them when I'm going to be able to do. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how you were doing your energy management.
Mattia Maurée: Yeah, great question. Big question. One way I because this is something I talked to clients about quite a bit. So I've thought about how to describe approaching it, which is basically it's an experiment. There is no endpoint. As far as I can tell, again, I haven't reached one. I've done a ton of little, tiny detail, you know, little work optimizing my own energy. And it doesn't end. So knowing that there's no endpoint, what we're looking for is trying stuff that works for you in the short term. And then if it keeps working in the short term and you like it, maybe you turn it into a long term thing. But the reason I'm putting it that way is because if you have ADHD and you know that your brain might just throw something out in six weeks, it does not make sense to put a ton of time into a system, even if you're also autistic, and you love a system, and you think a system is going to fix your whole life.
But if you spend two weeks making the system, use it for four weeks. And then four weeks later, your ADHD brain is just like, I'm done. Never again. I'm never going to look at this ever again. Like it's just it's a waste of time. And we've all been in that cycle. So, what I've found works for me really well is experimenting. So kind of having an idea and I'm like, I think this might work and trying just the easiest, tiniest version of that possible for as long as it's interesting to me. So that kind of keeps the novelty side going. And then on the back end, I use the word reflection, but whatever works for you, I have a regular check in with myself, a kind of journaling prompt basically to reflect on what I've been working on. So if I'm trying something, then I will put a reminder in my calendar for two or four weeks out to reflect on how it went.
And what I'm doing is I've slowly been pulling out all of this information based on what's actually working, as opposed to just what I think might work or what other people have told me to try. Because the other thing I really want to say to ADHD folks is if you hear an idea that somebody says will work for you, and your brain goes, that's not going to work for me, don't try it. Your brain is correct. Most of the time there might be an exception here and there. But for the most part, if your brain is saying, eh, no, because you've tried something similar and you just know it's not going to work, don't waste your time. But is there something within that idea that might work for you? Because you can kind of make up your own thing or pull out what might work.
Try it at some point, reflect on it. And again, the reflection part for me is it's not required, but it has helped me figure out, for example, I actually was just writing about this this morning, two to four hour work blocks on one project work really well for me for a big project. So for example, this morning I had a two hour work block scheduled and I thought the first task that I wanted to get through, which was going to pull in notes from these various sources, was just going to take me like half an hour. It took the whole time because it turned out I had written a lot more on this than I realized and I was trying to summarize some stuff and then I was like, now I'll just copy and paste. So it took that amount of time because I had to make decisions about the project within that. It just took longer than I realized.
So if you're always scheduling in really, really short blocks and just trying to get things done as quickly as possible, which I think is a pretty traditional scheduling advice, it's like schedule a shorter amount of time to force yourself to get it done faster. That just stresses me out. So that's something I found that works for me is scheduling longer blocks unless, and this is where the cyclical energy comes in, if I'm on a day where my brain's just like super extra on or chatty or just all over the place, then I basically scrap my schedule for the day and I just let myself do, I just go full interest based. I'm just like whatever I want to do in the moment, I will do it and then I'll just note what I've done.
So I kind of keep track of what I did and that's part of my own system. So I can go back and look at that and go, oh look, once a week, often on Wednesdays, my brain is in this mode, like midweek, where my brain just can't anymore. So it's almost like I need a couple days of deeper work, a day of just fully following my interest and then I can get another day or two of work in later in the week. But I can't just do super scheduled intense work every day, my brain won't do it. So, and again, noticing, okay, I'm looking back at my literal calendar and what I've jotted down of what I've actually done and I love tracking what you've done instead of what you intended to do. Also, I look back and I go, oh look, I'm working in like 15 to 30 minute blocks max all day, I'm just all over the place.
But that's fine. I usually get a bunch of little admin stuff done on those kinds of days. So I also think about this larger question of how your cyclical energy works in the span of a week or a month or however long you want to look at it and go, especially for example, if your hormonal cycle affects what you're doing, which it absolutely does, and going, oh look, for two or three days a month, I'm just in total brain fog. Okay, well maybe you can plan ahead for those to be, if you have to work those days, maybe you can have those be the days where you just do the boring catch up tasks as slowly as you need to and they don't take any extra brain energy. It's a really good question because I think thinking in terms of energy management and working with the system that you have is so much more kind and so much more effective for yourself than trying to just force yourself into some existing paradigm.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. It allows me to like evaluate, yeah, I do have those days where I'm not going to be doing things and with just the time management approach, I would end up feeling bad that I'm not checking things off my to-do list or getting things done. It's like, but I didn't get enough sleep. I'm not doing my best work, but I'm like that and it's trying to, like I used to like, I'd try and force myself to keep writing on something and I'm like, not only did I not get anything done, what I did get done, I can't even use because it's terrible.
Mattia Maurée: It's terrible, exactly. No, and that's a really simple metric I love is if you're not enjoying the process and the outcome is bad, don't do that. If you're enjoying the process and the outcome is bad, sure, fine, that's actually probably pretty useful as a writer, for example, just writing regularly. So if you're enjoying the process, cool. Or if you hate the process, but it turned out well, so like, you know, all the terrible stuff at the end of a project to actually finish the project and then the project's done, but you like it, great, okay, we got there. But if you're not liking the process or the outcome, that's a full on waste of time.
William Curb: Yeah, and I want to reduce that. So let's look at how my energy is making me do things. Yeah.
Mattia Maurée: Oh, one other thing I've been experimenting with in my own energy management is, again, kind of from the monotropism lens, okay, so like this Monday, for example, I had three different calls, and they did have little breaks between them, but they were very, very different types of calls, and they were with people. So I was like, okay, I'm going to be in people mode, but on very different topics in totally different areas of my life, three in a row.
So I actually held the afternoon after that, because I was like, I don't want it to just fill up with clients and then have like four clients in a row at the end. Be like, because what was happening was I would get kind of little mini burnout feelings, kind of at the end of the week, or even sometimes just the end of client days. And I was trying to figure that out. And I was like, oh, it's in part the task switching, the just switching between. So I had these very different calls, I blocked off the afternoon, and I just told myself like, hey, if I have work energy, I can do work, but I'm not deciding what that is, I'm just holding this time.
And doing that periodically, just holding space in my calendar that's not scheduled, but also that nobody else can schedule into, just to kind of check in and be like, hey, we just did some hard stuff. How did that go and actually have time to process? I ended up not doing any more work after that on Monday. And I usually don't do that. I usually would have just kept going. But I was like, wow, I'm really glad I held that time because I guessed correctly, that's the experiment part, that this was going to be a hard day.
William Curb: Yeah. I remember when I first set up like my calendar to help with like scheduling interviews and stuff. I was like, I'm going to give people all available free time that I know.
Mattia Maurée: No, no, no, no.
William Curb: And then I was just like, wait, why am I scheduling interviews at the most inconvenient times for me? Oh, I don't have to do that. Okay, let's just choose when I want to do this and put that in there.
Mattia Maurée: Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how, because there's so little good information out there about ADHD in particular, but I would say, I mean, there's lots of good stuff about there on ADHD. There's a decent amount of good stuff out there on autism, but there's still a lot of, you know, there's a lot of stereotypes still kind of blended in and like the paradigm of disorder, you know, around all of these things. So a lot of the stuff out there, the way I've been thinking about it is there's a lot of 101 material out there, sort of like the intro class, just the very basic, this is what it is, this is what it might look like, like that stuff exists. I feel like what I'm creating with the ADHD flourishing podcast is kind of the 201 level, like gather some basics in there, but it's kind of like, okay, and now how do we actually put this information into action in our actual lives?
How does this look in practice? And what I do in a lot of my one-on-one work is really more the 301 to 501 level, the like end of undergrad through master's program, basically like, how do we actually make an awesome life, even if you still have meltdowns sometimes, which I still do. This is not about reaching some magical point where nothing is ever hard ever again. But what I kind of want to put out there is that if you're having trouble finding that sort of 201 and up material for you, the like putting it into action, and then figuring out how it really works in your life, and then moving on toward mastery of what you love and actually building a career that works for you, et cetera, all these things, it's not you. This stuff is actually really hard to find. This material is really hard to find out there. And it's in part because you couldn't even be diagnosed with both ADHD and autism, which I think until 2012 in the US.
So this is very new that people are even really thinking about what do these look like together. And if you're listening and you're like, oh, I'm definitely not autistic, but you're struggling a lot all the time. Will, this is something you said when we talked before that like, if you just feel like everything is so hard for you, you know, there might be something else going on. And I think it's worth looking into because the stereotypes about autism are such that most of my autistic friends at some point said to me before they realized, and I'm sure I said this too, oh, no, there's no way. There's no way. I could be autistic. There's no way because I just didn't know what that looked like. And I didn't know how many of my little funny childhood stories were actually really classic autistic child things.
William Curb: The way that ADHD is portrayed in pop culture is terrible and inaccurate, but is way better than how autism is portrayed in pop culture.
Mattia Maurée: Exactly. Exactly. And acknowledging, obviously, the frame from which I'm speaking, which is a very much speaking hyperlexic person who presents, who has been able to do things with, I mean, I certainly have had and needed supports, but, you know, there's obviously a huge swath of the autistic community that I'm not at all speaking for or representing. Well, I'm not representing anyone besides myself, but, you know, I want to always add that, that there's like a huge amount of experiences. But if all you think autism is, is non-speaking, you know, that's just one way that it shows up. Anyway, if you're really struggling, if you're struggling all the time, then life is hard. And also societal, right? Like there's all these larger cultural things happening that, you know, I think it makes sense to be anxious and depressed at this point. Like that actually seems like a reasonable response to the world. Yeah.
William Curb: I was talking to my therapist about it. I was like, yeah, I'll like say something. He's like, yeah, that's yeah, there's no reason that you shouldn't be worried about those things. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think people get a lot out of this and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Mattia Maurée: Thank you so much. And where I would like to send people is audhdflourishing.com. That's a-u-d-h-d-f-l-o-u-r-i-s-h-i-n-g.com/hello. So audhdflourishing.com/hello for podcast guests to come check out just a super simple overview of what I do and send you to some of the top podcast episodes that I have.
William Curb: Awesome. And I'll have that link in the show notes.
Mattia Maurée: Thanks so much.
This Episode's Top Tips
Monotropism is our tendency to narrow our focus and is a characteristic of both ADHD and autism and can lead us to miss things outside of this attention tunnel. By learning about attention tunnels, we can work on creating more effective coping strategies that take into account our narrow band of focus.
Simplifying one's environment and commitments to minimize overwhelming stimuli and demands can help maintain focus and reduce anxiety.
Regularly reflecting on what works and what doesn't can help tailor our personal strategies for managing symptoms and challenges, acknowledging that what works may evolve over time.
When seeking a proper diagnosis, it is important to find a healthcare provider who is knowledgeable about the nuances of ADHD and autism spectrum disorders to make sure that you’re getting an accurate diagnosis. Who is assessing you can make all of the difference.