One of the most unexpectedly healing things I've done since my ADHD diagnosis is to give my ADHD a name. Meet Dory... Yes... that Dory... the absent-minded fish from Finding Nemo. She's the delightfully chaotic roommate living in my ADHD brain. 🐟💙 Even before I knew I had ADHD, she was always my favourite character. Looking back, maybe there was a reason 😄 Sure, Dory forgets everything, gets distracted every five seconds and has the attention span of... ooh look , a jellyfish! 😂 But she's also kind, brave, fiercely loyal, endlessly optimistic, and has some pretty amazing superpowers that save the day (like unexpectedly speaking whale! 🐋) When I started calling my ADHD "Dory," something shifted. Now, instead of thinking, "What's wrong with me?" I catch myself saying, "Ah... Dory's driving today." That tiny shift matters. It sounds simple, but it's powerful. In ADHD coaching this is used to externalise your ADHD helping to separate the condition from your real identity. This powerful tool creates space for compassion instead of shame, and for me, it's turned many frustrating ADHD moments into something I can smile about. It helps me laugh when I lose my phone while it's in my hand. It helps me forgive myself when I walk into a room and immediately forget why. Because I may have ADHD but it is not who I am. I'm the person learning to live alongside Dory... and she's actually pretty lovable. 💙 Now, whenever Dory makes an appearance, I smile instead of spiralling (mostly). She's still wonderfully chaotic... But she's also part of what makes me, me. And just like Dory... ✨ I can be forgetful and intelligent. ✨ Distractible and creative. ✨ Chaotic and deeply caring. ✨ Different and incredibly valuable. Does your ADHD had an alter ego, a movie character, an animal, or even a nickname... What would you call it—and why? 👇 I'd love to hear from you... Let's see who lives inside everyone's brain! I can't wait to meet them!

We talk a lot in the ADHD space about mindset Reframing. Strategies. Cognitive tools. And I use all of those things. They matter. But the question is... are they enough? I'm going to say no. I've come to believe that if we only ever work at the level of thoughts — if we're only ever trying to think our way through what we're feeling — we're missing the layer where a huge amount of healing actually lives. 💛The body 💛The nervous system that learned decades ago that it wasn't safe to slow down. 💛The muscles that still brace before you've even registered a threat. 💛The breath that shortens when you feel like you might be getting it wrong. You can't think your way out of a physiology that's been in survival mode for decades. So — what do you think? Have you found that mindset work alone wasn't enough? What shifted for you when something different came in? (Asking for all of us. 😅)

It was the change in hormones starting with perimenopause that started unmasking my ADHD. I was more emotional, more disorganized, more exhausted. I found it harder to cope at work, I was bad tempered at home, and carrying more shame than ever as I felt like suddenly I was failing at life completely. If you thought you were falling apart in perimenopause — you weren't imagining it. Here's what actually happens. Estrogen directly supports dopamine production in your brain. And dopamine regulates attention, emotional regulation, working memory, and executive function — the exact things ADHD already makes harder. So when estrogen starts declining, your brain loses one of its key supports. The coping strategies you spend decades building — the ones that let you look functional even when you were white-knuckling it — start failing. Not because you get worse. Because the chemical scaffolding that was quietly propping everything up is being dismantled. A 2025 study found that women with ADHD experience perimenopausal symptoms at nearly double the severity of women without it. And for many of us, it was perimenopause that finally made the ADHD impossible to hide — from ourselves or anyone else. It's not falling apart. It's being unmasked. And now that you know — there is a path forward that doesn't involve trying harder, or managing better, or performing more convincingly. It starts with understanding what was actually happening all along. What do you think? How did the start of menopause affect you and how did you feel?

Gratitude check 🙏✨ Drop ONE thing you're grateful for in your life right now. Big or tiny. (Gratitude is a frequency — let's raise it together) 👇 I'll start in the comments 🙂

I spent most of my life trying to become it. 👉Work harder → be enough. 👉Be more organised → be enough. 👉Stop being so emotional → be enough. 👉Apologise for the thing you did → be enough. 👉Achieve more, explain yourself better, take up less space, be easier to love → be enough. The exhausting, never-ending, impossible project of becoming enough. Here is what I found on the other side of a late ADHD diagnosis, twenty years of self-development, and more shame than I care to remember: Enough was never the destination. 🎯 It was always the starting point. ✨