He's founded around drug free ADHD, and he'll be doing presentation followed by q and a. He's absolutely incredible. I I I've had the great privilege. So I've done been meeting with all our presenters. Previously, someone I've known for a long time. Someone gets for the first time, I get to have a private one to one conversation. I have to say, like, no not downgrading anyone else's picture, but I loved my conversation with Joseph more than I did with anyone else. Like, he presented me with ideas that I'd not really heard before, and I think we're both able to happily debate and have different perspectives and actually quite enjoy the the challenge, and I really, really did. And and I.

Yeah. Honestly, it was great fun. So you are in for an absolute treat. As before, go to globaladhd.com. Go to click on Joseph segment. You can put questions in there. We do also have feeds from most of the social media channels, so we can see comments. So if you've got comments to add, put them in, and I'll I should be able to pull questions from there. But the only way to be absolutely sure is go over at adhd.com. The other thing to say is we do conferences differently. Right? They're free, but donate if you can because we're not putting barriers between information and those that need it, and we think that's really important. We do that with almost everything we do. It absolutely could like, it is ruinous for us financially.

We do this with ADHD Australia, but honestly, we need donations. So please consider donating. Go to globaladhd.com and donate. It's the only way we can do the work we can do, the advocacy we can do, and the change we're trying to make and put this conference on. So thank you. Right. Had to do that, Joseph. Welcome.

Good afternoon. How are you doing? Great.

I can hear you loud and clear. Wonderful to see you. Like, I have, like, I have admitted that yours is my favorite.

That's just a way to blow up the little ego there just before we get started. I enjoyed the chat.

I think we both did. Right. It's over to you. I think that if you've got a presentation, need to share into the.

I'm just gonna be talking free flowing. Okay. Fair enough. Well, not it is planned. Don't worry. I know my offbeat waffle may scare you. I'm not gonna be doing that. That's fine. You know, it's interesting that Henry mentioned about school. Am I yeah. So it's very I thought I might be talking to you, Henry. No. It's very interesting that Henry mentions about schools there because I had an absolute nightmare at school. I mean, I left school at 16 with four GCSEs, and I think my highest grade was a c. I can't even remember what that was in. I genuinely haven't looked at those results or even really thought about them so much until perhaps just now. I couldn't sit still. I just was the only thing exciting about school was getting in trouble.

It was the only thing that could keep my attention. I wasn't scared of the teachers in the slightest, and therefore, was a a troubled kid and wasn't paid any attention. I ended up leaving that school and going to a college, to do music. So that was really the only thing I was really fascinated in. And the teacher there, she just immediately understood that the kids in the class would be different. Now I can't remember her ever using the words neurodivergent or ADHD or anything like that, but she understood that it was quite likely that creative children would need to learn in different ways. Now for one reason or another, I actually started a few days late. I remember very vividly walking into the classroom and.

Expecting rows of chairs because I'd I'd gone to a very traditional UK Victorian type school, if you will. So I expected the exact same thing except rows of chairs and tables and absolute silence. So it's my absolute shock when I open this door and see all the way around the outside of the room are chairs, but they're not full of kids. Some of the kids are in the chairs, probably about 15% of them. Some were lying on the floor. Some were in the windowsill. Some were just moving around all over the place. And I was like I said, I was a little bit late as well. So I was like, surely, we we're all gonna sit down in a minute, we're gonna listen to the teacher. But from that moment on.

For the next few years of studying music at that college, the teacher, Janet, never forced us to sit when we didn't want to and allows us allowed us to learn in the way that we learn best with her support and the support of other teachers around her. And that was the first moment that I really realized that I needed to do things very, very differently. So but the problem with having no GCSEs and a BTEC in music is it's not that's not gonna get you a job, unfortunately. So about 19, 20 years old, I was floating around working in cafes, and I ended up doing this very stereotypical ADHD thing, which is having a grand idea and vision for the future, which was to create a marketing agency. Now I have absolutely.

No experience in marketing whatsoever. So this was just a delusion, really. So I go to one of my friends and say, look. Should we start a marketing agency together? He says, yes. We end up designing a logo for the cafe that I was working in. And one thing leads to another through what becomes obsessive hyperfocused, total addiction, really, to the process of building this business and underlying that, a deep fear that had no qualifications to fall back on at all. The business actually works. We moved from rural Derbyshire where I grew up to Manchester, opened an office, got several employees, worked with these massive clients like Patagonia, Adidas. We even worked with the NHS for a while. And then.

Even at this point, I had not been diagnosed ADHD. It seems so blatantly obvious that I had ADHD in hindsight going back, the schooling, the way that I learned, the hyperfocusing, the obsession and addiction to things. But it wasn't until a very, very important day in my life, which is the 08/11/2016, that began my journey to getting diagnosed ADHD and was the very beginning of my journey to creating this company, drug free ADHD. And I'll just tell you a little bit about it from what I can remember. So I just remember opening my eyes, looking to my right and seeing my mom sat there, and then looking to my left and seeing my sister sat there, and I could hear beeping.

And it wasn't it didn't take me very long to realize where I was. I was in a hospital. And my mom gets up from the chair, and she just comes over and grabs my hand and just says, Joe, you've been in hospital for a few days. You've been out cold. You had five seizures in twenty four hours. Nobody knows what the problem is, but that's not the worst news of all. Unfortunately, you're about to be wheeled down the corridor for a lumbar puncture into your spinal column check for meningitis. Unfortunately, that did happen. I go and get checked. Fortunately, it wasn't meningitis, but still nobody could work out the problem.

And then my father, who had been in another country, came back and arrived in the hospital, and he took action straight away. He he moved me out of the hospital and took me to a specialist neurologist, on the edge of Manchester, somewhere in Cheshire. And within five minutes, the neurologist worked out the problem. He said to me, do you drink caffeine? And I said, yeah. I drink probably 10 coffees a day, something like that. He says, okay. I think I know the problem. Says, you've been drinking so much caffeine for one reason or another, which we hadn't got into at that point, that your brain literally did not know it was tired. So, effectively, when you drink caffeine, what it does is it blocks.

A hormone called adenosine, and adenosine tells the brain that it's tired, which is why when we drink caffeine or ingest all sorts of stimulants, the brain just doesn't register that it's tired. So and in small doses, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Coffee is a perfectly healthy thing to drink in moderation. Problem is, I wasn't drinking in moderation. I was drinking bucket loads of it. Anyway, he says, I think you need to obviously cut that instantly and make some really big changes to your lifestyle. Because what I've not told you yet is that in the years running up to those seizures, I was working literally every second that I was awake and partying whenever I could. And part of that job meant partying quite a lot.

So I really wasn't sleeping. I was working constantly, and I burned myself out, basically. So I'm going get some therapy because I thought that might solve the problem. And we spend an hour talking about my childhood and talking about things that I've felt anxious about or when I might have been depressed and things like that. And it it feels good. I get to the end of the session. I'm feeling pretty good. And I stand up to walk out the door, and the therapist just stops me before I walk out the door. And he he he looks at me and goes, do you think you might have ADHD? Or I think he might have said, have you ever thought that you might have ADHD?

And I said, honestly, no. I'd never thought about it ever. And he goes, I recommend you get diagnosed or go for a diagnosis, go and get screened. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I do go and get diagnosed. You know, I hate to admit this now because this is eight years ago, but it was quite a quick process back then. And I then go and see the doctor. I can't even really remember exactly who I spoke to, and he said, okay. We're going to prescribe you this medication. And I didn't really think anything of it at the time, so I took it home and well, got the prescription, took it home, and then I called the neurologist because I just wanted to double check with him what his opinion was on me taking this medication.

And I said, look. I've been diagnosed with ADHD, and the neurologist goes, well, that that makes sense. He says, well, I've been prescribed these stimulant medications for it. And he looks well, he doesn't look at me because I'm on the phone, but he just says very sternly, do not take that. I said, why? He said, look. You've had really severe seizures that knocked you out for multiple days from caffeine. These stimulants are very strong. You do not wanna be taking them. Now I'm just gonna caveat this a second. This is specific up to my experience and what happened to me. So me saying, that the medication is going to give seizures is does not mean that it will for you. So that's definitely not what I'm saying. The other thing is my genuine.

Even though I run a company called Drug Free ADHD, my genuine belief is that if the if you want to take medication, if you think that it's going to help you and the benefits of those medications outweigh any risk of those medications, then you should take them. So and I can get into that again in a minute because that's a very, very specific statement to make if the benefits outweigh the risks. And what I mean just quickly before I get into it later is ADHD comes with risks. So if the risks of ADHD to you in your life are greater than greater than the medication risks, then it's a fairly wise decision. If you can cope or manage without medication, perhaps the risks are not worth it. But that is a completely.

Personal choice. And I would even argue it's not a choice for your doctor either. It's a choice for you only. And, unfortunately, that means doing a hell of a lot of research yourself and really learning about what the risks really are, not from someone talking on screen like me who may have an agenda or someone, a doctor who may have only been looking in one direction and has a you know, at the end of the day, they are scored and marked on their ability to medicate or to treat, but not necessarily looking into the long term. So it's completely personal. But, anyway, I get this news. Turns out I can't take medication. So what do I do?

I speak to my GP and say, look. Is there anything else you can do for me? And they're like, no. This is the only thing we can give you. I was like, okay. So I cannot take the medication according to a neurologist, but you and I'm looking for more support from you, and you're not able to give it to He says, no. I just can't. Okay. Fine. Then it gives me some guidance to go and look at some supplements or something like that. So I then begin taking all these different supplements, and nothing really seems to work, to be honest. I mean, maybe I feel a little bit more awake, maybe a little bit healthier perhaps, but, know, you never know how much placebo plays an effect in that. And.

I just begin trialing all these different things for the next couple of years. And then it it didn't really work, but then one thing really did work. Like, it changed my life, this thing I'm about to tell you. So my wife and I were in Georgia in Eastern Europe, and it was just at the end of winter. And I had been reading about the benefits of cold exposure for, boosting focus, for example, and amongst many other things. And I thought, well, perhaps this could work for ADHD. I'll I'll just try. So I take a cold shower for the first time. And even though it was absolutely excruciating, the first one I ever took, bearing in mind in Georgia in winter, it felt like someone had just turned the lights on inside my head.

So I vividly remember walking into that bathroom very sluggish and all but this really weird ADHD thing we have where we're both sluggish and low energy, but also frantic in the mind, which I don't think many non ADHD people would understand. So I was feeling very much like that, and I had been for days. And I come out of the shower, and bear in mind, it was only a few seconds, maybe twenty, thirty seconds. I came out full of energy, totally alert, and with the noise in my head. It was still there. It was still there, but I was better able to handle it.

And that is a really important thing to bear in mind with managing ADHD in any way is that we don't necessarily need to make the voice or the noise in our head quiet down. We could just learn over time to handle what it's saying and handle that it's noisy. It's it's a hell of a lot more prudent strategy, I would say, to look at it that way rather than having the expectation that one day the mind will be quiet because I don't even think for many neurotypical people, it's quite like that. So.

Anyway, I take this cold shower, and then I I think I need to do this more. And I've become, in typical fashion, addicted to it. I say cold showers every single day increasing to three, four minutes in the cold. And as I continue to increase, I realize I'm more and more alert, and it's lasting hours. Like, I'm so awake. I'm so alert. And I find some research that shows that people who've spent a fair amount of time, to be honest, in submerged in cold water, so not actually in the shower, their dopamine could boost by up to 250%. Now, controversial, but that is very similar to the dopamine increase you would get from several recreational street drugs. So it it cut there are no risks to that in the cold water. So you're getting this enormous.

Boost in dopamine. So it's taking you from someone who's really struggling to get started to someone who's getting started without even realizing they have. But it it does other things too. It's proven to boost norepinephrine by as much as 540%. I thought, well, you know what? It's great to put some numbers to it, but I don't really care, what the numbers say. I know it myself that I feel fantastic when I do this. And that then led to taking cold baths, cold ice baths, and and beyond. So the first in three very, very core fundamental tools in my drug free ADHD method is cold exposure. And I'm gonna just tell you now how you can get started with it in a very simple way.

You can do this from you could do this immediately after this talk if you want, where you could start tomorrow morning. So just take a hot shower as you normally would. No nothing different there. And just before you're about to get out, start to take deep breaths in and out. Fill the lungs and then breathe out very gently through the mouth just to calm yourself down, ready for about for ready for the cold to hit your body. Then turn around and just turn the cold fully on. Absolutely no hesitation, and then just get it all over your body as quickly as possible, maybe ten to fifteen seconds at most, then turn it off and get out. Notice the difference straight away. The next thing, do that for a few days, then next week.

Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, then a week after, forty seconds. Continue increasing it week after week after week. Now, again, lots of ADHD people that I work with want to immediately go to two or three minutes. That is a mistake. The body isn't conditioned for that yet. And, also, adding, even more importantly, adding a very high goal or target, it it brings in many opportunities to not do it because it raises the fear level of getting in the cold water. So increase ten seconds or fifteen seconds per week until you get to around two and a half minutes. Once you're at two and a half minutes, start sticking your head under the water.

The I don't know the exact number on this, so I'm just gonna fudge it slightly, but I know that I believe that there are something like 70% of your nerve endings in your head. So once you completely cover your head and face in cold water in the shower, it is like being electrocuted with energy. And even to this day, years on, from first taking that cold shower, I am still getting that exact same boost, but we can go one step further. And this one step further should be done with a trained professional. So I'm just gonna tell you about it rather than giving you the guidance, which is wild swimming and proper ice baths. Okay. Wim Hof or a Wim Hof trainer is probably the best person to go to for something like that. Okay. But.

That wasn't quite enough, the cold exposure. Because even though I'm getting this dopamine boost and norepinephrine boost that's lasting hours and hours and hours, I can't just keep going and getting in a cold shower all the time. I can't just take it whenever I'm feeling a little bit low or anything like that. Life gets in the way. So I then begin to start experimenting with breathing techniques, And I learned something quite quickly, which is that when you breathe out for longer than you breathe in so if your exhale is significantly longer than your inhale, It does something called activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Now you don't need to remember that at all, but this part that I'm gonna say now is essential.

Doing that, activating that thing I just mentioned reduces heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and very importantly, reduces cortisol. Now cortisol is your stress hormone. It's what fires into the body whenever you're feeling stressed or anxious or something is bothering you. The ability to reduce that at your will without having to rely on medication, without having to rely on circumstances outside of you changing is so unbelievably powerful. And even though taking a cold shower or an ice bath has changed my life in many ways, the ability to control how I am reacting to moments in my life at my own will has changed my life inordinate ways. So it might be difficult to sort of teach this in this format.

But I'll just give it a little go because I think it's good to try and do something right now so you can see how different you can feel. So if you are sat down and you're able to, you know, be in a quiet space and there's no one around to bother you, what you can do is sit with your with the backs of your hands on your laps. K? So and place them like this with your palms facing the ceiling. The reason that we wanna do that is because that automatically forces the shoulders open. That's two benefits. It's it opens you, so you feel more open. As simple as that. Open to receiving this, if you will. But, also, opening the shoulders means that there's more space in the lungs to breathe in. You know, you would just raise your chin slightly.

And take a big inhale through the nose, filling the lungs completely, like, 100 full. Once the lungs are full, you breathe out very gently through the mouth, immediately pass your lips so that the sound of the air coming out of your lips is now making a noise. Now take your awareness, your attention, and place it on that sound. Place it on the sound the air is making and breathing out very slowly. So what the lips are doing is restricting the air. You will then reach a natural level where it feels like you have to push to get the remaining air out. Do not push. Just breathe in again. So what you're doing is you're breathing in for around two seconds, and you're breathing out for around twelve seconds.

But anywhere between ten and fifteen seconds is pretty optimal so long as the exhale is much, much, much longer than the inhale. Doing that and breathing for two, three, four, five minutes depending on how you're feeling will mean that your parasympathetic system is more activated than your sympathetic system, the competing system for that period of time, which over that time will bring all those markers down, heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol. I run a daily meditation group specifically for people with ADHD. So the meditation technique is specifically designed for those with ADHD. Every single morning, we begin at 07:30AM.

With that breathing technique. We breathe in for two seconds, and then we breathe out very slowly for around twelve or fifteen seconds. And that means so what happens is everyone comes into the session. This is remote over Zoom on the Internet. And everyone could they might come in with all different challenges or frustrations from the morning. The kids have been screaming. There's something gone wrong. They've got a letter from the bailiff saying they have to pay a fine, which is exactly what happened to me yesterday, by the way, for an unpaid parking ticket from two years ago, which I knew nothing about until yesterday, genuinely. We come in. We do this breathing technique, and very quickly, it just helps just wash those anxieties.

Wash those stresses away. And then that will then prepare us to go into the next phase, which is meditation. Okay. Meditation is a scary word I've learned for people with ADHD, and it was for me too when I first began experimenting with it. The reason why it's a scary word is because the way that meditation is taught isn't applicable to us. Because it they always say something like this. Clear your mind. Empty your mind. Ignore thoughts or quiet the mind. Shush the mind. That's not gonna happen. That's just not gonna happen. And that set that teaching, that instruction is just setting us up for immediate failure. So what we wanna do instead, instead of.

Trying to quiet the mind, we wanna use an object of attention. We create an object of attention. In more traditional styles of meditation, people would follow the breath so they could literally focusing on the sensation of the air coming in and out of the nose touching the top of the lip. Now I don't know about you, but every time I try and do something like that, my mind goes wild. There's no control in that thing, and nor should there be, and I can come to that in a bit. There are other things you can light a candle and stare at the flame. You can pull beads through your fingers. There are lots of different ways. But the absolute best way to do this with an ADHD mind is to use a mantra.

Now there are many, many, many different mantras to use, but the one I will talk to you about now is so unbelievably simple. Basically, sitting in a meditation posture with your eyes closed, and you begin repeating silently, I can handle this. I can handle this. I can handle this. This has two benefits. One is creating another thought in the mind that you place there at will. So in your mind, you have automatic thoughts. You know all about those. They're chatting all day long. But then you also have willful thought. So an automatic thought has been it's just there. You're not asking for it to be there. A willful thought is one you place there yourself. So a willful thought could an example of one could be.

What shall I eat for dinner tonight? What shall I eat for dinner? An automatic thought would be, I'm just really, really panicked about this new job this job interview that I've got, and then it's coming up with thousands of things that could go wrong in it. They're all automatic thoughts, and, basically, not a single one of those thoughts have any use for us whatsoever. So if we create if we place a mantra into our mind, we are putting in there a willful thought that repeats over and over again. I can handle this. I can handle this. I can handle this. That's it. There's no more to this technique because at no point do we ask the mind to be quiet. The mind is busy for a reason.

And we don't get to stop it from being busy. But what we do get to do is create a mantra, an object of awareness, place our attention on it, and keep turning our attention away from the busy mind. So we focus on the mantra. I can handle this. I can handle this. And every single time the attention gets pulled into the automatic mind, we acknowledge that's happened. We're not annoyed by it. We just acknowledge it's happened, and we gently bring ourselves back to that mantra. We may repeat it again three or four times over five sessions or so, and then all of a sudden, that automatic voice is very loud, and our attention gets pulled into it. We just acknowledge and gently pull ourselves back again.

What's happening here is every single time you pull your attention away from the automatic mind to the mantra, it's like a bicep curl for your awareness. It's strengthening your ability to pay less attention to the noise. Now, again, extremely important wording that I use there. Pay less attention. Not make it stop, not fight with it, not make it say nice things. We're not gonna do any of those things. I've tried it. It doesn't work. We can spend our entire life fighting with the mind to try and make it say nice things to us when we could have just learned to ignore what it was saying altogether anyway. And granted, that's not something that can happen overnight or immediately.

But it's absolutely possible. I've seen it dozens of times with people with ADHD. Now that I can handle this mantra is just one very gentle mantra. There are other mantras, but I'm not gonna talk about them now because I need to teach the person either one to one or in a very small group setting because they can often trigger uncomfortable feelings inside. People can sometimes feel quite dizzy or they can feel, I don't know, maybe a heightened state of emotion or something like that. But these are really good things. Maybe not so much the dizziness, but that tends to pass after the first time trying it. But this trip sort of gently unlocking uncomfortable.

Feelings that are buried somewhere deep inside is one of the main points of meditation because as it's releasing as it's, like, unlocking, it's attempting to release from you. So if you've been storing these heavy energies inside, they wanna get out. They don't wanna stay in there. But what we're doing, we're so we find them so uncomfortable. We're so afraid of them that we're so subconsciously and sometimes consciously just pushing them back down again. If you ever found yourself saying the phrase, I just don't want to deal deal with that now. I just don't wanna deal with that now. Again, no judgment. We all do that. Totally.

It's just part being human. If you've ever found yourself saying that, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's like a conscious suppression of energies and trapped experiences that are desperately trying to release themselves. Meditation, by creating an object of attention, a mantra, creates space to allow these things to come up, which is the main reason why the other more advanced mantras need to be taught with someone who knows what they're doing. Okay. There is actually another enormous benefit to meditation. Just gonna take a quick drink, and then I'll tell you about it. And that is impulsivity. A neurotypical person has a stimulus, and then they respond to it. It could be someone check saying nasty things to me in the street.

Gap, chance to make a decision. Okay. I'll probably just let that go, or I'll react. I might fight that person or something. Someone with ADHD has been more like this. There's a stimulus occurs, and instantly, a response happens. I want cake. Oh, I'm eating cake. Someone's being mean to me. I'm gonna retaliate and lash out immediately. And in fact, I think it's probably more like this where the response appears to be coming before we even notice there was a stimulus. Often, we could be taking action before we've known why. And going back to prediagnosis, there was a time where I was having a very unusual day, and I, in in Central Manchester, picked up a rock from a skip for no reason whatsoever.

Threw it down the street as hard as I can and went straight through a window. To this day, I couldn't give you any rational or logical reason why the hell I did that, but I did. And I think the reason was I was doing this. I was reacting before I noticed the stimulus. What meditation does is it creates this space slowly over time. So in my case, it would have been, I'm having an urge to pick up this rock. Gap, time to calm down and not do anything about it. Oh, wouldn't that be a stupid thing to do? That's the difference. And over time, we continue to meditate, this gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then something really wonderful happens. All of a sudden, because this gap's getting bigger and bigger, we notice that we are in there.

Aware of the mind chatting. But rather than it consuming us with all of its incessant noise desperately controlling our actions, is now further away, and we're seeing it literally, hearing it, chatting away with its melodrama after melodrama, but we're not engaged. We're not engaging because we've created such a gap that we recognize now that voice isn't us. I've been taking advice from that my whole life. I know this is a crazy thing. It might be a crazy thing to recognize, but everybody who meditates like this consistently over a long time recognizes that you are not the voice of the mind. You are the one who hears it. You who is in there aware of that voice are not that voice. It is your voice.

It belongs to you. It's been there your whole life, but it's not you. If it was you if it was you, in those brief moments of silence, you would cease to exist. You are the one aware of it speaking. And when you combine cold exposure, breathing techniques, and this kind of meditation consistently, and that gap increases ADHD managing ADHD without medication, which, again, I must state is a personal choice. I have no right whatsoever and never will tell anyone what to do. But when that gap widens, managing ADHD without medication is not so difficult. At first, it is difficult, and it is a hard process to get to this point. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it or make it sound easy. But in time.

Managing ADHD without medication is nowhere near as difficult as I thought it was gonna be. Okay. So I don't know. I think I've got maybe fifteen minutes. Before we get into the q and a, I'll just say there are a few other things, of course, that we can all do to manage ADHD without medication. We can look at our diet. Now I could go on about it, but I believe that Lucinda Miller is gonna be talking at this conference, and she knows a hell of a lot more than me. And she will be so interesting to listen to on this subject. Okay. So has anyone got any questions for me? I have got, I think, about ten minutes. I know. You do.

That was wonderful and actually very good bit for Lucinda who's waiting in the wings because she's on next. Perfect.

I know that.

You do there are plenty of questions, and I'm just checking there's no more you wanted to to say.

Like, this is the I think generally, you know, again, listen to Lucinda on diet. For for me, it's about just cutting out ultra processed food, like, 100%, not oh, you can have a bit here or there, and that's very extreme, I know. But I just feel horrific when I eat ultra processed food. It's so that's the personal thing. And then the things like, you know, of course, productivity stuff. So working, this is probably much more applicable to self employed people, but being really strict about working when you work best. This is getting pretty in pretty late in the day for me. Right now, I'm usually finished work about an hour ago.

So I like to work really, really early in the morning, often from, like, 06:00 because that's where my brain is most active and fresh, and I like to finish before I burn out. And that's just been a huge game changer. And I think, you know, if if thankfully, I'm I am actually seeing one or two clients who have full time jobs where their bosses are being quite accommodating of the way that they work because they recognize that the quality of the work getting done and the time it gets done in is a lot more important than this archaic thing about them staying till 5PM in the afternoon, which is just absolutely ridiculous that we're still doing that in 2024.

Blah blah blah. And and, you know, if anyone you know, if people don't get to ask me a question right now, they can just go to drugfreeadhd.org, and they can subscribe to my newsletter. And you'll get an automated message, and you can reply to me with any question, and I promise you that I will reply properly.

So Okay. That's a big promise. I do not give that promise. I'm not on top of that. We've got a number of questions. And Good. Well, someone a great bit for you. So someone is, can we join your morning meditation, please, and how do we do that? Yeah. Go to drugfreeadhd.org/meditation.

That simple. Go. There's a button. Just click it. It'll give you the instructions to join.

We have asked how long do the effects of cold water therapy last, and can you please share any details of of the research? Yeah.

So they last about three hours according to the research. But I find that by the thing is, it doesn't really even matter that it lasts three hours because once you take a cold bath, for example, like an cold plunge, so, like, sort sort of outdoor ice bath without the ice in it, which is probably plenty for most people, you feel extremely alert, ready for the day. And then what what happens is because you're very productive early in the day, you find it easier to remain productive for the rest of the day. So it's not like so for example, you know, one of the things I do hear from people taking medication, of course, like, in drug free ADHD, just so you're aware, I help people.

Get off of ADHD medication if they want to with a process, a specific process. Or people who have decided not to take it, I give them the process that they can use to continue not having to take it. And one thing that I do see when people are coming off medication is that they have, like, a really steep, withdrawal, process in the afternoon, which makes it extremely difficult to focus. That does not happen with cold exposure. And although the effects, the stimulating effects of cold do not last as long as medication, you don't get any side effects from it at all. And in fact, there is another benefit, which I didn't mention, which is that if you are able to get into very cold water in the morning when it's dark and raining in The UK.

You're building grit. And things that used to bother you in the day are not such a big deal. And I'll tell you, right, I'm not comparing it directly to this, but I was a little bit nervous before doing this talk until Henry told the story about the the suicide a year ago. And then I put it into perspective immediately. Why the hell would I be nervous doing this talk when I'm alive? You know, it's just things like that. That's again, getting cold water is building grip. It helps with other things.

Honest like, honestly, I I'm gonna give it a go late. Like, I've gotta do this for now twenty six hours due to slightly overachieving on content quality, interesting content. And so I will give it a go. Last year, we have all referrals from one year in their beer, also talk about the benefits of cold therapy. Yeah. We've got a coach, Katie Hayes, who's contributing later. And she she goes off to the wild swimming. So.

Every day, goes out for the wild swim and finds it beneficial. It's interesting because I get I fully like, I I can't actually remember the exact name of the study, but I'll get it and give it to you so you can put it somewhere. And and or if they they come back We will we will we will put it on to the I've got it in my Put it onto the onto your page on this. If they come back and look The other thing is It'll be there. People who actually so I can't get why you care about the research at the beginning. People who start taking ice baths couldn't give the monkeys about the research because they know exactly what it feels like. So as in, like, you care at the beginning, but once you start taking it, you're like, I already know.

Yeah. Because I think also the research help it helps give you the Oh, no. Of course. That journey, and that it's quite I wouldn't have done it down. Got some research to help you gives you that extra input impetus to believe, yeah, this is gonna make a difference. But what I'm saying is once you do it, you know.

That's the only thing. It's one of the things It's like I've done meditation is like, well, this isn't working immediately. But with think with an ice bath, it works like that. That's the difference. It's instant. Yeah.

Something I very much advocate for is being a scientist itself. Right? We've gotta work out our own path. We are fundamentally different, so we have to work our own path out. And that does mean giving this kind of thing a go. Can't can't I get right. We have another question. First question from Sarah. Is there a difference for how the drug free approach works for hyperactive versus combined type, and is there a gender difference?

About seventy percent of my clients are women. I haven't seen any difference in gender. The only thing that I am cautious of, and I created a group where, is when women are going through menopause, which I have obviously no direct experience on. So I've created a group where there's several women who've been through the drug free ADHD experience, and they can they will share lots of information about how they're dealing with that. So they're sort of, like, coaching themselves with me monitoring it, if you will. And with hyperactivity, I mean, because I am less interested in making the mind be quiet and more interested in creating space between awareness and thought, is so far been no difference whatsoever.

Between hyperactive and nonhyperactive ADHD. And I'd actually say that more hyperactive clients probably take to it a little bit quicker because they're more willing to just jump straight into the cold water.

That's interesting. Yeah. And I think that I actually thought it's a gender difference question, which you had a very interesting answer to. Like, it's it's a sort of important pervasive question in the for the ADHD throughout, and so that we know that ADHD is predominantly modeled on Yeah. Male and the just the abject failure around understanding diagnosis and difference and the huge piece which you picked, you know, talked immediately to around menopause and how that's not not not got a lot of lot of work to be done. Okay. This is a cracking question, which probably applies to me. Okay. Because I am in the meditation hater group. And and and it's because.

And what I found as I've had conversations with people is that the answer is you have to do meditation differently and use have you talk quite eloquently to that. Because otherwise, if you're supposed to plunk yourself down and have an empty mind for twenty minutes or thirty minutes, I mean, you just feel like an idiot. Like That's hopeful misnomer anyway. Okay. I actually think that the people who say that are talking out of their behind, and they're not being honest.

I think the the neurotypical people who say empty minders, what a load of absolute nonsense. It's not true. I I.

I look at the world through an ADHD lens, like, which obviously, until I was diagnosed, I didn't know. And and so I don't, you know, I don't know. I I agree. Like, it would be nice to, like, I'd, like, get one of I've I've still never chips and plug it into them. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Let's see what you're actually thinking.

I've I've still to this day not had a sing I've never had a single person who couldn't meditate this way. I've never had a single and I'm I'm talking to, like, over 2,000 people now. I've never had a single person who didn't go, I get it, just immediately because of it. Just again, it's about I'll skim to the surface. And then it's about I'll I'll have to do it with you one on one, and I'll show you.

Well, that's a very kind offer, and I feel obligated to take you off on it. Because I like I think it'd be it'd be the only obviously, with the stats, we have to be slightly mindful that your audience is self selecting. So like the meditation haters like me are unlikely to select. Yeah. So we do have to be a little careful. Without not understanding I think I'm always I'm always a bit nervous when we say everyone because it's don't need people that I say ADHD.

It's the only reason why a person can't meditate or say they can't is because they can't handle that can't handle just sitting there. They can't handle the busy mind chattering away. It's too whatever. That's really It's why.

You're on, like, saying something to replace it. So I thought it was interesting that one of my takeaways on listening to people talk about meditation is it's it our version is a bit different. And and It's like having understanding that's very helpful. And, you know, even last week, I had a lady who she's really ADHD with a big capital h.

And she cried the first time I taught her this meditation technique because she said it's the first time in decades that she's felt calm.

Okay. We need to do that live.

This is this is a live show for Joseph making a And it's nothing I I wanna say, like, it's not it's not I'm not there's nothing special about it. It's so simple. It's not like I'm a genius. Not at all. It's so simple. It's you know, I learned it from I learned I just pulled different meditation techniques together and was like, okay. I think I need to make it more like this because I think that will be more applicable to my brain. So it's a very selfish endeavor at the beginning. I was never ever thinking about teaching to anybody else. It was all totally selfish. And, like, all this being able to now teach it to thousands of people has just come by accident just from I just started talking about it on the Internet.

Just thought because I thought if I talk it out loud, I'll I'll remember it. That was it.

Well, we have one final question, which is to point on this on that topic is what's the best way to make this medication approach appropriate for my highly reactive, undiagnosed ADHD 11 year old?

They have to want to meditate. I always say that. If they if they if they can find a way that makes meditation interesting or exciting or valuable to an 11 year old, then then amazing. And I believe it could work because if you watch a documentary with Chris doctor Chris from about a decade ago called the doctor who gave up drugs, I think one of one entire hour long episode was about ADHD medication, and it was about a group of researchers in Amsterdam that developed meditation techniques, is very different to the one I use, which is for children with ADHD, and you see them coming off their medication as part of this documentary.

So go and go and search for the doctor who gave up drugs with doctor Chris and find that. That'll teach you how to teach an 11 year old how to meditate.

And you've already slightly answered this, but it was the core question of can these methods work for children too? I cannot imagine I don't work with children a cold shower.

I personally don't work with children.

I'm not. But Yeah. It's a bit difficult. Like, obviously, it's an it's an area where you fair enough. I think that's quite a good good answer. Yeah. That's us out of time, sadly.

I've enjoyed it.

I've enjoyed it. Like, I I we had a very interesting conversation previously because I think one of the things to say is you're not completely anti medication. You're like, you're more this is a path that can work and work for a lot of people. And I would imagine, especially in The UK, because people basically get offered nothing else except medication. Yeah. It's either off your chart. Good luck. Or here's some medication. Also off your chart. Good luck. But that's the two parts. There's no other support. You must then feel.

Very strong about wanting to tell people that there is another path. And I think it's really one of the things when we're talking about it and I'm talking about it, we talk about the fact that the long term data shows it's about fifty fifty. So both paths equally well trod, and it's it is important there. And some people, they have no choice in this. There's health reasons they can't opt for medic medication applied to you. We've had some commenters and talk. When we look at the statistics on NHS business issue statistics, you can see medication being taken by people in their nineties. But I would say that as you get older, you get there's a likelihood of other health conditions, things become more more challenging. It's a the.

Likelihood of having an interaction or an issue as you as you have then arises. I summarize pretty well, you're amazing. I've really enjoyed like, absolutely wonderful. You already queued up, which is my job next. Yeah. I just have to say thank you so very, very much. You are thank you for opening our conference, doing it in such a interesting and compelling way. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm gonna totally do. And a guy will have a cold chat between the when we drop off with Australia and give a hand over to Australia. You're gonna have to provide evidence of that. I'm not taking the video care.

I will say one last thing before I go is that, you know, people can go to drugfreeadhd.org and just subscribe to the newsletter. And if, like, if they have something they wanna ask me and just it it will send an automated message, and it will literally say, if you have anything to ask me, do it now. Reply, and then I will receive it, and I will get back to you.

Brilliant. And that's drugfreeadhd.com. So thank you very, very much indeed.dotorg. Sorry. I I you know what? I knew. I can't quite remember it. I was just like, can go with it and hope. You're amazing. Thank you very much, and have a great rest of your day. See you later.