Somatic exercise & ADHD

So did you know that an estimated 14% of adults live with ADHD and don't even know it? And more times than not, it's either misdiagnosed or diagnosed incorrectly. As a result, many of these same people have spent their lives blaming themselves for things like procrastination or lacking focus. Liz Tenuto, aka The Workout Witch, is a somatic exercise expert. And in her book, When the Body Speaks, explains how stress and trauma are stored in the body and how certain exercises can bring healing so she's here to talk more about how undiagnosed ADHD can impact someone's mental health and what can be done about that to help welcome hi nice to have you thanks so much all right let's talk about it you often hear people say i have ADHD and they're just throwing that out there like it's a common thing talk a little bit about that when it's real when it is diagnosed and and when it's misdiagnosed absolutely essentially we often think about ADHD as difficulty with attention difficulty with focus but there's a whole physical component that goes kind of less discussed as well and for people with ADHD they experience a lot of overstimulation and overwhelm so they may feel constantly exhausted or they may feel really stressed out all the time but not really understand why and the reason is because people with ADHD process sensory information differently in their brain it's almost like there's a filter that generally blocks a lot of sensory input for people that's missing for folks with ADHD so they'll feel really overwhelmed or overstimulated and the reason why it's often misdiagnosed is because a lot of people just think they're really stressed out they don't have anxiety or have anxiety and they don't or maybe they just like have mom group mom brain or have a hard time focusing in general and they don't really understand all of the different components so you say that more women are misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed how do you know when to get help and how do you know that you're actually pinpointing it on the dot that you do have in fact ADHD if you're starting to feel just constantly exhausted every day. And if you feel like you get really irritated at things that other people don't get irritated at, like multiple people talking at one time, bright lights in a grocery store, for example, can be really overwhelming or overstimulating for people with ADHD. Or even loud sounds like a lawnmower can really bother someone with ADHD because the thalamus in the brain works differently and they're lacking that filtration system. So if you feel easy to irritation and easy to overwhelm, it's a good idea to get checked out because when you know that you have ADHD, you stop blaming yourself as much and you can give yourself the tools to live with more ease with it. Let's talk about how somatic exercises can really help with this and maybe we can do a couple. Yeah, let's do one. So essentially if you're feeling overwhelmed or overstimulated or exhausted, this is my favorite go-to exercise. And we're going to do a little test together before and after so you can feel the difference after you do the exercise. So we'll start sitting. Wherever you are, just back off the backrest. And you're just going to take your head a little bit to your right. And as you're ready, you'll come back through your midline and then take your head a little bit to your left. And let's do that one more time. And you're just going to notice how far your head turns. A little bit to your right and a little bit to your left and now we'll bring it back to the middle next we're going to interlace our hands behind our head yes this is called the basic exercise you're going to keep your head straight forward but now you're going to take just your eyes and look over to your right and keep your eyes looking over to your right until you yawn sigh or swallow it might take a little longer than mine so once you've done that you'll bring your eyes back to the middle great and then let's look over to the left eyes over to the left and you'll yawn sigh or swallow great and then we'll bring our eyes back to the center and rest our arms down and now we're just going to do that same test with our head looking a little bit to your right and a little bit to your left and you may notice that your head moves much more easily now or it moves much further to your right or to your left after doing that exercise so your advice is when you're feeling overwhelmed and have that sensory overload to stop slow down and just get in touch with your senses essentially exactly that just a little reset right there yeah and that just interrupts your body's stress response so when you're feeling overwhelmed overstimulated from things that could potentially be ADHD related you can just interrupt your body's stress response with a quick exercise like that perfect and we want to let people know right to pick up your book thank you so much, When the Body Speaks is available now, thank you, thank you, we'll be right back