Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE!
Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!

---

This week kicks off a three-part series on planning, and it starts where every planning conversation should: with honesty about why plans fall apart in the first place. Pete opens with his own cascading construction disaster at home, where raccoon damage set off a chain reaction of disruptions that has bled directly into his work life. Nikki’s diagnosis is both simple and profound: when you make a plan, you’re trying to predict the future with the information you have right now. When that future doesn’t cooperate, the real problem isn’t the plan failing. It’s that we treat plan failure like a personal failure.

From there, Nikki walks through the full spectrum of executive function challenges that make ADHD planning uniquely hard: time blindness that operates at every scale from individual task to entire month, working memory that drops the ball the moment you turn around, prioritization paralysis where everything feels equally urgent, the cognitive inflexibility that turns one bad morning into a ruined day, emotional regulation struggles and the sharp edge of RSD when disappointing someone is unavoidable, and sustained attention that evaporates the moment your environment gets interesting. At the center of it all is what Pete calls “fantasy Pete,” the imaginary version of himself who wields time like a saber and never lets anyone down, and whom nobody would actually like at a party.

The antidote isn’t a better system. It’s moving from shame to curiosity. Nikki’s framework: instead of asking what’s wrong with you, ask what your brain actually needs. Find the friction. Learn your own flavor of ADHD. Build in margin so that when things go sideways, you have something left in the tank for recovery. The episode closes on Pete’s central paradox, the one he returns to with clients again and again: it’s not your fault, but it is yours. You didn’t design this brain. But you’re the one who has to work with it, and building that muscle, one honest conversation at a time, is exactly what this trilogy is for.

If this episode hit close to home, we made something to help it land a little deeper. Your Planning Reflection is a free companion guide—just four honest questions to help you connect what you heard to what's actually happening in your own life. No productivity exercise. No grade at the end. Just a quiet moment to start paying attention.

Links & Notes

• Lattice by Pete D. Wright — Pete’s new science fiction novella, now available on Amazon
• Unapologetically ADHD by Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer — the planning book behind this trilogy
• Your Planning Reflection worksheet — Nikki’s four-question companion to this episode, available now!
• GPS Guided Planning Sessions — Nikki’s membership planning program
• The ADHD Podcast on Patreon — early access, Discord, and live stream recordings
• The Spanish Prisoner (1997, dir. David Mamet) — Pete’s most underrated film, home of the worry quote
• Ricky Jay — magician, actor, and unwitting aphorist: “Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due”
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (01:25) - Introducing Pete D. Wright... Struggling Author of Fiction
• (04:15) - Patreon.com/TheADHDPodcast
• (05:18) - Why do your plans fall apart?
• (10:21) - Were you taught how to plan?
• (32:01) - Today's Reflection Worksheet

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE!
Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!

---

Here’s a story a lot of women know. You’ve been getting by — maybe not perfectly, but you’ve been getting by. And then something shifts. Suddenly the coping strategies that used to work don’t. The brain fog is different. The irritability is new. And nobody around you — including your doctor — seems to have a particularly good answer for why. For women with ADHD, the answer is often estrogen. And for too long, that connection has been wildly undertreated.

Linda Roggli has been living this story and researching it and coaching women through it for twenty years. She’s the founder of the ADDiva Network for ADHD Women 40 and Better, and she joins Pete and Nikki to trace the whole arc: what estrogen actually does for the dopamine-depleted ADHD brain, what happens when it starts its perimenopause roller coaster, why the Women’s Health Initiative study scared a generation of women away from hormone therapy that could have helped them, and what the science now says about timing, delivery methods, and who it’s actually for. It is a lot of information, delivered with the kind of warmth and hard-won clarity that only comes from someone who has personally been told by a doctor, “You’re not in menopause” — and then spent decades making sure other women don’t get that same non-answer.

Links & Notes

• Linda Roggli — professional certified coach, award-winning author, founder of the ADDiva Network for ADHD Women 40 and Better
• Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey — the book Linda’s therapist recommended at her diagnosis; she read it in the bookstore on the way home
• Women’s Health Initiative — the federal study whose 1990s findings caused a generation of women to stop hormone therapy; Linda explains why the study was fatally flawed
• Dr. Patricia Quinn — ADHD specialist whose research on estrogen-only therapy for ADHD women
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (01:52) - Patreon.com/TheADHDPodcast
• (02:55) - ADHD Aging, Hormones, and More
• (05:18) - Linda Roggli

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE!
Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!

---

Here's something nobody tells you about aging with ADHD: the part that feels like decline might not be decline at all. It might be retirement. Or perimenopause. Or just the fact that the external structure that quietly managed your symptoms for thirty years finally disappeared — and nobody warned you it was doing that much work. The question isn't whether your brain is changing. It is. The question is whether you understand why, and what the research actually says about where it leads.

Dr. Brandy Callahan is a clinical neuropsychologist, Canada Research Chair in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology, and the founder of the LiBra Lab — the Lifespan Brain Health Lab at the University of Calgary. Her research sits at the intersection most researchers haven't bothered to explore: what happens to the ADHD brain across decades, and specifically, what connects ADHD to elevated dementia risk. What she's finding — about allostatic burden, about the gap between how people perform in a lab versus how they function in a grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, about what a lifetime of navigating a neurotypical world may actually cost the brain biologically — is the conversation this series has been building toward. There is hard news in here. There is also, genuinely, a lot of hope.

Guest Spotlight

Dr. Brandy Callahan, PhD, RPsych is a clinical neuropsychologist, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Calgary, and a Canada Research Chair in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology. She is the founder and principal investigator of the LiBra Lab — the Lifespan Brain Health Lab — which focuses specifically on ADHD in women and in older adulthood, and she came to ADHD research not through personal experience but through a memory clinic, where she kept meeting older adults being evaluated for dementia who turned out to have lived their whole lives with undiagnosed ADHD. Her current research is investigating what may drive elevated dementia risk in adults with ADHD — including allostatic burden, cerebral small vessel disease, and the biological cost of decades of chronic stress. She is also currently running ADHD Her, an online study about girls and women with ADHD across the lifespan, open to participants from age 8 to 87. Learn more at libralab.ca, and find the ADHD Her study by searching "ADHD Her" online.

Links & Notes

• LiBra Lab
• ADHD Her Study (online, open to participants ages 8-87
• LiBra Lab participant registry (RADAR)
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (06:40) - What does a research neuropsychologist actually do?
• (09:18) - How does EF Age?
• (15:45) - Charting the Decades
• (23:06) - The Shame Cycle... Missing in the Lab
• (24:23) - Alostatic Burden
• (37:50) - So... where's the hope?