Hi, and welcome to the In The Cortex podcast.
We are your hosts.
I'm Paloma Garcia.
And I am Dani Perrecone.
And we're the founders of In The Cortex, an online community with programs that show
people the tools that they need to change their lives, their brain reorganization, no
medication, just movement.
When you get your brain out of survival mode and regulate your nervous system, you start
to live in the fun, logical part of the brain, the cortex.
Subscribe today and learn how to live your best in the cortex life.
And now, on to today's episode.
Let's listen to a quick cortex moment from one of our members.
Hi, I'd like to share with you my experience within the Cortex program.
There was a time when I felt my life was a complete mess.
My focus was all over the place.
And the word procrastination might as well be in my middle name.
My biggest obstacle, the annoying PowerPoint presentations at work, could never bring myself
to start them until the last very moment.
And I made every excuse I could think of not to do what I had to.
It was a cycle of self sabotage, rush, panic, and of course, messing up.
Then something shifted.
I found and started the ITC program and became completely involved in the strategies and
it wasn't like an instant fix.
But I had to accept that I was skeptical at the beginning.
But slowly, I started noticing changes.
Lots of things that helped me to begin untangle the mess in my mind.
And then, guess what?
One morning came and I woke up.
It was like a switch had flipped.
I sat down, opened my laptop, and began working on the presentation that I had been avoiding.
It wasn't rushed.
It was intentional.
It wasn't panicked.
It was composed.
I realized in that moment that I had changed.
Since then, it's been different.
No more last minute rushes, no more frantic all nighters.
I've reclaimed control over my time.
The ITC program didn't just help with the presentations.
It helped me reclaim my life.
I'm not scouting anymore.
I found focus, purpose.
So listen closely.
I came to this conclusion which might sound like a cliche.
You can change.
Even if you're not that young, like me.
The ITC program gave me the tools, the understanding, and the power to create my own narrative.
So that was one of our members sharing about procrastination.
And what about procrastination?
What does that have to do with the brain?
Today we're talking about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD.
And oftentimes those people who have that label of ADHD, they can relate and it really
resonates to understand what procrastination means for them.
So today we're going to really dive into the challenges of that ADHD label.
We're going to talk about it today and what the symptoms are around ADHD and where they
come from.
And we're not saying that it doesn't exist because the challenges that someone with ADHD
as their label is very real.
And we understand that.
But we want to talk about how to diminish that everyday challenge of those symptoms and
then how to just make it easier of day to day living.
Exactly.
And most mainstream healthcare is focusing more on the symptoms rather than the root
of ADHD related challenges.
And that's for everything, right?
Not just for ADHD, for many other mental health concerns and even physiological physical
illnesses.
That's kind of the mainstream approach.
But the truth is more than 366 million adults worldwide have ADHD as of 2020.
And we've seen an increase, a huge increase in the past 20 years, right?
So where do we think that's coming from?
From the NITC perspective, the way that the brain develops has been the same for hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of years.
It has to be through movement, through nurture and through exposure to different experiences
in those first years, right?
To give the baby that freedom it has to do the movement that it's programmed to do, that
we're naturally designed to do.
But what has the main thing that has changed in the past, what, 50, 100 years, right?
The way that we live.
Our lifestyle is changing so much day to day, and that's impacting the way that we are
able to move or not so able to move or not so, we don't give as much importance as we
do used to.
Yeah.
And this is why social media is great.
This is the highlight of those two sides of social media, but now we're starting to hear
more people talk about their challenges.
And now that we've aired it out and we're all saying, hey, we're experiencing similar
things like, yeah, procrastination is very real for me, or I have this strong need to
always jump from project to project, or I can never focus on certain things.
And now we're all talking about it.
And that's great.
And I love that we can bring that all out into the open because then that means that
there's something and collectively we are in that human connection level able to relate
to each other.
Now this is where our ITC perspective comes in.
And we like that people are talking about it.
But like Paloma said, we're very bottoms up approach.
So we're like, why?
Why is there such a huge increase?
And that number you just listed out 366 million Americans.
That was in 2020.
We all know that from 2020 to today, there was a giant thing that happened in humans
that none of us had ever really experienced in our lifetimes.
And we've seen those increases drastically, right?
Paloma, we've seen huge shifts in anxiety like we talked about in the last episode.
And we know more people are identifying with ADHD.
So here's the tricky thing about it though is if we do start to put the label on it,
it's great.
We have awareness.
Hey, I identify with all these symptoms of what is classified as ADHD.
We know that's real.
The tricky part though is then once you inherit that is your identity.
Because then we see it as you're now putting yourself into a space of this is how I will
always operate and this is now my identity.
And this we see a lot of times people who come onto our program and they want to reorganize
their brains and get out of their limiting beliefs.
They find it really hard to remove that identity of my ADHD.
We hear that so many times, my ADHD.
So there's also no judgment or shame here.
So that's a really big piece of you say that, yeah, I identify as ADHD.
Like you can't tell me that the way I feel about life is not true.
We agree with that.
There is a different way to go about living because both of us have experienced it.
I was a major procrastinator.
So was Paloma.
I always jumped from project to project.
And now we don't.
And we're not saying that it just magically went away.
We did a lot of hard work to get there.
So this is what we're going to help unpack a bit is how you can change that.
And how neuroplasticity has proven that you can change how your brain's wired.
We are products of it.
We are living our best lives every day.
It's not always totally straight and clean.
It's a lot of messiness too.
But we're telling you that there's possibilities and other options other than just what's out
there right now.
Totally.
And the brain loves to have a name for things.
We love to put things in categories.
And that's why diagnoses are so helpful because it helps your brain be like, okay, all this
stuff is really hard for me or for my child or for my spouse, whoever it is.
And now that I have a name for it, I can understand it better.
Right.
So what we're saying is we don't want people to get stuck in that name, in that label.
And we don't require any sort of diagnosis or anything when you participate in our program
for that reason, because you can also be somebody who has these challenges but never got diagnosed.
Right.
Like Danny and I would have probably been diagnosed if our parents had taken us somewhere.
Right.
We just didn't.
We were really good compensators when we were little at the age where most people start
to get diagnosed.
Right.
You can have the challenges and not have the label.
Right.
There's a lot of self-diagnosing going on, on, you know, TikTok and Instagram and all these
different things.
And it's because people just want to belong.
But what do you do about it?
Right.
That's the number one thing.
Once you know this, what are you going to do about it?
So let's talk about some of the very common, the most common symptoms of ADHD.
We have impulsiveness, disorganization and problems prioritizing.
Right.
This is procrastination.
Time management skills.
That can also fall into the procrastination.
Impulsiveness.
Just by the way, I was the most impulsive buyer you've ever met in your life.
And my friends still like remember to this day, me going into a shop to buy like a bottle
of water and coming out with like 17 different things that I picked up on the way.
Poor time management skills.
Problem focusing on one task.
Trouble multitasking.
Active activity or relentlessness.
So these are the people that even as a, you know, the kids who are like, I'm not going
to be able to sit in my seat all day and listen to the teacher.
Right.
But as adults, we also find ways to compensate and make that a little bit less obvious where
we're like somebody who's getting up all the time and, you know, I, oh, I have to go get
this thing.
Oh, I forgot I needed to go get another glass of water.
Oh, blah, blah.
You know, you're finding different ways to move all the time.
Trouble with planning, low frustration tolerance, mood swings.
Of course, if your brain is constantly compensating for all this stuff, like we talked about in
another, in a previous episode about if it's constantly compensating, then your frustration
tolerance is going to get way lower because you don't have that much bandwidth to deal
with what's coming up in your day to day life.
Right.
Problems following through and completing tasks.
That was 100% me having a hot temper that also actually feeds in with the ponds.
So that's one of those.
We'll talk about that in a little bit and trouble coping with stress.
These are all very common symptoms of a disorganized brain, but what else are these challenges
associated with Danny?
And that's a beautiful way to segment into what we cover in the second pillar of, in
the cortex.
The second pillar, we'd mentioned last episode, we talked about the first pillar, all about
the ponds and all those behaviors.
And now we're talking about the mid brain.
And that's the second pillar of what we talk about of the primitive brain and how the mid
brain is designed in the stage of life from about six to 12 months.
Now remember, this is very wide range.
There's not definite times here.
This varies for every baby of when they're supposed to be crawling.
When you're crawling on hands and knees, this is developing the mid brain.
And it's the part of the brain that's able to do a lot of the things that Paloma just
mentioned automatically, meaning to be working as they're intended to.
This is why we say in our program, the way you crawl tells us where that part of the
brain left off.
And every single time we watch for the hands are placed, we watch for the feet are placed.
It doesn't matter if you're two years old or if you're a hundred years old, we can tell
where that brain left off.
So that correlates to the same behaviors that are connected to someone who possibly has
ADHD.
Another thing that's very much connected in a lot of overlap is sensory processing.
That goes for tactile, the way things feel when you are touched, like if you ever touch
somebody and they shy away from you, or it could be the tags in the shirt, the lines
on the socks, it could be getting your hairbrush.
That's a big change I've seen in my four year old because we've really amped up our brainwork
at home.
And now I can brush her hair without her screaming and having to like run away from me.
So those are all the tactile ones.
Then we have the auditory.
A lot of kids, I don't know if you all see this, but cover their ears, especially when
you're in public bathrooms and the sound of the hand dryer goes off or the toilet flushes.
It's a big one parents bring to us all the time or the blender turns on and they automatically
want to cover their ears.
It's because that part of the brains is not able to filter out the volume correctly.
That should be an automatic function that is put into our brains so we can handle life
for what it is.
Other things are taste and putting certain foods in our mouths, not necessarily the taste
of it, but maybe the way it feels.
So that goes back to sensory.
So there's a lot of overlap here on how we're processing our sensory world around us.
And if there's any challenges there, it's probably related to this part of the brain.
There is oftentimes motor coordination.
So our bodies are divided from right and left sides, front and back and top and bottom.
When we see people walk or move, we can always tell if there's a disconnect between the top
and the bottom or our right and left coordination.
And it's often connected to how we crawled.
And oftentimes we see people who didn't crawl as babies enough.
They move the right hand and the right knee at the same time versus seeing a cross lateral
pattern of right hand left knee moving.
And so that's a very strong indication that I don't have right and left brain communicating.
This also bleeds over to motor planning and executive functioning.
Like Paloma mentioned, how can I look at a task, stay on it if my right and left brain
are not communicating with each other.
It's almost impossible.
You look at the situation and you just walk away from it because you're like, I can't even
figure out how to work through this.
Even an eye movement, the way your hands are placed when you crawl very much lines up with
how you're able to process words in front of you on how you maybe cover one eye because
it's too much information coming in or you can't get eye contact.
This is such a big one.
Our society, and this is why we're like screaming on this podcast.
Our society thinks that if you look down and away from someone, you're being rude or you're
not listening.
And we want to share with you when you're looking down and away from something that person is
taking in the information better than when they're forced to try to look at you because
their eyes are not actually able to do that.
So if you have a child or a partner in your life that needs to look away, they are listening
to you.
Pain and temperature also related to this part of the brain.
So many times I see the bruiser kids that are like throwing themselves into other kids
and it's not that they're not getting hurt.
They're just not feeling it.
And that's a really big piece to notice because there's the kids who either avoid it all together
because they're too fearful of getting hurt or the kids that are slamming other kids.
And this goes for adults too.
So we talk about this in the kid version, but the adults do the exact same things.
Have you ever done a handshake with someone and their handshake was so extremely firm
and they almost broke your bones in your hand?
They didn't feel that or they give you a super hard high five and you're like, I didn't feel
that was so incredibly painful.
Like I'm still shaking my hand off after that or they give you the really big hugs and they
like really hurt you and it's not like that deep.
And that's oftentimes when we see different profiles kind of budding into each other because
maybe someone loves the deep pressure and the other person doesn't like it.
And so this is where we help you make sense of really understanding why that person is
doing that versus, oh, that person is just so blah, right?
We always give labels to other people.
The temperature sensation is also another one.
We talked about this in the last episode where we see kids wearing sweatshirts when it's
hot or even adults not wearing appropriate clothing, depending on the weather.
This also comes over to the mid brain as well.
So there's a lot of overlap here.
Another big one is the dopamine production that comes from the brain.
Dopamine is the main chemical that brings motivation online and gets you to move towards
something.
So if you're not getting enough dopamine production, then you don't have that same desire to want
to complete things, right?
You kind of fizzle out quickly.
You get excited because you get hit with the dopamine and then maybe your brain's not
regularly enough.
You don't have enough to keep you going throughout the entire process of whatever is being asked
of you.
Same thing for the serotonin production, feeling that happy, good feeling.
And some of us just don't have enough of that.
And so then we oftentimes fall down into like a deep state of like, I'm not good enough
and sadness and all those things going with it.
These are brain chemicals that are being produced from this part of the brain.
There's a few more things here connected to the mid brain.
We will add more of this into the show notes.
You can go back and look at this.
Really there's so much more proprioception, pain, suppression, muscle tone, body position,
the way you walk, your heart rate, your blood pressure regulation, your circadian rhythm,
making sure you're actually going to bed at the right time.
We all talk about how that gets disrupted.
And then also the reward based learning pattern.
So this is all coming from the mid brain.
And this is also so important for doing the functions like we just mentioned for ADHD,
brain, organization, the motivation, longterm versus instant gratification, sustained attention,
awareness, and then many other daily functions.
Absolutely.
And this is why we love to like break it down and kind of show what is the mid brain in
charge of.
And if it's not doing all of its automatic jobs, we will probably have a challenge is
with what Danny would just mentioned at the end.
And so, and some of it really is just our brain.
Everybody is wired completely differently.
And we really want to make sure to talk about this because society, and we talk about this
I think in the last episode as well, but we expect we hold ourselves to such a high standard
in society and society is set up in a way that the expectation is so high for who you're
supposed to be, how you're supposed to behave, what you're supposed to do in your daily routines,
right?
You have a kid that's supposed to be sitting in a classroom perfectly straight, looking
at the board, listening to everything the teacher does, writing it down, ignoring what's
going on next to them, or ignoring the fact that they might be hungry or that the tag might
be bugging them in their t-shirt, right?
Or that they might be, they honestly maybe can't stop thinking about a song that they
listen to in the car on the way to school.
Like there's so many different things we assume that children have to be doing that automatically
or all the time.
Or as adults, for example, we have those, those very, very, very unrealistic morning
routine tick tocks, right?
That's like my five to nine before my nine to five.
And you're like, really?
Do people actually do that?
And so that just plants more of the seed of you're doing something wrong.
If you can't do these things naturally, easily, all the time, 24 seven, then something's going
on in your brain and you better fix it, right?
And so that just puts so much pressure on us.
And so the other, the second part of the episode here, we want to talk about how we need to
have grace with ourselves and we need to have patience with ourselves.
And we need to change the standards and the expectations that we have for the way that
we are supposed to behave.
Because where does that supposed to be come from?
Right?
It's just coming from all these ideals that have been thrown out into our world.
And I do think that nowadays we're in a part of history where people are really breaking
those things down.
They're breaking down the expectations and the kind of this need to aspire to a certain
thing.
We're all just a lot more natural.
And like you said, Danny, from what happened in 2020, the pandemic really shifted everything
for a lot of people.
And lots of us are looking at our lives and our priorities and being like, okay, that's,
I'm not going to hold myself to that moment.
Like that's unrealistic.
And I just want to live my life and be happy and be the best version of myself.
And that's what we really want to continue to share with people is there is so many,
there are so many ways to do that from a neurological perspective as well.
Yeah.
And I love that you just said that because we do talk about here at ITC that it's just
the goals to live a happier and easier life.
And we don't say that life is easy.
We don't say that there's not messy moments.
Paloma and I are always on the Facebook group talking about all of our major changes that
we experienced by doing our brain work on a daily basis.
And so that's exactly the answer for us is doing the brain work.
And what that means is we talked about the last episode, we talked about the ponds, we
talked about creeping.
And then we talk about now crawling.
Crawling is the function that's going to develop the midbrain.
So like I mentioned earlier, the way your hands are placed, the way your feet are placed,
the way your body is moving overall, all of that can shift into a natural rhythm if you
give the brain the time to do it.
So that's where we guide you.
We give you the tools and resources on what to look for, how do you get to that?
How do you make sense of what your brain's currently doing?
And the best part is, is it puts you in the driver's seat to then take control of your
life.
And now you can really start to look at things and go, oh my gosh, I just tried to have a
sit down restaurant, dinner conversation with somebody and I could not block out the conversation
next to me.
I was so distracted and overwhelmed.
And now I know I can go home and do some crawling to help my brain get online.
Or I was the person who, you know, I needed everything to be exactly perfect and I'm really
hung up on my perfectionism right now.
Where is that coming from?
So that's where we help you say, okay, get out of the survival state of the right here
right now, go do some brain work.
And now let's zoom out and look at what the root of that is from the program perspective
coming from, meaning what is the subconscious belief in there?
So that's where it's a two part process.
There is no perfect.
There is no like immediate answer to any of this, but we will tell you when you start
to learn about your brain, your behavior, you'll accept that there's no such thing as perfection.
There is no perfect.
There is only imperfectly perfect people in this world and you gain a whole new sense
of compassion.
And then you have this tool to help you with your everyday living to just make life easier.
And I think that's something that we're all really looking for.
And I love how Paloma and I are always owning a whoopsies.
I just messed up, had a human moment, but here's what I can go do about it to make my
day just feel better.
A really quick thing that we can share with people if they're not doing the program right
now and they're like, okay, I wish I had something to help me when I'm trying to focus.
Let's share the lazy eight with them.
So we'll plug this video in the show notes as well.
The lazy eight is basically you're tracing an infinity sign.
You can do it on a piece of paper.
You can do it out like in front of you with your thumb.
What you're going to do is you're going to start in the middle and start tracing that
infinity sign up to the left, then up to the right, up to the left, up to the right.
And you're going to make sure you're following your thumb.
If you're doing it with your fingers, you're following that pen on the piece of paper where
you're doing it.
And this exercise is a brain gym exercise as well.
And it is amazing for helping your left and right hemispheres connect and helping bring
in that focus for when you're about to do something.
So this is a good one for if you know you're going into a class or you're going to read
something you really want to focus on, try this and let us know how it goes.
And thank you so much for being here.
We're so excited about this podcast and just being able to share this information with the
world.
And please subscribe, share, follow us on any platform that you're using.
And our social media also is Instagram is in the cortex underscore us, tick tock in underscore
the underscore cortex.
And our Facebook is in the cortex us website in the cortex.com.
It's getting a little repetitive repetitive, but hey, I'll say it anyway.
And because you're listening to this right now, you can get $10 off your very first payment
of our program with the promo code brainiac.
So go ahead and sign up and hey, let us know if you have any questions.
If you want us to talk about something specific, please reach out to us on social media and
we will get back to you.
So thanks for being here.
Bye.
Thank you.
Yeah.