ADHD for Smart Ass Women with Tracy Otsuka

Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/signup_____Every year, many of us feel pressure to set resolutions, overhaul our lives, or become a “new version” of ourselves. That approach rarely works for ADHD brains.In this episode, let’s talk about a different way forward. Instead of adding more goals, habits, or systems, this episode explores the power of choosing one word to guide the year and why simplicity works so well for ADHD brains. Tracy walks through the science behind why a single, emotionally charged word is easier to remember, easier to act on, and more motivating than long to do lists or rigid plans.The episode also shares the personal experiences that shaped Tracy’s word for 2026, including major family health events, big transitions, and the decision to let go of a long time family home. Along the way, she explains why ADHD brains do not thrive on more, how clutter and obligation quietly drain cognitive bandwidth, and why subtraction can actually bring clarity, creativity, and energy back online.You’ll hear how subtracting is not about minimalism or doing less for the sake of it, but about making space for what actually matters. From simplifying systems and commitments to questioning beliefs that no longer fit, this episode offers a grounded way to think about growth that does not rely on pressure or perfection.If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stretched thin, or ready to stop carrying what no longer fits, this episode is for you.Resources:Website: tracyotsuka.comInstagram: https://instagram.com/tracyotsuka YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tracyotsuka4796FREE 3-days to Fall in Love With Your ADHD Brain training on Jan 6th:  tracyotsuka.com/ilovemybrain Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.comSend a Message: Your Name | Email | Message If this podcast helps you understand your ADHD brain, Shift helps you train it. Practice mindset work in just 10 minutes a day. Learn more at tracyotsuka.com/shift Instead of Struggling to figure out what to do next? ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. That’s why most strategies don’t stick—they weren’t designed for how your brain actually works. Your ADHD Brain is A-OK Academy is different. It’s a patented, science-backed coaching program that helps you stop fighting your brain and start building a life that fits. 👉Learn more here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/aok-academy Learn more by connecting with Tracy through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or visit adhdforsmartwomen.com.Are You Ready to Discover Your Brilliance? Order Now: https://tracyotsuka.com/book2 Visit our website: https://tracyotsuka.com

Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/signup_____Join Tracy as she breaks her women only guest rule by welcoming Dr. Edward Hallowell to Episode 106 of ADHD for Smart Ass Women. If you know anything at all about ADHD you recognize Dr. Hallowell’s name as the leading authority in the field of ADHD. Dr. Hallowell is a board-certified child and adult psychiatrist, and a New York Times bestselling author. He, along with Dr. John Ratey wrote what Tracy considers to be the bible of ADHD, Driven to Distraction. Now retired from the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Hallowell has been featured on 20/20, 60 Minutes, Oprah, PBS, CNN, Today, Good Morning America, and in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, Time. He is a regular columnist for ADDitude magazine, and is also the host of his weekly podcast called Distraction. Dr. Hallowell is the founder of The Hallowell Centers in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Seattle. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and their three grown children.Dr. Hallowell shares the circumstances surrounding his ADHD diagnosis, Why he and Dr. John Ratey decided to write their new book ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction. Who he wrote this book for, Why most medical professionals have ignored the strengths in ADHD for so long, His opinion on ADHD and intelligence, Exciting research around the task positive network and default mode network and how you can use them to benefit the ADHD brain, The ADHDers need to create and constantly improve their life, Why those of us with ADHD should never worry alone, Where he believes the field of ADHD research and treatment is going, Whether he believes that there’s a relationship between introversion/extroversion and ADHD types, Why ADHD women have not been part of ADHD studies.Resources:Website: drhallowell.comADHD 2.0 Book: https://drhallowell.com/read/books-by-nedAmazon: ADHD 2.0: https://www.amazon.com/ADHD-2-0-EssenSend a Message: Your Name | Email | Message If this podcast helps you understand your ADHD brain, Shift helps you train it. Practice mindset work in just 10 minutes a day. Learn more at tracyotsuka.com/shift Instead of Struggling to figure out what to do next? ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. That’s why most strategies don’t stick—they weren’t designed for how your brain actually works. Your ADHD Brain is A-OK Academy is different. It’s a patented, science-backed coaching program that helps you stop fighting your brain and start building a life that fits. 👉Learn more here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/aok-academy Learn more by connecting with Tracy through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or visit adhdforsmartwomen.com.Are You Ready to Discover Your Brilliance? Order Now: https://tracyotsuka.com/book2 Visit our website: https://tracyotsuka.com

Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/signup_____What if the intensity you’ve chased in relationships wasn’t love, but dopamine?Amanda McCracken is an award winning journalist, endurance athlete, and intimacy researcher who was diagnosed with ADHD at 36, long after she had built a successful career. From the outside, her life looked accomplished and disciplined. Inside, she struggled with distraction, emotional intensity, anxiety, and a lifelong pattern of romantic fixation. In this episode, Amanda shares how ADHD showed up quietly in her life, from trichotillomania and overthinking to using extreme exercise as a form of self regulation, long before she had language for what was actually happening.The conversation centers on limerence, a psychological state of intense romantic longing marked by obsession, idealization, and emotional highs and lows. Amanda explains how limerence thrives on uncertainty, making it especially powerful for ADHD brains that crave novelty and fast dopamine. Tracy and Amanda explore how rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, and trauma can blur the line between desire and self worth, and why many women mistake intensity for connection. Amanda also shares how chasing emotionally unavailable partners became an organizing force in her life, and how that pattern kept her stuck in fantasy instead of intimacy. She also had to confront a deeper truth: real intimacy feels quieter than fantasy. Today, Amanda is married to a securely attached partner and is the author of When Longing Becomes Your Lover, a deeply personal exploration of limerence, ADHD, and what it takes to receive love instead of chasing it.Resources:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-mccracken-4716373 Website: https://www.amandajmccracken.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amanda.mccracken.39 Send a Message: Your Name | Email | Message If this podcast helps you understand your ADHD brain, Shift helps you train it. Practice mindset work in just 10 minutes a day. Learn more at tracyotsuka.com/shift Instead of Struggling to figure out what to do next? ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. That’s why most strategies don’t stick—they weren’t designed for how your brain actually works. Your ADHD Brain is A-OK Academy is different. It’s a patented, science-backed coaching program that helps you stop fighting your brain and start building a life that fits. 👉Learn more here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/aok-academy Learn more by connecting with Tracy through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or visit adhdforsmartwomen.com.Are You Ready to Discover Your Brilliance? Order Now: https://tracyotsuka.com/book2 Visit our website: https://tracyotsuka.com

Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/signup_____Some ADHD stories come from authors, psychologists, and researchers. This one comes from a 23-year-old ER nurse who learned early that the brain she has is exactly the one she needs.Nina Padilla spent ten years trying to get someone to take her ADHD symptoms seriously. From age thirteen through twenty-one, she told her pediatrician every year, “I think I have ADHD,” and every year she heard the same dismissal: good grades and good behavior meant she couldn’t possibly have it. It wasn't until her last semester of nursing school, during a three-day panic attack, that she finally found a therapist who listened. At 23, she was formally diagnosed with combined-type ADHD and started on Adderall.Today Nina works in the pediatric emergency room at the same hospital where she fell in love with the chaos during her final clinical rotation. She calls herself an energizer bunny, moving so fast that a pediatrician once told her, "Nina, don't fix whatever's going on up there." That was the moment she realized her ADHD wasn't a disability. It was her superpower.In this conversation, Tracy and Nina talk about growing up emotional and misunderstood, finding your people early, seeking rejection on purpose to heal rejection sensitivity, and why the ER is the perfect place for an ADHD brain that never gets bored.For any listener in their twenties who feels unsure about the future, Nina offers the clarity so many of us need at that age: follow what interests you, work with the brain you have, and stop chasing a version of “productive” that does nothing but make you miserable.Resources:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nina_izabellaSend a Message: Your Name | Email | Message If this podcast helps you understand your ADHD brain, Shift helps you train it. Practice mindset work in just 10 minutes a day. Learn more at tracyotsuka.com/shift Instead of Struggling to figure out what to do next? ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. That’s why most strategies don’t stick—they weren’t designed for how your brain actually works. Your ADHD Brain is A-OK Academy is different. It’s a patented, science-backed coaching program that helps you stop fighting your brain and start building a life that fits. 👉Learn more here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/aok-academy Learn more by connecting with Tracy through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or visit adhdforsmartwomen.com.Are You Ready to Discover Your Brilliance? Order Now: https://tracyotsuka.com/book2 Visit our website: https://tracyotsuka.com

Tired of ADHD strategies that don’t work? Here’s what actually does. FREE training here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/signup_____Gratitude is talked about a lot, but for us with ADHD brains it isn’t just a feel-good idea. It is a physiological strategy that changes how the brain functions.In this episode, Tracy breaks down why gratitude is not optional for ADHD. It starts with dopamine. ADHD brains rely on positive emotion to initiate action, sustain focus, and regulate emotion. Gratitude spikes dopamine, boosts serotonin, improves sleep, and builds the emotional foundation that makes everything else feel more doable. Tracy explains how this loop works and why even trying to think of something to be grateful for is enough to start shifting your brain chemistry.She also shares personal stories, including the impact of a daily gratitude practice, the “positive emotion dossier” she developed for A-OK, and the profound lessons she learned from a woman with ADHD living with metastatic cancer who embodied gratitude in the hardest circumstances. Tracy walks through the five levels of gratitude, the ADHD habit of scanning for what’s wrong, and how gratitude helps interrupt the spiral.This episode is both practical and encouraging, giving listeners a clear understanding of how gratitude improves executive function, stabilizes mood, strengthens habits, and helps ADHD brains filter out noise. Tracy also explores how gratitude intersects with trauma and how emotional healing can lead to post-traumatic growth. If you’ve ever wondered why gratitude matters or how to build a practice that actually works for your brain, this episode offers tools you can use immediately.Send a Message: Your Name | Email | Message If this podcast helps you understand your ADHD brain, Shift helps you train it. Practice mindset work in just 10 minutes a day. Learn more at tracyotsuka.com/shift Instead of Struggling to figure out what to do next? ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. That’s why most strategies don’t stick—they weren’t designed for how your brain actually works. Your ADHD Brain is A-OK Academy is different. It’s a patented, science-backed coaching program that helps you stop fighting your brain and start building a life that fits. 👉Learn more here: https://programs.tracyotsuka.com/aok-academy Learn more by connecting with Tracy through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or visit adhdforsmartwomen.com.Are You Ready to Discover Your Brilliance? Order Now: https://tracyotsuka.com/book2 Visit our website: https://tracyotsuka.com