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Feeling stuck while waiting for an ADHD diagnosis? Discover how to take control of your mental health and well-being while navigating the UK’s diagnosis backlog. In this episode, Dr. John Finn shares his personal journey with dyslexia and ADHD symptoms, offering practical self-improvement strategies through the Habit Mechanic approach. You’ll hear an eye-opening BBC news clip that highlights the frustrations faced by adults awaiting ADHD assessments within the NHS, and learn how building better habits can significantly enhance your concentration and emotional regulation, even before a formal diagnosis.
Transform your life one step at a time with Habit Mechanic coaching, designed for long-term success. Dr. Finn invites you to explore how small, manageable changes can lead to substantial improvement, drawing on his own experiences and success stories from others. Whether you’re dealing with dyslexia, ADHD, or simply looking to improve your focus and emotional health, this episode provides valuable insights and actionable steps. Don’t forget to spread the word about our podcast and tools, and stay updated by liking and following us for new episodes. Remember, you’re just one habit away from making a significant change!
Transcript (automatically generated)
Speaker 1: 0:15
Hello Habit Mechanics. It’s Dr John Finn here. I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far. We live in a challenging and complex world. We’ve called that world the VUCA world for a long time the Volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous World, and every day I see more evidence that people are struggling to be their best. And I just wanted to first of all share a clip from the BBC 6 o’clock news from July 25th. Here we go.
Speaker 2: 0:54
An NHS trust which has closed its waiting list for adult ADHD assessments has told BBC it plans to work with the private sector to tackle the backlog. Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust says it has more than 11,000 people on its waiting list. A BBC investigation has found at least 195,000 people across the UK are waiting to be assessed for the condition. Our health correspondent, catherine Burns, reports.
Speaker 3: 1:21
ADHD causes problems with concentration, hyperactivity and impulse control. Jess Strawn says it has shaped her life Without knowing that I had ADHD.
Speaker 4: 1:32
I just felt like I was a useless person. I’m not a child, but it makes me feel like I’m like a big adult baby, just like I’m not trying hard enough, when actually I am trying really hard and I’m beating myself up about it constantly.
Speaker 3: 1:48
There is no official data for how many adults are waiting to be assessed by the nhs to see if they have adhd, but we did a freedom of information request to trusts and health boards across the UK and calculated that if services carried on working at the same pace, it would take more than eight years to clear the backlog of people waiting.
Speaker 5: 2:12
We had to close our waiting list in November. I think there’s something about being honest with people. If people came onto our waitlist.
Speaker 3: 2:19
They’d be waiting years. Dr Dipti Shah Arman is the clinical director at Central and Northwest London NHS Foundation Trust. It has the biggest waiting list for ADHD assessments that we know, of more than 11,000 adults. There is a plan, though.
Speaker 5: 2:37
As a NHS provider, we cannot do it on our own. Our plan is to work with the private sector and really try and get through this backlog as quickly as possible, and you hope to do that in three years. We hope to do that in three years. It must be so frustrating for someone to have to wait. Sadly, that’s the reality of our services at the moment.
Speaker 3: 2:58
All four UK governments accept that something needs to change. Nhs England has set up a task force which is expected to report back later this year.
Speaker 1: 3:08
So that’s the situation in the UK right now around ADHD diagnosis, and I feel really sorry for those people that are having to wait so long to find out if they’re, I think, just to find out more information about why they feel like they feel. But what I’d like to say to people that are struggling is you don’t necessarily have to wait for the diagnoses To start doing some really practical things that will make yourself feel better. I’m speaking about this from experience. When I was at school, I was coerced to take a dyslexia diagnosis and symptoms of dyslexia would be collapsed into the kind of symptoms that we associate with adhd. Um, adhd is. It’s got multiple components. Some some would argue that adhd isn’t one thing. Actually it’s multiple different things. It’s quite hard to to diagnose because when you, what you think is adhd might actually be something else. Anyway, at school I was kind of coerced to do this dyslexia self-assessment and I got halfway through it and I just walked out and I said I’m not doing this. I just don’t see the point of doing it because even if you tell me that I’ve got dyslexia, all you’re going to do is give me a little bit of extra time on an exam and I don’t really see the point of that and by the time I started working in education I was really disheartened that that hadn’t moved on very much. Schools and parents were paying for private diagnosis for their kids to be diagnosed with dyslexia or to be tested for dyslexia diagnosis. But if they were diagnosed, they weren’t getting any more support than just being given some more time on an exam. And in my adult life I have struggled and I can really empathise with the kind of symptoms that people describe around ADHD, and I recently took an online test that said that it’s highly likely that I have ADHD. But the reason that I haven’t got a formal diagnosis is it’s a bit like the dyslexia diagnosis for me I don’t really see the point. What I see the value in is recognising wait a minute.
Speaker 1: 5:56
The way that I process certain things is a bit different to other people, and if I need to get better at processing those things, like for me, reading and writing and spending long bouts with focused attention those the types of bouts I’ve needed in order to write a PhD, in order to write the habit mechanic book then what I need to do is to recognize the habits that are stopping me from doing that, the habits around, how I concentrate and how I regulate my emotions, and to build better habits. And that’s what I’ve done. I’m really part of the journey to developing the habit mechanic approach and the toolkit that has been driven by my own experience of sometimes struggling to concentrate in the way that I really needed to, at sometimes struggling to manage my emotions to, you know, regulate impulse, for example. So the habit mechanic approach is designed for everybody, whether you have an adhd diagnosis or you think you, um, you think it would be helpful for you to get an adhd diagnosis, or whether you have dyslexia. And on that point, it’s really interesting that just a few weeks ago, completely out of the blue, on linkedin, someone added me into a message um, and this, this guy had actually written an article about how the habit mechanic book had transformed his understanding of his own dyslexia. Um, I don’t know that person, he just bought the book and, of his own volition, he’d written this blog text just saying it’s completely transformed how he thinks about himself. And we’ve seen that time and time again.
Speaker 1: 8:00
Um, we hear this term neurodiversity a lot. Neurodiversity simply means neurons, brain. Is that? That’s what it’s how we refer to brains neurons, because they’re a set of neurons, are diverse, so brains are diverse. Nobody’s brain is the same. Everybody’s brain is different because everybody has slightly different genetic material and plugged into. That is. Everybody is practicing different things all of the time and we get good at what we practice.
Speaker 1: 8:39
I think the thing that we struggle often struggle to understand is that we don’t just get good at practicing the physical things that we do, we also get good at practicing the psychological things that we do, like beating ourselves up, like not focusing, like not regulating our impulses. And we we hear this language about attention a lot. We hear the term attention economy and we use that because it’s kind of common parlance. Obviously we have, um, we have diagnosis for attention deficit, um, disorders, but what I would say is that disorders, but what I would say is that it’s not actually about your attention, it’s about your emotions, because emotions come before attention. It’s emotions that the, that are the immediate biological signals that drive your attention. And if we actually want to get better at managing our attention so we can manage how we concentrate, how we regulate impulses, we need to get better at managing our emotions and that’s why the entire habit mechanic approach is actually focused on emotional regulation focused on emotional regulation, and emotional regulation is a neuroscience term in social science to just describe, describe exactly the same thing. They talk about, um, self-regulation, and you’ll see people like roy burmeister, very, very high-profile academics in that area.
Speaker 1: 10:20
I think Roy Burmeister’s work, his peer-reviewed research, has been cited over something like 400,000 times. He’s a seriously big hitter when it comes to psychological sciences and actually I just want to turn to a page. I have the Habit Mechanic book in front of me here. I just want to turn to a page where I talk a little bit about Roy Burmeister’s work. I’m going to go to chapter. I’m going to go to chapter. Bear with me one second. I’m going to go to chapter. People are thinking I know what chapter you’re talking about. Um, let me find it. Yeah, so it’s here. I’m in chapter 12 and actually, uh, burmeister sorry, he’s been cited over 200 000 times, not 400 000, I correct myself. He’s.
Speaker 1: 11:17
His research and others show that if we get better at regulating our emotions, these are the outcomes that we are far more likely to experience more success in education, better mental health and physical health, more likely to feel happier, more likely to enhance our creativity, more likely to be popular with others, more likely to have stronger marriages and relationships, more likely to be trusted, we’ll have fewer drinking problems and addictions, we’ll be less likely to commit crime, we’ll be less likely to be abusive to others, we will live longer and we will enjoy more successful life. So they are findings from and let me just go back, this is not one study, this is burmeister, another leading scientist, lifetime work. So he’s written, he’s had over 650 publications and he’s written 40 books. So what the habit mechanic approach is all about, it’s about getting better at recognising and regulating your emotions. And if you’re thinking, okay, well, how do I do that? Well, that’s what, as I said, the whole approach is about. But what I would suggest that you do is, if you go to chapter 17 of the habit mechanic book and remember you can get a free copy, physical copy, of the habitit Mechanic book. And remember you can get a free copy, physical copy, of the Habit Mechanic book on our website.
Speaker 1: 12:53
If you go to chapter 17, I just want to find the exact page number. I know what it is roughly, yeah, so it’s page 174. And you will be able to do the in-depth habits reflection. Um, the first question on that is I give into temptation and act impulsively. If you always do that, you score yourself a 10. If you never do that, you’ll score yourself a one. And then, once you’ve completed the in-depth habits reflection, you can go to page 179 and you can look at the helpful habits reflection and by doing that, you’re not only going to get a better understanding of yourself, you’re going to be able to start taking some positive action immediately, because getting all diagnosis in my opinion does. It’s just makes you more aware of what’s going on for you.
Speaker 1: 13:56
Um, and I think that when it comes to psychology, we spend far too much time on the diagnosis area. So you will know that the most popular thing that you’ve probably seen in the psychological spaces are things like psychometrics and things like disc profiles, and for me that’s a great starting point. But then what do we do next? How do we then start to practice thinking and doing things differently? That will make our life easier, because we are not set in stone. We are a result of our genetic material, but also what we practice, because we understand now epigenetics. Even our genetic material is malleable.
Speaker 1: 14:44
So I appreciate a lot of people out there are really struggling, but I hope that the tools we’ve developed in the habit mechanic approach can give you some immediate relief, but also help you to start building better thinking and doing habits. If you think that’s going to be helpful for you, you can get the book for free. You can sign up to Habit Mechanic University. If you don’t want to read the book in full, you can get the lazy guide. You can see all this stuff in the links below this podcast.
Speaker 1: 15:29
If you want coaching, we can give you Habit Mechanic coaching. You can book a free call so we can help you to understand what’s going on for you and show you exactly how we can help you step by step. So we are here to help. Not only have I gone through this myself, our program has helped thousands of people go through this and get fantastic results, not just in the short term, but also in the long term. So I hope that’s been insightful and I hope that it helps you to start taking a couple of small steps to feeling better or, you know, helping those in your community those loved ones, friends, family to start feeling a little bit better. If you like what you hear, please tell someone else. Tell someone else about the podcast, the mechanic podcast, about the book about how these tools can help them. Like the podcast, follow the podcast and then you’ll get automatic notifications of when we release new ones. So thank you for listening and remember you’re only ever one habit away.
