424: Pandemic Anxiety with Dr. Doug
We interrupt our regularly-scheduled podcast to inject a couple of ideas in your path today. In this first episode, Dr. Doug Herr is back to talk about the anxiety and stress that comes with living with the unknown.
This week, Dr. Doug joins Nikki and Pete to talk about our emotions, but not by belittling them or running from them or even moving through them. He approaches our emotional response to living in the world of uncertainty that comes with the pandemic by helping us understand what our emotions are, why they exist, and how we can better come to terms with our reactions this way.
Dr. Doug is planning a webinar in which he teaches these techniques more deeply for next week. We encourage you to sign up to be notified — it’s free and should be incredibly helpful.
Links & Notes
Episode Transcript
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Pete Wright: Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast on RashPixel.FM. I'm Pete Wright, and right over there is Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer: Hello everyone. Hello Pete Wright.
Pete Wright: How you doing, Nikki Kinzer?
Nikki Kinzer: I'm dong pretty good.
Pete Wright: All things considered, we're in an all things considered kind of a state right now.
Nikki Kinzer: All things considered, doing pretty good, right.
Pete Wright: Yes. We've shaken up our schedule a little bit given what happened, and what has been happening in this country, and on this planet, and in our community frankly. We're going to talk a little bit about dealing with the pandemic, and where we are, and what is it doing to your ADHD, and how are you living with it, and what are the emotional constraints? We have our very favorite, Dr. Doug, is here to talk with us and help share some of his wisdom with us as we navigate uncertain waters with.
Nikki Kinzer: And I just want to add, we're also going to be talking about working from home as well. Because I know a lot of people are making that transition, and they're not exactly sure what to expect or how to make it work, so I'm going to give some the tips at the end after we get done talking to Dr. Doug about what to do that will make it a little bit easier for you.
Pete Wright: That's right, absolutely. Before we get started with the conversation proper, head over to TakeControlADHD.com. You can get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list, and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can again connect with us on Twitter or Facebook app, Take Control ADHD.
Pete Wright: And if this show has ever touched you or helped you make a change in your life for the better, we invite you to visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast, and become a paying supporter to help us grow the show. To continue to support the platform to have wonderful guests like Dr. Doug on the show.
Pete Wright: Patreon is listener supported podcasting, just a few dollars a month. You can guarantee that we continue to thrive in the future. Of course, make smart financial decisions in time of uncertainty, but we're here for you. That's all I'm saying. So thank you, thank you in advance to all of those who are considering to join us. And thank you as always for those who are already members. We appreciate your support.
Pete Wright: All right, here we go. We're talking about anxiety and stress and the unknown in the age of the pandemic. Now it was interesting how this came about because I think Nikki and I had already been thinking about how we're going to talk about this, what we're doing here. Then I get this text from Doug saying, "Hey, I got things I want to share too. We got to come together and do an episode and make this happen." Yeah, and so that's kind of we are. And so I don't know, how do you want to start, Doug? Do you want to kick us off and share a little bit about what you're hearing from your folks, and we'll kind of weave in from there?
Dr. Doug: I was actually wanting to start where you guys are. For people who don't know me and my background, I am a psychologist. I've been counseling people since, I don't know, almost 30 years. Lately, I do leadership development work with doctors. I've worked with medical patients a lot and 100s of doctors too.
Dr. Doug: So because I worked with disease so much at Vanderbilt when I was there in the Integrative Health Clinic, I just realized like everything that I taught them is stuff that people can benefit from in this time. Like suddenly everyone needs that. The course that I developed at Vanderbilt was called Living Well with Chronic Pain. The truth is it's really just living well with chronic distress, whatever that distress is. Right now, it's a virus. Then there's all the secondary distresses too like.... Could they hear when Nikki was talking about buying potatoes because everyone else was, even though you didn't need potatoes?
Nikki Kinzer: I don't think they heard it, but I'm happy to share the story. So I went grocery shopping on Friday afternoon. My intention was to go grocery shopping, but there were no grocery carts available, so I had to use one of those little handheld baskets. I thought, "Okay, I'm just going to go in and get what I need for dinner and I'll come back another time." But as I was going through the produce, I was seeing all of the potatoes were going away.
Nikki Kinzer: People were putting potatoes into their bags or into their carts, and there was one bag of potatoes left, and I thought, "I need to get it." And so I grabbed it and put it in my little handheld basket. My basket was really heavy with the potatoes and everything else that I was sticking in there. But yeah, there was this like instinct of mine of, "I better get that. If I don't get that, something bad's going to happen." It was weird how it just sort of takes over.
Dr. Doug: I wanted to talk about that secondarily too. That's really, it's tricky because that's not a real problem, but because everyone has gotten afraid and gotten silly. The biggest one is toilet paper. Has everyone heard about that? Somebody started this idea that there's not enough toilet paper, and so now it's true. Everyone started doing that and now if you were left out, now you're in a problem.
Pete Wright: That's the secondary virus. We have the virus that we're all trying to do the right thing to help stem, and the idea virus, which has gone out of control.
Dr. Doug: Well, and there's not just one. There are many of them. I wanted to talk a little bit about those. In integrative health, you have all kinds of people schlepping all kinds of products, and some of them are beautiful. But what we really focused on, of course, since I was in an academic university medical setting, was one that were scientifically based.
Dr. Doug: The first thing about controlling your anxiety in this situation, which is I think the biggest Google search that people are doing, is listen to accurate information only, and only listen to what you can use. The CDC puts out information. Johns Hopkins has a great webpage for tracking how the virus is spreading that's useful to you and to me that, I don't know, some people would get more anxious looking at that. If that's what happens, don't look at that. That's not helpful.
Dr. Doug: The simple things that we know are the important things to keep focused on. Keeping social distance, avoiding big crowds, washing your hands regularly. Like my new practice for myself and my son is when we walk into our home, the first thing we do is wash our hands. You sing Happy Birthday twice, which is a nice little thing too. As you're getting water all over your hands, you do in between your fingers, and you don't forget your thumbs. You'll be as good as a surgeon if you pay attention to all that details there. But this is important because this is stuff that actually matters. My guess is I'm not really that worried about toilet paper because I don't think the entire supply chain has broken down.
Pete Wright: Well and they've been very clear about that. The food supply is okay, we're fine if we just stopped buying it like hooligans. Stop hoarding pasta, people. Everybody will have enough pasta. This is my theory and I wonder if you have any idea? I wonder if I'm even close to right, that we have been spending... And specifically the Pacific Northwest, the last thing that we needed to prepare for was the Pacific Subduction Zone. Everybody was terrified about the West Coast cleaving off the side of the country because of this giant fault. So we all learned how to prepare for that, which means have a bunch of water, have a bunch of food, have a bunch of non-perishables, all that stuff.
Pete Wright: It's like that's the only disaster we know how to prepare for. So when we think about disaster, we immediately trigger that response that, "Okay, I better start hoarding stuff because you never know when the Corona zombie apocalypse is going to occur." This is not that disaster and we have to retrain ourselves, right?
Dr. Doug: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Is there anything psychologically to that?
Dr. Doug: Well, yes, because think about it, or rather don't. What happens very quickly... Okay, so here's the most basic rule of anxiety that people need to understand. Thinking increases anxiety. I mean, it's just that simple. If you want to decrease your anxiety, do something. Now it is important that we do something rational. Because we did something irrational and stormed the stores, then everyone is even more anxious.
Dr. Doug: But that started with thinking, and not thinking accurate thoughts. It's your brain when you get into... This is what people look like as they're headed into fight or flight. There's actually four states of brain. There's freeze, which is we usually look at deer in the headlights. Then there's fight or flight, which everyone's familiar with. The last one is faint, and that can be like playing possum. It's playing dead. It's the thing that happens before you die if you're a gazelle. If you ever saw a gazelle getting eaten by a lion, they don't feel that. Their brain has said. "There's no point to pain anymore because we're done here," and their whole body just goes into faint and they're food now.
Dr. Doug: It might surprise people to know that the only place that pain exists is in the brain. The brain creates pain. There's no pain in your body ever. That's why you can also have your arm cut off and still have phantom limb pain because your brain hasn't adjusted to what's real. Obviously, that's a really deep thought. But these very simple thoughts that are always frothing up. Thinking increases anxiety. It's really important to have whatever it is in your life, it helps you to feel calm and peaceful, centered, connected with other people, love. These are the really basic things that we need right now. We need peace.
Dr. Doug: Now I'm going to return to some tried and true material, which is meditation. When your body is filled with anxiety, it's also great to do meditation that involves your body, yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, even martial arts. If you already know those things, that's a really important starting place. Because going for a walk, especially if you can go for a walk in nature, these are really simple grounding practices that help to metabolize. When you feel anxiety, it's a biological response, and it fills your body with hormones that tell you, you need to do something, and the problem is there's nothing to do.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, I can totally relate to that because I think that is that initial instinct is you want to do something. But you're right. What we need to do is nothing. We need to...
Dr. Doug: Well, you really don't need to buy all the potatoes. You don't need to become a prepper in that sense right now. We just cause problems by doing that.
Pete Wright: We did. We did secondary problems that now the people who need it most, the people who can't afford to hoard, are the people who still have to go to the grocery store every week or every three or four days. There are people who are in the service industry that just can't afford to live. Maybe you're choosing to live if you're doing that. So this is a sort of a spread the wealth period. I've been likening it to our generation's moon mission. It feels like this is the grand thing that we all have to come to terms with and do our part, even though doing our part means, as you say, doing nothing. I'm not engineering a rocket. It feels like I'm not pulling my weight, but I really am if I just do nothing.
Nikki Kinzer: And you follow what the guidelines are, don't go out, stay in, be with the people that you know where they've been and they know where you've been. Wash your hands and do the things that you know you should be doing. I saw on the news this morning that there's still all these people that are going to bars and they're celebrating St. Patrick's Day. And it's like that is just a disservice right now. I think what they're looking at is does the federal government then come in and say, "These are the rules all across the United States and not just [crosstalk 00:13:24].
Dr. Doug: So here's the thing. The federal government is, I think, slow to respond to this crisis in an inappropriate way. That does need to happen probably. Everything in Nashville is already shutting down anyway. Local governments have just started doing that, and that's wise. The truth is there is a danger here of under responding to this. The thing we need to do though is do nothing. Nothing is a very particular thing in this case. Don't go out when you don't need to. Don't go to crowded places. This is a very strange thing because it's usually the opposite of what I think, but it's a great time not to touch each other. We all need love and affection. More than ever right now, we need to understand that not shaking hands and keeping our distance is a way to be loving. Jazz hands, right.
Pete Wright: Jazz hands [crosstalk 00:14:22] there are all kinds of options for this. I think that this gets to what, and I'm going to use this, I don't mean this derogatorily. I really don't when I say this word, but there is a certain possibly uniquely American, I don't know, entitlement spirit. That comes with, "I've worked hard and I deserve what I've gotten. I'm just so angry that all of this is happening to me."
Pete Wright: My hunch is we all go through this at some level. That is one of the things that helps to fuel the hoarding aspect that, "I'm going to do whatever I need to do so that my quality of life, my standard of living doesn't change at all during this period and I'm just mad. I'm mad that all of my favorite things are canceled. I'm mad that my favorite movies are being pushed out a year. I'm mad at all of this stuff." That's another emotion that I feel like we have to figure out how to process. How do you advise people, I mean to get to the other side of that particular trigger?
Dr. Doug: In the base of the brain there are two states of being. One of them is peace and the other one is threat. These are the two basic states of being, so I don't want to make anger bad. It's not bad, but when somebody is feeling threatened, anger jumps up, or fear jumps up, and then we tend to do things that are totally irrational. If we're in a state of threat, so much energy gets pumped through our emotions, they get amplified. Then it shuts down the thinking part of our brain. Because all of that threat response from our body is designed to kill something like a wild animal that's trying to chase us. It's not useful in human interactions unless you're in a dark alley and somebody has a knife.
Dr. Doug: When it comes to the frustration and the anger that people feel, that's very real. We're attached to our way of life and our way of life is changing. We need to get below the attachment to a particular way of life at least for a few weeks and say, "But wait a minute. What's the point of this way of life? The point of all the things I'm doing is to try and find fulfillment, to try and maybe contribute what I can to this world, to feel connected to people I care about, to express my gifts, and to enjoy myself." These are all good things. We can do all these things in a new way. It's a transition. It's a grief. It's an adjustment period because I don't know what my kid's going to do to run around. It's not warm enough yet for him to go play outside and soccer's canceled.
Pete Wright: It's very real and I think that is exacerbated by our desire to keep informed and our practice of keeping informed. We have notifications. The latest one this morning as I woke up with my kids and we started to try to have a normal day was yeah, I know school is closed for two weeks, but the CDC is now saying no gatherings of over 50 for eight weeks. That can be sort of terrifying, especially when my daughter's in a high school class where the average class size is 45 or 50. It's a terrifying experience.
Pete Wright: I want to go back to what you just said, which is finding fulfillment. Like if we instead of talking about this as a thing that is, "If we just hunker down for two weeks, everything will be normal." Instead, maybe the practice is, "I need to change the way I'm living my life for an indefinite period of time and figure out how to find fulfillment in this completely new undescribed way. Where can I find joy in living with my family in a new way, in helping to educate my kids thanks to the resources that their schools are providing? Or maybe not, maybe I'm doing that myself. How can I find a way to create some new behaviors and habits around the house to give people exercise and burn off some of those non soccer calories?" What does that look like?
Dr. Doug: Well, so let me first say, my heart goes out to everyone who just heard what you just said. The latest CDC recommendation was news to me when you just said it.
Nikki Kinzer: Well, what hit me with it, it too is that I have a nephew who's planning on getting married the end of May. My guess is that wedding's going to end up probably most likely being canceled. Prom is being canceled, graduations are being canceled. I mean, these monumental events. So it's not just it... I guess that I understand parents being frustrated because yes, you've got these kids at home and what do you do? And now you have to work at home. But it's also all of these milestones in people's lives that are getting canceled too.
Dr. Doug: Well so let's reframe that. Everything is changing. Now the reality is this has always been true. But in this country, there is this exceptionalism. Because we developed, I think, from the '50s through the '80s, where the economy kept growing, everything seemed to always be an in a growth phase. What happens there is it's easy to get used to that and take it for granted. What's happened too is because we've got an ocean on either side and friends above and below us. So we have a relative peace and prosperity. What happens is people haven't begun to think that that phrase in the constitution is the pursuit of happiness is something that is an exterior journey.
Dr. Doug: I would suggest that rather than even thinking about this as a temporary change, which for some people it will be, but for some people, I hope this is actually invitation to a permanent change. The truth is we can't grow our economy forever, and we're starting to see that now. There are problems with that. The truth is we don't need to, to be happy. The more that we increase our prosperity and our economy and all of that, we have not increased our happiness.
Dr. Doug: In order to increase our happiness, we really need to look to our minds. It's the regulation of that out of control, anxious thinking that's really going to make the difference for us. It's the ability to create happiness inside ourselves. I think if we go back to 1776, or whenever that particular phrase was written, what we're talking about is there is no mall where you can go buy stuff. Everyone's got the same, what they were talking about is this spiritual journey. You're free to have your own spiritual life, whatever you conceive it to be. That's what I think they were saying.
Dr. Doug: Your pursuit of happiness is truly always been an inner thing. We've gotten used to all these externalities, but if you have an external problem, that's fine. It's the virus. It's the changes in the store and not being able to go to work. Those are external problems. Happiness is, if you're not happy, if you're feeling distressed inside, that's an internal problem. The good news there is we can create our own peace and joy on the inside.
Dr. Doug: There's some really simple principles. The first thing I mentioned that I really thought was important is get accurate information. The CDC, your local public radio. If you Google, I tried this last night in Nashville. I've had that page up, Public Radio Nashville, and they're updating my local circumstances. Same thing was true for Chicago. I bet you the same thing's true just about any city.
Pete Wright: There is something related to that, that I just want to make sure we get out. That in terms of trusting information, because that's a real challenge right now is figuring out what resources to trust. I really stand by this, that the resources that you tend to be able to trust the most are the resources that don't shy away from giving you information that hurts, that sharing bad news. The CDC saying this might go longer than you think it will than a lot of organizations are telling you that it will. That's an organization that's not afraid to give bad news, but also sometimes good news. Also, there are treatments that we are finding might be, or at least a treatment protocol that's on the horizon. Things that are mixed. If you look for the mixed bag, generally you find an organization that's more sort of resonant.
Dr. Doug: Yeah, that's fair. I think the other thing is please do not go by what you see on Facebook. I've seen so much garbage on Facebook, I don't even want to try and name it all. But there's some decent information mixed in with just stuff that's just crazy. The one thing that we know about Facebook is that if it's extreme and weird, it will go viral faster. So don't do that. If you read that-
Pete Wright: Well, there are people who are trying to make this an economic boon. These are the people who have bought up all the Purrell and are now reselling it on eBay for a huge market. And the same goes for information. We're using this idea of virus as a way to make a buck, and so we have to find a way around those.
Dr. Doug: So, yeah. I just got the link from Trina. I want to do a seminar, a webinar, I guess you call it. I have to wait until next week because, honestly, I'm just kind of getting everything in place to do it. But all the tools that I taught people in my class are useful in this situation. The tools that I taught people have to do with shifting your body from a state of emergency. So fight or flight is a state of emergency that your body is in. It's great at fighting infections. Infections are happening when a bear grabs you with its teeth or something.
Dr. Doug: What we want is our body to be in a very calm state where there's no emergency. Then it's doing long term maintenance. And that's when the immune system is designed to take care of things like viruses. The link I want to give people is changetimeisnow.com is my website, then backslash Corona. If people want to register there, I'm just going to like I think on Tuesday of next week. We haven't even decided a time yet, but I'll, I'll get that out to people. But it's just going to be free, and I might even put it up on YouTube.
Dr. Doug: This is all new to me. I'm not a social media guy. [inaudible 00:00:26:00]. Didn't imagine this happening, but it feels like, "Okay, I have these tools." The first one is love and connection. If you're in that angry, agitated state, you miss out on the people in your own family. That's a tragedy because we really need to be connecting at the heart level right now.
Dr. Doug: The next most important one is stress reduction. Now, stress reduction is ubiquitously important, and so I want to teach people a variety of meditation techniques. Basically, if you don't like the word meditation, I don't really care. It doesn't matter. What you're doing is you're wiring relaxation into your brain so that you can approach whatever the stressful situation is with a relaxed and calm, which means orderly, mind. And then you can make good decisions. That's the best tool you've got is your mind.
Dr. Doug: The first thing that is important is like if you're suddenly hit with something, this could be an argument too. What you want to do is stop everything and take three breaths. If you're about to have an important conflict, just stop and take three breaths.
Nikki Kinzer: You say that and I immediately breathe. I take a deep breath. It's like it's just an instinct and you can feel better immediately.
Dr. Doug: Exactly. So you just changed the way your body feels with one breath. Here's the other thing to be careful about, longer out than in. Make the exhale longer than the inhale. If you're breathing in, your heart rate increases. If you're breathing out, your heart rate decreases. If you breathe out longer, you will decrease your heart rate, your blood pressure, you'll decrease all of those stress hormones that tend to really jack us up.
Dr. Doug: It's really important that we take good care of ourselves in this time. It's really important that we recognize we're all in this together. We can either be all in this together or we can be all in this together all alone. The first is better.
Nikki Kinzer: Well, and you know, what a blessing that it's... I guess this is the silver lining. I shouldn't say silver lining. Hashtag silver lining is that we are in an era where we can be connected online. So even if you have to be at home and be quarantined for 14 days because you've been exposed to this in some way, you still have the ability to FaceTime and Skype and be connected to your loved ones. I think that is a huge blessing that we get to do that, that people actually do get to go home and work and not lose their jobs. Now there are going to be some that will take that cut and I totally understand that.
Nikki Kinzer: But the other thing I want to say real quick too is, Doug, you mentioned the very first thing you were talking about is that connection with your loved ones. If you are at home with your kids or your family, and for my situation, they're teenagers. It's nice to have them home. I get to see my daughter and my son more now than I have in a long time. And so in that way, I guess it's again looking at the silver lining. It's like, "Well, if we're going to have to be here, at least we can be here together and enjoy that." And you can still go outside and run and walk, and maybe not in a marathon type of way.
Pete Wright: That's right, just not in groups of 50.
Nikki Kinzer: Not in big groups, but you can still go outside. I think when you were talking about nature, that's really important.
Dr. Doug: It's huge. Yeah, being outside is going to be really important. Sunlight is actually... I don't want to overstate any positive solution right now. Because like you said, there's no toothpaste. I mean, you say that, I'm like, "Really? Somebody did that, okay." But there's also sunlight is good for this, but I don't know that that's going to make it all go away because it's summertime. But it's still, and it's also good for us. What's good for us that calms us down and makes us happy also improves our immune system.
Pete Wright: There you go. I mean that part is settled science. Like we know what happens when your body interacts with vitamin D. We're not saying that the virus is going to go away if you're out in the sun. This is not like the Colorado like TB treatments. Where you remember those things of people sitting in lawn chairs outside in Manitou Springs with their mouths open trying to get more sun into their bodies. That's not what we're talking about here. The sun is joyous.
Nikki Kinzer: I'm talking about notice the flowers.
Pete Wright: It is a beautiful day.
Nikki Kinzer: Yes, it is beautiful day. There's this beautiful flower, I'm going to stop and I'm going to actually smell that flower.
Pete Wright: You smell that flower, you smell that flower, Nikki Kinzer, smell it.
Nikki Kinzer: I'm going to. I have them on my desk even, see.
Pete Wright: Yeah, there you go.
Dr. Doug: So let me add to that, how to manage Corona anxiety is what we want to offer people. The difficulty here is, I don't know if our webpage is actually working.
Pete Wright: Well, we can deal with that offline. We'll put a link in the show notes and we'll put a link in the community for anybody who's interested. I'm proud of you for making that a free webinar because you are not hoarding Purrell in this period, and that's very generous of you.
Dr. Doug: I heard a guy on TV here in Nashville recently talk about, "Oh, it's really important to stop those runaway thoughts." Okay, that's cool. I just wished that he had finished that with how?
Pete Wright: Yeah, so how do you do that?
Dr. Doug: Okay, that's like a whole, that's a lot. That's why I need more time to share all of that. That's what I want to share in my webinar. But like the first thing is just those three breaths. As you're focusing on your breath, you know what you're not doing? You're not focusing on your thinking.
Nikki Kinzer: Focusing on that, right, yeah.
Dr. Doug: You're doing something. It's so small, but it's still incredibly powerful. The other thing is as you're focusing on yourself and your life, if you realize if you focus inward, it tells your brain that there's nothing out there trying to get you. That helps to reduce the threat energy. If you can see me, I'm putting my hand on my heart, and if I stop and just feel my body and notice this is a moment of suffering.
Dr. Doug: If I'm completely threatened and agitated, I need to be able to bring some compassion to myself. If I see my loved one doing that, and here's the other problem, when you are in a threat state, it is very contagious to the people you were close to. So that spreads just like that. It's really important if you notice that happening for everyone to take a time out so we can calm down.
Dr. Doug: Like I was thinking, it's great to have your teenagers in the home, Nikki, until you all get cabin fever, and then suddenly things are going to get a little intense.
Nikki Kinzer: Oh right.
Dr. Doug: So you send them for a walk. But to realize I don't demonize emotions, they're a great source of energy, and they're the source of liveliness in us. What we want though is to make sure that our emotions aren't overwhelming us in that sense of threat or attack. Our emotions need to be bridges to other people and to ourselves, not weapons or walls.
Dr. Doug: So anyway, all of that, meditation is a technique that helps you to get there. Eating, moving, it's really important that we eat in a way to take care of ourselves. It's really important that we keep moving. Your body was made to move. Moving with intention is a really... Like if you're moving furiously, that's like you do in an emergency. So we want to train our bodies. "No, I'm moving with intention in my movements and that is training my body that everything's okay." That's not how you act if you're being chased by a bear.
Dr. Doug: So reducing our stress, increasing the love in our relationships, this is all the kind of stuff that's important.
Pete Wright: The thing that I feel like is a mantra for me right now is something we say around here all the time in the context of living with ADHD. It's, "You're not alone." Well, you know what? We are, planetarily speaking, not alone. This is the great unifying event of our generation right now. [crosstalk 00:35:26] It is affecting us all right now. If we can figure out how to do this, there might be hope that we can tackle climate change or whatever other grand like planetary initiatives. We can do it. We can do it. Yeah, it's good practice. [crosstalk 00:35:41].
Dr. Doug: It's almost like that Independence Day, where if we get invaded by an alien, then suddenly we all come together.
Pete Wright: Yeah, suddenly we come together. This is our alien invasion right now.
Dr. Doug: It's an opportunity. It's not just a generation. This is in our lifetime. There's never been anything like this in our lifetime. This is really a spectacular change and we really need to pull together. Be a force for good in the midst of this.
Nikki Kinzer: I love that. I love that message.
Pete Wright: All right. We talked about doing some of our working from home fear conversation in this. Nikki, you want to change your strategy a little bit on that?
Nikki Kinzer: Yes I do. I'd rather end it here because I think that this was a great message. Doug, thank you so much for being here and talking to us about that. Then let's make this working from home a separate episode that we can just focus because they're very two different things, and I don't want to confuse the two subjects, and I think his message is very important. Mine is more on the practical side.
Pete Wright: Okay, all right. So we'll start there and we'll take on the other one in the next episode. So thank you all very much. Dr. Doug as ever, you're an incredible resource. Thank you for bringing your heart to this show today. We appreciate it.
Dr. Doug: Thanks man. I appreciate the chance to be here, Oh, and Nikki, the heart is very practical. Don't...
Nikki Kinzer: That's true.
Dr. Doug: The most practical thing we've got for life anyway. Thank so much, both of you.
Pete Wright: Thank you, everybody for downloading and listening to this show.
Nikki Kinzer: Thank you.
Pete Wright: We appreciate your time and your attention and your social distance. We love you, everybody. We have Dr. Doug, and Nikki Kinzer, and Pete Wright. We'll catch you next time right here on Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast.
