You know, recording moment, these things start, gets into that natural flow and then there's not this thing of, okay, we're beginning. Yeah, everyone's like, okay. Well, I need to be more vigilant than I was a second ago because I need to be out of the mic. Welcome to... Why? Different. Welcome to why different, the podcasts for a neurodiversity with people in the creative industry. This is episode eight and it's a pleasure to welcome my next guest, who is none other than Tristan Humm, an ADHD coach for people in the music industry, helping them to thrive while navigating the challenges of ADHD within that particularly high pressure environment. Tristan's managed to combine his knowledge of ADHD following his late diagnosis with his long experience of working in the music industry and that provides some really fascinating perspectives. I've been really looking forward to this episode and it doesn't disappoint. We talked about a bunch of topics from childhood traumas and how they can be a link in a chain of events that lead to many of the behaviours and difficulties that people with neurodivergent conditions suffer with today. And some of the angles that aren't commonly talked about when considering predictions and how people get there packed with analogies and scientific information broken down. This is an amazing chat and Tristan I'll be in your ear to get you back because we weren't able to condense everything we wanted to discuss into one single episode. Now without further ado, enjoy episode eight with Tristan Humm. Tristan. Thank you for coming. George, thanks. Tell me a bit about your story with neurodiversity. How is it showing up in your life? I got diagnosed with dyslexia when I was maybe six or seven and this was back in the 80s. It's quite a while ago now of course and the understanding of neurodiversity wasn't what it is today and my mum was told that I was stupid. I was just think that this dyslexia thing was just something that was an excuse for being stupid or thick. So that was my first sort of inroads to understanding that I had a neurodiverse condition, conditions because I also have dyscalculia, I really can't add up for toffee. That's inability to handle numbers. That's right. Yes, it's like number dyslexia. And that caused a lot of challenges in terms of my learning of course. I didn't know that I had ADHD at the time. I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until I was 40, which is now four years ago. And of course, all three of those were showing up all the way through my primary school, three secondary school, onto university when I did a master's some years later, and all the way through work. So this sort of later stage diagnosis has made a lot of sense of a lot of things, a lot of behaviours, a lot of successes and a lot of failures, addictions, a whole range of different things. My neurodiverse conditions have shaped my life for better and for worse, and for a whole host of things in between. But yeah, it's been a journey. It's a common description that is better and for worse. And I think that's been the perspective that resonated with me the most, because you hear about superpowers and stuff. And I appreciate the value in those statements to empower people and make them feel like they're not broken, which is often what people have been taught their whole life. And whereas there are elements that are great, there are elements that are not great, and they come about unexpectedly. I like how honest and upfront you are about that, because I think that gives licence to then accept those feelings in yourself. It's very personal how you choose to define your neurodiverse experience. That's personal and it's yours to define it as you so choose. I set up my ADHD coaching practice, so music industry, ADHD coach specializing in helping people from the music industry, artists and professionals with their ADHD and in that context. But in the last year and a half since I launched full time, I coached people from all around the world, North America, Europe, through South Australia, everywhere. In between of the 140 plus people that I've worked with, not one has come to me and gone, "Do you know what? I really need help with my superpowers." My cape keeps on getting caught in the door. This is really problematic. The thing that capes to the dry cleaners, for most it's more of a Clark Kent experience if you like. Where my glasses tripping on themselves, all of these sorts of things, and always something light about this. But people are coming with often significant challenges around their professional life, around their personal life, often both together, that can have a dramatically adverse effect on their life experience. And it's not until that they get the understanding of how their ADHD in this case shows up for them and the mechanisms that sit behind it, that they can really make a change and sort of feel empowered about their condition and thrive within whatever space they're in. But this notion of toxic positivity, where we are told your condition, your ADHD, your homosexuality is a superpower, that I think is problematic, because it's not for anyone to tell you or me about how we feel about our conditions. If you choose to term it that way, that's yours. And you're empowered to do so. And that's 100% cool. But I think there's a sort of growing notion from some parts of society, at least, that these are superpowers and it's all good. And of course, you and I both know that the lived experience can be quite different to that. So for positivity, it presents an unrealistic picture of life. It's like a distorted view. And I think there's a room to put more perspective and show there are great elements, but they sit within a much bigger framework of life, which has good and bad. Absolutely. And the more judiciously we use social media, the better. In my coaching agreement, we talk about the size of not using our phones for the first and last hour of each day. There's a reason for that, this sort of old adage, if you win the morning, you win the day. It can be very true for people with ADHD, then if we can get ourselves off on the right foot and behind this is a lot of detail, of course, but if we can get ourselves into a place at the start of the day where we've got a nice positive momentum with a clearer head with greater focus, giving attention to things we want to give attention to rather than the multiple impulses and distractions that are coming in from all different angles, then the better a day will have, but of course, social media can do the opposite. We can go on there to scroll, to self-medicate, to self-soothe, because we're feeling stressed. We wake up stressed about that thing we did yesterday, anxious that we didn't do it quite right, that social interaction, that thing at work, and we then zoom in on that and we can go to a real negative thought spiral about that, moving from the task positive networks here and now goal-orientated focus thinking into the default mode networks and other set of brain regions that are responsible for our conceptual sense of self, thinking about past and future, but also where we can do this sort of ADHD spiral of catastrophic thinking, zooming on a particular point, all of this can happen within a few minutes of us waking up, right? And the day hasn't even started, and we pick the phone up to self-soothe, oh, Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is that we're looking at and use. And of course it can go well, it can calm the mind and mind-produce a more dopamine, we go online, we get a big spike of dopamine, that makes us feel good for a while. But of course we can see something on there where we can pair ourselves to someone else and this need that people often have, that have ADHD, that have often constantly wanting some external validation is what I'm doing right, am I right? Am I okay when we can talk in sort of more detail as to if you like, as to why people feel that, but that certainly all it takes is to see that one friend or person they aspire to be doing better than them in some way, whatever better means to them. And then the rest of the day is for naught because that thought gets lodged in their mind very firmly. What's the point in doing the thing that I'm doing because there's loads of other people doing it better, I'll never be able to do it that well, I'll never be able to do it perfect, talk about perfectionism, and of course that can have a really negative impact on our whole day. So this idea of moving away from social media and things like that, certainly in a sort of more passive way, something that's more elective can be very helpful. You touched on traumas that puts people into negative thought patterns and spirals. I want to go back to your formative years because I imagine that you reflected on your childhood quite a lot and see it in a different way to how you did at the time. I'm interested to know what role of negative messaging plays in your life and what you've learned about it when you look back. I have a lot of compassion for little me, which I didn't for many years, I did a piece of psychotherapy work that lasted for just over a decade, 1100 hours in the couch trying to understand my mind better, and a big part of that, how many? 1100. Wow. Yeah, so I was going three times a week at one stage for about five years. It's a very intensive, I'm a huge advocate of psychotherapy. I would just add the caveat that now with the understanding I have about neuro-diverse conditions, ADHD specifically, my therapist changed my life. She probably saved my life a lot. But for a psychotherapist to not have a deep understanding of ADHD can be problematic because they're looking at it from a certain lens, and we really need to have both lenses, the neuro-biological lens of understanding ADHD, and also the psychoanalytic lens, if you like, to really understand how somebody's challenges are showing up for them, specifically where the root causes of those challenges are. I'm liking these words and using it, definitely live in more detail, if you like. The question around my childhoods, I was very negative about my experience as a kid for many years as an adult because it was so profoundly negative. I grew up in a loving family with a growing group of good friends, some of whom I've known since early childhoods, and are still firm friends now. But nonetheless, I was bullied from the moment I started primary school, all the way through secondary school in different ways. Then I've experienced a lot of that through my professional life as well. I think this is something that a lot of people with ADHD experience in different ways often because they are more sensitive. Our neuro-biology means that we are wide differently, we're actually from a nervous system point of view, wide differently, touch, taste, sound, smell. We all experience these often to much more amped up degrees. Some people, all of them, some people won specifically. But emotionally, we're more sensitive, but we're also, we can be quite naive, and we can not get social cues, and we can put ourselves into more vulnerable situations, and we have an impaired working memory. So we can't remember the thing we did last time that put us into that negative foot, you're putting your hands up when it is resonates. Yeah, I was throwing my hands up in the air. Speaking from my mind, and it's often a shared experience that we can have unfortunately. And that was compounded by the fact that, and dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, there was no real success, academically I failed, socially I felt like I failed a lot. And when you combine that with the conditions, that can create a very negative sense of self image, if there is a sense of self image at all, which obviously feeds into sort of adult life. But my ability to focus as a kid on the school work I was doing, it was, you know, looking back, it was pretty non-existent really. It sounds like a rough time, you know, you need elements that stimulate you. So much of your ability to do anything is from your ability to be stimulated to do it. And through our years, the education system was designed by people who thought didactic teaching and traditional subjects was the only way to be successful. And that was probably their experience, and it's all they knew, you know, if you want to have money, then do well in school, et cetera. But now we understand that you can be successful in absolutely anything you want to do because there's always going to be something that's going to have value to other people. And that's the essence of success, having value to other people and so whatever your niche might be, if you can be stimulated, inspired, encouraged to do it, that's like the key. But, you know, it sounds like the traditional subjects weren't stimulating you, weren't inspiring for you, but then you could become sort of a target. Like teachers get frustrated with you because their job's harder and other students made think there's nothing to admire about you. I was fortunate, I would define that school and that brought a lot of social capital. But if you weren't doing well at sports or, or I don't, I'm not saying that you weren't doing well at sports, but... No, I wasn't. You can see that that led people to be a target and I didn't experience that, but I was all sensitive to it for people who were. And a lot of the people who would get bullied and perhaps weren't traditionally smart, inverted commas, they're some of my best friends and I could identify with that probably because I was getting negative messages in other areas of my life. Where were the negative messages typically coming from? My lived experience, all the sort of classic negative messages I guess we often hear. People with ADHD share about their lived experience, which is that I'm good, I'm stupid, I'm rubbish. I don't have a touchstone of positivity here that I can go back to. Like you're saying, you're clearly a smart guy I'm experiencing you as somebody that's probably like high functioning. With ADHD gone into plastics, one of my friends is one of the top consultants in South Africa in plastics, trained over here, there's residency here and stuff. So I have an insight from him just how very difficult that job is and what is required to operate at the level that you operate at. So that level of smart, I think, as you rightly said, can carry you through school and academic life, even if you're struggling in these other areas, but you can advise you a lot of social cache. It puts a lot of social cache in the bank, whereas my social cache, they were moths in my bank, shall we say, there wasn't much going on there and that made school very challenging. It made that whole period very challenging. But I think it fostered in me the sense of knowing I had more in me and wanting to find out what that was and knowing all the way through, right up to now, that I could be more than I was, if I could find the right thing to do, which comes back to your point earlier around interest, you know, from an ADHD perspective, if we can find the thing that interests us, that creates dopamine, then we can thrive and, you know, sort of people listening to this, I guess, it can be helpful to understand that if you've got ADHD, you're generally showing up for work, I'm using air quotes there around work, in one of two states, either there's interest, so interest equals dopamine, that neurotransmitter that our brains are chronically lacking, brains produce more of it in interesting situations, or we've got urgency with severe consequences. This is deadlines. When we're in deadline-driven structured environments like that, then the brain produces noradrenaline, nor pnefren if you're in the state, it's one of the same. And we can suddenly focus, but that can be very anxiety-provoking and stressful. So we've got one hand dopaminergic situations, on the other hand, we've got sort of noradrenaline situations, and sometimes there's a situation, perhaps, where you've got the two running together, but anything in the middle is extremely difficult for us to do, which is often most of life, of course, taking out the trash, it's the sending of emails or the messages doing the invoicing, getting your end of your accounts done. And through school, of course, it's just endless amounts of things you're not interested in, which of course makes it very difficult to dig in and get going. So it was about learning from school that I needed to find something that really interested me, and that was really my journey to becoming a music industry, I did, actually, village. Talking about things that stimulate you and give the brain the neurotransmitters, that you need to be able to focus, be fulfilled and happy. If you don't have those things, then I don't know if this is true, because the school experience actually would be quite damaging to deprive in the brain of neurotransmitters by not catering to subjects or topics that are going to stimulate that brain, like depriving soil of water. I think that's a great way to put it, sorry to jump in, but I think that's such a good point, that the soil that we give our children is often wrong for them. The education system is set up in such a way that I wanted to get too political. You perpetuate capitalism, what we want is nice little taxpayers that are trained up to go and get good paying jobs, jump through all of the hoops, go through the round holes and go and be a good member of society. And of course, we know from the research that's out there, it certainly is around 3.5 to 4.5% of the UK population has ADHD. This lecture I think is around somewhere between 8 and 12%. In totality, we're looking and I'm probably underestimating this from the figures I can remember. But somewhere between like 25 to 30% of the UK population has one or more neurodiverse conditions. And of course, we often have with ADHD, especially coexisting conditions. So I mentioned that they've got dyslexia and dyscalculia on some ADHD. We have Tourette's dyslexia dyspraxia, a whole range of different conditions that can exist around this. And all of that is to say that there's a high percentage of the population that is not being catered for from childhood. So of course, what you're doing then is you are creating generation after generation that has this sense of failure because they are a square peg to use this particular analogy that won't go through society's round hole. And this is why we see such high rates historically of children with neurodiverse conditions failing at school, failing, again in our quotes by other people's standards. Why do we see such a large number of people within our prison service having neurodiverse conditions? Dr Tony Lloyd, who I work with at the ADHD Foundation, I'm a guest lecturer for the ADHD Foundation's ADHD Professional Coaching Diploma course. It's amazing. Huge honours. They asked me to talk on it this year. I was delighted to do so. He bends quite a lot of time with government going into prisons and speaking with people that have neurodiverse conditions within those settings. And of course, if you fail at school, the chance of you getting into interesting things that are stimulating, things that maybe aren't good for you or even legal increases dramatically. Rates of addiction for people that have ADHD, specifically 70% to 75% greater than the general population. So all of this is to sort of circle back is to say that to your soil analogy, if you will. This society still refuses to give children the right soil in which to flourish but have neurodiverse conditions. We are setting them up for failure again and again. And if you are gifted or if you are high functioning, great, this is very positive stuff. Or if you know, you're particularly athletic. If you have some attributes that can carry you through, great, that can go a long way. If you're just averaging or middling or not even getting that high, then there's really not much there for you. And this isn't the child's fault because of a lack of infrastructure, the right infrastructure, the right soil for them, they're being set up to fail. So that I think is something that radically needs to change in it. Yes, our schooling systems are inadequate for people with neurodiverse conditions. Yeah, if we go back to the peanut butter sandwich analogy, after lunch, that kid has PE and they don't do very well. They're too tired and the teacher is like, why didn't you eat anything? That's right. Yeah. How are you meant to be fueled for the work you're doing if you're not nourished? Exactly. Yeah. This is a safe space for wild tangent analogies. When you're talking about the square peg round hole, thinking about the round hole being the pathway that society allows you and though you're a square peg, you'd have to try and get through it. So if you think it, for example, a wooden square peg, you force it through that round hole. On the other side, does it look like a nice round circle like the other ones? No. It looks damaged and frayed and not the version of itself you would have if you're able to square off the hole. I love that analogy. That's a brilliant analogy because it so eloquently summarizes what we're left at on the other side of that process. But all of the magic and the joy and the abilities that people with ADHD often have are shared off them by being pushed through this hole, you know, their ability to think in an consequential way, which is part of one of the gifts, if you like, of ADHD brains, which I see a whole time, of course, within the music industry where I work and still work now, what's the music industry for 20 years, over 20 years now, I'm still very much part of the International Music Summit in Ibiza next week for Annual Music Industry Conference there. We spoke at seven different music industry conferences last year around the world on this topic and it's great to see that getting much more attention. But this idea that people who are household names are work with main stage artists that you'd be familiar with on Glastonbury, Coachella, all of these sorts of things, Grammy-nominated award-winning Brit, Mobo, Ivan Novello, all of these sorts of folk right the way through to the people that are just starting up, that are working in A&R, sync, publishing and whatever it might be. And everyone in between, like C-suite individuals, so many of these people have ADHD, they have neurodiverse conditions and they're the beating heart of our creative industries, right? These people are absolutely the beating heart of the music industry. But yet we have a school system, we have an education system that pushes those square pegs, those creatives with those brilliant minds through these round holes and shears off the best bits of them and then of course, how does the person feel after that? I have nothing to offer because I can't meet society's expectations. I think you're so right there. It's such an important point to touch on, particularly in the creative industries and particularly at the time we're living in, where artificial intelligence is trying to simulate creativity. AI is great at taking information we already have and adapting it to make something that seems new but isn't. So preserving the enthusiasm of creatives is really important for us looking forward. But the question is, how do we do that? There are probably a number of ways. One that comes to mind. People need to have the chance to understand the neurodivergent experience because there's a lot of noise and people who talk about it without knowing. For example, journalists talking every time somebody of prominence gets diagnosed with ADHD like a comedian or an artist. The next day, the articles, there's another person who's got ADHD, there's another person as if it's this ballooning kind of sham and none of that is true. This is almost certainly happening because people are becoming more aware and there's more acceptance, people are more willing to explore it and because we are more able to spot it in ourselves and others. That's certainly one of the reasons why people aren't seeing more diagnoses of ADHD. Also, because it's so intertwined with shame, people haven't been willing to expose themselves by declaring that actually they might have ADHD. So those are a couple of reasons why it's more common but despite that, it's likely that people who are not neurodivergent still can't identify and that's why there's so much value in people who have experienced ADHD, sharing what that experience is like because it's such an invisible condition that if you don't experience it, there's a really high chance that you have actually no idea what it really is like and if you think you do, you probably don't and that can be frustrating because it's human nature that when people don't understand something and keep seeing it or being presented with it, they start to get frustrated by it and the next step, when they see it again, is to try and push back against it, that's happening to an increasing degree and the problem is it takes the focus away from people who struggle with the intensity of the negative elements of ADHD and if that focus is important. I think that's right, I was commissioned by the musicians union last year to write a part of their website on working with neurodiverse musicians and it looks at ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, Tourette's, autism and how these show up for people and also the sorts of things that we can do, also as individuals with these conditions but also as colleagues to these people and it can make reasonable adjustments in terms of how we work with one another and just by making those very simple adjustments and a lot of them are, it's just how we communicate rather than me sort of sending you at 1,000 emails, is it better for us to have a face to face conversation and talk it through, maybe followed up by some bullet points, so you've got a nice clear summary of what was discussed. There's a range of different things that can be done and that was very much the purpose of that, exactly to your point there, knowledge is power of course and the more informed people are the more able we are to meet our fellows, colleagues, friends, whoever it might be at their level and then of course that changes the game, because individuals with neurodiverse conditions aren't any longer square pack, maybe they're not even a peg anymore, let's just leave the peg analogy but what we're talking about here is enabling individuals to be individuals and thrive on their own terms rather than some horrible societal constructs which can really limit their success, I want to ask about the music industry, tell me about your path into that, yep I mentioned earlier actually, I went to university and people might be listening to this going, hang on a second, this guy's going on about how he fell at school and it was real and he went to university, I managed to lag my way through school and I got through clearing to Southampton uni, which is a Russell group university at school, yeah lots of my friends in medics went there, but I went through clearing, I was never going to go to university, that was never a thing, I was in Botswana at the time, I'm on a year out gap here, my friend who's now like a producer director for Netflix, he went off to Cambridge did very well, academically called me up and he was like mate, mate, mate, you got, I think I got a B in English instead of a C that I thought I was going to get, I was running around that and this was back in the day where people throwing money into a phone to make a long distance phone calls back in the late 90s and I picked up the receiver and it was just a flat dial tone he'd be gone, but that then meant that I could apply to university, went through clearing, went Southampton and I was in a record shot there soon after starting and I was just complaining to the guy in the record shot, I was like there's no way to go man, there's no scene here, there's all this other stuff, I had this hand on my shoulder turn around, this is a very moody looking skin head guy standing behind me, who later became my friend and it turned out that he's a local promoter, about 10 years older than me at the time and he ran a club with his business partner called Squeeze 18, so Squeeze was like this sort of long running underground night that I've been going in Southampton for many years and I started promoting for them and we worked with people like African Barbata, easy rollers, DJ Markie, you name it, Goldie, all sorts of folks, it was very much a little underground club, I got rid into the promotion side of things and I was taking a lot of drugs at the time, so I got rid into my MDMA, so the one time for me through this period that I could actually feel normal was on MDMA and it's still like a compound which I have personally for myself, so much spoke for because it enabled me at that point in my life to let the anxiety go, this is pre coaching, counselling, therapy, I hadn't done any of that work, so it was a very helpful chemical crutch which quite conveniently also went very well with the music that I was listening to and I absolutely love dance music, so it was the, go on, carry on, sorry, I got into that through uni, I was doing that through my terms and then I went to Beethan for a season, friends like John to come to Beethan, I've been very briefly before, I was like okay, I was going to do a season in a Beethan, so I then spent the next three seasons working in a Beethan, doing lighting for the clubs, meeting lots of people and that was really my sort of inroads into the electronic music industry. Sounds like you felt at home or you felt comfortable in the environment of the industry, was that what was taking you back to Ibiza? Yeah very much, I met my tribe, I met light-minded people, really good people I'm still friends with now, this is over 20, 25 years ago now and I just met really good people and that felt safe and that felt like a nice environment and we were all into the same things and that of course creates an environment where you feel secure and empowered to do the things you want to do and of course that feeds into confidence etc and I ended up getting a job working for a record label at the time which was a big deal for me because it was my favourite record label and they were doing stages with 10,000 people at Cream Fields and Gate Crasher which were the big festivals at the time and I was doing stage management and artisans so I got into this space where I was getting to do stuff with people that I really respected in an environment that I loved and so that was the beginning of my interest so there we go, the interest has been seeded and was by this stage already starting to grow. That's amazing you just said that because I was about to say you've found your soil and you said it's been seeded. Thank you George, it's a really nice story and it fits that you find the environment that is safe and important work to focus on because that's a platform on which you can then start to thrive. Definitely. A lot of people with ADHD have trauma with a small T, things like bullying for example, a lifetime of unachieve and being told that they're stupid, failing at jobs and that compounds negatively in their mind's eye as to what they can and can't do. Of course, I'm finding a sofa space where you're around like-minded people who tell you it's okay to be you, it's so important. Yeah, I really like the authentic you. Yeah, exactly. What were the next steps in the music industry? I spent some time working in production so light, sound, all of those sorts of things in the UK. Went to Australia for a year working for the big festivals and doing stage management after stage one. I came back over here and I got into the rights and royalties side of things and then spent the last four and a half years working for the Association for Electronic Music which is the global trade body for the genres, traveling the world, talking at conferences, doing panels, chomping things like mental health. One of my key focuses there was helping people better understand within the music industry the importance of mental health and this was a period where very sadly Tim Berglin of each he took his life and Keith Flint from The Prodigy as well and it was the first time really I think that the music industry had given the focus that it needed to, to this subject because up until then if I go back to the beef back in the late '90s, early '90s. This sort of quite ladish, competitive drug taking vibe was there, people were going out and it was about how long can you stay up, how long can you stay out, not showing any weakness, doing crazy hours, crazy touring, all of these sorts of things and to show any weakness or to talk to people in a way that was vulnerable was quite taboo but it was only around maybe 2015, 2016 that the industry started to get a real grip and hang on. They're dying here and they're dying needlessly because of a toxic environment that we've allowed to happen, how can we change that and so I like to think that was some small part at least of that change in championing ideas around environments which were healthier for people that catalyzed better mental health, going back to that idea of soil, that changed the soil into something that was more nourishing for the people that were working in the music industry and in all aspects of it. It's really necessary and it's a shame that it has to take deaths for it to come about. I won't go into it much further than to say the whole show no weakness culture. It's oxymoronic in that the whole reason to want to show no weakness is you're not feeling safe like when a rattlesnake starts rattling, it's showing no weakness essentially but actually it's showing no weakness because it's terrified and to where you have that show no weakness culture, you don't realise actually what a lot of these people need is help to support or reassurance but it's hard to receive help unless you present somebody who needs it and society hasn't historically been comfortable to accept that this actually exists like people do feel afraid, men do feel afraid and they do need to escape and going to a club for example isn't necessarily a act of hedonism it's often because they are sort of undistimulated and like you're saying which I think is a really important point, we're talking about drugs and getting addicted and if anybody you know can think of a time when they will undistimulate feeling low it could be something as traumatic as happened in your life or maybe not even that but we all know that feeling of feeling a degree of low. Think about if that was how you felt more often than not and that was just your existence in life but then you go to a club and whether or not you take drugs that brings you a little bit closer to the normal level makes sense that you're going to try and repeat that and unfortunately because drugs are addictive you then become a victim of those working in any for many years I've seen people come in every week similar to the whole narrative about drugs getting addicted and being a choice that people have made take one minute to sit down with that thought and think why would somebody choose to end up in this situation if there wasn't an underlying problem that they were trying to correct. Definitely the word choice implies pollution of course that this is elective and often more often than not it's quite the opposite but we don't want to spend 45 minutes an hour just scrolling on our phone we want to go and live our life and be connected to people but I spoke with ADHD we can find ourselves doing that or researching for 10 hours straight or gaming or whatever it might be because there's something wonderfully self soothing about that the the circus of our minds that the noise gets quiet and down for a while with zoomed in on a central point and gosh doesn't that feel calming and relaxing and lots of dopamine being generated we feel for a time soothed because the brain is in pain and the brains of us folk with ADHD are chronically under aroused again unless we're doing something that's of sufficient interest and of course people do take drugs they do go out and use our cold cannabis cocaine nicotine caffeine the five main drugs that people with ADHD often find themselves using alongside phones and screens we'd see it a lot within the dance music industry across the music industry as a whole perhaps this sort of self-medicating behaviors but there was no resource for people to go to and go do know how i'm struggling it's only recently and i'm said last 10 years or so that that's been a resource so even if you felt comfortable enough to unmask and go hey i think i've got this thing i'm really struggling who are you reaching out to again it's only likely that we've had those resources in place for people to even go to somewhere where they can feel safe and i'm sort of like groups like the mitc the music industry therapist collective where you've got a dedicated group of experienced music industry professionals who have also worked in the industry for many decades have retrained the psychotherapist my industry colleague and friend Matthew Bushwacker who might come on to later on music this just round the corner very well respected agent retrains the psychotherapist so you now have these people that have the lived experience of what the challenges of addiction and other things might present but trained up sufficiently to be able to help from mental health perspective and increasingly there's a greater number that also have the understanding of neurodiversity and what is this all kind of moving towards it's moving towards an environment within the music industry that is far more inclusive and accepting and providing a space and spaces where people can hopefully unmask in a way that is safe to them and get the support that they need so that's a huge step change and it's obviously very heartening to see are we where we need to be yet no there's still a long way to go but it's definitely moving in the right direction it's fulfilling to hear the esteemed DJ producer like Bushwacker using his experiences both bad and good to contribute because he recognizes how significant an impact it has you use a term that i've not heard of you said the brain is in pain it hit the nail on the head even more so because you then listed off a number of drugs caffeine nicotine cannabis cocaine and alcohol that there often seems that the five main go-to drugs that people with ADHD use to self-medicate yeah interestingly a lot of those take away pain cocaine it's an anesthetic that takes away pain alcohol is analgesic so before when they're doing operations without anesthetic they would give hard spirits to get through the operation so when you talk about the brain being in pain and you see in a sense attempt at therapy it's interesting how several of them drugs give relief of pain absolutely that there's a guy called Dr Gabour Mate who you might be familiar with he ran an addiction center in Vancouver he's now retired also has some views on ADHD his book scattered minds is very interesting in parts but i don't necessarily agree with the root causes he feels ADHD comes from he the places i think an over emphasis on these sort of socialization societal parts that can enable the ADHD gene people to be expressed that's his thinking that i'm more of the school which is widely held by experts within the current field of ADHD and that's it's far more genetic that that is the main sort of driver behind the condition if you will but he talks very adequately in his book in the realm of hungry ghosts fantastic book on addiction about just this point which is this addiction serves a very helpful purpose for the brain it's about trying to see his pain i say helpful it seems to the brain like it's a good idea i'm in lots of pain i'm going to take cocaine whatever else it might be but of course it's only momentary but if you don't have any other tools if you haven't been to counts things like a therapy done the self work what else is there i remember when i was you know drinking heavily um and doing a lot of coke and no one saw this i got away with it because there's work in industry and i showed up to all the stuff i needed to do and you play out with partying whatever else i was wrecked from friday to sunday you know just because i needed to turn this pointing at my head i needed to turn it off because it was just exhausting um and it wasn't until i had a scare found myself in hospital um that um i was like okay i'm i was fine you know um i was fine but it was like there was a wake up call but up up until around that point i hadn't had the tools to be able to manage it and the idea remember my my psychotherapist said to me like i think you're an addict the rage that came up you know took up to about three weeks to process that um but that came from don't take my drugs away okay and i noticed this within the coaching that i do now that we talk about like phone use and stuff you know i'm fine with my phone and we find out that these everyday behavioral addictions are on the similar continuum obviously maybe not as problematic but they're getting in the way of life they're atrophying the parts of the brain that we need to be stronger in the prefrontal cortex i'm pointing at the front part about our brain here where we have the psychological term executive functions planning time management organization execution working memory every time we task switch we're moving between phones and screens and this and that and we're weakening the part of the brain that wants to be stronger we've got the mid-singular cortex the anterior mid-singular cortex is part that are vital to bringing our attention and execution and so we want to do things that are more conducive to strengthening that that part of the brain these addictive behaviors that they're cleaning on sister's circle backs up to the point yes addiction is often the means the brain's best guess at how to solve pain now let's move on to the last part of the episode three pivotal tracks i love this bit because this is your opportunity to share with us three tracks that tell us something about you either because they have a particular significance to you maybe they represent a particularly poignant event or time in your life or perhaps because they tell us more directly something about the way your brain works maybe something about your neurodiversity so just you're up what's your first track so i think we've got in there lk by dj marki and xrs featuring stammer mc yes takes me back again to sort of those days where i got into promoting and we had marki come down and play on a boat in south hampton the poor guy looked absolutely terrified he's just flown in from brazil and we brought an art on the launch to play on this this boat with about 300 people and the guy's got one of the decks upside down he's scratching i mean it's insane dj so that that track takes me back to that time because i was peaking then and i remember just talking to stamina the emcee involved and it was like mate we've just been on top of the pops it's the sickest thing ever that hazy he's got like this big old drum bass emcee going i love topping for the pops when i was a kid and i'm on it although it was a bit of like front with drum bass sometimes and it just all all gone just pure joy so that that was certainly one of them and then i think i love that top of the pops in the uk before we had satellite tv just terrestrial would be the hit show of the week friday nights half an hour big deal to be on there i'd be massive massive so i kind of everybody who goes around the scene at that time recognizes it what about it speaks to you is it mostly the experience the time yeah it's experience at the time it's at that sense of connection i thought of a very strong sense of connection to the people i was with at that particular time in my life and yeah that's what it evokes now very positive amazing what's your second treks written we've got yucky yucky yes by moron county and the hard floor remix it's just to be through a spent three seasons working to be through that would come on i'd be doing laser engineering which was basically running this laser in a club called privilege at the time the world's largest club 12,000 capacity for a unlike called mani mission which is like fairly outrageous head mistake night at the time and i would protect this laser onto a water curtain and it would go through onto the far side of the wall your aeroplane hanging from the ceiling and you've got people on ropes pirouetting down and just all sorts of insanity people would come up to me and they'd be like have you got a lighter and i would like their cigarette off the laser and give it back to them that was my party piece at the time and that tune was just ubiquitous to that time so it just takes me back to to a b-3rd again that feeling of connection that we often also look for was very much around that tune it's very cool tracking the cool remix of it it's quite different from the original that's still quite high energy he was from guinea i think so yeah i think sadly he passed away um in the last year or two and tell me your third one so we've got the um biddie jean remix by bushwacker okay now again similar time so this is when i was going to fabric a lot and remember it being played there just come back from the betha and hearing it on the space terrace like all season and i was there with my friends and james vell was playing in the main room from moax and the intro came and it's really it's got really long track so i think the track's like 12 30 minutes and i just freaked out and my friends are like what you know i'm there with 21 mates at the time big group has gone down and taken over the main stage in there and i'm bouncing around going and then of course when it dropped everyone's familiar with biddie jean and then just did the whole place when bonkers it's absolutely nuts so again it's just got um those memories and of course when i hear these tracks now in a club so i'm still going to club some festivals it takes me straight back yeah it's such a good remix of the classic biddie jean amazing Tristan you're a busy man where can listeners find you my website is tristanhunt.co.uk i'm on instagram it's tristanhuntuk on linkedin is tristanhunt and the note which i made earlier around the musicians union so if people have questions and they're working specifically in the music industry or elsewhere because actually a lot of this applies around how to work as a neurodiverse person or with neurodiverse people that resources on the musicians unions website which perhaps we can pop into the show notes there's a link there so yeah that's wrong before you go final question what's the best bit of advice that you've heard that relates to neurodiversity in the last few years that's a big question that's a good it's a very good question i think this idea of radical honesty of really understanding who we are as an individual which can be probably most safely and well explored and in therapy if you're not a point to do this by yourself it's so key to unmasking this unless we really understand ourselves what is it that we want from life who are we we could have spent an entire lifetime people pleasing showing up for other people trying to be perfect for society doing all of these things that aren't really for us therefore other people and of course we've conditioned ourselves in this way that's not really us you know and it's only through doing that sort of bit of introspective thinking which again a huge advocate of psychotherapy and things like that to do this work that we can really identify perhaps you know what it is that we want and of course that can sound quite selfish but it's not you know if we're doing the things that we want we're living on our zone of genius if you will you know those things that we're great at like yourself moving into plastics then we can help other people we're thriving we have a better quality of life a nice survive other people feel and experience that so it benefits not just ourselves but also our family and friends put your oxygen mask on first before helping others every time Brilliant Tristan thanks so much thank you so much for having me on pleasure To find all of our episodes follow us and subscribe on Spotify Apple Music or wherever you find your podcast that will keep you up to date with new episodes as they come out you can also find out more about what we're up to who we're interviewing and more information about neurodiversity and creativity by following us on our Instagram at underscore wired different thanks again and see you on the next episode [BLANK_AUDIO]
