ADHD Chatter
Cambridge Educated Psychiatrist Shares New ADHD Treatment | Dr Judith Mohring
Mon, 21 Apr 2025
Dr Judith Mohring has over 25 years' experience of clinical and organisational practice having studied medicine at Cambridge and graduating as a gold medal finalist. She enjoyed a distinguished career as a private psychiatrist in the City and Harley Street before founding The Natural Psychiatrist to focus on education and coaching, enhancing business productivity and performance. She is an expert trainer for the UK Adult ADHD Network, on the advisory board for The Centre for Neurodiversity at work and a visiting lecturer in organisational psychiatry at King's College London. Chapters: 00:00 Trailer 01:52 What is your mission within the ADHD community? 02:45 Trends with regards to what women with undiagnosed ADHD tend to struggle with 08:09 How to respond when someone says ‘ADHD isn’t real’ 09:40 How can ’feeling different’ be detrimental to a person's mental health? 12:43 Is ADHD is a deficit of self awareness 17:05 Tiimo advert 18:20 What is "positive psychology" and why can this be particularly beneficial for a woman with ADHD? 27:07 What does the term "Natural Psychiatrist" mean compared to simply "Psychiatrist"? 29:13 3 tips to increase mood and focus 30:21 How to improve ADHD traits in 4 weeks 32:14 How ADHD people deal with stress 37:54 ADHD in the workplace 45:21 What is "vicarious trauma" and how can that affect a person? 49:32 Ned Hallowell Brain Health Advert 51:59 The ADHD item segment 54:09 The ADHD agony aunt segment Visit Dr Judith Mohring's website 👉 https://www.adhded.co.uk/ Get 30% off an annual Tiimo subscription 👉 https://www.tiimoapp.com/adhdchatter Get 10% off the Hallowell Brain Health App 👉 https://zingperformance.com/adhd-chatter/ Buy Alex's book entitled 'Now It All Makes Sense' 👉 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-All-Makes-Sense-Diagnosis/dp/1399817817 Producer: Timon Woodward Recorded by: Hamlin Studios Trailer Editor: Ryan Faber DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Dr Judith Mohring’s mission within the ADHD community?
What is your mission in terms of the ADHD community and mental health?
Such a great question. Thank you so much, Alex. And thank you so much also for asking me on because I'm really passionate about sharing high quality information with people. And ADHD is both wonderfully complex and also wonderfully simple. So the science is complex. Sometimes the answers are quite simple.
And I have a real passion for sharing that evidence based science with people so they don't have to wait to have an assessment. They don't have to wait to see a doctor. And they don't have to just have medicines. They can also use skills to help themselves get better. So that's my real passion is to see the light bulbs go on, see people inspire and go, oh, that's what I can do. That will help.
So that's why I'm here. So thank you.
Yeah, no, it's amazing. I see so many people in the community, particularly women. I'm sure you're familiar with it. They have that light bulb moment and suddenly so much makes sense.
Yes.
I read on your website that your special interest is women's mental health. Yep. So I suppose, have you noticed any trends in your work in perhaps, if you are a female with undiagnosed ADHD, what particular struggles there might be for that person?
Again, that's really interesting because one of the things about ADHD that I think we're only just beginning to understand, and I'm really clear that ADHD is emerging. The science is new. It's emerging. Many of the papers that I quote have only come out in the last four or five years. is that ADHD is really tidal.
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Chapter 2: What struggles do women with undiagnosed ADHD commonly face?
And what I mean by tidal is that we know that noradrenaline and dopamine are dysregulated. Not low, but dysregulated. Which means that when the tide is out and we're zoned out and we're not focused and we're not concentrating, got low noradrenaline and dopamine. But then when the tide rushes in and you've got high dopamine, noradrenaline, you have hyper focus, you've got hyper energy.
So you've got this real tidal variation in your energy levels and your focus. And it looks really confusing, both to the individual, to their friends, their colleagues, and also to doctors. Because doctors have a kind of thing called present mental state, which is how is the client now?
And if you have ADHD, how you are now could be really different from how you are in half an hour or even an hour because the tide may be in or it may be out. Does that analogy make sense to you?
Oh, totally. I mean, how many people have had, you know, by bosses, by partners, drastic mood swings?
Yeah, drastic mood swings. And so you get told you're moody or you get told you're difficult because it's like, but you were different yesterday. Who are you today? And it's almost like your neuroscience is kind of quasi gaslighting you because of this variability.
Now, I'm going to caveat that with the fact that this is, there are a few papers that show this difference and it's called the difference in tonic, which is resting, dopamine and phasic, which is dopamine on. when we are rewarded or stimulated. So there are a few papers that reference this. And from talking to experts in the field, this is what we think is going on.
It's very hard to evidence in live people, but we do have a few studies.
Fast forward a bit, someone gets a diagnosis or they become aware that they might have ADHD. Do you notice that their struggles might shift a little bit from that ebbs and flow you were just talking about to perhaps a new territory, a new area of frustration? Why am I just finding out now? Do you see a new sort of type of struggle pop up after diagnosis?
So there's a couple of things that happen after diagnosis. And I think the first thing to say is that neurodiversity, I tend to say this when I'm teaching doctors, neurodiversity is like the soil in which other conditions grow. So neurodiversity isn't, it's not a disease. You can be diagnosed neurodivergent with ADHD or autism. You can be diagnosed with it, but it's actually a way of being wired.
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Chapter 3: How should you respond to those who say ‘ADHD isn’t real’?
Yes, yeah, I mean, new imagery with the pretzel, yeah.
The pretzel. And I know myself, one of the reasons I was really good at being a psychiatrist was that I could see that different clients needed different things. So I would pretzel to what they needed, but it didn't leave any space for me. And so my coming out has been to begin to emerge into the world and un-pretzel and go, actually, I am a bit different. And so... So it has a massive impact.
And again, that's why we come back to coming out, because when you come out, you can explore. Does this really feel authentic or not?
Yeah, no, so true. I think people with ADHD, we're the world's best actors. If there was an Academy Award for playing a character called Normal, we'd be on stage accepting it. We're experts. We're chameleons. We're so good at copying, masking, mirroring other behaviours.
essentially putting everyone else's needs ahead of yours and the the knock-on effects of what that does to your self-esteem i think can be really detrimental yes it's so interesting the self-awareness piece you mentioned because i truly i haven't spoken to 300 amazing people on this podcast thousands of people in the community i truly don't believe adhd is a deficit of attention i think when we
find something that captivates us and is a true alignment with our core, we have an abundance of attention, like there's no stopping us. I think ADHD is more along the lines of a deficit of a self-awareness because of what you've mentioned, all of those years of changing, adapting, switching up your interests to please someone else other than yourself.
Do you think that ADHD could be more of a deficit of self-awareness and what steps could someone take to flex that muscle of self-awareness?
Yes, so self-awareness is so, so, so key. And I agree with what you're saying as well, Alex, about it's not a deficit of attention. We now think it should be called attention dysregulation because, as I say, it's tidal. When the tide is out, no, you cannot remember where your car keys are. You know, I'm quite proud of myself.
I've never lost the children, but I have lost more or less everything else, including at some points in my mind, you know, I've lost many things. So there's this deficit of attention at times and other times. So I really love a bit of hyper focus and I'm never happier than when reading academic articles and digging deep into things. the default mode network, et cetera.
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Chapter 4: How can 'feeling different' affect a person’s mental health?
yes so true i think it's often hard to distinguish between what you and who you really are and what is the mask and i think it's so important to pay attention to your knee-jerk emotional reactions and what i mean by that is say you're reading a newspaper and you see an advert for a musical theater role and you think that's amazing and you fill up with genuine intrinsic excitement for auditioning for that character
That's your knee-jerk reaction. But then you remember, oh, my parents wanted me to be a doctor. And you suppress that excitement and you go back to medical school. Some people's whole career, some people's whole marriage, so much of their existence can be a mask and they don't realize it.
I think it's those knee-jerk reactions to things in our life that can be your inner child screaming out, trying to remind you of what you actually care about and what you want to do.
I love that example firstly because my parents wanted me to be a doctor and indeed I became a doctor and secondly because I think it really underpins one of the ADHD experiences which is difficulty distinguishing between imagination and reality and that makes it sound like a deficit which it isn't but it's more like I have shower thoughts, get in the shower every morning.
And it's like, it's like this beautiful fruit tree has just come into fruit. And there's all these ideas just falling off the tree. And I'm like, I need to capture all these fruits that are falling off the tree. And I've now realized that it's okay to let some of them fall on the ground, but it would be wonderful. I always thought I wanted to be like a singer in a cabaret club.
in another life maybe but not right now that it that sometimes the fruit is allowed to fall to the ground because the joy of adhd is there'll always be more fruit always it's like a tree which is forever in fruit when you're in particularly when you're in flow and when you've slept well so so it's allowing yourself to have you talk about what is it the ideas shelf
Yes, the metaphorical idea shelf. Yes. Yeah.
I have a now, soon, later basket now.
Oh, amazing. Love it.
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Chapter 5: Is ADHD a deficit of self-awareness and how can it be improved?
So I made up the term natural psychiatrist because it's really a reflection of who I was, of a developing sense of self-awareness of what I brought to the party. Because I was a successful psychiatrist but was also really unhappy. And I couldn't work out why, but it was this identity piece. I didn't see myself. I didn't see other doctors who were like me. I didn't really...
know who i was and it was a real yeah that real self-awareness piece but the natural psychiatrist sort of emerged from um an understanding that there are three ways to treat any mental illness you can use medicines and many of those work really well and you can definitely use therapy and therapies can be very effective particularly when there's a good rapport between therapist and client
So there's medication and therapy. Those are the kind of two of the legs of the stool. But the third leg of the stool, which is the most important, the one that keeps it standing up, is everything else. And by everything else, I mean everything from group-based outdoor exercise to mindfulness to cold water swimming to changing what you eat to giving up alcohol to joining a choir, everything else.
And everything else is massively powerful. And that's what the natural psychiatrist does. It's teaching that to say to people, if I can teach you to mend your mental health, then you might never have to see me again. You might take the doctor with you. It's like that teach a man to fish. You feed him for life. You teach people to improve their mental health. They don't need to see a psychiatrist.
And you won't be surprised to know, Alex, there are not enough psychiatrists to go round. There's probably, I've calculated, about one psychiatrist doing primary care mental health for every 12,500 people who need one.
there's just not enough psychiatrists to go around so if i can teach people to improve their mental health then actually that's a massively helpful thing to do and that's what the natural psychiatrist is
I read on your website, Judith, you said education can be as powerful as medication for treating ADHD in adults. I guess that's what you're talking about. It's kind of understanding what are the natural ways you can get out, move, listen to music, raise certain chemicals rather than medication.
But what would you say is like the top five or three tips, things people could do that would boost their mood and focus?
But the top two, let's go with mindfulness. Mindfulness, really well evidence based in ADHD. Unbelievably hard to do if you have ADHD, because basically we're saying let's, you know, we're trying to calm the chatter of the mind. And so we have to adapt our mindfulness offering. So it's something really simple that you could mindfully run. You can mindfully dance. You can mindfully listen to music.
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Chapter 6: What is positive psychology and how does it benefit women with ADHD?
and we can talk about that a bit more in a minute but um and so i had a very strong sense that i was lost for a while and actually that wasn't a bad place to be there's nothing wrong with being lost if it means that it's a chance to find yourself if if it's a if it's a chance to to to reflect to journal to become more self-aware to go well that was a screw up what am i going to do differently now
What did you learn from that screw up?
Yeah, it cost her intuition massively. I remember that day I signed that bit of paper. My intuition, which I now know is so strong with ADHD people, was screaming at me. I sensed that they were not on my side, but I didn't listen to it. And it nearly cost me my life through getting screwed over in business.
you talk about intuition screaming at you my my inner self sometimes has screamed at me not that way not that way don't go there and you do it and then you're like why did i do that but it's because you know logically it all looks good but i think that there is often a very strong you know people talk about the sixth sense and they talk about sensitive sensory sensitivities in neurodiversity
The ability to intuit others' mental states is a sixth sense and it can be hypersensitive in us, those of us who are neurodivergent. And that's both a blessing and a curse.
Do you think it's a bit of an internal contradiction or a tug of war? Because yes, we have amazing intuition and we can sense when someone is trying to screw us over or might be toxic or is not a good fit for us, particularly at an early start of a relationship, like sometimes we can see someone's true character. But we might not have the internal confidence to actually listen to it.
So we get into that relationship regardless of that inner intuition telling us that it's not a good idea.
yeah it's a blessing and a curse I think there's two sides to it there's the knowing and then there's the have you got the courage to then take action and do and I think that takes practice and that people pleasing piece as well about ADHD as an ADHD often we're like oh no this is the right thing to do and I'm doing it for other people and then I have a sticker at home a postcard that says stop me before I volunteer again
Because you can be very impulsive and go, yes, of course. No, no, no, no. So it's learning to say, and I think that thing of, I now have a technique, which is if I think I'm going to say yes to something, I'll go, let me get back to you.
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Chapter 7: What distinguishes a 'Natural Psychiatrist' from a traditional psychiatrist?
Yes, I think people with ADHD, again, that intuition can probably protect you in spotting the grifter or the person who might not be truly as righteous as they're portraying and selling something maybe for their own financial gain rather than actually wanting to help the community.
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The app is available for the tablet or smartphone. 10% off if you use the link in the bio. Back to the episode. Just finally, Judith, this has been truly, truly fascinating. Or penultimately, what moves you the most when helping ADHD women and guiding them through their struggles?
um seeing people validated that moment where somebody goes it wasn't just me nope it wasn't just you because the big fear when you go and see a psychiatrist is you're frightened that you're going mad and actually the power of education is say no no this is a normal response to a really difficult situation you're not going mad you're going sane it's a really sane response
to what's happening in your life. And I'm always flattered when people, or when I was running my clinical practice, when people would cry because it's like, well, this is a good place to weep. This is a place to let go of that masking.
So I think validation and people being heard and listened to and believed is hugely moving because very often they've experienced not being believed for a long, long time.
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Chapter 8: What are the top tips to improve mood and focus for people with ADHD?
You're welcome.
I want to talk about your ADHD item finally, Judith. Oh, yes. I've been patiently waiting underneath that cloth for our entire conversation. I ask all my guests to bring in an item that most represents ADHD. It ends up on the shelves behind us, but for now, yours is underneath this cloth. I'm going to reveal it before the explanation. Oh, he's fallen over. Oh, the dog. It's a puppy. Is it a puppy?
It's a dog.
He's a puppy. Yeah, he's a puppy. And so he links to a metaphor that I use. So I run various courses for ADHD, which use kind of an awareness and regulation coaching model. And one of the things we talk about is we talk about neurotransmitters and we talk about that tidal nature of neurotransmitters. We also talk about networks.
We haven't talked so much about networks today, but maybe another time, because the puppy is the default mode network. And so the default mode network of the brain is the part of the brain that struggles to switch off with ADHD. And we only discovered it maybe 20, 25 years ago. So it's new and it's complex, scientifically complex. It does all sorts of things.
But the default mode network is the part of our brain that is curious. It wanders. It doesn't want to stay on the path like the central executive network. Like a puppy, it wants to wander off the path. And it's looking for new ways of doing things. And it's playful. And it's creative, just like a puppy.
and just like a puppy it needs looking after it needs exercise it needs sleep needs rest and it does not need to be beaten and that's why i use the metaphor of the puppy and the path when we teach the networks of adhd because when we understand our networks and we begin to get a feeling for what they might be and a feeling for what's going on we know instinctively what that puppy needs so that's my that's my puppy
It's so fascinating and I'm going to remember that because I have a dog. I'm going to firstly dog D, default network, but my dog went off the path two days ago and came back covered in horse poo. So I will very much remember that. Judith, truly fascinating. Thank you so much.
I want to finally do the ADHD agony aunt section, which is called the washing machine of woes because my ADHD item is this washing machine. That's fabulous. Is it a toy? It is. I think it actually works. I think it's got the plumbing. If you actually want to connect it to a water source, you can put in the detergent or whatever, the powder in here. And they claimed it worked. I don't believe them.
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