What does it actually mean to “thrive” with ADHD?

“Thriving” is often held up as something to work toward in life, the gold standard for existence. If you have a learning difference or you’ve experienced mental health issues or even just went through a tough time, you’ve probably gotten some advice on what it takes to thrive. 

But for me, it’s never been clear what it means to thrive. It’s an abstract concept with many definitions. As someone with ADHD, it feels like thriving can be a codeword for hiding parts of myself that aren’t exactly desirable to the rest of the world. 

Yet thriving remains a constant point of discussion in mental health. It’s a conversation my colleague Sarah Greenberg and I have been having on and off for years. That’s because Sarah’s been working on a new way to understand and measure thriving, and she has a take on it I’ve never heard before.

Sarah is the vice president for expertise and strategic design at Understood.org. She’s a licensed psychotherapist and has been a leader in digital mental health for many years. She’s also really smart, thoughtful, and has a very different perspective on thriving than I do. 

So we decided it would be a good idea to record one of our conversations for an episode of Hyperfocus. 

We’d love to hear from you. Email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.

• What does it mean to thrive? 

• Masking my ADHD at work was exhausting, so I stopped 

(2:12) Are you thriving, or are you masking?

(5:11) Internal vs. external thriving

(23:04) The deficit model and erasure

(27:35) Privilege and thriving

Rae: Just thrive.

Sarah: Thrive.

Rae: Just thrive.

Sarah: Just thrive.

Rae: Drive to thrive.

Sarah: Thrive.

Rae: Sarah, we're here to talk about thriving. I want to preface our conversation about thriving by saying that I am not thriving particularly today because I have a cold. So, if I sound like I can't breathe through my nose or I cough, I am sorry.

Sarah: Quite all right. Thriving is not a static state.

Rae: Well, I'm gonna start by saying a lot of bad stuff about the word thriving, and then you're gonna tell me why I'm wrong. Because I'm pretty sure I am, but I have some thoughts, and I'd like to hear what you think about them.

As you probably gathered, I have a complicated relationship with thriving. It's a word that gets under my skin. Because if you have a learning difference or you've experienced mental health issues or ever just gone through a tough time, you've probably heard this word held up as a goal, something to work towards, a standard to reach for. It's been bandied around forever, but I've never really been sure what it means. And in its abstraction, it feels less like a call to find a way to lead a good life and more like an arbitrary goal. Or worse, a suggestion to hide the parts of ourselves that aren't so easy or pretty or fun.

But I have a colleague, Sarah Greenberg, who's very smart, and she doesn't see it that way at all. Sarah is the Vice President of Expertise and Strategic Design for Understood.org. She's brilliant, a licensed psychologist, and has been a leader in digital mental health for a long time. And she and I have been talking and politely arguing about thriving for years now. And recently, we thought it would be a good idea to record one of our conversations.

Like a real conversation, this one flows and goes. We both have ADHD, so you know what that means. So, I'm not gonna jump in with any more voiceovers or explanations. What you get is our real, unfiltered thoughts and feelings on thriving. This week on "Hyperfocus," a polite debate with Sarah Greenberg.

You have ADHD, too. We're both neurodiverse women.

Sarah: Yes.

Rae: We both work in this world.

Sarah: Yes.

And we've both been bombarded with this word, both personally and professionally, I think, for as long as I can remember. I don't know about you.

Sarah: Yes. And every place I've worked has had, for the last decade, has had a specific model of thriving. So, it's been bombarded with the word personally, professionally, as a psychotherapist and coach, and then also professionally in terms of designing models of thriving to fit unique use cases. So, bombarded is accurate. Yes.

Rae: So, but we have been kind of bombarded, and I use that word in part because it's true, and in part because of the way it feels. Because as a person with ADHD, when I am thriving to others, a lot of times, it just means my neurodiversity is no longer bothering them. I'm doing well at masking. I'm succeeding in my job. When I say succeeding, I mean performing the things that my job requires of me. I am, at least externally, happy and seem like somebody who is a productive member of society, right?

These all sound like good things. I'm saying them like they're horrible. But for me, the reality is that those things have a really high cost for me. And thriving, when I think about it now, is not, for me for a long time has just felt like another kind of like a euphemism for erasure.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: Like, you're thriving when I can't tell you have a learning disability anymore.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: And it's honestly, I've kind of like set my face against it. But one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you're one of the only people who's ever explained it to me in a way that felt different and better.

Sarah:Yeah, I mean, I think one thing we have in common is I imagine both of us, right, have kind of in our lives had to wrestle with thriving, right? For professional reasons, because it's a word that's thrown around a lot. But also because we're women who have maybe different strengths and talents than perhaps what is expected of women, right? As we were growing up. And so, we've sort of had to find our own like — like many people, right? — who perhaps are a little different than who the world is built for, right?

We've had to really contend with thriving and and find our on path and I think what you're saying makes so much sense particularly the example of "Well when i'm thriving, when people call me thriving, this is what it looks like," but it sounds like, Rae, that that may be a mismatch, like the external thriving isn't in balance with that internal sense of thriving when you're kind of getting that label.

Rae: I like the idea of external versus internal, like it's, what is driving like to somebody else versus what does it feel like to you?

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. I think there's really, to me, three components. The thing that's interesting to talk about is I do think that that external success, that external sense of success, doesn't matter in the sense that it feels good to be doing good, right? Like when we think about like, a child, right? It feels good to be succeeding in school. It feels good to have a challenge and reach a challenge. So, I think there is that external success component. I think the problem is, is when we're, when we overly focus on that, right?

There's also that internal success, right? Like how do you feel inside? How do you, do you feel good about yourself? Do you feel a sense of belonging in the world? And then I think, there's also, right, there's the external you, like the you who others see from the outside. There's the internal you, the you you actually experience: you live in your body, you live in your mind, every day, I would say every waking moment. But honestly, it's even when you're sleeping, right? The brain doesn't just suddenly turn off, right? You are in you all the time.

And then there's the relationships, right? We're such relational beings. So, then how do you interact with the humans and the environment around you? So, I think there's those three aspects of thriving, and what I'm hearing you say, I love thriving. I also love your hatred of thriving.

Because I think it, I think your hatred of thriving really brings out some of the ways that we can really misinterpret it, and even create this sense of like, I think for individuals who are neurodivergent, I could tell you so many stories from therapy or coaching where not only do you feel like you're sort of like messing up in certain areas, but then you also feel like your messing up with thriving.

Rae: Yes. This is an issue I have failed at thriving. You know, there's like failure to thrive. I think failing at thriving is something that's like, this is a real big deal to me. Like it's like when people are like, you know, "Richard Branson has dyslexia and it's so wonderful. Look at him go." And you're like, "Well, I'm not Richard Branson. Like I'm just, but I did find both my socks today, and they match, so is that thriving?" Like, you know, it's like, if you can feel like, if you're not doing the super power narrative about learning differently or thinking differently, then you are failing at thriving.

Sarah: And I think it's, I remember, oh my gosh, I remember working with this woman years ago. She was in therapy, and she was so unhappy, and then she was unhappy about being unhappy. She had ADHD, and she also had depression. And so, she was working with me. She'd never been to a therapist. This is maybe 15 years ago, so mental health wasn't quite as, there was still a lot more stigma. She grew up with parents who were immigrants from China. They had to work quite hard to achieve their status in life and their sense of security and safety.

And they absolutely, she got that message, that if she wasn't succeeding, all of their work was for nothing, right? That message came in loud and clear. They didn't pressure her to also be happy. What was interesting is that she went to school here, starting in middle school, and that's where she first started feeling that pressure to be happy. So, by the time she came to me in her early 20s, she was so miserable from being in a work world that really didn't suit her mind.

She was objectively doing actually quite well. She constantly felt like she was failing. She constantly felt overwhelmed. She had no energy. She felt like she was ignoring her relationships. But then she was also so upset with herself for failing at happiness. Because of this pressure. What do we call it, right, thriving pressure? It's real.

Rae: Like you said this thing to me a long time ago, that there is an internal version of thriving and an external version of that, like you said here, but you said it a little differently. It was like what it means to you versus what it looks like for other people.

Yeah.

There's a difference between having a drive to thrive, sorry for going back to this, I like things that rhyme, and being driven to thrive in a way that just makes you palatable to others. And happiness is kind of caught between those two things, I would think, especially if you're someone with a learning difference, because what does that look like? If you're successful, you're probably sacrificing a certain amount of freedom, of brain space, of ability to relax, like, you know, I don't know.

For me, depending on what I'm doing, depending on the kind of task I have to do and the environment in which I'm going it, I'm thriving significantly less when I'm doing well. But I guess, something I want to kind of back up and ask about before we go there is, from your perspective, like you've thought about this so much, and you have such a lovely way of doing it, is there, like, if you were gonna make a list of internal thriving characteristics versus external thriving sort of veneers, what would that look like? What would that be?

Sarah: Oh, that's such a good question. Gosh, when I work with individuals, I do like creating kind of a bespoke checklist because just like you gave an example, when you feel like you're externally thriving, you actually feel maybe perhaps a little bit miserable and that totally makes sense because are you thriving in areas that are actually aligned with your values goals and what you care about? Sounds like in those circumstances, no. So, of course, you detest the word. I would, too. I have before.

I think if I were to create a list, gosh, right, you know, what comes up for me? Is we actually recently did this? We created a model of thriving for Understood. And, there's five aspects to it. So, we call it SPARC, cause well, just like you love rhyming, I love acronyms. It makes it very easy to remember. And so, it's, it's got five elements. I'm a huge believer that thriving is multimodal. So, when we only make it about one thing, like grades, right, is an obvious example from youth, it's terrible, that is a terrible reflection in and of itself on how someone is doing, right? Holistically in their lives.

So, it's actually got five elements and it's built upon a foundation of knowledge from self-determination theory, from positive psychology. So, it is very much grounded in decades of work from other researchers and practitioners who have really wrestled with this question as well. The five elements are self-concept, right? How do you feel about yourself?

Rae: This is the S in SPARC.

Sarah: Yeah, that's the S in Spark is self-concept.

Rae: OK.

Sarah: And it's not just confidence, right? Because you might feel, hey, I'm awesome, or self-esteem, but that, it's more, right? Do you have do you have an accurate sense of self? Right? Do know yourself? Do you know your strengths, your challenges? And you may be veered towards the positive, right? Do you, are you generous with yourself in that self-concept? And then the P is the P, and SPARC is purpose and meaning. So what, do you do have that sense of something that matters beyond, being part of something that matters beyond the self.

So, for a child that might be helping to take care of a pet, right? For an adult, that might be volunteering or spirituality, or family, or I know you often talk about your motivation as a parent, right, and creating a better future, a more inclusive future. The A is autonomy. Do you have the freedom to make choices? And this is where you start to see the internal and the external matter so much, right?

Because when you're in an environment where you can't make choices...one example I like to give for youth is, right, imagine a young girl with dyslexia who the books at her level, right, maybe she's in third grade, but the books at her levels are really more relevant to the interests of a first grader. That's going to feel pretty terrible. But then imagine she has access to something that makes reading more accessible, like an audiobook, and she can suddenly make the choice to read things that are at her level and in her interest area, right? So, that's that freedom to choose.

Relationships. The relationships in our lives matter so much. We're social animals, we don't exist on an island. The relationships, right, across our lifespan, matter so match, so that's the interpersonal relationships and how you relate to being part of a community. So, like, for example, I mean, this is gonna sound just like a love fest, but like having colleagues like you, for example, amplify my thriving, because it makes me feel like I'm part of something where we have shared values, a shared mission, right? That's huge. That's the R.

And then the C is capacity. So this is kind of approaching part of the area that you hate, but I think it's when we see it more holistically, we never want to think about something with thriving that you don't actually have control over. So, employment is a good option. I mean, sorry, not a good option, employment is a good option. I opt to be employed. But it's a good example because, you know, circumstances in your life are going to shift. You may have a hard time, where maybe you're getting a divorce or you just lost your job. Does that mean you can't thrive or work towards thriving? Absolutely not.

And honestly, the suggestion that that would be so, right, that how your external circumstances are, like limit your desire to thrive, I think is a massive issue that comes up frequently in our field. But the reason why we say capacity versus accomplishment is do you feel like you have the skills to achieve your goals? It's not are you actively achieving them, but do you have the skills to achieve them? Or do you have the capacity to grow your skills? So, external success still is a piece of thriving.

Rae: Well, I mean, I think it would be ridiculous to pretend that it's not, right?

Sarah: Right.

Rae: Like, we live in a capitalist society. You have to make money, you have to have a house, you have to be able to, like, get from place to place, since you should be able to get medical care and food and have appointments if you need them with a doctor.

Sarah: Right.

Rae: Things like that. Like you need all those things in order to thrive, because I don't know if this is too basic, like psychology 101, but there's a hierarchy of needs, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: If you're not doing well at the bottom, you don't have safety, security, food, water...

Sarah: Exactly.

Rae: You're not going to be able to move up the pyramid into things like self-concept and try and know what you need or see what your choices even are because you may not have been in a position where you even realize there were choices, like the client that you were talking about. Exactly. I think this model is so fascinating. And I find it to be like, I don't know, people always like to say that thing like, there's a word in this language and it has no English translation, you know, like.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: Saudade or something like that. There's these words that people say, it means a whole paragraph, and you really have to understand it to understand. And to me, I feel like thriving is one of those words that doesn't really have a definition, it has like a paragraph.

Sarah: I love that.

Rae: And this, to me, what you've laid out, is the paragraph. But I often feel, and I think this is something that you speak really well to, which is why I wanna know more about it, is like, thriving is an individualized thing. Like, what is putting somebody in the place of being OK, which sometimes that's thriving, right? Like, it doesn't mean you're doing awesome. It means you're all right. Or maybe it is awesome sometimes, but there's a spectrum of thriving, yeah?

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so interesting.

Rae: It's different person to person.

Sarah: It's different person to person and Rae, I think actually, I thought of something as you were saying that the thing about words, one of the words that has meant a lot to me and it's a big one, it may be familiar to some listeners, but I'm going to use it because I just love it.

Rae: It's all right, we'll break it down.

Sarah: OK. So, often we think of thriving as hedonic, right? Are you happy? Rae, just like you hate thriving, I hate happiness.

Rae: That's the whole episode now, that's it. Rae hates thriving, Sarah hates happiness. Welcome to "Hyperfocus."

Sarah: So, of course, I want everyone to be happy. I wanna be happy, I think the way we interpret happy is often, do you have a sense of pleasure, right? Are you getting this sort of like, are you getting good grades? Are you like getting these external markers that show happiness? Are you in a good mood? And the reason...I love happiness, I truly, truly love happiness. I do a happiness meditation quite often. I love happiness, for the record, but I hate how we've interpreted as, right, positive mood. So, hedonic is one way that thriving has been looked at across ages, right? Are you happy?

Rae: And just to be so we're clear, hedonic means happiness, like the amount of happiness that you have?

Sarah: Kind of the amount of happiness, like a view of thriving, where are you happy, right? But mood fluctuates, like you know this, right? Mood fluctuates. We could be thriving and be sad, right? You could experience grief and still be thriving because you have this community to lean on, right? Sadness is a part of life, different moods are an inherent part of being human. The word that I love is eudaimonic. And gosh, now I kinda want you to Google the origins of it. I wish I had thought to look it up ahead.

Rae: It sounds Greek.

Sarah: Sounds Greek.

Rae: So, eudaimonic. Tell me about that.

Sarah: That is a view of thriving where you are, it's more grounded in meaning, a sense of meaning on purpose. So, a life well lived. So, hedonic happiness, you think of the hedonic treadmill, right? Like I, my thriving is measured by how happy I am or how consistently positive I'm feeling. Whereas eudaimonic is my thriving is about right, am I living by my values? Do I feel a sense of purpose in my life? Do I feel like I matter, and I'm able to engage in activities that matter?

So, this is where we see things like, this is why I think thriving is so contextual because in certain environments, you can be doing just OK, and that's incredible. Like I think maybe some listeners have probably read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," right, where he's living through a Holocaust and finds these small ways to experience meaning, right? And through that came his psychological theory, Viktor Frankl.

But I think that, right, I think we can experience at least being on the path to thriving or experiencing some element of thriving in many, many circumstances. And Rae, I love what you hate about thriving because I think you have probably been exposed to a motto of thriving that just doesn't work in every situation for every kind of brain.

Rae: I want to ask about that model, actually, because I like that you use that word. And something I've sort of thought about and that we've talked about a bit before is the medical model of thriving. And for people with ADHD and other, really any condition of any kind that isn't simply you are fine all the time, the medical model to me seems like the erasure model that I was talking about.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: When we no longer can see that you have symptoms of this difference or condition or whatever it is, then you are thriving, then you are better. And that's something in psychology and psychiatry for sure, right?

Sarah: Oh, 100%. And I think the most common, some of the most common ways to measure success in mental health are through these check symptom checklists. So, you go, you're at a deficit, right? And then success looks like the absence of symptoms. So, let's imagine, right, you're getting treatment for depression. As you go on, are you experiencing less days where your mood is almost always down? Is your energy up, right? But it's not really thinking about elevating what's good in life as well. So, there's two paths to healing. One is you can decrease symptomology. The other path is you can increase what's good in your life.

So, let's apply this to ADHD, actually, right? So, if we think about the deficit model in ADHD, and then we go back to what you were saying earlier in thriving, like, it's interesting because your description of it sounded just like the deficit model, right? Not because that's how you think of it, but because that is probably what you've been told most of your life. So, thriving is more the absence of symptoms. You gave some examples, right? What were your examples of erasure actually?

Rae: Erasure is, I mean, it's really basically effective masking, right? Like I am causing no ripples in my work.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: I am successful in my relationships. My house is not horrifying when people come over. They don't wonder what's wrong with me, basically, you know, like "Clean up. People are coming." But under all of that is the "Clean up. People are coming," is the maybe I come to work and it's too loud and chaotic here to get anything done. So then, after I put my daughter to bed, I'm up at 10 p.m. trying to get things done when it's quiet. And I'm so tired because I also can't sleep because I'm taking double doses of my medication because I have to get to work in the morning, I have get my work done, my house is a mess, but it's OK because I'll get it all done and I'll figure it out and tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble down the train.

And I feel like that's something that is really familiar for most people with ADHD. And I think what you mean about the deficit model, to me that it does feel like deficit's a great word for it because you feel drained.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: You feel the deficit of what your abilities are. You feel like, when I think of like attention deficit, it's less the attention piece and more like the deficit piece, like what am I not able to do with the same amount of ease as people who don't have the condition that I have? And how do I make up that gap? And what does it take to make up that gap, what kind of energy, what kinda cost, what kind, it's OK, we're gonna make it through this, we're gonna be fine. And then, honestly, when you're not thriving in the medical model, the cost is massive, you know, job loss, divorce, like we can go through all the things like we've talked a lot about, like people with ADHD have these massive consequences.

People with other neurodivergent conditions also have massive consequences. So, when thriving is wielded like a weapon, when it's used wrongly, because then, like you said, it not only makes you feel bad when you're already trying to do all these things, it also makes you feel bad feeling bad.

Sarah: Yes.

Rae: You know, it's not like, like I think we, when I say we've been bombarded with it, like it gets thrown around, like it's a harmless thing, like it's a fun goal for a corporate retreat. And it's not. It's something that has a real impact on our lives. And so, I love having you come basically to like kind of talk me down from this, you know, rant that I'm on, because I don't think that a lot of people see it the way that you do, because I think that is part of the problem.

Like you are introducing this model because, your hope, I think —and you can tell me more about this, I'd like you to — is that this won't just exist in the lab where you built it, that this is gonna go out into the world and hopefully rewrite some of the stuff that thriving has done, the word thriving has done.

Sarah: 100%. And Rae, I also, I do, I really appreciate the opportunity to bring in a new perspective. At the same time, I want to validate what you're saying because you know, that use of the term erasure, I think it's really accurate, right? So, in that example you gave of what thriving means, like, "Oh, I'm gonna," it's that masking, right, "I'm going to work so hard to make my house clean. I'm gonna work so hard to keep it together at work. I'm to work hard to show up in relationships in a way that is expected of me."

And it leaves you drained because all of your focus is on what you're bad at constantly. Even if you're getting better, all of your focus is on what you're bad at, who wants that for their lives? Who wants that for their children's lives? So, the reason why I think erasure is such a good term for this is because it literally erases part of the greatness of who you are.

Rae: When we talk about concepts like thriving, when we talked about a lot of things, like even at the end of an article that we write where we say, "If you notice any of these signs in your child, it's a good idea to get help, contact your health care provider," even that is a privileged statement, right? Most people don't have a health care provider they can contact. And if they do contact, they're probably not gonna get a call back. And are they covered by their insurance?

Sarah: And once you hit all those barriers, do they understand the neurodivergent mind?

Rae: Yep. Are they racist?

Sarah: Are they racist?

Rae: Are they somebody who doesn't want to work with an LGBTQ child? Are they someone who simply is like, "I don't know how to deal with you"?

There's a million things that you can come up against that are not just like detours on the path of thriving, but literal blockers that are going to stop you from moving forward. Does that mean you can't thrive? I don' think at all, but I do think when we talk about this stuff, we have to talk about the fact that the path to thriving looks very different depending on who you are and what you're coming in with.

Sarah: Yeah, I'm so glad you raised that because I think another thing that we see often in the more deficit medical model, I don't want to kind of dismiss all of medicine because I think some of it is very strength-based and also very like, just very necessary. But, right, if we think about kind of that deficit model that we see a lot in psychology, I think that another aspect of that is who's determining what thriving is and what you need to get there. So, one of the work situations or the work situations where I've learned the most about thriving have been very, very, resource-constrained.

I started my early career in the Rape Crisis Movement, designing clinical services for a county of 400,000. We were seven people total. There was not the, a lot of the individuals that we're working with were new immigrants, maybe as part of their trauma healing, didn't have jobs, right? Very, very limited resources. And then just even talk about, Rae, you often talk about like the burden of belief. I think that's something that that area has a lot in common with ADHD and neurodivergence, right?

Maybe going through and trying to get support, but not being believed. This was prior to the Me Too movement. Right, a lot of challenges. And I think that, right, another way is, instead of saying like, "Wow, you don't have anything. So, we have nothing for you because you don't have resources." Well, what resources are in the community? And what's amazing about the Rape Crisis Movement is that this was not me who started this, this was, right, that the movement was started by some really, really strong and brilliant women who said, "We do have resources. We do have strengths."

And through that came really leaning into peer counseling approaches that were highly effective, where you have members of the community who have been through really significant challenges and had some positive experiences, then helping other members of the community. And I will say, right, I want everyone to have the best gold standard options for health and healing. I want that for the world. That is never, that is most likely not gonna happen in our lifetimes at least, right?

So, I think in the deficit model, we also often aren't able to see, often what gets ignored is the strengths in communities that, right, it's kind of like you're like looking at deficits and saying "This has to get better." And then you're saying, "Oh, and you don't have the resources for that."

But then, when you see these exceptions to it, right, there's really incredible strengths and resources that I've just seen from a mental health perspective, communities really lean into. And I think peer counseling is a really good example of that where, right, you can take a situation where there seems to be very limited resources and draw upon the strengths of everyone involved to create something that in many cases is better than standard models. I don't know if that makes sense, right? But I was just thinking about it.

Rae: No, it does make sense to me. I like it as, it's like, you don't define thriving within limits. Like this is what I think you keep saying, that I am finally genuinely starting to understand, which is whatever you're coming from, wherever you're come from, it's important to be aware of the things that stop thriving, whether it's structural inequality, whether it is feeling like you're under pressure, whether it's feeling like you're in a world that doesn't understand your brain, whatever the things that seem like the blockers are, those are there. No one's saying they're not.

Sarah: No one is saying they're not.

Rae: But thriving doesn't define itself around them. Thriving is the thing that moves between them, and it's all of the things that let you forge that path, whatever it looks like, and whatever's in the way. Thriving, a word that I'm starting to make some slight peace with. Is the river that moves between, and it's what we do for each other, and it is what we do for ourselves, and is the things that we use to make our world a better place to be in general. Is that right? Am I picking up finally the true meaning of thriving?

Sarah: Yeah, I think that's so beautifully described. And in what you were saying is something that I believe very strongly in, which is we get to self-determine what thriving means for us, and we get to self-determine that as an individual and also as a community, right? We don't exist in isolation, right? Right, we work together. We have some say over what our environment is like, right?

Rae: Sometimes.

Sarah: Sometimes. I think that, you know, part of what I learned from your kind of critique of thriving is that not only do we often use definitions that don't work for individuals, we're very paternalistic. Like a lot of models have been very paternalistic in saying, right, "This is what thriving looks like and this is what you need to get there." And I think there's a lot of room to question those models.

Rae: I like that. I like it's like, it's like you're handing thriving back to the person. We get to define what it looks like for us, not the other way around.

Sarah: Yeah.

Rae: Sarah, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah: Thanks, Rae.

Rae: "Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions ,and Justin D. Wright mixes the show. Samiah Adams is our supervising producer, Briana Berry is our production director, and Neil Drumming is our editorial director. If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you wanna help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.