How to Keep Going When Life Feels Impossible (rebroadcast)

Hacking Your ADHD

William Curb

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 779 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today's special rebroadcast, we're revisiting a deeply personal and essential conversation from the Hacking Your ADHD archives. When the world feels heavy and focus feels like a luxury we can't afford, how do we keep moving forward?

Will opens up about the "surreal" experience of navigating life's mundane demands: laundry, dishes, and school runs all while grappling with the sudden loss of his mother. It's a raw look at the cognitive dissonance of surviving a personal tragedy while the rest of the world refuses to hit the pause button.

If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/212

What You'll Re-Learn:

Numbing vs. Resting: How to tell if you're actually recharging or just hiding from your feelings.
The "Go Big or Go Home" Trap: Why your ADHD brain loves a fantasy plan, and why "going home" is usually the result.
The Power of the Bucket: Shifting from the despair of being alone to the strength of community.
Self-Grace: A much-needed reminder that being hard on yourself is never the productivity hack you think it is.

Whether you're hearing this for the first time or the fifth, William's insights on "resisting despair" are as timely today as they were when this episode first dropped

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD.
0:06.5	I'm your host, William Kerb, and I have ADHD.
0:10.0	On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with
0:14.5	your ADHD brain.
0:16.7	Hey, team, over the last few weeks, it has been increasingly difficult for me to keep myself
0:21.3	focused on what I want to be focused on. I don't think I have to particularly speak to the
0:26.5	reasons why. We're all handling the state of the world in our own ways. In many ways, it has a similar
0:32.5	feeling to the beginning of the pandemic, where I felt like I needed to pay extra attention to the
0:36.3	news because so many people around me were just ignoring all the alarm bells.
0:41.1	Trying to deal with all of this while also having to grapple with a cognitive dissonance
0:44.8	of having to go on with real life while all of this is going on at the same time can feel
0:49.2	incredibly difficult.
0:50.3	It feels like we should just be able to press pause and all the other things going on in
0:54.1	our life right now.
0:55.0	But regardless of how we feel, time marches on.
0:58.0	In today's episode, we're tackling how to navigate life when focus feels impossible,
1:02.0	why we turn to numbing when we're overwhelmed, and most importantly, how we can break out of that cycle in ways that might actually support us.
1:10.0	If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page, you can find that at hacking your
1:14.2	ADHD.com slash 212.
1:17.4	All right, keep on listening to find out how to keep going when life feels impossible.
1:31.9	One of the stories I haven't talked about much on this podcast is about one of the most difficult times of my life, which was right after my mom died. It was a sudden, unexpected event.
1:38.3	I saw her one week and then was away for the weekend and she was gone. And life went on.
	...

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