Tips from an ADHD Coach: Psychological safety

We can feel more anxiety in some situations than others. Some people and settings may make us more on edge, and others more relaxed. Psychological safety is the freedom to be imperfect or to make mistakes without major consequences. 

With ADHD, psychological danger can be even more intense due to challenges with impulse control, executive dysfunction, and emotional dysregulation. ADHD coach Jaye Lin talks about what can make us feel more psychologically safe, and what can make us feel more anxious and dysregulated.

Have a challenge you’d like Jaye to talk about in an episode? Email or send a voice memo to us at adhdcoachtips@understood.org.

Related resources

• Managing your emotions with ADHD: One lawyer’s story

• ADHD and emotions

• ADHD and anxiety

Timestamps

(00:47) Dina’s quote

(02:19) What is psychological safety, and psychological danger?

(04:14) ADHD and psychological danger

(8:26) What can we do if we find ourselves constantly feeling psychologically unsafe?

(14:17) Recap

Episode transcript

Jaye: Are you someone who feels anxiety in some situations and not others? Are there specific people and settings that make you feel more on edge and others that make you feel more relaxed? What do you think are the differences between those environments that make such a big impact on your anxiety levels?

This is "Tips from an ADHD Coach," and I'm your coach, Jaye Lin. Today we're talking about what can make us feel more psychologically safe and what can make us feel more anxious and dysregulated. We're going to hear from Dina, who is on another understood.org podcast, "How'd you get THAT job?!" about how the job she has and who she works with allowed her to be more herself.

(00:47) Dina's quote

Dina: I was interviewed in that position by an individual who was the deputy director at that time, and he is an honest person. And I can't express this to the stratosphere of the universe enough, working for an honest person is literally my brain getting hugs because I know that I can screw up, I can do good, I can do indifferent, I can be sassy, I can be weird, I can be whatever, and he's just going to tell me how he feels about it.

I don't have to contain myself within myself because I have an environment that allows me to have that conversation and then pulls me back.

Covid happening when I got this job, made it that this job that I absolutely love was remote. I don't know if this is my ADHD or if it's just who I am as a person, I never want to work in an office again. It is immensely important to me to be able to decompress alone. It is immensely important to me to be able to express myself off camera and where my body and my face are not being policed by other people. As someone with ADHD — or maybe it's just who I am — it is more difficult for me to create a neutral body positioning just for someone else's comfort.

(02:19) What is psychological safety, and psychological danger?

Jaye: Dina mentions two separate things that make her feel more psychologically safe to be herself, a person she works with, and the environment she's allowed to have while working. Both are important for us to feel psychological safety and having one without the other can still make us feel on edge. But what exactly is psychological safety? What does it mean to feel psychologically safe?

The most simple way I see psychological safety is the freedom to be imperfect. So, feeling like it will be okay for us to make mistakes or fail without major consequences. On the flip side, psychological danger is when we feel like there will be big punishment and consequences for being imperfect or making mistakes, which can give us a higher level of anxiety and create hesitation about moving forward. But what does imperfection mean to every person? What counts as a mistake? What counts as failure? How do we define a major consequence?

Sometimes the psychological danger we feel from a negative experience can creep its way into other areas of our lives. We can start feeling psychologically unsafe in other environments and around other people. We can start expecting to be criticized or judged in every interaction and assume the worst from the people around us. This can create a baseline of anxiety and decision paralysis and is something that happens even for people who don't have ADHD.

If someone is given a negative performance review by their boss for voicing an opinion that is different from theirs, they probably wouldn't feel comfortable doing anything other than enthusiastically chime in with their agreement going forward, even if they don't actually agree. Voicing a conflicting opinion isn't necessarily an imperfection or mistake, but it can start feeling like one due to the punishment they'd anticipate from doing it. Even when interacting with someone who is not their boss.

(04:14) ADHD and psychological danger

With ADHD, the spreading of psychological danger can be even more intense due to difficulties with impulse control, executive dysfunction, all or nothing thinking, and most importantly, emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation can cause the negative experiences in our lives to feel more intense and painful.

For example, if we've been told we're a jerk because we blurted and interrupted someone impulsively, we can feel the sting of rejection and shame much harder than someone who is neurotypical. This can make us feel extra fearful and on edge about interrupting when we're having conversations with the person who called us a jerk and maybe other people as well. And especially for girls and women whom society is a lot tougher on about interrupting others, being late, being disorganized, being physically restless, zoning out, etc.

There can be multiple factors of psychological danger woven into all of our interactions. This can make us reluctant to show any parts of ourselves that could possibly be interpreted as less than perfect and overthink everything we say or do, which uses up a lot of our already lower brain processing power with ADHD and can make us feel stressed and worn out. This might be why perfectionistic masking is so common for girls and women with ADHD and why anxiety disorders are so often a co-existing condition for us.

Some people argue that psychological danger could be a good thing because it keeps people hungry. A pressure cooker method is often used to train athletes, musical prodigies, and others in highly competitive fields. It's common for coaches, instructors, and parents to be overly strict in their expectations, with punishment and consequences given for not delivering on extreme perfection.

Examples of consequences for not reaching perfection include getting yelled at for getting a B-plus in an AP class or having the end-of-season celebration canceled after losing the championship game. A lot of institutions who use these intensely hard training methods say that it works because some of the greatest athletes or artists have emerged from this process.

While it's true that those who are able to come out of that process unscathed can achieve greatness, I always wonder how many have quit competing, making art, or doing other things they were good at because of the toll the psychological danger had on them. Because what happens when we feel psychologically unsafe?

Well, it can create a negative association with that person, that activity, parts of our personalities, and much more, which can lead to avoidance. It can make us feel on edge and anxious in ways that can lead to burnout and emotional blow-ups. It can make us want to take less risks, be less ambitious, less confident, less fulfilled, and honestly, it can make us way less productive. If I think that I will get fired if my podcast producers hear any vocal fry or stuttering in my delivery, or if I flub any of my words, I will probably be extremely anxious going into all of our recording sessions.

I will probably do anything I can in order to not stutter or have any vocal fry, like speaking in a tone that's higher pitched than my regular voice or speaking so slow there is no chance for me to stutter or mispronounce a word. But at those high levels of anxiety, my brain would be so preoccupied by trying not to mess up that I wouldn't be able to dedicate a lot of focus or attention to what I'm actually doing. I would most likely flub my words or stutter more often than I would if there wasn't all that pressure on me to be perfect.

And obviously, if I modulated my voice to sound different than it does, it probably wouldn't even sound like me and it wouldn't sound very natural. Lucky for me, Jessamine and Margie are really wonderful and have created an encouraging environment of complete psychological safety for me that allows me to be calm, confident, and completely myself in recordings, which actually makes the results better than if the environment was unsafe.

(8:26) What can we do if we find ourselves constantly feeling psychologically unsafe?

So, what can we do if we find ourselves constantly feeling psychologically unsafe when we feel like the people around us are constantly nitpicking what we do and we feel on edge, or we feel paralyzed because we need to know our results will be perfect? The first thing I suggest is to really explore what is making us feel unsafe. What is it about the environment, the people around us, the events of our past, or how we see ourselves that makes us feel like we can't show imperfections?

Then I suggest taking a close look at the evidence. If I feel psychologically unsafe around my boss or a friend, what have they said or done that supports this feeling like I can't be imperfect around them? Sometimes in this process, it becomes obvious that the person making us feel psychologically unsafe is ourselves. Sometimes the people we feel afraid to take risks or fail around have not given us much reason to feel psychologically unsafe around them.

Maybe we find them to be really successful and intimidating, so we feel unsafe sharing about our small wins when their wins are so big. But maybe the evidence shows that they're regularly supportive and cheer us on. The advice I gave to new admins at Google when I had been there for a few years was to fail early. It was something I wish someone told me when I started. I was so scared to make any mistakes because I always thought I would get fired.

I immediately started burning myself out with trying to do and be everything to the point where I was crying at work, always on the verge of a panic attack, and unable to enjoy anything in life. My work definitely started going downhill and that's when it happened. I made a mistake. It was a huge one that could have cost my team a lot of money. I immediately told the director, who was my manager and another senior manager on that team.

They're going to be so mad at me, they're going to think I'm completely incompetent. I'm going to get fired. I braced for that reaction. But you know what they did? They told me to take a pause. They asked me how I was doing. They told me I'm doing too much and that mistakes are expected when I'm going at that speed. They came up with ways they could go out of their way to help out the situation.

I was so shocked and it hit me that they've never said or done anything to suggest that they would react the way I expected them to. But because they never looked at the evidence that the environment was psychologically unsafe, I just assumed it would be, I'm not going to gaslight you and say that it's always in your head. There are definitely people and environments that the evidence will show as being psychologically unsafe.

I'm just saying that it might not be all of them. Use the evidence to guide you, not just assumptions. If you still feel anxious about it, even though the evidence doesn't support that someone will react the way that you're fearing, I suggest testing the waters with something very small to see what the result will be.

The next time you make a small mistake, instead of scrambling to try to possibly cover it up or make it so that no one can see it. Allow others to see this very small mistake that you've made and see how they react to it. Also, what we can do is we can allow the mask to slip a little bit and allow ourselves to be chatty, fidget in our meetings, share something that we are having difficulty with, with the people around us, and see whether they support us or whether they view this as a flaw.

This is especially good to do if you find yourself in a similar situation as I was in at Google, where I felt justified in my fear because I didn't have any evidence of how they would react to my mistakes since I was too scared to make them. We can also do the opposite and analyze what about certain people and situations makes us feel more relaxed, confident to take risks and free to be ourselves. Then surround ourselves with the people and environments that bring out the best in us.

And the last step, we can try to pivot the relationships we already have that make us feel unsafe into more psychologically safe relationships. Sometimes people aren't aware that what they say or do can make us feel this way and might want to know how they can support us better.

For example, if I have an acquaintance who is always commenting on how my body looks when I see them, I might tell them that while I don't necessarily think they're doing this on purpose, when they comment about my body constantly, it makes me feel self-conscious and on edge. I would appreciate it if they stopped doing that, even if they were doing it with good intentions.

This isn't always smart to do with everyone, obviously. Like I said, there are people where the evidence shows them to be psychologically unsafe. If someone is constantly ridiculing other friends for communicating their boundaries or there's someone that is regularly discounting my feelings when I bring them up, I usually won't try to pivot the relationship and just accept that I want to keep them at a distance.

But for those I felt comfortable taking this step with, for the most part, they've been hugely supportive of my requests and I've put in a lot of effort to make me feel more psychologically safe. Their response tends to strengthen those relationships and make them feel even more safe afterward, which is pretty great.

Honestly, after taking these steps, everything in my life got better. I'm less anxious, more fulfilled, and even more productive. That's what I want for all of you too.

(14:17) Recap

Psychological safety is when we feel safe to be imperfect, make mistakes, and be ourselves, which can be harder to achieve with ADHD and emotional dysregulation. When we feel psychological danger, it can make us reluctant to show any parts of ourselves that could possibly be interpreted as less than perfect and overthink everything we say or do, which uses up a lot of our already lower brain processing power with ADHD and can make us feel stressed and worn out.

It can also make us way less productive to only shoot for perfection and keep us from going after the things we want. It can also lead to burnout and emotional blow-ups. But if we analyze what about a person or environment makes us feel psychologically safe or unsafe using the evidence to determine whether those feelings are accurate, we can get a clearer picture of what we can do to feel more safe.

We can surround ourselves with what and who will make us feel more psychologically safe and communicate to loved ones what they can do to help make us feel more safe so we can live more psychologically safe and fulfilled lives. Thanks for listening.

You've been listening to "Tips from an ADHD Coach" on the Understood Podcast Network. If you have a challenge that you'd like me to talk about on air or would just like to say hi, you can email us at ADHDCoachTips@understood.org. You can also check out the show notes to find links to anything mentioned in the show and more resources.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/whygive.

"Tips from an ADHD Coach" is produced and edited by Jessamine Molli and Margie DeSantis. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright, who also makes the show. Ilana Millner and Ash Beecher are our supervising producers. Briana Berry is our production director and Neil Drumming is our editorial director. For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. And I'm your host, Jaye Lin. Thanks for listening.