So just to drill into that, then, and I know it obviously depends on the child, but how, how would you tell the difference? How would you know the difference? How would you, how would you identify in the situation which is which?

Well, if you get a child walking through the door and slumping and, you know, just, like, maybe even staring off into the distance or, you know, not showing interest in anything, this is a child who is under-aroused, hypoaroused.

And that's the thing with self-regulation or with regulation in general, like, what we want.

So imagine that this is like an odometer in a car that, you know, measures speed.

I think that's what [laughs] an odometer does.

Um, it measures the...

Oh, no, the o- odometer measures the revs of the engine, doesn't it? That's what we want.

So do you, do you th- do you think that as children, if, you know, if you're a parent and you've got a child with ADHD, do you think that this stuff starts to change habits and starts to impact their ability to regulate in the long run? You know, are we, are we learning something as we go along or are we just fighting fires?

What led you to specialise in ADHD?

Well, I was working as a psychologist in a large university counselling service and I would work with, obviously, lots of students who were struggling and For various reasons.

And so some people come in for anxiety, some for relationship issues, et cetera.

But I started to notice that there were certain students, didn't know that they were ADHDers at the time, who really struggled semester after semester with this.

And there was just like this pattern coming through to me.

There were so many commonalities in these students.

They were so... passionate about their studies.

Yeah, yeah.

[laughs]

Now what I want you to do is I'm gonna, um, paint you a picture of what it might have been like if you had ADHD.

Okay.

So the alarm goes off, and you've had to put a lot of thought into this because time doesn't come so naturally to you, and the night before have to work out maybe, like sit down and really deliberately work out how much time you needed to get ready to, to go out.

But the alarm goes off and really you've had to set five alarms 'cause it's really hard to wake up.

And so let's say you manage to rouse yourself on the third or fourth alarm.

And bear in mind, it was really hard for you to get to sleep last night, so you haven't had a lot of sleep.

... manage high stress and high energy.