Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

Here's something nobody tells you about aging with ADHD: the part that feels like decline might not be decline at all. It might be retirement. Or perimenopause. Or just the fact that the external structure that quietly managed your symptoms for thirty years finally disappeared — and nobody warned you it was doing that much work. The question isn't whether your brain is changing. It is. The question is whether you understand why, and what the research actually says about where it leads.
Dr. Brandy Callahan is a clinical neuropsychologist, Canada Research Chair in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology, and the founder of the LiBra Lab — the Lifespan Brain Health Lab at the University of Calgary. Her research sits at the intersection most researchers haven't bothered to explore: what happens to the ADHD brain across decades, and specifically, what connects ADHD to elevated dementia risk. What she's finding — about allostatic burden, about the gap between how people perform in a lab versus how they function in a grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, about what a lifetime of navigating a neurotypical world may actually cost the brain biologically — is the conversation this series has been building toward. There is hard news in here. There is also, genuinely, a lot of hope.
Guest Spotlight
Dr. Brandy Callahan, PhD, RPsych is a clinical neuropsychologist, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Calgary, and a Canada Research Chair in Adult Clinical Neuropsychology. She is the founder and principal investigator of the LiBra Lab — the Lifespan Brain Health Lab — which focuses specifically on ADHD in women and in older adulthood, and she came to ADHD research not through personal experience but through a memory clinic, where she kept meeting older adults being evaluated for dementia who turned out to have lived their whole lives with undiagnosed ADHD. Her current research is investigating what may drive elevated dementia risk in adults with ADHD — including allostatic burden, cerebral small vessel disease, and the biological cost of decades of chronic stress. She is also currently running ADHD Her, an online study about girls and women with ADHD across the lifespan, open to participants from age 8 to 87. Learn more at libralab.ca, and find the ADHD Her study by searching "ADHD Her" online.
Links & Notes
LiBra Lab
ADHD Her Study (online, open to participants ages 8-87
LiBra Lab participant registry (RADAR)
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(00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

(05:56) - What does a research neuropsychologist actually do?

(08:34) - How does EF Age?

(15:01) - Charting the Decades

(22:22) - The Shame Cycle... Missing in the Lab

(23:39) - Alostatic Burden

(37:06) - So... where's the hope?

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What happens to your sense of self when the coping strategies you've relied on your whole life start to give out? For a lot of us, "pushing through" wasn't just a strategy, it was the story we told ourselves about why we kept making it. And when that story stops being true, what we're left with can look a lot like grief.
Dr. Kathleen Nadeau has spent decades sitting with people in that moment. She's interviewed 150 older adults with ADHD about what the losses actually feel like — the unmet retirement fantasies, the disorientation of late diagnosis, the particular sting of watching younger generations get the support that was never offered to them. She knows what keeps people stuck. And she has a lot to say about what's possible on the other side.
This is the second episode of our ADHD and Aging series, and it goes somewhere we didn't fully anticipate. Kathleen pushes back on the idea that aging with ADHD is mostly a story of subtraction. She makes the case, grounded in decades of research, that our brains are more malleable than we've been told, and that the real question is never "how do I push through this" but "where do I need to plant myself."
Links & Notes
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(00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

(03:08) - ADHD and Aging

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"You forgot because you didn't care enough." Most people with ADHD have been told that — or have told themselves that — more times than they can count.
Dr. Daniella Karidi returns to challenge it. She's a PhD researcher from Northwestern who has spent her career studying memory in ADHD, and her opening argument is one of those ideas that reframes everything that comes after: forgetfulness isn't a failure. It's the default of the system.
This episode also kicks off a new series on ADHD and aging — what happens when the structure we've built around our ADHD starts to change, how to tell normal forgetting from something more serious, and why brain fog in perimenopause and menopause is absolutely not your imagination.
Dr. Daniella Karidi is the founder of ADHD Time and a board member of CHADD Greater Los Angeles. Find her at adhdtime.com and on YouTube at ADHD Time on Air.
Links & Notes
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(00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

(00:46) - Join the Community: Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast

(02:05) - Memory & ADHD with Dr. Daniella Karidi

(32:35) - Aging Issues

(39:00) - Declining Cognition, Aging, and ADHD

(54:39) - Visit ADHDTime.com

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If you've ever given everything to a friendship and been left wondering what went wrong, Caroline Maguire has a gentle but clarifying answer: you probably gave too much, too soon, to someone who hadn't yet earned it. That's not a character flaw — it's the ADHD brain doing what it does when it finally finds someone who sees it. The dopamine hit of new connection can tip straight into hyperfocus, and suddenly you're all-in on a relationship that hasn't had time to prove itself. Caroline calls it the impulsive friendship cycle, and she has spent years helping neurodivergent adults find their way out of it.
Caroline is a social emotional learning expert, ADHD coach, and author of the award-winning Why Will No One Play With Me. Her new book, Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults, arrives April 14th — and it's not another book that asks you to fix yourself to fit a friendship model built for someone else's social battery. Instead, she starts with a reframe that carries the whole conversation: our friendship struggles are not a personal failing. They're a neurological mismatch between the way we were taught to connect and the way our brains actually work.
In this conversation, we dig into the masking vs. adapting distinction that has already sparked significant conversation in our Discord community — including what makes the difference between reading a room and suppressing yourself entirely. Caroline walks us through the ice cream scoop method for building trust slowly, what "emerging friend" means and why it matters, how to troubleshoot a friendship before you decide it's over, and the unmasking story she never expected to tell — including the moment Ned Hallowell called her out on a mask she didn't know she was wearing.
This episode is part of our ongoing relationships series, and it may be the most practical and personally honest conversation we've had in it yet. The book is available for pre-order now, with bonus resources, at any major bookseller.
Links & Notes
Caroline Maguire
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(00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

(01:51) - Introducing Caroline Maguire

(03:19) - Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults

(15:48) - Adapting versus Masking

(28:35) - Over-extending "Friendship"

(41:32) - About the Book

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If you've ever spent an entire day performing a version of yourself that felt nothing like the real you — holding it together at work, seeming calm when you're not, passing as organized — you already know something about masking. But knowing it and understanding it are two different things. Dr. Sharon Saline returns to help Pete and Nikki unpack what masking actually is: hiding traits, suppressing impulses, and overcompensating to appear more polished than you feel. It's a coping mechanism that can be useful, but for adults with ADHD, chronic masking carries real costs — increased anxiety, emotional exhaustion, a growing disconnect between who you show the world and who you actually are.
One of the most important distinctions in this conversation is the difference between masking and presentation. We all show up differently in different contexts — there's a version of you at work, with close friends, with your partner. That's not masking; that's healthy. Masking is specifically about hiding, about a core sense of deficiency that says if people see the real me, they'll reject me. Sharon traces this directly to the social anxiety spectrum — and to the RSD, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome that so many with ADHD know intimately.
So what does it look like in practice? Saying yes when you mean no. Staying quiet when you have something to say. Overpreparing to look like you know everything so no one discovers you feel like you know nothing. And at work, pretending you have it all under control when you're drowning — rather than simply asking for what you need. Sharon draws a crucial line between protective masking (I will never feel safe here) and productive masking (I don't feel comfortable yet) — and that distinction is where the path forward starts to open up.
Lowering the mask isn't about tearing it off all at once. It's about identifying the patterns — the people and places where you've felt safe before — and using those as your guide. It's about noticing the physical sensation of safety when it shows up, and recognizing that you deserve spaces in your life where you don't have to perform in order to belong. Sharon also reminds us that for AuDHD people especially, masking has often been an essential survival tool, and that owning your challenges with honesty — and even humor — is ultimately far less exhausting than the alternative.
Links & Notes
Dr. Sharon Saline — drsharonsaline.com
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(00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

(01:58) - When Masking is a Strategy

(03:18) - What is Masking?

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★