Rhythms of Focus Podcast Por Kourosh Dini arte de portada

Rhythms of Focus

Rhythms of Focus

De: Kourosh Dini
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Join psychiatrist, musician, and productivity strategist Dr. Kourosh Dini on a journey to transform your relationship with work, creativity, and focus. "Rhythms of Focus: for Wandering Minds, ADHD, and Beyond" explores the intersection of meaningful work and the art of engaging creativity and responsibility without force, particularly for wandering minds, ADHD, and beyond. Each week, Dr. Dini weaves together insights from psychiatry, mindfulness practices, and creative experiences to help you develop your own path beyond productivity, and to mastery and meaningful work. Whether you're neurodivergent or simply seeking a more authentic approach to engaging the world, you'll discover practical strategies for: - Building supportive environments that honor your unique way of thinking - Transforming resistance into creative momentum - Developing personalized workflows that actually stick - Understanding and working with your mind's natural rhythms Drawing from his experience as both a practicing psychiatrist and creative artist, Dr. Dini offers a compassionate perspective on productivity that goes beyond traditional time management techniques. You'll learn why typical productivity advice often falls short and how to craft approaches that genuinely resonate with your mind's natural tendencies.Copyright 2026 Kourosh Dini Ciencia Ciencias Biológicas Desarrollo Personal Música Éxito Personal
Episodios
  • 50. Gaming Ourselves

    50. Gaming Ourselves
    Apr 9 2026
    Many of us with ADHD and wandering minds have been told our motivation problems are mainly about dopamine dependence. This has led to numerous activities and products built to "gamify" motivation and productivity.But trying to “game” oneself with reward apps, points, quests, races, or even caffeine often works only briefly because it goes against what is true for ourselves.What makes video games engaging is not flashy stimuli, but a flowing progression of challenges calibrated to be neither too hard nor too boring, where enjoyment comes from the activity itself.Motivation can come from pausing with existing frustration and tension, asking what feels boring or irritating, then simplifying, shrinking, or slowing tasks to gently reduce tension and “titrate” challenge. Then, dopamine becomes an afterthought.We end with one of my oldest and ever-evolving compositions, “Aging,” written in C minor.Transcript:Maybe if I trick myself. Maybe if I reward myself. Maybe if I use that app that gives me points, sparkles, and a lot of fanfare, I'll get my chores done.The idea of dopamine dependence, or maybe dopamine starvation, is often a suspect in the world of ADHD and wandering minds.If I only had more dopamine I'd get things done.The phrase is supported by this idea of an "Interest-based" nervous system - this idea that has somehow been interpreted to mean that we can only do things that we have some a priori interest in, effectively arguing for a lack of free will.And so, some of us look for ways that we can "game" ourselves. Maybe we consider ways to set up a points system for which chores are worth something. Maybe we turn our to-do list into a set of quests with levels, loot, and the like.Or how about "how fast can I clear this Inbox?" reminding me of trying to get a kid to tie their shoes in the morning by asking them to race out the door.Maybe we even use a chemical like coffee after the work report is done, quite literally trying to get a flush of dopamine after doing something that we'd otherwise avoid.Look, if any of these work for you, great. But I believe, more often than not, it'll work once or a few times, and then some part of us, starts to say "no."Why? Because we have been dishonest with ourselves.Any Worthwhile System Requires HonestyAny system of work worth its salt, requires honesty with ourselves.Part of the problem is in how we interpret the word "game" itself.We look at video games, for instance, as this poster child of dopamine dependence. Things flash and make noises on a screen, beaming photons into our eyes, jiggling air molecules at our eardreams, sending signals into some secret lairs in our brain, a mesolimbic pathway of the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, working its way into the dorsal striatum.Whatever the terminology, the more seemingly scientific, the more it becomes a metaphor for whatever lies beyond our control. We may as well imagine some evil villain with a smirk and a lab suit, standing in our brains, laughing as they pull the levers for the things that make us do wrong.What is "gaming"?"Gaming" in this context is a word that seems to be interpreted as, maybe I can trick that guy into pulling the levers at the times that I want, by attaching something that already makes the dopamine flow with the thing that doesn't.But gaming, video gaming, is very much not about this process at all.Things that go blip and bloop do not excite us. Or maybe they do briefly, but then that fades off all easily, its novelty spent.What excites us is not the rewardWhat excites us is a flow of moving from one challenge to the next. At first we see something that somehow fits some window of not too difficult, not too boring, and maybe even completable.We nudge forward, stomping on that one bad guy. And then we see some next window of challenge, maybe bringing some of what we've just accomplished with us.One at a time, and then blending into each other, like picture frames across old-school film, we get into it, stomping, swinging, dashing, grooving, ready to take on more.What began as a trickle became a river.Whatever it is, we are enjoying the thing for the thing itself. We haven't skirted meaning. We haven't cheated ourselves.Beyond games, we can do this with any type of play or work, enjoyed or not.The Path is ThroughThe path in is through the frustration, the tension, the emotion that already exists, not by avoiding it.If we can pause with that sensation, not force ourselves through or hide from it, we can then ask, "what is boring, frustrating, irritating about this?"And then, simplify, or maybe shrink things down, or slow down and try to render some of that tension into ease. Gently, - as we do.And then with doing so, we then start finding the real levers that can adjust the challenge within ourselves - tuning into where we are. We can adjust those levers for ourselves.Once we learn how to titrate a challenge for ourselves, dopamine is an afterthought. The word ...
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    17 m
  • 49. SMART Goals Are Anything but Smart

    49. SMART Goals Are Anything but Smart
    Apr 2 2026
    For those of us moving through life with ADHD or wandering minds, “SMART Goals” can act as too rigid a process. One that may impede the value of the end results.These so-called “SMART Goals” can actually feel dehumanizing, as if something measurable and specific were given more weight than something that might allow your wonder and creativity to flow even more freely.Premature goals can be weaponized by workplaces, while much of what matters in creativity has little to do with relevance, specificity, and time.Creative work, meaningful work, is often inherently blurry. There is an act of discovery when we allow our minds the freedom to ask questions, to play, and to pause and reflect.Transcript:How big? How small?Word of warning, today's episode is one of my crankier ones.You may have heard of the so-called "SMART Goals". Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Some employers even demand them in their relationships with you.But I find SMART goals to be anything but smart.When it comes to goals, we often hear something along the lines of:“What do you see yourself doing in 5 years?"“Dream big! Now dream bigger! You are only limited by your imagination!"Ugh.Does anyone else find this to be similar to "Think of a number. Now think of a bigger number"? I guess we're supposed to keep doing this until we're all wearing Infinity Gauntlets or something.Then we are supposed to write them down, perhaps using the obnoxiously titled "SMART" mnemonic to make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.Perhaps a boon for the ever de-humanizing forces of parasitic corporations, I have some concerns about these so-called "smart" goals:Premature specificity can lead to a rigidity that can shatter the goal, the individual, as well as injure nearby innocent bystanders. (See also every story villain.)Not everything that can be measured matters. In fact, I'd argue that most that matters cannot be measured.How do I know what's achievable until I'm there?How do I know what's relevant until I explore?And for those of us with wandering minds, Lord help us with the clearly implied use of clock time rather than that of self time. (See also Clock time vs Self time)What goes horribly missed is the over-privileging of the written word, and the under-privileging of the wordless experience born in the seemingly menial but utterly vital, tiny world of a single visit.Privilege the WordlessExperience is largely a wordless place.Much of the Now cannot be translated into words. As much as I love playing with words, they are hardly more than emissaries, often beaten and beleaguered when sent on meaningless missions.We discover what we are creating in the act of creating it. What we once thought was clear and concrete, becomes obviously not as we are there, in the Now.We learn what we can learn in the act of learning it.Any creative vision will be, by definition, blurry in one sense or another. We don't know the time it would take. We don't know the steps there. We don't even know what it will look in the end.Envisioning that blurriness, sensing a direction, we wordlessly feel the tensions and decide from there how to shape and shift the moment's sails.Privilege the TinyWhen we focus on the tiny, we often unlock the large.Catching a tiny turn of phrase in a client's concerns, I ask,"Wait, what do you mean by that?"From here, new worlds may open.What they once stated as a goal perhaps of therapy even is now revealed as only an attempt to further suppress an important part of themselves. "Make me not angry" - but what if there is reason for the anger, a reason you hadn't considered? "Make me not worried" - what if the worry is doing something for you? What do we do with that? Make me do my work - What if doing your work is a bad idea.I'd rather not collude in their collapse.Working on the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata 14, I stumble here and there, a bit at the beginning, a bit at the end, and a bunch in the middle.Diving into a single measure, slowing it down, feeling for the basic nature of the single notes involved, I gently rework a small knot in the fabric.Why here? Why now? I don't know.But something interesting happens in that discovery in the tiny, a turn of phrase, I realize my goal was wrong as the whole piece begin to flow different from this tiny place of practice.Of course...Of course there is utility to thinking of large matters.Of course we can revisit where we thought we were going to make adjustments.Of course it is useful to think of small steps on the way there.But premature goals can be weaponized - forced, forming a procrustean bed of words, twisted into submission. Have you done the thing by now? Why haven't you done the thing? Update the ticket. Say where you were, say where you'll be, convince me.Returns and revisions take time, a time easily burdened upon our future selves.I wonder if the world beyond goals is one far more vast and rich than they'd have us ...
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    14 m
  • 48. On Willpower and ADHD

    48. On Willpower and ADHD
    Mar 26 2026
    This episode discusses the concept of willpower, particularly in relation to the struggles of individuals with ADHD.We question the traditional notion of willpower as merely doing, or not doing, something despite our internal emotional opposition.We explore how creating supportive environments and pausing enables wandering minds to make better choices and engage in meaningful activities.We discuss:What defines willpowerWillpower versus the wave of emotionsThe power of holding tensionSupporting our needs with pausesWe conclude with a piano improvisation piece called 'On a Dare'.For more, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.comTranscriptWillpower. What a troublesome word. Those with ADHD in particular supposedly don't have enough. Fight more, do more, do the thing you don't want to do. But what is this willpower thing anyway?What Defines Willpower?Have you ever had a cut and then knew, while it was healing, that it was important not to pick at it. But there was some part of you that just felt like, "Hmm, I just gotta scratch it,"And when you hold back, and you just keep holding back, is that willpower?Maybe we can define willpower as the ability to deliberately do, or not do something, despite an unaccommodating, if not deeply opposed, emotional world that surrounds it.But is that really the focus? To do things we don't want or not do things we do want?Willpower Versus the Wave of EmotionsThe emotional world, is a swirling world.At times chaotic, at times peaceful, sometimes vengeful. Throwing one wave after another at us.Is it a lack of willpower to fail to stand against some typhoon of emotion? I think there's something here, some tension.When going with the flow, we follow some line of least resistance, a summed vector of internal fields of boat floating wherever the sea of emotion takes us in this moment.But we know that it's important to occasionally hold back.The Power of Holding TensionWhen we're having a bad day and someone asks us for one more thing, we hold a certain tension to not respond.When meditating and trying to hold onto awareness itself. We hold a tension.When we try to understand, build, create, maybe hold two ideas in mind simultaneously. Once again, there's this tension that we're holding onto.But holding that tension seems about as possible as chronically holding a 50 pound weight in the air. At some point we lose it. Consciousness being the way it is.We don't even recognize that we've lost it. I dunno about you, but, even though I've meditated for many years, there's still plenty of times that I wonder, wait, where did I go?Beyond the Path of Least ResistancePushing ourselves through a difficult task can be similar. Somehow we lose track, exhausted. There's something that happens when we can hold tension.We discover, if not create, options. We have this option to place ourselves on alternate paths. We realize that there's more than just the path of least resistance.And as such, we can create more accommodating situations, make better choices. We can even create supports for ourselves.When practicing on the piano and only going with the flow, I engage in some empty form of play. Playing the same piece I know all too well, doing the same licks over and over.But in that pause I see other paths. This I know, this I don't. Here's a book that I can look at. Here's an idea and an area to study. How would I even do that? Options we did not have before begin to form.And from here, we can seek the windows of challenge within the difficult. We can simplify things, shrink them down, slow them down. Whether in piano or in therapy, or in hobby or work, whether habit or craft.To resolve, if not dissolve, the difficult into the newly easy. Mind can discover paths of tension to now release.Support Through PausingIn other words, what we seek is not necessarily more willpower, some finite resource if there ever was one. Instead, we look to practice using our limited reserves to pause.To pause for leaving that itch unscratched, to decide what we can to support ourselves — we place ourselves in situations showing up to a visit.We create our environments to support us, reducing our distractions so that we can find ways we can support ourselves, so we don't need to hold ourselves back so much. And that way we can engage with our nature of curiosity, if not grace.The following piece is called, “On a Dare.” It's an improvisation. It'll never be played again. I hope you enjoy it.Mentioned in this episode:Rhythms of Focus - CTA - Subscribe, Rate, and Review
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    9 m
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