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Here’s a story a lot of women know. You’ve been getting by — maybe not perfectly, but you’ve been getting by. And then something shifts. Suddenly the coping strategies that used to work don’t. The brain fog is different. The irritability is new. And nobody around you — including your doctor — seems to have a particularly good answer for why. For women with ADHD, the answer is often estrogen. And for too long, that connection has been wildly undertreated.

Linda Roggli has been living this story and researching it and coaching women through it for twenty years. She’s the founder of the ADDiva Network for ADHD Women 40 and Better, and she joins Pete and Nikki to trace the whole arc: what estrogen actually does for the dopamine-depleted ADHD brain, what happens when it starts its perimenopause roller coaster, why the Women’s Health Initiative study scared a generation of women away from hormone therapy that could have helped them, and what the science now says about timing, delivery methods, and who it’s actually for. It is a lot of information, delivered with the kind of warmth and hard-won clarity that only comes from someone who has personally been told by a doctor, “You’re not in menopause” — and then spent decades making sure other women don’t get that same non-answer.

Links & Notes

• Linda Roggli — professional certified coach, award-winning author, founder of the ADDiva Network for ADHD Women 40 and Better
• Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey — the book Linda’s therapist recommended at her diagnosis; she read it in the bookstore on the way home
• Women’s Health Initiative — the federal study whose 1990s findings caused a generation of women to stop hormone therapy; Linda explains why the study was fatally flawed
• Dr. Patricia Quinn — ADHD specialist whose research on estrogen-only therapy for ADHD women
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (01:52) - Patreon.com/TheADHDPodcast
• (02:55) - ADHD Aging, Hormones, and More
• (05:18) - Linda Roggli

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE!
Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!

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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)
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (06:40) - What does a research neuropsychologist actually do?
• (09:18) - How does EF Age?
• (15:45) - Charting the Decades
• (23:06) - The Shame Cycle... Missing in the Lab
• (24:23) - Alostatic Burden
• (37:50) - So... where's the hope?

Grab the Declutter Guide ... FREE!
Visit https://takecontroladhd.com/adhd-declutter and get a head start on your toughest spaces today!

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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

• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (03:52) - ADHD and Aging