Rhythms of Focus

Kourosh Dini
  • 4.9 (15)
  • Self-Improvement

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.

  1. 3h ago

    69. Further Adventures of AI and the Wandering Mind

    As someone who loves tools and figuring out the best ways to use them, I've been intrigued with the potentials of AI, particularly using it as someone with a wandering mind. This week I delve into my recent experiments existential dilemmas, and adventures with the so-called artificial intelligence I am feeding my own intelligence into. So is it helpful, more efficient, how can I use it without giving away my agency? Let's find out. #Mindfulness #Neurodivergence #ADHDpodcast #ADHD #WanderingMinds #Anchoring #AI Transcript Every Friday morning, I sit down to write on my own without the help of any AI this draft of my podcast and newsletter. So this morning, I tiptoed to the edge and asked, uh, "Hey, AI, I like to write on Fridays. I usually do so from this blank slate, but I wanna give it a try here and see what, uh, you've been about. Maybe you can help me out. Maybe take a look at what I've been recently writing about. Give me... Show me what that's been and, and, uh, and then suggest something." And I used the latest and greatest from Claude, this Fable 5, and it gave me this perfectly cogent response, totally looked at what I did, and then I ignored it completely. So here I am writing about AI instead. Today's a bit of a wanderer, but I think I land somewhere useful, so tag along if you will. The Whirlwind Does AI help the wandering mind? My goodness, have I drunk the Kool-Aid with this thing. It's been a whirlwind, and my goodness, can there be controversy behind it? I heard this story about some school somewhere using AI to announce its graduates walking across the stage. It then mispronounced a bunch of names, forgot to mention others, and by the time it was all done, they couldn't go back and announce those that it had missed. And then I get these emails, much like you get emails, and can't you just smell the AI on them? What's that about? Why would I want to respond to a robot? I hear stories of the massive warehouses that are being built, draining water from an entire state perhaps. But hey, maybe it's providing jobs? Or is it taking jobs? Or is it changing jobs? Having frank discussions with my longtime graphic designer and friend, Matt, who, was a guest in episode 64. Play around with Claude Design and see what happens. Construction or Destruction? I wonder about our civilization as it progresses here. Going through the industrial age, we polluted the heck out of things, didn't we? Beautiful Chicago River and its tributaries were just nasty. We could barely go near them. We'd choke in the smog, walk through horse crap. It was awful. But once we made it through that developmental stage, if you will, we've now come to some place where things are cleaner and kinda nice sometimes. Progressively think about the world we live in. Is it a truism that we go through messy stages to get to cleaner ones? How do we know if we're going through construction or maybe destruction? It's not always clear. Sometimes we think of the fight between money and the environment, those greedy people who have more money than various countries. The question isn't how we resolve this fight between money and environment. It's, it's how do we align them? How do we make a clean environment profitable? How do we extend our vision beyond the myopic moment, beyond the quarterly report? But, ah, maybe that's not where I am. I'm one who likes to tinker. I like tools. The Tinker Man Tinkers Tagline for my website when I first built it in 2000 or so used to be Mind, Music, and Technology. So the tinkerman tinkers. After wrapping up the last bits of The Waves of Focus, I had this idea to put together a beginner's series of the course for YouTube, um, and, uh, why not test the waters with AI? Let's see what it can do. It's already released by the time, or at least partially released by the time this podcast episode's going out, so do check that out. I don't even remember the first question I had asked of AI. It was maybe something like, "Hey, I'm building a YouTube series. Help me out, would you?" A couple months later, I'm full steam ahead with not only that, but I've created several compendia of ideas from my DevonThink database. I've organized multiple next steps for marketing, extracted the nearly 360,000 words. Yes, I'm not so subtly bragging. From my course keynote to create a reserve of information from which to build the YouTube series and my next book and all that good stuff. How do I reconcile these? Please Think for Me Clearly there's a benefit, but clearly there are also problems. I often like to say the more powerful the tool, the more caution it requires. And I wonder about AI and its impact on the mind. The trouble comes from the sense of, "Please think for me." When we ask an AI to write our emails for us without our editing or rewriting it to fit our voice, when we ask it to come up with a gift idea for someone rather than reflecting on what we know of that person ourselves, when we ask it to tell us what to do without reflecting on what's meaningful to us in the first place, we only grow more lost at sea. Thought is this cresting of emotion into mind, and as such, it's not static it takes time to form, something we often find in scarcity. So we often come to this erroneous, unspoken assumption that thinking is hard. It's only hard in the sense of any hard work, that it's emotional work. We can pause where we offer the seed, the soil, and the sun, and somehow our brains seem to do the rest. But of course, there may be other waves of motion at work, maybe in the difficulty to finish things. We fear the feelings of failure and how this rests on our inability to trust ourselves. The effort, if you will, is in allowing and sustaining a vision where we pause and ask, "What's on my mind about this?" Allowing that question to linger and stir those unconscious waters, that's how we build the creative moment. Some part of us looks to reconnect, to grow. Whatever the distance, whatever the injuries it may represent, there's some posing of a threshold beyond which it's difficult for us to engage this moment. That vision that we have necessarily comes from within us. Our AI's vision comes from within it. The human tendency is to avoid difficult emotion, including those that would require forming a thought, these difficult things that are in our lives, marred by anger, irritation, shame, regret, pain of any and every sort. The bridge between is to recognize that the pain and the lost trust may be one and the same, easier said than done. Where am I wandering off now? Let me return to this, uh, episode I'd recently done, Anchoring and the Option to Work, Episode 57. Symbiotic, Not Parasitic Symbiotic, Not Parasitic We allow thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions to come to mind. We pause to allow ourselves these thoughts. When they come to that place of being settled where no new thoughts are coming to mind and there are only ripples and variation, then all the information about whatever can come to mind has come to mind. That's the strongest ground on which we can stand. And from that firmly anchored place, we can then decide on our next action, this next direction, with whatever vision we have, as clear as we can make it. When we do that and then ask AI, "Hey, what do you think?" rather than it giving me garbage, it now gives me an approximation of where I am. I work with it and what I understand of it, and it can work with me and what it understands of me to develop a vision that I see as ringing true. We work together. It feels meaningful to me. But then I guess we're also talking about the art of relating to anything and anyone, aren't we? It's nice when we can engage symbiotically rather than parasitically. When we have a friend who hears and listens as we do the same. When we have a job that supports us, and we feel we can support it. When we sit with the dishes and feel engaged because we directly feel how that moment connects and clears paths for those things that we feel meaningful in our lives. Those are good moments. So does AI help the wandering mind? I think it's the same question about any of our tools, really. Are we asking it to be us, to create our vision? Or is it there to help us realize the vision that can only come from within ourselves? Depends on whether we've anchored, recognized where we are, where we'd like to be. From there, from that deep place of being, play, care, meaning, we can consider how to arrange for those places of symbiosis, for those gardens, if you will. Thought and AI, money and environment, self and world. Music — TornToday's piece is an improvisation called Torn. It twiddles a bit between two or three main notes with some chords floating around. Improvisations are essentially the realization of some vision in the process of creating them. Well, I guess that's really any form of creativity, isn't it? Enjoy the piece. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    69. Further Adventures of AI and the Wandering Mind

  2. Aug 13

    68. What If You're Not Time-Blind? — Three Rhythms Beneath the Clock

    The anxiety of a task taking too long, a project starting too late, or the loud silence of an undone to-do list can be incredibly overwhelming. This is particularly true for those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like. But what if the clock on the wall isn't the only conductor we should be setting our rhythms to? This week, we explore listening to the three foundational rhythms living within ourselves, and reflect on how the anchoring technique can prove useful across them all. Transcript The clock. The tick tocks of the clock. Be there at eight. Be done by three. How long will this go? Why can't I know how long this will take? Do I have time blindness? What if this so-called time blindness is less about being unaware and more that our own experience of time takes prominence? So much of our modern society runs on these external measures of time. Of course, it does. We have to share our existence. We have to meet in places, present our deliverables. But how much gets lost when we ignore our own experience of time? The time within ourselvesWhile the clock does its thing, measuring our days by the seconds and the hours, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice losing sight of the time within ourselves. The afternoon, the evening, the time before lunch, the walk from here to there, the time to remember a song, the time of being. Considering our own time isn't a selfish act, it's an act of self-reflection, and when we do it, we start to guide ourselves and gauge better, and sometimes even sync with the world's clocks better if we decide to. I find three foundational rhythms that I want to call attention to. One is the breath, second is the session, and the third is the day. Each of these are foundational because they rest in our experience. The breathSo first, the breath. It's useful as a measure for a pause. When we can pause, which may be the most difficult of all the productivity exercises there are, we reach a higher state of agency. Agency is this skill of deciding and engaging non-reactively It's where we can make our decisions with our greatest sense of meaning. When we can pause, we're able to connect with those things that resonate with us more deeply. That connects with what we care for, how we play, which in turn help us guide our moments, our days into mastery and meaningful work. The sessionA second foundational fundamental rhythm of time is the session. This is the time in which our attention aligns with some intention, even if our intention is just to think about something for a moment. Every time we align our attention with an intention, we create a wave of focus. It might be disrupted, it might be rough, it might be smooth, but each one of these waves has a beginning, middle, and end. The most experiential way to practice this is to recognize the power of a visit. You know, listen to episode four for a deeper dive on it. But for here and now, the idea is that we approach, we reach this edge of action. We pause at some work in front of us to feel whatever is at risk, whatever we are feeling we might lose, or whatever frustration is there. We expose ourselves to the emotions of the work and hear what they have to say. And then as needed, we can mount the bravery and care that it takes to engage. At any time beyond, we can let go, whether it's done or not. A second, a minute, an hour, these have no feeling. But an experienced time, the moment of a breath and its pause, the flow of a thought and action in their own times, those we can pay attention to. We can feel the beginnings, the middles, and the ends. The beginning is where we approach. It's where we can get thrown off, how emotion might have us avoid something, how we might inadvertently defend against something. The middle, while we're in it, we might feel confused, overwhelmed, bored, angry, anxious. We could feel excited, excited about something else entirely, and the daydreams that pull us out. And then there's the ending, the transition out. Whether we're done or not, that dreaded hyperfocus or exhaustion or just dropping it and discovering later, "Oh, I didn't finish that." Or maybe the rare, "Oh, I'm done." Across all three, anchoring can always help. Check out episode fifty-seven for a deeper dive there. But for now, know that you can always grab a pen and paper and write down the thoughts that are on your mind and decide which one you wanna be with. Anchoring itself becomes this moment in time. The dayAnd then there's the third, which is the day. Many of us keep some form of daily to-do list. We think about our habits. We wake up, hopefully every day, until one day we don't. Which, on reflection, points to a fourth cycle, the life itself, momentary or a hundred years, or either way, a single unit. But I guess that's tangent to these three. Back to the day. If we can visit something and not finish it, that idea that we can step away before it's done and still want to come back, well then, what do we do? We can invite our future self into the next day. Hey, future you, somewhere between waking and sleeping, can you make a visit to this? That person now has the whole cycle of the day to honor that self who sent the invitation, to then mount the courage to pay the visit, to expose themselves to the emotions of the work, and to make their own decision. Maybe even to extend yet another invitation to that next future you down the line. Using the experienced time of the day, we practice building a trust with ourselves, a sense that something will keep doing what it's been doing so we can rely on it. In this case, ourselves. Meanwhile, we distance ourselves from alarms artificially bolted onto the mechanical clock, designed to interrupt us wherever we are. Alarms do their job. They disrupt whatever wave we're in. But that's irritating, and I like to avoid it when I can. So that rhythm that we return to something perhaps every day can become a current, a stream, this river of trust that's formed of three parts: the honor for the self who gave us the invitation by showing up to it; the respect for the present self by deciding from that deep breath, from that place of, "I've been here"; and the care for our future selves by asking them to return tomorrow for another invitation if we want to. These are three fundamental cycles: the breath, the session, the day. We all share them, ADHD or not, neurodivergent or neurotypical. It's just that for some of us, they run choppy and hard to navigate, and sometimes our zoomed-in view makes the waves loom so large we lose sight of everything else. But that's another story. The takeawayMeanwhile, as a takeaway, may be that somehow you're feeling time blind. May be that your time hasn't yet found some harmony with the hands of a clock. But what if there's some way to begin practicing that harmony? What if you picked up one thing and invited your future self to visit it sometime tomorrow, sometime between waking and sleeping? It's not something you'd have to finish. You don't even have to do anything once you're there. That single deep breath counts. May not be easy, but there is a simplicity to it. And if you can do that, and then do it again, well, now you've got two beats. And in two beats, you have a rhythm. Music — Feet on Pebbles in WaterMusic's an art form whose very medium is time. And you may notice that it too doesn't necessarily connect with a clock. While there is a metronome, there's other ways of ar-arranging notes to, to music. Chopin's tempo rubato, this expanding and shrinking of, of the, time and the speed of the way, we play the notes, translates literally as "stolen time." When I play a series of quarter notes, then a series of half notes, I can tell something's shifted. It doesn't just feel longer, it feels larger, grander. And if I shift to whole notes, it can feel larger still. Yet the quarter notes and the half notes that came before simply are. There's a relativity of time. It's not just one against the other. It seems to give time its very definition, the experience of time itself. The piece I play in this week's episode is called Feet on Pebbles in Water, and I hope you enjoy it. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    68. What If You're Not Time-Blind? — Three Rhythms Beneath the Clock

  3. Aug 6

    67. ADHD, Mindfulness, and Anchoring

    As someone with ADHD or a wandering mind, you may have been told to keep a scratchpad on you at all times. It's a great way of capturing our thoughts in the moment so they don't flutter away as our minds are want to do. But, a scratchpad on its own doesn't always spur us into action. And in some cases, it can turn into the thing we avoid at all costs, serving as a reminder of many things that have been left undone. So how to we move past the scratchpad phase and turn into a powerful tool that is helpful? This week we walk through the different layers of the anchor technique. It's a tool that has worked very well for my students and for myself when feeling scattered. It's one that can be used in conjunction with other tools and often makes them more helpful. We close with a new take on a composition I've played here before, Caregiver, in C minor. Transcript What do we actually do with a scratchpad? There are various ADHD talking heads out there who tell us, "Keep paper on the desk, in the car, by the bed, on your person. Capture whatever's loose. Get it out of your head." Good advice. But you've likely noticed writing things down doesn't make them done. Sometimes it just builds the pile higher. The list itself can become something we dread. So what's the difference between a scratchpad that helps us and one that haunts us? Again and again, students have told me how they find the anchor technique to be a powerful way of engaging work and life in general, whether they're scattered, exhausted, even when they are focused and they're just trying to figure out a way to be even more so. Whatever system they build or use, whatever productivity method or app they try, they bring this anchoring technique with them. And I've explained it in some detail in episode sixty-two if you wanna have a listen there. But what about it works? Isn't it just using a scratchpad? Well, this is similar to asking, "Isn't meditation just about focusing on one thing?" Well, eh, kinda, maybe, some ways, yes. But it also misses the entire point. Mindfulness, reconsideredWe engage a type of mindfulness. The trouble, I think, is in that word, mindfulness. I, I don't know about you, but the word tends to make me feel a bit of the ick. I think it's been kind of mauled by the marketing machinery of, of everything. It's so amorphous, so soft and squishy. Aren't we mindful all the time? And even if I were to suddenly be mindful somehow, whatever that means, so what? I've still got things to do, matters to address, stuff to stuff. I like this comment that a particular Redditor pointed out and said, "Mindfulness is an unlucky translation of the Pāli word 'sati.' It's remembering to observe how mind's attention moves." When we do engage in this mindful approach, which I'll point out in a moment, we tend to help ourselves move from scatter to smoother waves of thought where we can more deliberately, deeply, calmly engage the moment. Okay, so well, that's all well and good. What am I talking about anyway? What is anchoring and how does it relate? So I'm gonna walk you through eight levels of how this practice of pen and paper deepens and, and how it becomes more mindful and hopefully it'll, it'll give you a sense of , what I mean by this. From to-do list to a menu of the moment Level one. We all know how to use a scratch pad, right? You write stuff and sometimes that's totally what we need to do. There's nothing more that we need to do. We just need to write what we need to do and do the things. Typically we write a to-do list of sorts. We throw things down, remember, "Oh, I gotta do this, that, the other thing," all the things that are weighing us down and ah, doesn't that feel good to get out? Trouble is none of it's done and that can be exhausting depending on what we've written. Sometimes we can even overwhelm ourselves looking at whatever we've just created, this awful golem ready to destroy its creator. One thing that's missing is any respect for working or short-term memory, those parts that engage the now. These are the things that would hopefully help us stay with this present moment instead of having to juggle the zillions of things that are bubbling outside. So level two. What if we just listed what was on our mind to do in this moment? What our mind is juggling just about the now. Those things that are not now, well, we could put those somewhere else. Those are quite likely important in their own ways. Fine. But just doing that, chances are you'll have reduced that list considerably. Just what's going on in our mind right now? What is on my mind? We might even recognize that having these items of the now sitting on paper can now support us. We have more mental energy available to clearly decide where we want to rest our attention next. We're not being dragged down by whatever we cannot do in this moment. In this way, anchoring answers two questions. First is, what's on my mind? Maybe something that's bubbling just below consciousness or right there. What's on my mind to do? And then secondly, where would I like my mind to be? And that's where we circle something. Now, we're only at level two here in terms of the levels of mindfulness, if you will. So let's keep going here. So far, we've only written down the things that are likely "shoulds", but what's also in our mind are "wants." What if we expanded? What if we allowed onto this list our current wants? I wanna play a game. I wanna step outside. I wanna watch a show. Even allowing ourselves to recognize that we have wants, that they might have a place to sit side by side with our needs, that can be a revelation. Not the least of which, and one that can take considerable practice for some, is realizing how this sheet of paper can now shift from "shoulds" and "have tos" into a list of options, a sort of menu for the moment. At the fourth level, even further, when we start to conceptualize more deeply how this is just about the now, we can start feeling like this paper is not here for us to serve it, it's there to serve us. It supports us. The way we do that is we allow ourselves to throw it away. We can throw this away at any moment, whenever it no longer represents the now. Now, of course, if there's something we wanna keep, we can put that somewhere else. But here we've got this thing that is dynamically shifting to meet us in this moment. Okay, but what about when we finish writing this beautiful list and perfect it in whatever ways, although I'm not saying that one ought to perfect it in whatever ways, but let's say you're doing it anyway, and then wander off immediately. Well, we've been impulsive, haven't we? So we can define impulse as this sort of flow of emotion into action that at least in part has overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. Let me say that one more time. We can define impulse as a flow of emotion into action that at least in part overwhelmed or bypassed consciousness. In other words, something unconsciously happened. We suddenly realized we were in our emails or social media, three tabs open researching the best possible air fryers when all we wanted was a snack. Well then, what if we acknowledge those, too? That's level five. In those moments, we catch ourselves, which we may not always be able to do, but when we can, we can return to that list, that anchor path that we've been building here, and write down where we wandered. In that way, we're doing a few things. We're, we're making the unconscious conscious. But not only that, we're giving it a space, a place that it can rest, where our working and short-term memory can again be supported, where we can gently decide where would we like our mind to be. We're not forcing ourselves out of where we went. We're not forcing ourselves into something else. It is now an option amongst the rest. Agency is strengthened. WIN, WIND, WIND-E, BE WINDWith these ideas so far, we've got want, impulse, need. A lovely mnemonic already. WIN. Win of the now, right? This prompt can already be helpful to help us be mindful in engaging, in helping support that sense of agency at the moment. But there's deeper we can go yet. What if we wanna do nothing? Level six. Don't we have that right? Of course. We can drift. D for drift. Adding to our mnemonic, we have WIND. Level seven, deeper yet. We can recognize how our options are all formed from emotion that which is cresting into consciousness. These emotions are coming from somewhere, maybe somewhere of meaning, known, unknown, conscious, unconscious, well beyond. We could, if we wanted, don't have to, write a word or two about where our mind is. Write one part frustrated, three parts worried, and a dash of curiosity somewhere in the corner. Maybe we start to journal or not at all, but doing so adds E for emotion to a misspelled WIND-E mnemonic. Finally, we've got level eight. We can think about how these emotions even rest in the body, a tension in the gut, a crinkle of the eyebrows, a tightening of the breath. Our bodies are trying to tell us something, whether clear or not. So B for body creates the mnemonic B WIND. I find there to be something deliciously paradoxical between the idea of anchoring and being wind, but it works. Anchoring is pausing, not tethering. Often when I mention anchoring, people at first think I'm talking about tying ourselves to something, and that is not at all the case. Anchoring is about pausing. It's creating that breather, that space between the waves of focus to look at the possibilities....

    67. ADHD, Mindfulness, and Anchoring

  4. Jul 30

    66. ADHD and the Power of Care in Story with Guest Neal Foard

    This week I am joined by storyteller Neal Foard to discuss the act and emotion of care. Those of us with ADHD and wandering minds can often get overwhelmed by the negativity taking over our social feeds, looking at the news, or even just talking to those around us. Neal reminds us that while compassion fatigue is real, it's also not all doom and gloom. Our algorithms are created for engagement, doom sells and our attention is our currency. It's important to take a step back and look at the good things going on around us - even at a micro level. From the person letting you merge during heavy traffic, to someone turning in a lost wallet. Good things are happening all around us, and when we put more care into the world, more care comes back. Learn more about Neal and his work on his website StoryFire.net Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    66. ADHD and the Power of Care in Story with Guest Neal Foard

  5. Jul 23

    65. ADHD and the Seductive Pull of Passion

    When the universe puts something fun or interesting in front of us, it can become a welcome distraction from what we are "supposed" to be doing. This can be especially true for those of us with ADHD and wandering minds. We can easily be swept away, like a boat at sea, riding the current of thoughts and emotions taking us further and further away from our plotted destination. Instead of going against the current, I propose a structured pause to reflect on where you are being pulled, as well as what is pushing you away. Take a deep breath and notice your thoughts and the feelings flowing through your body. Then name and write down the activity pulling your attention towards it. You can then turn tasks into options, allowing deliberate consideration for how you would like to precede and where to focus your attention. We end with a piece entitled “Waves on Night’s Shore.” Clunking down the stairs, dragging myself to the laptop, an idea or two rattling in my head. I need to get back to that person. It's been a couple days since they emailed me. Starting to get rude not to answer. Ah, but I still have to research something. Pet the dog, pull out the chair. Wait, I need my tea. Grab the decanter, go through the motions of preparing a gong fu session of tea, this wonderful little art of creating tea, a shortly brewed small cupful at a time. Finally, I crack open the laptop. Barely conscious whispers of that email evaporates as if I said, "I can wait. I have all day." 'Cause as I open that lid, that project I'd been working on, open overnight, greets me with its virtual open arms. "Hey, you, here's that next step ready to go. Just nudge me forward." The Project That Greets YouSo here I am, dragged myself to the laptop. I had an idea of what to do, and it's gone as soon as the laptop's opened and there was something sitting there waiting for me. What would it hurt if I just tapped it forward? I do have all day, don't I? And we all know where that thinking leads. I've been working on a major project both using and exploring the potential of AI and more specifically, Claude Cowork, building what are called "skills" along the way. Questions have been bubbling. Am I giving up my sense of agency? Am I harming the environment? W-I can do what now? This is the neatest thing. Back and forth ideas go as I come to grips with the ideas of its impact on society as well as the minutiae of the moment's project. All wonderful problems to wrestle with and excite me along the way and distract me from that email. I Can Feel the RiverI'm being pulled. Paraphrasing Dungeon Crawler Carl, "I can feel the river." A wandering mind can easily be caught in eddies of emotion. Interest, passion, that regular visit to something that engages us, tantalizes, promises, develops a sense of meaning, flares from play into challenge along some paths of mastery. Forget the dishes, forget that email. There's the thrill. We're doing something. Maybe we hadn't been doing something before. Maybe we're just pulling out of some period of exhaustion, some not only still but stagnant waters, and here before us is that feel, that pull. For some, it's a game. For others, it's a book, a garden, an exercise, an event, a world developing within and without. May even be the dishes or cleaning beyond. Whatever it is, we inherently sense that distortion that comes from that powerful emotion. Any emotion, particularly the powerful ones, passion or otherwise, distort that lens of the now. For those with ADHD, we're already myopic, monotropic, magnified. This moment is already heightened, in the not now, meaning beyond current conscious awareness, flows along the periphery, shrouded in a fog we hardly even know to be there. Maybe you have an overwhelming list of things to do. Maybe you have a meeting waiting to stare you down in a calendar. But those negative associations, themselves a rocky, thorny, ugly worry reflexively deflecting our gaze away, seemingly steer us even further into the rapids of that promised play. Boats, Not CarsI've often said we're not cars with poor brakes. We're boats floating on the seas of emotions, and there are no brakes. Why the Pause Is So HardThe pause is vital, but my goodness is it the most difficult of all the productivity ideas, the executive function skills, whatever terminology you want to give it. Pausing is difficult in part because we haven't a clue as to what to do with it. Do I look at the ceiling? Do I white-knuckle avoiding the thing I really wanna do? Do I force myself to do the thing I don't? Framing the PauseBut how about if we frame a pause with the following? One, first know the pull, the push, the joy, the anger, the worry, the fear, the care, the overwhelm, the whirling winds and waters ready to drag us about. Again, the hardest of all steps. Second, take at least a single deep breath to be there, though to whatever caring degree makes sense. Give those feelings their space to be recognized as thoughts, felt as feelings, sensed in the body. And three, name the thing of interest. What's pulling us? Maybe even write it down, optimally with pen and paper. In this situation, part of what's thrown matters off is that ease of access. The laptop said, "Hey, I'm right here," as I opened it. The hope, though, is that we can then hold ourselves in that space so that we can better craft our environments. We can then raise the thresholds against those things that we'd prefer to avoid simply drifting into and lower the thresholds towards those things we'd like to engage more deliberately. We hope to guide ourselves. Begin, or Wind DownSo here in this pause, where we've written down this idea, we can consider also writing the words begin and wind down next to whatever idea. So if I've been working on a project, I might write down wind down project with the idea that I would clear it out. Doing this, we've now created the options of one or the other, acknowledging that we can engage or deliberately consider how we can set it aside. With that deep breath, we can then more fully decide perhaps to wind it down, and let's say we did. The Project MapNow with a piece of paper again, I could write a title, play the game, garden, explore the AI. I can write down what's on my mind to do about this. I can write, if I were to put this away somewhere out of the way of other things that I find meaningful, maybe even out of sight, how would I get there? How could I get there from this document I'm writing right now? Could it be a link? Would it be directions? Could I start putting things in places, hiding them so that they're out of the way of other things? So that this thing won't jump out at me once I open the laptop, and then I can still get there from, from this piece of paper, from this document. Once I've done that, maybe I can think, is there anything else about this on my mind? Can I even let it consciously drift from my mind? If I can do that I'm acknowledging the momentum that's there, the strength, the power, the whatever it was that was, so fueling me in that moment, and with that, addressing that momentum. Now, those questions that I just mentioned, those steps that I walked you through, create what I call a project map. That document, that object can now act as a portal. Makes it easy to get to everything, but keeps everything else out of the way. You no longer have to rely on the thing to be the reminder of itself, a surefire way to distract or shame yourself as it continually sits there undone. Now you have this central place, and you can cross off wind down that you'd written earlier. One More BreathPause. See what comes to mind. Maybe you still wanna dive in even after you've cleared it all out. But I also wonder if after doing something like this, you might have more mental room for other ideas to come to mind, other wants, other needs. Maybe write those down. You have every right to dive back in. Those currents are still there ready to ride. But if you decide to do so, you'll be much more conscious of that decision. "Waves on Night's Shore"Well, July just seems to be a month of improvisations. Years ago, I performed live on various stages. I remember one such performance about 20 years ago or so now at an electronics festival in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. I was talking with other performers. One of them asked me about the bed I used. A bed in the musical sense is this sort of background rhythm, a beat, something that would go where, you know, you could, create things above it. Generally something in a higher register, a melody, typically, it was something pre-programmed. But I said I didn't have one. Everything I did and continue to do is generated live. I take my inspiration from jam bands like Phish, who I admire greatly. There's an importance to underlying structure, but it needs to be able to match the energy, sound, rhythms, and the like of the melodies above, at least as I feel it. Maybe that can happen. Maybe those pre-recordings need to happen, especially if we're recording in a studio. But something fun does seem to happen when, the background and the foreground reacts with each other. Same thing that happens when musicians play together live. In any case, I hope you can hear that in this following piece called Waves on Night's Shore, and I hope you enjoy it. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    65. ADHD and the Seductive Pull of Passion

  6. Jul 16

    64. Creativity and the Wandering Mind with Graphic Designer Extraordinaire, Matt Strieby

    This week I welcome creative mind and graphic designer extraordinaire, Matt Strieby of New Leaf Design. I was first lucky enough to work with Matt in 2005, when he captured the vision for the art gracing the CD for my album, Ontogeny. We've been collaborating ever since. We discuss the creative process for those of us with wandering minds and neurodivergent/ADHD traits, the importance of play balanced with structure. We also talk about embracing and learning from our earlier "cringe" moments, and the importance of sometimes literally walking away from a project to give space for our creativity to breathe. We talk about Matt's personal process: reflection/visualization (often sitting quietly or walking), playing in the “sandbox” phase of sketching and experimentation, a refining phase that narrows options while preserving play, and a final production phase with technical, structured execution. Matt’s design work is at newleafdesign.com. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    64. Creativity and the Wandering Mind with Graphic Designer Extraordinaire, Matt Strieby

  7. Jul 9

    63. Creativity and Frustration

    Frustration is an emotion that can be elusive in its origins while being capable of putting a halt to almost anything we're trying to accomplish. We feel frustration doing something like putting together IKEA furniture. Sometimes it really is about the furniture. Other times we may have something entirely different lingering in the back of our mind making it difficult to use the hex key, thus derailing our ability to put the Früken shelves together. We may buy a new tool or software that is supposed to make life easier, only to find it too complicated to use and too much of a burden or embarrassment to return. We may even feel a sense of failure tied to it. Frustration is the feeling that arises when reality fails to meet a preconception, whether that vision is clear or blurry. This week, we explore how frustration can be a great teacher if we pause to see what we can learn from it. Transcript Ah, it's going all wrong. Order the pieces of whatever's lying about. A screw is sitting there. Where did that come from? Frustration at work is quite the companion. Digital, physical, even mental piles of whatever sits about as we try to build whatever. How is this ever gonna come together? The garage, the report, the dishes. What do I do? So what do we do? When the Pieces Won't Come TogetherDemands from others pile on. The budget, the stakes, hidden or in plain view, all pile onto the pressure and overwhelm. A Camera, and a Decision Somewhere I decided, in the wake of completing the Waves of Focus materials, that I might work on my YouTube channel, maybe something to enhance the Rhythms of Focus podcast. A teleprompter would help me look at the screen. A webcam as opposed to a DSLR would save me some money. Research mode engaged. Days, if not weeks later, I emerge victorious. Decisions have been reached. Decisions themselves, these weighty beasts, desires, visions, fears, more ideally rest in reflection until they settle with some clear option forward But so often they don't. The ordered supplies sit there, and things aren't working. So I might wonder, do I know what I'm doing? Well, the answer is no, otherwise things would be moving forward. Will I know what I'm doing? Well, I don't know. I can only put one foot in front of the next. I think I may have made a mistake with that camera I bought. No, let me see how I can make it work. Frustration. The heart of it is frustration, the sense that appears when what is being realized is somehow not meeting that preconception, as clear or as blurry as that vision might have been. It's the same gap we find in story, that space between wish and fulfillment that just doesn't seem to resolve. But let me keep trying. Isn't that productivity? Sometimes. Push or RunSometimes it's a matter of an unconscious fight playing out on the stage of the now, this anger at IKEA furniture that represents the troubles of an unsolved chronic argument in a relationship that has nothing to do with this. A confusion with a report that plays out at a sense of loss at work. Other times, it really is just the furniture itself. How do we know the difference? So often we can either push ourselves through or run. Pushing becomes hyper-focused, this unrelenting, "I need to do this. I need to get this done." Everything else is ignored. Seems like we're thinking something through, but in reality, we're being driven by that force unreflected. When we run, we look for anything else that's easy to solve. That temptation to jump into email where we can mark something as read, to look at a short video on social media for some easy sense of consumption. But what we lose, what I lose, is a recognition of frustration as teacher Frustration as TeacherPausing to rest the mind on that sensation of frustration, sometimes we find a clue. In consideration, I might think of where the pieces are now. The camera's well-featured, but those features conflict with the setup. I've been trying to make it work. What if I freeze it in place this way? What if I get something to block the glare? All of them might be useful to experiment with. Where Bravery Comes InBut I gradually realize this resistance. I don't want to return it. Not only is it more time, but there's this sense of failure with it. Maybe imagined confrontation with the staff of the place that it's ordered from, the sense of mistake, error, part and parcel of the creative process. And while I can consciously say that there might be some emotional part of me that just doesn't see it that way, there's another part that may. Once confronted, though, I can then say, "Oh, that's the point where I can apply bravery." In retrospect, it seems simple. While the cost of returning something, the effort, the packing of stuff, yeah, it's there. It's the whatever that might come from conflict that blocks that true work. Thought Born from FrustrationFrustration, when managed well, has opportunity to become thought. In fact, psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion would say that thought doesn't exist without it. If mastery is an ability to do something without thought, frustration gives us the path there, a reflection that something meaningful is attempting to unfold. Deliberately pausing with those sensations, allowing thoughts to form from the emotions beneath as we witness the process, lets us see them in greater relief, lets us see the ideas below the surface, the greater meanings, the greater places for bravery. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    63. Creativity and Frustration

  8. Jul 2

    62. 3 Unlocks from Scratchpad to Anchor

    This week we explore how ADHD-related working-memory limits create a bottleneck. While a scratchpad can help, it often fails without a mindfulness-based technique called “anchoring.” Anchoring uses pen and paper with three “unlocks”: 1) Shift your mindset from thinking of what is written as tasks and to-dos, to thinking of them as options. This reduces wrestling with the “I really should” thoughts, reduces shame, relieves working memory, and increases agency. One mnemonic to help identify what's present is WIND(E) “want, impulse, need, drift, wind” (optionally emotion) helps identify what’s present. 2) While lists are useful, it is also important to recognize that lists decay. You must periodically return to update them, thus creating a conversation with your past self and building trust with your future self. 3) When a list no longer reflects the present, archive or discard it. We close with an improvisational music piece, “In the Interim,” blending minor and major keys. Transcript One of the struggles of ADHD is this trouble with working memory that can be very small. Meanwhile, intelligence is trying to get through this bottleneck. It's a difficult situation. The Scratchpad, and Where It Falls ApartOne quick way that we tend to resolve this issue is by using a scratchpad. Write down a few thoughts about what we have to take care of and then go through them. Often feels positive to do this. Sometimes we go overboard, write a gazillion things. Sometimes we're just able to capture what's on our mind in that moment. Feels very empowering. At least for that moment, and then things often fall apart at that point. We can expand the use of this, though, through a mindfulness technique and what I call anchoring. I've mentioned it on several episodes before. There are two or three, I wanna call them rules, but I also don't wanna call them rules. All right, let's call them rules. Anchoring is a powerful way of bringing our mind to the moment using pen and paper. But there are a few different unlocks that need to be put in place before it really blooms, because otherwise we're just using pen and paper. So what are these unlocks? Unlock 1 — From Tasks to OptionsWell, the first one is to transition from only writing tasks and to-dos to writing options. All right, so what's that about? There's a sense in meditation that we are not our thoughts — a commonly mentioned phrase that seems mystical in nature. Mystical maybe being another word for mystery beyond our understanding, unless we sit down and do this difficult thing every day. And especially for those with ADHD, that sort of meditation can seem well out of reach. So what is that? One of the troubles with ADHD is that we tend to wrestle with our thoughts. For example, we have this idea of a thing we "should do," the laundry, taking care of the fridge that's starting to rot, other things that may or may not have deadlines. Usually the ones without clear deadlines are the more insidious. And then we might try to push them out of our minds, try to focus somewhere else. Acknowledging them in one sense, for example, writing them down, can be a difficult proposition because now we're even more directly facing this thing that we don't wanna do. We don't know where to write it. We don't know how to convince ourselves to do it. We're enraged by it, among other possibilities. Meanwhile, it may shame us, worsening matters. When we can write a list as options, for example, if we have the option to start cleaning the fridge using a small, tiny step forward rather than cleaning the entire thing, among other possibilities, acknowledging what's on our mind, we're relieving our working memory. That's part of us that's already strained. This allows us then to have more ability to decide. Not only do we have more ability to decide, but now we have more energy to face the difficult emotions, the storm of emotions that are waiting for us around these difficult matters, whatever it is we decide to do. The point is that we've heightened our sense of agency. We've not forced ourselves one way or the other to do the thing or not do the thing. Reading the WINDI like to use this mnemonic: want, impulse, need, drift, wind. There's also this optional E at the end of it for emotion, if you like. So windy. It's useful as you're getting a sense of what those winds are, what's on my mind in this moment. When we practice that sense rather than writing our tasks, we then get to more, uh, clearly decide which direction to head. We have more resources to make that decision as we're not trying to push ourselves against one or the other. In this way, we're not our thoughts. We're not being driven by the thoughts. The thoughts and the emotions behind them are messengers. Unlock 2 — The List DecaysNow, the second thing that happens, second rule maybe, second unlock, occurs when we realize that the list decays. Not only do we realize that, but we acknowledge it, and we do something about it. Let's say we've chosen something on this list to visit. We've circled one thing. We've gone ahead and made that visit. If we can return to the list, when we are able, if we haven't lost our way, we have this benefit. We can see who we were before that session, before that visit that we'd engaged in. We're now in this position to say, "Hmm, what's different?" Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We can cross things off, add them, update things in whatever way, shape, or form so that it now reflects the now. As we do that, we are engaging in this conversation with our past self. That process develops a trust over time that we can use for our future selves. We can recognize, "Oh, I can hold onto an idea and come back to it, even if it's for a brief moment." It's a practice. Trust is something of a muscle that we form. It's a sense that something will continue to behave as it has been, such that it might be relied on, and developing that is a muscle. Unlock 3 — Let It GoNow, the third unlock is that once this is no longer representative of the now, we can trash it. We can archive it. We can get rid of it. It's no longer an anchor. From Scratchpad to AnchorThese three unlocks move a scratchpad from a simple thing to a very powerful ally in our day-to-day, helping us reduce scatter, manage exhaustion, connect to our task lists if we have them. We're getting more buckets of email and all the rest all the time. It helps us manage those as well. For example, we can write something like, "Visit the inbox." That can be one way of acknowledging, "Oh, there's a thing." In the InterimToday's piece of music is called In the Interim. It's an improvisation oddly written in both minor and major keys, sometimes with minor in the lower registers and major in the higher. Other times, there's a full-on transition to the major. At first, uh, you know, you might think that music doesn't allow for this kind of transition. But somehow, if you commit to it, it does. But that commitment isn't blind. It isn't like, "I'm gonna do this no matter what." That's often a recipe for might makes right type of a disaster. Instead, it's an acknowledgment of both the major and minor, respecting both as they are. I hope you enjoy it. Mentioned in this episode: Waves of Focus YouTube Series Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

    62. 3 Unlocks from Scratchpad to Anchor
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Kourosh Dini
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    70
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Kourosh Dini
  • Show Website
    Rhythms of Focus

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