Pregnancy is often described as exhausting, emotional, and physically demanding. But what happens when you feel your best during pregnancy—only to feel like you’ve completely lost yourself after giving birth? In this episode of The Dr. Brighten Show, Dr. Jolene Brighten sits down with ADHD advocate and entrepreneur Vanessa D’Souza to explore an experience that countless neurodivergent women recognize but …
Pre-order ADHD and Women by Dr. Jolene Brighten and discover how hormones shape focus, motivation, executive function, and emotional regulation http://drbrighten.com/adhdandwomen From the outside, success often looks effortless. A successful career. National television. Confidence under pressure. But for many autistic women, what looks like confidence is actually constant masking—the exhausting process of suppressing natural autistic traits to meet society’s expectations. In this episode of …
Pre-order ADHD and Women by Dr. Jolene Brighten and discover how hormones shape focus, motivation, executive function, and emotional regulation. If you’ve ever felt like your brain suddenly changed operating systems before your period, postpartum, or in perimenopause, this episode on estrogen and dopamine is going to help you understand why your focus, motivation, and emotional regulation can feel completely …
Before we get started, I want to share something I’ve been working on with you. My new book, ADHD and Women, was born out of years of seeing women struggle with symptoms that are often overlooked, misdiagnosed, or dismissed entirely. So much of the conversation around ADHD has been centered on men, and it leaves women without clear answers. In …
If you’ve ever wondered why you used to be able to hold it all together and now suddenly feel like your brain is working against you, this episode will hit home. In this conversation, Dr. Brighten unpacks the reality of ADHD masking, why so many women go decades without a diagnosis, and how perimenopause ADHD symptoms can make long-standing coping …
If you’ve ever wondered why your ADHD feels manageable one week and completely unhinged the next—why your medication suddenly feels useless, your focus evaporates, your emotions feel impossible to regulate, and even simple tasks like making dinner feel overwhelming—this episode was made for you. In this episode of The Dr. Brighten Show, Dr. Jolene Brighten breaks down what a major …
When your ADHD sex drive doesn’t match what you “think it should,” it’s easy to assume something is wrong with you—or that you’ve fallen out of love. But in this episode, Dr. Jolene Brighten sits down with Leann Borneman to unpack a radically different truth: for many women with ADHD (and many women in perimenopause), the problem often isn’t a …
If you feel like your ADHD symptoms exploded in your late 30s or early 40s—your focus vanished, your sleep fell apart, your body started hurting, and your brain felt like it stopped working—you are not imagining it. And you are not failing. This episode explains why perimenopause is worse for women with ADHD, why it often begins years earlier than …
If your focus, mood, and memory seem to fluctuate with your menstrual cycle, or your brain fog worsened during perimenopause, you’re not imagining things. In this episode of The Dr. Brighten Show, Dr. Jolene Brighten sits down with ADHD therapist and educator Andrew Robinson, MSW, to uncover how hormones directly influence ADHD symptoms — and why so many women are …