The ASSAP Framework: S is for Security

Why Overwhelm Isn’t a Motivation Problem

ASSAP Framework: Security

Being told to “just calm down” when you’re already overwhelmed doesn’t help—it usually makes things worse. Especially if you have ADHD. Especially if you’re doing life solo.

In this episode, Christine breaks down why overwhelm is not a motivation issue or a character flaw. It’s a capacity problem—and treating it like anything else leads to shutdown, shame, and bad decisions.

This is the second episode in a four-part series on the ASSAP Framework, focusing on Security: the ability to stay functional enough to think when your nervous system is activated.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why “trying harder” fails under overwhelm
  
  
• The difference between emotional awareness and emotional processing
  
  
• Why calming down is often impossible until understanding returns
  
  
• How ADHD overload shuts down working memory, attention, and decision-making
  
  
• What “security” actually means (and what it doesn’t)
  
  
• How to keep your thinking online without forcing calm
  
  
• Why shame is data—not a verdict
  
  
• A real-life tech meltdown story (and why it matters)
  
  
  

Key reframes:

• Overwhelm is not laziness
  
  
• Shutdown is a nervous system response, not avoidance
  
  
• You don’t need calm—you need stability
  
  
• Progress looks like fewer destructive decisions, not emotional peace
  
  
• Security is about staying present, not fixing everything
  
  
  

Where this fits in ASSAP:

• Access = clarifying what the real problem is
  
  
  
• Security = staying functional enough to think under stress
  
  
  
• If you spiral quickly, starting with Security is valid
  
  
  
• Structure comes after Access and Security—not before
  
  

Christine also previews a short, low-pressure audio resource designed specifically for moments when your thinking starts to disappear—something to bridge Access and Security without asking you to fix anything.

About the host:

Christine Dunning is a Master Certified Life Coach and the owner of Two Cats Coaching. She works with adults who have ADHD—especially those who are single and carrying life without a built-in second brain.

This podcast shares the thinking behind her coaching work, with practical reframes you can use in real life.

Explore more:

• Listen to the full ASSAP series
  
  
• Find free resources and coaching at Two Cats Coaching
  
  
• Follow along on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads: @twocatscoaching

Reminder:

You don’t need to calm down before you’re allowed to think.

The goal isn’t calm—it’s support.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Have you ever been told just to calm down, take a breath, clear your head? Or even worse, hey, cut it out already. And did this happen when you were already overwhelmed? Did it help? Or did it just make everything worse? Because now, on top of being stressed, you're also failing at being calm. If you have ADHD, this is a familiar trap. And I'm going to say, if you're single on top of this, you can feel even more isolating. Because you don't have somebody else around to absorb that stress or slow things down or help you think. Hi, I'm Christine Dunning. I'm a master's certified life coach, the owner of Two Cats Coaching, and this is a solo person's guide to ADHD. Today I want to talk about security and why being overwhelmed, it's not part of motivation. It's a capacity problem. So a quick note before we start. This is part two of a series of four about my program called the ASAP Framework. In episode 28, I talked about how to clarify your thinking so you can figure out what the real problem is. I call that access. And before we go any further, here's a quick thing about the order of ASAP. If your emotions tend to go from 1 to 100 very quickly, if you're spiral fast, if overwhelm shuts your thinking down almost immediately, you can start with the information I'm going to present today about security instead of access. Some people need to understand before they can regulate. Some people need to regulate before they can understand. Either one is fine. Both are valid approaches. My only rule in ASAP is this: don't move on to structure until you have both access and security locked into place. That order can be flexible. The rest of it really isn't. I'd like to set a couple of quick boundaries about what this episode is and is not. Today is not going to be about trauma work. It's not about emotional healing. This definitely is not therapy. I'm a life coach. I'm not a therapist. What we're talking about today is about staying functional, functional enough to think, to choose, um, to just make things not be worse when your system is already under stress. And in doing so, I'd like to tell you about uh actually the last two days. I sat down yesterday in the hopes of filming this podcast. And I do both audio and video. And I sat down, I only had a little over an hour available in my schedule. I was going to try to do that, then I had to leave. Then I would just have barely enough time when I came back to be able to quick do a quick edit and hopefully be able to put this out to the world. Um, that was yesterday. I spent the first hour and 15 minutes dealing with technology. And when I did, although I'm not somebody who usually spirals really fast, bad tech totally makes me go from one to 100 and I become a hothead. It makes me angry. It's very frustrating. But I worked really hard on saying, okay, I'm pissed off, but I still want to get this done. So I need to solve the problems. And I know with tech, it's usually not one problem, it's usually several, because that's the way tech works. And I did, and then, but didn't have any time in the morning to create the episode. So came back in the afternoon, created the episode, but then I had to leave again and didn't look at it until this morning, only to find that it didn't exist. I don't know what happened, but it didn't even record. So after all that, I don't have a recording from yesterday because, you know, that's the way life is sometimes. Understand though, this is a process I used to, because that's where the best things come from, right? Things we've tried out ourselves. So why does the idea of just trying harder fail with ADHD brains? When people shut down under stress, usually there's some things assumed. You know, you're you're just avoiding things. You need to try harder. So you're lazy. But for ADHD brains, it's it's not about motivation. Overwhelm is not a motivation problem. It's a capacity problem. What looks like avoidance is some form of friction. And what looks like laziness is often overload. When you've got that overload going on, your attention narrows, your working memory can drop, decision making slows or sometimes disappears. And many of us try to find a way to escape this situation entirely. Telling what yesterday, I just wanted to walk away. This morning, when I realized that this episode was not filmed properly, I just wanted to walk away. But here I am, because this is what I want to do. So know that those responses, they're not character flaws. It's nervous system responses. Now, one of the things, and you hear this from a lot of people who mean well, and I think I'm gonna put myself in that category. I've thought this for a long time. I'm only starting to realize that my thinking around this really isn't quite correct. Most advice assumes that if you could just calm down, everything would come back online. You'll be fine. Just calm down first. But here's the problem. Sometimes I just can't calm down. Sometimes I can't calm down until I understand what's going on. And then I can't understand what's going on because I'm not calm and my thinking has gone offline. It's a big catch 22. And again, this advice, people with ADHD, honestly, we're really good actually at emotional awareness. We know we're overwhelmed. We know we're anxious or frustrated or ashamed or overloaded or like me yesterday, just plain angry. But awareness is not the same thing as processing. Awareness is noticing. This feels bad. Processing allows you to look at the situation, make changes, to move it, to soften it, to resolve it. But when your system doesn't feel safe, that processing goes offline. It doesn't mean you're doing emotional work wrong. It means this is not the time to process. This is the security moment. This is the time to make sure that you can just hold on to things long enough so that you can think. Something happens and the alarm goes off. It's loud, it's relentless. And in this scenario, because of your ADHD, you don't know how to turn the alarm system off. You don't know what the code is. So a lot of times, you shut down, you leave the house, you flee the situation, you run away inside, or you run away outside, or both. Security is about learning how to turn the alarm down long enough so that you can stay in the present. You can stay in the building and look around. You're not trying to fix the alarm. You're not trying to actually even solve the mystery. You're just trying to keep your thinking online. Security doesn't mean getting calm. It doesn't mean comfort. It means, okay, I can't. This is really hard to deal with, but I'm going to work on making a non-destructive choice right now. Yesterday, when I got so frustrated with my technology, all I want to do is pick up my computer and throw it through the big window that's right over here. Feels good in the moment, not really a great solution in the long run. Computers are expensive. I can't really afford to replace this. Instead, I took the time to figure out the problem without just giving into my anger. And that's an example of what we're looking at here. So instead of asking, how do I calm down? or why can't I get calm? Or I should be calm. I don't know why I'm not calm. Here are some other things to ask instead. How do I keep my thinking online? How do I access my thinking brain in this moment of overwhelm? So here's a few ways to consider trying that. First, try to notice the overload as it starts. What is that earliest overload signal? Not what's wrong with me or, you know, what's going on or why am I feeling upset? But just start to notice what stops working. For some people, it's words. Either you can't think of what to say or what you would say is so destructive that it wouldn't work. Is it memory? I know this is a big one for me. Um, do you just completely lose track of what's going on or what may have worked in the past? Is it impulse control? Is your reaction fine? I'm just gonna go stuff myself with cookies or alcohol or shopping until I feel a lot better. Is it the urge to escape? I can't handle this right now. I'm gonna go leave, I'm gonna go play video games, I'm gonna go shut down. Doing things, these things may help you feel safe, but they're not really great ways to work on solving whatever the problem is, especially if you need to be present for other reasons with another person. Finding ways to minimize these will also help solve your issue sooner, not later. Now know that some situations, the only immediate and appropriate response is to leave. Somebody's physically hurting you, please get out of the way. Please get out of there. But that's not really what we're talking about here. I'm just talking about your mind spinning and you don't know what to do in a moment. Okay? Save those situations for true emergencies. And in true emergencies, please get out of the house. Second thing, try to shrink that feeling of danger. Overwhelm makes everything feel urgent and risky. So try in that moment not to make a bunch of decisions. Try to take in less input. Quiet down noise whenever possible. These things, it's protection, it's not avoidance. And the third one, please get the word calm out of this situation. Because what you really need is not calm, but stability. Ask things like, what would make the next five minutes less volatile? Not better, not salt, not less. Think about it like this: if when you're upset, you can still keep 20 or 25% capacity. You you have your feelings, you're still upset with whatever it is, still whirling, but you're still able to think. You're gonna make much better decisions in that time period. Instead of waiting for yourself to get calm. Now, one thing, uh quick note about shame. Shame shows up fast when our capacity is exceeded. You know, instead of feeling it like a verdict, oh, I'm such a failure. Oh, I'm oh, this is horrible. I feel terrible about things. Treat that as information. Because shame isn't telling you who you are. It's telling you that something has exceeded your capacity. This isn't about eliminating that shame. Don't wrestle with it. Listen to it, extract the information, and move forward securely. All that shame, it's really just data, especially in this moment. So you may have noticed that access and security often show up together. Confusion plus shutdown. I don't know what's wrong, plus I can't deal with this. Again, in a situation where you spiral quickly, start with security. I gotta I gotta keep thinking. I gotta keep thinking. If you can get that under control, or that's you're not spiraling so bad that that's a hard thing, just simply start getting curious. What's going on here? What's the deal? What do I need help with? Either way is fine. A reminder, you don't need to calm down to make progress. You don't need to fix everything to move forward. I'll tell you, in my little tech story here, I don't know why tech makes me so mad so quickly. That's probably a good thing for me to look at at some point. I really I really think I'll do that. But yesterday morning or this morning, when I realized technology was failing me, that's not the moment for me to decide, why do I feel like this? No, it's the moment for me to fix the darn tech, get the job done. I can look at the feelings later. Right? So next time we're gonna talk about structure. That's what we build after access and security are locked into place. Think of it as like the hammer and nails of what's going out. Before we wrap this up, I want to say if today's episode kind of stir things up a little bit. If you're noticing your stress or shutdown or overwhelm mode makes things louder instead of quieter, it doesn't mean this isn't working. It means we're where we're supposed to be. Security is the step that most advice skips. We're told to calm down first, get regulated first, as if that's something we know how to do on command. But for many people with ADHD, and frankly, a lot of people without ADHD, safety doesn't come before understanding, it comes from it. Again, my name is Christine Dunning. I'm a master's certified life coach, and I work with adults who have ADHD, especially those who are single and carrying life without a built-in second brain. This podcast, a solo person's guide to ADHD, is where I share the thinking behind my coaching work. I also offer one-on-one coaching for people who want to help applying this framework to their lives. If today's episode felt useful, but maybe a little intense. I'm working on creating a quick low pressure resource to support this phase. And as I record this, um, it's the first week of February of 2026. Uh, with any luck, I'll have this done, I would say, by the second week. My goal, my goal is no later than Valentine's Day. And it's designed specifically for moments when your nervous system is activated and your thinking starts to disappear. It's not going to ask you to fix things, it's going to help you stabilize enough to keep access. It's going to be an audio. You'll be able to find that free resource on my website, in the show notes, all over the places. Think of it as a short bridge between access and security, something to hold on to when things start to wobble. If you'd like to stay connected, please listen to more episodes of this wherever you're listening now. Uh I'm on generally all the podcast platforms, and I present this on YouTube as well if you'd really rather watch me say all these words. You can explore coaching and free resources at 2CatsCoaching, and you can follow me on social media where I share some smaller pieces of this in real time. Uh I'm on Facebook, Insta and Threads at TwoCatsCoing. So, reminder don't need to calm down before you're allowed to think. The whole idea here is not to get you calm, it's to get you supported. Thanks for coming. Take care.