Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Soundtrack for this newsletter: Zico - Any Song

Spotify

Apple Music

One of the most common questions we get is - why do we travel?

What started it all?For me, there are a tons of reasons why I love traveling, but there’s one really personal reason that I thought I’d share just in case it resonates with anyone else out there.

This is a recounting of my struggle with ADHD and how it actually led me to finding a sort of solution for the problems it’s caused me - in the form of a non-stop life of travel.

ADHD is a curse, for sure. But, also, in some ways, a blessing. It’s complicated.

When I was a little kid, people would call me things like “active” and “energetic”, and “incapable of focusing”, basically gentler words for “terror”. I used to take things apart because I was bored, run around and get into trouble, and change my mind of what I wanted to do every 10 seconds. I couldn’t slow down, and I definitely couldn’t do one thing at a time, unless I was really into it, then I could ONLY do that one thing, to the exclusion of everything else.School was a real struggle for me - I was too loud, too disruptive, and could not focus on really anything for any amount of time. Well, everything except computers. I didn’t enjoy any of the other parts of school, and I just couldn’t get myself to concentrate, at all, no matter how hard I tried, or how much my parents told me that I needed to, or how important it was. I. Just. Couldn’t.

I still can’t, not really. I’m just better at pretending now.

I spent most of my early years beating myself up for not being like the other kids - I couldn’t control where my attention would go, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get myself to care about things I wasn’t interested in. You know how if you need to study or focus on something that’s important, you can generally tell yourself “Ok, gotta do this, even if it sucks” - it’s like I was born without that switch.

I had no idea why I was different, why school and the hours of sitting still were so impossible for me… I didn’t have a lot of friends in school as a result of this - I spent most of my recesses just walking laps around the school until it was time to go back in. I couldn’t connect. I didn’t fit in, I was all over the place, and I had no idea why I was like this.

It felt… permanent, like my whole life was going to be like this.

On the other side of that, for things that I was truly interested in, I could focus on those for hours and hours and hours on end, totally losing track of time and what was going on around me.

Even that felt like a bit of a curse - I would just lose myself in something totally unrelated to what I knew I needed to be doing, no matter how many times I would berate myself by saying “ok, after this, THEN it’s really time to start studying”.

Then, I think when I was in 1st grade, the problem had gotten so big that my parents brought me in to a doctor, who diagnosed me with ADHD, and prescribed Ritalin to be taken every day.

I didn’t really understand it at the time, but that diagnosis would shape a lot of me, my life, and how I needed to interact with the world to fit in.Many of you have likely heard of Ritalin before, but it’s a medication that essentially increases the amount of dopamine in your brain. If you have a normal amount of dopamine, it creates an overly positive feeling and provides additional alertness and a massive boost of energy. Happiness, effectively. Incredibly addictive happiness. If you don’t have ADD / ADHD and take Ritalin or Adderall or the like, you’re just asking for trouble. Trust me. Don’t try it without getting a proper diagnosis.For a person like me, with ADHD, the medication got me to baseline, from a massive dopamine depletion to a more normal amount.

The only problem was the come-down. I would go from feeling really normal, able to focus, able to be in school and interact with the other kids to then feeling like a complete zombie. My entire personality would just be neutralized. It was a constant rollercoaster like that for most of my school years. Up and feeling great, and then suddenly, down and feeling empty. Back and forth.

ADHD, to oversimplify and summarize it greatly for the sake of this (I’m not a doctor, this is just what I understand after studying it and living with it), is a problem with dopamine regulation and production in the brain. It turns out dopamine is pretty important for a lot of things, among them movement, memory, and motivation. If the dopamine levels are too low, which is more often than not the case with ADHD, I won’t have any motivation to do anything, I won’t want to move, and I won’t be able to pay attention. All I will be capable of doing is seeking out more dopamine to attempt to reach a baseline.

And I’ll do it in the most impulsive ways I can think of - all just to get to a semblance of normalcy.

The best way I can think of to explain what it’s like for me is that if my attention is like a camera lens, my brain doesn’t have any control over the zoom function. Imagine you’re in a room talking to someone, and you want to focus on them and the conversation you’re having. If you’re using a wide-angle lens - you can see everything in the room.

With that wide-angle on, if something moves in the corner, you’ll notice it, and it’ll distract you, and then the person you’re talking to will think you’re not listening… because you aren’t. Dopamine production works against this, acting like the lens zooming-in - ignoring the rest of the room to focus just on the person and conversation, while being able to exclude all the distractions.

I don’t have control over the zoom of my camera. This is why, more often than not, when I’m having conversations with people I’ll be looking all over the place, and thinking of 100 different things. I’m not producing enough dopamine to maintain attention, and it can feel truly awful for the person talking to me - like I’m being rude, and not listening.

I am listening, but I can’t control where my attention goes, and not only that, I can feel this whole process happening in my brain, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. My attention just drifts all over the place because I can’t zoom in, I’m usually always seeing the whole room, all the time. I beat myself up a lot over this, because it feels like everyone else is just able to FOCUS when they need to, and I just can’t.

God, just thinking about what it must be like to talk to me and have me looking all over the place and not able to maintain attention… it’s depressing and hard to think about. I’ve struggled with that for a long, long time. I still am.

You probably notice this in our videos, I find it excruciatingly difficult to maintain eye contact with the camera, and usually am looking every possible direction except where I want to be looking. It just happens. I’m noticing everything, all the time.

To put it another way, someone else has control over the TV remote of attention for my brain, and I have no control over which channel is on.

It means that i might not able to pay attention to whatever it is that I’m doing at the moment, and will only be able to pay attention to things that generate dopamine. Like playing video games or eating/drinking sugary / carby stuff, including alcohol - the trickiest of all of them, which has caused a very real struggle for me for most of my life, up until very recently.Or as I learned later in life, I could redirect that energy into something new.

This is where travel comes in.

Traveling gave me a real, true way to funnel all that energy, instability, frustration - all that dopamine searching - into something positive. To cope with my ADHD, it often felt like I had no way of living a life of consistency, or of sitting still, or of normalcy. I needed a life with near-constant newness. Novelty, constantly. Travel is exactly that, which is why I not only love it, but I think that I truly need it.

When I quit my job and went on my first trip by myself, and wandered into the first of thousands of hostels that I would call home for most of the next decade, I felt like I had finally found my people.

I found the ones who were searching, all the time, for wonderful places and adventure and newness. The ones who just couldn’t sit still, and didn’t really want to.

Those out there who had specifically architected everything in their lives to be able to be as “free” as possible, to be able to change their minds, locations, and interests in an instant.

Most importantly, I felt like, for the first time, that I wasn’t alone.

That maybe, just maybe, I could live a “normal”-ish life.

I just needed to construct the right life for me.

That’s why I kept going back to it, back to a life of full time travel, as often as I could. I would work for a year, save like crazy, because I knew that 9-5 Josh was not the real Josh. The real me was out there, traveling, connecting, exploring. So that’s exactly what I did - quit my job 3 more times to travel the world.

I would never be able to hold down a single job until retirement. I would never be able to live in a single place forever. I would always be rapid-fire changing my interests and entire life path. That’s just me, that’s who I am, that’s who I’ve always been. It was time to stop beating myself up for trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t.

I was different, and that was ok, for the first time.

I could be a good person, and not just a burden on those around me. I could have a semblance of control over my life and attention. I had never felt this way before.

Looking back on it all, this might explain why I still have control issues in my life - I had spent so much of my life totally without control, that having just a bit of it was incredible, and now I’m always searching for more. Hmm. There’s something more there to dig into.

Midway through my first trip, I stopped taking my ADHD medicine, and replaced that with exercise, constant travel, meeting new people, and seeing the world.

I had found the right outlet, the right way to cope with ADHD that worked for me.

Adderall / similar drugs are a great solution for many people out there, and help a ton of people with ADHD every single day - I hope I’m not coming across as anti-medication. Just, for me personally, the side effects of a lifetime on amphetamines way, way outweighed the positive effects of the drug. That’s all.

Being in new environments, with new people, doing new things helped me feel energized and focused. I could freely explore any interests I had, at my own pace. I made meaningful connections with others like me, others who looked at the world and life the same way I did.

It all came together when we started this YouTube channel. Which feels incredibly lucky to say now—that we even get to live this life… that I feel like I’ve found a non traditional job that I can just be me in. And maybe, hopefully, if we can manage keep working hard to build this business and keep making videos that are good enough and connect with and help enough people, that we might keep just be able keep doing it.

Not only that, but we might be able to really, truly help others out there as we’re doing it.

That’s the dream at least.

I’m so grateful to all of you out there who watch our movies, who make this lifestyle hopefully-eventually-maybe-one-day possible indefinitely, and who support us along the way. It quite literally means the world to me.

There’s a ton more to this story - a literal lifetime of it - but this is the short (ok, not really short) story of how travel has allowed me to manage my ADHD, while being able to explore new cultures, gain fresh perspectives, make meaningful connections with others, and find my place in the world and a community (that’s you!) that is supportive of each other and our weird and wonderful lifestyle that we have.

Please know this has just been my story. This isn’t meant to be advice and likely there is no one single piece of advice that solves it for everyone.

The only catch with ADHD is that due to the nature of it - you HAVE to find your OWN path. There’s no advice out there that will solve it. You have to figure out what works for you. ADHD is personal - it’s about finding interests and a lifestyle, and for a lot of people, the right mixture of drugs, that solves a mega-complicated dopamine problem that you didn’t ask for in the first place.

There’s a few things that help me - like super cold showers in the mornings, going for long runs, having grace for myself when I can’t control my attention or focus, controlling my food intake, and trying my best to leave time to get really bored every once in a while to kinda “reset” my dopamine levels. It works for me.

It might, or might not work for you.

I really hope this helps at least one person out there who’s struggling to understand why they just CAN’T focus, can’t sit still, can’t fit in, and can’t control their impulses.

This thing, this inability to focus, is not you. But, it is possible to control it somewhat.

If I could say one thing it would be:

You’ve got this. You’re not alone.

Today

We’re in the middle of nowhere Portugal, on Camino v2!

The (Near) Future

250 km (155 miles) of walking in our future.

Our Latest Videos

Millennials try to fit into cruise life

Cruises do hate him (me).

Big boys, even bigger stakes.

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Unsubscribe