A short protocol for the adult with ADHD who can lose three days to one piece of feedback.
It does not stop the sting arriving. It ended what I used to build on top of the sting. Your next episode is already scheduled. This is what you will have ready when it arrives.
£19. Paid once. Twenty-one day refund, no questions asked. About forty minutes to read.
The trigger is always too small for what follows, and often it is not an event at all. A reply shorter than the message you sent. A two-word note. Silence after you posted something. An invitation that did not arrive. A meeting with no agenda. A one-line reply in a different tone to the paragraph you sent.
The feeling arrives first. The hot skin, or the stomach drop, or the mind-freeze, or the chest tightness, or the urge to get away and hide. Mine was the flushed skin and the tightness in my chest, and it was a part of my life for years before I had a name for it.
The size of the trigger tells you nothing about how long it runs. An afternoon. An evening. A weekend. Three days. A sentence you still quote back to yourself years later, word for word.
Afterwards, with the heat gone, you cannot explain your own reaction to yourself, and it has happened often enough that you have stopped expecting an explanation.
The first is the one above: RSD in the moment, and the behaviour you regret. The second is quieter. One piece of negative feedback causes you to ignore dozens of positive ones, and you pivot to a reasonable-sounding plan to stop doing the thing you were doing. It does not feel like RSD. It feels like a decision.
The protocol is built for both. I ran it for over three years before the second shape caught me. I was days into an episode before I recognised it.
An adult with ADHD who already knows the term, has read the explanations, and noticed that not one of them told you what to do at eleven at night.
RSD Alchemy is not a diagnosis and it is not a diagnostic tool. Recognising a pattern in yourself is not a diagnosis of anything, and nothing in this document can tell you whether you have ADHD or any other condition. A diagnosis is not required: each document describes a pattern, and if the pattern describes you, that is the signal to weigh, not the paperwork.
Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is a widely used description of a pattern of experience. It is not a recognised medical or psychiatric diagnosis, and this document is not a clinical account of it.
RSD Alchemy is not therapy, treatment, or medical or psychological advice, and it is not a substitute for professional care. It makes no claim to treat or cure ADHD, rejection sensitive dysphoria or any condition, and no outcome is promised.
Someone in crisis now. If you are at risk of harming yourself or you need help right away: call 988 in the US, Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, or find your local line at findahelpline.com.
It is not for someone who wants to read more about RSD. You have done that. This is a thing you run.
Nicholas Traherne is a pen name. I am not a clinician and hold no medical, psychological or therapeutic qualifications. I write from my own experience of ADHD.
The episode still started. What ended was what I built on top of it.
In August I launched something I had spent eleven months building, and nobody bought it. I did not delete the archive or throw my notebooks in the bin. That is the difference.
A smaller one, from a few weeks later. My proofreader for the protocol sent me a list of cuts and edits. Some I disagreed with, strongly. I explained they did not understand and that the text was best left as it was. They asked if I was experiencing RSD and if I should run my own protocol. It annoyed me more. I was certain they had not understood, and that my position was reasonable and correct.
The next morning I did not have to run it deliberately. As I began the final proofread myself, I read the first sentence of the first section. In a second I knew they were right, and I knew exactly what to do. I let them know I was wrong, apologised for my rudeness, thanked them for their advice, and made every change they had suggested. An episode like that used to be able to run for weeks. Before the protocol I might never have known it was one at all.
The rest are smaller, but I notice them more. I take responsibility now, where before I did not understand how I had made someone feel. I do the small things that tell the people close to me I have been thinking about them. None of these are big. That is the point. They are the things an episode used to take from me.
RSD Alchemy is a protocol: four steps, in a fixed order, that you run on a real episode. Not a course, not another description of what RSD feels like. You already know. The four together are called WANE, because that is what the surge does once you stop fighting it.
The first step is aimed at the surge. The second is aimed at the story built on top of it. Both are built to end an episode. For me they did, faster than I believed was possible.
The third and fourth are about the people near you. They are the ones built to end the hiding, and they are placed last because by then they cost me nothing.
Every version of this advice I was ever given started me at the third step. That is the wrong place to begin, and it is why none of it worked for me. The instruction was never wrong. The order was.
The steps are the instrument. The rest of the document is the context that made me able to use it.
What follows is my model, not a clinical one. It explains the one thing the other explanations skip: what RSD actually is, and what it is for. RSD is an alarm that never got wired up to anything, still going off, still trying to point you at something.
What it points at is other people. Not whether they are angry with you, which is what you already spend all night guessing at. What it is actually like to be them, standing next to you, watching this. Nobody ever showed you that, so you learned to fight the alarm instead.
Left alone and fully allowed, the surge was shorter than I expected, every time. The episode was everything I built on top of it. That is why suppression never worked.
You read it once, start to finish, before you need it. About forty minutes.
Then you run it on an episode you already had. That is what the worksheet is for, and it is how I ran it on the failed launch: five days late, from the notebook I first built it in.
The runs themselves were never the slow part. The first time I ran it deliberately in the moment, on something that had happened that morning, it took minutes. What took me years was noticing I was in one, and believing I needed to run a rep. The worksheet is built for the late rep, because that is where I started.
It is a real inbox and I am the only person in it. I cannot answer questions about diagnosis, medication or treatment, or tell you whether to seek an assessment. I am not qualified to, and that is not what this address is for.
£19, paid once. No subscription. Buyers must be 18 or over.
Twenty-one day refund, no questions asked. Reply to your receipt email or use the refund form, and I refund you. I would rather have the email than the £19.
Delivered by email straight after checkout.
Five days after the failed launch, I ran the first step of the protocol on the bed in the spare room, straight out of the shower, with a towel round me.
It is the step nobody wants. Stop escaping. You knew that already. What you have never had is how, at the moment you least want to, and that is the hardest part to train. It is what the document is for. I had spent five days doing the precise opposite: avoiding the launch, avoiding the mentor, avoiding sharing with the friends who were politely not asking. I followed the instructions a younger version of myself wrote.
I stopped running. I cried. It was neither quick nor dignified, and it ended on its own, which is the part I still do not believe until it happens. Then I saw the situation objectively. Someone about to throw away eleven months of real work because strangers had been quiet. Nothing had been lost.
Two steps in, the spiral was finished.
The last two are the reason I could tell my friends what had happened. I had been the only person who knew the result. They had not asked, because you don't ask a question you already know the answer to. Those two steps are what turned them back from people I was hiding from into people standing next to me. So I told them: I got zero applications, and I had been too embarrassed to say so.
I have ADHD. I had RSD for longer than I had a name for it, and I have been running this protocol since I created it. I built it over three years ago for myself, shortly after my ADHD diagnosis. Back then RSD loudly directed a lot of what I did and quietly decided what I would even attempt. It worked well enough that I forgot the spirals had ever been normal.
The most recent test was the failed launch. Before the protocol, that would have ended everything. I would have deleted the whole archive and never gone back. This time was stranger. I burned nothing, yet I was still completely certain I would never return to it. I did not know I was in an episode. It had come back wearing a disguise, and it was five days in before I recognised it.
My mentor pointed out that my protocol for RSD spirals should be the next thing I write up. They knew I was in a spiral, and rather than say so directly they suspected writing it up would force me to run it on myself first. The next morning I pulled out all my notes and ran it. That was the end of the episode. The day after, I started writing.
The only endorsement on this page is that I ran my own protocol on my own failed launch, and then wrote it up.
It may arrive wearing a disguise. This is what you will have ready.
£19, paid once. No subscription.
Delivered by email straight after checkout.
Twenty-one day refund, no questions asked. Reply to your receipt email or use the refund form, and I refund you.
I have already read everything about RSD.
So had I. Everything I read described what RSD feels like and what it does to you. None of it said what it is for, and none of it gave me anything to run when it arrives. This does both.
What if my life doesn't look like your examples?
The scene looks different. The mechanism is the same. A second date that did not become a third. A friend who used to suggest things and stopped. A group that quietly got smaller without you. A reply that never came. If none of those ever came with an explanation you actually believed, this was written for you. What the protocol runs on is the episode, not the thing that set it off.
Why £19?
Because it is short, and because I would rather a thousand people run it than a hundred people admire the price. This is the only thing I have written that you run. That is the difference you are paying for, and it is worth more than nineteen pounds to me that you actually use it.
How long is it, and what format?
About forty minutes' reading. A PDF readable on your preferred device or printed out in whole. There is a worksheet and a one-page quick-reference sheet which you can print out separately if you prefer.
What if I only manage to run it a week after the episode?
Then you have run it. The protocol is built for lateness: the first reps are always after the fact. Running the protocol like this is how it is designed to be used at first. There is no version of doing this wrong because you are doing it late.
What is actually inside?
What RSD is and what it is for. The four steps, each with exact instructions. Where each one tends to fail, and what to do then. The origin story. The protocol run in full, late, on a real episode of mine. A written worksheet that turns an episode you already own into your first rep. The report-back route. The one-page quick-reference sheet.
Is this clinical fact or your own model?
My own model. I built it after my ADHD diagnosis, from my own reading and my own pattern, and refined it over years of running it on myself. I am not a clinician and the protocol never pretends otherwise. It tells you what I understand, how to run the protocol, and what it did for me.
I'm not diagnosed with ADHD. Is this for me?
RSD Alchemy is not a diagnosis and it is not a diagnostic tool. I wrote it for the late-diagnosed ADHD adult because that is what I am. I built it from my own pattern, and that is the basis I sell it on. A diagnosis is not required: each document describes a pattern, and if the pattern describes you, that is the signal to weigh, not the paperwork. The twenty-one day refund exists for exactly that question.
I'm in therapy. Should I run this?
That is a question for your therapist, not for me. I am not a clinician and hold no medical, psychological or therapeutic qualifications. This is not therapy or a substitute for therapy. It is a protocol I wrote originally for myself. It does not ask you to change anything about your care. If you want a second opinion, show your therapist this page.
What if it doesn't work for me?
Then reply to your receipt email or use the refund form within twenty-one days, and I refund you, no questions asked. One thing before you decide it has not worked: the first rep is meant to happen late and imperfectly. Late and badly counts.
Who is this not for?
Someone in crisis now. If you are at risk of harming yourself or you need help right away: call 988 in the US, Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK, or find your local line at findahelpline.com. This is not therapy, not a community, and not a clinical account of RSD. This is a protocol you run on yourself.
Your next episode is already scheduled. It may arrive wearing a disguise. This is what you will have in your pocket when it does.
Delivered by email straight after checkout.
Twenty-one day refund, no questions asked. Reply to your receipt email or use the refund form, and I refund you.
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