Breaking Free from Burnout: ADHD, Sobriety, and Finding Balance with Heather Simco

A conversation with transformation coach Heather Simco about burnout, sobriety, and the slow work of building a life that actually fits.

There's a version of a high-achieving woman that I know really well. She's running at a hundred miles an hour. She's building things, managing things, holding things together. She looks like she has it all figured out.

And she is quietly falling apart.

That was Heather Simco. For decades.

Heather is a transformation coach and founder of Sober Boss Babe. She has 12 years of sobriety, a 21-year-old daughter with ADHD, and a story that I think is going to hit really close to home for a lot of you. Not because it's dramatic. Because it's so familiar.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Heather grew up in what she calls a very Cinderella-like environment. People-pleasing was survival. Overcompensation was the strategy. And when she hit college and started building a life alongside her husband in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world, she kept doing what had always worked — running harder.

"I was making bank. I was doing really, really well in the business. But it all came crashing down because it was all untreated mental illness that I didn't realize I was suffering with."

She didn't know she had ADHD. She just knew she had to keep moving.

The coping mechanism shifted over the years — food, then alcohol, then the business itself, then working out. Whatever it took to stay ahead of the thing she couldn't name. Then she and her husband sold part of the business and moved to Southwest Florida, and within a month of arriving, a car accident took away the last coping mechanism she had.

"All the titles, all the goals — got stripped away from me. And I really had to deal with me as a whole."

That's where sobriety came in. But here's the part Heather kept coming back to: getting sober wasn't the finish line. It was the starting gun.

"That's where the heavy lifting comes in. Transforming who you are as a person, how you organize yourself — that's where the heavy lifting really starts."

Learning to Live in the Middle

If you have ADHD, you know extremes. They're comfortable. They're familiar. They give your brain something to grab onto.

Balance is harder. Balance is boring. Balance doesn't deliver dopamine.

Heather has been doing the slow, unglamorous work of learning to live in the middle for 12 years. And the way she describes it now — I want you to hear this.

"I've learned to become so much more comfortable that when the extremes happen, I'm uncomfortable with the extremes."

She talks about guardrails. Not as failure. As feedback.

"I joke with my husband, if I hit a guardrail, it's not personal. I just know I need to get back in the middle lane. I'm not going over the cliff. But I'm going to hit a few guardrails here and there as I continue to figure it out."

That image stopped me. Because we spend so much energy trying to never hit the guardrail. We treat it like proof that we're broken. Heather reframed it as proof that the guardrail is working.

One Tiny Thing First

Here's what Heather does with every overwhelmed mom who comes to her:

She does a time inventory.

Not a new system. Not a productivity app. Not a personality assessment. She looks at where the time is actually going — and then starts grouping like-minded tasks together so the day becomes less chaotic.

"Can you get gas on the way to soccer practice? I start grouping tasks together that make it so much easier."

And then she picks one tiny thing to build first.

"We need to master one system first and then build on it once it becomes second nature. One tiny thing that you build on — then next thing you know, you've got a whole foundation. And everything else becomes so much easier."

She told me about keys by the front door. Simple. Almost embarrassingly simple. But she watched herself spend 10 minutes digging through her bag for her keys, and she watched other women do the same thing, and she knows what that costs — not just the time, but the way it starts your day.

"It felt almost like a punishment. Why do I need my keys by the front door? So I don't spend 10 minutes looking for them."

And yes. Exactly. That's the whole thing. The system isn't punishment. The system is protection.

What She Learned Raising an ADHD Daughter

Heather's daughter was diagnosed at five. At the time, Heather and her husband chose not to start medication right away — they wanted her to understand what her brain felt like in its natural state first, so she could develop her own tools.

"It's not a one size fits all. Just because that system works for other people doesn't mean you have to fit into that system."

Her daughter is 21 now. She's found her own dose, knows when she needs it, knows when she doesn't. Heather credits that to years of building self-awareness alongside the systems.

"She knows what her extremes and lows feel like — that she can now manage what it looks like in her adult life."

And Heather was honest about the hard parts too. The school moves. The fatigue cycles. The way her daughter will still bottle everything up and crash. She's not painting a picture of a fixed problem. She's painting a picture of an ongoing relationship with a brain that works differently.

"I'm always making sure not to make her feel guilty for her natural ebb and flow."

That sentence. I felt it.

The Quick Win She Brought to the Show

Every episode, we start with one thing you can do right now.

Heather's was this: before you leave your workspace at the end of the day, lay out your to-do list for tomorrow. On paper. Where you can see it. So when you walk in the next morning, the first thing you see is the first thing you need to do.

"Five minutes before I leave, make sure it's laid out and I'm set for the next day."

No app. No system. Just visibility. Because out of sight, out of mind is real — and working with that instead of against it is the whole game.

The Thing That's Stayed With Me

At one point in our conversation, I said something about explosions in my head — all these ideas constantly firing, businesses being built in my brain, branding and strategy and next steps just running on a loop.

Heather laughed. And then she said something I keep thinking about:

"I almost have to remember other people don't think like me. And then I'm like — okay, here's my brain. I'll help you."

That's what this work is. You've spent decades thinking something was wrong with you because your brain moves differently than the people around you. And it turns out, that's not the deficit. That's the thing you have to offer — once you stop burning it as fuel for overcompensation and start building a life designed around how it actually works.

Connect With Heather

You can find Heather everywhere at @HeatherSimco — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. Her website is heathersimco.com and her link tree has all the ways to work with her.

She's also hosting a three-day reset retreat in Naples, Florida, in October 2026, for high-driven moms who are ready to come out of the extremes and rebuild. If that's you, get on the waitlist now.

Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is built for the mom who looks like she has it together and is quietly exhausted. If that's you, you're in the right place.