Noice, Smort

Anger, fear, and frustration. People who struggle with executive function (as in, doing something on time) spend so long pressing this button long after it’s ceased functioning for a very good reason: It USED to work! It SOMETIMES works! It’s the technique How to ADHD calls “Hulk Smashing through the Wall of Awful”. Hoooowever. As well as the downsides How to ADHD mentions (that it damages your relationships and self-esteem), building up enough adrenaline to get something done is extremely costly to your body--when you invoke the body’s stress response, you’re diverting a lot of resources from normal healthy processing--and it gets less useful the more you use it. Your body loses its sensitivity to that level of stress and you need ever-increasing amounts of anger and fear and frustration and self-hatred to motivate yourself. If you use this method enough, you can eventually become completely desensitized to these emotions, and literally no amount of them will motivate you, and it can take months or years of low-stress living before your brain will begin to respond to them again.

I hit that point somewhere around year four of a 2-year Master’s degree program. It was Not Fun. (I just had a dream last night that I had to go back to Vancouver to finish an assignment I’d left undone or they’d take away my license to practice. I graduated half a decade ago.) 

So one thing that works for me is to think in terms of what we know about optimal productive experience, a concept in psychology called Flow:

Flow means hitting the sweet spot of something challenging and interesting enough that you want to do it, and that you feel you have the skills and ability to do.

So if you want to be able to do something, you need to adjust the parameters of that task to make it either easier, more challenging, more interesting, or less overwhelming, until you feel capable of doing it.

For people locked up in the realm of anxiety, that often means cutting your workload until it actually feels manageable--lowering your standards or decreasing the amount you’re expected to take on until you can start. Often once you’ve started, you feel more capable and can up the challenge level again, but it can be important to give yourself an on-ramp.

On the other hand, it may involve increasing the skills you bring to bear. You can cast around for any related skills, anything that it feels like you do easily or well, to help you out, or even just remind yourself that you’ve been skilled enough in the past to help your confidence.

If what you’re dealing with instead is apathy or boredom, then you may need to make something more of a challenge or more intrinsically interesting, until you have a reason to want to do it. This is why gamification of basic tasks, like Habitica, can be so successful.

For me, the goal I strive for is being able to reflect on how I feel about an experience and think, "Is this what I want to be doing? Do I like the way I'm doing it? Am I forgetting anything? Where will I go next?

That's moments like tonight when I was in a grocery store, distracted by the bulk nuts aisle, then realizing, "I don't need this. I'm being distracted." I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and reminded myself I didn't have to decide which type of nut was better or cheaper; trying to calculate that was overwhelming me when I needed to calm down and focus on my goals. I could remind myself of my budget, look at the cart and judge that it was already going to be heavy to carry home without adding more stuff, and called up my shopping list in the phone so I could walk away from the nuts and buy the one thing I needed before checking out. That's... not the kind of thing I was really capable of when I first went on ADHD meds.

Hyperfocus is just the flipside of inattention. It's still about being out of touch with the world as it's happening around you, and not aware of your own functioning or able to question or change how your attention is spent.

Flow, meanwhile... can mean figuring out that everything else is overwhelming, but you can bring your empty dishes to the kitchen. That today is going to be a potato day, so it might be time to stop doomscrolling through Twitter and pull out that new book you haven't read yet. It's just... finding a way to connect to where you are and what's going on around you, and being able to actually engage with it.

New Year, New Gifs Challenge Day 3 ● Comfort movie ● Enchanted (2007)

not once in the films 

do you think that’s a coincidence 

not on your life buddy