aka why tf am i procrastinating on The Thing (more like a flowchart, actually)
lots of people who have executive function difficulties worry about whether they’re procrastinating on a task out of laziness/simply wanting to be a jerk or mental struggles. this checklist might help you figure out which it is at any given time! (hint: it’s almost never laziness or being a jerk.) (obligatory disclaimer: this is just what works for me! something different might work better for you.)
1) do I honestly intend to start the task despite my lack of success?
yes: it’s a Brain Problem. next question
no: it’s shitty to say one thing & do another. better be honest with myself & anyone expecting me to do the task.
2) am I fed, watered, well-rested, medicated properly, etc?
yes: next question
no: guess what? this is the real next task
3) does the idea of starting the task make me feel scared or anxious?
yes: Anxiety Brain. identify what’s scaring me first.
no:next question
4) do I know how to start the task?
yes:next question
no: ADHD Brain. time to make an order of operations list.
5) do I have everything I need to start the task?
yes: next question
no: ADHD Brain lying to me about the steps again, dangit. first task is ‘gather the materials’.
6) why am i having a hard time switching from my current task to this new task?
i’m having fun doing what i’m doing: it’s okay to have fun doing a thing! if task is time-sensitive, go to next question.
i have to finish doing what i’m doing: might be ADHD brain. can I actually finish the current task or will I get trapped in a cycle? does this task really need to be finished?
the next task will be boring/boring-er than the current task: ADHD brain. re-think the next task. what would make it exciting? what am I looking forward to?
I might not have enough time to complete the task: ADHD brain wants to finish everything it starts. (if task is time-sensitive, go to next question)
i just want to make the person who asked me to do it angry: sounds like anxiety brain trying to punish itself, because I know I’ll be miserable if someone is angry at me. why do i think I deserve punishment?
no, I seriously want to piss them off: okay, i’m being a shithead
7) have I already procrastinated so badly that I now cannot finish the task in time?
yes: ADHD brain is probably caught in a guilt-perfection cycle. since I can’t have the task done on time, i don’t even want to start.
reality check: having part of a thing done is almost always better than none of a thing done. if I can get an extension, having part of it done will help me keep from stalling out until the extension deadline. i’ll feel better if I at least try to finish it.
no, there’s still a chance to finish on time: ADHD brain thinks that I have all the time in the world, but the truth is I don’t.
reality check: if i’m having fun doing what I’m doing, I can keep doing it, but I should probably set a timer & ask someone to check on me to make sure I start doing the task later today.
8) I’ve completed the checklist and still don’t know what’s wrong!
probably wasn’t honest enough with myself. take one more look.
if I’m still mystified, ask a friend to help me talk it out.
hope this helps some of you! YOU’RE DOING GREAT SWEETIE DON’T GIVE UP ON YOU
Hi! I have decided to make this masterpost, putting in one place everything that I have found ADHD – related!
For some links, I have listed some of the things you can find there, choosing those that I thought were the most useful, but check the whole site because everything is great!
Social networks! Use facebook to find support groups and pages, use Tumblr to connect with others like you and use Twitter to find out about new articles and resources with the tag #adhd!
Thats it! Hope you have found this mp useful, feel free to add things!
as a kid i’d always have random headaches ‘out of nowhere’ and no medical professional ever had any idea what was up with that. then i learned that adhd brains are terrible when it comes to overstimulation and everything suddenly made sense
huh? can you explain? i have pretty bad adhd and near constant headaches and no one told me theyre related until now!
my last therapist specialized in adhd and she told me that headaches are common with adhd because of our brain filters being so messed up. you know, all the stimuli is coming at us all at once usually unless in a state of hyperfocus. and yeah, that can have a pretty bad effect on you and give you frequent headaches
can’t do it because im bored and nothing is interesting
can’t do it because im overwhelmed and im one slightly dissapointed glance away from crying for the next week
can’t do it because this one thing has had my full entire attention for the past three days and i think ive gotten two hours of sleep in that time and my blood has been replaced with coffee
imo the cause of rejection sensitive dysphoria in adhd people is: all your life it’s just a fact at any given moment you have fucked up probably three or four things? and knowing about them won’t help you not fuck them up again next time. so when you’re called on it it’s like welp, here we go again, back into the shame pit. there’s nothing you can do to keep it from happening.
like maybe if people understood that sometimes my brain just does not fucking work, i wouldn’t have developed that response. but even now people think you should be able to stop being cognitively disabled by trying harder, and back when i was a kid it was just called Being A Bad Child. so by the time i got diagnosed and medicated and started to laboriously learn how to have some measure of control over my life, the reflex was already ingrained.
so even though i know that when seebs scolds me for spending money on phone games, it’s no biggie, and nothing bad’s going to happen, my danger-avoidance reflex or whatever is already going “ok so you need to figure out how to eat and stay warm on the street tonight because you’re getting kicked out” and no matter how much i tell my brain NUH UH NOT REAL it won’t listen to me.
cuz in the past, all too often, the catastrophe WAS real. the gentle scolding from a teacher DID mean i was going to fail the class. the tsk of disapproval from an acquaintance DID mean i was social kryptonite forevermore. and to make it all so much worse, the descent was going to be slow and painful. i would see myself failing at every hurdle, and every time, these people would be freshly disappointed, because they were absolutely convinced that if i cared i could stop fucking up. and there goes me, down the dune into the sarlacc, caring so much i couldn’t sleep or eat properly, repeating the whole way down, “i must not care enough, i need to care more, it’ll be all right if i just care more!”
result: i now instantaneously care so horribly much about every tiny hint that i might’ve fucked something up that i lose the ability to function on a biological level.
Meaning that it might not be a symptom of adhd at all, but rather a symptom of comorbid, marginalization-based cptsd? That sounds distressingly plausible, and like something the experts really ought to look into — if they haven’t already. If anyone knows of any literature on this, I would be interested in seeing it.
If someone says something that you only partially understand:
DON’T ask for clarification with a generic “What?” or “I’m sorry?” (In my experience, people will repeat the phrase the exact same way without helping you to understand).
Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “What?”
Them: “Do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “I’m sorry, what?”
Them (annoyed): “Do you like pahganabasa?”
Instead, DO repeat the part that you did understand, and substitute a “What?” for the unintelligable part.
Example:
Them: “Hey, do you like pahganabasa?”
Autistic Person: “Do I like what?”
Them: “Pineapple pizza?”
Autistic Person: (Understands the words!)
I’ve also had successes with “I’m sorry, I only heard the first half of that sentence,” or actually verbalizing my interpretation of the part I heard incorrectly as a question: “Pahgana… basa?”.
Sometimes that makes the speaker think that they might be mumbling, or verbalizing in a way that makes them difficult to understand (because there are times it’s really not your brain–it’s their mouth).
This is also a lifesaver if you have Auditory Processing Disorder. It stopped the amount of annoyed sighs because ppl thought I was deliberately ignoring them or them saying the same thing but louder (which does not help when volume isn’t the problem)
I do this a lot- I have really shit auditory processing and ADHD, and we often get sensory issues. I have to be on the phone a lot for work and my auditory processing isn’t good enough for me to really deal with phones. I’ve def done the repeating thing a lot.
Customer: “Do you have the green car with the akj;ldfjksal;fjda?” Me: “The green car with… the flux capacitor or the mobile pizza oven?” Customer: “The pizza oven!” Me: “Okay cool! Yeah, we’ve got that, and in lime green too!”
Makes my life a zillion percent easier, especially since phones add an even worse layer of difficulty to my words-to-brain lag time.
adhd culture is getting an idea/thinking of something while u scroll thru ur dash but continuing to scroll so u have to scroll like 6 posts up to pick up ur earlier thoughts again bc suddenly u’ve forgotten
if you give me a task with no deadline i will literally never do it but if you give me a deadline i will get it done exactly 1 hour before the deadline even if the deadline is in six years
god dammit my tags got cut off AGAIN I’m hitting the tag limit on like every post lately, I really need to work on that
Anyway I went on to say that there are 5 major executive functions of the human brain. These are the ‘higher functions’ that really distinguish between a human brain and that of any other animal. We have added intelligence on top of that, but these are the functional abilities our brains have that the rest of the animal kingdom does not have on a a structural level. There are 5 of them. ADHD affects all 5. And none of them are actually ‘attention’ (the closest function to anything that can reasonably be called ‘attention’ is what’s called Working Memory, which is your brain’s ability to hold a specific task in mind to come back to it; distractions are inevitable, but a healthy brain will hear a phone ring, look up, and remember to go back to what it was doing before. An ADHD brain will hear the phone riBANG ALL MEMORY OF THE CURRENT TASK IS GONE. ADHD brain looks up, sees the name on the caller id, oh it’s an unknown number, oh it’s probably some political pollster, oh man this year’s election is just awful I can’t believe people are supporting that angry cheeto. Oh cheetos I’m hungry I should go make a snack. What kind of snacks do we have? Did I remember to buy cereal at the store the other day? What about dog food? Oh my god I forgot to let the dog back in the house this is why I should have gotten a cat. Oh my friend sent me a great cat video earlier I should watch that. AND GUESS WHAT YOU NEVER GO BACK TO WHAT YOU WERE DOING BECAUSE THE STRUCTURE IN YOUR BRAIN THAT SUPPORTS RETURNING TO A PARTIALLY COMPETED TASK DOES NOT EXIST THE WAY IT DOES FOR A NORMAL HEALTHY BRAIN. This is why even if you start a task well before a deadline you can’t keep to it until it’s been completed; the consequences of it being done MUST be more compelling than everything else in the immediate environment for the brain to see it. No matter how much time you give yourself to complete the task, if you have ADHD it will take you 100% of that time, every time, which is why having ADHD actually TEACHES YOU to put things off, because it’s the only way to shorten the total time actually spent completing the task – the disorder rewards you for self-destructive behavior because it’s the only way you can get things done at all, and you end up living in a permanent state of extreme stress, hopping from one emergency deadline to the next even though you hate yourself for it every single time). The disorder has been horribly named in a way that trivializes just how serious and life-ruining it actually is.
ADHD is a very, very serious disorder and the pop psych/common understanding of it makes it seem HORRIBLY trivial compared to the real damage it actually does to people’s lives.
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…ohhh…
This is both fascinating and… possibly slightly alarming.
Make sure you pick up the latest editions since our understanding of ADHD/ADD has changed a lot since those were first published.
If anyone needs further books recs or help finding specific resources, feel free to IM me or send me an ask. I’m not totally up to date on current stuff, but I’ve had my diagnoses for almost 30 years and totally count as experienced old fart now. XD
I'm a defeatist but I don't have to be 