executive dysfunction is telling yourself for two and a half hours that you need to shower bc you smell like your workplace and you absolutely Cannot do Anything Else until you shower, doing Any Other Thing before showering is illegal!!! but you still haven’t for some reason??? you’ve just been sitting on your bed in a towel scrolling tumblr for 2+ hours thinking “I need to shower right now immediately” and growing increasingly frustrated that you are still not clean and you haven’t eaten or done your laundry either
ok actually no I’m reblogging this because a) I am clean now (and I smell amazing, thank you), and b) I had a heckin Realize and I wanted to share it with y’all in the hopes it’ll help someone else with a brain like mine.
I figured something out about myself a long time ago– it’s only just now occurred to me that I was in fact solving a problem caused by executive dysfunction, and I haven’t been implementing this solution lately because my brain went “that’s a relatively new term to me and therefore a Different problem that requires a Different solution”. thanks a lot, brain.
anyway, long long ago, before I knew these fancy schmancy Official words, the problem, as I phrased it to myself, was such:
sometimes I get Stuck. I was doing something, or on my way to doing something, and then… I just. got stuck.
“Stuck” looks like refreshing my feed or dashboard repeatedly. or it looks like staring at a spot on the wall. or chewing my fingernails. or picking at a stubborn sticker. all the while, my brain drifts through various unrelated topics I wouldn’t be able to recall if asked. sometimes I can get Stuck for hours before realizing I am Stuck. sometimes I get so Stuck that I go to bed that way (feeling especially bad for being unproductive) and I have to just reset everything by sleeping.
one day I asked myself, “why is this happening? why am I stuck, right now, at this moment in time?” the answer, as it turns out, was pretty simple: I was trying to make a decision, and I got distracted. I haven’t moved forward because I haven’t answered that one question or made up my mind.
let me rephrase this in terms of executive dysfunction: many people have expressed that it feels like knowing you need to do a thing but not feeling “ready” to do it. many with ADHD may also be familiar with the feeling of needing things to be “just so” before you embark on a task- you need your setup to look a certain way, or you need to set a timer, or have the right music playing, etc.
when I get Stuck it’s often because I got lost somewhere in that setting-up process, and my brain took the opportunity to nyoom off into Distraction Town.
getting myself Unstuck is solved, 95% of the time, by tracing my steps back to the original decision I was trying to make- often something small and inane- and then troubleshooting from there. (out loud! verbal processing is totally punk.)
- “what was I trying to do?”
- “was I trying to decide between two things?”
- (the answer’s usually yes.)
- “what were they?”
- “okay, let’s decide.
- “okay, that’s settled. let’s move on.”
- and then I am free as a bird to nyoom in the direction of The Thing I Wanted To Do All Along, in the amazingly disorganized, scattered, yet rapid-fire way that I do many things.
so!!! in the case of my first post, where I hadn’t showered for 2 hours? turns out I had been trying to decide what music to listen to in the shower. (another hack: my chances of getting Stuck while showering decrease by 75% if I have music playing to help me keep track of time.) I couldn’t immediately make up my mind, got lost in thought, got distracted, and drifted. once I stopped and asked- “why am I stuck?”- then I remembered- “oh yeah! I wanted to listen to music”- and then decided- “I want to listen to Daft Punk’s Discovery album”- I was finally heckin able to shower. and also eat, and also throw my clothes in the dryer.
and may I add I only zoned out once, during the slow part of “One More Time.” 😛
I’m not saying this is a foolproof method. sometimes I don’t have a reason for being stuck, and that’s okay! I’m also not saying this is how every adhd brain works. it’s just how my brain works, and I’m sure there’s at least a few who can relate. for those few, I hope this helps!!
a lot of people are reblogging the original post without the update and leaving frustrated comments and that makes me sad! if I can find ways to hack my brain than so can you! executive dysfunction is a real and frustrating challenge, but don’t buy the lie that there’s no way to work with it or around it!!!
!!!!
This sounds really useful and for some reason, I’m also really happy to find out that I’m not the only person who uses music to keep track of time
i got stuck in one shoe once for six hours. had the other shoe and sock right there, but just. doop de doo.
iirc in the end i just went “ok we don’t have to climb Mt. Put On Shoes. But let’s pick up that sock.” then i put on that sock, solemnly in the knowledge that the shoe was no longer a goal. Then the shoe went on, and had a laugh at how Mt. Shoe didn’t even see me coming.
getting stuck in a mudhole is a mofo. change gears to get out of the hole and do that, rather than thinking in terms of continuing to drive to your destination while in the hole. at least, that’s how i do it.
i can’t do Errand but i can sure as hell leave the house, and if i leave the house, eventually Errand will sneak up on me and i won’t have fretted myself to death about it for hours.
Tag: getting stuff done
I just explained my issues with executive dysfunction to my dad and holy shit he gets it!
I described it like this:
Imagine you’re back at AllPro(where he worked) with fifty phones and they’re all ringing. You want to answer them all because they’re all equal priority. That’s an environmental cue– phones are generally a ‘respond immediately’ cue.
Picking up a phone is a simple thing. You know it’s as easy as deciding which phone to answer and reaching out to pick it up, but your brain is saying “I must answer all of them!” The phones are ringing, and you can’t make your body reach out to pick one up because you don’t have fifty arms to reach out, you don’t have fifty ears to listen with, you don’t have a brain that can process and respond to fifty conversations and you don’t have fifty mouths that can all say different things all at the same time.
Either you do it all simultaneously or nothing will happen. You can want to do it so bad it makes you cry, and you can’t make a decision because no choice seems like the right one. So the task stays unfinished and you get frustrated every time somebody reminds you to “just do it, it’s not that hard!” Because yes, it really IS that hard.
Now, if you had somebody who could point to which phone to answer, you can do it fine. That’s a prompt. Prompting removes the ‘middle man’ thought that says ‘do it all at once’ and gets you to focus on tasks one at a time instead of seeing them as some towering insurmountable mess.
Dad looked at me for a couple of seconds and said something to the effect of, “I didn’t know doing things were that hard for you.”
This is a major, major, major breakthrough between us because dad had it in his head that I left things messy because I didn’t care. While that’s crappy of him to assume, teaching him how that’s not the case and having him really understand it is a huge deal.
okay I’ve never been able to articulate this at all thank you so much for putting words to feelings
You gotta have a plan…
This is the mist motivational and inspiring thing I’ve seen all goddamn week
This is incredible.
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