joy cometh with the morning

Attention Deficit

photo of cows in a field

The first time I had therapy, several years ago, I remember talking to my therapist, trying to slowly back into the problems I was facing and I found myself saying "I just want to fix whatever it is that's wrong with me." He replied, not unreasonably, "Why do you think there's anything wrong with you?" He was right inasmuch as that vague sense of wrongness wasn't the primary problem I was having at that time, but with the benefit of hindsight I think whatever answer I gave to him would have been in some way deficient. If I'd been in a position to listen to myself better, to get the other stuff out of the way, I might have been able to articular that I did feel like there was something wrong with me. In a way I couldn't put into words, I felt like I was somehow broken. For years and years, I felt like this. I tried to slow things down and work out what it was but I was never quite able to; there was something stopping me. All I knew is that there was something wrong with my capacity to do what I wanted to.

The trouble stemmed from my teenage years. I'd been a precocious little sod as a child: school work seldom a challenge, able to do all my homework at the last minute and be at or near the top of most classes. However, around sixth form my ability to just be able to show up and ace everything without trying took a nose-dive. In retrospect, the cracks were visible before—I had never been able to achieve results with quite the same ease in foreign languages (which required a certain level of focus and effort) as I had in everything else. My A-levels were all maths and science subjects, which required a greater level of consistent concentration than I'd had to apply previously, and it was a real struggle. I thought my natural ability had let me get away with not working hard in school and now I'd bumped up against the limits of what I could do without trying—which was sort of true, just not in the sense that I thought it was. Some part of it stuck, however; I beat myself up for years thinking I was lazy.

It continued in that vein: university was a blur of things-done-at-the-last-minute; I always finished the work but never quite in a way that satisfied me. There was always a sense that I was pushing against something, that this should all be so much easier. Getting a job saw things become relatively easy again, as the work was less mentally taxing—but that, if anything, was more tricky, as the lack of challenge meant a lack of impetus to do the work before the last minute. Mostly that was fine, and partially compensated for by the addition of more direct supervision for the first time since school, but any unanticipated problems and I'd be in a real jam.

For many years I continued like this. These were not years of unhappiness or lack of activity and achievement. My friends would probably tell you I am someone who likes to be busy. I've written hundreds of thousands of words, recorded hundreds of podcasts, performed music, organised political groups, run events, spoken at conferences, run courses, made things. I almost stood for elected office; I've started two businesses. When I was doing well, I could even believe that I wasn't lazy. But no matter how much I did, I always felt like I wasn't fulfilling my potential. In particular, anything that required deliberate focus seemed completely out of my grasp. The writing, for instance, was mostly blog posts; any attempts to write things longer tended to founder. Most of the time, if I can't fit it all into my head at once, I can't do it.

Then: some chance conversations, some articles linked to. I first read this post on Gekk in March 2019. It's saved in my Pinboard with the note "To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have ADHD but I do find some of the stuff in here an extremely good articulation of problems I’ve experienced." (If you ever find yourself thinking this, I would suggest you investigate further immediately!) I read this newsletter by Klint Finley when it was published in August of last year. Accompanying note in Pinboard: "the stuff here on adhd is pretty relatable and makes me think that maybe I could do with getting tested". But one of the tricky aspects (pointed out in a quote in the post) is that described in the abstract, a lot of ADHD symptoms sound very much like normal human behaviour. Difficult to focus on boring things, you say? Do tell! So I shelved the thought, again. Eventually, though, I read this Raptitude post. While reading it, I finally thought: you know what, I really should maybe look into this. And I did, and guess what? I do, in fact, have ADHD.

It did feel good, knowing that I wasn't broken, but rather different in a rather annoying way that would fortunately be amenable to treatment. The more I read, the more I found it explained all sorts of things I wasn't expecting: why I ate so much, particularly sugar (reliable source of stimulus!), why caffeinated drinks never seemed to give me the "kick" everyone talked about (insufficient source of (chemical) stimulus!). But suddenly, a lot of my brain was trying to unpick everything else about my to see what was "real". I think I do like being busy, but a lot of the why for that historically was subconsciously gaming the condition: if I'm doing a lot, it creates a constant low-level sense of anxiety, which spurs me to do things, whatever they might be. (What that means, regrettably, is that historically I only really feel like I'm at peak performance when I'm on the edge of burnout.) So much of my life has been trying to find tricks to help myself do things that most people don't even think about.

(This hopefully explains better a question that I ask myself in my darker moments: if I can do all this stuff, then where's the problem? The best description I've been able to come up with is reliability to myself. Unlike a lot of people with ADHD, I've never had a rep as being unreliable. I have created over the years a number of systems to ensure that I remember things that are told to me, that I perform tasks that are given to me, that I don't lose things. My perpetually-morphing to-do systems (there's a bit in the Gekk article linked above about that which describes this precisely, search the page for "Scorched Earth Effect) means I don't 'lose' things I want to do. Because of my deathly fear of letting people down, unless there's an absolutely impassable impediment, I always, always get something done if I tell someone I will. The trouble is, while I am externally reliable (the job will always get done), I am not internally reliable (I have little to no control over when I will be able to do the job). As you might imagine, this creates a significant amount of stress, also often I'll want to be doing something but find myself unable to do so.)

After diagnosis, treatment. The best way I can describe how the medication works is that before, when I tried to do something that was boring, uncomfortable or uninteresting, the voice of distraction, the part of me that wanted to do something else, exerted the strongest force on me—unless it ran up against greater forces, chiefly my fear of letting other people down or my fear of deadlines. The medication doesn't remove the voice of distraction, but reduces how loudly it can speak. I can choose to ignore it now. I think it also helps my emotional regulation. However, it's not actually the Limitless pill, and it turned out that I can still be distracted, bored, diverted from my intended task etc. Adam Mastroianni has written well about why maybe you should stop eating frogs. I, like him, find tremendous joy in writing—I've got a plan to integrate that a bit more into my job, too—but there are still a number of frogs that are required, in work and in life in general, and I've been trying to work out how to eat them with the least possible distress and fuss.

Things I Have Tried:

No Podcasts Before EOD

I've realised that podcasts—my constant in-ear companion since I got my first iPod at the age of 14 in 2007 and didn't have a credit card or any money to buy music to listen to—really put me in a distractible state that it's hard to shake out of. I've never really listened to podcasts while working, save when I've been doing the most brain-off work possible, but if the first thing I do is listen to podcasts, I'm habituating myself to expect constant stimulation—Andy Matuschak talks about something similar here. I don't want to stop listening to podcasts entirely—I just want them not to froth up my brain so much when I want a bit more tranquility. My compromise is that I don't listen to them until after 5pm, at which point I'm unlikely to get any good work done. How do I enforce this, you ask? Rigid personal discipline? Well, no.

Using Freedom

You've probably seen Freedom or similar things before—it's a content blocker that I tried a few years back, found wanting, but after reading Jay talking about it realised that it's now developed into being exactly what I wanted. I'm off social media, so that's not really a worry, but it lets me block Overcast until 5pm every day, and my brain appears to have gotten used to that pretty quickly, and doesn't kick off about it.

I think when I went into Freedom I thought I'd need some big complicated System for it. That's my tendency, making things like that. In fact, it's been remarkably simple: I pretty much just have two blocklists: one is the podcast one, which is on a timer, and the other is what I've called "ents and fiddles", which comprises my email apps, bank apps, newspaper and reader apps—if I notice myself getting distractible (picking up my phone and just tooling around with it for no purpose) I throw a 25-minute blocker on there, put it away and get on with something else.

I definitely have a tendency, if not otherwise checked, to be a Phone Idle Animation person—always on it flicking around doing nothing much of value if I'm deprived of stimulus for a second. Having blocked the active stimulus and having facility to block the more 'passive' things, it leaves me free to use my phone for the utility apps that are part of the reason that having a phone is actually useful.

The problem is, fundamentally, that you want to be able to use some of these things some of the time and not have them available for fiddling with them the rest of the time, but it can be a little difficult to determine beforehand which point of any way will be which time! My current solution requires that I trust myself to notice and act when I feel like I'm being distracted, but so far that's been something I've been able to do. It helps the whole thing feel less like a cage that I'm putting myself into and more like I'm just putting things out of reach for a bit while I'm doing something else. Thinking of it as artificially enforcing the kind of limits that would've been physically enforced prior is quite helpful.

Developing A Solid Routine

I've recently found myself with a set of routines—particularly my morning routine, that just click for me. They're effortful, obviously, but feel very light. They're not frogs to be eaten. The key components are: take tablets and drink water, go outside, stretch, meditate, do morning pages. There are various other 'bonus' bits that can fit around that, but that's the minimum viable routine that can be cut back down to if I'm ever short on time. It works, I've been able to do it pretty much every day for months now, and it clears my head and sets me up to do, in the words of Krusty the Clown, all the pathetic stuff I have to do.

Just Doing Stuff

I'm going to describe something that might sound like procrastination, but isn't, quite. Or possibly it is and I've had a different definition of procrastination than everyone else this whole time. There's a thing that happens when I encounter a task that, for whatever reason, I find uncomfortable. That is: I decide I need to think about it some more before doing it, then I think about it a bit, or maybe I don't. Either way, I don't do it, and I either add it to the list of things to do 'in a bit' or I push it back in my calendar.

I think the reason I want to distinguish this from the "oh I'll just do it later" of procrastination is the focus on needing more time to think about it. I'm putting it of, in theory for something. There are some things that generally require some thought—this is certainly a genus of task that exists—however usually when I'm thinking this, it's not true of that task. I've found it possible to tell when this is the case because for the tasks that do not, in fact, require more thought, I have an almost physical aversion to them; I'll look away from where the relevant email or Trello card is on the screen. They're also surprisingly amenable to the eat-the-frog, just have a go for five minutes-style methodology.

The same also goes for more involved processes. I had developed a habit, I realise, of not doing my thinking in the moment; of putting off the task of e.g. reading something with any depth until such a time as... I dunno, I had the capacity to think, I guess? That may, again, be necessary on occasion, but in general I'm not really 'saving my brainpower' for anything; I'm building up a big stack of things you'll never actually do anything with, for no good reason. If you read something and you really, truly can't engage with it, it's possible that I'm too tired—this happens!—but it's also possible that I do not understand it because I don't understand the subject well enough to just pick it up. Which is fine! Go and work on that subject some more until you can.

The thing I've realised is that this putting things off almost invariably leads to buildup, developing a backlog, which becomes corrosive to routine, to discipline, to just cracking on; it makes things feel like more of a chore because you feel like you've got to deal with everything at once, or once you've finished one thing you'll have to go through all the other things too, or replying to emails would invite a response which is more stuff to do, etc. I used to know a guy who worked in a very big company and whose workflow management seem to revolve around being really slow to respond to emails. I used to find it weird, until I realised that at times I've been guilty of falling into the same habit myself.

I've been trying to work with this as much as I can, and I think in the case of e.g. books or films or something it helps to think of things as a library rather than a backlog: something which may be selected from rather than something to be worked down. Tasks, especially work tasks, are different, of course, because for the most part you kinda have to do them (though it has been my experience that sometimes—more than you think—you actually don't). I'm just trying to explore this at the moment, but I think my main methods of attack for this are currently maintaining inbox zero—not letting communications build up, not being afraid of response—and making it a priority to keep my Anytime tasks fresh and do regular weekly/monthly clearouts. I don't think I'm 100% there—goodness knows I'm going to have a bit to clear through when I get back in tomorrow!—but it feels good just to have articulated the shape of the problem.

Discipline

The role of discipline in getting stuff done, I think, is misunderstood. A lot of people have realised that leaning on it too much can lend itself to a certain grit-your-teeth forced-ness that isn’t very pleasant or (long-term) very useful, so you get a lot of talk about acting entirely from volition or whatever.

The role of discipline, for me, is to assist in dysfunctional relationships between desire and enjoyment. It’s something akin to a catalyst in chemistry: something that can help lower the activation energy for something. Discipline what you apply to get you over the hump and into something that’s you want to do but for whatever reason are having trouble with; usually some kind of effortful fun, or something it takes you a while to enter flow with.

I might feel a bit lazy and not want to go for a jog: discipline can be applied useful here, as I’ll feel better once I'm doing so. If, however, I’ve got a stinking cold, forcing myself to go for a jog isn’t helping anyone—it's not for forcing you to do stuff you hate or that will make your situation worse. If I’m hemming and hawing between reading a book or watching Netflix, discipline will nudge me into at least cracking the book open.

You may need to deploy discipline more extensively—sometimes if you have a significant and complex goal or project, there might be a lot of uncertainty, skill development etc required, which can be uncomfortable and may require discipline to hold fast to—encountering new stuff can be 'continuously uncomfortable' in a way that makes it easy to look away. But things change as you’re in different state. Your day-to-day shouldn’t, necessarily, require all that much.