We’ve all seen the meme. Can anybody relate? I genuinely feel like a permanently exhausted pigeon most days. I don’t get up early unless I have to (bar the 7.30am wake-up call for breakfast from the cats, of course!) and I can’t seem to stay up late a lot of the time either — although there’s the occasional stint of 3am bed-times when my housemate and I start watching a series of some sort.
Which leads me to wonder whether or not this is something I can change. If I were to start getting up earlier, would I be more productive? Or would I just procrastinate until my ‘normal’ wake up time then start my day from there?
I feel like it’s the latter and I can thank ADHD for that. If that’s the case, how can I combat it? How can I convince myself that doing things will actually be good for me, when all I really want to do is sit down with a puzzle book, a cat or two on my lap, and the telly on for no reason other than to have some sort of background noise (that I can intermittently look up to and watch at my leisure)?
It’s a difficult one. For me, anyway. I know plenty of people whose answer would simply be ‘just do it!’
Oh. Of course! How silly of me. It’s that easy, isn’t it? No. No it’s not and I wish I could find a way to explain why. But I can’t. So I’ll ramble on, as I often do, instead.
If it were simply a case of ‘just doing it’ then I wouldn’t be asking how. If it were simply a case of ‘just doing it’ there wouldn’t be a problem to begin with, would there? It’s the same as people telling me to ‘cheer up!’ when I’m depressed. ‘What have you got to be depressed about, there are plenty of others out there worse off than you’.
Do people really think that’s going to help someone feeling so incredibly low? Of course it’s not. If anything, for me anyway, it makes me feel worse. It makes me feel even more worthless than I already do. It makes me feel guilty for feeling sad when I have a roof over my head, food on the table and friends around me for support.
I think I, as well as many others, have said it before: you can be the richest person in the world, with everything you could ever want, and still feel lonely and depressed. It’s not about the material things. It’s a mental health condition. Mental. Health. The health of your mind.
The brain is a weird and wonderful thing, isn’t it? The myth that we only use 10% of it is quite intriguing (and makes for a great movie plot — ‘Lucy’ and ‘Limitless’ being the first two to come to mind — hah! mind… 🤣) and I wish it was true that we could access more of it with a pop of a pill, but as those films also suggest: it definitely wouldn’t end well.
Added to that the number of different personalities and morals we all portray and carry, using every part of our brains all at once would likely have detrimental effects on humanity (even more so than the detrimental effects humanity itself has on… well… itself…)
So how can I train my brain to react differently to things when ADHD has such an impact on every single thing that I do and think?
How can I train a brain so comfortable with feelings of self-doubt, anxiety and depression? A brain so set on being as destructive as possible without even registering to me, its host, that it’s happening?
You can give me all the tips you want, and some of them I’ll really want to try (I’ve found loads here on Medium!) but if I can’t motivate my brain to actually do these things to begin with, I’m still stuck in the same position, aren’t I?
The easiest way for me to do anything at the moment is to wait for the hyperfocus to kick in. Once that’s switched on I can do anything. It doesn’t mean I’ll finish what I’m doing, though. I can be absolutely determined to finish a task and find myself so incredibly focused on it for the longest time, only to be snapped out of it in an instant by something as little as a misinterpreted comment from a friend or peer.
I could be sat here writing the best post I think I’ve ever written and be completely turned around by someone simply saying “Oh, you’re still writing?” If the tone implies anything negative, that’s enough for me to spiral in to despair and convince myself that what I’m doing is pointless. ‘I’m taking too long’. ‘I should have finished by now’. ‘I’m writing too much’. ‘This isn’t interesting…’ yadda, yadda, yadda…
It’s okay though, because once the hyperfocus kicks in again I completely forget how crap I thought I was and find that random confidence in what I was saying to smash that Publish button with gusto!
I just wish I didn’t have that time in between where I completely doubt myself and everything I’m thinking and saying.
Being a permanently exhausted pigeon has its drawbacks but the ADHD hyperfocus saves me sometimes, so I’m grateful for that.
Now all I need to do us harness that focus and use it to destroy the rest of the things that make things so difficult. I want to say goodbye to emotional dysregulation, zoning out, forgetting everything — be it things from a day ago or things I’m actively thinking about in the moment.
I want to destroy remembering insignificant things from the past and allowing those things to affect me in the present, interrupting people, that god-damned shouty thing I do, brain fog, talking/thinking too fast and mixing my words up, tantrums, difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts, intrusive thoughts, freezing on the spot, sleeping all day to avoid actual life, staying awake all day so I don’t miss out on life, the list is actually so contradictory and apparently endless that I’ll stop it there, but hopefully you get what I’m trying to say…
Easy, right? Still nope. But writing about it helps, and I really needed to write this today. So I’m glad I’ve done it (thanks again, hyperfocus!)
And so I ask you, my lovely readers:
Do you struggle with the same thoughts and struggle to process everyday life and tasks? Is there anything that actually works, straight away, when you need it to?
The only thing that comes to mind for me is that if it’s for someone else — I can do whatever it is without a second thought. I’ll still be scared, anxious and all the rest of it, but it’ll benefit someone else so it has to be done. People-pleasing at its finest, amiright? Perhaps I really should start wanting to please myself a little more? But we all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon, don’t we 😂
I have to laugh at myself when I think things like that — I know what I need to do it’s just doing it that’s the problem. As always, maybe getting this diagnosed officially will be the answer to all my problems. And one day soon I’ll be able to announce that I’ve made the phone call that will lead me to that end result. But today is not that day.
Let me know what you think in the comments. I’d love for us all to be able to help each other through the ups and downs that is life with ADHD.
Until next time,
KD x