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natatorialremnants
@natatorialremnants
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

idk if it's exactly the same thing, but the problem I've experienced - and I don't really know how to put this in a way that doesn't sound demeaning, but trust that I am literally describing how my brain seems to work, based on the only evidence i have - is that I do not have the ability to "fool myself." i am, to put it plainly, too smart for my own good.

you know when you shake a feather behind a box, and the cat jumps through the box instead of just, going around to grab the feather? but then some cats understand that the feather is actually outside the box and they don't need to stuff their big soft face through a hole and look like a disgusting gremlin in their attempts to reach it? i feel like cat #2

i must point out that cat #2 does not have any fun, in this scenario. instead of wildly pawing at a thing they can't reach and having a grand old time playing, they just walk around the box and go "uh, it's right there" and lay down like a stuck up little asshole who's too good for your generous attempt to entertain them.

I feel like people who can develop good habits have brains that just accept what they're told. Like, not in a "you're gullible" sense, but in a "your godforsaken meat computer respects the instructions you give it, instead of acting like a petulant know-it-all kid who knows they're ahead of their class and thinks it means they get to skip straight from childhood to adulthood without any of the scut work in between."

I wish something like "set your clock 10 minutes late so you'll always be early to things" would work for me. It does not; the exact millisecond that I institute that policy, my brain turns to me and goes "I just started subtracting ten minutes from everything. Can we not... you know, do this?" It's response to every single thing I try is "do you think I'm stupid over here? I can see that the feather is attached to the string. I can see your hand moving it."

When you form "good habits," and when you try to create "systems," you're creating an outside authority, something bigger than your id. You tell yourself, "let's make a system where I write down everything I need to do on a post-it, and then I update the post-its, and then I can just look at them to see what needs doing."

This works for a couple days. In that time, you are letting the post-its police your behavior. They are in charge - you believe, for that period, that if it isn't on a post-it, I can't do it.

This works until you need to make an exception. You need to do something that's not on a post-it, something emergent, or a little convenience item that isn't worth walking over to wherever the post-its are, filling one out, going and doing the thing, and coming back two minutes later and crossing it off.

Whoops!

The system is now powerless. You have stripped it bare, you can see how naked it is, you can see that it never had any power at all, and you will never fucking respect it again. Your brain goes "post-it? what, you're still doing that? do you still believe in santa claus too?"

Is it ADHD? Is it something comorbid? Do I just have oppositional defiant disorder towards everything including myself? I don't know and it wouldn't matter if I did; the effect is that there is a voice in my head mocking every solution I try to create, as soon as it's revealed to be voluntary. Fuck that, it says; I know more than a pile of post-its or a kanban or a set of personal guidelines you created for me to follow. I'm smart, says the id, and I don't need any of that bullshit.

It's Scorched Earth Syndrome because you leave a trail of these broken, incinerated systems behind you, failed plan after failed plan. And every time you feel worse about it, because you remember how nice things were the last time, when the system was working. The post-its were wonderful! They fixed so many problems! You had a couple of the lowest-stress days of your life with them, until the moment they began feeling like preschool baby blocks that were being imposed on you by some demeaning third party.

As I wrote in my article six or seven years ago, I say again now: I have no advice. Knowing what the problem is didn't help me solve it and I still haven't figured anything out.


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

"just start doing the thing for ten minutes, only ten minutes and you can stop. You'll find that you usually end up doing the thing for way longer than that!"

thanks, but my brain is not stupid and it knows I'm hoping to do the thing for longer, so it just won't do the thing

Actual advice about "scorched earth syndrome:"

Embrace it.

Meaning, you did the thing for a few days or weeks (months, if you're lucky) until the system collapsed around you. The reason you did the thing is probably (partly) because of novelty. Enthusiasm for novelty carried you those first few days until you got into the "groove" of it. Then a single obstacle derailed you and you can't start again because... now you know it's not infallible and it's no longer novel enough for you to want to start again.

Try a different thing, explore the novelty of the new thing, until it fails, then move on to something else. Post-its stop working? Start a planner. You stopped using it? Get a whiteboard. Marker ran out? Download a new app.

The trick is to stick to things that have very little "set-up" time, otherwise you waste all that novelty on setting up the thing instead of using it.

"Isn't this trying to trick yourself into doing the thing?" Nah, I'm fully aware that I will drop the thing at the first opportunity. But for now I can customize the app to be my favorite shade of purple, and I got this sheet of holographic stickers for my journal, and my stack of post-it notes is in pastel colors, and I started doodling a thing in the corner of the whiteboard, and...

You get the idea. I know the novelty won't last, but I still enjoy it. And a few days of being on top of my shit are still good, even if they are not permanent.

So, basically, you'll still leave a trail of collapsed systems behind you, but like, on purpose.

(Admittedly, accepting this cycling of systems as not a failure is hard. We're used to all the adhd advice being about achieving neurotypical standards, even couched in self-acceptance vocabulary. In this case, I have no advice to stick to a system because that's the neurotypical standard and... it's not one I will ever achieve. Now my standard is to minimize the "downtime" between systems, but switching them often is a given)


smallcreature
@smallcreature

this might be hard on a different part of your brain, but accepting that you're a cyclical person and going all in in that direction can feel so good. It's an entire new set of skills to notice a routine isn't working for you anymore and then change it, but it's made my life so much easier.

And it's not just about cycling between methods of organization, either. My hobbies are cyclical, too. Like op learning Japanese. And the important thing to remember is that everything you've already done, you've already done. If you do want to pick japanese back up after three years, learning all the kanas again will be faster (trust me, I've been there). Maybe these three weeks brushing your teeth impeccably helped delay your next visit to the dentist, even though you've fallen off for now. These three days when you felt on top of everything probably helped you sleep better for a little bit and catch up with some of your fatigue.

It's just the same for the periods of in-between, too. I just spent a week doing Nothing Important and I was NOT happy about it, but I know that I need those from time to time to built a want to do something again. Some of these things might just be me, I don't believe every adhd brain is the same, maybe some of you DON'T need to cycle between things, but I at least wanted to share my experience.


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in reply to @natatorialremnants's post:

This is a very exact description of the problem I have too, sans the specific scenarios of course. I've gone through life with other people telling me I'm just lazy or maybe I don't actually care about the things I keep procrastinating, but the problem is it's EVERYTHING. I don't attempt to start projects anymore if it's not something I can finish in one or two sittings because I WILL barely start some notes and then oops it's no longer consuming space inside my head anymore so I've entirely forgotten about it.

I'm guilty of the 'not being able to brush every day' too 😅When I was in school, I just completely stopped taking care of myself because of depression, and now that I realize how completely screwed up that was, and am trying to reverse it, it's like I can't stay on the habit for long. It becomes mentally painful to continue.

I've watched an ADHD video that described motivation as like a full bridge at first, but over time as you continue with the thing you lose more and more planks. Until eventually, you're stuck in the middle of the bridge. That definitely applies to me where motivation's concerned.

I have this trouble as well.

A few things that have helped me, and I hope helps others:

-External Cooperation: If available, getting someone to do or structure systems with you can be a life saver. A gym partner, someone to brush your teeth directly after every morning, someone to send mirror selfies to to prove you brushed your hair, whatever.

-Internal cooperation: More of a mindset. A lot of times I find myself struggling with the above issues of respect for a system/seeing the system as authoritative. It's become a lot easier when I treat systems primarily as things to iterate on, like tools I'm crafting. If I'm making an oath to myself (do things off the postits), I need to find the places in which there are reasonable exceptions and allow for them in the text; no text contract is going to be perfect. "I'll do things off the post-its except for in dire or emergent need, and I'll record on the post-its my justification and review it." Is one such iteration. The text will be longer but its not like anyone but you needs to read it. "For two weeks, after which I'll stop for three days and review." is another such iteration! etc. When systems fail (and they do!) I normally get relatively caught up and excited on what I could have done better and what I can do next time.

-Contract Knowledge: Touched on above, but my goal when making an oath to myself is that the oath should be Achievable, Binding, and Changeable. Achievable means they should be able to be completed and then you win. You get a reward maybe, but it ends regardless. You want this to happen. Binding means that, once you're in it, you ONLY get the exceptions to it you set up originally (except three days this month of my choosing, not when sick, not when guests are over, etc~) and if you mess that up you've LOST. You gotta record how you lost and then suffer it out and move to iteration phase, or scuttle and iterate immediately. Changeable means that the entire thing should be modular. You want bits and pieces you can move around and alter, levers that you can easily change. I find:
"I'll (do action) for (x time limit) every (triggering event) so long as (contextualizing information), unless (escape clause one). Additionally (overarching escape clause, exclusion days, what-to-do-if-you-fail)." makes a really good starting contract to work with. Just fill it in however.

Hope that helps someone :3

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

the world is already a system, of which I am a subset, undifferentiated except by ego. anything I build around me is more of the system that is "me" than there was before

I am unsure if you would like advice, but if so here is a gist of what I did for this

basically the name of the game is to work with the flow and opposition instead of trying to "tackle" or "cure" or "fight" the gremlin brain. our brains fundamentally do not work like most, so the advice for them just will not work, willpower will not work.

an off the cuff example was I was having difficulty waking up on time, so I started placing my headphones / laptop near my bed, so now it isn't "I have to drag myself out of bed to go to work in two hours" it's "if I wake up I can, right now, put on a youtube series I like". our brains hunt for novelty and struggle to conceptualize time, so "we have to leave in a few hours" is nothing, there's no dopamine there, ya know? instead I found a reason to leave bed on time that has novelty and immediacy as the reward. it's a million tiny changes like that.

I remember that thread fondly, because it was the most visceral depiction of an unidentified struggle I've had my whole life. The last piece in the puzzle that upon completion, read: "Oh Fuck, I Have Undiagnosed ADHD." Or, as you've said here, it could be a comorbidity or whatever. I also heavily suspect I've got a Pathological Demand Avoidance profile of autism, so who knows where it ties in. Doesn't really matter, I get it.

Like yourself, I've not found a useful solution but can't say I've been looking for one either. Got myself an actual ADHD diagnosis and stimulant treatment a couple of years ago, and while that doesn't help me with long-term structure it's definitely been a lifechanger for my day-to-day functionality. So uh, thanks for raising that flag that clicked everything into place. You're still killing it 👍

I'm sort of despondent that the best advice I can give (in general, not this case) is with every planning system, my big weakness is it's too much because I Need To Be Doing The System Or It Wont Work (but it still will) -- smaller changes that are easier to adopt make them stick more for me, and then I can build off from there. But trying to adopt something whole cloth makes it rly hard. But that's not new advice, that's the same advice everyone gives for ADHD. There's literally no good solution and it's so frustrating, because the researchers are about three decades ahead of the psychiatrists.

It sucks and i wish I had better to give people outside of "read these two books, they might help, they helped me but not enough"

I've found checklists do help, but that's because of my bad memory

but i also just scorched earth early. Learn the lessons I can from a failing system and then move to another. Really doesn't help the wallet, but.

for ADHD (all of these are on Audible):

  • Laziness Does not Exist (from the author of Unmasking Autism, mostly pointing things out and saying 'this is you it's not a thing to fight or a failing' and then going into the research. Written by someone in the community, but who also has a PhD. Bridges a good gap between research and community Veers into a screed against capitalism, which is cool but I wish it wasn't padding the book. Some pretty good strategies to redirect things instead of fighting them. Def gave me a better outlook on some of my things, even though I'd been actively working on my ADHD for decades before reading it.
  • You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy? written by authors from the community, and not researchers. It's all over the place and perhaps needs a stronger editor, and suffers from being rewritten in 2006 instead of more recently, but it's still worthwhile imo. Also one of the few places I've heard anyone outside of psychiatric research discuss the thing where many ADHD people are desensitized to specifically oral sex for some reason.
  • honorable mention to Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, it wasn't helpful to me but it did give me a good breadth of systems to try and fail at, which gave me a great idea of what did and didn't work

for Autism:

  • Unmasking Autism, one of the best books for "look, here are all the different ways your brain works, here's how to help some of them, and here's how to understand it better". As someone who's been in online autistic and autistic-led-research spaces for years, it had new things even for me. Highly, highly recommended read

Thanks for this! I already have Laziness Does not Exist, and I've heard about Unmasking Autism, but I've never heard about the rest.

many ADHD people are desensitized to [...] oral sex for some reason

what

Hmm. yeah. yeah this. my brain usually just understands that a lot of what i try to set a goal and accomplish doesn’t actually need to be accomplished by a date or anything and there’s so much leeway that any deadline or habit I try to set is about as solid and meaningful as a roll of toilet paper in the ocean. Especially intermediate chunking deadlines in the face of a bigger one, so I get big anxiety about the bigger one while failing the mid ones. Only thing that has been effective is being decisive about “when i feel like doing some of this naturally, i Need to”. It really doesn’t help that when i get into a minor groove of, say, getting out of bed earlier, i lapse sooner than later and find that it really didn’t improve my wellbeing very much. But ‘growth is a spiral, not a circle, and even though I return to the same patterns, I will eventually break free.’

I mean, i want to believe that last quote to be an inevitable truth of some kind, but at this point having lived with 28 years of ADHD and autism i'm really not sure breaking free is ever truly achievable. maybe it is and i'm just being pessimistic, but i havent seen anything to prove the contrary

your godforsaken meat computer respects the instructions you give it, instead of acting like a petulant know-it-all kid who knows they're ahead of their class and thinks it means they get to skip straight from childhood to adulthood without any of the scut work in between.

oof ow owie

Yeah that's. That's it, huh.

I can't remember to take my meds. Alarms don't work, putting it in an obvious place doesn't work, having snacks to eat with them doesn't work, Habitica (therapist's suggestion) felt almost insulting. Then the doctor asks why I'm not taking them, I say for the millionth time that my memory sucks and all the reasons why previous things failed after a week, and get told to try harder.

Maybe if my goddamn brain could do its basic functions I wouldn't need to try tricking it, did it ever think of THAT

in reply to @smallcreature's post:

Good point that this is for hobbies and projects as well!

And you are so right, identifying when a thing is not working and you want to move on is a learnable skill.

Also I needed to hear the thing about "doing nothing" periods, because I still struggle with feeling like crap about them:sixty: