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.
"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)
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.
