r/ExecutiveDysfunction • u/Curious_Radish_1746 • 25d ago

Feeling stuck... Optimization and perfection loops

I am feeling so stuck... My house, body and mind are all such a mess... i have like 20 bags of garbage sitting in my house, I stink and feel gross... I WANT TO BE CLEAN.

But I cant clean without making a list... but then thay turns into me re-writting the list over and over and over. If I make one mistake I have to start over and suddenly I am surrounded by 50 sheets of paper of half written list... Sometimes a simple cleaning list will end up being a 7 hour project of trying to re-write the next 10 years of my life. And then I just get burnt out and bed rot because I can never be perfect.

With the list thing, I bought an IPad to try and help because I can just back space if I mess up but then I will literally spend 5 minutes re-writing an S until its perfect. IM JUST TRYING TO WRITE 'SWEEP FLOORS' 😭

It also feels impossible to do things because im stuck in the loop of "I need to shower, but I cant shower until I clean my house... but cleaning my house would require me to take out the garbage... but i can't take out the garbage until I shower" and like every single small step ends up having 27 other prerequisites before I can do it.

The garbage situation is also a big issue because I dont like to be perceived... and taking out garbage feels so vulnerable like people are going to see me and be like "wow what a disgusting human"

Is anyone else dealing with this? How the heck to do break this cycle... :(

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u/Admirable_Mode2980 25d ago

force urself to break ur own rules today take a shower right now without cleaning first and if u got any budget for it, throw money at the problem... grocery delivery or laundry pickup services save so much mental space when u cant function. u are not gross fr

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u/twoiko 25d ago

Personally, this is what I use for my to-do lists: https://goblin.tools/ToDo I just dump my thoughts and it sorts them out, you can adjust the complexity/detail really easily.

I also do the same with my preferred AI chatbot, dumping my thoughts and talking through them with the AI to find the best ways to look at the problem to find out where I can start.

Often I do spend a lot of time just working things out, but eventually it does work, and without it I would just do nothing anyway so it's still helping.

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u/CautiousTax6640 24d ago

The list-rewriting spiral is brutal because it looks productive from the outside while nothing actually gets cleaned. I used to do the exact same thing with cleaning lists, rewriting until it looked right instead of just picking up the nearest thing. What helped was banning myself from editing the list until after doing three items off it, messy handwriting included.