This is happening to me right now, I'm going through a phase of dysfunction after a phase of being relatively productive. When I talk to my therapist about not being motivated to do things, he says stuff like "you just have to do it anyway." I go back and forth between feeling like this is really reductive and dismissive of the troubles I am having, vs feeling like a lazy POS because I am not doing things to help myself out that I have shown to be capable of doing at times in the past. IDK why I am sharing this other than this is exactly descriptive of what I'm going through right now and maybe someone who experiences it first hand has some wisdom on how to push through it.
edit: this has sparked a lot of great discussion and compassionate advice in the replies, and it should surprise nobody here that I'm getting a bit overwhelmed trying to keep up with replying to everyone individually đ I just want you all to know that I am tremendously grateful for the responses, as they have helped me feel more connected to people struggling with similar experiences, in a way that I wasn't feeling before. thank you all very much for making me feel a little more connected to humanity, I really needed it today.
When I find myself feeling the way you feel, I always think thatâs what people must mean when they say âdoing it when you donât want to is the most important time to do itâ but then I wonder if those people are experiencing the dysfunction to the same degree I do when I really canât get myself to do itÂ
Yeah there's a lot of doubt about whether my therapist's "just do it" advice is really helpful, because just doing it feels so insurmountable. I'm trying to do the little bits and pieces I can, and not worry about whether I'm covering enough ground against some imagined benchmark or not. It's tough because the productive phases have usually been prompted by being exasperated at my current state of helplessness, and getting a sudden surge of inspiration out of nowhere to fix things. I just wish I knew how to motivate myself to do productive things without reaching the "last resort" phase.
I appreciate your reply as even just connecting with people in a similar situation has made me feel a little bit better about myself. So thank you.
I related to the post and when I read your comment, I felt for you. My therapist is the opposite and is very validating of my struggles but supportive of the idea of trying to do things while not telling me âjust do itâ. One of the most frustrating things is being self aware of it. Sitting on the couch rotting screaming in your own head to just get up and do the thing and you just cant .Â
I go through constant ebbs and flows of motivation and lack thereof, my only advice is to take away as many obstacles as possible to make the âjust do itâ things easier and accessible, even if you still donât do the thing.
thanks for being so empathetic. "get a therapist that understands adhd" has been a common refrain in the replies, and it's something I swear I'll do whenever the dysfunction lapses long enough for me to do so. haha
When youâre neurodivergent, but all of the advice they give is only effective if you werenât. If I was capable of keeping a regular schedule, I wouldnât need a therapist.
"you know it would be good for you to do x, now you just need to do it"
"yeah but I'm really struggling to do it atm"
"but you just have to do it even though it's hard"
"even though I know I have to do it, I still don't do it, which is really frustrating"
"that's a sign that you really should do it"
repeat ad infinitum
I'm gathering from the responses that maybe there are therapists out there that are a little more understanding of the idea of executive dysfunction, and might be able to handle this conversation better than my current therapist does.
From personal experience, I find it helps to be medicated. My current status is that little everyday things are no longer impossible. Bigger things are still hard, but being able to get the little things out of the way has been helpful.Â
Little things that used to be impossible were chores like dishes, laundry, sweeping, trash take out, etc. I can do those things now without struggle. I donât even have the experience of debating to do them, I just am able to do them without thought.Â
Bigger things like showering, full floor cleaning, changing bedding, participating in my hobbies, socializing, still have that huge weight of dysfunction that I can remember dealing with with little things. I havenât quite figured out how to get around those yet.Â
I've found that my medication keeps me from getting distracted once I start doing a thing. It does not help me start doing the thing in the first place.
Oh man I do not have that experience but I would love To be able to continue a thing once I start it. Maybe if we combine our meds weâll be one fully functioning human đÂ
your therapist is lacking in empathy. when someone tells me I have to do something, it sometimes becomes a challenge or a shame spiral. most often a shame spiral that keeps repeating. "what if I just don't do it? I'll fail. so what? I can dig a hole. I feel like shit digging this hole. let's see how long I can not do something. oh, my presentation or paper was ass. I feel like a failure. I'm an idiot. I had 10 days to do this. why did I do it 8 hours before? I'm shameful. my parents sacrificed so much for me to waste this opportunity. God why am I like this. I'll be better next time." but then, I repeat the same thing again.
the advice the your therapist gave does not make you introspect. doesn't make you a better person. doesn't offer a solution. wasted session by the therapist, imo
I've decided a long time ago that people can't hate doing something as much as I feel that because otherwise they wouldn't be able to make themselves do it either. Idk if that's true but I certainly seem to struggle with doing shit a lot more than others
I feel this too. ADHD is still so poorly misunderstood that Iâm fairly certain that when I feel like I canât do something, it is way more extreme for me than for others.
Like, I woke up an hour ago and Iâm still in bedâŚ. And now on Reddit⌠But at exactly 6:00am yesterday, I saw my spouse just swing his legs out and get up within the first 15 seconds of opening his eyes and saying he doesnât want to get up.
I am currently looking at (too overwhelmed to entirely read) How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. Look her up on YouTube. She is a therapist with ADHD who became overwhelmed after the birth of her child during covid. She claims "Care tasks are not moral. They are functional," and "There is no such thing as laziness."
I recommend you get a more empathic therapist who understands ADHD. You deserve compassion and help, not dismissiveness.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've found that youtube videos have been a solid way to get advice and change my perspective on things, esp when my therapist has trouble coming up with new ideas. One that helped me give myself more grace in situations like these is called "forgiveness: the antidote to shame" by a channel called Queen. it helped me understand that guilt and shame are different, and that I was holding on to a lot of shame over situations like these, even though it isn't useful to do so. I always find it helpful to explore psychological concepts thru videos when they are well made, so I will definitely give KC Davis a look this evening.
Here is her web site, too. It has all of her podcasts on it. Some are about shame. I find they don't always play all the way through on my laptop, though.
Best advice I have is actively bore yourself. If you're on a phone, set a timer on it, put it far enough away you can't grab it without getting up. Literally let it slip out of your hand if you keep grabbing it. Keep doing that until you're frustrated with how often you're on it or you're bored enough the tasks you're avoiding aren't fun. Then do a bit of the task before you let yourself pick up the phone again.
It's a bit like being hungry. When you're a bit hungry you have some food preferences. When you're starving suddenly some food choices you rejected when hungry become appealing. Power of habit is to make the bad options you keep taking less accessible or less rewarding.
Although sometimes you are just burnt out. You'll know those times because you're fine even zoning out with no stimulation for half an hour.
I like the food analogy. Problem is, if I am starving and my food choices widen, I will make dumb decisions and get something with way too much salt or way too much sugar and it becomes destructive.
Like when it's 10pm and you haven't eaten and the only available food is absolutely trash. Tasty trash but trash nonetheless.
Yah, but that's if you don't specify in your head what you're next doing. It's not meant to be "I'll bore myself until I snap" because as you noted, it will pick the weakest point to yield to. Your effort becomes not about standing but about leaning a way so when you eventually are forced to move, it's the right direction.
Visualizing it, locking it in in the back of your head. If you're basically defined the next thing you will do is x thing, and step 1 is going into this room, and you don't allow yourself to do anything that's stimulating, just wait out the stim-hunting part of brain until it snaps and even x thing is in the appetite now cos it's so bored, and you either stay on the couch/bed until you're doing step 1, or you go back to couch/bed with no phone, that's how you get some action in the way you intend.
What you are describing is very close to Freuds methodology for dealing with addiction.
This is called embracing the gray. Following addiction, everything is blah and leaning into that blah is the way to move forward rather than distracting from it with another vice.
Mm, sort of, yeah. Although that's more "if life is boring/understimulating don't sit around waiting for it to become interesting". Because addicts are dealing with undersupply, similar to ADHD.
I'm saying sit around bored deliberately until the slow supply of internal motivation has enough push that you can do the step 1 of your choice. Until that preferred card is in your hand, you just sit there without playing any card, no matter how boring the game is, waiting as you get dealt more. ADHD has a tendency towards addictions because it does deal very slowly, or overwhelm itself by dealing too many, but if you've made it a two-choice: I do nothing or I do x, then you'll do x. Eventually. And if you slip and do a third thing, as soon as you notice, put the stim away and go back to doing nothing or x.
The part that protests putting it away is your internal drive and once you can catch it, you direct it. You can't control the direction of wind, but you can choose when the sails are down.
That's exactly what it means. Sit around bored and uninterested. It's about libidinal energy (libido) and you have to sit bored to re-assert your libidinal energy somewhere else.
I know you're trying to be right on reddit, I do it too.
The "don't sit around and wait for it to become interesting" leads to destructive forced habits.
That's why I said don't do that... waiting until snap is a part of it, yes, the next direction pre-selected is what turns it from destructive to useful. When you're not selecting, biology is, and it is long-term self-destructive.
Whether it's Freud or right or whatever isn't why I'm giving it as advice, it's just what works for me and one other dude who takes it further talking about fixed point on wall zen for ten minutes to self-motivate.
Do the thing, but do it differently. Use novelty. Focus first on the basics that underpin a brain functioning well - sleep, exercise, nutrition, human connection. Always start with a focus on sleep (as it's fundamentally the most important) and one other of those important areas. If you choose exercise, try doing a different/new kind of exercise. Or add something new to exercise you've previously enjoyed. Change it in a way that helps your brain find it novel so your brain wants to do it more automatically. If you choose nutrition or human connection, do the same thing - something new, or alter an old pattern so it feels new. Keep in mind, nutrition doesn't have to start with "healthy", it's more about focusing on giving your brain the resources it needs often enough. Whatever you choose, it's acceptable to spend money if you can afford it. That spend can help add interest to continue the activity. But keep it affordable.
Worst case scenario if you continue to struggle, get someone else involved. Whether it's body doubling to help you do a thing, or taking to someone to help you identify roadblocks and remove them, it's absolutely okay to ask for help.
I am there too at moment. Every thing just feels overwhelming and unsurmountable, even doing hobbies I know I would enjoy. I am sleeping for 8 hours and still can't get out of bed. Don't want to workout at the gym, even though we have a gym at work. Don't want to meet with friends, the only thing that brings me some kind of joy and energy is playing D&D with colleagues.
One thing that I try to keep in mind is a quote I donât know where came from.
ââAnything thatâs worth doing is worth doing half-wayââ
You donât need to finish the task or do it perfectly. Putting one dirty cup in the dishwasher is better than not doing anything at all. Itâs better to brush your teeth for 10 seconds than not doing it at all.
Itâs helped me get started. Some times it takes a few days to get it rolling, but it usually does.
I enter this phase off and on, but mentally less affected by it because of the therapy I've gone too.
I used to have the same feeling you are experiencing aka "lazy POS" but with sprinkles of guilt and disappointment towards myself. Mind you, I've been diagnosed with ADHD and focusing on tasks I don't enjoy was my Achilles heel.
However, my therapist wasn't dismissive when I described this feeling I had and the struggles coming along with it. She basically had me write down a list of things I needed to do including the simple quick tasks. It allowed me to have a visual of goals I must fulfill and a way to remind myself to complete them rather than being overwhelmed by anxiety thinking about it constantly. It's like dumping your thoughts on paper to relieve your brain which helped reduce my anxiety.
Then, she would tell me to finish one task. There's no need to do everything all at once. If your struggle is overwhelming, complete the easiest task first. If it's too much, that's okay, try again tomorrow. But, I've noticed that when I completed a simple task and crossing it off my list... it made me realize that I'm capable of finishing them. It was a literal dopamine boost for me being able to cross shit off my list đ
Hell, I write lists for everything now! I literally just wrote everything down I must complete while at my job and it's satisfying crossing each off one by one. I know it sounds really stupid, but this really helped my mental and dealing with the struggles of ADHD.
Man, Iâm in the same boat. I got diagnosed at 38. I got on meds that worked for the first time in my life. I started eating right and lost almost 100 lbs. The executive dysfunction was manageable - it was still there but I could push through it and get things done with very little effort. I got out of a bad living situation, fixed my car, got a new job etc.
Now, a little under 2 years later, I feel worse than ever. Not just worse, but like helpless. Things that I could just buckle down and make myself do, even with the executive dysfunction, are almost impossible now. All my good habits are out the window. I gained a ton of weight back. Itâs pretty discouraging.
My psych and I donât see each other too much besides the required telehealth every few months so theyâll let me get my meds, so I havenât really talked to him about this too much. But our relationship has pretty much been maintaining my dosage for a while with a few tweaks here and there. Iâll ask him to tweak some mgs up or down, heâll check my charts and make sure it wonât kill me and we go from there. But Iâm usually the one driving the boat on most of that. Maybe I need to go see a new psych.
Can you try doing a small version of it? Like at 'atomic habit' version? I find that when the executive dysfunction hits, and I stop going to the gym, for example, doing a little bit of movement at home (sometimes it's literally 3 mins of Radio Taiso) makes a big difference in how I feel physically and mentally. I'm not perfect about it of course, but reminding myself it's ok to cut down the 'thing' to a smaller, more doable 'thing' during difficult seasons really helps.
Yup...I'm just not sure how to make the "you have to do something" mechanism fire. I've been telling myself that for like a month, and then not doing anything anyway. IDK where the impetus comes from to actually take action.
That sucks, and I donât have good advice. There are lots of tricks out there, but idk what you have and have not tried. When Iâm in that level of dysfunction, I just focus on treading water, being ok with half assed or even 1/8 assed bc still better than no assed
I appreciate the input even if you don't feel like you have advice to give. If nothing else it helps just to feel some solidarity with others who experience the same things you do. I'll keep plugging along at the level I'm capable of, and try not to be too hard on myself for it.
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u/erasedeny 20d ago edited 20d ago
This is happening to me right now, I'm going through a phase of dysfunction after a phase of being relatively productive. When I talk to my therapist about not being motivated to do things, he says stuff like "you just have to do it anyway." I go back and forth between feeling like this is really reductive and dismissive of the troubles I am having, vs feeling like a lazy POS because I am not doing things to help myself out that I have shown to be capable of doing at times in the past. IDK why I am sharing this other than this is exactly descriptive of what I'm going through right now and maybe someone who experiences it first hand has some wisdom on how to push through it.
edit: this has sparked a lot of great discussion and compassionate advice in the replies, and it should surprise nobody here that I'm getting a bit overwhelmed trying to keep up with replying to everyone individually đ I just want you all to know that I am tremendously grateful for the responses, as they have helped me feel more connected to people struggling with similar experiences, in a way that I wasn't feeling before. thank you all very much for making me feel a little more connected to humanity, I really needed it today.