ADHD’s First Law

In my article, The Spark in Your Relationship—With Yourself, I explored the relationship between dopamine, attention, routine, and mental health. That relationship is especially informed by attention deficit and hyperactivity—ADHD. My whole family struggles with ADHD. We get in our own way, and we get in each other’s way when we leave things out of place, take up space with a fixation we can’t put down, or forget to take care of commitments to each other.

You don’t have to have ADHD to relate to or benefit from this blog, but I am writing it to share some different perspectives and strategies for adapting self-care strategies with ADHD. Not all self-care is the same. Lots of popular and useful mental health tips simply don’t work for someone whose brain doesn’t work the same way—and a lot of content out there geared toward helping people with ADHD is from a perspective that doesn’t really understand what it’s like to have it.

People with ADHD disproportionately suffer from depression, in part because other people only understand the symptoms from the outside: what it’s like to be inconvenienced by them. Being told that you need to change something you have very little control over (from a very early age, mind you) makes you feel hopeless. Another article about how you should write lists to keep you on track and meet someone else’s expectations just adds to an inescapable sense of failure. Trying to reduce your ADHD doesn’t help you improve your mental health or self-esteem. Instead of trying to stop your symptoms, it helps to adapt around them.

Adaptability and flexibility are the greatest strengths of ADHD. We thrive in spontaneity and adversity because of our unique ability to adapt to new situations and stress. You can bring that incredible strength to the way you love yourself, and the way you take care of your body and brain.

ADHD is currently understood as a lower receptivity to dopamine: the neurotransmitter that controls your attention, and by extension, learning, motivation, observation, etc. You can’t focus when an important task is mind-numbingly boring because it’s not triggering a dopamine release in your brain. It’s hard to stay motivated when you don’t receive the same intrinsic reward for success that other people have every time they complete a chore.

Because of that, rest doesn’t work the same way when you have ADHD. Newton’s First Law of Physics is a common and apt metaphor for the difference I experience with my ADHD: an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion. 

An Object at Rest

Executive function is a clinical term for your ability to execute things, or do tasks. Because dopamine is the prime mover of behavior in humans, one of the symptoms of ADHD is called executive dysfunction. It describes moments when you’re unable to begin a task.

People often mistake executive dysfunction for laziness or lack of initiative, but it feels like being trapped. You get stuck in one place, and knowing how important it is to get up and start working makes you all the more unable to take the first step. The more you want to get it done, the harder it is to begin. This paralysis is often accompanied by guilt and a sense of failure.

But this exists because you are an object at rest. Some other force has to act on you in order to push you into motion. If you don’t have the motivation to start something intentionally, sometimes the best strategy is to do it mindlessly. If you use something else to distract your brain into motion, you can keep that momentum and begin the daunting task without intention. When you’re stuck at rest, here are some ways to trick your brain into gear:

The Baby Step

A simple task for someone else can be really overwhelming for me. Showering, for example, is physically exhausting and utterly unrewarding. To abate my dread, as well as to explain my overwhelm to other people, I break it down into a lot of smaller tasks. Picking out clean clothes, using the toilet (so I don’t feel immediately unclean afterward), fixing the temperature, shampooing my hair, conditioning my hair, washing my face and body, drying myself, and brushing my hair out are all the different tasks hidden in the big, hard one. One task for you is actually eight for me.

This also works to my benefit because I can use the next tricks to start some of those eight tasks. Even if I only pick out my clothes, I’m one step closer to being done.

The Trojan Horse

Like putting a dog’s pill inside a piece of cheese, you can hide one hard-to-start task inside a smaller doable one. Say you need to get up to start a project, but you’re trapped thinking of all the steps ahead of you. If you can stand up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, you’re halfway there! When you’re dreading washing dishes, something like setting the kettle for tea or turning on a pot of coffee will get you into the kitchen, where you’re unstuck!

The White Noise

When your tasks aren’t stimulating your brain, you can distract it with other stimuli. Being focused on something that isn’t a responsibility can make it easier to start them as a secondary focus and multitask. Playing music in the background makes it so much easier for me to zone out and do daily chores, exercise, or shower. By contrast, stimuli that hold too much of my attention can trap me for hours. If I turn on the TV as background noise during breakfast, I won’t open my computer all day.

The Body Double

For some people, being observed helps prevent executive dysfunction. Company can give you its own dopamine reward, so having a friend over to sit on your bed can make it easier to fold your laundry. This is the same idea as having an accountability partner—knowing someone else cares about your success can jumpstart it. I’m more productive on days I start my morning with an LYF team meeting and discuss our projects, so much that sometimes joining an empty video call will trick me into writing my next draft!

An Object in Motion

Executive function explicitly refers to putting something into action, which means that once a task is begun, finishing it is actually fine and easy. It isn’t doing dishes that’s difficult with ADHD, it’s starting them. And taking breaks is the surest way to chain myself to the couch and get nothing done (and feel immensely guilty for it).

For many people, overworking themselves and burning out are the worst enemies of mental health. Giving yourself permission to rest, taking regular breaks, and starting again refreshed keeps your work honest and your mind clear. The guilt of rest in an efficiency-based society is a huge obstacle to overcome and preserve your self-esteem. But another reminder to take a break won’t cut it if you don’t have the intrinsic reward system that keeps you motivated.

Productivity depends almost entirely on momentum for me. If I can break that first trap and start the dishes, then I can keep going and do my laundry, wipe down the counters, take a shower, write a blog article, and take my dog on a walk—unless I sit down in between them. I stay in motion until a break interrupts me.

This is especially true (and especially hard) when I’m getting home from a class or a shift. I want to sit and rest. I want to decompress. But if I do, I won’t start my homework, and I’ll forget to fill out my timecard. Rest couldn’t benefit my mental health as much as eating dinner would.

The most important part of self-care for my ADHD is to take advantage of the momentum while I’ve got it. Having a productive day is good for my self-esteem. I can use my momentum to journal, exercise, and do all manner of self-care activities.

Eight Objects at Once

That said, sometimes an object in motion starts a bunch of tasks and forgets half of them unfinished on the counters. My mother is a prime example. In my experience, you don’t need a special strategy to work around this; it’s okay!

Work, chores, and tasks don’t have to get done in a neat and efficient order. Say you start dishes and realize you need to put away the dry ones first. Then you realize you need to prepare food for tomorrow, and clean out the wrinkly apples from the bottom drawer of the fridge. Then get distracted by the potted plant next to the garbage and go around watering the plants in other rooms, and start working on your computer instead.

You might not have finished the dishes, or food prep, or cleaning the whole fridge. You might have left a couple things out and only remember to work your way back when you see a watering can you accidentally put in the fridge. But you know what? All of those things got partly done. It’s a heck of a lot more efficient than getting so trapped by the fear of inefficiency that you don’t do anything at all.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Progress is better than perfection. It might be a little different from the way a totally stable person would do it, but who cares? A couple things left on the counter (that hopefully will remind you to go back and finish that in an hour when you get up again) never hurt anyone. It’s okay to accept and take pride in your kind of success, even when it doesn’t look like someone else’s.

About the Author

I’m an LYF administrator and wellness coordinator who works closely with the writing teams. I have a background in journalism, technical writing, poetry and creative prose.

Introspection and careful behavioral analysis have been my most refined skill. I take a deep care in observing and understanding the people around me. It’s an interest that is only fair or possible to do if you're 100% accepting of what you're going to find in people. To discover the things they can't admit because they dislike it in themselves is cruel and unkind unless you take on a particular perspective that at worst their worst traits are neutral.

I define myself by that perspective of radical acceptance, and I hope that you as readers can feel warmth in my work.