← Navigating Adult ADHD
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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD Podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my friend. Today we are Navigating Adult ADHD together. Welcome back to the podcast. Why is it so hard to get yourself to reply to that one email or to book in that appointment, or drop off a bag that you have had sitting in the car for two weeks that needs to go to the charity shop? The short answer is because your ADHD brain is not being difficult, it's actually protecting you from something it has decided feels too big, too heavy, too much today. So, in this episode, my friends, we are talking about an ADHD concept called the Wall of Awful. And this concept was originally created by somebody called Brendan Mahan. So I want to give a shout out to Brendan. So the Wall of Awful is an invisible emotional barrier that stands between you and the task that you need to do. So you know what you need to do and sometimes you might even want to do it, but it's like your brain and body are screaming, hell, no. Fuck that. So what happens? You avoid it. You do something else entirely. Maybe you clean out the fridge or you start scrolling. It is that heavy, stuck, guilty feeling, that big feeling. It kind of feels like you're trying to drag yourself through mud. Like you're up to your waist in mud and you're just trying to drag yourself through it. It's that feeling right before you start a task that, my friends, is the Wall of Awful. Sounding familiar, I'll bet. So this wall of awful is an emotional barrier that stands between us and taking action. It is not a motivation or a willpower problem. And it sits between you and things like replying to an email, booking in that dentist or doctor's appointment, starting a work task, doing the dishes or the laundry. In theory, these things are very, very simple. But emotionally, they can feel huge. And that huge is this wall again, it's an invisible wall made of emotional pain that you've got to get past before you can even start the task. And every brick in that wall is a past painful experience connected to a similar task. So it might be times that you have tried and failed. It might be times when you were criticised or you felt ashamed or you were mocked, Times where you felt disappointed or you disappointed somebody else. Times when you felt stupid or lazy or not enough. So over time, each of those moments becomes another brick in that wall. So when you face a new task, your brain's not just seeing, I need to send one email, it's feeling, well, last time I forgot they were upset. I messed up. And I've messed up so many times. What if I do it wrong again? The higher the wall, the more we will avoid and procrastinate, okay? Which of course, what happens when we avoid and we procrastinate. There is more failure. There is more bricks added to this wall. So let me give you a real life example. Right now, I need to go and have a blood test, all right? I have had a reminder via text message. I was also sent an email. And this morning I even had something that was cancelled last night that I could have used the space. I had a couple of hours free morning. I could have used that time to go and get a blood test. Did I do it? No, I did not do that. When I think about getting this blood test, I have a huge brick wall full of emotions. Emotions like dread, fear, anxiety, shame, embarrassment, failure, hesitation. Now here's the important part, my friend. If you have zoned out. Hello. If you've zoned out, come back to me. Come back to me. This bit's really important, okay? Emotions drive actions. What you feel determines what you do and don't do, right? This is human psychology. It's all how all human brains work. And I think it's one of the most important things that we should have been taught in school. But that's a whole nother rant I could go on, right? So when I feel all of those emotions I just described, I feel dread, fear, anxiety, shame. What do I do? I'll tell you what I don't do. I don't go and get the blood test, right? Instead of that, I avoid it. I procrastinate it. And it's no wonder, with all of those big awful emotions I just shared from the outside to somebody else, maybe even to you, my friend, this just looks like I'm procrastinating it, I'm avoiding it. But from the inside inside of my body, it feels huge. It literally feels like I'm standing in front of this giant, awful, ugly brick wall that has no safe way through or over it. That, my friends, is the wall of awful. So what builds up the bricks, every brick in the wall is a past painful experience connected to that kind of a task. Okay, so as I said, maybe you have tried to do this thing before. It could be, say, let's go with replying to an email, right? You've got an email that you have received that you need to reply to. Maybe you've tried that task before and you've failed. You've had some shitty responses. Right. You were criticized for your spelling, you were criticized for sharing the wrong number, for, you know, making a mistake in the email or leaving something out. You were shamed. You were mocked, right? Maybe somebody else was disappointed because you left it too late to get back to them, right? Maybe you have felt stupid or lazy or like not good enough in some way. When it's come when it comes to doing that task, to sending that email, to replying to that person and over time, what happens? All of those experiences become another brick in your wall. So what happens when you face a new task? Your brain doesn't just see, oh, I have to send that one email. It's feeling all of those feelings all over again, right? The dread, the fear, the criticism, the shame, the disappointment, all of that. What if I fuck it up again and again? The higher the wall, the more we avoid it. So my friend, back to my blood test. I live literally two kilometres away from the path lab where I would get my blood drawn, where I've got my blood drawn before. Okay, so it sounds super simple. I had two hours free this morning. Could have just driven down there, gotten the test done. I'm super close, I could even walk. But let's take a look at some of the bricks in my wall. I feel dread because I hate needles. I feel shame because in the past I have cried, I have had panic attacks, I have had full on meltdowns when I've had my blood drawn. Which is also why I've got bricks with embarrassment, criticism. I feel fear. I feel a lot of fear and anxiety around this because I've had a bad experience in the past and I don't want to feel that again. I don't want that experience. I feel criticized and I feel judged because of how hard this is for me and the big deal that I make from it. So again, it's no wonder there is this really big invisible emotional wall standing between me and going to get my blood taken. And remember, emotions drive actions. All of these negative emotions in the wall of awful lead me to procrastinate, to avoid, to seek out dopamine. Right now, my favorite dopamine is coming from my puzzle. I am obsessed with the what is it like the backside, backside back, the front, inside out jigsaws. The was jigs, whatever they are, right? So that's my favorite thing. I'll go do that instead. I'll spend two hours doing my puzzle instead. Right? I'll do anything else of climbing that wall. So here's the thing. Simply knowing that you are Staring at a wall of awful that you have one in front of you. This is good news, my friend, because it gives us language of what the hell is going on. It's kind of like turning on a light in a dark room. Oh, now we know what we are dealing with. Awesome. And this is why I have created a free worksheet for you, okay? Because in order to get over the wall or through the wall, which we're going to talk about, we need to see the wall and know what it's made from. We need to illuminate that wall. So in the show notes, you will find a link where you can get a free worksheet with a little explanation and demo of how to explore your own wall of awful. Okay? Totally free. You can also head to navigating adultadhd.com wall awful. Now I hear you going, okay, okay, Xena. But how the hell do I get to the other side of the wall? How do I make myself do the thing I need to do? So first, first things first. You can't work with a wall you're pretending isn't there, right? Simply knowing, oh, this right here is my wall of awful. That is good news, my friend, because it gives us that language and that awareness. Like I said, you're flicking on the light in the dark room. We know what we're dealing with. So step one, go and grab that worksheet from the link in the show notes below. You can even pause this and come back. Right? I'll be right here when you get back. I'll be right here. So once you've got that, there are three simple ADHD friendly ways. I want you to think about getting yourself to the other side of the wall of Awful. Number one is to climb it safely. Number two is to add footholds to make the climb easier. And number three is to put a door in the wall. So let's walk through each of these together. So number one is climbing it safely. This is the part where we do the emotional work, the regulation work on purpose, right? This is the part where you allow your feelings. You know when people say to you, oh, you just need to feel your feelings? Oh, God, that always used to fuck me off. Because I'd be like, what the fuck does that mean? Like, I feel terrible. Am I not doing it right? My friend, we weren't taught how to feel our feelings. Which is why so much of my coaching, so much of my courses, so much of the work I do is on emotional regulation. Because honestly, game changing should be taught in schools. But Anyway, I digress. So step one, where we're climbing this wall, climbing it safely, is all about doing the feelings part, right? Regulating our emotions, regulating our nervous system and helping ourself to feel and allow the emotions and work through them. When you do this, like, your emotions go through you pretty quick. You can actually turn down the volume on the loud emotions really, really fast. But again, we so often try to avoid it. We procrastinate it or we don't know how to do it. So we. We try and white knuckle, try and, like, Hulk smash our way through the wall. We yell at ourself. Okay, so I want to take you back to my blood test story because I haven't shared with you the full story. The full story is that I was having a blood test and checking two different things. I was checking B12 levels and A different hormone. And I was checking these two things because I had all of a sudden had this real low drop in energy, and I knew it wasn't my iron. I'd done a few other tests, so I was getting my blood test done. So I think it was maybe a month ago now. I went and got my blood done, and I was meant to get the results within a few days. And I got the result for the B12 and I actioned it, right? And then the testosterone one, which is the other hormone I was checking, it took forever. It was meant to be like a week. Anyway, a couple weeks later, I get this email that says, oh, sorry, we've made a mistake with your blood test. We need you to come back in and get it done again. Okay? So I'd actually gone and got my blood done. It was meant to be done and dusted, and then they fucked it up, okay? I don't know what happened. They fucked it up. And they sent me an email and then a text reminder to say, hey, you need to come back and get this done again, because we need to run the sample again. I was like, oh, my God. But let me tell you about how I got that original blood test done, all right? With the first part of the results that I got, I climbed the wall safely. So what did that look like? I first of all named what was happening, right? This is my wall of awful. This is my brain trying to protect me and trying to, you know, avoid doing it because of all of these really big emotions. And I listed them all out and I looked at them all, and I reminded myself, okay, nothing's gone wrong. My brain is just trying to protect me. I named all of the Feelings, there was dread, fear, shame, embarrassment, embarrassment, anxiety, trepidation. Like all of these emotional cocktail. So of course I want to avoid it. I told myself, of course I want to avoid it. It makes a lot of sense. And then I took action to regulate my emotions. And for me, I used a lot of eft tapping. Massive fucking fan of that. It's been a game changer for me, right? I was using EFT tapping before I went down to the PATH lab, in the car on the drive. When I got there, sitting in the waiting room, when I got into the little cubicle where the nurse or the woman taking my blood, I'm tapping away on my face and my body. And that helped me to turn down the dial on the emotions, helped me to regulate my nervous system. And I talked to myself really nicely, right? For me, that looks like, oh, this is really fucking hard, right? Proud of myself for doing it, right? I'm allowed to cry. It's okay. Do whatever you gotta do. So proud of you for doing this. Like, just. It's okay. You're doing really, really good. Those are the sorts of things I said. Okay? Notice what I was not saying. Oh, stop being so ridiculous. Just get over it, right? What's wrong with you? It's just a needle. Other people don't react like this. Hell no. Because what does that do, my friend? That adds more bricks to the wall. Okay, so again, the first strategy is to climb the wall safely by doing the emotional work, right? And the more you do this, the more it helps to dismantle and loosen the bricks in the wall. Like learning how to regulate your emotions, honestly, a life changing skill. I've got loads of podcast episodes that you can listen to here about that. But like I say, it should be taught in skills, right? Because we know emotions drive actions and behaviors. Anyway, I get very fired up about that one. Right, let's talk about number two. Number two is to add the footholds to the wall, right? This is, think of this like some practical scaffolding. So the footholds are the things that make the climb less brutal for our ADHD brains, right? They don't magically delete the wall, but they give us somewhere to stand. So one of these is self compassion, talking to yourself like you would talk to somebody you love and care about. Of course this is hard, right? There's a lot of painful bricks here. Of course I don't want to do this. I'm allowed to find it hard. That's okay. I'm just going to do the next tiny step Another foothold that you can often add is knowing what done looks like. So in the blood test example, okay, it is having the blood test, right? Being on the other side of that, having had the blood taken, getting the results. But sometimes it might be that you're saying, I need to clear my inbox of all of my emails, okay. Which is very, very vague. So knowing what done looks like is I need to reply to these three emails and I need to draft this email and I need to forward this email to Sally, okay? So being very specific about it, because when our brain doesn't know what's involved, it can just look like a massive mountain, when in actual fact, it's a tiny little molehill, okay? So knowing what done looks like can be very, very helpful. Another way we can add footholds is to break the task down into tiny little steps. Could be put the form in my bag, look up the opening hours, right? Something so tiny in minute, it might be, find my trainers and put them by the door, right? Anything tiny like that, the next one is asking for help. And that could be in the form of body doubling. So in this example, I actually asked my partner if he would come with me last time for the blood test. And that made a huge difference because that I remember the morning I was going to do it, I was like, oh, I'll just do it a little bit later. And he said, okay, we're off, we're doing it, we're doing it now. I need to go now. I've got other stuff to do. Come on, let's go and get your blood taken. So again, having that body double can be really, really help. It could even be that you take, you know, take a support person with you, but it might be message a friend and say, hey, you know, can you help me get to the gym this week? Can you hold me accountable or can we go for daily walks? I need to get back into it, whatever it is. Okay. Another really useful one is to time how long it takes. This is another way we can add some footholds to the wall, is because ADHD brains love to catastrophize. We love to go all or nothing extreme, dramatic. I love our brains. But if you can see, and this actually would be quite useful for the blood test part. If I time how long it takes from the moment I sit down with the nurse who's going to draw the blood, because it probably only takes like three or four minutes. Like, you're in and out of that room so fast, right? So again, sometimes it's like, well, I've got to say back to the inbox example. I've got to clear my inbox today of all of my emails. If you time that and it only takes you say, 25 minutes, so good to know. Because in your brain, your brain might be like, oh, God, it's going to take me hours. How am I going to fit that all in? And so it wants to avoid it and it makes it less scary for next time. So every foothold, and I just gave you some ideas for how you can add footholds to your wall. Right. Every foothold helps to reduce that emotional load or add some safety which, you know, lowers the emotional intensity or perhaps the height of the wall. Okay, let's talk about number three. Put a door in the wall. So what is this? This is where we change the emotional fuel. Okay, Remember, emotions, what we feel determines what we do and what we don't do. Emotions drive actions. They're the fuel in the car propelling us forward or back. Sometimes we don't need, like a bigger ladder. We need a different reason. If the wall is built out of shame and fear and I'm failing again, that fuel, of course, is going to feel heavy and awful. Now, a door is when we change the fuel that you're using to try and propel yourself forward to move. Okay, so if we, as I said, right, emotions drive actions. If we change how we feel, we change what we do. So what? This could look like one of the ways I have done this in the, in the past, in the fast. One of the ways I've done this in the past. My brain is going so fast today. So fun is by linking it back to my values. If you know your values, which I think every ADHD we need to know, our values are so, so important. Okay, I do this in my membership. I've got like a whole course on this because I'm just. It's so important anyway, I get digressed. Linking to your values might look like I'm doing this blood test because future me deserves to have answers and energy. One of the things I really value is freedom. So for me, I know I value freedom. And the more energy I have, the more freedom I have. So that helps to change the fuel that I'm using to take action to go and get that blood test. Another way you might do this is by using the NICU tool. Okay. Adding dopamine deliberately. Dopamine or stimulation to the task. Right, The NICU tool. NICU stands for novelty, interest, challenge and urgency. They are four things that motivate the ADHD brain. When a task is novel. When something is novel, Ooh, tell me more. I'm interested, right? We lean in. Our brains love things that they're interested in. For me, it's my puzzle right now. I am obsessed. I will talk about puzzles with you all day. I will do puzzles all day. It's my new favorite thing, right? An element of challenge that we enjoy has to be something that we are interested in. Like this puzzle of a fucking challenge. I tell you that. Stare at it for hours and only do, like, one piece. And again, a deadline urgency. Our brains operate really well when there is a deadline. Okay. So we can add. Sometimes we can add those things to help us put a door in the wall. So if you want to get back to going to the gym, it might look like you sign up for a new class, right? Your gym's advertised this new class, so you sign up to do that. It's novel. It's interesting. There's an added challenge element there. So it could be that you need to send an email and you add some dopamine, some novelty and interest by playing the latest episode of Landman, which, if you haven't seen it, that series is epic. Or while you send the email. Okay, so putting a door in the wall doesn't magically erase your history and the bricks there. Okay. Which is why I always recommend if you can do steps one and two, that will be hugely beneficial in helping you to reduce the size of the wall going forward. Okay. However, when we do put a door in the wall, we're no longer trying to, you know, sprint through it. Hulk, smash our way through it. Right? We are choosing a kind of more sustainable kind of fuel. And again, if we can create success, we get evidence that we have done the task, and we can do the task, which again, helps us to loosen or reduce those bricks. So let's talk about brick math, right? Girl Math is a thing. Let's talk brick math. Self judgment is what adds more bricks to the wall. Ask me how I know that. But kindness and self compassion is what helps remove bricks. So every time you say, oh, my God, I'm such a disaster. Why can't I just do this like everyone else? That is another brick. And every time you say, okay, yeah, this is hard for me, and I'm taking it one tiny step at a time, you're gently taking another brick out. Or. Or when you celebrate, hey, I actually did that. Like, I got that blood test. That was so hard and uncomfortable. And I'm proud Of myself. I did it again. You're loosening and taking out another brick. So, my friend, when you catch yourself staring at a task, freezing up. Number one, name it. This is my wall of awful, right? Get the download. Get the free download. In the show notes below, label your bricks. Number two, choose your strategy. Do I need to climb this safely? Do I need some, you know, regulation? Do I need a bit of support with that? Maybe I do some tapping. Do I need some more, you know, footholds in the wall, A little bit of scaffolding? What does that look like, a bit of support? Or do I need to put a door in the wall? Do I need to, you know, change my emotional fuel? And then lastly, number three, use self compassion as the soundtrack in the background, not self attack. Okay, now, if this has been helpful, don't just nod along, move on to the next podcast, my friend. Go and grab that free wall of awful worksheet, or there's actually a couple of worksheets there. It is incredibly helpful. You can get it in the show notes. Spend just five minutes mapping out one wall that you keep running into. Okay? And you're gonna start to see. Oh. There is always a reason. While your brain is saying no, you're going to see. Oh. These emotions are driving the action of procrastination, of avoiding. Okay. No wonder my brain's trying to help me. It's trying to protect me from feeling that way. And once you see the bricks, you can start to choose how you climb, where you put the footholds, or if you install a door in the wall. Okay, that's it, my friend. That's a wrap. Huge love. Take care and I'm excited to speak to you next week. Hey, friend, if you want some more help navigating and thriving with ADHD and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website, navigating adultadhd.com.