A (2:45)

But.

B (2:45)

But that's the thing, right? I think one of the things, Ash, that at least for my adhd, but I think for a lot of my clients too, that we don't always talk about, when we talk about things we need to anticipate with adhd is the role that frustration plays in derailing us. Because we can plan for time management, we can plan for disorganization, we can plan for forgetting. But so often you plan so carefully, you put in so much effort and then something goes awry and we get, you get dysregulated. Right. Something doesn't go the way it's supposed to go. And I think especially when you're really vested in that plan and you're like, I've put a lot of effort into this. As soon as things go off the rails, frustration and you know, everybody experiences frustration, Everyone experiences big emotions. But with ADHD we're more prone to, to bigger emotions more easily. And we get what's called emotional dysregulation where it's what makes it. I think, I think what makes dysregulation, the way that I explain it, what makes dysregulation different from say like experiencing a regular emotion is an inability to tolerate distress, an inability to self soothe and an inability to work towards goal directed behavior while in an escalated state. Right. So I think other people have a greater capacity to like compartmentalize and manage emotions, to modulate emotions and to self soothe and tolerate the distress. And so they're able to kind of like get to the other side of that emotion. But because we can't do all those things, the emotion is like really, really big, especially frustration. And so we experience very often an inability to work towards goal directed behavior. Well, dysregulated or frustrated. And so you can do all this careful planning and it almost kind of makes it worse when it goes off the rails. And then you're more prone to frustration. And then after all that, the thing doesn't get done. Like I can't tell you how many times I've put time aside or put, you know, organized things to take care of Something really important. But due to emotional dysregulation, especially frustration, I just have to throw my hands up in the air and be like, I can't do this. I can't. Like, I'm. I'm. I'm completely done. Like, I'm out of gas.

A (4:52)

Dusty. It can be so easy for us to either underestimate or on the opposite end, completely overestimate the time and effort it's going to take to complete a task. Cam and I did an episode on this a while back, and we introduced a concept called red light and green light planning. Sort of these two extremes. Where the idea is green light planning is thinking about your trip to Costco. Maybe part of your. Your time estimation is that you're going to hit every green light. And red light planning is the exact opposite of that, right? Where you're. You're sort of over anticipating barri or frustrations. And so that itself can become sort of a stumbling block before you even get started. And so it's really hard to find that happy medium, that space between. And sometimes it's not always possible with some tasks. I run into this with my clients at work a lot where they don't necessarily know what challenges they're going to run into until they're in something, right? So they're on one hand feeling this expectation that they say they have a deadline that's a week or two or three from now. They're feeling this expectation that they should know how, precisely how to plot out the steps between here and there. And so hitting anything unexpected can throw up that sort of red light. Feeling that, oh, just, oh, forget it. I'm. I'm not going to do it. I myself ran into this a lot this spring. I decided to spend a lot of time in my gardens. And my initial goal was to have all of my gardens be looking really nice by summertime, which was, by the way, way too much to bite off and chew for one spring season with the number of gardens I have in my yard and how overgrown they were. And something I did to cope with this is I would just carve out time to go out and start. Because I've never gardened before, not really, not seriously, not by myself. And I would work for a while, sort of get the sense of how long something was going to take. And then whenever I would hit a stumbling block, say, when I was weeding, I was like, there's gotta be a better way to do this. There's gotta be a tool or a process or something that's faster than doing hand weeding rather than sort of throwing up my hands and quitting. I would take a break. I would sit on my stoop, take a break, have some water, just kind of take a breath, and then recoup. And that was the only way. And by the way, I only got through my front yard gardens. I did get them really nicely weeded and mulched and they look much better than they did last season. And because they are well weeded and mulched, they will be much less work next season, which will make more room for me to tackle other parts of my yard. But I had to adjust that expectation along the way and that was a really difficult thing to stick with When I started with goal A that I just want to clear the slate and get it all done. And then had to realize over time that this all takes quite a bit longer than I would have anticipated. And there are quite a few more stumbling blocks than I would have imagined. Imagine moments where it's like, oh, I really need X tool that I don't currently own. So now I either have to pivot into something different to keep working in the yard right now, or I need to stop and I'm all sweaty and gross. I need to stop and clean up a little bit and get in my car. So I have to transition from one thing to. To another and go to the freaking hardware store. So, yeah, for me, kind of building in those pause moments, recognizing it as like a moment to like pause and breathe and regroup was really helpful. What find helpful in situations like this. Dusty?

B (8:37)

Yeah, I had so many thoughts and feelings while you were talking about that, and I just want to take a second before I answer your question to talk about. There was a book that I read and it wasn't even about frustration. I think it was Come as you are by Emily Nagoski. I could be mistaken, but yeah, I think it must have been that book. And she was talking about how frustration functions in the brain, which I never thought about, and she said it's like a thermostat, Right? So what causes frustration is the difference between your expectations, expectation of difficulty of a task, and how difficult it actually is, Right. So if I think that something's going to be easy and it's not, it's like a little thermostat goes off in my brain and I become frustrated. Right? But if I anticipate that something's going to be difficult and it's about as difficult as I anticipated to be, I will not become frustrated. So the difference isn't in how hard the task is or how off track the task gets. It's actually in your mental construction of the task. And to me, that's so interesting because it totally plays into everything we know about planning with adhd, right? It's a working memory issue. If I am thinking about doing a task, say building an IKEA bed, right. I'm picturing myself bringing the bed home, putting it together and then moving it into position. I'm forgetting, like, oh, I don't know where my tools are. So I have to like, get the tools, I have to search around and find it and I have to clean the bedroom first. And there's probably three or four steps that when my brain, like when my working memory sequences out that task, it's just forgetting or it's under anticipating how long it's going to take. Right. And so when, when our brains scope tasks with adhd, we usually are like missing pieces. So of course our expectation of how easy that task is going to be is usually off and we don't realize. So we. I think that when you have adhd, you are much more prone to frustration because it's in the conceptualizing phase of doing something. We have a flaw in our programming that unintentionally is going to lead to frustrating outcomes. Even if you're not doing what I would call best case scenario thinking and what you're saying, you know, green light thinking, right. A lot of the times we're thinking best case scenario, like we're planning for the version of ourselves who has the best executive function, who was able to like, do the thing flawlessly. You know, on a good day, we're not often even planning with our own variable capacity in mind. But even when we are, we're still often missing steps. And that's certainly the case for me. It's. It's frustrating to no end when I try to plan something and then I'm like, oh, but I forgot this. Oh, but I forgot that. So we're gonna experience that frustration more often. And I was just thinking as you were talking, Ash, I remembered how like, as a kid I was almost constantly frustrated because I, I had a lot more inattentive type symptoms as a child. And I was often like fantasizing. I was always thinking about stuff I wanted to do, especially when it came to like, art. Okay. I would, you know, think about some drawing I wanted to make or some craft I wanted to make. And I get like, really, you, you use the word expectation. I would get really into this expectation of the outcome. I get really Jazzed, right? And so my ADHD likeness got really invested in, like, doing this thing. But when I would go to do it, maybe I didn't have the right tools like you were talking about. Like, maybe I needed hot glue and I only had, you know, Elmer's glue. And I often didn't have the skill level. And so I would get totally frustrated. The end. The end product would not look the way I wanted it to look. And instead of having a fun time doing crafts, I'd be in tears. But this happened to me all the time as a kid, and often I wasn't communicating to the adults or the other people around me, like, what my expectation were. So I just try to go do something and, like, you know, my mom would be like, oh, you can't do that. And I'd get really frustrated. And that must have looked like oppositionality. But what it actually was was in my head, I had the whole thing planned out how maybe it was like cleaning my room. And she didn't know that, right? And so she would kind of like ruin my plan without meaning to, and I'd flip out and she'd be like, what the heck? And it's so interesting because I absolutely see that with my kid and my. The kids that are staying with me right now. It just happened the other night that one of the kids was doing a painting and just got so frustrated because it wasn't turning out the way she wanted it to. And I've seen that with my daughter as well, where she gets frustrated. It seems like it comes out of nowhere. And then I kind of think the reason she's getting frustrated isn't because it's not because I'm telling her what to do. It's because she already had a sequence in her mind of what she was doing and how she wanted to do it. And now I'm pivoting her from her plans so that. That's kind of neither here nor there. But I see it a lot with the kids, and I think it does relate back to, like you said, expectation. And so I feel like I'm the worst. I feel like I'm the worst content creator to follow because instead of being like, here's one easy hack to, like, fix this problem. Whenever I think of how to solve a problem, I'm like, okay, listen, guys, it's not going to be easy. It's going to take you a long time. I'm not very good at it myself. It took me years, so buckle up. I'm so sorry, everyone. I wish I had an easy answer for you around frustration tolerance. But, like, I think there's two parts, right? One is recognizing the inability to tolerate distress and learning distress tolerance skills. I have a great therapist who practices dialectical behavioral therapy like dbt, and I have found DBT skills so helpful for me in the areas of emotional regulation and distress tolerance, right? Like, once you're frustrated, you need to know how to get out of the frustration. And the first thing is to stop doing what you're doing, right? Like, the worst thing when you're frustrated is to just keep going and then you like, break the thing or you're like, you know, like, once you're escalated, just back away. Just be like, I can't do this right now. I've learned to do that because I've messed up a lot of stuff, like broken it or, you know, been trying to go too fast and whatever. You gotta back away from the task. And once you're frustrated, learning how to de escalate yourself, which I can loop back around to in a minute, is really important, but I actually think it's about avoiding frustration in the first place. And part of it is just general good ADC management, right? Because like I said, a lot of it relates back to not understanding the gaps in working memory, not understanding how to properly plan out a task. So if I sit down and I write out the steps of a task or I time a task, if it's a task that I do a lot and I time it, I'm less likely to miss steps, right? For example, I have a morning routine. I keep it written down. The morning routine is all the things I need to do to get out the door. If I reference that written list, I will go through those steps and I'll get out the door. But there's still days where I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I can sleep in. It's only gonna take me like half an hour to get out the door. And then I go to do a few things and then I'm like, oh, shoot. But I haven't fed the cat. Oh, shoot, I forgot to get that. Oh, shoot. I don't know where my keys are, right? If I don't use that explicitly written list with all the steps, I will not do all the steps. My brain will not remember all the steps. I will be late. I will be frustrated, right? So my good ADHD management external brain thing prevents frustration by reminding me of what I'm forgetting. The thing that kind of like went off in my head like a light bulb when you just said that, Asher, is that the flip side of expectations is disappointment. Right? And what those, you know, what my kid was experiencing when she was, when the painting didn't go the way she wanted it. Disappointment when, you know, my other kid wanted to do something a certain way and I interrupted them. That's disappointment. When I can't. When you can't weed the garden in the amount of time that you wanted to weed it, it's disappointing. When I can't build that IKEA bed that I thought I was going to get done today and now I'm not going to get it done today. Disappointment, right. The thing is that for me, and finally to answer your question is the longest answer ever, what I've realized, the key thing is to pre manage this, the disappointment, and talk myself off the expectation, which is so hard to do. But really it's actually just front end disappointment versus back end disappointment. Right? Front end disappointment is me going, okay, Dusty, this is probably going to be harder than anything is going to be because I'm. Although I'm always the one who's under planning, I'm never the, I'm never the red light planner. Right? So, okay, remember you're probably. This is going to take longer than you think. You might not have enough time. So if you can't finish the bed today before you have to go to your next appointment, that's the way it's going to be. And it feels disappointing. But I can pre cope with it because I can't cope with it on the other end when I'm like, oh.

A (16:25)

But I wanted to have this done.

B (16:27)

And so there is disappointment either way. But when I do it, when I front load the disappointment, like just so you know, this might not work out, it's easier to cope with the frustration.

A (16:38)

Dusty, a couple of thoughts there. When you talk about frontloading the disappointment, I tend to think of that a little differently. I tend to think of that as detaching from outcomes. So the example I gave with my garden, I stopped looking for outcomes in my gardening sessions, meaning I stopped saying I'm going to do X today. And I stopped that real quickly when X the first day was, I'm going to weed and mulch this one garden bed. And then two hours later, I was still just weeding the garden bed and I was getting increasingly frustrated. So rather than measuring success by what the completion was, I've started measuring success in a lot of areas in my life and have I moved it forward in some way? Have I, have I made meaningful progress? Have I spent an amount of time on this today. There that's meeting my goal rather than expecting an explicit outcome. So adjusting the idea of disappointment instead, thinking about measuring success differently can be really helpful here. And then when you're talking about learning how to manage frustration, pause, disrupt pivot is really relevant here. When I talked about those moments where I would stop and sit on my stoop and take a breath and drink some water, that was me taking me putting my own model into practice there and taking a pause and taking a pause rather than continuing through the frustration. Because I like you, I'm a person who can continue through the frustration and then end up doing something wrong or half assed or breaking the thing. In the case of the garden, I might have just sort of surface weeded. So it looked good, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to get down in and get the roots out so that that way I have an easier time moving forward maintaining said garden. And so rather than kind of giving into that, oh, I'm just frustrated, let's just barrel through and get it done so I don't to deal with it anymore. That was me sitting down and taking a moment to take a pause. And sometimes the disrupt pivot was hanging it up for the day, was saying I, I need to walk away from this and do something else with my time from here. I'm not going to be productive on this front anymore today. And that's okay. But sometimes the disrupt pivot was being able to stop and take a breath and then figure out what the next step was and engage with that next step. So listeners pause disrupt PIV really relevant here because so often in those moments where we do barrel through, there's no pause, we're in frustration, we're not acknowledging it, we're acting out of frustration. So much unwanted ADHD behavior comes from negative emotion, comes from being in a place of negative emotion, be it frustration or guilt or shame or anything else and not really acknowledging or naming or recognizing that in a useful way until it's too late.

B (19:48)

Yeah Asher, I, I think that like when I say the first thing I have to do is take a step back from trying to do what I'm trying to do. Like that is the positive pivot thing comes into play for me a lot when I'm already at that level because I've learned that I just need to turn to self soothing and that's a, it feels very alien, very foreign. It's not what comes naturally to me. But I've, I've kind of learned how to do it and it, you know, like, it does help. And the funniest thing is whatever, whatever you do to self soothe, it never feels like it's gonna help. When you're on this side of frustration, you're like, oh, it's not gonna make me feel any better. And I've had that happen with clients too, where I've been like, well, would you be willing to like, just try it and see? And then I have to talk myself too into trying these things and then you do them and then lo and behold, you do feel better. There was that meme on TikTok going for a stupid walk for my stupid mental health. It does make you feel better. So I think for me there's like, there is some detaching from outcome in some situations in my life that's been, been really helpful and like, sort of getting more into like journey thinking. Right. So for me, one of those ones was exercise. Exercise was very frustrating. It was never sustainable. I never lost weight, I never got stronger. I never got any outcomes. And when I was able to completely let go of outcomes and just put the focus on what was enjoyable about working out, lo and behold, I got more of those outcomes. Right. I was able to completely detach from outcomes in that area. There is still this aspect of this term I just made up, which is like front loading disappointment. Because I think even from childhood, even though I'm not nearly so like imaginative and so mental as I was like up in my head all the time. When I say mental, I don't mean crazy mental. I mean like thinking mentally a lot. But when I do, when I, when I think about all the things I need to do in a day, I think my brain naturally does get a lot of dopamine from planning and from like sort of visualizing and imagining like what's gonna happen when my brain is very attached to getting its dopamine from like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. It's gonna be like this, like, and getting really stuck, stoked about ideas and plans and dreams. So that's just where my, that's what, my brain does that all the time to me. And so I really have to actively be like, okay, brain, like, let's, let's take, let's reel it back in. Let's. You know what? Like, I know you want it to be like this. There's a good chance it won't be. Okay, That's a. That feels disappointing. Yeah, it's disappointing to not be able to just go all in on the fantasy outcome. And so I think for me, there is still a lot of coping with the disappointment of more realistic expectations. But it is like a muscle that I'm getting better at because I. I prefer the feeling of not, like, getting frustrated and, like, having a meltdown. And I've learned that that is really the way to it. So in some areas I can totally detach, but in some areas I can't exactly detach. It's just the way my brain goes. But I just have to, like, learn how to kind of be okay with. With things not going the way I want. And I. I don't know, I feel like there's some sort of, like, maturity or wisdom there that's very satisfying. Like, I feel very wise when I can be like, yes, disappointment is an emotion I must experience.

A (22:44)

Yeah, Dusty, a couple of parting thoughts there. First, back to pause, disrupt, pivot. I think it's. I think it's just important to talk about what's actually happening there when we take the stupid walk for our stupid mental health, or when I sit on my stoop and drink some water and take a breath or whatever else your pause might look like. What's important about that moment and what allows us to disrupt and pivot is getting out of our limbic system, getting out of that emotional brain, coming back to a more regulated place where you can see what is possible and what is not possible from here. And again, sometimes the answer is, I need to walk away from this for right now because re engaging with it is just going to put me right back into frustration, and that's okay. But we can't think strategically when we're in our limbic system. Fear and curiosity live in two different parts of the brain. Right when we are in our limbic system, when we are in frustration or fear or shame or guilt, we cannot think constructively. We cannot think through things in a logical way. So those moments are really about getting out of that place or attempting to get out of that place so that you can then disrupt. Disrupt, meaning disrupt what would normally happen, what the typical ADHD behavior for you would be there and then have an. A different experience by way of pivoting. And as far as the last thing you said, I think this is another way where we're very different. You said, you said that you are primarily green light planner. I think I'm primarily a red light planner. I'm primarily the person that will anticipate roadblocks and strife and challenge all the way through before I even get started. So I think that that's why measuring success differently is a really good strategy for me across the board because that gets me out of the, oh, this is going to be so hard. Ooh, this is going to be imposs. Possible. Oh, I don't know what the steps are. I'm. I'm scared to touch it and into. Just engage with it. Just engage with it. Because beginning to engage with it helps me start to see the steps. And more often than not, the steps aren't as onerous. Not true with my garden, but in other areas where I will throw up barriers for myself, this steps aren't nearly as onerous as I'm making them out to be once I actually engage with the thing. So rather than being so attached to getting it done and freaking out about that, just putting some time in and measuring success that way can be a great way for me to kind of see the full picture and remove some of those red lights that I'm throwing up for myself along the way.

B (25:19)

What occurred to me earlier, Ash, when you were talking about red light thinkers, is that there's, there's again, it's frustration. It's like front end versus back end. Because when I'm under planning or I'm green light planning and then I go to do the thing and it's harder than I think back end frustration, frustration during the task. But when you're anticipating it to be harder than it's going to be, then you procrastinate, then you put it off and it's frustrating to procrastinate. And then you go to do it and it's easier than you think it's going to be. And I've seen this happen so often. People get really frustrated with themselves for how long they've put things off when they're like, oh my God, that only took so long. And so it's like a different kind or like a different flavor of frustration, but it's like the frustration is still there. So it's kind of interesting. Like it shows up in different ways when you plan one way or another. And you're right, there's some Goldilocks, some magical Goldilocks zone of planning in between that I think we just have to keep striving for and like, sort of like one of those things that swings too far one way and then swings too far the other. And then you kind of settle in the middle in terms of your planning and the execution of that plan and managing your expectations precisely.

A (26:29)

Dusty. There's challenge on both sides. It's just the challenge manifests differently and at different points. And you're absolutely right. So much of my lived experience is frustration with myself for what I'm not doing that when I do do it. It was so easy, but it doesn't feel better because I waited so long to do it. I'm just. I'm just frustrated with myself that I didn't do it sooner. So one thing I do for myself is I try to know what and anticipate what those tasks, notice the thing that I am likely to put off or likely to throw up red lights for myself and try to remember what it's like to sit in that frustration and remember I don't have to do that. I there, there is another choice here, right? So kind of thinking about future me and what it looks like to take care of future me can be a helpful strategy there. I think this is a good place for us to wrap for today. Dusty.

B (27:24)

I agree.

A (27:26)

But before we wrap, listeners, one thing you can do to help out the show is leave a review wherever you listen. So if you have a couple of extra moments and an episode you've listened to recently has been helpful for you, please take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast. This helps us show up in searches, helps let other people know that this show is a valuable resource and it's one small way that you can help us out. So we'd really appreciate it. And until next week, I'm Ash and I'm Dusty and this is the Translating ADHD Podcast. Thanks for listening.