← Translating ADHD
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- [00:02]
A
Hi, I'm Ash.
- [00:03]
B
And I'm Dusty.
- [00:04]
A
And this is the Translating ADHD podcast.
- [00:08]
B
Alrighty, friends. So I just want to remind you that the ADHD Boot camp is coming up in June. It is a big mega body double that I run. It's like basically a bunch of time that we get together to organize your home d doombox your doom boxes, go room by room and just kind of figure out where the problem areas are. If you've ever thought to yourself, I just need a huge uninterrupted chunk of time and I could really just kind of like go through these drawers and just get everything organized for once and for all. This is that time. Spoiler alert. Is definitely not going to be for once and for all, but I'm going to be there helping you, keeping you on track. We're working as a crew, we're taking lots of breaks, and along the way we're going to learn some things about adc. Friendly stuff, inventory management. So if you're interested, go sign up at ADHDStudio CA. It's always a blast. And our next coaching demo with me is going to be June 11th at 8pm Eastern Time, 5pm Pacific Time.
- [01:03]
A
Listeners, those live coaching demos are for our Patreon subscribers only. So if you are not currently a subscriber and you would like to join in on these live events that we have once a month, you can visit the website Translating adhd, click on the Patreon tab, and for five bucks a month, you gain access to these monthly events with either Dusty or myself, and you gain access to our podcast, Discord. I am also still taking new clients. If you've been thinking about ADHD coaching and you're worried about affordability, I do offer sliding scale. Visit my website, coachasher.com, fill out the form to get started, and if you do need sliding scale, bring that up in our first conversation and we will talk about how to make that work for you. So, Dusty. So, Ash, you want to tell our listeners what we're talking about today?
- [01:50]
B
Oh, yeah, we're talking about oppositionality or what I like to call having a case of the I don't wannas.
- [01:57]
A
Oh, I get the I don't want us a lot. I get the I don't want us a lot. I actually tackled one of my I don't want us this weekend because one of the strategies that works well for me, interestingly enough, because body doubling does not work for me, but having someone come over with the express purpose of helping me with something is A surefire way to get me started on it. And so I had a friend come over last Saturday who loves doing yard work. So it was a win win. And we spent a couple of hours in my yard. And for me, it's one of those things. The funny thing about yard work is I don't dislike it. Like, once I get started, I'm okay and I can do it for a good amount of time. And having someone else here helping me means that I am not going to not work. Like, I will stay at it for however long I have their help for and no longer. By the way, as soon as he left, I was also done doing yard work. But we did spend a good couple of hours in my yard on Saturday and got quite a bit done. And that kind of brings up one of the things that can cause oppositionality, is we can look at something and without breaking it down or without getting started on it, it can feel like this insurmountable task. And that's what yard work felt like to me. I was genuinely surprised at how much we were able to accomplish in a couple of hours. Even though I've lived in this house for five years, I. I ought to know about how long it takes to do yard work stuff. But I had built this up to be just an unsolvable problem. Like, no amount of effort or labor is going to get my yard into a reasonable state when realistically, two people for a couple of hours put a huge dent in everything, that huge, massive dent in everything that needed to be done. And gave me a better idea, a more realistic perspective on what's needed now, which is going to make it much easier to re. Engage with that task in the future, even without help.
- [03:55]
B
Yeah. And I. I certainly find that this is something that's present for a lot of my clients. We've been talking a little bit about some of the differences between, like, ADHD and adhd. And I do find that sometimes it's more intense for my ADHD clients. And. And there's like a version of oppositionality that, you know, there's this idea of PDA or pathological demand avoidance. And my understanding of this, because I'm not an expert, is it's still being sort of hotly debated as to whether or not this is like a real thing or a subset of a profile of autism. It's, you know, there's. There's a lot of debate around the concept, I think, because my understanding of the discussion is that there are some problematic ways that it's being characterized, basically that you Kind of have to let people do whatever they want, even if they want to be jerks kind of a thing. Like, that's. I'm summarizing it, but there's like, there's pushback from both sides of the community where there's some debate around autonomy versus personal accountability. It's very interesting. Anyway, sidebar. Certainly a lot of my clients do struggle with this. Not all of them, but some of them. And it's so frustrating because you can make the perfect plan. You can put a lot of effort into setting things up for yourself the right way. You know, setting the stage, priming the pump, all that jazz. And when the, like, moment of truth comes, everything should work. But your brain is just like, nope, I'm not doing it right. It's like when you have that little kid and they really want to be in, like, ballet or something, you buy them the expensive thing, you pay for all the lessons, they happily go to all the lessons and they get on stage and they just, like, throw a fit and refuse to do the dance. So it's. It, it's just as frustrating for my clients as it is for anyone else. So certainly, like, there, there has to be. I think, Asher, the interesting thing about oppositionality is from my perspective, the tools and the adc, like hacks or the ADC approaches to this, they're primarily cerebral or cognitive. Right? It's about, I find, like, how you talk to yourself. Because again, there's. I always say to clients, there's no, there's no alarm in this world. There's no amount of post IT notes that are going to be so effective that they will force you to do a thing that you've decided not to do. Right? Because people will often say, oh, alarms don't work for me. Post IT notes don't work for me. And actually they do work. The alarm will go off and the person will go, oh, I'm supposed to do X, Y, Z. But. But sometimes there's a knee jerk like, I don't wanna. And it's like, okay, no, no, no, that alarm worked. It did what it was supposed to do. It's supposed to remind you that you're supposed to do a thing. But like, if you have said to yourself, I don't want to do that. There's nothing the alarm can do about that. There's nothing the post it note can do about that.
- [06:24]
A
And Dusty, to add to that, sometimes we don't realize we have that knee jerk reaction so quickly that we don't realize the story we're Telling ourself or the conversation we're having with ourself. And I have a couple of client examples here that, that breaking that down was kind of what a different experience. One client, and I've talked about this client before, but it's such a helpful concept that I'm going to talk about it again. Describes these two voices in her head as the rebel and the drill sergeant. So the drill sergeant is the. Is the beating yourself up, right? You should, why aren't you, what, why can't you do it, what's wrong with you, etc. And the rebel is the opposite of that. The who says I have to do this? Me. I don't have to do this. And so sort of understanding those two voices allowed us to bring a third voice into the conversation. That third voice being her, right? What. What do you want? And so for her, it was attaching to better positive outcomes. Her. One of her big coaching goals was to. She was working full time and in school, and she wanted to break the pattern of doing things at the last minute that had plagued her throughout her academic career because she knew that at this stage of life, working full time, being married, having dogs to take care of. Right. That she could not pull all nighters the way she could when she was just in school. And so bringing herself into that voice and bringing this concept of taking care of her future self and then noticing over time the better experiences she was having when she was doing that, that was the solve for her. I had another client just this week who talked about the sort of guilt of something's been on my to do list for quite a while and now it necessarily has my attention for some reason. So there's the guilt and shame of not having done it, and then there's this magical thinking that I'm just gonna hurry up and do it all right now. And not only am I gonna do it all, and this is relative to work tasks for him, not only am I to do it all, I'm gonna drag in these other related tasks and hu up and knock it all out. And again, he didn't realize that that's the story he was telling himself. All he was noticing was the resistance to engage with the task. And what wasn't or isn't happening here for him is breaking something down into realistic steps. So for him, he's a manager and he's a new manager, so he's learning how to be a manager. And there's this tension between this need for planning and this discounting the value of planning or the time that it take. So this is all planning oriented tasks and there's some false belief that that shouldn't take any time and. Or it's not worth spending the time on. And so alongside that, there's no realistic sense of, like, what does a first step or a next step look like? He's. He's always thinking in terms of how can I knock this out the quickest while never actually getting to a. How do I get started? What's the first step? How do I. How do I even engage with this? And the combination of the guilt and the shame and also the, the overwhelm of I don't know how to do this causes him to back away from the task before he engages with it at all.
- [09:49]
B
Yeah, I think it's so important to figure out what's going to work for you. But also I think maybe have a couple of different approaches because I'm not trying to say that I personally don't struggle with oppositionality at all. I just, I don't think for me, it's one of the biggest ways that my ADT manifests. But I, I still personally, you know, cope with this, as I know you do, Ash. And I was gonna say, you know, like, part of it is this, this mental strategy and making sense of it. Right. So when you're talking about the rebel and the. What was it? The rebel in the drill sergeant, like the rebel and the drill sergeant. To me that sounds a lot like sort of internal family systems, which I don't know a lot about. But several clients have. Have said they found it helpful. And so I think you're. I think you're hitting nail on the head here is just having language for it and just like understanding, even being able to say, like, I'm feeling very oppositional or I have a case of the. I don't wanna. Or it's my pda. Like, whatever way that you can verbally make sense of it first. Yeah. If you can name it, you can be like, okay, here's this thing. Do I have tools for this? Yes, I have tools for it, or no, I don't. And like, maybe I know what to do about it. And I think how you approach these tasks can both depend on the type of task and where you're at. Right. So there's kind of layers here. Where are you at with your executive function? Do you have a lot of executive function, but you're just feeling resistant or, or are you, like, also exhausted? Are you also going through a lot? Because that's gonna, I think Influence the approach that you take. For me, sometimes I just have to accept that this task, you know, like your client is gonna take way longer than I thought it was gonna take. And I have to kind of relinquish control and make peace with the fact that this is not gonna get done as quickly as I want it to. But progress over perfection, like any progress is better than nothing at all. Right. And so this is where black and white thinking gets in our way. It's like, oh, if I'm gonna do it, I have to do all of it. And I certainly can't do all of it. So I of it. And so something that's helped me personally is using reverse pomodoros in conjunction with giving, like accepting that it's going to take longer, but that, that it doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. So for me, that looks like, let's say I have some horrible tasks. You know, it's whatever, it's my taxes and it's a multi step task. And each step is dreadful. For example, so I'll give myself permission to pare it down to just the most tiny, tiny basic task. Let's say I need to go through all my expenses and all my receipts and check them or something. Okay. Well, the first step is just getting my receipts out. Like just getting them. And perhaps my receipts are even in multiple places. So even that task feels overwhelming. So I might give myself permission to do something really, really pleasant, like play Stardew Valley. And I love, I think, Ash, you don't play a lot of video games, but a lot of my clients, and I love Stardew Valley in particular, because the format of the game is such that you play like a day, and a day is a set amount of time. And then there's this sort of natural break, much like watching short episodes of something. But Stardew Valley has the additional benefit of like, it's very pleasant. The music is very like soothing and calming. And you're like doing things in the game that are kind of productive. So it's almost false. Dopamine. It's sort of like synthetic dopamine. Right. So I'll like play a day on Stardew Valley and then at the break I'll get up and I'll be like, okay, just get receipts, I don't know, out of your wallet. Okay, then I'll play another day. Just go downstairs and get receipts from the envelope where you keep them downstairs. Okay. And so like in the course of an hour, maybe, all I've Done is got those receipts together. But I've managed to get the receipts together and I haven't like got myself into a crying mess doing it. And then like, slowly, slowly I'll do like one small task either in between shows or we were saying earlier, like, I really, I like yard work. I find I do it as a way to like to procrastinate. So I'll go outside and do like one yard work task. But then I'll be like, okay, when this one task is done, small task, come in and do a bit of the other task. And then the reason I call it a reverse pomodoro is obviously because I'm spending a lot more time doing the pleasant thing. And just a very. Instead of a short break, this short break is actually a short amount of productivity. And so in the course of an eight hour day, a person, you might not get the whole task done, but you'll at least be 10 to 15% ahead of where you were. And if you were just going to not get it done that whole day anyway because you were going to freeze up and procrastinate, well, you already weren't going to get it done. Right. So part of this is like admitting, okay, day after day I've been telling myself I'm going to do this. I'm not making any progress, at least just, you know, in the example of getting my taxes done, at least just getting my receipts together is progress. But I find that for myself personally, I will end up getting some momentum. So maybe after three to four hours once the task is started. Because again, sometimes it's actually just about task initiation and being locked up there. Once I kind of, you know, I've got the receipts and now I've like opened the spreadsheet and now I've like opened the software or whatever. But I've done it by taking lots of breaks and doing pleasant things that I want to do eventually. I find that often I will hit a point where I'm like, all right, I'm gonna sit down and do this. But the beauty is that even if I don't, I've broken it down in a way where I know what the next step is and I can chip away at it like that. I recently had to do this. I had a big backlog of just a lot of small admin tasks. None of them were major, there was just a lot of them. And I just had this huge resistance to doing any of them. So what I would do is whenever I was going to see somebody and do some socializing I would take my laptop with me. I would say to my friend when I got there, whoever it was, I'd say, hey, I really need you to body double me to just do this one admin task before we like go to the movies or play this game or go to the park or whatever we're gonna do. Can you just like force me to sit here and just like do a 10 minute admin task? And over the course of a week, I just basically took my laptop around with me. Everywhere I dropped the kids off at school, I'd stop and do one small admin task on my laptop. I'd, you know, go to the gym, in the parking lot, do one small admin task. I just had to spread it out. I just couldn't sit there. It was maybe only an hour worth of work, but it just, something about it felt too hard for me to just sit and grind out these tasks. So in a way it was like more painful, but it was like also the only way I could get it done. So making it easy, I think is one thing, but there's also, I think something to be said here about mood. And I just want to. I've been talking a lot, so I want to pitch it back to you, but when I say mood, I mean like, are there things that you can do to actually want to get over the. I don't want us and get to a place of like, I do want to, or. Or a place of motivation. And before I get into what works for me or what I've seen work for my clients. Ash, I'm curious if you've seen anything effective for your clients or for yourself to actually change how the task feels?
- [16:10]
A
That's a good question, Dusty, and I think that coaching process has a great answer here because one of the things that I am consistently doing with all of my clients and something that we're really bad at as people with adhd, is connecting to and learning from our actual experiences. So as a client starts to have different experiences, engaging with these tasks instead of putting them off, not carrying around the guilt, the shame, the anxiety, the. The panic, not having to frantically and urgently do things at the last minute, that unto itself starts to become the reward, right? That. That ability to connect to future self and recognize that I'm going to feel so much better or I do feel so much better when I stay on top of these things. How we get there looks very different from client to client. I have one client who has this really interesting system. This is an Audi HD client and it was really Helpful for him to start color coding his tasks. The type of task that he feels opposition towards is a great task. And just naming it is that. Just understanding that that is a particular type of task that I do not like to do was really helpful. And then setting some very small and manageable goals around gray tasks. So right now, I think the goal is to do one gray task a week. And we don't. We're not attached to which one. That gives him some flexibility and choice, gives him some amount of ability to adapt to both circumstance, context, mood. But we've been at this for a while. And his bigger noticing is when I am on top of my gray tasks or when I'm on top of enough of them that I don't feel like I have this looming, overwhelming, gross backlog that feels better. And so there is motivation on his part to stay after this. And this is something we keep coming back to. I set the goal right now. Now is once a week. We've played around with this concept now for months in our coaching, and there are times when great tasks do become harder to do and we revisit and we retool, but there's that intrinsic motivation to. It feels good when I'm on top of this. So I want to come back to this. I want to readjust and figure out how I can keep doing this. Interestingly enough, it was also helpful for him to recognize when a task that isn't gray. So his favorite color is purple. And purple tasks tend to be things that he's doing for things that are for him, things that he enjoys doing, things that are typically not hard to engage with. And so something that has been really helpful for him is to recognize when a purple task temporarily becomes gray, when it hits some point, some wall of awful, some challenge for him that introduces that oppositionality that wouldn't otherwise be there. The thing that was hugely important about that for him is with the purple task, he's naturally motivated most of the time to attack that almost. Almost to his own detriment in the way of, like, latching on and hyperfocus and having a special address. Like, it can get to that degree. But certainly engaging in oppositionality are not the challenge. But he was recognizing this pattern of I put things down and I don't go back to them, and I don't know why I do that. And that frustrates me because I want to engage with this thing. I was previously really super engaging with this thing, and then one day I put it down and I never picked it back up. Why did I do that? Well, why did he do it? Because there was oppositionality there that he wasn't recognizing. He was expecting to have the same level of sort of natural motivation and ease of engagement with this task that he had before, when there was a barrier in the way that was making that not possible at that moment in time that he wasn't seeing as such.
- [20:04]
B
I like the idea of, like, yeah, just doing, like, one small one, and then you still have that choice. To me, that does kind of feel like it's somewhere in between. Like, the making it easy thing. Like, oh, you just have to do one. It can be anyone. But then there is also mood, because it's like, you can choose the one that you most feel like doing, right. For myself, it's so frustrating to me that I still do this, but so often I literally forget how easy it is for me to change my mood around a thing and then make myself want to do a thing. Like, there are just tasks that I consistently never want to do, like put on makeup or practice the guitar. Sounds funny. I don't want to do those things. They feel like a drag. Literally, the difference between me wanting to do those things, like having internal motivation and feeling like I have to force myself to do it is passively absorbing content. Like, if I watch a makeup tutorial, I'll be like, whoa, I gotta go try that. Or if I watch, like, a music video or anything about literally anything about music, music theory, guitar, all I have to do is sit there on the couch and intake it, and then I will just naturally want to get up and do it. So for me, a really big shift that I've made is instead of, say, putting on my to do list, like, play guitar or think to myself, I need to do makeup. I'll go watch a guitar tutorial or, like, watch a music video, because that seems easier. The barrier is lower, and it's like, if I actually shift to that, then I will want to. And a lot of my clients do this with, like, cleaning. They'll listen to, like, cleaning podcasts, or they'll. They'll use an app like Finch or Sweepy or just something that they're shifting to. A thing that's adjacent, that doesn't have the same resistance, but that they're using that thing like a trampoline almost, right? Because once they hit that trampoline, they get more air, and they can, like, get into the task. So that's kind of a cool thing to think about, is, like, what. What do you know that will put you in the mood. But once you know that thing, don't just, don't just scroll that information away. Like actually shift it. Right. Make it like, I need to open the sweepy app versus I need to clean the kitchen dusty.
- [21:57]
A
Similarly, but a little different than that, it can be helpful for my clients to pair something they really like with something they don't like. You, you described a version of that with the reverse Pomodoros. But what I'm talking about here is if a client has a particular podcast they really love listening to. Listening to that podcast while they cook dinner and pairing those things together. Do they love to cook? No. But does it feel much more rewarding to spend that time doing a non preferred task while they get to do something that they really enjoy alongside it? Yes, it does. A slightly different take on that is setting the mood can sometimes be helpful. You mentioned Stardew Valley earlier. I have put in. I have put a lot of time into Stardew Valley. I love that game.
- [22:42]
B
Oh, okay, okay, okay. I thought for some reason you weren't a gamer person, but yeah, I love that one.
- [22:47]
A
No, I'm definitely a gamer. I've put a lot of time into Stardew Valley. So interestingly enough, you were describing the soundtrack earlier. I have the soundtrack on cd. And so putting that on because of the nature of that game can be a way for me to set the mood to like, okay, I'm gonna just like, I grind stuff out on my farm in Stardew Valley. Like, I'm gonna spend the duration of this 45 minute CD grinding something out for myself. I had a client years ago, this was during the pandemic, who was struggling. We had just designed all of this supportive structure around her time on campus. And then time on campus went away. And so we were, we were readj to, now this all happens in my apartment. How do we rebuild this structure? And part of what was important to her was the supportive environment of the library for studying. And so making some minor adjustments to the way her living room was laid out, just moving a couple of things around so that she could sit in a comfortable study position in that space and putting on a particular soundtrack was the way that she sort of set the mood to then get into a study headspace.
- [24:01]
B
So what you just said there about pairing, pairing things that you don't like or that you do like, so important. And I, I often will suggest that clients make this shift because clients will come to coaching all the time and they'll be like, I really want to paint my nails and give myself a manicure. Maybe what I'll do is I'll promise myself that if I do this, then I can do that. And I see that fail so often because clients will be like, well, if I do xyz, I can have a cookie. But then their brain goes, well, I know I can just have that cookie. That's a made up rule. You made that rule up, Dusty. You can just eat the cookie. Right? So the thing is shifting from like the idea of a reward. Like if I do X, then I get Y to like using the reward to make the task more pleasant, as you say. Asher. Like often when I have to do stuff like taxes or admin tasks that I don't want to do, I'll do it on the couch with my laptop while watching a show that I like. Right? Or I'll like send emails in the bathtub or like, I'll go to a park that I like or like. Any way that you can kind of add, yeah, the thing that is enjoyable either intermittently or as you're doing the thing. Obviously it's a little bit hard to do your do your nails and give yourself a manicure while you're doing other stuff. But yeah, you know, I do this as well too. A lot with cleaning. I'll put like, I have all my apps like Disney, Netflix, everything on my phone and I'll just put a show that I like on while I'm cooking and I'll use headphones or like I'll put on a show that I like while I'm cleaning, usually one that I've already seen before, like reruns of Star Trek or something. But I just find it so much easier to actually do a sort of mind numbing cleaning task if I'm also having some entertainment.
- [25:34]
A
Dusty, you listen to shows. I listen to fish shows, which if you are a fish fan, like each show is kind of its own unique thing, so there's always something to discover there. But similar idea that like putting on a fish show that I haven't heard before or one that I know that I really like can be a way to kind of keep my brain engaged while I'm doing the thing that otherwise feels boring or mind numbing, as you said.
- [26:03]
B
So we could talk about this forever. But just to kind of like summarize, I think what we've both agreed here is the first and most important aspect of this is naming it, like understanding that this is like a symptom of adhd or it's like an experience you're going to have. Whether you call it the I don't wannas or gray tasks or PDA or like, just, oh, I've got my drill sergeant. Finding language that makes sense and resonates for you so that when you're in this feeling, you don't just get stuck in it, but you actually, like, externalize it so you can kind of hold it in your hands and look at it and go, oh, I'm having this experience. And then the next thing is knowing what works for you and maybe even combining things, right? Whether you break it down, make it easier, give yourself more choice so that you're getting out of that feeling of a loss of autonomy. Like, like what Ash was saying with his client. You know, being able to choose, you know, asking for help, accountability, or mood management, making the task fun, gamifying it, finding a way to make it feel pleasant, finding a way to add in value. Reverse Pomodoros. There's. There's so many ways that you could cope with this. And, and I will say, like, people with ADC are so brilliant. You could look on all the vast corners of the Internet, Reddit, tick tock, and just find more and more and more, like, different iterations of these strategies that are cool and unique. So, like, don't get frustrated, don't give up hope. You're probably always gonna have to cope with this, but it is copable. I don't know if that's a word. And just knowing that there are things that you can do so that you don't just get stuck and frustrated and get behind, that's really, I think, at the heart of this, right, Ash?
- [27:28]
A
I agree, Dusty. And the one last thing I will say is sometimes when we're facing something like this, it can freeze momentum on everything, right? I'm not engaging with this thing. So I'm not. I can't do anything else. I'm not allowed to do anything else. You alluded to this earlier with the, with the idea of the reward. I'm not allowed to have the reward until I do the task. But more so than that, it will prevent us from doing other tasks that need doing because we feel the pressure of this thing looming, but we are so unable to engage with it. So alongside everything you just said, one more thing I will throw in is sometimes I will ask myself if I. If I just can't, if I just cannot engage with that thing, my shift will be, well, what can I do? And put effort in a different direction. And sometimes putting effort in a different direction then helps me approach the thing. That I'm avoiding because I'm getting some amount of momentum going. And sometimes it doesn't. Right. But it at least prevents that complete freeze that can happen when there's something that you're avoiding and you're struggling to get past that oppositionality or avoidance to action on.
- [28:40]
B
Totally. So. Well said.
- [28:42]
A
All right, Dusty, let's wrap here for this week. So, listeners, until next week, I'm Ash. And I'm Dusty, and this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.