If the Brain Finds a Loophole

Closing the pathway to task avoidance

Our brains are so smart. So crafty. These amazing piles of skull spaghetti do such a fantastic job at helping us to avoid suffering.

Sometimes we’ll have some solid intentions to get some important stuff done. We’ll even schedule it in our calendar like good ADHD girls and boys. And when the time comes to do that thing that we planned to do, we find ourselves not doing it.

But we said we wanted to do it?!

Doesn’t matter, the brain found a loophole and we auto-pilot loopholes. Every time.

This is how that looks in the wild. Let’s say the task is to work on our taxes. It’s a craptastic task, so it’s easy to just blow off. But we scheduled it for 2:00pm on Tuesday and put it in our calendar. It’s now 2:00pm on Tuesday and the reminder alert goes off. Enter loopholes:

We are in the middle of something, so we’ll just silence that alarm and keep going on the thing that we are trucking on. Wouldn’t want to mess up our flow. (Loophole!)

The alarm goes off but suddenly our brain reminds us that cleaning up the kitchen makes sense, and so does cleaning the living room, and we are so overwhelmed with household chores, the taxes will have to wait. (Leeoooophole!)

The alarm goes off, but we are in “a mood” and we just say fuck it. Hey, there’s a term for this in the ADHD manual, oppositional defiance, or demand avoidance, and I learned that’s normal for people with ADHD, so, fuck it. (LOOPHOLIO!)

The alarm goes off, and we have to spend a millisecond thinking about how to get started on the taxes, that millisecond translates into the inner feeling of ‘for the rest of my life’ and the thought of doing the taxes becomes impossible because you don’t have all day! (Loopey-doop hole!)

There are plenty of others that I’m sure you can think of and please feel free to leave them in the comments.

What adults with ADHD are great at is explaining why we can’t do things. I, myself, am similar. I know all the ways that I struggle to get things done. What I would love to encourage everyone to practice is “even though.” It’s my patented, trademarked 8 step formula for…..I’m joking.

It means that even though the brain offers you a loophole, a justified reason, a reason that makes complete sense, even though that…you honor what you said. It requires self awareness in the moment. And getting in the habit of honoring your calendar (this is tough, I know). But try to remember, you put something in the calendar because you predetermined it was a time you had available and you had an intention for that time.

Practice the art of doing what you said when you said you’d do it.

Practice the feeling of torture as you “do the taxes.” (Setting a timer and giving yourself a quit time is the answer to this, fyi.)

Practice the uncomfortability of saying no to something because you already have an appointment…even though that appointment sucks and this new thing would be so fun!

This is one of the ways to manage your ADHD. ADHD doesn’t go away. Shitty tasks never become unshitty. To do them requires some level of suffering at first. And if you need help getting through that suffering, then come to ADHDBB, because we do this stuff every single day in there.

What are some of your loopholes? (That you are not going to take, starting today!)