The Cure For 'The Shitty Now'
Wanna play?
One of the ways that we adults with ADHD motivate to do things is novelty. It’s in the “ADHD Guidebook On What It Takes For Us To Do Shit”. Look it up! :) I’m almost positive you have read this about novelty, or learned this, or understand this. There’s no way I’m your entry point into learning about ADHD! If so, you have a lot of sciency, neuro-ziptastical psychoeducating to do.
If that’s you, here ya go. I’m a fan of Russell Barkley, this will help you if you are wondering WTF when it comes to your brain: This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture
Now let’s talk a little bit and talk about how ADHD looks out in the world, not inside your skull spaghetti. I’m a huge fan of making this complicated neuro-business as simple and grounded in real-life experience as I can.
When people say they are doing a thing for a dopamine boost, I don’t have a fuckin clue what that is. It opens up a big can of worms in my mind. Does it mean they feel a little bit of goodness in their heart? Are they high? They have energy? They believe in themselves a little bit more? They have energy for a task? What. The Fuck. Is a dopamine boost?! Somebody said dopamine was responsible for, or deficient in, adults with ADHD and doing stuff…and now it’s a buzzword for “I did something!” It feels like it became a word like how we use “googling” to talk about researching something.
Novelty
It’s a synonym for “interesting” and we have interest-wired brains. Pretty easy to come to that conclusion.
So if we are to believe that novelty is a mechanism for doing stuff, then it stands to reason that we would ask ourselves, “can I make this awful task novel in some way?”
I see this as combatting ‘The Shitty Now’. The Now of a dumb task. That Now sucks, doesn’t it? But a novelty Now, being in the moment of a now that has a bit of novelty in it…no, that doesn’t suck…not as much, at least.
What can we do to make ‘The Shitty Now’ easier, more fun, more interesting? Novelty!
I shared my views on novelty in my recent podcast episode. Here’s the link if your ears want something to listen to.
How this looks in my world is by creating challenges (I love 30 day challenges, I love friendly competition with others, I love getting a badge/award for accomplishing a thing).
And I also love the novelty of body doubling. When I’m doing podcast outreach (one of my least favorite tasks but critical for my business), it isn’t as dreadful, isolating, and doom-y feeling when I’m in the ADHD Big Brother body double room and there’s a member hanging out with me. To me, that is increasing the novelty to me. The ability to type “This sucks!” in the chat, and they respond laughing, or with their own crappy task they are working on…sure beats slogging it out in isolation.
So often we are going against the internal dialogue that we shouldn’t need hacks or tips or tricks to do things that we know how to do, that we’ve done before. We should be able to just do the damn things. But believe you me, when you are ready to take an “even though” stance, meaning that even though you ‘should’ be able to do it, and even though you know how to do it, and even though you feel like a child for needing tips/tricks…even though all of that, you are going to give a new way of doing a try. Do that, and you’ll manage your ADHD so much faster than trying to grind it out like a normie. You may even surprise yourself, as members of our community say to me “I don’t know why this works, but it does!”
Comment challenge: Let’s novelterize one of your shitty tasks. Tell me something that always resonates as “NOT NOW!” And be as ridiculously dramatic as you possibly can. GO BIG with the drama!
Here’s an example from my world. The dishes are awful. The are a level of hell that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It feels disgusting, the sensation of a wet sponge, the sound of silverware scraping and when I enter into the task of doing dishes, there is no concept of time, just “this is who you are for the rest of your fucking life…guy doing dishes!” To novelterize it, I could create a challenge in the community to run the dishes every night before bed. And I’ll give myself a Dish Wizard badge when I hit 30 days. NOVEL! GAMIFIED IT! Your turn.
