ADHD is a misnomer. We don’t have an attention deficit, we have a dysregulation.
Many of us struggle for years trying to make sense of what that means. In some ways, it boils down to simple physics. We ADHDers have a lot of inertia.
My high school physics teacher delighted in long acronyms. Every once in a while, the sound of our class chanting one in particular drifts through my mind. OARSAR…OIMSIM…SSSD…UAUBAEAOF…
All these years later, these sound patterns have kept Newton’s First Law of Motion imprinted upon my auditory thinker’s brain. Newton’s First Law is also called the Law of Inertia.
Replace “objects” in this law with “ADHDers” and you have Newton’s First Law of ADHD.
Objects ADHDers at rest stay at rest…
I have a great work ethic — once I get started. Most ADHDers struggle with transitions. If you give us a job to do, we often feel resistant. We don’t know where or how to start.
Whether we’re in bed in the morning, sitting in front of the TV, reading a book, even just staring out the window, our brains want to keep us there. We aren’t lazy, but getting up and getting started feels crazy difficult sometimes. Heck, I even avoid getting started on stuff I want to do!
Objects ADHDers in motion stay in motion, same speed same direction…
Once you get us going on a project, look out! Some people call this an ADHD superpower <insert eyeroll here>: we can put in marathon efforts on tasks that really grab us. We focus our attention like a laser and we won’t leave it alone.
We do it writing code, wrapping up a project at the office, hunched over a craft table, or sorting all our Legos into color-coded bins. Many ADHDers possess an uncanny ability to put on our blinders and work long past when others would’ve quit for dinner or lost interest.
Even if we aren’t hyperfocused, per se, we resist changing gears. For example, I hate using the telephone. I’ll let phone calls pile up on my to-do list for months. But eventually one phone call becomes enough of an emergency that I have to bite the bullet and do it right away. Then something funny happens: I get my brain into phone mode. After I hang up, I pull out that list of phone calls and cross off five more. I may hate the telephone, but sometimes it’s easier to keep making calls than it is to make my brain switch gears to a new set of tasks.
…Unless acted upon by an equal and opposite force.
Even more than making phone calls, I avoid cleaning up our basement. The basement tends to attract clutter from elsewhere in the house. It’s easier to hide stuff down there than it is to deal with it for real.
But I also hate clutter. The mess recently got on my last nerve and I had a complete meltdown about the basement. To be fair, the whole house had been a powder keg for a while. I’d felt myself stewing about clutter in every room. But one day, something lit a spark in the basement and boom! Where once I didn’t know where to start, I now raged through the project at a breakneck pace.
People with ADHD avoid unpleasant tasks, but if something becomes enough of an emergency or triggers enough of an emotional reaction, we can really show up. Unfortunately, sometimes we require an epic meltdown to break the motivational logjam.
Likewise with hyperfocus. For an ADHDer deep in the zone, a simple “hey, we need to leave for dinner in 15 minutes” or “you’re going to be late for work” won’t cut it. Same speed, same direction, remember? The “equal and opposite force” will likely be that stomach-dropping moment when we look at the clock and realize we should’ve been arriving somewhere by now. Then we’ll put down the hyperfocus task and run around the house gathering our things and yelling “oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t.”
If ADHD is a problem of inertia, that means we need a greater equal and opposing force to change our course. We won’t respond to the quiet knowledge that we should do this or we’ll be sorry if we don’t do that. If we’re resisting a transition, sometimes nothing short of a disaster will move us.
Inertia has its pros and cons, of course.
I don’t see this added inertia as a gift any more than I see it as a death sentence.
Yes, inertia sucks sometimes. Focusing on one activity to the exclusion of everything else is so rarely practical. Sometimes we ADHDers keep going on a task when we really need to take care of other responsibilities. And once in a while, it’d be nice to knock out a tedious job before it became an emergency. To be able to make smooth transitions between tasks at appropriate times: the impossible dream, right?
And yet, my single-minded focus on a project like cleaning out the basement — and my ability to ignore physical exhaustion almost entirely — sometimes cancels out my procrastination on those same tasks. It feels good to turn myself loose on a project that has felt stalled for years and see miraculous progress in such a short time.
I have to admit, sometimes I wish I had more trouble starting certain projects once that hyperfocus motivation kicks in. Seriously, folks. Where would we be if we always stopped to consider whether we’d actually finish a project before we started it?
And there’s the rub: once our epic inertia encounters that equal and opposite force, we’re right back where we started — whether we’ve reached an acceptable stopping point or not. Physics has no memory or feelings. Objects at rest and in motion have no sense of their own importance. And our ADHD seldom bends to human whims, either.
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