5 Ways the Self-Help Industry Ignores ADHD
I used to be a self-proclaimed self-help junkie. It only helped me to feel bad about myself.
A few years ago, long before I knew that I had ADHD, I became obsessed with the idea of self improvement. I had just graduated college (10 years later than I was supposed to, but whatever) and I was convinced that my life was on the up and up. The problem was, I was plagued by all of these bad habits and a lack of discipline. Fortunately, there are literally hundreds of books dedicated to teaching how to harness your willpower and obliterate all of the obstacles standing between you and your best self.
I read them all. I listened to the podcasts. I followed the social media accounts. I paid for the courses and online conferences. I took the notes. I made the plans.
And nothing changed.
It was devastating. I spent months honestly believing that willpower and discipline were the keys to my success, and the only thing standing in my way was me. So every time I failed to follow through on a goal I set for myself, I took that to mean that I, as a human, was a failure.
Over and over, I would start a workout plan, or a journal, or a business plan. Two weeks later, I had completely abandoned it, reinforcing this narrative that I am a failure, so of course I failed.
Here’s the thing: all of these authors and influencers completely ignore the role that brain chemistry plays in traits like determination, will power, and discipline.
There are many different imbalances that can make achieving goals more difficult, but for those with ADHD, our brain chemistry makes the gap between goal creation and goal realization seem more like an infinite chasm. Here are 5 reasons that self-help advice doesn’t work for people with ADHD.
1. The Wall of Awful
People with ADHD commonly experience trouble starting tasks. This paralysis comes from a very real barrier formed from a lifetime of negative emotions. This barrier is known as The Wall of Awful.
The Wall of Awful is the result of a sick cycle of life with ADHD. You set a goal, or start a task, and you fail. That failure leads to negative feelings — shame, disappointment, etc. — and each of these emotions lays a brick on the wall. Soon, the wall is so large that it prevents you from starting the task in the first place, which makes you feel like even more of a failure, which adds more bricks, which… you get the picture.
I will write a future post about overcoming the Wall of Awful, but suffice it to say that just starting a task can be a tremendous show of willpower for someone with ADHD.
2. ADHD Paralysis
Similarly to the Wall of Awful, ADHD Paralysis prevents ADHDers from starting tasks, but this time for different reasons. ADHD Paralysis occurs when the brain becomes overwhelmed. As people with ADHD, we often have a hard time breaking large tasks into smaller, obtainable tasks. When given a task with too many steps, the ADHD brain will often “crash” or freeze up, making it impossible to start making progress on the task. Even worse, when we become paralyzed by one task, we often can’t do anything else either, because we know we should be doing the first thing.
For example, let’s say you decide you want to become healthier. The steps involved with getting healthier will include:
- Keeping a standard sleep schedule
- Working out 3 times per week
- Eating “better” (this will be its own post)
- Brushing your teeth twice a day (a common stumbling block for folks with ADHD)
Each one of these tasks have multiple subtasks that will need to be accomplished in order to establish the new habit. ADHD paralysis will try to keep the ADHDer from attempting to become healthy in the first place. Once the ADHDer gets past that initial barricade, ADHD Paralysis can make it so that they can’t decide which of these tasks to start with, so they decide to do all of them at the same time. This overwhelms the brain ,because no one could keep up with this many changes at once. The brain crashes, and the ADHDer becomes stuck, unable to do any of the things that they know they should be doing. This can lead to the same negative feelings that comprise the Wall of Awful.
This is one of the reasons ADHDers are often seen as lazy; internally we are at war with ourselves, but externally, it just looks like we’re procrastinating.
3. Faulty Memory
One of the things that I think is most misunderstood about ADHD is the fact that working memory is severely impaired. Working memory is described by the NIH as “the retention of a small amount of information in a readily accessible form.”
Thanks to an under-developed prefrontal cortex, people with ADHD do not have this ability, at least not in the same way that non-ADHD people do. We tend to forget things almost immediately, even really important things that we swore we wouldn’t forget. This also causes a sort of “object permanence” issue, where things that aren’t readily visible do not get remembered. It’s a very real example of “out of sight, out of mind.”
So what does this have to do with setting and achieving goals? Well, to work towards a goal, you first have to remember that you set it in the first place. You have to remember what tasks you need to be working on, or at least remember where you wrote them down.
Faulty working memory also leads to other struggles, such as “time blindness,” or the inability to gauge the passing of time. Time blindness prevents ADHDers from accurately predicting how long something will take to do, even if they have done that same thing a thousand times before.
So let’s look at the example of brushing your teeth twice a day. This is an activity that takes a maximum of 5 minutes, so why do so many people with ADHD have poor dental hygiene?
- They simply forget to do it. Even if they have brushed their teeth twice a day for their whole life, it is still possible for them to forget about it for days or weeks at a time, especially if someone put their toothbrush in a drawer instead of on the counter.
- They believe they don't have time. An inability to accurately gauge time makes it feel like things will take longer than they actually do. So if you need to be at work at 8am, and you live ten minutes away, you still may believe that you don't have time because it's 7:30am and you don't want to be late.
There is still a lot that is not fully understood when it comes to working memory and its relationship with ADHD, but one thing is absolutely certain: it is one of the biggest challenges that ADHDers face, and has the potential to derail every goal and plan you have ever created.
4. Hyperfixations
Hyperfixations are a strange phenomenon in the ADHD world. Unlike hyperfocus, where someone stays focused on a single task for an extended period, hyperfixations occur when someone with ADHD cannot stop thinking about something. Every ADHDer I have ever met has experienced this; you know you should be focused on work, but you can’t stop thinking about that hobby you just started. ADD.org describes it as “hyperfixation is fueled by an intense passion or interest in the activity.”
Hyperfixations can be incredibly disruptive to ADHD life, leading to near-constant daydreaming, impulsive spending, loss of time, neglecting responsibilities, and more.
Hyperfixation isn’t all bad, though. Most people with ADHD are knowledgeable about multiple, often unrelated things because of these hyperfixations.
For me, self-help became a hyperfixation, and I fully immersed myself in it. However, the thing about hyperfixations is that they are temporary, and will fade just as quickly as they appeared, usually in just a few weeks. So, when that fixation faded, another took its place, meaning that the time and mental bandwidth that I had been dedicating to bettering myself was now being redirected to the new shiny thing in my life. Although I continued to consume self-help material and make plans for habitual change, my heart was no longer in it.
More importantly, it became harder and harder to care about self-improvement, because all I could think about was starting a candle-making business (yes, my new fixation was candle-making).
5. Impulsivity
It’s no secret that ADHD brings with it a significant lack of impulse control. Although everyone experiences periods of increased impulsivity, the ADHD brain and its underdeveloped anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) experience impulsivity on another level. Since the ACC is tasked with regulating things like impulsive behavior and emotional response, the ADHD brain does not have the ready-built tools for keeping these things in check.
For example, let’s say your goal is to lose weight. Even after getting past the Wall of Awful and ADHD Paralysis, writing yourself tons of reminders, and tempering your tendency to become fixated on things, you still have to find a way to control the impulse to eat things that you shouldn’t. If you are an emotional eater, this becomes doubly difficult, because the same part of the brain that regulates impulsivity is also responsible for emotional response. In its never-ending thirst for dopamine, the brain can convince you that eating an entire cake by yourself is actually a good thing!
Self-help and ADHD
I will be first to recognize that the self-help industry is primarily made-up of charismatic snake oil salesmen in designer clothes, but I will also recognize there are some authors and pundits that have great ideas, research, and life experience to back up their writing. The problem is that even the best researched material relies on three primary traits: Willpower, Discipline, and Determination.
ADHDers are capable of cultivating all of these traits in our own lives, but it can’t be done in normal ways, because we face abnormal obstacles. We aren’t just fighting conditioning or a lack of motivation; we are literally warring with our own brains just to accomplish tasks that others might view as simple. This is a war that we can win!
Therapy, CBT, medication, meditation, Pomodoro timers, bullet journals, sticky notes, daily positive self talk, and body doubling are just some of the tools that we can use to overcome the unique challenges that ADHD presents. By starting small and implementing tiny, incremental changes, I believe that willpower, discipline, and determination are achievable by anyone with ADHD.
Just don’t count on self-help books to give you the answers.
