Lacking Executive Decision

So there’s a fun little phenomenon that happens when I’m depressed, maybe you’re familiar with it.

I sit down, start something mindless, and then I’m stuck. For upwards of six hours, sometimes. Not that I don’t want to move. I’m sitting there, screaming inside my head for arms to move, for legs to stand, but no one is listening. I know I’ll eventually move, so it isn’t particularly frightening in the moment or anything, just infuriating. Like, Get the fuck up, the desk needs cleaned, you need to sort your receipts, at the very least go get something to eat! But nope. I’m stuck there, doing whatever I sat down to do on autopilot.

I played Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild yesterday for 12 hours.

I didn’t WANT to. There are a host of other things I wanted to get done, cleaning and the like that I really need to do, but I just… couldn’t. So I sat there, grinding my way through a game that I stopped enjoying 11 hours ago, screaming at myself to get up, to go eat, to go to the bathroom, ANYTHING to break myself away from the couch and the screen. I didn’t move until my roommate came home from work at 1 am, and even then it was just to switch the cartridge from Zelda to Mario Party. At 1 am it’s not like I’m gonna get anything done anyway.

I’ve heard the term for this is Executive Dysfunction. Seems a little clinical to me, but to be fair that’s true of most phrases related to bipolar disorder. If you don’t use something that sounds clinical then it just sound rude.

There’s not a whole lot to be done when you’re stuck like that. There’s the preemptive things: stay up on your meds, “clean your room, tuck your shirt in,” etc. But I think at this point its pretty obvious that these things are hard to keep up with during a depressive episode, especially when you’re poor. I’ve personally spent the last week or two in a crunch period trying to apply to new jobs, create things to sell on digital storefronts, keep up with my Patreon and creative endeavors… maintenance tends to fall by the wayside in these situations.

So what can you do in the moment? Reach out. That’s honestly a good way to approach any issue with BiPolar disorder, but for executive dysfunction in particular it’s a life saver. I find that a lot of my “autopilot” actions keep happening when I’m in these situations, most notably Twitter and Facebook. If you can’t reach out to someone, then set an alarm to go off as soon as you can, until it jars you out of the funk. It’ll be loud and obnoxious, but you’ll be moving, which is a step up. Ironically, I’m fighting it pretty hard right now as I write this. It’s a bitch. But I feel like the fact that I am writing this at all is a sign that it can be beaten.

Or I’ve gotten to the point where I can write these posts on autopilot. I’ll settle for either one, really.