Hello, !
How often do you find yourself working frantically right up to (or beyond) a deadline? If you have ADHD, the answer is probably, “All the
time.”
Life does occasionally toss things at us that need to be handled immediately, with no warning, no time for planning, and no way to complete them with time to spare. These may be unforeseen, time-critical emergencies. In these situations, you are unavoidably up against a deadline and perhaps
in a panic.
But those of us with ADHD find ourselves in “urgent” situations more frequently than neurotypical folks. How does that happen to us so often? Are we just lazy people who don’t care about turning things in on time? Usually that is NOT the case!
Most of the time when we are stressing under the impending crisis of a deadline, we are in that situation
because of characteristic ADHD challenges of procrastination, perfectionism, difficulty getting started, time blindness, or one big one – the fact that urgency often seems to be what’s needed to get our brains in gear!
Most ADHD brains are a little sleepy or under stimulated. It takes something especially “sparkly” to get our brains to wake up, shift
into gear, and start moving forward. So, sometimes we unconsciously create a crisis, like a too-soon deadline, because that situation is more sparkly than “normal.”
We create urgent situations, because without them our brains have trouble getting started on a project that is important to us but not particularly interesting. It’s not a moral failing. That’s the way our
brains are wired.
Creating a crisis isn’t a bad strategy to use occasionally, but if we live our lives in crisis mode, our stress levels are unhealthy and our quality of life will be poor.
It would be good to have a few other tools to use when we need to get something important but boring accomplished. Here are a few ideas, using several other things known to wake up ADHD brains:- Interest – Use your creativity to make a task more interesting. You might include listening to a book or music, performing the task in a different setting, inviting someone else to work quietly beside you, doing the task backwards, or breaking the task into short chunks with small but meaningful rewards at the end of each chunk.
- Challenge – Make the process of doing the task a competition. You could try to finish all or part of the task within a certain time (keep it short); you could see how many small tasks you could accomplish in a specified amount of time (keep it short); you could set up a friendly competition of some sort with a co-worker, etc.
- Creativity – Make the task more interesting by adding creative touches wherever possible.
- Passion – Find a way to
connect the accomplishment of the task to something about which you are passionate. For example, you are collecting and taking recyclables to the dump (boring) because you are passionate about protecting the earth (very sparkly).
You are creative! How can you get your brain into gear short of creating a crisis? Think of crises like spices in your food. You are glad to have them in moderation, but too much is not healthy!
Until next Wednesday!
Linda |
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