3 Ways To Do That Thing You Really Don’t Want to Do

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

We’ve got deniers, and people who pretend to have it, but people with ADHD have no greater enemy than Executive Dysfunction.

For the uninitiated Executive Dysfunction is a mental situation, probably born from the bowels of Hell, that plagues ADHD brains regularly. Due to an abject lack of interest, the sufferer will find themselves almost paralyzed by an inability to do something that needs to be done. This does not have to be anything big either; it can be folding laundry, cooking dinner, or throwing away a piece of trash on the floor. If the brain doesn’t want to do it, it will not allow the body to do it. That, or it will require hours of struggle to do it.

Either way, it’s demoralizing and incredibly tough. You can tell bullies to leave you alone, but when the bully is your own brain? That’s a battle for the ages.

As an ADHD productivity coach and a person with ADHD herself, I usually suggest three things to try to fight past this, and they are thus:

Gamify it

I heard the hissing and cringing from here. ADHDers hear the term “gamify” all the time, and it can sound like a broken record.

BUT. There is something to the science of it.

As I’ve mentioned before, our brains naturally have a low amount of dopamine, the chemical responsible for a number of positive emotions, including pleasure. If something gives us no pleasure at all, the brain has no interest in lowering its recognition of pleasure further, so we freeze. Therefore, we have to add pleasure to the task somehow.

Gamifying doesn’t have to be a big production; you can make something a game by challenging yourself to do something within a certain amount of time; doing something to earn a “prize” at the end, or to do something in a new and challenging way. The point is to “trick” your brain into feeling more interested in doing That Thing. There are a number of apps that will help with this, too, if you’d like to do it that way.

Add some accountability or urgency

So let’s talk about ICNU for a sec.

I honestly can’t figure out where this acronym originated, but it stands for Interest, Challenge…