Wednesday, July 31, 2019

FEAR OF BOREDOM

Fear of boredom and all attempts to avoid it, conscious  & unconscious, is a real thing for MANY people with ADHD. I was thinking about this earlier this morning, as I was working against a deadline on a creative project that required repetition. 

 The kind of repetition that doesn’t require a lot of conscious thought can be soothing and meditative; however, doing something again and again that does require some real focus is almost painful. My automatic response is to just stop and walk away, or do something else. Or, if I can’t physically walk away, I might just start something completely different, even if I’m running behind and deadline is looming. 

 Does this sound silly, immature or irrational? If you think about it without understanding or having experienced it, I can understand why you might think so. It certainly doesn’t appear to make sense on the face of it. I imagine that folks who are not wired as I am could believe I’m engaging in purposeful self-sabotage, and they would be 50% correct. It is absolutely impeding, obscuring undermining and sabotaging my success. (Generally, and on individual projects) 

 They would be wrong that it’s purposeful. What IS purposeful, intentional, difficult and constantly a battle, is to FORCE MYSELF to continue when I know I must. One of the hardest parts of it is actually noticing that it’s happening. This morning, for example, I was finishing up a custom rock order. For those of you who do not know this, I love to paint rocks and I also sell them. In this case, I had to make many of the exact same design. I was thrilled to get this order and I actually loved working on it. But now, at the end, I don’t have the luxury of just stopping when I lose interest. It took me a couple of minutes to notice that I had picked up another one and started to paint it, “just see what _____ would look like,” or “just to start another one for a minute”, a couple of my standard internal mantras. 

It reminded me of a question a colleague posed yesterday, to a group I belong to, about how to prevent overwhelm and stay in action when it’s crunch time and you have much more work than it feels can be completed in the amount of time you have. Although it still can be difficult, especially if what you need to do is repetitive, or not so interesting to you, the difference is that NOW, in crunch time, you have the right brain chemicals to stay focused and able to just push all the other distractions and impulses out of the way and just get it done. 

There is certainly more to say about this, but since I actually do need to finish my project, I’ll leave it here for now. ;-) If this resonates for you and you want to chat about it, don’t hesitate to reach out. I love talking to people and educating about how ADHD can affect us in many more ways than most people are aware.

posted by Amy Falk at 12:26 PM
0 Comments