February was another eventful whirlwind of a month in my world. It’s hard to believe it’s already over. Now that we’re heading into March, the light is noticeably returning, and in the Pacific Northwest where I live, the flowers are starting to bloom. It is always so striking to me just how much and how immediately better I feel outside on a nice day, and it’s letting me move into the new month with a lot more energy.
That said, reflecting on the past month, a lot of what stood out to me was a lot of big feelings. In the US, February was the first full month of our new presidential administration, which has been a dizzying churn of fast and furious political upsets (including several moves with implications for ADHD specifically, like this, or this), and that’s all been layered on top of the normal winter season down time. From my vantage point, it's been very noticeable how many folks I’ve been interacting with that have been feeling (understandably!) down this month. Since ADHD comes along with emotional dysregulation and often justice sensitivity, these kinds of things can hit us even harder.
Mood Really Matters
Unfortunately, motivation and focus and drive are very intertwined with our emotional state, and experiencing negative emotional states often makes it much harder for us to do almost anything, but especially things that have a chance of making us feel at all worse (i.e. things that are boring or associated with other bad feelings like shame or fear). Whenever I’m feeling down, my brain does its best to distract me or keep me frozen when I try to do tasks like that, as a way of protecting myself from making the bad feeling worse, even when the thing I’m trying to do is genuinely important to me.
The problem gets even worse if, after noticing ourselves getting frozen or distracted, we respond by ramping up our critical self talk, perhaps calling ourselves names or deciding our inaction must mean we have some kind of a character defect, or trying to punish ourselves into submission (to finish papers in college, I used to tell myself I wasn’t allowed to sleep until it was done, or get out of the chair until I met a milestone, for example). That kind of strategy can work in the short term, but over time it gets less and less effective - and more importantly, it feels awful!
What’s served me far, far better has been to take that moment of distraction or avoidance as evidence that I’m in need of some emotional/mood repair, not of punishment, and get curious about what I need. Generally what’s needed is to make the freaked out part of me feel safe enough that my brain can calm down its efforts to protect me and free up enough resources to let me find some enthusiasm.
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