Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
Things I did not actually realize was an option
What’s amazing is what happens when you do this with children. I hit on it when working at the foster home, where nearly all our kids were on the autism spectrum, and they weren’t “defiant” around me because I said things like, “How long do you need to stand here before we can move?” and “Come into the kitchen when you’re ready” instead of saying, “Stop staring out the window, let’s go,” or “Come eat dinner,” and interpreting hesitation as refusal to obey.
Yup, that’s way better for toddlers and younger kids. It helps when they don’t have the self-awareness, attention span, or concept of the passage of time to estimate when they’ll be ready by themselves.
I have also definitely found that doing the “okay when I finish counting down from twenty is getting up time” has been useful.
WELL OKAY WHOOPS XD I should not have been overspecific, I was just thinking about teaching this stuff to the parents at my job and your reblog made me immediately think of you with Banana and the kidlets.
Another hack: when you want to get up but are stalled by your brain and frustrated – stop. Breathe. Think about what you want to do once you’re up, without thinking about getting up. Treat it like a fantasy, no pressure, just thinking about something you’d like to do in the future. Instead of thinking “I should get up” over and over, think about having a bagel for breakfast, or getting dressed in your soft green sweater. Imagine yourself doing the thing.
I find that exercise often side-steps the block and the next thing I know I’m out of bed and on my way to doing the other thing I thought about.
Works for other things too, if you’re stuck on one step and having a hard time doing it, think about the step after that. Need to do laundry and you can’t get yourself to gather up your dirty clothes in the hamper? Think instead about carrying the hamper full of dirty clothes to the laundry room. And when you get to that next step, if you get stuck again, think about the step after it – you have a hamper of dirty clothes that needs to be put in the wash, let your subconscious handle the “carry hamper to laundry room” step while you’re thinking about the “putting them in the wash” part.
YMMV of course, and this doesn’t even always work for me (particularly not when I need to do a collection of tasks in no particular order, like packing for a trip… “pack socks, pack underwear, pack toothbrush, pack pants, pack shirts” is the kind of non-linear task list where this trick doesn’t help at all), but it’s something I’ve found helpful often enough.
This is one of the most beautiful threads I’ve seen on Tumblr simply because it deals so compassionately with an issue so many of us have and can barely even articulate to ourselves, let alone to anyone else. ❤
I think I get overwhelmed from the thought of all of the consequent steps, so maybe I’ll do the reverse of the advice above and try to focus on the first one.
@the-rain-monster i was just about to say something similar. that can work too sometimes. instead of going “ugh i need to eat something” for four hours, i try to focus on each step in turn.
and i mean each TINY step. just getting out of my chair has this many steps:
pause music
remove headphones
hang headphones on laptop screen
pick up laptop
leg-bend recliner footrest shut
set laptop aside
stand
and i reckon that’s why i get stuck on it; because i’m trying to treat it as one thing, while executive dysfunction is treating it as seven things, and choking on trying to skip to step seven.
concurrent with this is a method i call ‘junebugging’. which is where i go to the location of the thing i want to do, and just sort of bump around the region like a big stupid beetle until the thing somehow accidentally magically gets done. this is an attempt to leverage ADHD into an advantage; i may not have the executive function to make myself a sandwich on purpose, but if i fidget in the kitchen long enough, some kind of food is going to end up in my mouth eventually. and hell, even if i fail on that front, i will probably have achieved something, even if it’s only pouring all my loose leaf tea into decorative jars.*
@star-anise please may i give you an internet hug *hug!* because god how i wish anyone had known to do that for me when i was a kid. my childhood was one big overload, and like 99% of the huge dramatic meltdowns that made me the scapegoat/laughingstock/target of my entire elementary school were simply due to people not giving me time to process the next step, and interpreting a bluescreen as defiance/insult.
*this happened when i was trying to do dishes actually but the principle is sound
yeah i absolutely echo what j’s saying about the steps, it’s a lot like that for me too. i get overwhelmed at the prospect of something that should be simple, and have to slow down and sort out how many steps it’s actually going to take, and what a complicated endeavor it actually is, even if no one else thinks so.
also, i thought i should put in: try to honestly figure out what you’re averse to, that makes things so tough. making a whole bunch of decisions really fast? the potential of things to make a horrible noise? the shame of failure? having to put down what you’re doing now? having to clean up whatever it is you might go do when you’re done?
for instance, for me, the difficulty rating on anything goes waaaay up when a step of a task is ‘go somewhere people will look at you,’ which is for me about the unpleasantness equivalent of ‘jump into a very cold swimming pool right now’. you know you’ll be fine and even have fun once you’ve settled into it, but it still takes a lot of shuffling around and bracing yourself first to go for it. and some days you just don’t fucking want to go swimming.
i discounted this factor for years because i wouldn’t admit that i was so daunted by something so silly as as people looking at me. but, now i know what i’m so aversive about, i can factor it in to plans, and work around it, and be kind to myself. for instance, i was never able to get fit since highschool PE, because i couldn’t make myself go to a gym, or even out jogging. once i figured out the big problem wasn’t avoidance pain or difficulty, it was avoidance of doing a New Thing that i was Bad At in front of Unknown Quantities Of Strangers, which is like a triple threat of stressors, i started working out quietly and safely in my room at night, and i’ve been doing really good on it!
Here’s something I’d learned about before, but didn’t really understand until nursing school:
When you put your hand on a hot stove
(or any extremity on any major, unexpected source of pain), the decision to pull it away happens in your back. That’s what a spinal reflex means–not just that the action is automatic, but that your brain isn’t even consulted.
You will never remember it this way. You will always remember the event as “the stove felt hot so I pulled my hand away.” But “you” didn’t do anything. All you did was come up with a justification after your back had already acted. Even if you know this intellectually, it won’t change anything–you still won’t be able to remember your hand acting on its own. Your brain will not allow it.
There are more parts of the nervous system that work this way than you’d probably like to think about.
Alternate framing: your spinal cord (and indeed your whole body) is part of “you” just like your brain
Alternate, alternate framing: Almost none of your brain is “you” either.
The parts of your brain that consciously think “My name is [name]! I want to do good things and not do bad things! Here are some decisions I’m going to make!” are pretty much dwarfed by the ones that don’t. We usually frame them as acting in service to the consciousness–your non-conscious brain may help you balance when you walk, but you tell it where you want to go–but then again, you also think you decided to take your hand off the stove.
Have you ever walked into a room, and then wondered what you were supposed to do in there? You think you just forgot. But what if you really didn’t know?
–
(Please note: this is mostly me going “oooh, wouldn’t it be creepy if,” and at this point I have strayed pretty far from the amount of neuroscience I actually know.)
There’re a few sci-fi stories that play with this idea!
If you struggle with anxiety, overwhelm, or just plain feeling like a failure, I have a mantra for you that’s been really helping me out lately:
Just show up.
I used to skip class because the whole thing was so overwhelming: I had to get dressed in something clean even though I never had the energy to do laundry, walk to school, sit in class for up to three hours, plus pay attention, take notes, and participate in discussion. In reality, I was being a perfectionist, and life would have been a lot easier for me if I had Just Shown Up. By staying home because of my depression and anxiety, I wasn’t giving myself the chance to do any of that. I was such a perfectionist that being a “bad” or average student was unthinkable, so I stopped being a student at all.
If you’re having trouble getting something done, Just Show Up. You don’t have to be employee of the month. You don’t have to be valedictorian. Just Show Up.
ime it also helps to be like “you dont have to stay the whole time, you just have to go” bc most of the time once youre there it’s fine. a lot of things are like that, like… you dont have to finish the dishes, just start them. a lot of the time once you start a task it’s easier to finish than to stop, especially if you can trick yourself like “after five more minutes if i still feel bad i’ll go home” or “after washing two more dishes i can stop for today”
even if you don’t finish the task, you started it, and by completing part of it you lessened your future workload and ALSO taught your brain that things may not be as daunting as they seem
The brain is an organ. Mental illnesses are illnesses of that organ. Brain scans show that there is a physical difference between a healthy brain and a sick brain. Telling someone “You’re not really sick. It’s all in your head.” is like telling someone with asthma “It’s not real, it’s all in your lungs.” The brain is an organ that can malfunction as much as any other organ.
Here are three guided meditations you can use to help inspire your mindfulness practice and address your specific challenges.
Sometimes it is helpful to cut out thinking and sometimes it is helpful to talk back to your thinking. These meditations are examples of how to talk back to your thinking. They are written in a form inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s guided meditations. You can also write your own guided meditations to work on life issues where you would like to create change.
**Overcoming jealousy, building self-esteem, working with anxiety and depression take time. Each of these guided meditations take about 2-3 minutes if you breathe with the lines. If you just read them they take about 30 seconds and don’t give you the benefit of deep breathing. Practice one or all of these every day. Practice the anxiety one whenever you are feeling anxious and need a bit of relief.
**Practice every day, once or twice a day and notice the effects, both immediately and as the weeks pass.
like.. if you really think about it, a mental illness can embed itself so deeply into your mentality & personality that you may not even realize that it is what’s barring you from doing many things. the first thing you do is blame yourself & thus become even more depressed, but that’s the depression trying to multiply itself. you can’t blame yourself for an illness that quite literally changes your brain and the way you function.
The Mental Illness™: *takes all motivation*
Me: *motivated solely by the power of spite* fuck u
The Mental Illness™: no… how…
Me: *ascends in golden light* because fUCK YOU, THAT’S HOW
just moving along like everyone else 