I Tried to Unplug for One Day

Recently I’d had some great success with productivity in both business I am running and co-running. I even stayed up until midnight a few weeks ago in order to fulfill my hours quota, such was the motivation I’d found.

The plates I was spinning of Green Door Life Coaching and Ringcrafts were solid, no sign of wobble. Then, without me even noticing, my self care plate fell. Usually I notice at least the clatter as it hits the floor, but not this time. Then my sleep plate fell. And when that plate goes down it usually pulls almost all the others down with it.

So on October 1st, I started a 30 day self care challenge of my own creation. Each day I am tasked with an item of self care that will also hopefully set a trend. One early item was drink either a cup of green tea or a large glass of lemon water. Since then I’ve been fairly diligent in my habit of drinking at least one of these two hydrating items.

Then came the item ‘Unplug for a day’ and with it a philosophical conundrum. I scheduled the day on October 8th because the day it happened to land on was a day I needed technology for business purposes. When October 8th came however, I was excited and looking forward to the break from all things wired, but problems just kept cropping up.

The first was the fact that I am not able to take a complete break from tech because my clients need to be able to reach me. So I made that my first exception, for my smartwatch, email, and phone.

The second exception was my poor dopamine production as a result of my ADHD. I rely heavily on Netflix to give me the dopamine I need to have executive functions. So if I banned Netflix/DVDs/YouTube/Podcasts I would not be giving myself a refreshing break but actually dooming myself to a painful and boring lack of productivity on either work or leisure activities.

So I decided I would listen to music out loud, with no headphones to reduce the technological impact, and watch Netflix only with my husband. This was a great theory, but it assumed my husband would be available and we would be able to agree on what to watch. This was not the case so that rule too fell by the wayside.

The third issue was that of my routines. The items are housed in a list in my phone. Without that item of technology essential tasks would go undone. So I made an exception for that as well as all the items of work listed in the phone. Concession after concession.

At the end of October 8th, the only difference between my “unplugged” day and a regular day was all the extra work of trying to figure out how to function without technology. I did not feel refreshed, except for one thing: I actively sought out ways to produce dopamine without technology and ended up taking the time to engage with people.

There was a time when my use of technology was very harmful to me. The fact that taking technology away was harmful now tells me that I have finally reached a good balance. This is an amazing accomplishment for me.

The lessons I am drawing from this:

1: When you try and do things just because conventional wisdom says it’s beneficial, you are likely to be missing something.

2: Going to extremes isn’t helpful.

3: All of the above doesn’t mean stopping to smell the roses is bad.

How would you define ‘unplugging’?

Harnessing the Shiny

When I was first diagnosed with ADHD one of the things that struck me most forcefully was the concept of choosing new and “shiny” projects. I'd always felt this was something of a character flaw of mine, that if I has real persistence, I'd be able to work on anything, happily. The truth, that the neurochemical dopamine is necessary for anyone to maintain concentration, and it is a challenge to produce or maintain in the ADHD brain, has been something of a comfort and an explanation for me.

The downside being that I was now aware that jumping into a new “shiny” project at the expense of an old, boring one, was sometimes detrimental to me. So, naturally, because I have a very hard time with the cognitive distortion “Black and White thinking”, I decided that this was completely a bad thing. Whenever I decide to go to extremes, the results are never very favourable.

I was talking to a friend a few months ago and we realized we both do this. We decide that because something is fun, we must avoid it in favour of “real work”. Unfortunately the topic at hand was cleaning, which is a very necessary thing!

The trick, as with so many, many things, is to create balance. It doesn't help to continually jump at new things, perpetually abandoning the older, important work. Neither does it do to ignore the treasure-trove of dopamine that comes with jumping at the new project. When something catches our interest, the ADHD brain is able to produce a lot of dopamine, which allows us not only to work at a task, but allows us to work remarkably fast and long. So if we pause, figure out if it is currently appropriate to dive into this new thing, and go ahead if the answer is ‘yes’, time might be saved because of how quickly the work goes.

Another thing I like to do is if that isn't currently possible, just do a small amount of prep or research. This allows me to use the resulting dopamine on my other, more boring project. It also allows me to eliminate projects that just seemed good at the time but those I never go back to after the first initial rush of excitement.

Balance. It is difficult for anyone to attain. With ADHD it is even harder. The longer I strive for it, the more strategies I create and discover. Each time I discover a new strategy, I realize anew that ADHD is truly one of the most treatable of disorders. Everything seems so obvious once explained.

What projects excite you?

The Double Agent of ADHD

The very first thing a lot of people learn about ADHD, even if they remain fixed on fiction of “just boys with ants in their pants”, is the short attention span. This is of course more complex than even the name Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder suggests, but the simple fact that there are very few and specific things someone with ADHD can easily focus their long-term attention on is very real and very impactful. It can be our saving grace or, much more often, our downfall.

The word “routine”, noun, means ‘a sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program’. In other words a bunch of things, sometimes that you have to do, repeated over and over again. When applied to ADHD, this can trigger multiple symptoms, such as difficulty with transition, resistance to repetition, simple boredom, memory problems, time blindness, difficulty with decision making, difficulty creating and maintaining structure for oneself, and the idea that creative people must live in chaos or betray their artistic soul. The idea of embracing something so downright painful is incredibly hard for the ADHD brain to comprehend.

To me, as a person with lifelong ADHD, routine seemed to be something that happened to other people. I didn’t even have school to give my life structure until I started training as an ADHD coach. After my diagnosis, I began slowly scooping my life into a more comfortable and workable shape. Many things began to emerge that stood the test of time as being very helpful to me. But when I tried to get every one of them done in a day, I would get distracted between each item, and a list I assumed would take others less than an hour took me half or three quarters of the day.

Over years I tried to tweak, alter, and change things until I now have what I proudly call a morning and evening “routine”. It is a list of things that all, in one way or another, form the foundation of my life. They allow me to accomplish everything from maintaining friendships, to housework, to the two businesses I run, to assisting family in times of crisis and celebrating with them in times of joy. I cannot overstate how essential they are to me.

An excellent example is something that happened just this week. Even though I’ve been working on myself and my life since my diagnosis almost 8 years ago, a real, solid, regularly followed routine is a relatively new thing, at least in its current, and historically most useful, iteration. I woke up feeling very low and because, for ADHD, emotion is reality, it was very hard for me to imagine that anything could help lift me. I knew, however, that my morning routine was very beneficial to me, so I started it.

Throughout the process, which takes me between an hour and 90 minutes, I realized my mood turned completely around. I felt content, happy, even energetic. I attribute this to the comforting nature of the familiar flow of tasks, the knowledge that I was accomplishing something important, and the soothing transition ritual and dopamine creation strategy I have in place.

In order to circumvent the list of symptoms of ADHD I’ve listed above that interfere with my ability to accomplish daily routines, I have four major ‘fierce systems’ in place:

The first is headphones playing something I really like (Netflix, YouTube, music, or podcast) to keep my interest focused, allow for easier transition between tasks, and production of low-level dopamine. The second is an agreement I’ve come to with my family that if they see me with both headphones in my ears, they are to refrain from talking to me so I don’t become distracted from my routine. The third is a stopwatch I use for recording how long the routine takes me every morning. This is like a game, or a race against myself, seeing how efficient I can be, and helps produce more dopamine. The final system is, of course, that each routine (every day of the week has slightly different tasks) is recorded as a list in a phone reminder.

This is what I have to do in order to keep my life running smoothly, with the double agent that is routine, in an ADHD brain. When I imagine how other people, who have brains untroubled by these things, glide smoothly through their lives, without a second or even first thought to structure, routine, or dopamine, I have to admit to feeling jealous. That being said, I have proven to myself that I can overcome challenges of neurobiology and work with the very nature of who I am. All, I might add, without the benefit of medication or coffee. That is something of which I am very proud.

What role does routine play in your life?

Small Bits of Happiness

There are so many theories on happiness. Just so incredibly many. I tend to go with the ones backed by science and my own experience.

Small amounts of happiness spread out over time are considerably more beneficial to mental health than large amounts of happiness once in awhile. This seems like common sense, since it was presented to me in that way. Though, like so many things, it is way easier said than done.

I think this is partly because of what our culture finds “acceptable” in terms of self-care. Vacations are a generally accepted form of self-care, and those are usually big, and infrequent. Self-care that happens often can often be viewed, erroneously, as selfish and outside of what is needed.

One way to assist with increasing these little pieces of happiness is to schedule self-care into your day/week.

Another is to insert it in other creative ways.

I love receiving messages first thing when I wake up. I subscribed to Notes from the Universe for this reason. And if you’re like me, you probably have a 99+ Watch Later YouTube playlist. I decided to combine these things.

Through the automated text service Remindr you can send yourself emails (as well as texts/calls) at certain times. Copy the link to a video from the Watch Later playlist into an email, one per day/weekday, and watch the video when it arrives in the morning. Laughter is a great way to give that little boost of energy needed to pop out of bed. Just make sure you’re not at work if you have NSFW videos in the playlist.

The other great thing about this strategy is I completely forget what’s in those emails by the time they arrive so it’s like a little lottery of novelty in my day. Novelty is fantastic for ADHD because it helps us produce dopamine.

What small bits of happiness can you accumulate?

Captain Motivation!

ADHD has a hard time with procrastination and this is a relatively well known fact. What isn't as well know is why this challenge occurs. Recent research has suggested a factor might be our reward systems. This is a neurophysical term that basically means motivation. Dopamine is a neurochemical that allows the brain (ADHD or not) to sustain motivation.

The ADHD brain produces lower levels of dopamine ordinarily, however it has no trouble working on something fun, because the enjoyment is producing dopamine which allows us to focus. But take away that enjoyment, and the dopamine it produces, and it becomes significantly harder to sustain focus, sometimes to the point of a physical impossibility.

I was faced with a challenge of dopamine production this week. I am working on an extremely boring task and was flagging in attention and motivation. To make matters worse the task was also extremely mentally taxing. When my brain works harder, it requires more dopamine to function, which means the small amount of dopamine I had was being used up faster.

I had been working on the task for several days when one day I saw that Canadian Netflix had added Captain America: Winter Soldier. Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of my top fandoms and I hadn't been able to see the film when it was in theatres, so I was very excited. Due to issues of morality and technological incompetence, I do not stream or pirate media of any kind.

So I decided Captain America would be my reward for finishing my task. The prospect of being able to watch this movie provided me with the dopamine I needed to finish the task in increased mental comfort. I finished in 3 days.

What do you use to leverage your motivation?