ADHD

Giving my brain a break

My brain is being a bit of a jerk today so I spent a bit of time listening to an audiobook and drawing and colouring this.

It helped a bit.

A drawing of brightly coloured shapes with thick black outlines
Image description: A drawing of shapes created by thick, black, curved lines that takes up the whole piece of paper. Each shape is coloured with a different bright coloured marker. The shapes are somewhat similar to how beach rocks end up when they wash ashore.

Monday, Monday

I decided to take last Friday and today off so I could have a long weekend and it has been great for my brain (even though the next few paragraphs will make it seem otherwise – bear with me.)

It’s kind of weird though because one part of my brain thinks it is only a day ‘off’ if I am doing absolutely nothing.

Yet, as I have said before, a day with nothing in it is very stressful for me because I spent the whole day subconsciously wondering if I *should* be doing something else.

So, basically my brain is telling me that a real day off is a day doing nothing but if I try to do that, my brain spends the day bugging me about what I’m doing.

Either way, my ends up spending a lot of time asking itself if this ‘counts’ as a day off, if I’m fooling myself, and…you get the drift.

When you couple that with the fact that it is tricky for me to distinguish between my work and my relaxation because my hobbies, my work, and my volunteer work have a lot of elements in common, it makes it even harder to tell if my day off is a day off.

(Especially when you add in the way my brain jumps around and makes connections between things. I could be solving work problems while I am walking the dog or lying in my swing. Not because those problems were on my mind per se but because that’s when the solution floated up.)

So, anyway, that’s where the borrowed phrasing of ‘letting my brain off-leash’ is coming in handy.

I’ve decided that any time in which my brain can be off-leash for the majority of the day counts as a day off.

That gives me nice, broad parameters that are still specific and it doesn’t limit me to specific activities.

And that’s worked out pretty well for me this long weekend.

ADHD Waiting Mode

This is one of those things that may not be unique to ADHD but is exacerbated by ADHD thinking patterns.

I have an event to go to this afternoon.

I want to go to the event. It’s important to me that I go. It will probably even be fun and it is only 3-4 hours out of my weekend.

But know I have to go has affected my whole weekend.

It feels like I don’t have enough time, like I can’t get anything else done because I have that event to go to.

It’s not a fact.

I have plenty of time to do everything I want and need to do this weekend.

And, like I said, I want to go to the event.

It’s just that having this one fixed point in my day, in my weekend, is putting me into waiting mode.

Waiting mode, as I experience it, is when time gets distorted (in my mind) around an event, appointment, or activity. That time distortion not only makes the event seem bigger (and like it is going to take longer) than it actually will but it also makes it hard for me to do things beforehand.

I guess I have trouble doing the things beforehand because I am afraid that if I hyperfocus I will end up missing the event?

Or perhaps I am afraid I have underestimated the time needed to get ready for the fixed event?

Or that I won’t actually have time to do the other things I want to do beforehand? Or that I will have scheduled too much before the event?

Since the event looms large on my mental to do list, I have this urge to get this clearly-most-important-thing done so I don’t forget about it but I can’t actually do it until a specific time.

So my brain tells me that there is nothing as important as that thing and I should just wait until it is time to do it.

Even if that thing is hours from now.

My brain doesn’t want to settle on doing anything else because it is not the Important Thing That Must Be Done.

It wants to just wait until it is time to do the Important Thing That Must Be Done.

So, I end up needing to consciously pour energy into the following things all at once:

  • Remembering the Important Thing That Must Be Done and the details surrounding that – including when to leave and what to bring
  • Remembering the other things I want to do beforehand
  • Reminding my brain that it is ok to step out of waiting mode and do those other things
  • Reminding my brain that the Important Thing That Must Be Done is later so it can wait
  • Keeping track of where my focus is and bringing it back to where it needs to be
  • The usual, routine monitoring-my-thinking-and-talking-and-doing that runs as an internal management system for me (Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about my thinking. Yes, it’s tiring.)
  • Assessing new information that occurs/presents itself to me to see if I need to alter any of the other things that I have planned/have going on
  • Trying not to talk myself out of the Thing That Must Be Done because even though I want/need to do it, it is causing a lot of extra mental work so maybe it’s not worth it?

Having to do all of those things is the very opposite of letting my brain off its leash.

It’s no wonder that the thought of making plans just wears me out sometimes.

Even when I actually really want to do them.

Taking an easy route

Except for meditative doodles, I don’t do a lot of detailed artwork.

Anything that requires a lot of prep work or that needs a bunch of measurements makes the energy cost of getting started way too high for me.

(Meditative doodles are just ‘in the moment’ type of details so they don’t have the same cost.)

But, that being said, I like those round, repetitive designs that a lot of people call mandalas. I’m pretty sure that mandalas are a specific type of design that has a cultural meaning so I won’t use that name for the design I want to make.

I’m not trying to borrow or appropriate a cultural practice , I’m not pretending that what I am doing is sacred, nor am I adding meaning to it – I just want to make a pattern in a circle.

But making a pattern in a circle requires a lot of measuring and every time I have tried that, I have gotten bored with the measuring and haven’t finished the design.

Until now!

Last week, I bought some templates for another project and one of them was a circular pattern of straight lines.

The energy cost of using a template to make my ‘measurements’ is very low.

So now I have an easy route to creating these patterns for myself and I won’t end up abandoning my projects partway through.

Really, taking an easy route gets a bad rap a lot of the time.

Taking the hard route for its own sake, especially if it means you lose the fun and the purpose, is just foolish.

Smooth Sunday

Yesterday’s experiment was a success.

At the end of the day I felt both relaxed and accomplished and I didn’t feel like I had pushed myself too hard.

I have no specific plans today so I am going to keep my brain mostly unleashed and allow myself to move from task to task in whatever order makes sense.

I’ve already put some clothes on the line, dusted a few shelves, and did a little reading.

Now I’m going to read a bit more while I drink my tea and then I’ll dust a few more shelves.

I’m really hoping this approach not only helps me relax but also helps me get used to working on a task without the need to ‘get it done before I forget.’

PS – I know that relaxation and housework don’t really go together but housework needs to get done and this approach keeps me from spending my whole day hyper-focused on it.

Yesterday