Tag: executive function

I actually thought I might still have a couple of days’ grace period left before the full-on Christmas rush made getting any grocery delivery slot outside prime hours impossible.

(I like the late slots, and those normally just don’t fill completely up at all. I’d have been willing to take an early morning one, which often don’t either.)

Yeah, not so much 😊

Should have gone ahead and checked that basket out when I added most of the stuff to it over the weekend. Though, from the look of things, that may have already been too late.

Hopefully I will remember next time, if it comes up again. Guess I’ll just need to either drag myself to the closest Sainsburys within the next few days, or give him a shopping list. We hadn’t gotten a delivery in a while, because I am pretty good at putting it off, and we do need several things specifically from there.

“I should go ahead and get that Sainsburys delivery booked before it’s too late!”

Hahahahaha

How everything until the 27th looked. Including the early and late slots.

We should finally be getting a fairly big grocery order in a week, though 🙄

mrozna:

hawkeyedflame:

biphobicerasurer:

hawkeyedflame:

t-i-a-r-n-a-c-a-p-a-i-l-l:

If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My anime/video game list consists of over 100 titles, easily, and yet I almost never get around to watching/playing any of them.

Executive dysfunction is not just for boring or unenjoyable things. It’s for everything. Even eating.

What is executive dysfunction? O.o

Put simply, it’s difficulty/inability with initiating tasks. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, like decision-making and impulse control. People with ADHD and other neurological disorders that affect the prefrontal cortex often experience difficulty making decisions and performing tasks, as well as exercising self restraint. Part of why people with ADHD tend to procrastinate so badly is out of genuine inability to begin tasks, even if they’re very important.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

Oh thank god, someone put it into words.

For me it’s also waiting for the “right” time to come to complete the task because for some reason my brain thinks doing the task at any other time is horribly, horribly wrong, weird, and out of order. The “right” time might come eventually, might not. It’s a lottery.

lanthir:

michaelblume:

*opens pill botttle*

*opens water bottle*

*pours some water out into my hand*

“Wait. No, that’s…no.”

I’ve done that before, but it still wasn’t as bad as the time I placed all of my pills into a glass and poured water over them before I realized that everything about what I had done was wrong.

neurodiversitysci:

finnglas:

lechadodi:

angelofgrace96:

“I’ll remember” is the ADHD demon talking. You won’t remember. Write it down.

bold of you to assume i’ll remember where i wrote it, or even that i wrote it

Visual exhaustion is another symptom of ADHD, which means that if we see something enough times (or we see enough instances of something), it fades into background noise and we fail to notice it.

This is why a lot of ADHD people can stand living surrounded by mess/clutter, because it’s just visual background noise to us. We don’t even notice it anymore.

So if we write something down and see the note stuck up somewhere a lot – or if we write a LOT of somethings down and have a lot of notes hanging around – then we’re even less likely to think of/remember the thing because it’s just part of the scenery now.

ADHD is the Catch-22 of brains.

This is one of the best descriptions of clutter blindness I’ve ever seen.

thebibliosphere:

So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of
Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD

by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.

So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.

To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.

Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”

And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.

Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????

Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.

Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?

My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.

prokopetz:

It’s probably not surprising that folks with executive dysfunction often have little difficulty getting stuff done when there’s someone around to tell us what to do and supervise us doing it. What’s perhaps more surprising is that it’s not necessarily due to fear of punishment: having a supervisor is effective even if the supervisor in question has no ability to actually compel obedience. Basically, “following direct orders” seems to be a totally separate executive pathway from “self-motivating”, and having trouble with the one doesn’t necessarily mean having trouble with the other.

Which, of course, is why you can end up with situations where your own self-care is garbage, but caring for your pet is totally fine: the benefit of having a supervisor ordering you around can be realised even if the party giving the orders is a cat.

Prompting more than ordering, at least for me. But some things are definitely much easier/more possible with some prompting.

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

luna-and-mars:

Executive dysfunction gothic

– You have to shower. You cannot shower. You are standing right in front of the shower. You want to shower. You cannot shower.

– The meeting begins. “Did everyone see the email?” There is a chorus of nodding heads. You nod, too. You think you may possibly have checked an email account before, on one single occasion, at some unknown time, probably in a past life.

– You are hungry. You have been hungry for three days now. The hunger has not spontaneously resolved itself. How inconvenient, you think. How rude.

– You depend on your planner/calendar. You loathe your planner/calendar. You can’t function without it. You live in constant fear of it. It’s an unhealthy relationship. You think you both should start seeing other people.

– There is a pile on your floor. It is a treasure trove, the Room of Requirement. It has everything. You look for something specific. It has nothing. There was never any pile.

– There’s been a change of plans, they say. You don’t understand. They repeat: “there’s been a change of plans.” You don’t understand. The mere suggestion causes a buzzing in your head that drowns out everything else. You don’t understand.

– You’re in class and you don’t understand the lecture. You look back at your past notes. You look at a calendar. You have not been to class in two weeks. You have no memory of this supposed time. Where did it go? Why did it leave?

– “Organizational tips for success: Keep a planner! Write it down! Stick to a schedule! Make a list!” You are torn between deranged laughter and ugly crying. You choose both.

– You type a few words, your phone rings, you answer. You frown and type a few words. A text, you open it and respond. You forget what you were doing. You type a few words. A text, you ignore it. You type a thousand words. A text, you open it. “Why haven’t you responded?” It’s been a week.

– You need your medication, you call to renew your prescription. You’re out of refills and the doctor needs to see you before you renew. You don’t get your medication again for six months.

– You want to RSVP to your cousin’s wedding but there’s no email address or phone number, just a card in an envelope that you have to put in the mailbox. You put it somewhere that you won’t forget it. The wedding was yesterday.

– “Look, it’s just one more stop before we head home, why are you making such a big deal of it?”

– “Hey, I invited our friends over to hang out for the day and maybe get lunch. You said you were free today, right?” You’re always free but you never have time. It takes an hour to decide what lunch will be.

– You write the shopping list. You stand in front of your door holding your keys while you tape the list to your phone. You step outside and realize you don’t know where your keys are. You step inside and they’re in your hand. You go to the store and pull out your phone. There never was a list.

– You’re meeting someone for what you’re sure is the tenth time. They say their name and all you hear is a high-pitched ringing. You carefully avoid interacting with them for the rest of the evening so you don’t run the risk of having to introduce them to anyone.

– “C’mon, you were in ceramics with me, we made clay boxes together. I sat next to you for two years!” You’ve never seen this person before in your life.

– You have to be somewhere at 6AM. You can’t be late. You don’t sleep the night before to be sure you can make it. When you’re late to work the next week your boss says “you can be on time when you want to be, you’re choosing to show me that you don’t care.” You don’t sleep to make it in to work on time tomorrow. You never sleep. You never sleep.

– You have to pee but if you don’t finish typing this sentence you’ll forget what you were saying. By the time you finish typing your body doesn’t notice that you still have to pee.

– “Uh, did you know you’re bleeding?”

seasonallydefective:

+ Chronic pain too. I talked about this a bit when I did my podcast interview. How my brain starts over-analyzing all the steps. And you don’t think about it but it really is that many steps you just don’t have to take that into consideration when your body and mind work like they should.

The TL;DR is that this is why I sometimes “forget” to eat. Food has just become rather low on the hierarchy of needs. 

Well said, with the hierarchy of needs observation. And a lot of people who haven’t experienced this just don’t understand how that’s possible.

That can also make for a great combo deal: seriously limited energy/ability, on top of existing executive function problems and tendencies to get stuck.

(Including limited energy to put toward working around it, but yeah.)

That said, at least IME this example sounds more like a straightforward executive function thing than the getting stuck kind of inertia. Chronic illness/pain can really complicate both.