ADHD and Feeling Stuck: 3 Reasons Why You're Not Moving Forward

Day 26: Feeling Stuck

When you have #ADHD tendencies your brain can tend to hold you in lock down.

There are some very good, albeit slightly annoying reasons for this.

I’m going to go over 3 of them below.

1) Sensory Overload

2) Safety

3) Black and White Thinking

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Picture a power circuit board with relay switches running all throughout your house to provide electricity.

Let’s then imagine your home is running at max capacity. Generating electricity for all things. The a/c, the washer and dryer, the appliances, everything is plugged in and buzzing. (Not ideal, but just go with me.)

What would happen if your neighbor decided to then connect their entire house directly to your circuit breaker to power their home?

I’ll tell ya…Snap, Crackle, POP! Your power would go out and the whole switchboard would blow a fuse. It’d hit maximum capacity and overload.

This can happen to our brains.

We have so very much on our minds. All of the thoughts, and the things we need to do and want to do.

We’re bombarded with all types of “noise” day in and day out. Electrical frequencies surround us. We’re almost always “plugged in”, literally! To a phone, an iPad, a computer, a TV…

It can feel very difficult to carve out some time away from it all. Time to reset, recharge.

When we don’t take a step back we can hit “system overload.” It can freeze us in our tracks. We just mentally shut down.

Another reason we can feel stuck is that our brains want to keep us safe.

They are very efficient at sniffing out “danger”.

Back in prehistoric times, we would sense danger and our “life saving brain chemicals” would kick in to help us respond appropriately, and well, save our lives.

Nowadays, our sensors are a bit off. We’re not out in the jungle trying to avoid lions, but rather we’re out in the world trying to avoid the discomfort of failure. Same brain chemicals kick in, so our brain’s response is automatic and unnecessary.

“Save yourself! Hide!” It’s a bit of an overreaction that needs to be managed.

In comes black and white thinking. This tendency will have you believing that something either has to happen one way or another, you will not have the ability to consider all of the options in between.

You’re automatic response sounds something like “if I don’t get this done by tomorrow, it’s over.”

One option. One solution. When often what’s best for you is some unique approach. (Typically not the first method that comes to mind.)

There’s good news here, all 3 of these things are fixable.

You can reset by taking a brisk walk outside or spending an afternoon doing something you love. Disonnect and reconnect with nature.

You can use metacognition (the skill of thinking about what you’re thinking about) to decide if you want to be scared and yet still do the thing that feels hard.

You can step outside of black and white thinking by asking yourself positive questions such as “What would be the most fun way to ______? How can I work on my project and experience some joy today? What’s the most creative way to get this job done? How might I do this if I switched things up a bit?”

Are you someone that gets stuck easily? I’d love to hear what trips you up and keeps you from moving forward on a project? If you’d like to learn more about how coaching can help you get unstuck, book a free consultation below and let’s get you moving towards what it is that you really want.

ADHD and Emotions: Feel Your Way Forward

Day 17: Feelings

“ Emotions can get in the way or get you on the way. “ -Mavis Mazhura

Emotional Regulation can be challenging when you have ADHD tendencies.

You can have a tendency to feel strongly. It can be difficult to manage your emotions. Today I want to talk about how you can feel your way forward, rather than staying stuck.

You can take back the reigns when it comes to your feelings and practice managing them. It’s a skill.

The past two days I’ve been focused on the 5 step tool that I use with my clients that’s called The Model. It’s a framework that’s based on universal truths and was created by Brooke Castillo.

There’s an acronym to help you remember it. C-T-F-A-R. Each letter represents one of the 5 steps in order.

Step 1 is Circumstances. If you didn’t read the post that talked about how we define circumstances for purposes of using the model hop on over to that post here.

Step 2 is Thoughts. We looked at how a thought is just a sentence in our brain. You can read more about that here.

Today we’re going to focus on Step 3, which is Feelings. When we’re using The Model, we’re going to describe a feeling as a one word emotion that you can feel in your body.

Some examples of common feelings are happy, sad, excited, nervous, overwhelmed, distracted, or confused.

There are thousands of feelings available to us.

When we think a thought, it generates a feeling in our body.

For example, the thought “she shouldn’t talk to me like that” can generate the feeling of anger. For others it may generate the feeling of sad. For still others it may create the feeling confused.

What we think about something creates how we feel.

Growing up we often learn that other people cause us to feel upset. That other people can hurt our feelings. It’s just not true.

Here’s an example, someone can say something about us and we will have no idea it was said, and we will not feel any kind of way about it.

Once we find out we feel hurt, or mad or disappointed, and we tend to think it’s because of what they said. Because what they said was hurtful.

If that were true, we would feel hurt the moment it came out of their mouth. The actual act of someone talking about us doesn’t make us feel bad.

It’s the thoughts that we think once we find out that something was said, that make us feel bad.

Thoughts like:

• “That’s not very nice.”

• “They shouldn’t say things like that.”

• “I would never say that.”

• “That’s the rudest thing I ever heard.”

• “I thought they were my friend.”

These thoughts (and others) then generate our feelings.

The good news here is that if you are creating the feelings, that means you can also stop creating them.

This gives you 100% license over your emotional life. When we allow ourselves to believe that our emotions are caused by others actions or words, it’s such a disempowering place to be.

Why? Because it takes things completely out of our hands!

When we take full responsibility for how we feel, we are operating from a place of what’s called Emotional Adulthood. When we believe that others are causing our feelings, we’re operating from a place of emotional childhood.

Where in your life are you giving your personal power away to others? Where do you feel at the mercy of what someone else says?

When we feel a negative emotion, we’re likely to get a negative result. When we feel a positive emotion, we’re likely to get a positive result.

The first step is just to become aware of what it is that we’re feeling and why.

~Shaun

If you’ve been thinking about booking a free consultation and haven’t yet, let’s do it. Learn how to stop the feelings of overwhelm, procrastination, bored, unfocused and generate more useful feelings for yourself. It’s not easy, but it’ll be worth it.

ADHD: Breaking Old Patterns and Trying Something New

Day 12: Habits

Our brains are on repeat.

How we do one thing is how we’ll do everything.

Our way of be-ing in the world is the same from one situation to the next.

It’s something that I watch for in my clients.

I watch for their way of be-ing and how it may be causing them trouble.

How it may be showing up uninvited to the party.

Let me show you what it can look like.

When a potential client says “I want to stop procrastinating and make stronger decisions for myself.”, but then wants to wait to move into coaching until it feels like a better time, or until they can figure out if it’s the right time, I like to show them their thoughts. They’re typically thinking something that makes them feel bad, and when they feel bad they’re indecisive, stuck spinning, and taking little action (which is the EXACT opposite of who they want to become.) These thoughts cause them to procrastinate and not decide.

When a current client says “I can’t afford that. My husband makes all of the money.” I can tell that they really believe it. I did at one point!

They believe that the circumstances are out of their control.

I remember a big shift that happened for me was realizing that I could make what felt like a larger financial decision without telling my husband. I signed up for a program that cost $2000. It was before I had paid off another program (that he knew about) that cost $18k. I knew that this $2000 program was the next step that I needed for my growth. I also knew that if I did the work I’d make the money back eventually, but the plan was to do it within 30 days.

The same day I was thinking about joining and how to join, I got an email from Paypal offering me a working capital loan. I decided to apply and if I qualified I’d join the program. Done! I hit submit, qualified and purchased the program. I immediately got to work and did make my $2k back in less than 30 days. Now the program felt free and I was a lifetime member! Best investment ever.

I told my husband after the fact “you know how I made $6k last month? it was in part because I did this thing without telling you. I invested in myself. Guess what, he wasn’t worried about the money I’d spent because it was already paid back. He was more excited about how it helped me generate more income.

Another way that I see this show up is with jobs and people pleasing.

When you’re used to being a people pleaser you really really care about what other people think of you.

In a job situation, it can present as staying way too long at a job that is not meant for you. A place that you no longer want to be at. The people pleaser may eventually be let go and then they feel very upset and unnappreciated. They may take it personally that their boss didn’t like them very much or didn’t respect their boundaries. When we look a little closer what we usually discover is that they didn’t like themselves very much and they didn’t respect themselves enough to set boundaries. They didn’t appreciate themselves enough to move on when it wasn’t working. They didn’t appreciate themselves to speak up when they were unsatisfied.

We teach people how to treat us. How we show up in one area is ineveitbly how we’ll show up in another.

It’s part of why coaching can help. When we recognize a repeating pattern in ourselves, we start to see it in multiple areas of our lives.

If we’re a victim of circumstances, we tend to be a victim in our relationships, on our jobs, to our eating habits, in school. It can leave us feeling sad, anxious and powerless. All we need to do is practice feeling and acting differently in one of those areas and they will all begin to improve.

Our way of be-ing changes when we try on something new.