ADHD Overwhelm

What is overwhelming about ADHD?

• let’s say that there is a project to do.
• I know from experience that, if I get started on this project but do not finish, I will forget pretty much the entirety of the project and all of my ideas about it. I will lose track of what I have already done. There is a risk that I could start this project 14 times, and never actually finish it. I will get distracted by something else, which will occupy my whole attention, and it will be as if this project never existed.
• I see that the project has a lot of parts to it. It will require coordinating several different sources of information and putting them together to support a single conclusion.
• I know that I will need to focus on the project for a sustained period of time. That means that I will need hyperfocus working my way.

This all contributes to a sense that I either do the whole thing all at once, from start to finish, in one major period of time, without being interrupted; or I don’t do it at all. All of my past failures, due to my forgetfulness and difficulty with focus, come flooding back to me.

If, in the meantime, a resource that I need to access for the project becomes unavailable, or there’s an unforeseen technical glitch that stops me from working on my project in that moment when I have rustled up the courage to work at it, or I need to ask someone a question who is not available immediately, it feels like the whole world is against me and things are hopeless – because I feel like if I don’t do it all at once, I will never get back to the project again.

A big reason that ADHD leads to overwhelm, in my opinion as someone who has ADHD, is that a person with ADHD experiences so many instances of failure to complete tasks – tasks that they understand and know how to do – as a result of being unable to easily pick up the thread of where they left off – that every task feels like an all-or-nothing situation.

The higher the IQ that a person with ADHD has, the more intellectual resources that person has, the worse it can be. More thinking means more ideas to keep track of and sort through, more projects begun, and more frustration because you know what it is that needs to happen – you perhaps know it more deeply and understand more of the complexities than most of those around you – but you feel like you can’t get it all to completion, no matter how hard you try.

So my next hypothesis is that successfully dealing with ADHD means finding ways of keeping track of the threads of different projects and making it possible to pick up where you left off with a minimum of rethinking or overthinking. That part – dealing with taking up unfinished business with a minimum of fuss – is key to decreasing the sense of accumulated overwhelm that dogs every new beginning.

That’s a topic to be explored another day.