No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”
― Denis Waitley
Most people procrastinate. But those of us with ADHD turn procrastination into an art form.
I think back to countless hours I spent as a lawyer staring hopelessly at a blank screen, willing myself to just GET STARTED on a task. I could stay stuck in paralysis for hours, overthinking and going round in circles.
The negative self-talk would start up: “I don’t understand”, “Where do I start?”, “All my colleagues know how to do this”, “I’m just stupid”, “Why did I ever think I could be a lawyer?” – and on and on it would go until I was in that downward spiral to hopelessness.
Other times I simply gave up and did something easier or more enjoyable (and usually trivial), while the daunting important tasks piled up and added to my overwhelm.
Not knowing I had ADHD certainly didn’t help.
I’d never even heard of executive function, but I lived with the impact of the unsuspected impairments every day of my life. I found it hard to hold instructions in my head, so I struggled to get clear on what I was doing and how to do it. Difficulty processing information added to the problem. Then there was my stellar ability to create chaos out of order (think piles of paper going rogue!).
Going round in circles was the story of my life!
So why do we procrastinate?
Obviously we don’t choose to procrastinate. Nobody wants to feel the anxiety, guilt and shame that comes with failing to do what we say we’ll do and letting ourselves and other people down.
So why do we do it?
While we all have our own brand of procrastination, I’m sure you’ll recognise and resonate with some of these potential causes.
We don’t trust ourselves to get things right
We’ve lived our lives forgetting to do things, making careless mistakes, putting our foot in it, being disorganised, and being criticised by family/teachers/bosses/just about everyone for doing things wrong. In short, all the things that go along with a life lived with undiagnosed ADHD.
As a result, we expect to get things wrong, to mess things up. And that makes it kinda hard to do anything at all.
Limiting beliefs
You know that negative voice in your head? The one telling you you’re no good, you always get it wrong, you’re going to screw up again and look stupid.
Well telling ourselves these stories makes it more likely things will go wrong. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. We get what we focus on!
Imposter syndrome
This is huge for a lot of women who’ve lived with undiagnosed ADHD.
It may even be worse for those of us who are outwardly successful, because all the while that self-talk is telling a whole other story.
Maybe you know that storyline too. You’re not really as clever or successful as people think you are. And if you’re not really, really vigilant they’re going to suss you out. You’ll be exposed as the fraud you believe you are.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism often goes hand in hand with all of these other factors when we have ADHD. It’s a mindset we adopted way, way back to try to protect ourselves from making mistakes, failing, looking stupid… And guess what? Perfectionism makes it harder to do things because – well, the result is never going to be as perfect as we want or imagine it to be.
So we spend forever preparing to do things (Caren McGill calls this “procrastiplanning” which is the perfect name for it). We go round in circles, we second guess ourselves, and we never get on with it. It’s not a choice, we just can’t!
Worry, anxiety and fear
These are the emotional manifestations of that lack of trust in ourselves, our limiting beliefs, imposter syndrome etc. The emotional impact of all those negative messages we’ve been getting our whole lives – from other and from our own inner critic.
These three form an escalating scale. We start off worrying – maybe we’re not sure we have what it takes to do the thing. So anxiety and stress set in and soon we’re overthinking and stuck in analysis paralysis.
If we are simply unable to get going we may experience full-blown fear. We have to do this task but we can’t do it. Everyone will realise what a failure we are. We’ll lose our job. We vividly imagine all the worst-case scenarios and we’re lost.
Overwhelm
This is the state we always seem to end up in. Everything just feels too much. I’m sure plenty of folks without ADHD, or who haven’t lived with undiagnosed ADHD, feel overwhelm at times. But for some of us it feels like a constant companion.
Breathing is one of the quickest ways to access greater calm and help us get out of the fight or flight response. I talk about other ways to dial down your stress quickly here.
On the positive side…
As Denis Waitley says, no matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. In other words, there’s always a chance to do things better.
We are not broken or flawed, we have ADHD. And more significantly, we lived for many years with undiagnosed ADHD which produced emotional impacts that we simply didn’t know about. We just lived with the consequences, thinking they were personal faults that made us somehow less than other people.
So in addition to reducing the immediate feelings of stress and anxiety, a longer-term project is to address the underlying issues.
If we can heal the emotional scars that over the years have led to perfectionism, imposter syndrome, limiting beliefs, lack of confidence, self-doubt and the rest, we can not only tame our procrastination and move towards our goals and dreams, but also live more freely, authentically and joyfully.
Let’s do that together!
