140 - Why I Can't "Do The Work"

If you go to therapy, you still gotta do the work. If you hire a coach, you have to do the work. You purchase a course - do the work. Read a self improvement book? Did you do the work? Why is the work so hard?! I have some thoughts...

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Transcript

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I find it completely bonkers that we adults with ADHD, like we'll read these books. Or well, let's say, let's say this. Let's we buy the books at least. We go to therapy, we hire coaches, we head off to these retreats, we see some crazy idea or some awesome thing on social media, and we think, yeah, that's it. Oh my God, I've got it. And we never do the work. Why don't we do the work? What's up with the work? Let's unpack that suitcase. Let's unfurl that scroll. Let's talk about it. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Rush Jones, author of Destending to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Hey guys, welcome to the uh podcast. That's what we're doing today. What are we doing? Podcasting? Okay. Um, welcome to that. Um, I'll give you my mental health report. Uh here's the deal medicinal side effects suck. I don't want to climb aboard the complaint train, you know, like nonstop to whiny town. Oh, these are all the things that suck. The positive side of the medicine is that I'm not debilitated by depression, so that's great. It's weird though, because it feels like I still have it. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about that. It's like it's weird because it's there, but we're gonna go ahead and have a day. You know, like it's a little fatiguy, a little constipaty, but you know, we're gonna go ahead and have a day. We're gonna have a day today. Is that too much uh in the podcast to mention my side effects? But you know what? If we're mentioning the main effects, I think it's only right that we talk about some side effects. Um we kind of owe it to ourselves to do that. But overall things are chugging along. It's good. Uh what's interesting is that I wake up in the morning and I'm super stoked to get out of bed, uh, to get started with the ADHD Big Brother community stuff because I love that place, love those people. So even though there's this like weird overall sort of a blonde, I can way more easily lean into life. I think that's what I mean to say. It's like I'm I'm I'm able to get out of bed and have my life as opposed to before, where it's more like I just don't want to get out of bed. So, I mean, that's all positive, really. So that's my super duper report. Hope you enjoyed it. I want to shout out a couple of new members uh in the ADSGB Brother community, Amonas and Anthony, because both joined the community a little uh about a week ago, a little over a week ago, and they both jumped right into the accountability club, the Skull Spaghetti Master Daily Accountability. Um, and they both hit seven days in a row doing the thing that they said they were gonna do, which is pretty freaking amazing. And they both earned their seven-day noodler badge. Way to go, guys. That's what you get when you're noodling around with some shiny new toy called accountability. So that's a public congratulations. Uh, I hope you guys are wearing your celebratory noodler cap and eating the customary noodle pie to honor the centuries-old tradition of noodling. And I'll see you guys later on this evening in the banquet hall for the celebratory noodle chuck, where we figure out our goals for the year, stick our hands in a big pile of wet noodles, and chuck them at the wall and see what sticks. That actually sounds like a really fun event. So maybe if this uh ADHD brother gets big enough, we can do that. We'll rent out a banquet hall and then we'll have a noodle chuck and never be invited back to that banquet hall ever again. But that's how it works with us, anyways. We want to go to a new place every time. Oh, this could really work out. Anyway, so the real part of this is that Anthony and Amonith, they got school spaghetti noodler badges. Next up is 30 days, and that's when you become a brain boiler. Can they do it? I think they can. But they've been doing the quote unquote work. So let's talk about like why we might not be doing the work. And I know why it is for me, I think. Um maybe you'll resonate, but guys, I've paid a lot of money for therapy that I never did the work on, for coaches that I never did the work on, for courses that I maybe started on, but I never finished, books I've read but never did the work on, books that I've bought but never read the book to begin with. So I don't even know what the work is to do. And most of the time when we are looking at all the self-improvement or are working on ourselves, we we talk about like needing to do the work. Like you gotta be willing to do the work. You gotta be committed to being willing to do the work. You gotta show up, you gotta do the work. If you cared enough, you'd put in the work. If you want change, you gotta be committed to the work. You go to school, you gotta turn in your work. You wake up in the morning and you go to work because you gotta work at work. You wanna get fit, you gotta work out. You gotta get in there and do the work. And man, for me, I've come to this realization that I struggled to do the work because it's work. I struggle to work out, it's work. I struggle to keep my place organized and clean because it's work. And I'm not interested in work. But Lisa from uh from our community, uh, shout out, Lisa. Hi, how you doing? Um, we both gamified some cleaning. She used an app uh that's like a decision maker spinning the wheel app, and I created a chorotto for myself to make things interesting. And it was effective. Uh, if you were watching me, you would have probably said, hey, he's working hard at cleaning up, but that's not how I see it. I'm in the middle of a game of chorlotto, and I'll tell you how I play it here in a little bit. But I've manufactured enough interest in what is otherwise a chitastical grouping of work. When we talk about all these ADHD tools and these strategies, like we have to practice them, right? That it's you know, it's not like everything in our lives, you know, where we go like, oh, okay, I get the concept. The concept is gotten. It's a good idea, but then we don't do anything with it, right? That's where they tell us you go, you gotta put in the work. You gotta do the work. I'm just starting to feel like that's wrong. I mean, it's right in that I get it, but it lands wrong with me. It does not compel me. I don't want to work these tools. I want to play with them. I want to enjoy the process of getting my shit together, not in this panic way, through this these desperate attempts to doing the work that never seems to work for me. Playing with the tools, that is such a refreshing feeling to me. I'm like, oh, the tool is a timer. Okay, well, let me play with the timer. Let me horse around with it. Let me play with the concept. I'll set it for two minutes and I'll see what happens when I clean the living room. Okay, maybe I'll put four things away. Maybe more. I don't know. Let me play around and see what happens. That is so much better for me than we gotta clean the room because it's a mess. Let's get to work. We gotta do some fucking work today. God, it's like no wonder so many of us with ADHD have trouble getting shit done. It's because we keep feeling like everything that's important is work. Those goddamn normies. They keep sneaking into my brain and getting in with their importance-wired brains. I'm an ADHD and my brain is wired for interest. Why am I never able to connect to this concept of putting in the work? It's because I hard work feels like such a god-awful chore to me. There's no play, there's no interest in it. But the culture that most of us grew up in, well, you know what? I say the culture that I grew up in, because I know that people listen from all over the lands here. But uh I per myself, I grew up in a culture that was we admired hard, grueling work. And that those people that put in the effort reap the rewards, right? The people that persevere through adversity, they climb the mountain. Those are the stories that we tell, those are the movies that get made, those are like the achievements that we marvel at. And so then I believe that that's that's gotta be the path. I have to work my ass off. And then at some point, I don't know, then I finally have my shit together. Okay. I feel like I'm trying to sell you guys on having fun, which just sounds crazy to me. Uh, I think some of this is some of this is coming from the depression stuff, but but I had read this study somewhere, and I know I'd mentioned it here before, um, I think, and I know that we're all different. So this is I'm basically sharing this because it it resonates deeply with me, and I connected to it very profoundly, and I fully honor and recognize that we're all different and that your uh life experience may be different. So knowing that, I shall share with you this. They mentioned that ADHD people tend to find life boring. That's our homeostasis. Like, it's just like, okay, this is it, this is what we're doing here. Oh, this is boring. So anything that gives us a little bit of juice or a little bit of excitement will move us into action because oh my god, I find that's interesting. And I really connect with that because sadly, that is kind of how I my homeostasis tends to be. And I don't know if that's a hundred percent related to the depression or if that's a hundred percent related to the ADHD, you know, or if it's an 80-20 thing, or if it's a 35-65 thing. I do know, uh, but I I connect with it. So I've really been leaning into this idea of interest, not just actively exploring it, but also in thinking about the things that in life that I do, like my day job, uh, when when I had my previous job, it's not like I liked that work. So, how was I able to do it? And I did it really well, and I think it's because I was interested in earning a paycheck. That's great. I'm interested in paying my rent and surviving and putting clothes on my kids and uh, you know, feeding my kids and all that stuff. So there's an interest in that. I was interested in pleasing the company, uh, which makes me want to vomit right now, but like the corporate entity, like I wanted to achieve things that would improve the company as a whole. And I like I'm personally invested in efficiency. So when I saw opportunities to improve efficiency, like I advocated it because that was interesting to me. I think there's a better way. Let's try it. So even though the job itself was just kind of whatever, I found interest. I created interest. And I think that's really interesting, which is why I'm able to write this podcast episode, I think, because I'm interested in the concept of interest. Hey, what do you know? I think a lot of this is me redefining the concept of interest and how I see it. Um, we've been playing a lot around with it a lot, the concept uh of play in the ADHD Big Brother community. Like we actually we tonight we have a live Zoom call. Uh, well, it won't be tonight for you. It'll be it's tonight, as I'm recording this, it's happening tonight, where some of us have created games. Uh they're kind of like productivity games or habit games. And um, I've gone down this hyper focus rabbit hole on it. So you'll probably see the ADHD Big Brother game bundle coming to a store near you. Uh, it's that intense. I'll explain the concept of one of them because I'm super excited about all this stuff. Um, I'm not inventing anything unique, really. It's a pretty common strategy. People do it in various forms a lot. Um, so this game is called Chore Lotto. And what I did was I wrote five chores on cards and I mixed them up and I added a free card, uh, which is like, you know, free time. And I shuffled the six cards up and I placed them on the table face down next to each other in a row of six. And so then the idea is I'm gonna roll three six-sided dice and I'm gonna create three 10-minute chunks of time. In the game that I played recently, I rolled a one and then I rolled a four, and then I rolled another one. So I grab my timer and I push start on the timer for 10 minutes, and right as I push start on the timer, I flip over the card to see what I'm going to be working on for that 10 minutes. So I don't have time to make any kind of like, oh shit, oh god, it's the kitchen. Damn it. I don't feel like it. It's like I flip it over, it's the kitchen, off I go. I'm gonna clean until the timer goes off. And this is me playing a game, and it's also me getting a shitload done in 30 minutes. And here's a side note when I rolled the four, that was actually the free play card. So I got time to just do whatever I wanted, and I didn't want to do anything else. I had momentum. I was cleaning, I was in cleaning mode, and I was like, I don't wanna if I can take a break. So I re-rolled the dice and I got laundry and I was like, set the timer and boom, and I'm off. Who to thunk it? I was actually motivated because I already had, I was already compelled to action and I had momentum. This isn't necessarily about creating interest in the chore itself because cleaning the kitchen has no interest to me whatsoever. It's using interest as a means to compel action. And there might be times when I don't I don't need a game to clean the kitchen. If I find myself cleaning a kitchen, then yay, I'm fucking cleaning the kitchen. Good deal. I believe I've talked about situational variability before. I know we talked about it in the workshop, but it it just be it means interest varies. I may be interested in in this one day and I'm not interested in the next. Okay. That's where you know you get that statement from people sometimes like, I've seen you do this before, just do it now, what you did back then. It's like, well, I was interested back then for whatever reason. I'm not interested now. Cannot do it. So interest is really interesting. Um, I also created a game, uh I'm calling it Gold Digger. Uh, I'm not gonna spoil it though, but gameplay is about a year. I but I'm really excited about playing it. So if you want to play with me, hey, join the community. Although you you'd have to join for a year. That'd be a good selling tactic, wouldn't it? But I'm really excited about playing it. I'll have to let you know how it goes. Okay, so that's my ramble on interest. Anytime you hear the word work, change it to play. See how that resonates. Um, I haven't done the math on it, so I don't know if that it's gonna play out the right way every time. But who cares, you know? Let's just have fun for a bit. Let's turn the slog into a game. God damn it. You wanna play? Let's play. My challenge is that if you have some way of turning work into play, I want to know how you do it. Reach out via the contact form on the ADHJB Brother website. I respond to all my emails. And if you wanna if you want to get on the wait list to get your copy of Gold Digger or Chorlotto or Earn Your Turn, that's it, that one needs a different name. Um, it's a game that allows you to have guilt-free video game time. Yeah, guilt-free. You know how you play video games now, and then the whole time you're like, God, I damn it, I'm an adult. I'm playing a video game. I've been playing for two hours, and I've got shit I should be doing. I'm wasting my life. I found out the way out of that, and I actually played over two hours of Minecraft the other day with uh my son, guilt free, because uh I created a game to earn it. It's glorious. Life is actually easier for me when it's a game. Anyway, reach out if you have any questions, comments, concerns, or if I can help you, I will. I literally enjoy being of service to you guys. It has an immense level of natural interest inside my heart cavity. So reach out. Uh alrighty, that's it. I hope you guys found this helpful. If you did, please click on the button to subscribe to this podcast, and then you'll get episodes whenever they're whenever they come out, which is every Monday. And with that, I hope you guys have a great week, and I am going to talk to you later.