154 - Time and The Curse of Wiggle Room

Time is a tricky little bugger! Especially when we are vague about it. Let's learn a way to get on the other end of "wiggle room." 

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Transcript

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Today I am going to side with and I'm going to talk about doing things black or white. I'm going to talk about my personal ADHD approach to finding the gray. What am I talking about? What do you mean? What am I talking about? I'm obvious I'm talking about the curse of Wiggle Room. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of Descending 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. Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Come on in, file on in. Wow, what a turnout. Wow, a lot of fresh new faces today. God, come on in. I underestimated the number of chairs we were gonna need. If anybody has a lap available, please offer that up. This is gonna be fun. I apologize that the air conditioning's not working, so let's let's we'll make this a quick one, then then we can all get back outside and enjoy the pickleball and the refreshments. Let's go. I'll do a quick mental health update. Every week, I as a way to normalize talking about our school spaghetti, not just the good, but we got the bad and the weird thrown in there. I share my current mental health update. This week I feel good. It's a great week. I'm back on the dating scene. That's fun. I love that nervous gut that you get when you meet somebody. You know, you're like you're gauging your attraction, or you're like, we'll just check it to see if they're we'll see if there's chemistry here. We're checking all the chemistry. Man, I used to really go into like a first date, like just seeing they're gonna hate me. I'm a dork, I'm unattractive, I don't make enough money, all the bullshit stuff. And that nervous gut that I would have, it resonated as fear, like fear of rejection. You know, like uh it was an alarm that I had to run from. Uh, and it wasn't until I started going into dating, is like I'm genuinely interested in people. So you're automatically my friend, and I get to learn about you. And then that nervous gut, I started to enjoy it. Like it's a roller coaster. It means that I like this person, so uh it's it's more of a fun feeling. Anyway, I can ramble on and on about the dating world, but we'll do that in some other episode. You know what? We should probably get a professional in here to talk because I am no professional in the dating world. But I love meeting new people and I'm having a great time right now, even outside of dating. A new person is genuinely fun to meet. A new friend. I love it. That might be part of the reason why I love this work so much, you know, and like the ADHGB Brother community. Or like when somebody sets up one of those free calls with me, uh, I get to meet a new person. I just love that. So all good there. And then I found myself creating some new boundaries around naps, of all things. Uh, I was finding last week that I would gravitate towards getting back into bed multiple times a day for a nap. And this is and this is a tough part about being self-employed, you know, entrepreneurial, working from home, and then also having depression. That was not helping. It's very much teetering in this depressive episode where I'd feel in and out of it. And it's very bizarre, very frustrating. So I created some boundaries with my bed to keep me from napping and then fucking up my whole sleep at night. So that's been going way more good than bad. So awesome. And so that's basically my mental health update. I feel really good right now. Uh, so thank you so much for asking. Oh my gosh. And in ADHD Big Brother Land, I set up that webinar, the free webinar that I've uh I've done it a few times, how adults with ADHD can do shitty tasks. That's like we know we're typically good at the fun stuff, the novel stuff, but it's just that important stuff. Like, how do we get started on important things? The things that suck. How do we do that? Well, I do a webinar that educates on why, you know, the importance versus interest-wired brains and gives concrete strategies that you can implement. So if you want to see it, uh I set up a replay of one of the live versions that I did. So you can get it. Link in the show notes. Scroll on down to the show notes and clickety clackety on the links there. And if you watch it, reach out. If you have questions about any of it, reach out. I the thing that I want you guys to know about with all this stuff is that I want you to bother me. I want you to share your ideas, ask questions. I've dedicated myself to you guys. I created a blood oath. Not really, but I think you know what I'm talking about. This is a big deal to me. And we are such a people-pleasing kind of like, I don't want to bother you. You're probably too busy. Would I have to ask is probably the dumbest question anybody's ever asked, and I just feel stupid asking it. Ask it. I'm at your disposal, and if I can help you, I will. I'm not so big yet, you guys. I don't get 5,000 emails a day yet, where I have to have some sort of an AI automated assistant that's been trained to talk like me that answers all my emails. Like it's me. I'm reading those emails. I'm checking in on you guys in the morning and I'm reaching out. I love it. So, anyway, if you watch the webinar, if you have questions, ask away. Okay, wiggle room. What is wiggle room? It is this is not just a padded room where people oil up and then they writhe around like worms. That is a different kind of wiggle room, which I'm sure that room does exist. I do live in Los Angeles. Weirder rooms have been created. This is a different wiggle room. I was talking to a one of my one-on-one clients, and he suggested that I discuss this on the podcast. He had a profound moment, and we touched upon something that I think occurs with a lot of us, and it is the curse of wiggle room. Um, and FYI, I don't just share, I don't just share personal stories of clients without express knowledge. He was like, dude, you should do this, use whatever you want. You can use my name, my experience, all of it, if it helps. But I think that for the sake of professionalism, um, let's change his name. Let's call him Winston. No, let's not call him Winston. This isn't a very Winston y thing. Let's call him Cheweekwee. That's like a that's literally a name from my past. Ooh, this is gonna be a side note. I used to work at Red Robin when I was 18 back in Washington State, and I got hired to work in the dish pit. And so the manager was a super funny guy, and he was like, What do you want your name to be? And it's like, who gives a shit what my name is? I'm in the dish pit, I'm not customer facing. So it was like you pick whatever name you want. And I was like, Okay, I'm Chuck. And he was so let down by that, he was like, Chuck is boring, and I was like, No, no, no, no, no. It's spelled with a Q U E though, and he was like, Oh, and so, but then he added an I, so it was C-H-U-I-Q-U-E, and it just became Cheekwee. And so from that day forth, I became Cheekee. But I don't think that works here because that's like it seems like a little alien man. Let's say I'm gonna go see Deadpool and Wolverine tomorrow. So let us say Logan. So Logan had this idea of wanting to be done with work by 6 p.m. Okay, so the idea be done with work by six. But the way that he phrased it to me was like, I'd like to be done between six and seven, which is lovely and gray. And he's self-employed, an entrepreneur, he's a successful marketing guy. You know, he works all the time. So for him, it's about quitting the day because all he'll keep going. And I'm a big fan of talking things out and getting really specific commitments from people. And that's the ADHD challenge right there. So in this case, the conversation expanded into us talking about other areas of life where we give ourselves wiggle room. And do you ever notice, like, when you give yourself wiggle room, do you usually wiggle to the extreme, if not beyond? I do this all the time. Like when I've said I'd like to get to this by the end of the day, let's say, I'm always gonna push up against the end of the day. And then it's like, I don't know, maybe I could, maybe I could push this off till tomorrow. I don't feel like it now. It's the end of the day. And then we do that mental math of just how shitty or non-shitty our life might be if we push it off till tomorrow. And if it's not all the way shitty, like I think I'm gonna go ahead and do this tomorrow. But then we'll push it off to the entirety of tomorrow. There's no time specificity. I'll get to it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. Like when? Tomorrow. At some point. Like at what point though? At some point, there'll be a point. TBD. TBD is the death of ADHD. So let's take this desire, right? Uh to be done with work between six and seven. Any time in there, and he'd be cool with it. So my question, which is is usually it's a little more blunt. I apologize. I'm like, so what is it? Is it six or is it seven? And he's like, ideally, it's six. Okay, so then what happens if you say I'm gonna stop work at six? Like you're shooting for six. You're not gonna beat yourself up if you work till six thirty, but you're the time that you keep at the top of your head is six p.m. It's more likely to be a true six p.m. cutoff if the eye is on six p.m. at the end of the day. So we're casually talking about it, like especially in this entrepreneurial world, like self-employed. I experienced this myself. If we're always on the go to be working, then six to seven, it's always gonna mean seven. And then that seven will be the thing to be fighting against. So really six to seven is actually it's about seven fifteen-ish, maybe. But now let's look at the black and white cutoff of six p.m. And knowing that we have ADHD, right? 6 p.m., it's gonna probably push until maybe 6.15. So 6.15 is still in the camp of being done between 6 and 7. It's ultimately what he'd like to be doing. And it's more likely to be closer to 6. That's the ideal. I've mentioned this before. And that you know what? This is in the webinar that I was promoting earlier. But all these ADHD tools and all these strategies, they're in an effort for things to be more likely to happen. I believe, and this is a personal note, you know, I might be wrong, might be right. Jury's out. But I currently believe in playing to my black and white nature with grace. I'm so personally tired of trying to be like a normie. Like, I don't know if this is relatable or not. I can uh this could just be me, all right? Uh but this idea of trying to live in the gray, where gray is the starting point, to just be able to be gray about shit. I personally can't do that. And then the and the pushback of oh, you're not probably not trying hard enough, or you're not, you haven't given it enough a long enough effort, it really rings bullshit to me. Because I'm not trying to become a different person. I'm trying to figure out my way to achieve the things that they keep telling me to do their way. There isn't a the way, as far as I'm concerned. And I would even say that about the stuff that I talk about. There isn't this one way, as far as I'm concerned. There's ways, especially in ADHD world. So here's how I do it. Here's a way. This is how I do a normie thing in my ADHD way. My gray does not start out as gray, it starts out as black and white. In this case, okay, I'll take Logan's deal. I'm gonna end my work at 6 p.m. That's black and white, that's succeed or fail. And I actually stop working at 6.15. Okay. I added 15 minutes of white into my black, and there's my little bit of gray. The gray is the grace. There's grace in the gray. Like that's the be cool with ourselves. But in my view, we're more effective when we're going after the black or the white, and we cut out the quote unquote, I suck because I didn't do it exact, but we st but we don't stop going after the black and white. And I hope that makes sense. I hope that makes sense. It's really a perspective change. My challenge to you guys is to be specific when it comes to time. What is something that is time-based for you? Like your work schedule, your downtime, your exercise time. What is something where you are looser with time? Where you could be black and white, success or failure, all or nothing. You know, all those glorious cognitive distortions. Yeah, did he just did he just suggest all or nothing? Think again. Somebody call the cops on this guy. Start out wherever you're at, give yourself the hard deadline so that you're more likely to hit it, and then give yourself some of that little bit of gray grace. Give it some of that gray grace when you don't hit it exactly. I think they call it being perfectly imperfect. Be perfectly imperfect at going after perfection, you perfect bastards. Um but how close can you get? Every single day. That's my challenge to you. You want to try it? Reach out and let me know if you do. I would love to hear how it goes. Um, alrighty. I think that's gonna do it for this one. Like if you guys are getting value out of this podcast, please would you do me a favor and leave a review on iTunes or rate it on Spotify and share this on your social medias with your ADHD friends. That would put a big smile on my face. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.