One of the hardest parts about being neurodivergent and having mental disabilities is relating to others what your life experience is like. Finding the right words and concepts to accurately describe our condition is tough. What I’d like to put forth here is a metaphor I haven’t seen used to describe ADHD that I think captures:
- How it feels to deal with problems or take on work (both personal and professional) as an ADHD person
- Why dealing with those problems and tasks is a source of anxiety and generally takes a lot of energy from me.
I’m going to call this model the “terrain metaphor”, for lack of a better name. Let’s get started!
Laying out the Landscape
So, first, I’d like you to imagine every task in your life as a plot of land. When you want to work on something, you walk into the plot. Once you reach the center of the plot, you’re done!
What do these plots look like? Well, for easy tasks, they’re a walk in the park: flat land, clear path to the center. Easy peasy. For more involved tasks, they’re more hilly — still traversable, possibly not clear until you start working on it, but you can generally tell if you’re headed in the right direction. The most complex tasks in our lives may be literal mountains that we can’t traverse until we spend some time figuring out how. We may even have to change the task itself in order to be able to begin, or learn a new skill and practice to even start the journey.
For folks with and without ADHD, this is the landscape we navigate in life. Life is full of things to do, and we walk into these plots when we can. We keep going until a problem is solved or a goal is achieved. One thing I want to note: you CAN go between different plots of land if you want, and this doesn’t mean losing progress! The next time you come back, you should be able to navigate that plot more easily, and sometimes, hiking around in different plots may make other problems more easier from what you learn.
How is life different for those of us with ADHD? It’s my belief that ADHD takes most (if not ALL) plots of lands in our task landscape and raises them or lowers them into the ground several stories. I’m going to call these two different ideas “plateaus” and “holes”. In either case, working on many tasks for the ADHD person is made substantially more difficult in ways that seem absurd to the outside observer. Where we see plateaus and holes, they see hills and parks. The difficulty of navigating these tasks, combined with the mismatch in expectations from outside observers leads to a life that is harder than it would be for a neurotypical person. So let’s get into it. What are plateaus and holes?
Plateaus
Plateaus are tasks where starting is much, much more difficult. It’s easier to climb a hill than it is to climb a cliff. A classic example of this is Ned Halloway’s cough drop sign. In short, a common problem ADHD folk struggle with is putting stuff in its right place. A patient Halloway was treating was extremely distressed because they kept forgetting to throw away a coughdrop from the dashboard of their car for days, weeks, months. Putting away the coughdrop, a trivial task for a non-ADHD person, is a plateau for ADHD folk. So what symptoms of ADHD contribute towards a task becoming a plateau? Why do tasks get plateaued?
First, through the lens of: ADHD folk struggle with directing focus — this hits in two major ways: 1) It’s easy to forget to just start the task at all if we can’t hold our focus on it and 2) we can get hung up on the wrong things.
Getting hung up on the wrong things just takes the form of focusing on some aspect of the task that is not important. For example, when attempting to start an exercise plan, we may end up focusing on the thought that we’re out of shape instead just starting to exercise, and then not exercising because we now feel bad.
ADHD folk also crave novelty, so tasks that are perceived as boring or repetitive will inherently have a higher elevation for them. Impatience is another big factor — mountain-scale tasks that require additional work to be invested in order to be started may functionally be a plateau to the ADHD person. Poor sense of time and a difficulty in planning both contribute towards continual disappointment during a task: ADHD folk have a hard time trusting their estimates of time or effort. Because of this, complex tasks can become recipes for repeated disappointment, not only for the person but also for everyone else involved. Inaccurate perceptions of self-worth or the value that you provide to others can lead to ADHD folks thinking they haven’t made it as far as they have into the plot, or that they’re further than they think.
There’s a lot in the ADHD experience that can plateau tasks. Worse, they can all occur independently of each other both before and while a task is being worked on. And a plateaued task doesn’t just “look” harder. For an ADHD person, it IS harder. We’re working against things other people don’t have to work against. Carrying additional weight around from the differences in the way our brains work as we hike the landscape of life. This point I cannot stress enough. Our symptoms don’t make tasks appear harder. They just make many tasks harder period.
Holes
Holes are the other type of terrain change I think ADHD can create. An important difference with holes is that they’re far more common for a particular subtype of ADHD folk: inattentive, sometimes called ADD. Inattentive ADHD folk still experience plateaus for many of the same reason. But one of the key symptomatic differences for inattentive vs hyperactive is a symptom called “hyperfocus”: a frequent, very focused, almost impossible to ignore obsession with a task. I do not think hyperactive ADHD folks experience holes as frequently as inattentive ADHD folk do — hyperactive folk tend not to hyperfocus on things.
Holes are tasks inattentive folk will hyperfocus on, whether they want to or not. Often times, they won’t even see them coming. A hole looks like this:
Yuzu starts a task: change what is painted on a sign in the park from “No Pets” to “Service Animals Only”. She notices that the paintbrush she has been given has lost many of its bristles. She tests it on some cardboard. She can definitely paint the sign with it, it will just be a bit harder and require a few more strokes.
Yuzu goes to paint the sign. The entire time as she is walking to the sign, pouring the paint into a cup, and laying down primer on the sign, she’s annoyed by the bristles. She can’t focus on getting the task done. She’s too distracted by the paintbrush. As she’s about to dip into the black paint she would need to write the new message, she hits a breaking point. “Everyone that uses this paintbrush is going to have to work harder than they would if they had a new paintbrush!!” her mind is screaming to her at this point. It’s been saying this on repeat for the past 10 minutes, and she’s been doing her best to focus on painting the damn sign.
She relents. She puts the paintbrush down, seals up the paint, puts plastic over the paint she has poured, and drives to the hardware store to buy a new paintbrush. The sign remains unpainted for an hour longer than it would have if she had just used the paintbrush she was given.
This is a hole. I like the term “hole” because it captures a nuance that isn’t easy to express. Certain tasks for inattentive folk have a sort of “gravity” to them. If they stray too close to them, then they will end up trapped in them. All tasks have an inherent amount of “holey-ness” to them for everyone. There are certainly tasks that people are more likely to do if they encounter them: hobbies, interests, fun things. What inattentive ADHD folk experience when it comes to holes are:
- Their holes are generally much deeper and harder to get out of
- Their holes are often invisible to them — it’s hard for an ADHD person to tell what will be a hole and what won’t be
- They have more holes in their lives overall
Inattentive ADHD brains don’t shut up about things they perceive as problems or as “the right way of doing things”. What can be perceived as relentlessness and deep focus on a problem can be a waking nightmare for the inattentive ADHD person. Their lives are pervaded by a recurring feeling that you’re not in the driver’s seat of your brain. That if you happen upon the wrong hole, you can say good bye to whatever it were doing. These holes can feel random. It’s hard for me to tell what things I’ll take issue with on a given day, and which of them will feel so important to me that I can’t let go of them. Inattentive people work hard on these problems and don’t stop working until they’re solved. To the point of forgetting to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, or take care of other obligations. What we often don’t let on is that most times, this isn’t a choice, no more than falling when you step into a hole in real life would be a choice. If we don’t work hard, don’t keep working until the problem disappears, our brain goes right back to tormenting us about it. It would be a large, often insurmountable amount of work for the inattentive ADHD person to ignore that tormenting. I would go so far as to say that this is what I think is one of the big drivers substance abuse in ADHD people. Who wouldn’t want to escape an existence where problems randomly and inconsistently take over your life?
To be honest, I’m not sure what the symptomatic cause of these problems is. Inability to direct focus definitely is one of the causes of it, but if I had to guess based on personal experience, I’d say ADHD folk’s value systems are radically different in some fundamental way we do not understand. This pattern definitely has been noticed and studied in medicine, but we don’t quite understand how they’re different or why. We struggle with balancing alternatives when presented with them, especially if there’s no easy system by which we can rank them. Aspects of a task that don’t matter do. Aspects of a task that are not important can become major stopping points for us. I can definitely see how that contributes to tasks being holes. I just don’t know why it happens. Inattentive ADHD seems generally less well understood in medical research. It also frequently goes undiagnosed because it’s more subtle, and also because the end effects often tend to be more positive for others. It’s a lot easier to think something is wrong with the person who is bouncing off the walls than the person who retreats into their work and ignores everything else.
Living in a Landscape of Plateaus and Holes
So far we’ve talked about these two differences in terms of singular tasks for the most part. However, I think it’s important to realize that many of problems also arise out of us living in this landscape day after day. It’s not just that we have plateaus and holes that are larger than they would be for neurotypical people. It’s the fact that we’re dealing with the all the time. How does this affect us?
I think many ADHD folk tend to meander between tasks because many of them take the form of plateaus. This has a cost. As we mentioned earlier, staying in a task plot has two big benefits:
- You understand the task better and can more easily accomplish it if you have to repeat it/come back to it
- Working in one task may providing learnings that apply to other tasks
The problem is: spending little time in a plot reduces the chance that either of these two things (understanding, shared learnings) can occur. I think ADHD folk tend to benefit from these two things less frequently than others.
I also think the perception of our terrain by others is damaging to us over time. There’s very often fundamental mismatches neurotypical people and neurodivergent people looking at the same task landscape. Even two ADHD folk looking at the same landscape of tasks may have radically different understandings of their elevation. But when others in their lives see small hills where they see plateaus, what ends up happening over the long term is:
- ADHD folk distrust themselves because their opinions differ so greatly from peers/authority figures
- They lose self esteem because of continual misunderstandings about amounts of effort or time needed to do something
- They learn helplessness, or form anxieties that make them avoid things others might not because they’re tired of trying to climb plateaus all the time and being told “This shouldn’t be this hard”, “Why can’t you focus?” or “Why didn’t you get this done?”
For inattentive folks, holes create similar sorts of long term issues:
- Falling into holes is tiring. Holes often cause inattentive folk to work harder and longer than the neurotypical person would. If your life is full of them, you’re more likely to be tired/exhausted more frequently.
- Inattentive folks may be seen as unpredictable or unreliable if their particular holes don’t align with the goals of their peers/authority figures
- Inattentive folks may form anxieties that are general or unrelated to problems sooner due to fear of falling into holes. An extreme example: if your hole is “climate change”, and climate change sends you into obsessive existential dread, you may start avoiding talking about current events with peers so that you do not hear about climate change, which can lead to forming a more general social anxiety.
In short, tasks in life being plateaus and holes for ADHD folk not only creates problems in the immediate sense, but also long term. Because more tasks are plateau-y/hole-y for an ADHD person, longer term patterns and problems can emerge that make more sense when you consider that this tasks in their lives are more often plateaus or holes than not.
Summary
Plateaus and holes create all sorts of problems for ADHD folk, both in the moment and in the long term. There are two key differences between ADHD folk and neurotypical folk:
- ADHD folks have more plateaus and holes overall
- Those plateaus and holes are often more dramatic in their elevation and how they affect the life of the ADHD person
I think many issues that are seen as “side effects” or “related conditions” make much more sense through the lens “ADHD are navigating a much more plateau-y and sometimes hole-y landscape than the neurotypical person does”.
I also hope this model helps to create some empathy in people not suffering from ADHD. I want people to understand that these problems are as real as to me as a plateau or hole is real. My symptoms can be as exhausting as climbing a hill, or making my way down a slope. A big part of that exhaustion comes from me working hard to shore up these “changes in terrain” so that I can have a more “normal” response to situations and not create a scene where one is not deserved. But it’s work to do that!!
