If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My anime/video game list consists of over 100 titles, easily, and yet I almost never get around to watching/playing any of them.

Executive dysfunction is not just for boring or unenjoyable things. It’s for everything. Even eating.

What is executive dysfunction? O.o

Put simply, it’s difficulty/inability with initiating tasks. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, like decision-making and impulse control. People with ADHD and other neurological disorders that affect the prefrontal cortex often experience difficulty making decisions and performing tasks, as well as exercising self restraint. Part of why people with ADHD tend to procrastinate so badly is out of genuine inability to begin tasks, even if they’re very important.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

Oh thank god, someone put it into words.

For me it’s also waiting for the “right” time to come to complete the task because for some reason my brain thinks doing the task at any other time is horribly, horribly wrong, weird, and out of order. The “right” time might come eventually, might not. It’s a lottery.

Yeah.  This.

Y’all make it sound so deep but tbh to me it feels like tapping on the ‘Do the dishes’ button but a screen pops up saying ‘you must be lvl 27 to do this activity’ and I’m like ‘well shit I’m only lvl 26 so I guess I’ll just dick around until my exp goes up 

And then next time I tap ‘do the dishes’ it demands I’m lvl 28 and by that time it’s getting a bit moldy and I’m just staring furiously at this pile of dishes, slapping the ‘Do the Dishes’ button to no avail. The stars aren’t in position. 

The stars are never in position.

sometimes there’s a Just Fucking Do It special move available but it depletes your entire power bar and the recharge speed is completely unpredictable

I click Do Thing and it loads to 78% and then stays that way for 3 days

For me it’s like a notification pops up saying “The dishes need doing. You have 4 seconds to comply. If you do not comply within the allotted time, “Do Dishes” feature will become unavailable for 3 weeks.” And if I don’t get up literally that instant and force myself to do the task, and wait even like 3-5 minutes, it becomes like when u open an un-dismissible window and accidentally click outside the box and your computer makes that chime noise to let you know that the option to click outside the box (do the dishes) doesn’t exist. And then I’m just laying there like “ding…ding……ding….” until 3 weeks has passed and I’m given another 4 seconds to seize the opportunity to do the dishes.

That last one is 100% yes. 

All of these.

And there are methods for working around it, but my brain keeps patching the loopholes I use to exploit it and get stuff done so I have to keep finding new ones

My body lags.

Yes. I know this feeling. I know I have a lesson to prepare but I can’t drag myself to do it and I wait and wait and now it’s five minutes after we’re supposed to start and I have to start the video call even though I have no lesson plan at all. 

I feel like a manual-transmission car with the clutch pedal depressed. I can shift into gear, I can press the accelerator down, I can turn the wheel, but nothing’s happening because the clutch is disconnecting the engine from the wheels and until/unless I figure out how to make that clutch pedal stop doing its thing, I’m not going anywhere.

I used to be absolutely emotionally exhausted by the end of each day, because any task I had to do required constant fighting and screaming at myself in my brain to do it.

I’ve described it as standing over my brain with an actual whip, forcing it to begin or complete tasks, but my brain STILL wouldn’t listen. I would spend all day screaming at myself and telling myself how much of a failure I was every time I wouldn’t come through.

The first time I took ritalin (just over half a year ago), it felt like a ceasefire in my brain. I still can’t get over it. For the first time ever, the fighting stopped.

Imagine how worthless you feel if you’ve spent your life screaming at yourself for not being able to complete basic functions like opening the program you use at the office to get your work done?

I’ve finally begun to forgive myself.

Yeah, one of the things I think isn’t discussed enough is the self-loathing that can crop up in relation to executive dysfunction, because when you can’t get anything started, you feel incredibly useless and- well, for me, I often feel like a waste of space when I can’t manage simple things like, say, getting up and grabbing food, or taking a shower, or any of the many things neurotypical society takes for granted as “easy”.

Executive dysfunction is one of the worst parts of ADHD for me, because I want these things done, I just can’t start them, and I feel like an absolute useless idiot for it.

For me, medication helped to some degree but I was still struggling to start things, but I was also having major issues with my depression the last time I was on meds, so possibly they’d help more if I got that under control too…

My worst experiences with executive dysfunction have been when I was at my most depressed and experiencing that kind of brain fog where you would do things if you remembered you’d decided to do them, but at the necessary time you simply don’t, or you uselessly do the same thing repeatedly because you don’t remember you already did it, sort of the brain equivalent of when you lock a door that’s already unlocked trying to unlock it.

And when the thing you do repeatedly is requesting a refill of your meds, because you know you’re not well and it’s very important that you take them, you get in trouble because they think you’re pill hoarding for a suicide attempt!

(Nothing awful happened, I was just only allowed to get a week’s worth at a time instead of a month’s, but that was inconvenient and made me feel kind of humiliated not to be trusted, or believed that I wasn’t suicidal, I was just temporarily really DUMB because depression depresses your level of mental function.)