The end of "Today will be different"

Going to the depths of our ADHD mind to effectively trick procrastination

“Today will be different.”

Instead of creating excessive expectations in the start of every single day, expecting to accomplish in one day everything you've been postponing and handling erratically over weeks or even months, it's necessary to build a strategy to put yourself into action in the right direction, without focusing on the same expectation trap that most of us ADHDers have been falling into all our lives.

This particular way of doing things, this mindset, has followed me forever, and I've adopted it without much interpretation on my part.

It is a process that has provided me with much more frustration than success. Building expectations is delicate for someone with ADHD because we tend to set our goals too high, either to compensate for perceived periods of low productivity, or because we know we have the potential to achieve significant outcomes. But it's a trap.

It's a trap because it mostly leads to deep frustration.

When we put pressure on ourselves, we tend to freeze and engage in avoidance behaviors, which take us further away from our goals. Operational frustrations accumulated over the years lead to a behavioral pattern where we anticipate frustration before it even occurs because it has become too frequent to escape from. It has become rational to expect frustration because it effectively almost always happens.

The curious and tragic thing is that this behavior has both rational and irrational backgrounds. The rational part is that we deal with our own statistics, but the irrational part is that we never consciously take it for granted. We clearly tell ourselves that today we will make things different and this is the day we will finally rise up. We sometimes even tell our friends, partners, or family, but primarily, we are telling it to ourselves, while our unconscious side follows the logic of our perceived performance.

The complication arises from the fact that our conscience operates illogically, but our subconscious side follows raw logic. It may seem that their respective essences, conscience and unconscious, are interchanged, and it’s not just an impression: our conscience, our internal moral compass, our sense of right and wrong, needs to operate in a logical pattern, while lesser coherent elements are usually associated with our unconscious mind.

So now we can guide ourselves towards a plan.

Changing the components of our conscience, by definition, is less demanding than the subconscious. So let's focus our efforts here. Let's turn the controllable side of our minds to go through more rational assumptions because it will provide a wider range of conscious handling. Irrationality, by design, is related to instincts and our nature and so are much less flexible to deal with.

The main task is breaking the expectation cycle. Building expectations naturally turn into "building high expectations," which demands high levels of effort and energy that we can hardly achieve when operating in our normal state. It's a likely road to failure most of the time.

So we can gradually substitute "expectations" for "movement." Because “expectations” cover several elements of our lives that also include the “perception we have about ourselves.” We don't expect simply to get all our projects done; we expect to be a better person, more intelligent, wiser, richer, fulfilled, etc.

"Movement," instead, are much more linked to the tasks, without a big emotional attachment. It's easy to see that we are much more than the tasks and projects we work on, so failing at a given task, or in several of them, will not expand into the consideration that we are a failure. We failed only in the tasks, which do not have to do with our capacity to do things.

To set up a “movement” instead of “expectations” is a way to place the compromises we have in our lives in separate compartments and offer a rational treatment to them instead of mixing everything up with emotions. With this, we get the opportunity to place frustration into its respective box, leaving the other box less affected by the generated feelings and so better suited to have its own process, independent from possible frustration.

Of course, if we keep continuously failing in every single box of tasks, it will risk turning into a systemic behavior of pessimism again. But working more independently from the pressure we put on ourselves leaves an open door to occasional successes, and it's very unlikely that we would not achieve at least partial success in a single task or two of our lives.

And the occasional successes, even if taken partially, are an accomplishment that has the power to project themselves into our minds, both into our conscious and unconscious.

Into our conscience, by leaving aside “expectations” and adopting "movement" since it rationally gives good results, no matter the dimension of these results. Good results are enough because it's proven that even limited good accomplishments are much better than the previous mindset of no accomplishment at all (masked of full accomplishments at all.)

But the magic is that we have an effect that goes deep into our subconscious mind. This sector of our brain, which exerts a big command on our choices and actions, needs time to be trained, as if it needed to be widely proven it's wrong so to open a window of transformation. But since it has previously been involved with the logic of our bad performance, it will be no big deal to elevate it into the new state of successful records here and there. Our unconscious will eventually understand that the new logic is the likelihood that we will get some accomplishments.

Every time we start a day, the conscious side of our brain will be set on a mindset like "today I'll be on the move." Movements are much more flexible than expectations and much more achievable because there's no such thing as a low level of expectations, especially about ourselves. As time goes by, some accomplishments will come, and it will train the unconscious side of our brain to anticipate success instead of failure.

We consciously change the drive (expectations to movement) so as to achieve results and generate the unconscious change of anticipating success instead of failure. Which will boost the conscious drive towards movement because the unconscious has the ultimate command over our conscious choices.

Nothing is easy, particularly in the beginning. Changing a behavior repeated and developed over decades will always be a significant challenge, but it's entirely possible. It's important to start with simpler tasks, something like "brushing teeth in the morning," "making up your bed after waking up," "reading a book for 10 minutes a day," "answering one old email every day." Keep it simple.

The key is to keep it simple, even ordinary, at the beginning. We need ANY accomplishment because it will provide the dopamine we so desperately need and which we ADHDers have so much difficulty managing.

I believe in the multiplying power of simple accomplishments to train our brain into believing we are geared towards accomplishment instead of failure.

Instead of “TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT” ↦↦ “TODAY I'LL BE ON THE MOVE.”

Instead of “TODAY I'LL GET FRUSTRATED AGAIN LIKE EVERY OTHER DAY BECAUSE I DON'T ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING” ↦↦ “TODAY I'LL ACCOMPLISH SOME OF THE THINGS I HAVE TO DO BECAUSE EVERY DAY I ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING”