ADHD is a momentum game

I subscribe to the idea that a long explanation is a sign that you just haven't thought about it long enough to make it shorter. Per Pascal, "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I had not the time to make it shorter." To simplify is to understand.

So for me, and my experience with ADHD, I think the experience can be boiled down to this one line: ADHD is a momentum game.

Then if there was one piece of advice, it'd be to find a way to keep momentum.

It's funny how the laws of nature describe so much of life. Guess it makes sense given life is nature. An object in motion stays in motion.

Animation: a Newton's cradle; the momentum, in blue, passes from the swinging ball through the still balls to the other side and back, without stopping

Why a momentum game?

Because imo consistency is the hardest thing with ADHD, and enough momentum makes consistency easier. Progress can still be made in the inevitable down times when there is momentum. And progress, the result of action + feedback, solves.

There's a lot that has been said about "ADHD is this," "here's how you can help it," yada yada, but I think the easiest way to think about it is just: momentum. Partly because we all know what momentum is, partly because it's the principle that applies regardless of how you get there, and partly because the word itself is energizing.

Saying ADHD is a focus, or attention, problem misses the bigger picture. Focus can happen with or without momentum. Focus without momentum is paralysis, and that sucks.

Direction matters

Momentum is a vector, so direction matters. If you're doing too many things in too many different directions, you have none. It's often harder to work this way, but if you find the right balance of things that work in similar directions, then it feels like magic.

Animation: five equal efforts pointing in many directions chain tip to tail and net almost nothing; the same five efforts in similar directions net a long blue arrow

This isn't a loss of focus. This is the perfect combination of focus and exploration. Exploration is novelty, and we get dopamine from that, but it's also important because we never really know exactly what we want, and so it helps us find out what we want. If we're doing three related things that are different applications of thing X across domains A, B, C, all the different learnings we have from A, B, and C would make X better. Maybe we like X in B best, or maybe X is actually best applied in D. At the end of the day X is individually better in each of A, B, C because it was the combined learnings of A + B + C.

Over time you find out what you're most interested in, whether it be X or an area of A, B, or C, and then you're always converging on something. That is, until you diverge again.

What momentum feels like

Literally being on top of the world
Unstoppable
Almost unapologetic. Unapologetically you.
Questioning why you'd ever procrastinate. It seems so silly. If only your past self knew what your current self feels right now!
No urge to do drugs or watch TV or movies, because the present real life (your life!) feels too good. You want to be feeling your life, not escaping from it.

What starts it

Taking action. Overcoming inertia.

The 'why' is the thing that can ultimately drives a human more than anything else (we literally live longer/shorter because of it), but you can't just figure out what that is by doing nothing. You have to do stuff to figure out your why. Action is a precursor to finding that why.¹ But once you find that why, it could be the ultimate driver to keep the momentum going. The cognitive dissonance between what you want or say and what you do shrinks.

There's a line in Man's Search for Meaning around the idea that we need a future to live: "The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed." Frankl tells of the camp's death rate rising beyond anything before it in the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year's, after so many had hoped to be home by Christmas.² He also quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."

One way to avoid procrastination is to give yourself too much to do, where the only option is then to wake up and do it. But just saying you have all these things to do won't work. You need commitment and accountability. The same way that the absence of constraints counterintuitively makes us less creative, reliability increases with commitment (yes, there's a ceiling). This post exists because a friend and I each owe the other $100 for any week we don't publish.

What breaks it

So what stops momentum?

Slow decision-making
Not doing the thing that you enjoy
Busy work, thinking the work around the work is the work
Having to click through ugly UIs
Not understanding what the most important thing is that you get done today
Unambitious goals
Notifications and scrolling on your phone
Keeping everything in your head, and open loops
Waiting for perfection, or for the right time
Planning more than doing
Spending energy on the same decisions every day
Convincing yourself you need to do a thing before doing the thing
Trying to organize everything in the past so that you can move forward
Being dishonest with yourself, and ignoring uncomfortable truths
Worrying about others' opinions
Lack of sleep, and letting yourself be hungover
Overthinking

Animation: a dot runs and jumps over notifications, overthinking, waiting for perfection, open loops and busy work, and speeds up each time it crosses taking action, a why, and commitment + accountability

It's funny how the first day after little or no sleep can actually accelerate momentum, because your prefrontal cortex doesn't have the energy and attention to overthink. More impulsive. But string a second day and you're below baseline.

And not being yourself. The only time wasted is time spent not being yourself. I think of shyness differently now: a withholding of your true self.

Your environment

Just don't let it stop momentum. Some of my best days are when I don't sit. I just start standing and before I know it a whole day went by. I think people with ADHD are particularly sensitive to their environments.³ Find one where you can stand up.

Back to Newton: an object in motion stays in motion unless an outside force acts on it. Your why sets the direction. Your environment is the outside force, either friction or a push. So put yourself in the environments that push.

This is why I like long distance running. Just keep running.

The thing at the end

The one thing that you must still have a strong understanding of is the thing at the end. It doesn't matter how you get there and you shouldn't plan how you get there. The thing at the end, you should be very clear about what that looks like. You should wake up and tell yourself every day that you are that thing at the end. You are that type of person and you do the types of things that that person would do.

If you do that and you keep that singular end focus in your head, you'll eventually get there.

Action is part of momentum, but momentum encompasses more and feels different. ↩
Not only in the camps. In a study that followed 6,000+ US adults for 14 years, people with a stronger sense of purpose were less likely to die, at every adult age (Hill & Turiano, 2014). ↩
A small study found kids with ADHD concentrated better after a 20-minute walk in a park than after the same walk through town (Faber Taylor & Kuo, 2009). ↩