Writing When You Have ADHD, Part II
The Story of My Life
Welcome back to Shelf Life, where we are normalizing that everybody has ADHD.
Question: Do you have ADHD? Or is this just life in the death throes of a capitalist hellhole? Answer: It doesn’t matter! If you have difficulty with focus, executive function, task organization, motivation, self-direction, and procrastinating, then writing is hard. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of ADHD or the impending apocalypse.
I mean, it kind of matters. If it’s the apocalypse, let’s all meet up and barricade ourselves in the neighborhood Costco. Bring your typewriter. We’ll make a writing group of it.
Last Thursday, I shared three tips on how to start writing and keep writing, even when you have ADHD, even when that ADHD is unmedicated and out of control. There are a lot of barriers to getting medication, foremost among them living through the death throes of a capitalist hellhole. Today, I have two more tips that really get to the heart of living with ADHD. While Thursday’s tips would work well for anyone, today’s focus on two aspects of ADHD that neurotypicals don’t tend to experience:
Dopamine deprivation
Hyperfixation/hyperfocus
First, people with ADHD are starved for dopamine. We have have less of it circulating in our brains, and have to go trawling for it whereas our neurotypical peers with normal dopamine levels can kick back and write away. Second, ADHD brings with it the gift of hyperfocus, which we can use to our advantage if we know how and when.
So today’s Shelf Life is especially for the neurospicy among us. I think everyone should read it—I think everyone should always ready every Shelf Life—but the tips herein may not work for the neuro-normies in the audience.
Devise a Dopamine Machine
My therapist calls video games dopamine machines. You put a coin in them—the coin is your attention—and they dispense dopamine. I asked my therapist why I can play a video game for six hours straight, forgetting to eat, drink, or even blink sometimes, but it feels like I can’t focus on the things I want to do—for instance, writing—if my life depends on it. The dopamine machine was her explanation of this.
Buckle up, this is about to get scientific.
Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and rewards. When you do something that feels good, your brain releases dopamine. Some things that feel good and release dopamine include:
Eating a yummy donut.
Finishing a quest in a video game.
Snuggling a beloved pet.
Taking a walk on a pleasant day.
When you receive dopamine, you want to do the thing more. Finishing up exercise releases dopamine, which motivates people to exercise so they can finish and get more dopamine. (This is what a “runner’s high” is.)
Video games feel almost predatory in the way they are designed to stimulate dopamine release in the brain and keep players focused on them and coming back for more. Video game addiction is real. It’s a dopamine addiction. Video games do this by overlapping tasks and quests so that before you finish one, another one has begun. You say to yourself: “I’m just going to finish this objective up to clear my quest log and then I’m done for the day.” But when you finish your objective and get your experience points and your gold coins and your dopamine hit, the quest log isn’t clear—something new is now underway. So you finish that one and get another rush of dopamine, and that propels you into yet another objective.
Developers design games this way deliberately to keep players engaged and invested in their game, purchasing DLC, purchasing downloadable add-ons like skins, and purchasing sequels and spinoffs. This is why I suggest you gamify your writing habit—to turn it into a dopamine machine for you that keeps you coming back to the keyboard.
How you do that is the question. Do you still have that trusty friend, family member, or writing coach handy? Your accountabilibuddy from earlier? They’re going to play a role in this.
Okay you know how I said fake, self-imposed deadlines don’t work for me because I know the deadline is fake and I will just ignore it? That’s also what happens when I try to implement any kind of reward system. If I’m like “Hey I can have a cookie every time I finish a chapter,” that will not work for me. Because I know I can just eat all of the cookies and not write anything and no one can stop me.
False: My live-in partner can stop me.
Come up with your reward structure, whatever it is that will get the dopamine flowing for you, and ask your accountabilibuddy to administer it. Give them the cookies and strict instructions to only give you a cookie if you demonstrate that you have written a chapter. Or whatever your reward system is.
Divide your writing into achievable chunks (one scene, one chapter, 500 words, whatever).
Receive reward for each completed chunk.
Get dopamine.
Before long, your brain will start to associate the completion of the writing chunk itself as the rewarding behavior and writing becomes a dopamine machine.
Harness Your Hyperfocus
Finally, let’s talk about the ADHD-haver’s superpower: Hyperfocus. According to Royce Flippin in “Hyperfocus: The ADHD Phenomenon of Hyper Fixation,” hyperfocus is “an intense fixation on an interest or activity for an extended period of time.” My experience of hyperfocus as a person with ADHD is that this is not something you can consciously direct. Your brain gets interested in something and that’s it. You’re off to the races. You have no say.
Like if you get hyperfixated on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies—sorry, but until you’ve found and watched all of them you won’t be able to think about anything else. A week later someone will find you watching old bodybuilding competitions on YouTube because Arnold is in them. A week after that you don’t remember who Arnold Schwarzenegger is because you’re thinking about something else now.
In my experience, a new idea comes with a burst of hyperfocus on that idea. If I get a new idea, it shoves all the old ideas to the side. I cannot keep working on whatever I was working on. Only the new idea will do. I could look at this as a glass-half-empty situation but why not flip it and see the glass as half full?
When I luck into hyperfocus on an idea or writing project, I don’t waste it. I could lie in bed unable to sleep because my brain won’t stop working on it, or I could get up and write it. I could try to ignore it in favor of whatever it was I was working on before—or I could let my brain have its preference and just write the new thing. The amount of progress I can make on a project while I’m hyperfocused on it is astounding. I can knock out a short story or a couple of serviceable chapters in a day. When the focus fades, I can get back to my regularly scheduled writing. The trick is to capture the energy of the hyperfocus while you have it and make the most of it.
If coming up with new ideas is a precursor to hyperfocus for you, like it is for me, then you can start to control this magical ability by putting yourself into ideation mode when you’re in a writing rut. Get generating ideas until one seizes you and then enjoy the hyperfixation on that cool new idea that follows. You’re welcome.
Here, at the end of this two parter, I want to add that I don’t think there’s anyone out there who can’t tell a story. I think everyone has a story to tell and everyone has a way to tell that story. Everyone has to find the way that’s going to work for them. If you have ADHD, it might be harder in some ways to tell your story than it is for someone who doesn’t have ADHD. But if you want to do it, you can.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
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