Adult Add | Rid Yourself Of The Mind Killer

How many times have you said to yourself, or had someone else tell you that you "should" do something. If you have ADD, it's probably often. We don’t know about you, but we hate the word “should.” It’s terrible, and it makes people with attention deficit frustrated and confused. The only person who “should” ever be telling you what you should or shouldn’t be doing is you.

Why is it that you "should" be doing something that your ADD decided you shouldn't?

When your attention deficit kicks in and says you’re bored, you get frustrated really easily, right? And this happens, especially when you’re telling yourself you should do something that’s boring. Then, you get even more frustrated.

When you’re frustrated, unless you’ve gotten good at reframing frustration (which is a whole other topic), boredom slows motivation to a crawl, or even sometimes puts it in reverse. These are major stumbling blocks that people with ADD face as a result of boredom. When you’re unmotivated, when you’re frustrated, when you’re jumping around from thing to thing, while you’re trying to force yourself to do that thing that’s driving you absolutely insane, how do you feel about yourself?

You feel miserable, don’t you?

We don’t know about you, but we’ve had plenty of times where we were jumping back and forth because we were bored, not necessarily aware of that we were exhibiting that ADD behavior. When this happens to you, you may say to yourself, “There’s something really wrong with me, because everybody else seems to be getting stuff done, and I’m not getting anything done.”

But you’re bored. That’s it.

So, how can you just crush boredom?

You need to sidestep it. Some people would say, “You’re just using your ADD to get out of it.” Yes, you’re absolutely trying to get out of doing things that make you bored. We all do it, whether we have ADD or not. Some people don’t want to admit it.

If you’re going to try to sidestep boredom, we’re not saying to shirk here. We're not saying to become a slacker. I’m not saying do nothing instead. No. You probably need to the boring things done worse than anything else in your life right now, because your ADD has you procrastinating on them in most cases.

We want to avoid that, no matter what, for a couple of different reasons. Number one is that when you have attention deficit, you’re not necessarily good at doing repetitive tasks or tasks that you deem to be boring. It’s not a strength, so as always, you have a choice. You can go with your strengths, or you can work against them. At the moment, you keep forcing yourself; you’re working against them.

It’s okay not to want to do the boring stuff.

The first thing is to take a look at some of the boring things that you’re doing on a daily basis. Focus your ADD brain on what's going on right now. How many boring things are you doing in your life? How many fun things are you doing in a day?

The vast majority of your day should be spent doing things that really excite you. Hire people that don't have this ADD issue, outsource tasks, and barter with people—depending on the situation—to do the things that bore you.

It can’t actually happen until number one, you’ve taken a look at what you’re doing, and number two, you focus your ADD and write these things that you're doing down. Do that for a week. Are you looking at email, doing the laundry, scrubbing the floors, feeding the dogs, working in sales and marketing, or writing a book? What are all the tasks that you are doing?

Next, you’ve got to categorize. You’ve got to know how much of your time is being spent doing different kinds of activities. If you’re ADD frustrated and you’re spinning right now, or you’re feeling stuck, those are all indicators that you’re bored.

We'll talk more about this in our next article to help you overcome that easily reached attention deficit tendency for boredom.