How to Hack Your ADHD Brain for Long Term Fulfillment

ADHD often complicates life. If you’re someone like me, you no doubt organize your life with a gamut of GTD apps, calendars, clocks, timers, note taking, protocols, automation, preferences, and various other personal tools to keep life going smoothly. While many there are many articles detailing these methods, this will instead focus on the main point of frustration, your own mind.

Organization tools are no doubt essential for functioning with a chemically impaired working memory, but they’re limited in helping with one of the most important parts of life, long term fulfillment.

First, I will take you on a short journey through the issue, followed by my suggestions for managing and attaining control of your life in the long term.

Most of the problems I face with ADHD have to do with short term prioritization. Far too often, I make a plan in the morning, only for it to fall apart in the minutia of the day. I may ended up accomplishing a lot, but even when I do, I can still end up making little progress with my established goals, subverting my long term fulfillment.

The Long Term is made out of the short term, and we know all too well that if one can’t get the short term organized, they may not see their long term goals to fruition.

When succumbing to this, it often feels like the path to the destination is obscured. The map is incomplete, as all maps are. Most people seem to get there just fine, but what they don’t have that you do is the dense forest of your dopamine starved prefrontal cortex, seeking novelty on the side paths, losing the way back, without a natural way to keep track of time.

The question becomes: “How do I navigate this fog without sabotaging myself?”

The first thing you must do is know that you are not doomed to failure. You can do this, and you’re going to need your trusty tools to do it.

Let’s start by breaking down the issues you might experience.

The main reason why otherwise neurotypical people don’t have these problems is because of how our brains respectively handle the contexts of a situation.

The prefrontal cortex is a way station for all of the competing thoughts the rest of the brain is processing. When a thought makes its way to the prefrontal cortex, it’s fighting for a say in your consciousness. The prefrontal cortex has to weigh the strength of these thoughts and decide what is worth bringing to the forefront of one’s mind, or its “context”.

Let’s call “context” here the state of one’s conscious mind at any given moment, the whole of one’s working memory. Elements of that context might change over time, or the entire context might be swapped out for another if enough has changed externally but a context is effectively the cluster of thoughts that compose one’s working memory.

When the brain is dopamine deprived, like with ADHD, the prefrontal cortex more easily discards elements and even whole contexts. It is also more likely to keep new stuff from coming in, like the sensation of hunger while engaged in hyperfocus. Hyperfocus can actually be described here as a kind of anxiety where one is afraid of losing the context they are currently in. In the end, it takes more effort to manage our working memory dealing with ADHD than otherwise.

Otherwise neurotypical people can more easily hold on to a context throughout the day. The plans they decided in the morning are still available to recall late in the afternoon, and even subsequent days. Those with ADHD, on the other hand, are more prone being derailed by new events.

Overall, having ADHD often creates a potent combination of self paranoia and doubt. It’s hard to feel like you’re really in control when the channel keeps changing on its own.

All of this leads to a fear of losing one’s autonomy to external factors. Everything feels like it can potentially distract you from what you want. I’ve often felt compelled to shut out everything just to maintain my focus.

This, however, can be very self defeating.

Once you’ve switched from making a plan, do doing the plan, your mind has switched contexts and now the plan can feel like an external distraction to resist or ignore.

Every intrusive thought that runs through one’s mind has their own desires, but the fact that they’re even up to bat is a failing of our brain chemistry.

This must be overcome by externalizing the act of managing our thoughts to make any progress.

When you’re planning and organizing, you’re playing the part of a manager, composing the objectives that will take the form of tasks to give to their direct reports.

When you’re getting your tasks done, you’re abiding by the strategy set out by manager you. Remind yourself here that by completing the tasks as you have set out, you are, in fact, self determining but in the long term instead of merely the short term.

Players don’t win games, teams do and you are a team unto yourself.

In the same way direct reports are accountable to their manager, the you who acts out your plans is accountable to the you who is making those plans. You are accountable to yourself as different contexts of yourself.

It’s important to point out that, otherwise neurotypical people have no issue recognizing self determination in its long term form because they have enough working memory to hold a series of events into a larger context. However, when your working memory is impaired, like it is with ADHD, you are more likely see different contexts as discrete and disconnected events.

This is why your tools are essential. With ADHD, you must externalize the process of connecting actions, events, and contexts by using your tools.

When you make a plan and then carry it out, you’re accomplishing an amazing feat. You’re playing a series of roles in different moments of time, giving respect to each, and getting your goals accomplished. You are essentially transcending the confines imposed by your brain chemistry.

Seriously, this is no different from having to do math on scratch paper. We don’t expect the brain to hold all of the information necessary for long division, let alone complex differential equations. Instead, we accept that the process is complicated enough to require externalization.

Task prioritizing with ADHD is no different.

Interruptions are a part of life, and with ADHD, they are much more damaging than annoying.

We’ve all experienced this. You’re engrossed with an activity and then you get a phone call. It’s an important call, and you get the matter taken care of. After you hang up, you find that you either don’t remember what you were doing before or you can’t figure out where to go next.

This happens because the interruption completely overwrote the previous context with its own and now you’re not sure where to go immediately.

From there you find yourself having to do some self forensics to figure out what it was you were doing in the first place like Guy Pearce in Chris Nolan’s Memento.

Just like in Memento, make good note keeping a part of every process. I like to think of them as breadcrumbs to find my way back. Once you have a habit of effective note keeping, you will have an easier time retracing your steps

After I decide what I’m going to do, I make two lists that are going to be side by side.

Throughout the day, I fill in the log and I draw lines from the plan to the corresponding activity. If a series of events create large gaps between the lines, then it means I might be letting too much interrupt my day.

In Summary

From here, you can begin to really keep record of how well you’re doing which should help you not only accomplish your goals, but see your progress in the larger view. This is the ultimate tool here. All of your smaller tools help to give you the information you need to make this wide view map of your life as it progresses. From here, you can see what to anticipate in the long term, how to adapt, and know that you’re going to make it

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