087 - Overcoming Brain Paralysis

Do you ever get into those catatonic states where your brain just enters a void? Total brain fart? This episode might help!

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you ever sit down to do a thing and you got some great intentions and you're all motivated and your brain just farts? It just goes blank and you're like, I got ADHD. I'm supposed to, my brain is supposed to go nonstop. What's happening? Kids ever get that? Like the brain void, the brain paralysis? Today let's ramble on and on and on about that. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of Descending to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of the struggle. Let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Ah, welcome to the show. It's a show. What everybody, we're in New York City this week. Yeah, welcome to the show. I love a good ramble. Let's have a good, solid ramble today about this brain farting. And I've got some interesting insights uh that came up to me this week, came up to me, that arrived, that came in the mail. It was wonderful. I've got some cool insights I wanted to share. The reason why I wanted to talk about this is because I was sitting on my couch and I had my bullet journal open. It was the end of the day. It was maybe around like 7:30, 8 p.m. And I was sitting down to figure something out. And I'm not 100% sure if it was meal planning or if I was thinking about what I was gonna put in the forum or or it just for the sake of the podcast, let's just say that I was meal planning for the week. And so I'm sitting there, and as I'm as I'm sitting there, I caught myself being totally catatonic. I'm staring at my bullet journal and I'm just blank. There's nothing coming to me. It's like playing a video game, you know, and everything is running and gunning, and then all of a sudden somebody just pauses it and it just stops. That's how it felt. To someone looking at me, it probably they would have seen a person on a couch who looked like he was staring through his bullet journal. Totally checked out. My brain shuts down when I'm tired. And the easy answer here would be like, okay, well, you know, that's your body's way of saying it's time to rest. So just make some tea and you know, put on your favorite television show. Just let your mind recuperate. And that's great advice. Um, but what if I'm trying to plan my meals for the week and 7 30 p.m. is the time that I have to do that? What if I need to do the thing, you know, even though? You know? Like, I mean, even though, right? Even though all that, you know, even though. What if? My view on that is that with this kind of work, I need specific questions. And when there's too much thought required, too many dots that I have to connect, I stall. I go into paralysis of the brain, ghost town up there, total fart scaroonies. I think of it like this. Like if I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna write, okay, what's one plus one? Well, it's two. Okay, great. I don't even need a calculator, guys. I know my math tapes. Done. Okay, well, what's three plus five? Eight. All right, well, what's four plus four? Holy shit, that's also eight. Wow, math is neat. But what if I sat down and I said, what are some math problems I can solve? Well, now I have a dot or two that I have to connect. I was like, are we gonna do multiplication here? What are we working on? Division, addition, subtraction? Now I've got choices that I have to make, and then things start to become more complicated for me, especially when I'm tired. And now think about this. What if I sat down with my bullet journal and my intentions, and the intention was, I'm doing math. That doesn't do anything for me to move me forward, but yet I've declared it, right? I've I've said that's what I'm doing. I know how to do math. You know, I know math is what I want to do and I can do it, but I'm not doing it. There's multiple questions around this that with a tired brain, especially a tired brain, it creates this catatonic state for me. It's like I'm a robot that's shut down. Like I don't even know that there's questions that I need to ask. I'm just, I'm awaiting my programming. I feel like this is getting pretty nitpicky. Um, and it's a bummer because the thought in my head about this is really like, you know, really, you just can't just do math problems. It doesn't matter what math problems, just do some fucking math problems. Pick some. Just start. I this can make a person feel really stupid. Like, really, I need a specific question to get started. But this is a profound insight to me. And it's one of the biggest things, like uh in in my philosophy about coaching is that this aspect, when something that's it's pretty trivial, conceptually, it's very trivial, but when it sinks in, because it comes from within you, it's about you, it's for you, it's not given to you. And that's what I believe that that's what makes change a lot more effective for us. I talk about lab routing myself, you know, I try everything, I experiment with things, and that's when I'm taking somebody else's insights and I'm taking a leap of faith. I'll read a thing and I'll go, hey, that sounds like it might work. I'm gonna give that a try. And so I'll try it for a set amount of time and I understand my perfectionistic thinking enough to know that, you know, if I suck at it or it's not perfect, I shouldn't write it off completely yet. Maybe a couple weeks, give it a month, give it a go, we'll see. In that time, maybe I have insights, and then that tells me something. They might not even be directly related to the thing I'm working on. You know, maybe I'm practicing journaling my feelings every morning at 6 a.m. And then suddenly I have an insight that's like, holy shit, I'm actually really awake in the morning. I wonder what other kinds of productive things I could be doing in this time in this morning. It's an insight, but it's not directly related to the journaling. Or there was an insight that I discovered, uh I mentioned it the other time, uh last week, uh recently. I don't know exactly when. But my body calms down after 30 to 40 minutes of walking. That's a really interesting insight and something that I can do and use moving forward for myself. Somebody telling me, hey man, you stressed out, you should go for a walk. That's like, okay, yeah, I get it. So that sounds good. But it's just words. This could be said by a million people, a million different cliches about the same thing. But once when it comes from within us, that's when it resonates. It sinks in, it's like it clicks. Or if I see no change, nothing's different, then uh that that also tells me something. Maybe I file that under garbage for hey, this doesn't work for me. Maybe it works for you, doesn't work for me. I don't know. It's not for me, maybe it's for you, it's not for me. My old thinking about that is, well, you just didn't give it, well, you didn't try hard enough. You didn't give it a good enough try. You didn't do it right, you didn't commit to it. You didn't want it bad enough. You know, I don't see any blood. Where's the sweat and tears? Did you even try? Maybe not. I mean, fine, like that way sounds like it's a big, huge pain in the ass. I have to bleed to succeed. I'm gonna say no thanks on that. I'm gonna take a pass. I like my blood on the inside of my body, pumping and thumping, doing what blood is supposed to be doing, which I'm not 100% sure. I'm not I'm not actually sure. I just know that if you lose a lot of it, you die. What does blood actually do? Have you guys ever thought of that? Oh my god, here we go. Oh here. Yeah, I know you're thinking. Oh god, we're gonna do the whole thing again. This getting old. You know, guys, I'm just trying to I I know, I get it. Okay, all right, hold please. Okay, wow, this is really interesting. Okay, so what what does blood do? It's uh transportation of oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. That makes sense. I kind of figured that. Transportation of digested food from the small intestine to the tissues and cells around the body. What? It takes food bits? It carries cells and antibodies that fight infection. I think I knew that one. Supplying the waste products to the kidneys and liver, which filter and clean the blood. What? It basically grabs all the crap and takes it into the kidneys for a shower? What? That's all inside of our body. That's in our blood. It does all that. How does it even know? How does it even know where to take this stuff? Like maybe my blood takes all the crap stuff to my brain, and my brain is like, whoa, wait, what?

unknown 8:11

What?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Why are you bringing that here? That crap goes to the kidneys. Get it out of here. How does it know? Gosh, we are remarkable creatures. Good bird walk. Learned a little bit there. So I got some insights about my own process while typing up this uh podcast episode, and that is this, and it relates to brain fartery. I need supremely specific questions, and in this case, it's will relate it to meal planning for the week. And in general, if I'm planning my day or my week in advance, I need supremely specific questions in order to get that work done without zoning out, without going brain paralyzed and get a big old brain fart. So rather than sitting down with my bullet journal with the intentions, I'm meal planning, I would have my bullet journal open to a page that has pre-written questions already laid out for me so that I don't have to do the work to think about what those questions are. They're predetermined questions. And I don't know about you guys, but even knowing the questions to ask, that can be a task. Like, where do I start with my meal planning? What do I, what, what am I supposed to do? How do I start? It's an ADHD nightmare. And it's no wonder we order out. It's no wonder we just buy 10 of the exact same frozen pizza. So, you know, that they're there. I don't say that because I've done that and that my kids have banned pizza. That's not what I'm saying. My kids have not sat me down and told me not to buy pizza anymore. That's not a thing they did. They did not give me a pizza intervention. Okay, they did. Okay. Full disclosure: my kids did a pizza intervention. They're like, Dad, we need to talk. We love you, we care about you, but this has gone on too far. You've killed our enjoyment of pizza, where children were supposed to beg you for pizza and now we fucking hate it. So stop it. I'm like, okay, man, that's cool. All right. But that's how it works with my brain. You know, when something works, it automatically becomes the default. If this works, this is what we do all day, every day. This is everything now. And then anything that adds to that creates tension, and that's a problem. For me, for this exercise, I have four questions that are in my bullet journal on the page called meal planning. And if you know how awesome the bullet journals are, I don't ever have to flip around to find out where that meal planning page is. I look in the index, which is in the front of the bullet journal, and a quick scan of the page, find the word meal planning, bing bang bong, page 150, there I go. Instant finding of the thing, ADHD hacktasticness. Oh, the bullet journal. Anyway, the questions are. First one is, uh, what three meals am I having this week? You know, because I'm figuring leftovers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So on the meal planning page is a list of meals that I can make. I have like 10 of them on there. So for this week, I have red lentil soup, I have chicken pot pie, and I have uh spaghetti sausages and salad. And yes, I know you're wondering, I do make a badass homemade chicken pot pie. My kids love it. And it's not pizza, which I couldn't make if I wanted to. Uh, number two is when will I grocery shop for these items? And that requires me to just take a minute and figure out when I'm gonna go to the store. In this case, it'll be Monday morning. Number three is when will I cook these dinners and meals? In this case, the red lentil soup is already made, but I'll get the ingredients to make another batch because I love it, and maybe that's gonna be the next thing that gets banned. Uh I'll make the chicken pot pie on Tuesday morning so the kids will have it waiting for them when they get home from school on Tuesday, and then spaghetti and meatballs will make them Wednesday morning. Boom. And because I've asked the specific question, my brain answers and does the work even though I'm tired. And then finally, it's like, what's one new meal that I want to try to make that my kids might like? And that one I didn't get around to. That's no biggie. It's more of a fun one if I'm up for it, and it's on the list, it'll be there for me next week. The alternative to doing this, um, and uh this basically is turning into a meal planning and grocery store episode or something. But the alternative to this is realizing, oh, oh my god, I have I have I have time to go to the grocery store. I should just go to the grocery store right now, and boom, I'm off to the grocery store. I'll quick scramble together a haphazard list and I'll I'll end up buying something that I already have five of, but in the grocery store, I was like, oh, do I have that? Oh, I should just get it just to be safe. Or another alternative would be that I'm driving and I see the grocery store and I think, oh, I'll go right now. No list, no nothing, just overspending on random impulsive ideas, and oh, that's a fruit I'm never gonna eat. And oh, here's some vegetables that'll go bad, and here's the thing I won't cook because I'm only buying half the ingredients needed. Because of this particular structure, and because I'm asking these specific questions, I'm eliminating the brain fart, and now I have a pre-planned time to think about the meals, a pre-planned time to go to the grocery shopping, and a predetermined list to stay focused on at the store. As it comes out of my mouth, this feels like an excessive amount of structure. Conceptually, when and when I think about that, yeah, it actually does. It totally seems excessive. It's just meal planning and grocery shopping. But the experience of it saves me a ton of time, a ton of stress because I'm not waiting for it to become urgent. It frees up my brain because it's pre-scheduled. I don't ever have to wonder when it's happening. I can forget about it, and that equals more free time. This is the bizarre black magic of life with more structure, comes more free time. It's fucking I wish that wasn't the way it was. It's just one of those bizarro things. And in an ADHD mind, it is such a difficult thing to grasp. All right, guys. I hope this has been helpful. Hey, challenge, you want a challenge? Let's do a challenge this week. When you find yourself brain tired, brain farting, see if you can play around with asking yourself a specific question, get really specific and see if your brain provides you uh with an answer. You know, give it a go, see what happens. As always, you guys are more than welcome to reach out via the adhdbigbrother.com contact page. I love hearing from you guys. I answer every email. Super fun connecting with you guys, always making new friends. It's lovely, it's wonderful. And if you guys are getting value out of the podcast, would you be so kind as to rate it on Spotify, review it on iTunes, share it on your socias, share it on your social media? That would mean the world to me. And with that, I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.