Learn and Work Smarter

128. ADHD and the Hidden Shame of Falling Off Track – And How to Start Again

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 128

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People with ADHD know this situation all too well: they start a project with enthusiasm, then lose motivation and stop halfway through, and then struggle to ever restart because of the shame and embarrassment they feel about abandoning their work. 


Stopping projects halfway through is hard enough. But then not knowing how to get back on track and drowning in shame is a whole other experience.


That’s what we’re covering in this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. We talk about why people with ADHD start strong but fade fast, and what to do about it.


What You'll Learn:

  • Why people with ADHD tend to start new projects with high motivation
  • The role of dopamine in task initiation and task completion
  • How to hack your dopamine to keep going when you want to quit
  • The surprising connection between ADHD and shame
  • The one question you need to ask yourself when you fall off the bandwagon
  • A whole boatload of strategies to help you restart what you abandoned – without shame


🔗 Resources Mentioned:


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Hello, and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie Azevedo. I'm your host. This is episode 128, and today we're talking about something that doesn't like to be talked about. We're talking about something that often gets pushed to the bottom and ignored and reframed as other things. But today is the day that I am dragging that out of the shadows and putting it center stage and calling it what it is, and it's shame. Specifically, shame that people with ADHD feel more intensely than neurotypical people around abandoning projects. Now, we have all started projects, whether for school or work or personal life, and we started with good intentions and a lot of enthusiasm and really high hopes. And then for some reason or another, we either slowly fizzle out or we come to a hard stop. Now, some people can rebound. They can pick back up where they left off, it is no big deal, and they get back in the saddle. But then for other people, specifically people with ADHD, that restarting step can feel nearly impossible. It's not impossible, but it feels nearly impossible. And one of the reasons it can feel nearly impossible is because of shame. Now, I already have an episode called How to Finish What You Start. That is episode 72. I'll leave all the links in the description box and in the show notes. But in that episode, I clearly state that it is okay to stop things. Like, we don't have to finish every single thing we start. And the first step, though, is always to figure out, wait, like, do I even want to finish this thing in the first place? And then if you do, I share some practical strategies for re-engaging with the task and finishing the things that you want to finish. However, as I said, this episode today is very centered on ADHD because that is different. So the strategies I mentioned in that episode, absolutely, 100%, those will help everybody. But today is ADHD-specific. People with ADHD don't just abandon the task, they often start to abandon any evidence of the task even existing in the first place. So you know, ignoring emails entirely, empty notebooks with no notes, portals that they haven't even opened or checked in weeks, unfinished drafts of everything. It is just too much sometimes for somebody with ADHD to face the evidence of having dropped out of the game. And that's the shame right there. someone with ADHD who regularly falls into this pattern of starting and stopping and starting and stopping often experiences a loss of self-trust. Because after enough unfinished things, people stop trusting themselves, and they stop trusting their own initial excitement and their own abilities and their own goals. And that is not at all what we want. So today we're gonna talk about the ADHD brand of shame that comes with stopping tasks. We're gonna talk about how to overcome that emotional piece, or try to, emotions are tough. And then of course, we're gonna end with some strategies to help you finish the work that you know you are capable of. If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe. If you're listening in a podcast app, follow the show. Follow me on Instagram @schoolhabits so we can stay connected between Thursday episodes. And with that, let's begin. So I wanna start this portion of the episode with a story that actually is the inspiration behind today's conversation. Um, the story just happened last week. So I have a master's degree in special education. I have been an educator for over 20 years, and for the past 10 years, I've had a private executive function coaching practice, like a brick-and-mortar place where I work with students and professionals, and the majority of folks that I work with have ADHD. And I'm sharing that to say that of the 3,000, over 3,000 students that I have worked with over the past 20 years, I'd say a good, like, 70 to 80% of them have ADHD. So although I am sharing one story today, because it actually just happened last week, this story represents so many other stories from my case files that I could share with you as well. Anyways, I have a student inside my program, SchoolHabits University. That study skills program is for students in middle school through adult education, and this woman is an adult going back to nursing school after having taken some time off from school 'cause she was doing other things, and she has ADHD. And she told me she was very eager to enroll in the program. She was very excited. She was very motivated. We actually spoke on the phone. Usually, enrollment kinda happens automatically, like online, but we spoke on the phone. She might be listening to this podcast episode, and if you are, do not worry, I am not gonna use any identifying information. I never do But she did tell me up front that she has ADHD, 'cause she was like, "Is the program gonna work? I have ADHD." Yes, of course it does. I built it for people with ADHD. Please know that. Anyways, she has a very high level of self-awareness around that, saying, like, "I don't have these skills. I know this is what I need. I have a lot going on. I'm working." She's also a mom, "and I'm going back to school in a rigorous nursing program." So, that is why she enrolled. All right, so she told me all that up front. So that level of self-awareness is key. And then maybe about a month later, which was actually last week, she reached out to say, "Hey, I'm struggling a bit. I was gung ho. I was getting through a ton of lessons in a day, like a whole module in a week. I was loving it, I was using it, it was amazing, and then I stopped." And that's when she reached out, which by the way, is amazing because so many people stop on their way to their goals. They never self-assess. They never ask themselves why, and then they never reach the goal. Again, the shame. But this student was like, "Wait, I need some help," and she reached out, and that's what I'm here for. And she shared that she's been having trouble getting back in the saddle. She knows she needs the skills, she knows she needs the program, and she knows what she needs to do, but she's just overwhelmed with, like, how to even get back in it. And what she really leaned into was this idea of shame. This is, like, her language. She's like, "I do this. I always do this. I start, and then I stop, and then I feel bad about myself, and it hurts my confidence, and then just I give up on the whole thing." And so we did have a good conversation. I shared some strategies with her that were unique to her, you know, particular situation. But today, I'm gonna generalize some of those strategies and share them with you all listening. But I want to share that story not only because it's on the tip of my mind, because it literally just happened last week, but it is a good way to open the show so that you understand that this is real. This ADHD task abandonment and shame spiral is real. It hits the smartest of people. This woman is a very bright adult student. But it also hits middle schoolers who don't even know what the word shame means, and it hits everyone in between. And I'm hoping that today, even one person listening is like, "Wait, that's me, and I'll try this," and then I've served my purpose. So let me restate something actually from the start of that story, which was that the student was passionate, motivated, and really I don't know how else to say, like, gung ho, but, like, gung ho to start in the program. And she maintained that motivation for about a month. And that's an important point here because people with ADHD often thrive with new initiatives, especially when those are preferred tasks. I'm not saying a student with ADHD is going to be passionate, gung ho, and motivated to write an essay about a novel written in the 17th century, but if it's a project that they care about or they know that it's relevant and they can see that relevance, then they usually have no trouble starting. And the reason for that is novelty. Novelty meaning newness. Novel experiences trigger a big old dopamine release. People with ADHD have atypical dopamine regulation, often leaving the ADHD brain with very low dopamine along dysregulated dopamine channels. And so when dopamine is provided via an external stimulus like something new and exciting, those dopamine levels rise, and that increases motivation and engagement, and that's when all is good. The task is started, like you're feeling great, you're feeling like you've got this. But dopamine triggered by novelty is a very different experience from the amount of dopamine that's needed to sustain that work. The dopamine provided by novelty is only temporary. The beginning phase is stimulating, but the maintenance phase, the actual doing the work every single day phase, that is what we would call cognitively expensive. And in order to keep that excitement up, an ADHD brain is gonna need more and more dopamine. And at some point you kinda just like run out of sources of external dopamine, unless you're constantly changing your external environment, who's around you, the background music, where you're sitting, what color pens you're using, and a thousand other factors that are often just too much to do all of the time at the same time. So that's the issue. When the initial high dopamine, "I'm excited about this" phase wears off and you enter that maintenance phase, the dopamine dips again because the novelty is no longer novel. So that's usually where people with ADHD just dip out. They stop going to the gym. They start falling behind on assignments. They're not doing their projects. They stop organizing their house mid-house. They're not showing up to places on time. They're not completing the work. Now, they're capable, and they know what they should be doing, and very often they do know how to do it, but that dopamine isn't there. And so it often feels physically impossible. It is not physically impossible, unless of course you have a physical impairment. Not talking about that right now. But it's not otherwise physically impossible. It's just very, very hard. And that's where the shame kicks in because if you've got this really smart person who knows that they, what they should be doing and knows how to do it, but they're not doing it. And so they're like, "Wait. What is wrong with me? Now I'm embarrassed. I don't want people to see that I've started something and that I've stopped again. I've told everybody I was doing this thing, and now I'm not. What are they gonna think of me? My team is expecting me to create this presentation and present it on Friday, but I haven't even gotten past the third slide, and now I'm just not even gonna go to work on Friday because I feel so much shame." Or "I wrote half this essay and then I lost my dopamine, and now I'm literally not gonna turn in any part of this essay at all, and maybe not even go to class again because of the shame. The shame prevents people from ever even entertaining the concept of restarting. The shame prevents people from thinking,"Okay, well, I've actually done a whole bunch of work, and I had a blip, and now I just need to get back in it. What can I do to get back in it?" The shame prevents people from problem-solving. And you know what else it prevents? It prevents people from being curious, and that right there is the angle I wanna take today. Yes, I promised I would give you some practical strategies, and I'm going to, but these practical strategies will make so much better sense if it comes from a place of curiosity and not judgment. Let me explain what I mean. So between that initial excitement phase and the work you did early on in the project, you know, and, and from the moment that you disengaged and stopped doing something, stopped doing that project, something happened. And yes, obviously, novelty wore off, and so that source of dopamine is gone, but there's other reasons at play here as well, and that's what I mean by getting curious. We have to figure out what those reasons are. Instead of coming from a place of, "Oh, no, like I did it again. I am always doing this. Here I go. I can't trust myself. I'm not dependable. I failed again. I failed again." No, I want you to ask yourself this. This is what the inner dialogue sounds like of someone with ADHD who's curious, who started something and then stopped, but they're curious about why. They say What happened? What happened? And they don't judge the answer. Curiosity. What happened? And this question is so darn critical, but so few people ask themselves. How do I know?'Cause as I say all the time, and not to be shocking, I don't say this just to be like a shock factor, but I have data, right? Because I have worked, again, with over 3,000 individual people. I'm not talking about when I taught high school and there was, like, 30 people in a class. I'm talking about one-on-one sessions, and most of them with ADHD, and this is something that I see all of the time. And very rarely can a student of mine or a private client of mine early on in the process identify what happened when I ask them the question. So I say, "Okay, you started an essay and you stopped. You felt shame. You couldn't start again, so you didn't submit it. What happened?" And they often look at me like, "What do you mean what happened? Like, I just didn't do it." You know? And I say, "Okay, well, what happened? Why?" Now, I'm not coming from a place of judgment. I'm just modeling what curiosity looks like, right? And I, I know that open-ended questions can be tough, so sometimes I give, you know, some multiple choice options to sort of get their gears rolling, but here are some possible causes. Was the task too big? Did the structure of the task disappear? Did you stop seeing progress? Did perfectionism enter the picture at all? Did you actually hit a very real skill gap, like you knew what you were doing when you started and then the project got harder and you didn't actually have the skill to finish the thing? Did the project become emotionally overwhelming? You don't have to know why it necessarily it did, but did it? Did life logistics exceed your executive function bandwidth? Meaning did you have a million things going on that week that derailed your progress, so you took some time off, and now you're like, "Wait, like, I don't even know where to start 'cause I don't even remember the last step that I did, so I might as well never restart again." What happened? This is curiosity. This is a thousand times more productive than saying, "Whoa, I failed. Screw it all. Wave the white flag." Because when you come from a place of curiosity and you genuinely don't judge yourself on the answer, then you start moving in the direction of the right strategies that are gonna work for you. For example, if you give yourself the time and space to ask what happened, and you determine that the task was actually too big, well, then you can use the task completion strategy of breaking big projects into small steps. And I know if you have ADHD, you've heard that strategy a million times before, and you might be rolling your eyes being like, "Everybody says that," but I'm dead serious. Have you tried it? Think of a big task, a presentation, an essay, a project, a final thesis, painting the house, cleaning your room, whatever it is. Every single big project has multiple steps. You can't do them all at once. What's the expression? How do you, like, eat a horse? One bite at a time, or maybe it's how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? I don't know. I don't eat horses or elephants, but the underlying message is the same. One bite at a time, or one step at a time here. I can't tell you how many people I've worked with who are like, "Oh, that strategy doesn't work." And I'm like,"Show me evidence that you've tried it." Or they're like, "Well, I, I did it and I broke it down in my head." No, that's not how it works, especially if you have ADHD. If you have ADHD, then we're dealing with working memory limitations. So trying to hold multiple steps in your head, like it's not happening. Where's your project management tool? Where is even just a piece of paper where you wrote the steps down? You can't say it didn't work unless you tried it, and often unless you tried it multiple times. And if you ask yourself what happened and you realize, let's say, that the structure disappeared. So maybe you were given time in class early on to work on your work, and the teacher eventually was like, "Okay, guys, for, you know, for the remaining two weeks, everyone's gonna do it on your own." Okay, well then you're gonna need to create some external structure and accountability and maybe some check-ins on your own because it's no longer being provided in the class use some body doubling. Maybe reach out to the professor and say like, "I'm gonna come to all your office hours." If they don't have office hours, saying,"When can I come and meet with you?" Maybe you work with a classmate. Okay, here's another one. If you ask yourself what happened, okay?'Cause you're curious and you wanna know why the heck, you know, you stopped, and you ask yourself what happened, and you realize that the progress was eventually becoming invisible. Like, in the beginning, you were like, "Whoa," like, "This is awesome. Look at my improvement." And then once you hit that maintenance phase, it wasn't that obvious. Well, then that can honestly be really demotivating. Like if you've never gone to the gym and you start going to the gym, you're gonna see results pretty quickly. But then at a certain point, once you do get in shape, this is kind of like when you switch into maintenance, and that's not as exciting. The results aren't that obvious 'cause you're kinda just staying the same. So what can you do so that your progress becomes visible again. Can you use rewards? Can you use visual trackers? Can you use some kind of app so that you don't break... I think there's an app called, like, Don't Break the Chain. Don't Break the Chain? Something like that. I don't know. Google it. There's ways to make your progress visible that are, like, gamification And again, you might be rolling your eyes, but have you tried these? Maybe if life logistics got in the way, like you had a really wildly busy week, and that's what made you stop the thing, and then you stop for a week, and you might as well stop for two and three and four and five, and then you might as well just, like, literally give up. Well, then think about what those wild life logistics were. Are they likely to happen again? Probably. And if so, what can you do to account for those, you know, wild life moments for when they do happen again in the future? Maybe you're an adult working professional and you've got kids, and the kids' spring schedules just got bananas, so that threw you off your game. Okay, well, the kids' spring schedules are probably gonna be pretty bananas probably for the rest of the spring and then you know what's gonna hit in the fall. They're gonna have pretty bananas fall schedules. Okay? So what can you do to get some help in that area so that every time their sports schedules or seasonal schedules get, you know, cuckoo, then that doesn't become a factor and derail your goals. Now, identifying what happened, which can only happen if you ask yourself,"What happened?" Can point you in the direction of using the right strategy. But one thing I wanna mention is that there is a common trap here, which is to wait for that intense level of motivation you felt at the beginning to strike again when you try to restart the task. And it honestly, in full transparency, doesn't usually work that way. Because even if you're re-engaging and you're using some of the re-engagement strategies that I'm still going to share with you, don't worry, that initial novelty wore off, and you're honestly not gonna get that high level of dopamine hit again from, you know, original novelty. But you can add novelty differently. I think I rattled off a few strategies, like, really quickly, like changing your environment, changing who you work with, stuff like that. It can actually help you to inject a little bit more novelty and then boost that dopamine a little bit. I have a student in my private practice, he's in college, and he was telling me how he found like four different places to study on his college campus so that he likes to go and work, kinda like little study spaces, right? He has ADHD, and at first he found one, and he kept going there because it was a good spot, and he found that when he was there, like he was so locked in, you know, could really focus. But then over time he found that he was starting to get distracted again when he was there, so he found another spot. And as soon as he found, found another spot, he got motivated again. He could focus again. And, but then like that wore off, too. So he found a third spot and a fourth spot and now he rotates among all four. That's somebody with self-awareness saying, "I was curious enough to ask what happened, and I realized that my novelty wears off, which tanks my motivation, which checks me out, so I'm gonna use the right strategy." But he would never have arrived at that conclusion if he didn't indulge my obnoxious what happened question that I probably asked him like 37 times Now another point I wanna make about restarting is that it can be helpful to lower the activation energy of restarting. So let's say that you're writing a 10-page paper for your humanities class. You wrote two pages, and then you checked out. All right? Instead of saying like, "Okay, I have to finish the remaining eight," lowering the activation energy would look like,"Okay, I'm just gonna write one more page today, and that is it." Actually, let me use an example from the story I told you at the top of the episode about the woman in my program, SchoolHabits University. She said she got through the first, like, three modules, right? And then she stopped. And we decided together that it would be best for her to slow down the pace a little bit. I loved her enthusiasm of wanting to get through, like, a whole module in a week, but we were like, "What if it's just a few lessons a week?" That is lowering the activation energy. So another example. Let's say that you're really behind in your reading for one of your literature courses, and you're like 250 pages behind. Well, many of my students would say, well... So, well, not my students, but any other student would say, "Well, screw it. Like, I'm just gonna ask AI for a summary." Yeah, no, we're not gonna do that. That makes all of the work that you have to do on that book practically impossible, and it robs you of your future learning that you think you're getting, so we are... We're not gonna do that, and I will not go on an AI rant right now. I promise you. For now. But instead, you would say, "All right. I'm gonna read 20 pages today. That is it." And you put a bookmark where that 20-page mark would be, and you'd read up to that. You're not reading 250. You are reading 20. When you lower the activation energy, what often happens is that you land on a more sustainable pace, and mo- most likely should've been the pace that you started with. But that giant release of dopamine at the start of that project, that like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go to the gym 11 days a week," or, "I'm going to read a book a day," that plan was created for an idealized version of yourself with a massive flood of dopamine running through your system. But when that dopamine levels off and then dips below typical amounts and you have to reactivate, and I'm saying start with something really small, that's often the place that is more sustainable for an ADHD brain anyway. So maybe 20 pages a day, even though it pales in comparison to a book a day, okay? That's the place that you're gonna have to settle on, 'cause wouldn't you rather take sustainable progress over these giant fits and spurts and stops that lead you into a shame spiral? Because remember, shame is in the backdrop of all of this, but the way we lower that shame is by coming from a place of curiosity. That is the ticket right there. I haven't lost the thread of this episode, and I hope you didn't either. None of these possible reactivation strategies would work if you never got out of the shame spiral and the judgment. But asking yourself, what happened? With loving kindness and honesty opens up your mind to some of the strategies that I'm proposing today. All right, so now we're gonna get to the part of the episode where I'm gonna share some reactivation strategies to improve your chances of completing a task. I already did weave some throughout the episode today, but I'm gonna get a little nitty-gritty right now. Okay, and what's really important is, before we get into all of this, restarting is an executive function. That is a skill. Okay? And people with ADHD have weaker executive functions. That is not an opinion, that is a fact. So it's not coincidence that people with ADHD often abandon tasks and have a hard time figuring out how to restart. That is because restarting is an executive function. It requires time management, and task management, and focus, and concentration, and working memory. Because you're like, "Wait, what am I, what am I even doing?" It requires organization because you're like, "Wait, I haven't touched that thing in two weeks. I don't even know where any of my stuff is. It requires emotional regulation because you're like, "Wait, I'm feeling ashamed and I'm embarrassed over the fact that I didn't finish this." Every single thing I just listed is an executive function. So please know that restarting is an executive function, and that's why it is hard. With that said, here are some practical reactivation strategies that you can use when you catch yourself in that shame spiral that is preventing you from getting back in the saddle. We already know that it starts with asking yourself what happened instead of what's wrong with me. That is curiosity over judgment. We also already covered lowering the activation energy, so restarting way smaller than your brain wants to or way smaller than your ego wants to, rather. We also already covered breaking projects into smaller steps that you have written down and not kept in your head. We've also already talked about adding in external structure like going to office hours and body doubling and scheduling your work sessions. We've also already talked about making progress visible by using rewards and checklists and apps, whatever you need. And we've also already talked about adding in novelty by changing your environment, maybe rotating locations, varying your tools, the people you're working with, and things like that. However, I have some more. Remember, you can get a transcript of this by going to learn You can also pause me and write things down or slow me down if you think I'm going too fast,'cause this material is stuff that you're gonna wanna come back to. So first... Well, actually, not first. I think it's like 10th at this point, like whatever. Create a restart ritual. So if you regularly find yourself in a pattern of starting and stopping, we're not gonna be shocked every time that happens, right? We're gonna create a ritual in advance that says, "Okay, the next time I do this silly little thing with my ADHD brain, I'm just gonna use my restart ritual." Maybe you pour yourself the same type of peppermint tea. You create your same lo-fi playlist. You go to the same location. You wear the same comfy sweatshirt. Those, I don't know, four things right there are enough to be called a ritual. So every single time you abandon a task that you want to get back into, you say, "Whoop, time for my peppermint tea in the library with my raggedy comfy sweatshirt and my weird lo-fi beats playlist," and you get back in it. And your body and mind will start to associate that ritual with reactivation. You could also leave breadcrumbs for your future self. I love this strategy. I call it using a status note. I talked about status notes in episode 93. I'll leave that linked below. So before you stop work, you leave yourself a note for your future self that says what your next step is and what you just finished. So we're talking like a sticky note, maybe like the last sentence in your Google Doc if you're writing something. I don't know what your projects are, but some visual note that says, "I just did this, and this is what I have to do next." So you could say, "I wrote paragraph two. My next step is to open the article," and you can leave a link to the article," and summarize it for paragraph three." Or maybe in your task management system, you write a note to yourself that says, "Made slides one through 10. Have to start with 11." And then you write what is supposed to go on slide 11, like a bullet point. Or maybe you could just go right into Microsoft, you know, PowerP- uh, PowerPoint or Google Slides and in slide 11 you leave your status note in there. That is a very powerful strategy. Not a lot of people do it, but people with ADHD often struggle to reengage because that re-entry requires way too much context reconstruction. That's every executive function ever, to reconstruct the context of a project that you haven't touched in a while. And a status note is basically giving you an on-ramp right back into the task. You could also, this is another strategy, restart a few steps back or just one step back, not in the beginning. So many people think that restarting means restarting exactly where you left off. It doesn't. You can just open... Let's say you were writing something. Open a draft and start by editing a sentence that you already wrote. Maybe instead of watching the next video in a curriculum that you're supposed to be getting through, you rewatch 10 minutes from the last video. Maybe instead of reading 250 pages in the book you're supposed to read, you go back and you read five pages that you already read because it was like three weeks ago since you touched it. This significantly lowers the barrier to reentry 'cause you're giving your brain the context to say, "Oh yeah, this is what we were doing." Now, another strategy is to identify what your minimum viable progress looks like. So depending on what the task is, and if you're a student or a working professional, this would really look different. But let's say that you were supposed to, I don't know, make, I don't know, like 100 flashcards for your final exam, and you made 20, and then you just stopped altogether. Your minimal viable progress is the smallest unit that still counts as progress, so maybe it's making one flashcard. Maybe it's instead of doing 39 math problems, it's doing one or two math problems. Instead of responding to 38 emails that you have to reply to, it's one email. So, like, can you just do one of the things that you're supposed to do? Does that make sense? You could also use visual reduction. So again, this depends on the task that you're trying to reengage with, but ADHD overwhelm is often visual and perceptual. It's not just intellectual and emotional. It's definitely that too, but if there are, like, 50 vocab words on a page that you're supposed to learn, cover all of them except for one. If there's 20 math problems on a page that you have to do, cover all of them except for one. If you log into your school portal and you see 21 missing assignments, that is really overwhelming. We don't want that. So pull out maybe three missing assignments that you're gonna work on and write them on a piece of paper, close the portal. Another strategy is to build re-entry cues into your environment. This is helpful. So if you know you have to pick back up on a book that you've abandoned, le- just start by leaving the book open on your desk. If you wanna restart your gym habit, start by putting your gym shoes in the doorway so you literally trip on them on the way out the door. Leave that document open on your laptop. These cues are kinda like tri- well, they're not kind of, they are triggers that slowly plant the seed in your brain that says, "Yep, we're gonna do this." Now, another one, this is the final one. Actually, I li- I keep saying I like this one. I like them all. We're gonna call this administrative restarting. To a degree, it's kinda like procrasti-planning. Procrasti-planning, yes, which is kinda like when you do a ton of planning, but it's actually procrastination, but it feels productive, but it's just an avoidance tactic, but whatever. Administrative restarting is kinda like procrastaplanning, but it's, it's a little bit better It's basically not restarting the task itself, but restarting or recreating the ecosystem around the task. So maybe you organize your notes. Maybe you reopen the tabs that you're gonna need. Maybe you rewrite the checklist. Maybe you clean your workspace that you're gonna be doing the work at. Maybe you gather all your materials. Restarting or rebuilding the ecosystem that you had around the task can lower the emotional resistance to the task, 'cause you're like, "Well, all my stuff is, like, right here. Like, I might as well." Right? Even if you're not ready to fully engage with it, just open your student portal. Look at your assignments. Maybe just read the comments. Open the slide presentation you're supposed to create for work. Just maybe go back in and read the meeting notes from the last meeting. Maybe open your client file and read through it. I'm just, like, rattling off a bunch of contexts. I don't know what job you have, but you know what I'm saying. Make it work for you. Hiding from the task is never the answer because that gives shame a place to live. And remember, restarting is a skill, and skills can be learned. All of the strategies I just shared, those are skills that you can add to your toolbox and use depending on the context. The goal is never to not fall off the bandwagon. The goal is to get back up when you inevitably do. The goal is to get back up with curiosity and non-judgment. It is to say, "Hey, my ADHD brain did that thing again, and that is okay because that is what it does. But I know what I have to do, and I'm gonna be kind, and I'm gonna be gentle, and I'm gonna use a strategy. And if it doesn't work this time, I'm gonna use another one, and I'm gonna reach my dang goals." Shame loves when we are silent. Shame likes to keep us quiet. Shame likes to keep us inactive and secretive. These strategies activate you. They are the opposite of quiet. There is no place for shame here because shame needs judgment to survive, and we have replaced that with curiosity. All right, my friends. That brings us to the end of the episode. Remember, if you're watching this on YouTube, please do subscribe or leave a comment. And if you're listening on a podcast app, make sure to follow the show and share it with somebody you know. If you're curious about SchoolHabits University, which is my online study skills program that teaches these exact executive function skills we talked about today, you can check that out below as well or at schoolhabitsuniversity.com. I appreciate you. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions. And never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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