Overcoming The Wall of Awful; Why It's Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety (and How to Do Them Anyway)

[chuckles] Well, now the question everyone listening is waiting for, what is the wall of awful?

The wall of awful is my model for the emotional impact of repeated failure and struggle that so many people who are neurodiverse are navigating and dealing with.

The idea is every time we fail, we get a brick in our wall, right? We get this failure brick or a struggle brick if it's just something we struggle with, but, uh, ultimately succeed at doing.

But if we define that struggle as failure, it's gonna be a failure brick, right? Depends on how we look at it.

Along with these failure bricks and struggle bricks, we also get disappointment bricks because we've disappointed ourselves, and we get disappointment bricks for anyone in our life whose opinion matters to us as it relates to that task.

So if I mess up on something, I'm gonna get a potentially a disappointment brick for my wife as well as myself and maybe my kids and maybe a friend or a colleague.

And when we get disappointment bricks for people, we also get rejection bricks because if we disappointed someone, we worry that they might reject us, and we don't really know.

If they get ahead of that anxiety that ex- happens, those worries that happen, and they make it clear that there's no rejection, there's no disappointment, this is fine, don't worry about it, those bricks don't land.

They might not even show up.

But if they don't get ahead of it, if it's just us stewing in our own juices and, and thinking about how much my wife is gonna be mad at me, then that brick is gonna stay, and it's gonna pile up on top of the other bricks that are in there for that task.

And then we get like shame and guilt and worry, loneliness could go with rejection, right? We get all these other bricks that add to the pile.

And I come around to deciding that the mortar of the wall of awful is anxiety.

That's the stuff that's holding all these bricks together.

And eventually, this wall gets big enough that we can't step over it anymore, and we have to deal with it.

We have to try to get past it in some way.

And that adds a layer to these tasks that we struggle with.

I have to deal with this wall of awful before I can pay the bills, before I can try to make a new friend, before I can invite the friends that I already have over to hang out, before I can check my email, before I can do my homework if I'm a kid.

It depends task to task.

How do we know if we're facing a wall of awful?

If you're struggling to start, it could be a wall of awful, right? Like if you're, if you've got something you're having trouble doing, and it's something that you've struggled with in the past, perhaps there's a wall of awful there.

I would pay attention to how you feel.

Is this, am I struggling to start because I'm feeling anxious or uncertain? Probably we're looking at a wall of awful.

Am I struggling to start because I'm just exhausted or I'm sick? Probably it's not a wall of awful, right? Like that's totally normal stuff that's just you're in a dip.

Last week, I had trouble starting all kinds of things, but it wasn't because I had a wall of awful going on.

It's because there's fires in Canada, and the smoke from the fires in Canada are hitting Massachusetts, and the air quality was terrible.