The Challenge of Settling My Itchy AuDHD Mind: Why Can’t I Just Do It?

 

I hit ‘publish’ on the article and the feeling of satisfaction surges through me.

It feels so good, I don’t know why I didn’t do it before — but I’ve done everything but write for days.

You will feel better when you write, the pesky voice within has been busily proclaiming, ad nauseum.

I know. But I don’t want to!

Cue a day of sheer pointlessness as I succeed in neither relaxing nor doing anything productive. There’s more online scrolling and inner dialogue going on than anything else, and it’s not exactly settling to my AuDHD nervous system.

The most maddening thing is it’s often my partners who know better. They see my fidgeting feet and darting eyes and notice I’m somewhere else.

“Get your laptop out. You know you’ll feel better.”

And dammit. They are right.

But why can’t I remember that and just get on with it?

Ironically, I’ve been struggling to write this article because, well, it feels like too much of a demand. Last week, I had no problem writing; this week, it’s different.

An added layer is that it’s ADHD Awareness Month, an irony I can’t help smiling at. The idea that this time presents a good opportunity to write on this topic has somehow stalled my efforts to get anything out there. I’ve written about other things, but has ADHD been the focus? No.

Demand avoidance, right there.

Unpicking demands

“Demand avoidance is a sneaky thing that can wreak havoc in our lives”, says neurodivergent clinician Dr Megan Neff of this strong aversion to perceived demands. Of course, all humans experience this at times, but for those of us who are neurodivergent, it can be a whole world of struggle.

Demand avoidance, and on the further end of the spectrum, Pathological Demand Avoidance, sometimes renamed as Persistent or Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, are associated with both ADHD and autism. Although more research is needed to explore this connection, A 2020 study found that ADHD was a better predictor of PDA than autism.

You may be surprised at the wide range of things that can be experienced as demands. According to Nicole Washington at Psych Central, demands are:

External: Others impose these demands, for e.g. a work deadline, a time you have to pick someone up, or an instruction from a lecturer. My least favourite one currently is the day the recycling has to be taken out — it invariably feels like an inconvenient moment.

Internal: Demands imposed by yourself, like a plan you’ve decided to follow or a goal you’ve set for yourself. This is why I detest making plans to meet up with friends, or even to have a phone call, and I prefer settings where spontaneous socialising can emerge as and when I feel like it.

Explicit: being asked to do the dishes, have a conversation about a specific topic, or other direct demands. I respond so much better to, “Would you like to….?” or “I’m wondering when might be a good time for you to….?” than “Can you do ….?” Sounds like semantics, but the difference is everything when it comes to avoiding my system going into a big No.

Implicit: Even if something is politely requested and is open to a refusal, it can still feel like a demand to the nervous system. Then there are unspoken expectations, such as the ways we are expected to behave in certain social situations. A day full of those can leave AuDHD folk like myself exhausted and drained.

People with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) may go to extreme lengths to avoid complying with demands. This form of demand avoidance is usually associated with high levels of anxiety, although other theorists argue that anxiety isn’t necessarily the root cause of demand avoidance. PDA is considered a profile of autism in its own right, where individuals experience an exaggerated nervous system reaction in response to a loss of autonomy. With PDA, demands are interpreted as a threat, thus triggering a fight-flight-freeze response.

My focus here will be on neurodivergent demand avoidance. As a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in both our reward circuit and motivation, dopamine motivates us to move toward things we anticipate being rewarding, says neurodivergent clinician Megan Neff, Psy.D. With ADHD, the normal functioning of dopamine is impeded. Struggling with demands can mean it’s harder for us to boost our dopamine — the last thing we need.

When you consider how many challenges a neurodivergent person can face when trying to get stuff done, it makes total sense that demand avoidance is more common with autistics and ADHDers. Neff explains that neurodivergent demand avoidance can stem from:

• Perfectionism
• Sensory issues
• Difficulty with transitions (moving from one activity or place to another)
• Executive functioning challenges (planning, prioritising, memory, problem-solving and task initiation)
• OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) triggers
• Cognitive (thinking/mental) overload
• Environmental stressors
• Limited energy resources
• Time-scarcity mindset — always feeling there’s not enough time
• Routine disruption
• Anxiety
• Negative past experiences
• Lack of predictability

I highly recommend diving into her useful article on the topic of demand avoidance in neurodivergents.

So what can we do to understand and cope with demand avoidance? Here are some nuggets of insight from my experience.

Living like a crab

On the neurodivergent online forums I frequent, I often read statements like this: “I can only do things when I’m meant to be doing something else.”

When I started looking into demand avoidance, I understood for the first time why I’ve always felt I could only get things done on a weekend. Despite the fact that I’ve been self-employed for nearly two decades and can work whenever I please, the deeply embedded cultural concept that weekdays are allotted to busyness and productivity is alive and well in me. On a weekend, I don’t expect ‘doing’ mode from myself. With the pressure off, I can side amble towards a goal or item on the to-do list because it feels as if it was entirely my choice.

“Side quests” is another common phrase in ADHD parlance. It’s the reason why I’ll be able to swap over my winter and summer wardrobes in 30 minutes flat, despite putting off this seemingly complex task for weeks — all because, bored and distracted during my diligent daily yoga practice, I suddenly noticed the bag of clothes poking out from underneath my chair. We ADHDers can be like crabs, having to approach things from different angles to convince our tricky brains to do it.

It’s not just things we don’t want to do that fall prey to demand avoidance. As a single mom, I was continually frustrated by being unable to work on my own projects when my son was at nursery, my allotted “me time”. He’s at nursery, therefore I should write or work on my business translated into the most uncomfortable feeling of pressure, instant overwhelm, and eventually, sleepiness. I genuinely wanted to do these things, yet I found that without an unavoidable deadline (urgency is one thing that galvanises the ADHD brain into action!), this once enjoyable act had become so elusive.

When I was in active mothering mode, I would often get what I call my “itchy brain” and become inspired to do something creative. Of course, as soon as I got going, my son would move from being happily occupied with his toys to urgently needing my attention.

When he was young and I worked as an exam invigilator at a college, I found myself doing lots of writing at that desk. Those invigilating hours let me off the hook: I was already getting paid, so there was no pressure to try and generate income, there was a built-in shape to those hours so I didn’t have to decide what to do, and nothing was required of me except to show up and sit there. It was achingly boring, of course, so I ended up writing.

Back at home, could I do any writing? Forget it! This frustrating tendency is something I’ve learned to regard with humour, accepting that sometimes, I will just end up doing the thing at the time I least expect it.

Love it or hate it, I need it

When I stayed with a long-distance lover for the first time recently, I noticed that as much as I appreciated that he did all the cooking and cleaning for a week, insisting I should rest, relax and be a guest, I soon felt aimless and bored. While he was working 9–5, I could have done a whole lot of things — my own writing, for one — but I didn’t. The lack of anchoring into a routine left me adrift, treading the waters between a contented break from doing and an unbearably itchy brain.

On my return home, I felt a renewed sense of satisfaction in doing everything myself. The food shop, cleaning up, and making the day-to-day decisions, all felt less like burdens and more like choices. I was astounded. Could it be that, boring as these tasks can be, there is some dopamine generated by the routine of running my own life?

Periodically, I surrender to the fact that as much as I hate it, I need a routine. To avoid the continual and exhausting battles with myself over the internal and external demands to get stuff done — Will I or won’t I? — I have to create a flexible structure that still allows me plenty of autonomy.

A few months ago, I signed up for Flown, an online co-working / body-doubling platform populated by an abundance of ADHDers. I soon found my writing output soaring. Many ADHDers find body doubling — doing things alongside others — very supportive, while many autistics seem to find it more distracting than helpful. This is one of those situations where my ADHD usually wins out.

Recently, I was feeling tired, having been woken twice in the night by my housemate’s cat eating a mouse outside my bedroom door. My modus operandi would usually be to give in to my weariness and resultant low mood, go back to bed and surrender to a lacklustre day.

But I’d booked a Flown session, and so I didn’t. I went to the 2-hour block of body doubling and it felt great. The accountability of sharing my goals at the beginning of the session and my progress at the end, as well as seeing other humans, was good for me. It also got me into a “doing mode” for the rest of the day, as opposed to “floating around mode”. I used my buzz from the Flown session to sort out the recycling, something I’d normally procrastinate on. Then, I felt justified in sitting in the garden to meditate and read — and I could concentrate, because my brain had done its thing for a while and could now relax. The itchiness was momentarily stilled.

As a work-from-home person, if I don’t get my internal ignition button on, I can easily find myself still in my pj’s at 11 am, glued to the bed and exchanging endless WhatsApp voice notes with friends. Sometimes, on a low-functioning day, this is exactly what’s needed, but often this scattered focus only takes my mood and energy further downhill. I’ll descend into checking my phone multiple times, rather than getting into the flow state my brain thrives on and needs on a regular basis.

“While in a flow state, you can focus, concentrate, and filter out distractions,” says Leslie Josel in the ADHD magazine ADDitude. “It feels like you’re locked into a task and making real progress toward completing it. People in a flow state feel confident, invigorated, and powerful, likely because there is a sense of control and accomplishment surrounding the task.” Being in a flow state massively boosts my dopamine and has a knock-on effect on my well-being.

When I spend too long bouncing around from one thing to another without finishing anything, my ADHD under-stimulation flips to overstimulation. This is the kind of nervous system overload that eventually results in burnout and requires vigilance to prevent it. I have a routine of putting my phone on Focus mode on overstimulated days, preventing the constant demand of messages from tipping me over the edge.

Without a routine, I feel a near-constant background sense that I should be doing something, and it’s impossible to relax, even when I need to. As much as parts of me fight it, a gently held, flexible routine ultimately contributes to more nervous system regulation.

The necessity of do nothing days

You’re probably wondering how to maintain all this routine stuff without the demand avoidance kicking in. I’ve found that the key is to keep the routine as a moveable feast — a suggestion rather than a “must do”. If I’ve designated time to rest and do nothing but my brain is itching to do stuff and I keep fidgeting, it’s best to give in to that rather than forcing myself to try and read a book. Then, when I’m tired and my brain needs a rest, that switch-off mode can happen more naturally.

Because of my ADHD, autism and chronic fatigue, it’s an unavoidable fact that I need different things on different days. The “routine” means that the same ingredients need to be present throughout the average week, such as exercise outdoors, satisfying, productive creative activity, and social time, but I do best by regarding these as blocks that can be placed in different places. Where I place them each day and week depends on where I’m at: my mood, energy and executive functioning capacity.

It’s also about honouring my cyclical nature. I go through phases of being disciplined and focused, using Flown 3–5 days a week, but then there are weeks, particularly during points of the menstrual cycle, when that’s not within my reach. Then, my priority is to replenish by doing lots of nature walks and having plenty of naps. I’m finally getting to the point where I’m OK with that, accepting that my life doesn’t have to look like others’. One inspiration in my journey has been this video on ADHD-friendly flexible routines from ADHD creator Hayley Honeyman, based on varying capacities.

Life is not just about work and productivity. As someone currently signed off on disability, this is one of the things I’ve most needed to decondition from. Most neurodivergent folks need structure-free time to switch off and let our systems defrag, to process all the stuff that our brains work harder to process than neurotypical brains.

Routine can also support me by putting a cast-in-stone self-care day in the diary at least once a week. A day where I literally expect nothing from myself except the basics of feeding and watering. I’ve learned the hard way that if this demand-free time doesn’t happen, my mood, energy and executive functioning rapidly begin to unravel because the energy required to constantly keep up with demands runs out.

There’s habitual demand avoidance that we may need to plough through or sneakily skirt around, and then there’s the genuine wondering: maybe today I really don’t have enough spoons (resources) for this? Sometimes I find myself not doing “the thing” because part of me knows it’s going to take more energy than I have or can afford to use because of other stuff that’s looming the next day. Yoga nidra is my favourite way to build in rest daily and keep myself topped up: a guided meditation technique that creates a state of consciousness between sleeping and waking. I often use guided YouTube yoga nidras as a way into a nap.

Don’t let it pass by

I’ve done countless courses on personal development and mind-body health. Investigating how to generate more dopamine as an ADHDer is a recent hyperfocus. You’d think I’d have it all sorted by now — but the problem comes with remembering all my discoveries, since one of the many areas of functioning affected by ADHD is working memory and I often have many tabs open in my brain.

Sometimes, I’ll be moving through my day in a low mood, aware that my dopamine levels are in a perilous dip. Everything from clearing the dishrack to hanging out the washing feels like too much. A bit later, I notice I’m suddenly feeling better, but I find it difficult to connect my altered state with anything concrete. It feels frustrating because knowing what worked might allow me to replicate it another time.

I’m now making a conscious effort to log these incidences where my mood and energy shift. I’m working to notice the little things that lift my mood, help me reconnect to myself and the world around me, or give me more capacity to deal with the demands of life.

This week, I took my slightly depressed self on a woodland walk where I’d got lost repeatedly. To avoid this happening again, I made voice notes to myself of the directions, noting each turn as I went along, and then transcribed these into a file on my phone for future walks. A minute later, I realised I was feeling a substantial lift in my mood. Taking this concrete, simple action had given me a sense of happy accomplishment, generating more dopamine.

The surprising upside of demand avoidance

In his article, “I’m Pathologically Demand Avoidant. It Rules.,” autistic writer and advocate Devon Price writes, “I’ve steadfastly refused to follow social norms that strike me as unjust: gender roles, social niceties, guidelines of “professionalism” that are so often homophobic and racist, mandatory events that serve a solely symbolic function. … I love that I have a will to be so difficult to deal with — it’s forced me to build a life in alignment with my values.”

I can certainly relate to this. The autonomy-related aspects of my demand avoidance, the parts that are about me protecting the right to choose how my life is, made it impossible for me to keep going to church when the religion I grew up with no longer made sense to me; it pushed me out of boring full-time office work, made power-tripping managers intolerable, and made me ask uncomfortable questions in communities lacking in integrity, ultimately leaving them behind.

Instead of reflecting the values I grew up with and that my society prizes, my day-to-day life embodies my values of community, nature, nervous system regulation and creativity. I am anchored by solitary woodland walks, writing, somatic (body-based) practices, meditation, and occasional time with others to play music and co-create in other ways.

I realise I’m enormously privileged to be able to live this way, and yet it’s come about through the adverse circumstances that led to me being signed off on disability. I now believe that my burnout came through a long process of autistic masking and living in a way that wasn’t true to my values until my body just said “no”.

I’ve spent a lifetime exploring my “no’s”. Now, I’m experimenting with what brings a genuine “yes”. Learning to work with my demand avoidance is a vital part of this — and it all starts with accepting this about myself.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work. If you’d like to explore more, my book ‘The Wild Wandering Arc: A Journey Through Vanlife, Nature & Love’ is available here, and my Substack for further articles and podcasts can be found here.