How to stop when you don't wanna?

Something Shiny: ADHD!

How do you teach yourself (and/or children) how to stop, especially when you want to keep going/overcommitting/hyperfocusing? Like videogames, sugar, saying yes to everyone and being—anything addictive—how do you actually stop? David and Isabelle explore the difference between maximizing your time and actually setting reality checks for time blindness (which is real! We have FIVE MINUTES, after all…), how we experientially learn how to start/spot hyper focus things (when we have opportunity to do them), operationalizing and externalizing tasks, and digging into parenting strategies like punishments and limits (not just for parents, btw).

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It’s a dog whistle, if anyone listens to our show not on double speed, they are our friend, welcome to team shiny. Isabelle is still digesting the idea of what it means to put things down, to pause, to slow down, to ask herself “is now the time to do the thing?” And she wonders if this comes up against how rough time blindness is real. The idea that things are either now or not now. If she doesn’t do it now, when she’s thinking of it, and she has the wherewithal to do it—she’s going to forget it and not do it. She’s gotten ten messages at the same time telling her “multitasking is not great” and find a way to do one thing at a time, and in a sequence. But she does better with more stimulation, so isn’t more is better in terms of keeping more tabs open at the same time? Which David agrees, if we close a tab, we’re never going to remember about the website, we have to have tabs open—the way we see the world, and object relations. When we put things on a table, it just becomes a part of the table. You won’t notice it again until someone says something about it and you have to address it. There is an immediacy to things. David wants to rebrand what multitasking is, we have to find new ways to think of time. There was a TikTok where someone goes “5 minutes is an eternity, but 300 seconds is not an eternity” if David thought he had 300 seconds he might not do so much, but if it’s five minutes he’s going to do ten things like change jacket and switch shoes and start dishes and unload laundry. We will naturally try to maximize what we’re doing in a time frame. And the end of time is a transition—it’s really hard to stop and complete the task. The dilemma is: how many things can we do in this moment in time so we feel like we’ve maximized the 15 pounds of material in the 10 pound bag. There is a lot of starting on 18 things—but then the same thing happens, all those things in motion become part of the scenery, and then we’re stuck without the things we didn’t complete. So when we stack our time with 10 things, we lose every time because we have 5 things we don’t complete. Isabelle is into embroidery, her new hyperfixation—it’s always a loss to put it down, and it hits extra hard to stop hyperfocus. And then there's the thing where she doesn't want to do something and she has five minutes and she’s going to do so much before she gets to her doctor’s appointment. This is not dissimilar to how she habitually overcommits herself. Of course she wants to help, and it's always a yes, it’s always enthusiastic consent. But when she's faced with doing it, she feels total failure, and it connects to the thing where actually she feels like she’s failing even more. David is clarifying: one intervention is just for one person. So for David, he puts on his good day socks and thinks of something to do—so he makes a note. Then, when he has a pocket of time in his day, he looks at his list of things and picks one—he knows he cannot do them all. But then Isabelle wonders: how do you remember to only do one thing? David names that this connects to hyper focus and momentum, like when Isabelle is getting into the knitting—to which she replies, no, it is not knitting, where you count stitches, she cannot do that. This is embroidery, where you stab cloth over and over again and see results real fast. And David wonders, as an adult, you can dictate space and time to do this—but what if you wanted to do something, but you couldn’t dictate the time to do it—it would be sad making, but more than that, you’d want to do the thing MORE. Is this what happens with kids and video games? With a lot of addictive things, like candy, eating— the more rigid we are, the more we reinforce counter control, the more likely they're going to want the things we’re supposed to have. This is how kids with candy in the house don't grow up to binge on candy because it was normalized how to interact with it. This resonates with a book Isabelle has yet to read, Low Demand Parenting (see below) that connects to how limits on screen time, routines, punishments, even gentle parenting techniques that are really reflective and ask the kids to really think about their thoughts and feelings may not easily apply to neurodivergent kids—because they all emphasize self-regulation and executive functioning, which is the whole thing we’re not great at. So she just thought about the values she thought about building up relationship and confidence, you don’t have to do hard things alone, building up autonomy, if it’s kept from me and someone else is the game keeper, I never learn how to manage it though practicing. And David adds, you never get satiation, you never get ‘enough,’ you never internally experientially learn “it’s not the right amount for me,” like the tummy ache you get when you eat too much sugar. It’s also that you innately start to learn what to do when, including hyper focusing on things: it's not that you're not that you’re not allowed to do it, it’s when you do it. And you don’t have to earn it, what's the baseline you get for just being a human and it doesn’t get taken away. Never take away a coping mechanism, a self-soothing mechanism, like videogames, or books, or interacting with friends, because if you take away the coping skill as punishment you are taking away the thing you need to self-regulate, so you have less of the thing you need to be able to stop or regulate. Also, you get locked in power struggles, which with neurodivergent folk is like watching the bears eat each other, as Isabelle puts it. David names: the emphasis should not be providing consequences to make someone to do “right,” it’s how can you get someone to feel enough wins to feel good—this helps with behavior change. If punishment works, it only works with that reinforcer (aka with that person). You don't learn to not do the thing in general, you learn to not do the thing with that person. Or like larger rules, a family David knows would tell the kid “don’t touch, it’s hot and dangerous!” And that became the thing they'd say when something was dangerous “that’s hot!” And then when it came time for the kid to actually test the boundaries they felt like they couldn't really trust what people said because things…weren’t hot. Isabelle is by no means a perfect parent. In fact, she yells, she meltdown, she shame spirals all the time—this is a thing she’s very much learning. And she’ll give herself credit that when unmasked, she is pretty direct and blunt, and takes away the mystery and just names the thing and the context for the thing, like swearing. This makes her think of swearing and her dear friend who is neurodivergent, who delivers data on a thing with maximum warmth and bluntness. This is something she wishes would visit her when she’s doing too much: “Dear, that's impossible. Pick one thing.”

Low Demand Parenting by Amanda Diekman