late diagnosis lessons: automatic thoughts and procrastination (or, the sh*t roundabout)
Relatable
How emotions affect efficiency
So anyone with ADHD knows the torture of procrastination all too well. We don’t procrastinate because we’re lazy, slow, unmotivated or just shitty people/employees/students, we do it because of how our brains are wired and because of the particular chemical makeup that governs what we do and what we prioritize in our lives. That’s putting it very very simply.
Because of years and years of living with undiagnosed ADHD (or even diagnosed ADHD, really) neurodivergent adults can experience a jumble of trauma, negative messaging and negative treatment throughout their lives, so a lot of us end up with depression and anxiety. And this depression and anxiety can contribute to the procrastination — so not only do our brains work against us when we’re trying to accomplish something, we also have to fight through our own self-defeating depression and/or anxiety about it.
That depression and anxiety shows up as automatic thoughts. Thoughts like “I can’t do this”; “You’ve failed at everything else you’ve tried, why would you succeed at this?” and “What gives you the right to write a book/go back to school/apply for that promotion/ask for a raise? You suck!”
You know the ones! The ones that pop up any time you want or need to do something (like the thoughts I get whenever I sit down to write a blog post or work on my book).
The thoughts come instantly and unbidden. They’re just — there. They almost seem to be a part of who we are. We believe those thoughts, and we let them stop us from achieving goals. So now, we may not be able to even start something until we are absolutely sure that the outcome will be positive. And we’re never really sure of that, are we?
The great news about all this is that we can unlearn it, and it’s really simple, it doesn’t have to be years and years of therapy to figure it out. This is where cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) comes in — it helps you get to the core of a problem really fast, and gives you practical tools to use right away to fix that problem. It really works. It takes some time and trial and error and commitment and practice, but I’m here to tell you that it really, really works.
CBT is a type of therapy that mostly focuses on behaviours and reactions, instead of the deeper causes of why we do them. This makes it extremely useful for those with ADHD, because as our best friend Dr. Russell Barkley has made clear: for ADHD management, it’s all about externalization.
In CBT, you learn about unhelpful patterns and behaviours that are causing setbacks in your life. In the context of ADHD, we focus on the particular patterns that get in the way for us, our weak spots, if you will, like procrastination, perfectionism and people-pleasing.
***BIG, BIG DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT AND NEVER HAVE BEEN A THERAPIST OR MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL IN ANY WAY. THIS IS MY ADVICE FROM MY OWN EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH AND NOT TO BE TAKEN AS ANY KIND OF ACTUAL DIAGNOSIS OR TREATMENT. GO AND SEE YOUR OWN THERAPIST OR LOOK FOR CBT WORKSHOPS IN YOUR AREA - THEY EXIST.***
Tackling automatic thoughts with CBT
What CBT teaches you is to become aware of those thoughts as they happen, and to counter them before they stop you from doing stuff. The negative automatic thoughts, triggered by an event or circumstance — let’s say you have a job interview you have to prepare for — in turn trigger the emotions associated with those thoughts (I’ve failed at this before and was depressed about it, so now I’m depressed in anticipation).
Instead of reacting to the event in realistic, reasonable ways, such as researching the company for the interview, you react according to the emotions (sadness) you’re experiencing. This can then manifest as procrastination/soothing type behaviour, like withdrawing into a TV-binge, going shopping or picking a fight with your partner — so now you’ve essentially kicked the can further down the road, but you’re still feeling shitty, except now you feel even shittier because you’re actually engaging in behaviour that is shitty for you instead of doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing.
So what do you do about it? CBT lays out a very simple process for dealing with this steaming roundabout of shit. Well it might not seem simple, per se. But the more you do it and make it a habit, you will see that yeah, it kind of is.
Step 1: Identifying the automatic thought
The very first and very crucial step is identifying the automatic thoughts in the first place. Once you do that you can start to manage the resultant negative emotions, and they might even go away completely. Wouldn’t that be nice?
This first step requires the willingness to slow down, to pause and reflect when you feel an emotion around something that you have to do. If suddenly you feel sad, or anxious, or you have this fear suddenly come over you seemingly from out of nowhere, it’s time to take a moment and focus on it. As CBT theory explains, we have to start with the emotion and work back. Automatic thoughts are so intrinsic and habitual that we usually don’t even notice them when they happen, we just feel the shitty emotion that follows.
So you notice this feeling of depression, let’s say. Now it’s time for you to stop — literally stop what you’re doing — and ask yourself: “What was I thinking just then? What was going through my head?”
If you have trouble nailing down the actual thought (and yes, this part is important), you can use the type of feeling you’re experiencing as a sort of clue. For example, if you’ve sat down to pay some bills and rent online, and you suddenly feel sad (hard relate), you might have thought something like, “I used to struggle so much with paying my bills that I got evicted and lost that apartment I loved” — something that made you really sad at the time.
Not that that has ever happened to me.
Like I said before, this takes time, and that time it takes is a big hurdle around all of this for neurodivergent adults: this process requires actually sitting down and thinking about stuff, hard stuff, and changing ideas about yourself that you’ve probably been accepting as normal for your entire life. It’s hard to be reflective when you’re running at 250 percent, day after day, all day. This process requires patience, something that most ADHDers aren’t exactly known for.
So to summarize, step one of tackling automatic thoughts is identifying what they are in the first place, by first noticing their associated emotions.
Step 2: Recognizing cognitive distortions
Once you have identified an automatic thought (exciting!) the next step is naming what “cognitive distortion” it is. Basically what that means is, these negative automatic thoughts aren’t real, they’re distortions of reality based on previous experiences and what other people have told us our entire lives (“you’re lazy”, “what a scatterbrain”, “pick up the pace!”).
CBT theory also calls these distortions “thinking traps”, and here they are, listed in no particular order. They’re all basically variations on the theme of self-sabotage, except pathologically internalized to the point where they feel like a part of our personalities. They’re not! You will probably recognize some or all of these.
All-or-nothing thinking! Otherwise known as perfectionism or black-or-white thinking. So basically, if something isn’t the absolute fucking best it could possibly be, it’s trash.
I used to drive myself crazy with this when I was in school. If I got anything less than an A, it would mean I was a complete failure. I was terrified of it, and would work and work and work on something until the absolute last possible minute before the deadline, and then guess what — I would somehow fuck up some technical aspect of the online submission and turn it in late anyway. This has happened to me so many times it’s embarrassing to even think about. But I would be so focused on an essay being the best essay that anyone had ever written, ever, that I would, oh, put it in the wrong file format, or get the deadline wrong and turn it in a day late, or realize at the last moment that I didn’t have the right link to submit it, or something like that. And I would freak out and feel like the world’s worst fuckup.
This is what perfectionism does.
Examples of all-or-nothing thoughts:
“If I don’t get an A on this, I’m a failure.”
“Professional [insert career choice]’s don’t make mistakes like this. I’m a fraud and I should quit.”
Overgeneralization! This is kind of a banal term for what in my opinion is almost magical thinking. CBT defines overgeneralization as a single negative event being interpreted as part of a pattern. In layperson’s terms, it means that every negative thing that happens to you is just one more sign that you are destined to never succeed, or be happy, ever.
Examples of overgeneralizing thoughts:
“I never get invited to anything” (she says, forgetting the five other invitations that she either said ‘no’ to, or accepted and then didn’t show up. But hey, yeah, not being invited to that one thing definitely means that everyone hate you).
“I didn’t get the job. I guess I’m just destined to do work I don’t enjoy.”
Selective attention! One single negative detail is honed in on with hyperfocus and used to torpedo an entire situation. Otherwise known as ruminating. Otherwise known as overthinking.
Disqualifying the positives! Yeah, kind of the inverse of the last one, where we think that positive feedback or experiences don’t count. Your friend said you look great in your new outfit? She’s obviously lying.
Personalization! When you think you’re the cause of some negative external thing that happens, because why wouldn’t it be?
Some of these don’t really need explanation, such as:
Catastrophizing!
Jumping to conclusions!
Mind-reading/fortune-telling!
“Should” statements!
This might seem like a lot at first, but I promise if you keep thinking about it and being aware of it, and practicing, you will start to immediately be able to catch a thought and think, “Whoop! I’m overgeneralizing. Cut it out!” Which brings us to the third and final step,
Step 3: Challenge the thought
The third step, once we’ve labeled the emotion and identified the automatic thought and what it is, is to challenge that thought with a new, shinier, better one. You do this by asking questions and looking at facts:
What is the evidence that this thought is true or not true?
Is there another explanation?
What actually makes the most sense here?
What’s the most realistic outcome based on facts now, not on the past?
And then, finally, you tell yourself a different, reasonable reaction, based on these questions.
Examples of challenging the automatic thought:
You flub something at work.
Your emotional reaction: Fear
Your automatic thought: “Welp, I’m fired.”
Cognitive distortion(s): All-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, fortune-telling.
Shiny new challenging thought (CBT calls this a ‘rational response’): “Okay, I messed up. But everyone messes up, and this will be forgotten by tomorrow. Plus, I usually do a good job, which is evidenced by the positive feedback that I usually get.”
Your partner forgets to bring home that super special snack you really really wanted.
Your emotional reaction: Anger
Your automatic thought: “They don’t care about me. I knew it.”
Cognitive distortion(s): Selective attention, mind-reading, jumping to conclusions.
New challenging thought: “My partner loves me and they do a lot to show me that. What is more possible is that they had a hectic day and they’re tired, so they decided to come straight home. Or they forgot. And that is fine.”
That’s what the process looks like. So when you practice this over and over, and recognizing automatic negative thoughts becomes habit, you will be able to tackle procrastination better, and spend less time distracting yourself from those thoughts.