Rhythms of Focus

ADHD medications can be extremely helpful, but it's important to understand it isn't a catch-all that fixes everything. While it can have positive benefits when it comes to keeping our attention on the task at hand, it can similarly keep our attention on activities that are less productive.
This isn't to say the medication isn't working — it is working, we have just given our attention to something that is more rewarding at the time.
This week's Rhythms of Focus podcast explores what ADHD medication does do and what it doesn't. I highlight a recent study done out of Washington University, observing brain scans of children and adults, and the results may be surprising.
We finish with a composition entitled, "Water Dance."

Transcript:
"Hmm, I wonder if this medication's working. Maybe it is. I've been at this game for about four hours, and the report's exactly where I left it. Eh, what gives?"
Another version of this is when a kind caregiver worries, "I'm not sure this med's working. He's not making good choices." That's another phrase I've heard.
In both of these scenes, the medication may well be doing its job. Something else is missing.
If the med is helping address arousal and attention, they're not the problem. Maybe the attention's fine, but it's gone to the wrong address.
The story we are handed
Many of us have heard this story about ADHD and medication, that the mind cannot pay attention, the pill seems to do something to guide that attention, and the rest should somehow follow.
Sometimes that gives us hope. Sometimes it applies pressure in the voice of a well-meaning relative asking whether they've taken their meds yet, as though that were the entire solution.
I prescribe these meds. I've watched them help people profoundly. And I have little patience for the voices that shame anyone for taking them, and nothing that I'll be saying here today argues against that.
But the story of what they do is important and should be considered, because when we treat meds as the only or even main solution, we give it a job it can't do, and then we blame ourselves when that job goes undone.
What the medications seem to do
This past December, researchers at Washington University published a study in the journal Cell. They examined brain scans from nearly 6,000 children, comparing those taking stimulant medications with those not.
They checked their findings against adults scanned before and after stimulants, and what they found might be surprising.
The meds showed little action on the brain's attention networks. They acted instead on systems of arousal and reward.
One of the researchers described stimulants as pre-rewarding the brain, letting us keep working at things that would not normally hold our interest.
Attention does improve, but it does so indirectly. One comment I came across online put it this way: "It's like it untangles the knot in the headphones of my brain just enough that I can actually hear the music of my thoughts, and the melody properly heard, allows me to dance." I love that comment.
In this case, the medication untangles, but the hearing and the dancing are something else
Resting in a focus
I often like to think of the wandering mind, the ADHD mind, as one of great power. It's like having a race car.
But you put that car on the city streets, it's gonna have some troubles. It needs something to do.
Medication gives it that stimulation, much as a fidget does. The mind can then engage without seeking more. And for those of us with wandering minds, pushing against distraction can be exhausting. It can feel like this chronic muscle clench held all day, every day against a current that never lets up.
Medications then relieve that clench. The energy that goes everywhere settles enough for the mind to rest in some focus rather than being dragged back to one over and over.
There may well be truth in the feeling that we can finally think. That rest is important. A mind that's not spending itself on the fight has something left over.
What the medication cannot decide
But resting in a focus is not the same as choosing one. Consider playing a game at 1:00 in the morning. If the medication works by pre-rewarding whatever's in front of us, then it has no opinion about what's in front of us. The game qualifies. The report qualifies. The medication makes the staying easier either way.
It has nothing to say about the leaving or about what deserved our attention in the first place.
So the hyperfocus that consumes an evening is not the medication failing. The medication's working. What's missing is not attention so much as it is decision and meaning.
We decide our paths forward. We create meaning. The medication does neither of those. This is the piece the simple story leaves out. Medication can grant the wandering mind a certain type of rest. What we do within that rest, which work we meet, which people, which hours, remains entirely our own.
When decision and meaning go missing, the temptation is to adjust the dose.
But reaching for medications to fill that space tends to find only more side effects.
The pill also says something
There's one more layer. Twenty years ago, I wrote a post called Medication and Its Meanings back when my practice was young.
A medication carries a message alongside its chemistry. Taken from someone who we feel understands us, let's say a child receiving it from a caregiver who sees them, the daily pill can say, "Hey, someone cares about me." They're worth tending.
But if it's handed down as this verdict, the very same pill can say, "Ah, there's something wrong with me, something that can't be understood or I can't work with," and it can arrive feeling like a punishment.
It's the same med, but a different message, and that message is important because it can shape identity.
20 years later, neuroscience seems to have come around to half of this at least. The chemistry turns out to be about reward and rest rather than attention. The meaning, though, is not in the pill.
That comes from ourselves and the people around us.
A takeaway
So as a takeaway, medication can help ease that clenching muscle. It can allow us to better rest in attention, in a focus. That can be a big deal, and for many of us, it's the difference that makes so much more possible.
Beyond that rest come the deciding and the meaning, each of them tangled deeply with emotion, shaping it and being shaped by it.
There's no medication to address what matters to us, what to set down, what to return to. Those remain ours, and that can be difficult.
We can't delegate the hardest parts of being human. So when we approach some focus or find ourselves in something, we can ask, "Is this where I want my mind to be?" If yes, great.
If no, we can ask, "Where do I want my mind to be?" Simple questions, but oh so difficult to pause and ask them. And if we can, we can then assess, decide, and engage. Those are ours.

Music — water dance
The following piece of music is called Water Dance. It was recorded July 27th, 2026. Hope you enjoy it
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

Far too often we operate under the assumption that "pushing" ourselves and "forcing" ourselves to do something are the same thing. Both can definitely be difficult, but the end results are vastly different.
When we put effort into something, we have chosen to do it, we have agency over the decision.
When we force ourselves, however, we lose our agency and are usually left with a combination of guilt, shame, and anger.
Effort gives us the option to show up, meet ourselves exactly where we are, and build trust in ourselves over time to do things consistently.
Force injures our relationship with ourselves and creates a sense of distrust.
In today’s episode, we walk through the difference between effort and force, what each one leaves behind, and why the costlier one can feel like the virtuous one.

Previous Episode Referenced: Rhythms of Focus Episode 26 - The Trouble Isn't Interest, It's Force

Transcript
It's 9:00 at night. The report is maybe two-thirds done.My back is killing me.Well, maybe I'll just keep pushing.
There's something in that last sentence that we need to pay attention to. It's this idea of, am I failing at this because I still have to push?
Underneath that question is the assumption that many of us hold, which is that pushing and forcing are the same thing.
They're not, and the difference between them may be the difference between a practice that grows and one that wears us down.

Effort deepens. Force injures.
Effort is chosen exertion. It's our being moving through the work, a channel that deepens with use. That is why a practice running on effort tends to cost us less over time rather than more.
Force is exertion applied against a channel rather than through it. It hurts or injures our sense of confidence in ourselves. It's the push that arrives with shame behind it or the deadline that we're waiting for because we can't seem to engage work otherwise.
Effort deepens a channel, engages us and works with our sense of trust in ourselves, while force injures it. And injured often enough, we might even feel scarred.
Particularly with a long habit of these forced ways of working, we find trouble. This single forced session is this injury that, that mends.
Years of forcing leave the scar tissue, which is why some of us show up to work unable to feel trust in ourselves at all. So the practice we need to work with turns away from the injury, not exertion.
Hard work is hard. Hard work is emotional work. There are mornings that writing doesn't show up. It doesn't work with us for whatever reason.
And we can sit there for a while. We can be there in that visit. Being with the feeling itself is the labor, not distracting ourselves in the meantime, engaging that feeling to whatever degree feels caring to ourselves.
Then what is the working made of?

Why we keep reaching for it
We don't use force because we are weak or foolish. We use it because it has, in fact, worked well enough for us to use it again.
The deadline did get the report written. Shame did get us off the sofa. Have a listen to episode twenty-six for a fuller look at those methods and what each of them tells us about ourselves in that using.

Force feels virtuous
In this way, force half-works, but there's another way to approach things.
In the community recently this came up. Our culture tends to hand us these lines ready-made, like no pain, no gain, no fight, no glory, life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
She really worked hard on this. She deserves the promotion. Underneath these sits one motif, that exertion is value and breaking ourselves for a goal is a form of piety. To sacrifice is to be good.
But that distinction between force and exertion is important here. What that equation of sacrifice honors is not effort. Effort is being, moving through work, a channel that deepens it. Sometimes we even find ourselves more engaged and even enlivened.
What the equation wrongly honors is the damage. The claim is not, "I worked, therefore it counted." It was, "I, I was hurt, therefore it counted." And maybe this is why that voice in the back of mind says, "This is unhealthy," it feels faint. It's not competing with a preference, it's competing with a virtue.
We can be mid-session aware that other matters are going untended. We've not gotten up in hours. We register this, if at all, at the edge of attention, and we don't stop.

The absolution
For those of us who spend a good deal of the week in shiny distractions or on the sofa with the project sitting untouched across the room, those times of pain offer absolution, if you will.
The forced session is not only productive, it seems to redeem the days that weren't. You know, it's, "This is unhealthy, but look at me. Look at how hard I'm working now."
Force now seems to arrive as this cure for the shame that force created in the first place. Force then becomes hard to put down, again, because it half works.
It's hard to want to put down something because setting it down can feel like we're giving up on being good. Any turn away from force has to answer both. Showing that force costs more than it delivers is not enough on its own.
We also have to address the sense that the cost was the point, that we seem to be drawing meaning from the pain. None of this says that losses don't matter.

Where the loss actually comes from
They do. It's a matter of seeing where that loss comes from. The word decide carries cut inside it, from decidere or decidere. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it. It means to cut off.
Every decision cuts, and something is always either lost or risked as we cut. Choose to play the piano this evening and not the book.
We take this project and not that one. But the loss is the residue of reaching for something. It exists only because we were engaged with something else, something we wanted. Somewhere along the way, the two got turned around and the residue, the sacrifice, became evidence of the worth. A needless cut is still a cut.

A takeaway
So maybe here's the takeaway.
When the work is hard, and often it is, this changes the question we ask. Not how do I push harder, but whether there's a better way, something that engages the emotions of care and play rather than anger, anxiety, or shame.
That framing, I think, tends to make it move better. The smaller version for the moment itself is the single question is, "Am I moving through this work or against myself?"
And if the answer is against, there's somewhere to go. We use that visit approach, that smaller door back in. We show up, be there, engage the feelings, and then decide.
We may not always be able to tell, and that's fine, but consider that after effort, we tend to be able to come back. And after force, coming back tends to be harder.
It's not always true. This is not a clear, uh, sort of division, but I think there's something to that.
Sometimes it takes days to show or weeks to show. Some part of us remembers, and the returning is where we can read it. So it's not that we stop working hard engaging the emotions. It's that we stop using caustic fuels.

Music — Ascend
Today's piece is called Ascend. It's recorded April 24th, 2026. I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to/Download Rhythms of Focus Podcast Episode 76: No Pain, No Gain, and the Wandering Mind
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

Comparison can not only be the thief of joy, it can also be the bearer of guilt, shame, and inadequacy. For those of us with wandering minds, ADHD, and the like, it's easy to feel like running away from things our minds aren't instant experts at.
But, much like someone using weights for the first time needs to start small and build up towards heavier pursuits, a wandering mind doesn't need to carry the full load of any task in the moment.
If we can break a task down to meet us exactly where we are at and then trust our future self to come back to it later, we are much closer to completing what had once felt insurmountable.
This week we focus on agency, showing up for ourselves, and building trust within ourselves over time.
Episode Referenced: Trust, Decay, and Retooling (ep. 58)

Transcript:

Maybe others can do it, that trick, that hack, that system. I'm just not sure that I trust I could.
We said that fast, almost in passing, a thought that just goes through and moves on. But there's something in that way of thinking and that way of considering ourselves that's worth slowing down to pay attention to.

The Run From Failure
It can be all too easy to feel defeated before we even start. We read about that new hack, some trick, some tip. Maybe we try it. A few days later, we lose it. Throw ourselves against the wall. Nothing seems to stick.
Wallowing in whatever comes, running on whim, on deadlines, we stay at the mercy of the seas, hardly sailing on our own terms.
Until that next idea comes by, and maybe that one will work. So we harness that new spark of interest and go with that, and go fast and go hard. Can't let that seemingly negative energy of past failures catch up to us.
We run as fast as we can, hoping that maybe, just maybe, we'll cross some horizon into the place where things finally click.
We can do what we wanna do, do it on our own time without guilt, be on top of what matters, engaged when and where we are needed. That promised land. Ha. Maybe this time I'll get there.
And of course, we find that it doesn't exist, except that it seems to for others. So defeated again, we wonder, why can't we get there ourselves?

What Trust Actually Is
There's trouble hiding in this cycle. It's the run itself, the run from previous failures, that can create troubles. We can look at that distrust of ourselves with disgust and lose sight of how important that feeling of distrust itself is, and how much we need it to carry ourselves forward.
Trust is this developing sense that something will keep behaving as it has been such that we can rely on it.
It's vital. It's the thing we build. It's what makes our worlds. It's the very land we're seeking, that sense that we can trust ourselves and trust ourselves across time.
Trust is not willed into being. It's a feeling grown from experience. In a conversation on trust, decay, and retooling with Michael Porter in an earlier episode, trust turned out to be something that we tend, something we rebuild rather than something we simply have.
It can grow, it can strengthen, much like a muscle.

Starting Where We Can Lift
When we lift weights, we don't begin at three hundred pounds. That leads to injury, and that's what we do to ourselves when we ignore our current state of trust and dive straight into the next great idea.
But what if instead we started with ten pounds?
Maybe do three sets of six. That's fine. We sense it. Where are we now? Ah, I can do this. And over a few days, it gets easier. We might even find we've got some energy to spare.
Now maybe we do three sets of seven. Hold there for a while. At some point, we're doing three sets of twelve, and we're ready to add weight.
Go up five percent, ten percent. Drop back to three sets of six and begin again.
Beginning with where we are doing this helps us build the muscles from where they are.
Now, that small return teaches us something, about the mind caught in the pull of the moment, something the mind finds hard to believe.
Setting Things Down
We can put a thing down and pick it up later because the moment is singular. We can only do one thing at a time while the waves of the moment crash and carry us here and now.
To do anything well, we need to be able to set other things aside. That setting aside is a kind of message in a bottle to our future self.
It says, "Can you pick this up for me? I can't do it now." It asks us to trust that whoever finds will pick that up, that future self, decide with their own agency whether it's good to do, and in that deciding, honor and care for the self who sent it.
What I'm talking about here is being able to send an invitation to our future selves and say, "Hey, can you make a visit here?"
If they can do that, they can pick up with where we left off and then maybe send another invitation going forward. Doing that strengthens this muscle over time. It's a tall order. At the beginning, there is no trust. There's only that 10 pounds and a sense that we can maybe lift it
Distrust as Messenger
So we hold on to that distrust because that feeling itself is important.
Emotion is a messenger. If we don't listen to it, we risk injuring ourselves. Maybe 10 pounds is too much. Maybe we don't set that thing for tomorrow. Maybe it's not a visit, maybe it's a consideration. Maybe it's for an hour from now, 10 minutes from now.
Listening doesn't mean we only do whatever the feeling says. Being tired doesn't mean we only crash onto the couch. We might instead make a small visit to the work while we're tired, feeling the exhaustion there fully as we maybe nudge something forward, resting in that tension itself. Sometimes the, the session is a slog, goes nowhere.
A Trust We Garden
Sometimes a wave forms slow. Sometimes it gets fast. Even when nothing seems to happen, that visit can be the node that carries momentum from one session into the next.
In that practice of listening, , the distrust can begin to shift. Oh, I can continue a thing. Ideas form between sessions. I can put something down and pick it up later.
That land of trust, that growing confidence to carry ideas across our past, present, and future selves, that place of agency turns out to be something we garden, grown over time.
So here's a small rep to try. Pick one thing you don't quite trust yourself with yet and ask what, what is its ten-pound version? Maybe its five-pound version. Small enough that you sense, "I think this is right there. This is about where I can do it." And return to that version a few times across a few days before you add any weight.
Maybe it's about the dishes, maybe it's about a report you have to write, maybe it's whatever it happens to be. Alongside that rep, have a reflection. Consider the things you already trust yourself to do, the ones you don't, and of the ones you trust, ask, "What is it that I do trust here? How did that come to be?"
Of the ones you don't, ask, "What do I not trust yet? What small risk could I take to grow it?" We begin with where we are and move from there.

Music — Seeing the Tunnel
Today's piece is called Seeing the Tunnel. I hope you enjoy it.
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw

For those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like, coming up against the feelings of guilt, shame, and frustration at being unable to get our work done can feel like torture.
This can lead to anxiety and the urge to run away entirely.
Instead, if we sit with these hard feelings to examine where they may be coming from, we give ourselves the opportunity to name it, and give it a tangible presense rather than allowing it to be a mysterious force we are up against.
Pausing with this fear then brings with it the possibility that the emotion is our mind's attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.
If we can have the bravery to sit with our fears and combine it with the care of giving ourselves space, we are often more receptive to the possibilities which allow us to move forward.
And even if we say, "This is all I can do for now," we can invite a future self to return.

Transcript
I should know this by now. I should be able to do this by now.
Maybe I'm sitting at the piano, the spreadsheet, the page of whatever report. Somehow as this work sits in front of us, this tiredness appears, and we might wonder, maybe I'm just not able.
Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe I'm not confident enough.
There's that moment where the work stops making sense, and the mind reaches for some verdict about ourselves in that. That's where I wanna look at it right now. There's that feeling of tiredness, of bleakness, of confusion, a sense of not getting it, and it can happen anywhere.
Recently I'd been playing at the piano. I was trying to understand some jazz chords. Symbols are right there in front of me. I know what they mean. Still, something stalls. There's this cloud that forms, hard for me to memorize, hard for me to know what goes where and when, and somehow it's just not coming to mind.
Pushing through, using force often begins with that word of "should."
I should get this. I'm not smart enough. I'm not capable enough. We're reading the emotion of confusion, or whatever it is, some negative feeling, as evidence of our own ineptitude.
A shift, and the practice of it
There is a way through, and it has a couple of parts that are hard to separate. A shift in how we hold the moment and the practice of that shift over time.
What do I mean?
The change of perspective is a change of how we look at something. We often hear this in a simple phrase like, "Don't worry about it."
But a shift of perspective cannot be done by dissociation. Don't worry about it doesn't exactly work. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. We can't simply leave the original perspective behind. There's history behind it, and therefore emotion, which can't be argued with.
We don't simply adopt a new view and drop the one that hurts. Instead, the practice is to hold both at once, the old sense and the possibility of the new side by side.
This is one of those strengths of the psychoanalytic approach, for example. There we practice following associations. We come to a recognition that conflicting perspectives can be held at the same time.
Nothing has to be banished for a new idea to show up. And then over time, one may form over the other.
So we begin often by asking how we feel about the story we're telling ourselves. That asking itself can create a space of observation, an area a little bit freer of that belief's influence, even in the act of acknowledging it.
That sense of, "Oh, this means I'm dumb." Okay, how do I feel about that idea, that thing that comes to mind? Well, I don't like it, or I'm upset about it, or whatever it is, but it's there.
The pause initiates that process, pausing with the emotion, with the pain, with the fear. That space then holds a possibility that the emotion is the mind's own attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.
It may not be telling us in the best possible way, but it's saying something. Confusion, at least in this way, is not inherently negative. The first step is to simply stay with it and to notice that the negative charge is something we have added in some way.
The shove
What turns the emotions negative beyond the perspective is that shove, is it's that I have to study this, the test is tomorrow.
When we cut corners in that memorization and bypass the play that would have otherwise let that understanding settle in, we leave the session without having understood.
We lose the signal that confusion could have given us. Further, we also deepen the sense that we cannot do things deliberately, that we must rely on these harsh measures against ourselves.
Instead, resting our attention on the emotion, on the confusion, or any other negative sense, we can ask, "What is confusing about this?"
An answer may or may not come. But more importantly, in that pause, in that waiting with that feeling, we've practiced bravery.
What makes it bravery
All right, what makes that bravery? There's this idea I keep returning to from a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. "Anxiety," he says, "has no object." It's this cloud.
Meanwhile, fear has an object, something that can be faced.
Much of courage is the slow work of turning the cloud into an object, naming the thing so it can be met, turning the anxiety into a fear.
When we stay with the confusion, perhaps worried about what it might mean to us, and ask what exactly is confusing about it, we're doing that. We're letting the fog crystallize into something we can look at.
We remained with the sense that we do not know. We stayed with the confusion as it went on, being tangled up with the old belief that we're somehow dumb or otherwise.
Were we to shove ourselves through or bolt off to find something shinier somewhere else, something on fire somewhere else, we would have lost that chance.
That pause enabled the practice of bravery.
The harder part is that even while staying with this thing that we fear we cannot do, we may still discover that we cannot.
We may not understand it. We may still be just as confused as we began, if not worse.
Injured this way can be terribly hard to hold on to a larger possibility, which is that I can't do this now, but maybe it's just about now. Maybe it's just about not today.
That revisit again and again sometimes helps work it through. But it's hard to hold on to that perspective. Even so, it may never come to us, and we don't know.
Tempering bravery with care
That too is what makes this bravery. There's real fear. Fear is not always unfounded. So we temper our bravery with care.
A sword is made out of steel. Steel that's only hardened, quenched, and made as hard as it can be is brittle and shatters at that first real blow.
Tempering is a gentle heat afterwards, and it trades a little of that hardness for toughness, so the blade can flex under a strike and survive it.
Care is that gentle heat. Bravery alone, untempered, is hard, brittle, tends to shatter on exactly the day it meets real resistance, the day we find the fear was founded. But tempered with care, it can bend and hold.
So we can ask ourselves, to what degree does staying here actually serve me?
I'll give you another example. When we lift weights, we don't do well by trying to lift the most we possibly can. That's how we injure ourselves. Muscle grows faster than bone and tendon. If we just try to lift as much as we can, something will break somewhere.
We attend instead to the sensations of the movement, the good and bad pain that we can feel, a rough division between what builds us and what harms us.
The same principle holds in our work. This bravery and care becoming courage.
When care itself holds us back
Care is not an unmitigated good. I did a episode on this some time ago.
Overzealous, it can hold us back from the work. We procrastinate. We avoid on impulse. Maybe we tell ourselves we are waiting for better conditions or that things must be just right before we begin.
With this hypertrophied sense of care, we may avoid the work entirely. And bravery without care is reckless.
While care without bravery can lead to stagnation. Bringing them together, bravery and care, courage.
Simple, but not easy
The practice is simple and of course, not easy. Simplicity is this: when we run into the difficult sense inside work, the confusion, the overwhelm, the loss, we can pause and ask what exactly is confusing, overwhelming, and raging about it.
Somewhere in there, we may be able to shrink our vision, slow ourselves down, find something smaller that we can hold onto, maybe even find some ease, and maybe face that question, is this all I can do?
Back at the piano, the chord chart sits in front of me, C minor seven, F seven, B-flat major seven, two, five, one, rootless chords.
How do I ever remember these formations? I don't know how to do this. How does anyone know how to do this?
I feel that strain. My mind goes blank. I could stay and push, but then frustration builds. Trouble builds in that push.
Try to give ourselves the hollow reassurance that belief alone would carry us. I can make it through if I only believe enough.
No, I don't have that belief. Force is hollow. Instead, I face it with that...

I came across a social media post recently that made me laugh. "I'm so sorry," it said, "I can't do the laundry, I just don't have the dopamine." I laughed because it rang so true.
And while it's funny, things also need to get done, so we don't laugh ourselves into tears.
In today’s episode, we look at what “not having the dopamine” really points to, and how we might begin anyway. Not by forcing a start, but by showing up and, for a breath, simply being.
#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #ExecutiveFunction
References:
Dr. William Dodson, the interest-based nervous system: https://www.additudemag.com/secrets-of-the-adhd-brain/
Mesolimbic pathway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesolimbic_pathway

Transcript

Sorry, I can't do the laundry. I just don't have the dopamine.
I saw this post on Instagram. It was funny. I laughed. It's this honesty that makes something real.
We can join in with more examples, more laughter. It's great. I love that, "I can't do the laundry. I don't have the dopamine."
Laughter's good medicine, but past a certain dose, any medicine can be a poison. We have to be cautious because we can fall together into this sort of celebration of helplessness. Not because any of us are weak, but because the joke becomes the whole conversation, and then it leaves us where we began.
Those of us with wandering minds can have real difficulties, and they can be hard for others to understand. But I think it's vital that when the laughter fades, we need to be able to ask, "What, what can we do from here?"
What do we do when we don't have the dopamine? We might even use science against ourselves, naming dopamine as the prime mover of a reward system deep in the brain.
And because it's this chemical that we can't touch with our fingers, we might conclude that the only access we have is through medication or some trickery or something outside of our own sense of agency.
Another path might be reaching for a more psychological version of the same move. For example, we can invoke Dr. William Dodson's otherwise very helpful description of what tends to engage an ADHD mind, namely challenge, interest, novelty, urgency, and passion.
And then we can say, if none of these emotions are present, then like the missing dopamine, I suppose we are helpless.
This is that interest-based nervous system we explored in episode eight. It's real, it's a useful description, but the trouble is that conclusion that we draw from it.
Play and Its Cousin, Learning
Much of this, though, we can gather under the single idea of play and its close cousin, learning. Challenge, interest, novelty, passion, dopamine itself are all aspects of playful.
And, novelty is play reaching towards something new. Challenge is play testing itself against an edge. Interest and passion are play that has found something it cares for. Even urgency, at its best, is play with the stakes raised.
And the ADHD mind, in my experience, both of myself and as a clinician, often carries this powerful capacity of play.
And everything it represents, whether it's whimsy or discovery or deep engagement.
That play describes so much of what goes right when we're in flow, and so much of what is missing when we can't begin.
We looked at some of this before in episode seven as the cautions of dopamine and a lean toward mastery.
Not Buttons and Levers
So we need to be cautious not to reduce our brains to buttons and levers, this remnant and a metaphor of the industrial age.
We can point to a dopaminergic pathway called the mesolimbic pathway, and tie it to pleasure, to reward, then to drugs and sex and food as though that were all it were for.
But if we look experientially, where we actually have agency, we can notice that when we're engaged well, we're in flow. We're learning, at play. The motions of molecules and the firings of neurons from one nucleus to the next make a flow no less deep or nuanced than our climates and oceans.
We can see that the experience is not some on-off switch. We don't leap from, "I don't feel like it," to, "I feel like it," by some sudden revelation. There's a process we move through from one state to another.
Emotions Gather, Conditions Change
From our depths, emotions gather, ideas form. They crest in their own time on the surface.
We can't win arguments with an emotion, but we're also not helpless against ourselves.
Emotions shift and change with their conditions, and we do have the ability to change conditions. We can position ourselves to make those small transitions that might stir the mind.
The Visit
One way I often espouse to changing conditions is through the visit, in which we show up to a task, hard or not, and then simply be.
Whether it's laundry, a budget, a report, we bring the materials in front of us, move distractions aside, and for a few moments do nothing but be with it. We pause in the now.
We don't need to force ourselves to do anything, and it can seem strange to think of this as a unit of work. What good is it to do nothing?
Too often we privilege action. "Just start," we're told. But such advice can be corrosive, a repeated message that we cannot trust ourselves to decide and to act.
By being with the work, we're not doing nothing. We're meeting the emotions, the true ground from which our decisions are made, from which action of any real conviction is born.
Whether we begin in anxiety, shame, irritation, or more likely, a whole ecology of feeling, any real flow begins in being with those sensations.
In this way, we do the visit, which is we show up, be, and then decide.
The winds and waters of dopamine, of interest, of engagement, of whatever we choose to call them, may even begin to tickle the sails.
So consider as a takeaway, what's something that you don't have the dopamine for? Sometime today, somewhere before going to sleep, can you show up to it or bring it to you and then simply be, if only for a single deep breath?
You don't have to do it anywhere beyond any reality that says otherwise. And if you can do that, consider what's that like?
Music — Wind at Play
I end this week's episode with piece is called "Wind at Play" in C major, all the white keys, and in three-quarters time. Either of which just lends to that childhood play that I like to find. Not sure why, but it does. I hope you enjoy it.
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw