Me when the

[footlongdingledong]

rarely do i repost things and especially from shittr but this video is shutting down core partsof my mental processing i think

[awesomebutunpractical]

"He wouldn't say that" has a beautiful cousin, and her name is "That's Not What This Story is About".

[ctrl-shift-alt-9]

MAY 31ST IRON LUNG YOUTUBE MOVIES DIGITAL RELEASE ! ! !

[alphauke]

an angel on letterboxd just dropped a whole playlist of films free on youtube I was filled with so much love and light I had to share with you guys

[alphauke]

it also includes short films, animated movies, documentaries of every genre, full recordings of live performances. all spanning different decades from different countries. YOU DONT EVEN FUCKING KNOW

[anphivenas]

there are also websites like worldscinema, solidaritycinema, and rarefilmm hosting incredible obscure world cinema for free! and if you're more inclined towards the esoteric, there's also evilbjork's avant-garde canon playlist on youtube! also important to mention Maya S. Cade's incredible black film archive and the otherness archive, an obscure queer cinema archive! You could always be watching more films !

[meshugenist]

[dozydawn]

[adhd-vibes]

i'm telling you all right now. get bright sticky notes and a pen and write each individual task (or sub-task) on its own note and stick them somewhere you'll see clearly (a wall, a mirror, your front door). and then start ripping those bad boys off one by one as you accomplish them. my favorite to do list system ever. super visual, i can easily edit/add as i go, and i never misplace the list.

[thoughtfulrobot]

Not doing what I want to be doing, not doing what I need to be doing, but doing a secret third thing (absolutely jack squat)

[headlesspopcorn]

THIS. I will never shut up about this

I think this is possibly the best way I've ever seen it explained

@homunculus-argument @urgentkettle

[macaroni-induced-panicattack]

The internet has watered down ADHD to the silly hyperfixation disorder and like I genuinely wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, do you realize how awful it is to be laying in bed mentally kicking yourself over and over to just go do your work, you've done it before, it's easy, go DO IT, but the best you can do is doodle fictional characters all over it while you sit in your room and wait for someone to come in and scream at you to do your work, which just makes you not want to do it more. Like genuinely do you realize how awful that feels. You feel broken and worthless do you really think it's the quirky hyperactive fixation disorder because if so fuck you. Genuinely

[the-forest-library]

“No one had ADHD before the 1980s”

From O Pioneers! by Willa Cather published 1913:

[itslilyblog]

✨Daily ADHD hacks✨

From a postgraduate student in her 9th year since diagnosis

(aka things I do regularly that I don't think about anymore, but didn't know about when I was first diagnosed)

Analogue clocks

Put those guys everywhere. One of the best pieces of advice I found early on. Time seems actually real when I can watch it move around the clock! And visualise how long I have by the spaces on the clock face.

If you take medication, consider taking it with cranberry juice (or a cranberry juice mix).

This was a great piece of advice I got from an ADHD nurse (shoutout to Paul). It helps the medication last longer throughout the day!

On a similar note, try to avoid too much vitamin C right around the time you take your medication, as it can make it harder to absorb.

Write everything down.

You will not remember it.

YOU WILL NOT

(As in, you may remember many things, but the exact thing you need to know at the time may not be one of them. Save yourself)

Lists

I love lists.

When I was in the early stages of my recovery and everything felt like too much, I gave myself 3 things to do each day. Sometimes it was just like 1) get up 2) eat 3) read. But it gave me something to tick off and feel like I was going somewhere!

Consider using a diary.

This might not be for everyone, but for me, I really started to get the hang of scheduling things and actually getting my head around how much I could do in a day/week, and when things were happening when I started using a paper diary. Every year I get a 'Season's Greetings' set from one of my favourite kpop groups (whichever has the best diary/calendar setup that year), and that also helps because it adds the incentive of a special interest :)

Consider using a whiteboard monthly planner

I got one of these for the first time during my semester abroad in Korea when it felt like life was moving 200 times faster than it ever had for me and I had very little space to organise in. It was amazing, I could make a note on each day if anything was happening and then refer to my diary for details if needed, and see at a glance what was happening. Also good for pacing because I could see if I was going to have a busy week and try to plan accordingly! I started off with printable ones but now prefer the whiteboard kind because I can keep changing/updating it and it looks less cluttered.

A cute pill case(s)

If you take medication, this is really helpful. I make it a habit now to restock my pill cases at the start of each week (on a Sunday for me). I have 2 pill cases, one that's more travel friendly which holds a weeks' worth of lunchtime doses and lives in my backpack, and a traditional style dossette box that holds a weeks' worth of breakfast medication and lives on the table next to where I eat my breakfast. Since using this system with these particular cases, I haven't been caught short and haven't lost them, which is a minor miracle!

Find your thing

Try to find or think of something that always lifts your mood, even that little bit. For me, it's usually upbeat music. I set my alarm music as my favourite energising songs, and if I'm having a slow morning I like to listen to a morning playlist of similar songs while I get ready. I also play music in the car and it helps me chill out at the start of my day. Personally, I think certain kinds of music can be magic for ADHD brains, but this is just my opinion!

Keep moving

This isn't always straightforward for everyone (and certainly isn't for me), and as much as I would ideally do something energetic regularly, it doesn't always work out that way (if you can do something like martial arts, or dance, that would probably be amazing!) but I definitely find that if I've had a bad pain week and moved less, I feel more restless. When this happens, my go-to is usually just a simple stretching routine. It really helps to ground me and feel more aware of where I am. I still do love higher-energy movement, though, and fit it in when I can!

Be kind to yourself!

This isn't easy, but try to remember that you can't get it right 100% of the time, and it's okay to have bad days. Ask for help when you need it, be patient with yourself, and know that it takes time to understand your needs and build habits around them. You got this 💖

Let me know if you're interested in any more. I might post another of these or write a little more in-depth about some of the points.

[desultory-suggestions]

You are not a bad person for struggling with executive dysfunction. Even if it goes on for days or weeks at a time! Even if it prevents you from doing things that are very important! Even if you can’t explain why you cannot complete or stay on a task! Even if it contributes to impulsive behavior! Learning to manage executive dysfunction is about improving your life and health, not punishing you for a personal moral failure. Be kind to your mind and remember you are not alone.

[reasonsforhope]

Workbooks to improve executive functioning

Since the post I made last night about improving executive functioning was so popular, I figured I should pull these out of my comments and give them their own post, in case it's helpful for people.

I have worked with the publishers of all of the books linked below and can vouch for their psychology books. The publisher of most of them, New Harbinger, is an extremely credible evidence-based psychology publisher.

Obvious disclaimer that everyone's brain is different and what works for someone else may not work for you.

Is there evidence that executive functioning can be improved? Yes. This book appears to be a very thorough overview of the field, and contains both advocates and detractors of cognitive training, for a balanced perspective. From the table of contents, I would really recommend jumping straight to Part 3: Developmental Perspectives for executive functioning (EF) writ large.

Certain therapy modalities are specifically designed for skill-building in areas like impulsivity, decision-making, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility, all of which are EF skills or very dependent on EF skills. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is probably the best field to look at for these - skill-building in those areas is its core goal.

Some DBT workbooks:

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Teens

There are also a lot of workbooks for ADHD that are sometimes more broad but also can help with executive functioning:

The Adult ADHD and Anxiety Workbook: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Skills to Manage Stress, Find Focus, and Reclaim Your Life

The CBT Workbook for Adult ADHD: Evidence-Based Exercises to Improve Your Focus, Productivity, and Wellbeing

The Neurodivergence Skills Workbook for Autism and ADHD

General executive functioning workbooks:

The Executive Functioning Workbook for Teens

Executive Functioning Workbook for Adults: Exercises to Help You Get Organized, Stay Focused, and Achieve Your Goals

Hope these are helpful to someone!!

[lunellum]

Let me give you, the internet, and mostly myself, some executive function advice.

Sometimes, when you find yourself somehow unable to do a thing you need or want to do, one issue might be that your brain has subconsciously tacked on extra tasks, and those tasks are making the whole thing too overwhelming!

Tl;dr: don't do that!

For example, I like to track the books I read and I've been meaning to add a few books I've recently finished. But my brain has added that I should also write a review, and the exact dates I read them (which I can't even remember) and oh by the way I should finish moving my stuff over to storygraph and before I know it that 1 task has turned into 4! And my executive functioning says no.

In fact, while I was getting the idea to write this post, my brain went "wouldn't it be nice to also write a post about y and tag them all properly and go back through my posts and find all mental health posts and tag those too" and wouldn't you know it. 4 tasks.

Discard those extra tasks. Don't even write them down. They don't matter. Strip it down to the 1 task you started with and only do that.

Sure, you won't have achieved some theoretical better end result but that end result was never gonna happen anyway. It was paralysing you from getting the initial task done. And maybe once that initial task is done, you can get to one (1! not 4!) additional task. Later. Not now.

Half-assing is better than no-assing.

[biblicallyaccuratemoth]

If you’re like me sometimes you become trapped inside yourself, sitting doing nothing while internally screaming about all the shit on your to-do list, watching the hours fly by as your obligations prevent you from relaxing but your body just refuses to start moving

Lately whenever this happens and I find myself unmoving and wailing in my brain at my lack of productivity, I try to stop the internal screaming of, “I NEED to do X,” and instead I, calmly, say to myself, “I want to do X.”

The reason for wanting to do X depends. I want to draw? I want to draw because it makes me happy! I want to clean? I want to clean because tomorrow I’ll be so happy with my past self for being so nice and cleaning! I want to run that errand I’ve been putting off? I want to do that because it’ll be nice to not stress about it! I tell myself that, and it makes the act of beginning seem less impossible

I don’t know why but this works. It really works for me.

[thebibliosphere]

Executive dysfunction is such a mother fucker.

I've been putting off organizing the pantry for almost six months because it seemed so daunting, but today I woke up feeling okay-ish energy-wise and decided I could at least try and empty it today.

Reader, not only did I empty it, but I also cleaned and organized it the way I've been meaning to do for months—in an hour.

Was it an hour of work split into smaller, fifteen-minute increments so I could sit on the floor and rest while my heart tried to escape my chest? Oh, for sure. But knowing that it would have taken an able-bodied person forty minutes to an hour, tops, is infuriating.

Like, what do you mean my brain told me this was several days' worth of work, and it took an hour? What do you mean?!