#137: How to flourish as an ADHD academic
If you're an academic with ADHD, you're probably battle-hardened from years spent struggling to do things that come easily to your colleagues: focus, resist distractions, tame exciting but messy ideas into nice coherent research papers. But no matter how good you've got at finding ways to get the work done, you're still at a disadvantage. The rules for How To Get Things Done were written for people who don't have ADHD. Living by those rules is harder for you than for other people, and it leaves you with a demoralising sense of being second-rate. My friend, it doesn't need to be like this. You can rewrite the rules to allow you to play to your strengths instead of managing your weaknesses. Your card-carrying academic ADHD imperfectionist buddy is here to set you on the right tracks.
Episode transcript:
Stop trying to focus. Seriously.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey everyone! Welcome back, my friend. How are you doing? I’ve come up to my absolutely sweltering little office to record this, just for you. Honestly, my office is out of bounds while we’re dealing (ineptly) with the hot weather here in the UK. I’ve been working downstairs in front of the fan with my laptop, peering at the little screen, which is maybe a quarter the size of the one upstairs. At least I’m near to the snacks. And the cats. They’re a bit put out by my presence in their zone. They like it when I pay the mortgage, give them their food, and then get out of their sight. Not really. I tend to spread a variety of notebooks and printouts around me while I’m working, so that means a wider choice of reading material to obstruct.
Anyway, I’m here today to talk to you about what it’s like trying to do research with ADHD. Trying to do any focused work with ADHD really. If you don’t have ADHD, and you don’t suspect you might - honestly though is there anyone left in that category these days? - stay tuned, because I’m going to be talking about some of the potentially unhelpful ideas we’re fed about what it’s like to do focused work, and you might find there’s something valuable in there for you too.
Now, I’ve talked about having ADHD on this podcast before, including all the way back in episode #40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book. I’ve had emails from people with ADHD in response to the podcast, saying things like ‘I feel seen’, and sharing their own experiences with ADHD. I also have quite a few coaching clients with ADHD who tell me that they want to be coached by me because I talk about having ADHD. I’m delighted to see them but I always want to emphasise that I don’t actually have any official training in helping people with ADHD. I know what it’s like for me, of course. And over time, speaking with clients and colleagues with ADHD, I’ve got a sense of other people’s struggles, too, and specifically a sense of what it’s like to be an academic with ADHD. The difficulty people have in getting themselves to sit there and bloody write, and all the guilt and shame and anxiety that result when things don’t go to plan. All that guilt and shame and anxiety can be especially painful if you don’t have a diagnosis, because without the ADHD label, it’s tempting to default to explaining the difficulties with getting things done in terms of just being a crappy person. Some of us continue to do that even after a diagnosis, actually. We wonder whether the diagnosis was accurate. Maybe we tricked the psychiatrist who diagnosed us, or maybe they just felt sorry for us, or maybe the whole thing is made-up nonsense anyway. So, even getting a diagnosis isn’t a simple fix, unfortunately. Same with the meds. I’ve mentioned before on the podcast that I gave those a go, but then stopped. Getting the dose high enough to help with focus ramped up my anxiety, and in any case, by the time I got diagnosed in 2019, my main problem wasn’t the inattention but all the stuff downstream of it: the guilt, shame, self-loathing, anxiety, distrust of my ability to do stuff, and so on. When I realised that meds were not a good option for me, I made changes that have helped: I stopped drinking alcohol, prioritised sleep, started doing a lot of exercise - all things that work very well for me, as a boring solitary introvert whose ideal Friday night involves hanging out with my cats and my knitting and being in bed with a spooky podcast by 10pm, but those changes are probably not appealing to everyone.
All that stuff helps, but it’s not a magic cure. I still feel that urge, ten seconds after I open the Word document I’m meant to be adding words to, to go and do literally anything else. That urge used to be completely mysterious to me - I just experienced it as a force pushing me away from what I’m supposed to be doing, and it was near impossible to resist. Unpicking the layers of shame and anxiety and fear that have pervaded my relationship with writing over the years has helped me understand it a bit better, but I’m still learning how best to get things done. Over time, and especially through talking to other people (mainly academics) with ADHD I’ve come to realise that one of the biggest things we struggle with is this: our ideas about what it’s like to do focused work successfully are shaped by what it’s like for people without ADHD to do focused work. Even for those of us who have made accommodations to enable us to get stuff done. Especially for those of us who have made accommodations, actually. Because usually those accommodations are guided by the gold standard of what it’s like for non-ADHD people. Finding accommodations often means finding ways for you, with your crappy flawed brain, to be more like those better people who don’t need the accommodations. If that’s the way you view things, then it’s always going to be harder work for you than for those other people. You’re always going to feel like you’re running just to stand still - consciously and effortfully finding ways to do things that come naturally to other people. You’re probably acutely aware of the fact that you’re having to do this. Often, it’s impossible to ignore. That colleague who will just sit there, laser focused, writing for hours while you can’t manage a few minutes. Those people who seem to be able just to relax into their work and get it done, instead of approaching it like a tornado of anxiety, the way you do. You wish you were like them, and the reason you’re not like them is because they can do things that you can’t: focus, stay on topic, apply bum to seat and get the words down. You can almost hear their careers surging ahead, can’t you, while you’re left standing there? You all start the race from the same point, but everyone else is driving a Formula 1 car and you’re squeaking along on a child’s tricycle with a wonky wheel. That’s what it’s like when you try to approach your work the way they do.
What might be less obvious to you is that you’re able to do things that they can’t. There are things that come easily to you that don’t come easily to them. Those things are actually huge assets - or they would be if you realised how valuable they are and learnt how to approach things in a way that’s tailored to helping someone like you to flourish, rather than helping you be more like other people. So, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I want to show you a way to lean in to your strengths and get stuff done in a way that doesn’t involve playing catch-up with your non-ADHD colleagues.
Let’s start with the benefits that you get, if you’re an academic with ADHD. You’re creative; you’re great at coming up with interesting ideas; you’re great at seeing, all at once, the multiple directions you can take things; you’re great at starting interesting new projects; you’re even great at focusing for long periods of time, as long as you allow your focus to follow your interest, which doesn’t always make for spending your time productively. What you’re not so great at is following through: turning those great ideas into completed projects, which basically involves taking that excited explosion of multicoloured brain confetti and bringing structure and order to it, so that it becomes a narrative, something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a coherent way of getting from one to the other to the other. At least, that’s what you think you’re not so great at, because the way you approach it involves trying to force your attention in a direction it doesn’t want to go.
I’m not so sure about that, these days. I mean, sure, those of us with ADHD have a reputation for being able to come up with the ideas and then losing interest in developing them into a useful format like a research paper, or losing the will to live, or both. But as I started to pay attention to the experience of trying to sit down and get on with the work - the writing project - I noticed that there’s more to the struggle than simply wanting to get away, wanting to do anything but write. You might have noticed it too, if you have ADHD. There’s also a perfectionistic sense of ‘I can’t bear to do it because I’m worried that I might do it wrong’. Perfectionism, eh? Those nasty, unrealistic high standards. That binary, ‘either it’s perfect or it’s wrong’ framing. We all struggle with perfectionism - that’s why I’m here, doing this podcast. But in the case of people who have ADHD, I think that some of that perfectionism has its roots in something a bit more concrete. It’s not just an abstract fear of doing anything imperfect (although it might be that too), it’s also the result of actually being told that we were doing it wrong. Many of us have memories of that, being told that the way we tried to approach projects - the way that came naturally to us - was wrong. We heard things like, ‘Don’t just launch into it, feet first!’ and ‘Woah, slow down!’ and ‘Don’t rush! Don’t get carried away!’ and ‘Take a moment to think about the approach before you dive in!’ and ‘Hang on, you haven’t finished this part properly yet - why are you moving on to that other thing?’ Those are things that we heard from often well-intentioned people when we were excited and enthusiastic to get started on a project that interested us, whether that was a school project or something creative we were doing at home or a new sporting adventure. We were, in the view of those around us, getting ahead of ourselves, and those bits of cautionary advice often came from people who didn’t want us to waste our time and spoil things. I don’t want to claim that that advice was devoid of value. But I do think that, if you hear that advice again and again and again, the result is that you start to question and eventually distrust your way of doing things. Your enthusiasm and excitement and interest - all the things that make you interested in whatever the project is in the first place - come to seem dangerous. Slow down. Be less excited. Be rational. Think it through. Less multicoloured brain confetti, more linear, sober, black-and-white narrative. Less everything at once, more one thing after another. That’s the way adults do it. You’re not 5 years old any more. Be sensible.
So, where does that leave you, if you’re an academic with ADHD? Well, it means that when you try to make that shift from ‘I’ve got this great exciting idea for a new project!’ to ‘Ok, now I need to turn it into a research paper or a grant proposal’, you hit the brakes. That’s what you’ve been told to do, again and again. Don’t rush in. Slow down. ‘Slowing down’ means, basically, ‘approach it like someone who doesn’t have ADHD’, which isn’t your natural way of operating, and so you face the unsatisfying experience of taking your great idea and trying to move forward with it as a second-rate neurotypical person. BOR-RING, and also: how do you even do that?? You can’t just flip a switch to neurotypical mode. The best you can do is stare at the blank Word document on the screen in front of you and try to come up with something, while ignoring the fact that you’d do almost anything to get away. You’ve been taught to hold back, which means the resistance you feel now makes complete sense. How can you get started when you’re supposed to be holding back? It’s unfathomable. Time to fire up Google and look up what that one-hit-wonder pop star you liked when you were 12 years old is doing now.
The thing is, though, this is completely unnecessary, although it’s taken me many years and many conversations and many coaching sessions to realise it. You are 100% capable of making the connections, forming the narrative, finding a structure within the confetti explosion of ideas. You just need to learn how to do it on your own terms. You already probably do it all the time, just not on the topics you’re meant to be thinking about. Let’s stick with that example I mentioned a moment ago: you get distracted and you end up looking up that obscure pop star you liked when you were 12. Perhaps you go down a bit of a Google rabbit hole. You read about that person, about other people who were around at the same time, about parts of the cultural context you were completely unaware of at the time. Perhaps that pop star you liked is actually the parent of that actor you like, and you never realised before. Perhaps there was some scandal going on behind the scenes that you knew nothing about, but which is completely absorbing. You read and read. You lose an entire afternoon. You have a dream about it that night. The next morning, while you’re making coffee, you’re still thinking about it all: you’re making connections, filling in the gaps, deepening your understanding of that completely and utterly pointless little corner of decades-old popular culture. You got yourself into that state completely effortlessly, just by following your nose. You didn’t sit yourself down at your computer and think, ‘Right, I’m going to spend the next 10 hours researching this topic’ - it just … happened. Now, if you can just stop attacking yourself for how distractible you are for 30 seconds, think about what this shows. It shows that you’re capable of deep thought about a single topic. The sort of deep thought that you often think is beyond you. Just think about how far you could go if only you could get yourself to focus, not on long-lost pop stars, but on the research project you’re supposed to be thinking about!
That’s the big one, isn’t it? You probably realise already that you’re not incapable of focusing. It’s just that you’re not very good at choosing what to focus on. Focusing on the stuff that you’re supposed to be working on is something you need to force, if you manage it at all, and that’s exhausting. But, as I said, focusing on the stuff that you’re supposed to be working on is a task that you’ve learnt to approach like a neurotypical person, which is not what you are. What if you were to approach it differently, though? What if you were to approach it with the same sort of mindset that set you off down that Google rabbit hole of pointless nonsense? It’s not as if the interest is lacking. You were interested enough to choose your discipline and to come up with all those ideas for projects you struggle to finish. It’s following through that’s difficult - but it’s much less difficult if you approach it in a way that’s designed for you. Okay, so how do you do that? Well, what you don’t do is try to channel those laser-focused people you like to compare yourself with. So, don’t say to yourself, as I used to say to myself, and as many of the coaching clients I’ve seen over the years said to themselves: today’s the day, I’m going to be in the zone, no more procrastinating, I’m going to get it done, this latest productivity hack I’ve discovered is going to be the one, I can feel it. Finally, I’m going to be like that colleague. That’s not how someone like you is going to get something like this done, long term. Maybe you can manage it for a short period of time when there’s a deadline looming, but it’s not a sustainable strategy for you.
Instead, try this. Try ditching your thoughts about ‘focusing on X’, where X is your research project or whatever it is you’re battling with yourself to get done, and instead think in terms of ‘spending time with X’. When you set out to focus on X, you fail the moment you start thinking about something else, which can happen without you even realising, as I expect you’ve discovered already. That feels really disheartening. Nobody wants to feel like they’re failing, especially you, since you’re already worried about being left behind by those other people who you’re convinced are better than you are at all this. When you equate productivity with focus, you play to your weaknesses. You set yourself up to fail. But when the task is to spend time with X, all parts of you are welcome. If you sit there in front of the blank Word document, adding nothing and wondering how the hell you’re meant to take that tangle of ideas in your head and tame it into sentences and paragraphs, you’re working. If you’re trying to read that journal article and you reach the end of a paragraph and realise that you were thinking the whole time about what colour you should paint your living room and you’ve taken in absolutely nothing of what you’ve read, you’re working. If, when you do manage to think about your research project, your thoughts take the form of ‘I wonder if this?’ and ‘I wonder if that?’ but without coming up with anything concrete that you think is worth adding to the draft, you’re working. If, when you do write, you have a sneaky feeling that you’re going off on a million tangents at once, or that the ideas are coming faster than you can type, and you don’t have the mental discipline to stop what you’re doing right now and work out exactly which thoughts are relevant and which ones you ought to pursue, so instead you just sit there, bewildered, typing nothing at all, you’re working. The aim here is not to bring your attention to what you think you ought to be doing and keep it there, but instead just to steep yourself in the task without trying to force yourself to do it. The aim is to bring yourself to the task, sit in the same room with it. Your aim is not to detangle the mess in your head. It’s to hang out with it.
Wait a moment, though. You’re wondering: what about the final product? If you want to end up with a research paper, a chapter, a grant proposal, maybe even a book, hanging out with that mess in your head isn’t going to cut it. You can’t send that to a journal or a funding organisation. How do you get from what I’m suggesting - from spending time with your project - to the polished final draft? Am I really claiming that it’s possible to get there without doing any disciplined, focused, organisational work - the sort of work that doesn’t really come naturally to you?
No, I’m not claiming that. I’m not claiming that you can get away without any focused work. What I’m claiming is that that sort of work doesn’t have to be the main approach you take when you’re trying to get something done. Instead, it’s a strategy you can use in a targeted way at certain points in the project, when you need it. And it’s something that comes a lot more easily if you’ve been spending time with your project, in a relaxed and open-ended way, than if you’ve been trying to force it. Because if you emphasise spending time with the project, you get a lot of the organisation, categorisation, structuring, connection-making work done for free. People with ADHD have creative, pattern-seeking brains that are able to make insights and connections that other people may miss, but the way to realise those benefits is not to sit there and try to force them through superhuman feats of focus. For you, again, focus comes much more easily if it follows your interest. And the best way to stoke interest in your project is to spend time with it - unforced time that doesn’t come with demands or expectations that you’re ill-equipped to meet. You can spend time with your project and let your chaotic, fizzy brain do the rest. Trust the process and the connections and the insights will land in your lap when you’re not even trying - when you’re out on your bike or doing your laundry or lying in bed trying to fall asleep. If you do that, then when the time comes to sit down at your desk and do the focused task of whipping everything into shape and spinning your thoughts into a sensible narrative, things are much easier than your usual attempts to focus, for a few reasons. One is that, if you take the approach I’m suggesting, focus is just one of many strategies you draw on to get the thing done, and it’s something you do for a limited period of time. It’s not the central thing that’s holding everything together, the thing that you need to be doing all the time while you’re working, and without which you and your project fall apart. This makes the task of focusing much less ominous and demanding and exhausting, and it’s much less high-stakes, because you’re not viewing your difficulties with focus as evidence of your unworthiness. Another reason is that you’re not relying on forcing focus in order to come up with the important ideas and connections that make the project worthwhile. Focus is something you draw on after those ideas and connections start flowing. At that point, you know what you’re working with - you just have to give it some structure. And at that point, if you’re lucky, your focus follows your interest. It feels a lot less effortful. You might even have the experience of being excited to sit down and turn those thoughts into a research article or whatever the finished project is going to be. Drawing on your ability to focus, once you already have the ideas and the interest, is a very different experience than trying to draw on it early in the process, when you’re dreading making a start because you know you’re going to struggle and fail, and the end result seems impossibly distant.
So, again. Stop telling yourself to focus on your project, and start telling yourself to spend time with it. That’s what work is, for you. You can expect a period of adjustment as you get a sense of what sort of things count as ‘spending time with the project’. The test is whether what you’re doing supports allowing your mind to turn over the material in the background. Some activities are compatible with getting the ideas flowing, and others aren’t. Staring off into space is probably fine, as is daydreaming about ‘I wonder if …’ type questions that your project throws up for you. These are things that allow your mind to wander into the neighbourhood of whatever it is you’re working on, and explore. Picking up your phone and looking at social media is probably not compatible with spending time with your project. That’s probably something that sucks your thoughts away from your project and onto something else. But, you know. Your mileage may vary. And perhaps you’ll find that you need to begin a ‘spending time with my project’ session with a minute or two of uncomfortable, effortful focus in which you remind yourself about what you’re working on and where you left things last time. A minute or two of focus followed by permission to drift off is, of course, a much friendlier demand than the ‘focus for hours or fail’ choice you’ve been presenting yourself with so far. If you’d like a deeper dive on the idea of getting your mind to work in the background, go back and revisit episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing, and episode #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it!
Now, I’ve been talking in this episode about the experience of trying to get work done when you have ADHD. But actually, there’s a wider lesson here. It’s not just people with ADHD who might be struggling with unhelpful ideas about how they ought to approach getting things done. Perhaps you don’t have ADHD, but you have your own sticking points when it comes to fitting how you work best with your the ideas you were fed by others about how you ought to be working. I’ve spoken to clients who are night owls, who naturally tend towards doing their most cognitively demanding work later in the day, but who grew up with the idea that a serious person would get up early and get a head start on the day. These people sometimes can’t shake the feeling that they’re a bit lazy even though they’re getting things done, simply because they’re getting things done at the wrong time of day. Oh, and let’s not forget the pervasive idea that you can’t possibly get any in-depth work done unless you can look forward to several hours of uninterrupted time in order to do it - something I talked about back in episode #71: The best time to write is the worst time to write. For some people, a long stretch of time to write is a great opportunity to go deep; for other people, it comes with a terrifying pressure to have something impressive to show for it at the end. Messages about how we should be working can be so damaging, despite often being offered with the best of intentions, presumably by people who think that what works for them will work for everyone else. If you think you might be in the grip of some unhelpful ideas about how to get things done, try asking yourself the following question. If you knew absolutely nothing about how other people work, and you had to decide how to approach that project you’re working on based on nothing other than your knowledge of how you work best, how do you think you might go about trying to achieve the outcome you want? I’m not claiming that considering this question is an antidote to all those years of exposure to other people’s ideas about which way is the best way. But it might help you identify some aspect of how you go about things that you do simply because you were told at some point that this was the best or the only way, even though it doesn’t work well for you. So, there you go. I hope I might have inspired you to think about your relationship with your work a little differently, and to make the next time you sit down to spend time with it a little less stressful. Take care, everyone.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!