ADD limits executive function; what we used to call ‘will power’, when we linked the concept to free will. Of course it never made any sense, to berate someone for lacking will power, because if will power was simply a matter of choice, a free willed quality, who the fuck wouldn’t decide to have a lot of it?
People without ADD are better at creating routines which allow executive function to be redirected in various ways; getting out of bed and doing your work and paying your bills can be on a kind of autopilot; your executive function is now free to clear our drawers or plan vacations or take night courses.
Successful people often articulate their success as a series of schedules, or period of focus, time invested in certain things. “I goof around a tremendous amount,” said the famous entrepreneur, never.
You can build habits with ADD; but you will have to expend more of your executive function keeping them going than a normal person would. So adding even something as trivial as a ten minute meditation a day to a schedule can backfire–or rather, that ten minutes can knock something else out of the schedule, not because of the time involved, but because of the limited supply of what I’m gonna just call will power, because I’m tired of saying executive function over and over again.
So, I have been maintaining my weight with intermittent fasting, (is everyone still talking about IF? I’m off social media… so I don’t know!) and filling my apple fitness rings and doing my freelance and chipping in on a weekly adult ed writing course, and I added in the ten minutes, and now I’m eating at midnight again, fasts dropping from 15-16, to 13-14, and the number creeps upward on the scale.
So this is day 5. At some point I should start getting some kind of ball rolling. But this is sad. Because its not the time. It’s the mental energy.
It’s also of course, the yak-shaving, the procrastination, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.
