Avoidance of Writing That Requires Sustained Mental Effort
ADHD is real and wants to eat me alive
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a reader-supported health-themed newsletter. It’s written by Owen Muir, M.D.
Oh my god. I just can’t. I have an academic paper to finish. I should be writing it now. Not this. And yet…here we are. The thing you are reading right now? To you, it might be a light snack of an article. It might get forwarded to a friend. It might sit unread in your inbox.
To your author, it is:
A scathing indictment of my work ethic
An attempt to avoid adult responsibility and demonstrate how Owen will let down others again because he is so lazy.
procrastination
a symptom of ADHD
It's not a multiple-choice question. It's all of those things at once.
I will explain. For the last year, more or less, I've been working with a group of authors. I am the senior author of a collection of papers. We have submitted the first seven papers to the journal in question. They are being reviewed. There is one more paper that needs to be finished, which I am responsible for. The first author of an academic paper is the person who does most of the writing. I am not the first author of any of the other papers. I am the senior author, which means I have to do a lot of editing and strategizing about the formatting across the series of papers. Still, getting something that was a blank page to be filled up with words was not my responsibility on the first pass.
Anybody who has been reading this newsletter will have a sense that, given I write a daily healthcare newsletter virtually by myself, the thought of me taking issue with writing seems a bit odd. This guy writes daily; one might ask, what could he be complaining about?
Academic papers aren't funny. They're not fun to write. They're painful to author. They have to be well organized. I hate writing things that have to be well organized. And I hate writing things that can't be funny. If there's no room for humor, I just don't want to do it.
“I just don’t want to do it” is a story my brain tells itself. This is not the literal truth. I believe the literal truth to be slightly more complicated.
My brain avoids things that require organization because they are aversive. I have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Practically, ADHD has symptoms, including avoidance of task that requires sustained mental effort. What you're reading right now, it's a symptom. That's the bottom line. I'm not lazy. I write this newsletter every day. But instead of doing the work I'm supposed to be doing, which is boring, I'm writing this, which is slightly less boring. It's not that I don't want to do work.
I am avoiding something.
I'm going to get back to it now because I need to. I'm not a bad person. The people with ADHD in your life who are avoiding boring things are not bad. But it isn't easy in the A.A. Milne-initial-caps sense of the terms. For us to get boring things done, as evidenced by the fact that we haven't done them. Putting it off that's a symptom.
Are you coming up with excuses? Infuriating! Also, plausibly, we explain our behavior to ourselves absent access to the truth: ADHD makes you do stuff like this, just like a strong can paralyze half your body. The lesion is one of brain function, not structure, but it’s a lesion nonetheless.
I’m a psychologist who struggles with similar issues
Oh solidarity, friend