Katie McManus describes a common ADHD experience: sudden emotional breakthroughs hit hardest right before deadlines. She uses quick journaling to capture the insight without fully processing it, so she can get back to work and revisit it later.
Chapters
Okay, is this an ADHD thing, or am I just a little nuts? Well, of course we know the answer to that. But I also want to know if this is an ADHD thing. So when I'm on a deadline, like I am right now, my brain decides to open up Pandora's box of all the emotional work that I've been doing over the last couple years. And out of the blue, just because I have this deadline coming up and I have actual work that I need to do, my brain's like, oh, my God, here's this breakthrough moment of everything that we've been working on in therapy. And I tend to get these, like, really emotional moments where I'm like, oh, my God, I've cracked the code. I must journal. I must feel all the feelings. Feelings. And then I don't get any work done. Am I alone here? Does this happen to you guys, too? And I genuinely do think it's an ADHD thing, even if not everyone vibes with this. Because when you're under deadline and when you have, like, this thing that is looming and you're really, really stressed out about it, your brain will naturally, if you have adhd, cast around for different work to focus on. And if you've been doing the work in therapy, if it's something that you're really focusing on, personal growth, healing, what that is an option. It's not just like, oh, I need to clean my office. Oh, I need to go and cook something. Oh, I should send this email. It's also like, oh, let's do some deep thinking on our personal trauma and healing and then come to an aha. But the worst part about this, in contrast to, like, cleaning your room, cooking something, doing actual work, is that this is all internal stuff, okay? So there's no marker out there in the world to remind you to do this later. So if you have one of these, like, personal therapeutic AHAs while you're under deadline, you feel extra pressure to do something about it right then in the moment. Because what if you forget about this personal aha. You had so all that? I guess I just talked myself into spending, like, the next 20 minutes journaling on this thing, but not in a way that I'm, like, delving into the feelings I'm going to journal in a way that I, like, remember that I had this aha. And I don't get too emotional about it so that I can revisit it at a later point and get emotional about it then, because I can't be emotional now because I have work to do. So, yeah.
