What is it and why does the body do it? It seems like the mind is telling the person to do something but one cannot get themselves to actually do it.
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This is only my subjective experience, but picture doing tasks as eating M&Ms. Now, that would be simple, but add in that everyone else says you’re supposed to eat M&Ms in rainbow order. If the fact that you’re supposed to eat them in rainbow order makes little sense then congratulations, we’re on the same page. The order people expect me to do tasks doesn’t make sense to me either. I just try my best.
Now that we’ve established that you need to eat M&Ms in rainbow order, know that there are always more M&Ms coming. You don’t know what color they’ll be, but you can assume there will almost always be another one just around the corner.
FINALLY, we’ve reached the main part about ADHD and what makes this M&M eating hard… you’re colorblind. Not like red-green colorblind. All of the M&Ms are grey to you, with very minimal differentiation.
Now you know you’re supposed to eat the M&Ms in order, but you can’t really easily tell the difference between all of the colors so you try to organize them first, but new ones keep coming in and the older ones are getting old. Everyone keeps telling you you’re forgetting about the orange ones and that they need this yellow one done ASAP. But they’re interrupting your sorting so you only have room to half-listen so then you know that you need to get one of yellow ones done ASAP but you’re still not sure which ones are the yellow ones so you need to check in on which ones are red and orange and yellow and commit that to memory, then you need to eat all of the red ones then all the orange ones then all the yellow ones just to make sure that the one that they needed ASAP gets done.
The thing is, with so many intermediary steps and so many interruptions from people presuming you’ve forgotten about x thing they care about, and the constant stream of new M&Ms, you become overwhelmed in the same way that the run-on sentence in the last paragraph must have been tiring to read.
People are critical that I don’t get tasks done, and people are critical I don’t get the task that *they* want done, and people are critical that I don’t get the tasks done in the right order, so I end up spending so much time trying make sure I’m satisfying all of those criticisms to make sure I don’t get told I’m doing a bad job that I’m tired before I start.
And as an additional bonus, at least in my case, I don’t even need someone else telling me I’m doing a bad job anymore. I have a model for what other people act like and expect of me that is so detailed that I can construct criticisms that they would most likely have of how I’m doing in my own head and play it out in *their voice* so I get to hear that I’m doing a bad job and that I should do better a hundred times a day because the human brain likes to latch onto negative stimulus like a monkey’s paw in a jar.
Semi-TL;DR:
So essentially ADHD paralysis is a constant cycle of being overwhelmed with a torrent of information and expectations that don’t make sense while trying your best to follow guidelines while being nearly completely unable to intuitively and efficiently differentiate any level of task importance, all while being emotionally exhausted by being constantly denigrated by specters of other peoples expectations that at this point neither you, nor them have control over anymore.
It’s awful. And beyond that, it’s incredibly shitty because it makes no intuitive sense to people who don’t experience it. Eating shouldn’t feel like it’s just as important as cleaning my room or doing my homework or calling my mom or sending that email, but it does. Rigid structure helps because it takes all the guesswork out because someone else gives you the M&M you’re supposed to eat when you’re supposed to eat it, but it also gets borked super easily when more M&Ms get into the mix because, again, I can’t tell which M&M is the More Important Color.
Yes, my sentence structure is atrocious. I’m currently unmedicated against my will. It will happen again.
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