I think that the heart of executive dysfunction is the conflict between your own guiding forces and the guiding forces offered by society.
In our society it is assumed that it is only good and healthy that you submit to the latter. And the vast majority of us do, smoothly and automatically.
But some of us are different and this process of submission is not smooth. It might not even happen at all. There will be that ongoing conflict.
One aspect that I’m missing here is the fact that it’s a vicious cycle as well. The feeling bad makes it harder to start, which in turn makes you feel worse, which in turn makes it harder ro start, and so on.
I guess I agree, but also there’s the type where I don’t want to do something because of its sheer boringness. Not sure if that’s ADHD though.
Is “i don’t want to” enough? No justification. Just I don’t want to.
You should never feel bad for laziness. In fact the notion of laziness or sloth is a device by industrial authorities to press more work out of an already beleaguered labor force.¹
We’ve seen how it goes during the 2020 epidemic lockdown and furlough: most people couldn’t couch potato for a week and turned to hobbies, enough of which were monetizable enough to cause the great resignation and give us a moment of elevated ground-floor wages. The rest of us suffer from avolition, a symptom of major depression (or a number of other potential diagnoses).
Industrialists (and churches and civil officials) fail to recognize that the drive for profit to upper management and shareholders has made a lot of work environments toxic. Most of us who work are overworked, underpaid, and poorly treated by management, if not also dealing with bully coworkers, pollution from industry without adequate PPE, safety hazards and oppressive work conditions. Our capitalist masters could treat workers well, and even would see a productivity surge worth the additional cost, and yet they still crunch in the video game industry, and overtask rather than running a high-morale clerical pool with slight redundancy (where the task list is always short).
I was lazy enough in my career as a victim of major depression to sleep for about nine months (getting up only to eat or excrete), I am a pro at couch potatoing. Granted, it’s not good for me to go without some contact outside, but I’ll happily do it. In the meantime, when I was forced to work in late 1980s clerical pool conditions, it drove me to suicide, and typical conditions are even worse today.
Laziness is a product of slave drivers or mental health disorders. If you’re feeling too tired to get work done, it means it’s time to take a break. Don’t worry, if you’re mentally fit, you’ll be on task again.
¹ Though my sin nun explained the cardinal sin of Sloth as avolition specifically to engage in the work your faith calls for (e.g. feeding the poor, housing the stranger and the transient, healing the sick, etc.) If you have energy to engage in costly signalling and praying loudly in public, but don’t mind the unfortunate, then you’re engaging in the cardinal sin – according to a cloistered nun I called for tech support.
I was too tired to write this, which immediately jumped to my mind o’ reading the post. Thanks, stranger. Basically : what that person said.
I heard that laziness is pleasurable, and executive dysfunction is not.
Laziness is pleasurable???
Laziness has ALWAYS been derided as a character flaw.
Executive disfunction is euphemism treadmill for laziness. There were books 50 years ago on how to self manage behavior.
Executive disfunction is still a character flaw. It’s ok to be flawed. We are human. Recognizing flaws and trying to fix ourselves is personal growth.
From the ocean of laziness comes fabulous fishes. But you have to enter the ocean of laziness first. You’ve got to submit to it and be okay with it. And then when you are all floppy and spread out like that, a true inspiration will arise.
Laziness has ALWAYS been derided as a character flaw.
This is a nonsequitor. Masturbation has also long been vilified. Doesn’t make it not pleasurable. In fact, many things that are pleasurable are framed as character flaws by people who believe they will benefit from your self-denial.
Laziness does not mean lack of responsibilities and not doing anything. Laziness means needing to do something and not doing it. The definition is unwilling.
The premise that normies get pleasure from being lazy is false. Executive disfunction means not responding to the anxiety with action to remove the anxiety. Instead the anxiety becomes its own feedback loop of inaction.
Your reductionist take on something you clearly don’t understand is just wild.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23224-executive-dysfunction
Your link is on the official definition of executive disfunction. The OP used executive disfunction in the common use, “I don’t do things I think I should.” That’s also the definition of laziness.
When people use the common definition of executive disfunction they are euphemism treadmilling laziness.
But OOP did not say “I don’t do things I think I should”, they said “I don’t do things I want to do”. They described the executive dysfunction loop quite well.
When people use the common definition of executive disfunction they are euphemism treadmilling laziness.
I was unaware of anyone outside of ASD/ADHD communities regularly using the term.
The OP used executive disfunction as synonymous with lazy. The term executive disfunction has been used in mainstream media for years.
can be broken into two main categories: anxiety that your attempt won’t be successful or confusion about where to start or how to break it down into steps
doesn’t sound like laziness to me
Yes Laziness can be pleasurable and is not always seen as a character flaw. I pay someone to come clean my home because I have the disposable income and I do not wish to do this. This is a sign of virtue because I am not a “drain” on society but am a “job creator” (not really she has more customers than just me.)
As for Executive dysfunction. This is not “Oh I can decide what I want to eat so I’ll just snack.” Executive dysfunction is an acute state where the person is unable to make any decision let alone move causing them to literally freeze up and not respond to others.
And I would tread lightly with the term “character flaw” people here are not dealing with character flaws, they are trying to navigate this alien world.
This is a sign of virtue
That is because it isn’t laziness by definition. You aren’t unwilling to clean. You don’t need to clean. Laziness would be if you couldn’t afford to have someone do the work, you knew it needed to be done and you still didn’t do it.
I pay someone farm wheat and turn it into bread. That’s not being lazy.
Now we come to your perspective and view point. What is and is not laziness is based on ones opinions not facts. Many people where I live completely see it as lazy to let someone else clean their house. But you do not. Different perspectives different opinions. Maybe you would do well to consider others opinions and not stating your own as facts.
It’s not my opinion but the definition of the word in the dictionary. I looked it up before replying to the poster above you because I was unsure about the definition.
Paying to have things done isn’t lazy or everyone who has lived post agricultural revolution circa 10,000BC is lazy.
What about when you know how to do it, and you will be happy to have it done, but you know it’s going to be annoying, and you’re going to hate it, so you push it back as much as you can.
Motion to make this right here a third category. My executive dysfunction assumes the form of a petulant toddler.
I partly agree and disagree with the description of executive dysfunction. I would also break it into two categories, but the first encompasses both aspects of the description by “overwhelmed”.
In this case, the anxiety or stress that impedes function is due to uncertainty around how to achieve the desired outcome. The degree of anxiety or stress is dependent on the cost of failure; e.g. something with no perceived stakes (or very low stakes) allows for a high degree of uncertainty and an imperfect or incomplete plan can be executed because the cost of it going wrong is negligible. However, as the stakes rise, the degree of uncertainty required to create a “barrier to entry” (i.e. a sufficient amount of anxiety or stress to prevent action) decreases. The uncertainty itself could simply be not knowing how to approach or break down a task as per the comment, but it is also often the uncertainty introduced by other people. If you know someone well, then you can have reasonable confidence in how they might respond to a particular topic. If not, though, and they are a key part of achieving said goal, then oh boy does that cause stress!
The other category is not directly due to anxiety/stress but instead a result of fatigue, burnout or being overwhelmed (i.e. near meltdown). The brain effectively goes “nope” and refuses to process the required information no matter how much you want it to or how important it is. The irony is that if the anxiety or stress from the previous category is high enough, it can actually create this overwhelmed state, but in my experience severe fatigue, too much sensory input or too many cognitive demands (i.e. being forced to juggle too many tasks/problems/interactions at once) will readily create this situation too.
I still don’t like the term “executive” disfunction, since “executives” in real life don’t do shit. Makes me feel like I’m being told I haven’t been deemed successful by some stupid corporate standard.
“Not enough mana.”
I kind of agree. Maybe we should think of it less as meaning an executive that’s dysfunctional, and more as a dysfunction that makes you an executive :-P
I basically have to bribe my brain to do anything. Stupid electric soup in my skull.
Yes for sure. Doesn’t always help when it comes to bigger tasks on my to-do lists, but sitting down and making those lists helps me a lot personally.
I usually make one annually every spring because there is a time pressure where I live with only 4-5 months of nice weather.
yeah
It’s more than that. There are lots of things I want to do that I just can’t do. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort learning to program, and suck at it. I can’t program the things I want to make, and it feels bad that I’m no good at it. I spent months trying to learn to do one thing and while I reached the point I could copy and paste code that would do it, I had no clue why the code did what it did. I wanted to understand why it was so complicated, when what I wanted to do was from my human point of view, so simple. I got frustrated and ended up shelving it, and never went back.
I still get frustrated when I think about it. There is a indie game dev festival where people will get together to code games from scratch in like 24 hours. Manlybadasshero has shown some of their works on his youtube channel. There are people out there who are so good at coding and I’m having this monumental challenge with the basic stuff. It just drives home how dumb you are.
Also confusion about what to even do at all.
I just wanna actually pick up my guitar and practice and learn… It’s right there. I can see it. I have the desire, the motivation, and the time. And yet I can’t. 😬
I hate it. I hate it so fucking much. It’s like being trapped in a prison but the prison is your own body.
Then let’s apply this post. Here’s your steps:
Tune the guitar. Tuna is an app that will make it help, there’s hundreds or physical tuners. This will take between 3 and 20 minutes
Look up tabs for a song. Wonderwall or zombies by the cranberries are very easy to learn
Do the finger positions and strum them. Focus on the transitions between fret positions. Do you for 10-20 minutes
Listen to the song, over and over. You can put it at half speed, but after you feel you know it in your bones start to play along. Focus on the strumming pattern and making the notes ring clear… It’ll be rough at first but keep at it. This could take 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on your standards
And if this works, let me know. I’m self taught on the guitar with ADHD… My brother taught me the basics, and then I hyper focus on certain songs now and again. I’m not particularly good, but I can learn anything on any stringed instrument if I hyper focus on it
God part two of that is my problem. Thanks brain!
