Urgency (ADHD motivation)
Growing up with ADHD, you may have grown tired of people constantly telling you to just do things. They would look down on you and shame you for not doing or completing tasks that they deemed both easy and important. Often people with ADHD internalized this and have felt viewed as lazy and irresponsible their entire lives. No one, yourself included, has been able to figure out why you can’t seem to bring yourself to do the things you are supposed to be doing. I am here to tell you that you are not lazy or irresponsible. You are just motivated differently than neurotypical people. And no one was able to let you know about this super powerful and important information.
The Five Motivators:
Urgency
Interest
Novelty
Creativity
Challenge
In this post we will be looking at urgency and motivation.
Urgency
Based on my experience with the people that I coach, the most commonly used motivating tool is urgency. I find as a default people with ADHD use the running down of the clock to motivate themselves to do things. Usually at the last possible minute. That classic paper being written hours from midnight the day it is due, taxes being rallied up and submitted after several notices, buying all of your gifts as close to the celebration as possible, anxiously watching the days tick away for that work deadline and then pumping out that presentation the night before. Feeling completely unmotivated to get ready to leave the house until 5 minutes before you need to leave then finally jumping into action. Maybe you signed up for a marathon and haven’t been able to bring yourself to train until it is a the week before and now you suddenly feel the motivation to run as much as you possibly can. You have a big long-term project you need to be working on but the urgency of every day fires and current deadlines keep your attention away from something that is not due right now.
It can be good!
Urgency can bring a lot of great things like – increased motivation, being able to get a lot (A LOT) of work done in a very short period of time, extreme focus and clarity. Urgency can suddenly make the things you would usually overthink seem less important and make it easier to identify the most important courses of action. Urgency can be a great tool and can be used for somethings but it cannot be used for everything. Also, if we are going to use urgency then we need to plan time to rest after the task is completed to allow our energy stores to replenish and our stress hormones to lower.
There are some downsides
Using urgency as our only motivator can also lead to extreme stress, fatigue and burnout. We end up relying solely on stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to get things done (especially if we do not give ourselves time to rest post urgency induced hyper-focus). I believe the we need to mix in the other ways of motivating our ADHD brain. Using alternative methods of motivation may help reduce our stress and also make life more enjoyable instead of living in constant bursts of fight or flight followed by exhaustion, followed by trying to work through exhaustion.
And sometimes you have to scratch all that and just wait for enough urgency to kick in. Sometimes not all the time! But isn’t that the ADHD way? Things work sometimes but not all the time? It is both the beauty and the extreme frustration of the ADHD life.
