Breaking Through the Activation Barrier

Photo by Bruno Thethe on Unsplash

Hey friends,

One of the biggest ADHD challenges is something I call the activation barrier.

When you know exactly what you want to do in the moment, but there’s this invisible wall that you can’t seem to break through and actually start doing the thing.

It often seems to be active when there’s something important I feel like I should be doing and just can’t seem to do—but it also gets in the way when I’m trying to do something that I actually want to do!

People often describe it like this:

“My brain wants to do it… but my body won’t move.”

“I freeze up even when I want to do the thing.”

For a long time, whenever this happened, I would blame myself. Others would call me lazy or say I lacked willpower, and I couldn’t argue because I didn’t have any other explanation. So the label stuck. And the guilt and the shame stuck.

Now I know that it’s because my brain works differently.

ADHD brains need that spark, that excitement to help move into action. Something that ignites our interest or creativity and gets us engaged and moving.

Once we start moving, we can break through that activation barrier and keep going.

It’s not about feeling bad when you can’t get started. It’s about figuring out which things help you to get started, and leaning into those. Whenever you do break through the activation barrier—take notes! Find what energizes your brain and then use that when you’re stuck!

We’re often so excited when something does work, that we don’t take the time to pay attention to why it worked, what was the unique thing that helped us actually move into action this time?

Sometimes it might be about lowering the activation cost to something extremely simple, like putting a single dish away.

Other times it might be about connecting a task with a hobby you’re currently fascinated by.

Or maybe it’s about distracting (and entertaining) your brain with an interesting podcast, making it easier to do some mundane chore as just “something else to do while I’m doing the thing I enjoy.”

But when you notice something working, take not!

Stay curious,
Jesse J. Anderson

P.S. Yesterday I launched my ADHD Motivation Mastery course and there’s still a limited time to join the founding cohort for half off! Once the doors close (this Sunday), it won’t be available again until a future launch.

In the course, we’ll be diving into how to navigate motivation with ADHD so you can get unstuck, and can finally get started, keep going, and finally finish the things that matter most. We’ll be doing some live workshops as part of the course and I can’t wait to work with some of you!

P.P.S. If you want a live walkthrough of how ADHD motivation actually works, and some real-world strategies you can start using right away—I’m also hosting a free live Masterclass tomorrow (Wednesday)!

👉 Save your free spot here​

It’s a great chance to get even more help and see if ADHD Motivation Mastery feels like a good fit for you!

Unfocused bits

Some random things in my life.

📫 My hunt for the perfect email app

I’ve been doing my all-too-regular routine of trying out lots of different email apps because I’m never satisfied with the options I have.

I was using Hey, which I actually like a lot and seems very compatible with my brain, but it had some issues with some automations I’m doing with Gmail, so now I’m exploring other options. I wanted to like Superhuman (which lives up to the “fastest email” hype), but something about the interface just doesn’t work with my brain. I’m currently using Shortwave, which is decent on desktop and has nice keyboard shortcuts (which is important to me), but the iPhone version just isn’t that great. Notion Mail seems promising, but no iPhone version yet means it’s a non-starter.

Don’t tempt me with trying to create my own perfect email app because that’s exactly what I want to do… 😬

👋 Working on Wavepal

In addition to working on the ADHD Motivation Mastery launch this week, I’m continuing to plug away on Wavepal—the app I’m building with a friend to help me remember to be a better friend.

I’m really bad at remembering to stay in touch with my friends and family, so we started building Wavepal to help with that!

So far, it’s going great! I’m already finding it super useful for remembering to stay in touch as well as taking important notes on the important people in my life. Plus we just started onboarding our first early users so it’s now a real product used by real people. 🎉

Really excited to see where this goes.