The Wanting Problem

I met with a neurodivergent client this week, we'll call him Daniel. He’s undiagnosed but pretty sure ADHD. Like many ND clients, he burned out in a high pressure corporate role and now has his own therapy practice. He’s found his passion and is loving his one-to-one work. He’s also excellent at it.

In our work together over the last couple of months he’s identified events (group sessions or workshops) as a key marketing area for him. He loves it, and knows that referrals are a great pipeline for him. 

But he gets stuck. He gets a million ideas for the kinds he can do, and then gets overwhelmed by wanting to make them perfect. When he thinks about doing a repeatable one, something we’ve talked about to reduce the cognitive load, he’ll start to think about them, get excited, and then feel resistance to making it happen. Like he just hits a wall.

So during our session, I asked him: “Instead of thinking you need to ‘power through’ something you don't want to do, how could you design a repeatable workshop in a way that made them exciting for you to organize?”.

His entire affect shifted, he said “do you see how lighter I feel now in just you asking that?” The thought of shifting it to be exciting instead of just pushing through had never really occurred to him, and suddenly he saw a path forward. 

Here's why that reframe matters at a brain level. 

The science behind it.

To start, let me make it clear that there is no “average ADHD” brain. When researchers have done neuroimagining scans, they have found that people with ADHD have significantly different brain structures. Meaning, not only are no two people alike, but also suggesting that ADHD is likely too large of a category.

Some researchers have suggested ADHD may encompass several distinct neurological profiles, and as research continues I think we are going to know a lot more in the next ten years.

But for now, we have to work with what we know. And ADHD is a behavioral categorization, not a neuroscientific one. Meaning the diagnosis involves a series of questions about behaviors and their impact on your life. 

This behavioral categorization is why, to date, a lot of the ADHD tools and tips address the behaviors (popular books like this and this). The hope is that you’ll identify which behaviors are hard for you and those that you want support on, and then implement some tips and tricks to get through. 

The assumption here is that you should figure out how to fit into the way the world currently works, not that our expectations of what is “normal” or “good” should change… but that’s a topic for another day. 

With all that said, I do think that understanding the brain function that we know impacts some people with adhd can be helpful. I’ll bring this back to my session with Daniel at the end. 

I’m really just going to talk about dopamine. This is because dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is talked about the most with ADHD, and it’s the one that is understood the most. The most common medications, like adderall and ritalin, work by increasing dopamine availability in the brain.

What we know about dopamine

Dopamine is our wanting or pull mechanism. It's that feeling of 'I have to go do this.'

In a neurotypical brain, over time, the brain learns that certain cues predict a reward. This is called reward prediction. Once that association is built, dopamine fires at the cue itself, not just when the reward arrives.

For example, you've run an event before and typically have 10 attendees and really enjoy it. Over time, your brain has learned that the planning and admin predict that enjoyable outcome (the event).

So dopamine starts firing during the planning, even though the reward (the event) is still weeks away. The planning tasks are the cues that carry the motivational pull. Even if you don't love the admin itself, you are able to do it because your brain is getting motivation from the reward prediction mechanism.

In ADHD the wanting signal is the unreliable one.

With some adhd individuals, however, the reward prediction system doesn’t work in the same way. Dopamine is inconsistently or less reliably released when those planning tasks, or cues, show-up; like when you sit down to do the first item on your event planning list, dopamine - or the feeling of motivation to do something - doesn’t release as reliably as it would in a neurotypical brain.

The motivational pull towards starting something that is far away, or where the reward isn’t as clear, is weaker or inconsistent.  

This is why someone, like Daniel, can genuinely want to organize an event, even know they'll enjoy the work, and still feel nothing or resistance when they think about starting it. In ADHD the wanting signal is the unreliable one.

What do you do with this information?

So how can Daniel use this fun science knowledge to help him plan his event?

First, understanding this science and the "why I do this" is an important step in both giving yourself some grace and finding solutions that work for you. Knowing that the reason he is facing that brick wall is likely due, at least in part, to dopamine inconsistency is helpful.  

Some standard ADHD advice does work. Breaking tasks into smaller steps works because it creates closer, more immediate rewards for the brain to work toward. Timers work because the mild urgency they create activates a stress response in the brain, making dopamine more available than it would be for a low-stakes task.

But they don't work for everyone or every situation. For Daniel, the problem was both that the reward was too far away and that the format he was imagining, a teaching workshop, didn't have novelty, challenge, or an immediately visible output; all things more likely to activate that wanting or pull signal.

His aha moment was that he doesn’t need to 'push through' to set up another teaching workshop, but to think about what would pull him towards doing it. For him, it was doing a group therapy session with a combination of teaching and therapy.

If you see pieces of yourself in Daniel, know that your version will look different, but the question is in the same. 

Pick one task you've been avoiding and ask: what would need to change about it so that thinking about it creates pull rather than a brick wall?