Take Advantage of ADHD’s Interest-Based Nervous System - Enhance Drive, Energy, And Motivation

Do you usually start working only at the very last moment, fueled by an intense sense of urgency made by a brain cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol?

How many hobbies have you abandoned in the past ten years?  What about university degrees and careers? 

For many people with ADHD, motivation constantly goes up and down, eventually fading away from the once-beloved interests and pleasurable activities. If motivation is fickle and unreliable for the average neurotypical person, it's even more unstable for a person with ADHD.

This article will explain the connection between ADHD and motivation, offer ways to optimize your life to feel more motivated, and give strategies you can implement immediately while struggling with motivation. 

How Motivation Works With ADHD

Your brain needs to be optimally stimulated and engaged to function well. This state of optimal arousal allows your brain to be alert, receptive, and ready to attend and learn. 

However, ADHD brains have a neurotransmitter deficiency, leading to a lack of sufficient dopamine, norepinephrine, and other crucial brain chemicals. As a result, ADHD brains are, more often than not, chronically understimulated (1)

Since your brain has a larger-than-average need for stimulation, this leads to the following consequences:

1. Actions around intrinsic motivation - Experiences that are intrinsically fulfilling and intensely stimulating are very often prioritized, no matter their long-term consequences. Those activities are urgent, done as a selfless duty toward someone else, intellectually entertaining and stimulating, emotionally engaging, novel, interesting, exciting, and creating competition (2)

2. Impaired self-control - People with ADHD struggle with discipline, willpower, persistence, and mental techniques, like visualization and goal setting. Even if they rationally know what ought to be done, the brain inevitably drifts toward what creates the quickest and most intense dopamine spikes. Therefore, boring and mundane everyday tasks are hard to sustain (3)

If you have regularly watched productivity content on YouTube only to see no results other than becoming more miserable, now you know the reason. A lot of the advice to get started with work, stay motivated, and reach your goals is not effective for people with ADHD because of those brain differences.  

Examples of productivity advice that is incompatible with ADHD:

1. Discipline - It's very hard to convince your brain to abandon short-term gratification for long-term welfare if it's time blind, struggling with self-control, and desperate for stimulation. You obviously have some control over yourself, but it's an uphill battle to try and go through life with discipline alone. 

2. Start with the most unpleasant challenge for the day - Eating the frog doesn't work if people with ADHD need small victories before getting in the zone and tackling harder tasks. Furthermore, it ignores how motivation and mental energy fluctuate throughout the day. Many people with ADHD are night owls who can't start with the hardest tasks in the morning. 

3. Visualization - Many people use positive and negative visualization exercises, mantras, and vivid dreaming to get motivated. This may be harder for a person with ADHD who struggles with foresight, time blindness, and visualization due to executive dysfunction. 

4. To-do lists - Plain to-do lists alone are insufficient if the person struggles with prioritization. They can end up doing unimportant tasks that are minor or could have been done in the future instead of those that ought to be urgently completed. Furthermore, just because it's written doesn't mean you feel the need to complete it. And just because you have it written doesn't mean you will remember to use it at all.  

Just because a strategy isn't ADHD-friendly doesn't mean it's inherently wrong and can't be adapted to be more suitable. 

For example, to-do lists can be more specialized with sections for urgent, important, trivial (not important now) tasks, creating a hierarchy system. If none of the tasks are particularly urgent because they are personal hobbies, projects, and actions for personal growth, then you can just make a numbered list based on how important each one is compared to others. 

If you want an example of an already developed system, then look into the Eisenhower matrix, which implements the aforementioned principles.  

Breaching The Motivation Gap

ADHD symptoms become less severe, and you feel more motivated when you are doing an activity that is:

1. Novel.

2. Social.

3. Urgent.

4. Exciting.

5. Interesting.

6. Challenging.

7. Selflessness.

8. Competitive.

Those are the most common ways to get motivated but to find one that works, you will need to experiment.

For example, you can easily create a sense of urgency by setting the alarm, asking a friend to check up on you, or even putting money on the table if you don't finish a certain amount of work before a given hour. If urgency doesn't work, you can secretly start competing with a co-worker or openly start a competition with a friend over a desirable prize. 

If you look closer at those different sources of motivation, you will notice that they are not the same. This is because some sources of motivation are very hard to control. You can’t gaslight yourself into finding something novel, exciting, and interesting. However, you have some control to make your environment more social, challenging, and competitive. So, it would naturally be best to start with the sources of motivation you have the most control over.

One overlooked aspect of motivation that deserves a special highlight is the social aspect of work. 

We are social animals, and since the dawn of time, our ancestors have worked together on almost all activities in communal societies. It’s only in the last few hundred years that we have a highly individualistic and specialized industrial society, and only in recent times did ideas like hyper-individualism, solo entrepreneurship, and side hustles become popular. 

Relying and needing other people to be productive is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not a flaw or a deficit in who you are but a feature of human nature. After all, for most of history, we were not expected to be productivity-maximizing robots that have perfect control over their impulses and desires, managing their mind and bodies like a strict factory manager.

This intuition is what has led many people with ADHD to adopt body-doubling techniques where they work in the presence of someone else. This creates some pressure to get started and keep going, ensures frequent accountability, and gives social context to what you are doing right now, which allows you to bypass common executive function issues, like action paralysis and procrastination.

Finally, there are many cases where you can’t do something interesting, find anyone to do it with, or change your environment much. When I have no other option available, I try to gamify my work. 

Similar to video games, gamification allows you to quantify your progress and gives you a clear stimulus to keep going. Motivation is likely to be much higher if everything you do can be turned into points, and every goal and project is like a mission. This leads to quantifiable and tangible progress that can be easily seen (there is no need to gamify what you already do without much resistance). 

The easiest way is to install an app that already has the system designed (Habitica, LifeUp, Habit Hunter, Forest, etc.). This way, you can level up whenever you make progress on a project and get points for completing tasks, giving you immediate feedback and rewards for the effort you are putting in. 

It goes without saying that how much you can gamify will depend on the type of task you are doing. For example, drawing, listening to music, or doing yoga is not something you can easily quantify, nor should you try to since those are activities designed to keep you relaxed and away from the productivity-maximizing headspace. However, physical exercising, reading, and other self-improvement habits or work projects can more easily be gamified.  

Using Rewards When Enjoyment Is Not Enough

Although seeking to find intrinsic motivation is the route most likely to succeed, you will need a different approach for manual, repetitive, mundane, and utterly boring tasks. Think household chores, like cleaning, grocery shopping, re-organizing the place, and sorting out documents, or healthy habits, like walking, stretching, and torturing yourself with cardio.

Trying to fool yourself into thinking anything is interesting about them will be very hard, if not impossible. 

Rewards can help if you can't get fulfillment out of the task itself, no matter what. There won't always be an intrinsic enjoyment of an activity, so you can selectively give yourself an external reward for accomplishing a task.

You can combine them with something you enjoy, so there is less mental resistance and exhaustion when doing those activities. For instance, you can listen to a podcast while cleaning, blast your favorite music when sorting out documents, and watch your favorite TV show while on the treadmill or bike. 

Over time, you can start associating the unpleasant activity with the positive experience from the reward, which keeps you going. 

For example, let yourself watch an episode of your favorite show if you are done with X amount of work for the day or get your favorite dessert at the end of the week after Y amount of workouts. Just keep yourself from cheating and indulging too much. Otherwise, the system becomes pointless. Get an accountability buddy in case you need someone to supervise the process. 

Setting Up The Stage for Motivation Over the Long-Term

How you feel in the present and what kind of tools, equipment, and systems you have to handle current problems is determined by the effort you’ve put in the past. 

Sometimes, you can't just transform yourself and become motivated in a few minutes or hours. Instead, you have to weather through and put effort toward building a life in the future that is more resilient to procrastination, action paralysis, and demotivation. Here is how to get started.

Synchronizing Your Career With Motivation Needs

We just discussed the main ways for you to tap into intrinsic motivation. I won't blame you if you struggle to immediately connect a boring corporate project with urgency, competition, mastery, curiosity, purpose, or anything else that can keep you driven. 

Even if you can't quickly change your motivation in the present, you have all the power to set up a stage for a career that is more ADHD-friendly and naturally aligns with your values and your needs for intrinsic motivation.

Some of the most common jobs worked by people with ADHD and recommended by experts include the following: 

• Creative professions (graphic designers, writers, artists, musicians, etc.)

• Teachers

• Programmers

• Chefs

• Teachers

• ER and critical care nurses and doctors

• Firefighters

• Sale representatives

• Copywriters

• Journalists

• Consultants

• Entrepreneurs and small business owners 

It's not a coincidence that many of them offer a great degree of flexibility and independance. They have dynamic and always-changing working environments and offer an ability for creative expression. Furthermore, many of them rely on you moving around, being outside, or focusing on verbal communication with others.

ADHD brains thrive in professions that have many tasks that are manual, smaller in size, easily achievable, with clear and upcoming deadlines, a persistent sense of urgency, and tangible results in the short term. Furthermore, to remain motivated to work your job over the long term, it should offer some novelty and variety so that you don’t have the same repetitive and mundane routine every single day. 

Forget catchy productivity and business phrases like "work is not supposed to be enjoyable" or "following your dreams won't make you rich". 

Loving, or at least enjoying your job, is not only common sense advice but also an essential rule of thumb for people with ADHD. 

To remain sane, you must find intrinsic motivation in your actions. 

Knowing this doesn't necessarily mean you are forced to choose one of those professions. However, the typical 9 to 5 routine takes a minimum of 40 hours per week for more than half of your life, so you should carefully select an education, courses, and qualifications, and then a career compatible with your ADHD needs. 

Obviously, you can't change your current academic or job environment. However, over the long term, you can get the relevant skills and qualifications needed and selectively apply for jobs that fulfill your personal preferences.

If I had to urge you to consider a piece of advice other than essential self-care (sleep, diet, and exercise), putting intention when choosing your career would be next on the list. Unfortunately, you will have to have a job, one way or another. If you don't select an ADHD-friendly option, society will enforce one on you, and financial struggle will coerce you to accept. 

Even if you can tank through a highly stressful, toxic, and mentally draining work environment, the damage to your mental health trickles down to every other aspect of your life. The anxiety makes you more avoidant, increasing cravings for phone use and other unhealthy but easily accessible coping mechanisms, like smoking and drinking. Mental exhaustion stops you from taking care of yourself and strips all energy for hobbies and passions. 

Avoid Excessive Stimulation

What is the difference between you eating a doughnut and a bodybuilder eating a doughnut after a competition?

You likely devour it in two bites while watching a YouTube video and barely stop to address the sweetness. Meanwhile, the bodybuilder would savor every single bite, treat the doughnut as their long-lost love, and barely contain their tears of joy. 

Your brain learns to adapt quickly based on the stimulus around you. In a very simplified way, one doughnut out of nowhere can bring you immense joy, but constant consumption would literally send you to heaven if you get the same joy out of every additional doughnut. Your body can't allow that, so each doughnut eaten without much of a break becomes less and less enjoyable, offering diminishing returns. 

The thrill of novelty, the rush of excitement, and the high of stimulation eventually wear off from most activities. If you've ever spent a whole day watching a show or playing video games, you may have noticed how, throughout the day, you begin to hit the skip button more quickly and rush through the game to get more frequent excitement spikes. 

The more you consume now, the more you need to consume next time to experience a similar kind of stimulation. 

When this doesn't work, you need to do it more quickly, like speeding up YouTube videos or combining multiple activities. This is why you can find yourself simultaneously browsing social media while listening to a YouTube video, texting with a friend on the side while also eating. 

Unfortunately, after a certain point, binging social media, rushing through shows, playing your favorite video game, pornography, and other highly stimulating activities don't feel so good. Instead, you keep doing them because you grow restless, agitated, and frustrated without them. It's a negative spiral, which only gets worse over time.

The biggest issue is how this negatively impacts your ability to fulfill your duties and get work done. Much like a person used to doughnuts will find porridge repulsive, your brain will not be content with sitting for hours to study, research, or work because there is no high, frequent, or immediate stimulation. 

The solution is to re-sensitize your dopamine receptors. 

Ideally, you will cut social media, video games, internet surfing, pornography, snacking, and other highly stimulating activities. You would also want to avoid "dopamine stacking," where you do two highly stimulating activities together. After all, if you were forced to stare at a wall for 20 minutes, then getting started with your essay for university would be a godsend in comparison. 

The strategy sounds perfect on paper, but it is much easier said than done. Going cold turkey on all "modern temptations" is borderline impossible for most people, especially if you have ADHD and have a higher need for stimulation. This is why an approach of moderation is much more reasonable, manageable, and sustainable for most people. 

Cutting your phone usage from 12 hours to 3 is a significant improvement, even if you don't cut out social media entirely. You have to come up with a protocol depending on your circumstances. 

For example, everyone can install app blockers or go into focus mode when working de-install video games, do online shopping to avoid getting tempted to buy snacks, and other strategies. However, some strategies may not be compatible with your lifestyle. You can't shut off your phone for the whole day if you need to answer messages to friends or emails.

Circumstances Where Dopamine Stacking May Be Wise  

Previously, we mentioned how adding a stimulating activity (watching a show, listening to a podcast or music, etc.) could be beneficial while doing an otherwise boring activity. But now we mention you want to avoid it in general. How do you find the balance?

There is no harm in stimulating stacking for essential tasks that you need to get done. However, you should limit how much you combine two activities that are already stimulating on their own. For example, playing games while listening to something else in the background is not desirable, but listening to music to get yourself to have a workout is not a problem at all. 

Learning To Do Deep Work In a Flow State   

A person with ADHD doesn't just get distracted often and zone out. This happens more broadly because of a problem with attention regulation. This ADHD symptom can swing to the other extreme as well. It can also turn into an intense focus on a single thing without paying attention to anything else. 

Think of the times when you struggled to start with a research paper or an essay, but after three days of procrastination, you overcame the slump and suddenly dived head-first into research rabbit holes and began to write paragraphs like there's no tomorrow. 

You can probably think of other times when you felt immersed entirely in an activity with no interest in anything else and responded with anger when interrupted and stopped. My hyper-focus feels like having a compulsive urge to do something and never stopping due to the strong fixation. It gets the job done, but it doesn't always feel pleasant.  

However, hyper-focusing is not the only way to sustain alertness, concentration, and motivation for an extended time. 

What Is A Flow State?

Hyperfocus sounds very familiar to being in a flow state. However, instead of being defined as being obsessive, a flow state is a way of being where work seems effortless, and you can fully engage in a task without feeling overwhelmed. 

This is a state of consciousness where you are in the zone, positioned in the sweet spot between boredom and excessive challenge, where the effort required is just enough to engage you without overwhelming you. It gives full immersion in the experience, multiplying how productive you are and significantly increasing the quality of your work.

The psychologist who pioneered the term, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, observed how people with all sorts of careers, hobbies, and backgrounds described those characteristics despite doing vastly different activities (4) 

Based on the criteria for entering and staying in a flow state, some activities that can more easily create a flow state include painting, running, swimming, surfing, martial sports, skateboarding, cooking, and even playing video games. 

However, just because it is more challenging for other types of work doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. All you need to do to be in a flow state is to have a very clear objective, immediate feedback from the environment, and the right balance of challenge - it shouldn't be too easy because that'd be boring, but it shouldn't be too hard, so you don't get overwhelmed.

Hyper Focus & Flow State - What's The Difference?

No research has been done on the nuanced differences between hyper-focus and being in a flow state, so everything I will say is purely anecdotal. 

Personally, being in a flow state always makes me feel good like I am merged with the work I am doing, while hyper-focus isn't always pleasant. Some of the discomfort of hyper-focusing comes from its obsessive element. You are glued and can't stop, no matter what. 

In flow, you are in control. However, in hyperfocus, you are more likely to be stuck. 

I feel much more in control, like I can manage and handle everything in a flow state. Moreover, my reaction to interruptions is very different. I want to rip someone's head off if I am hyper-focused and interrupted, but I am fine with distractions while in a flow state because I have a natural confidence that I can get back on track. 

How To Enter a Flow State

Here are the essentials.

You need to go through a warm-up period where you overcome the initial discomfort. 

The goal should be broken down into clear, specific, and easy-to-do tasks. 

Small tasks will give you immediate rewards and help build momentum.

The work should be done in an environment with minimal distractions. 

Curiosity, passion, purpose, and mastery should be part of the goal. 

You should freely choose to do the work without being forced. 

Being in a flow state is tiring, so deep rest after is essential. 

Here are a few additional rules and strategies to consider:

1. Focus on a single goal at a time - Multi-tasking has its time and place, but not when you are trying to be in a flow state. Action paralysis is most common when switching between tasks since the change of context requires time to get familiar with. This is why it's better to focus on one university subject in a day of studying or a single business goal for a whole month if it's an option you can afford. 

2. Remove doubt and uncertainty as much as possible - The more vague, unspecific, and ambiguous your aim is, the more stressed and overwhelmed you will likely feel. To overcome the initial stage of entering the flow state, you need to minimize resistance as much as possible. This requires you to both break tasks as much as possible and prioritize beforehand, so you naturally know what should happen after a task or a whole project is completed. 

3. Plan deep work sessions to last multiple hours if possible - Getting into a flow state is highly taxing to your mind and body, so it must be justifiable. This could be why you have so many 30 to 45-minute gaps in your schedule where you can technically work but end up procrastinating and not doing anything. It's not enough to warm you up for work, let alone allow you to actually do the work. If your brain is "all or nothing" on work sessions, adjust your schedule as much as possible to have free blocks for multiple hours at a time and breaks for no longer than 15 minutes. 

4. Don't keep your environment static - If it's an option, you can try to occasionally switch the environment so your brain does not grow overly familiar and comfortable in one place. There is a natural need to invest more mental energy and increase motivation in a new environment, so have 2-3 easily accessible working stations, like the home office, оn the ground with a table desk, the couch, the nearby coffee shop, the library, etc. Naturally, you also want to change your body's position throughout the day. Switching from walking to standing for a while is more likely to keep you energized. 

Recharging Your Ability To Enter Flow State With Rest

We explained how you can successfully get into a flow state once, but you also need to know how to rest completely in order to replicate this success again. This is easier said than done if you have ADHD. For me, most of my awake time feels like I am stuck between trying to work but procrastinating and taking too many breaks and trying to rest but thinking of work and not really resting. 

How you rest is highly subjective and depends on your biggest exhaustion source. Some people get recharged in the presence of people. Others need to avoid most people, cut sensory input, do absolutely nothing, and do something they enjoy in solitude. I'm sure you have some hunch on what you need to feel rested.

It's much harder to actually allow yourself to rest without feeling productivity guilt. The only strategy that has worked for me is to draw a hard separation between the time I work and the time I rest. So, if I wanted to write this article, I would delegate three hours and turn on the clock every time I am working. After the three hours run out, I stop, no matter if I want to keep going. 

This separation is hard to get used to, but if you make it a habit, then the line between work and rest will be very visible, and you won't feel guilty for not working during your clearly established rest time. 

The only concern remains with falling behind if you work fewer hours, but this isn't an issue for most people. The less time you have to work on a goal, the more urgency you feel to start immediately and work more intensely. So, you can spend less time working and be more productive in the given time.

Staying In The Zone - Working With Not Against Your Chronotype 

If you have ADHD, you are more likely to have disruptions in your circadian rhythm. This is your body's internal clock, always tracking the time of the day to keep your body in check. 

Throughout the day, you may have periods when you feel sluggish, lethargic, and drained of energy. However, you feel rejuvenated and motivated to do anything after a few hours. This is true not only for periods during the day but for whole days as well. It also leads to differences in when you naturally fall asleep.

Here is a very simple way to think of it. Let's imagine all people are birds because that's more fun, and the world would be better off if that were the case. There are larks, owls, and parrots. Depending on your type, you will have a different productivity window. 

Many people with ADHD describe themselves as night owls whose natural sleep schedule naturally leans toward the 2 am to 10 am time window. 

For night owls, the sun's disappearance brings relief and new energy. The world is quieter and less distracting, and they feel a new sense of alertness and motivation. This period is a blessing, but being a night owl can be a big disadvantage since schools, universities, and workplaces don't conform to the preferences of night owls, who happen to be a minority of the population. 

Inversely, larks can wake up early without having to use half of their willpower supply for the day only to get out of bed. Even if there is some natural struggle to shift from asleep to awake, larks can more easily shake off the morning brain fog and get started with work. The quietness of the morning gets them alert, motivated, and energized. 

All of this is a generalization. Not many people are textbook larks and night owls. The majority of the population, even many people with ADHD, will fall somewhere in the middle or won't fully fit the profile of any single category. This is why the best thing you can do is experiment and discover for yourself.

Thankfully, your biological clock and internal motivation rhythm are highly fixed, meaning you don't have to worry about fluctuations once you discover them. You can learn your chronotype by observing when you fall asleep, wake up, and are most productive during the day. 

Larks usually go to sleep between 22:30 pm and 23:30 pm and wake up between 6:30 am and 7:30 am. Owls go to sleep between 1:00 and 2:00 am and wake up between 9:00 am and 10:30 am on average. Parrots fall somewhere in between larks and owls. 

When testing how you naturally go to sleep and wake up, make sure to be in an environment where other disruptors are eliminated. So, do it at a time when you don't have responsibilities in the morning for a few days, without napping for more than 20 minutes during the day, and no intense or stimulating activities two hours before sleep, like staring at your phone. 

Depending on your type, you will have a different peak productivity window. 

1. Owls - 4 pm to 10 pm.

2. Larks - 6 am to 11 am. 

3. Parrots - 8 am to 12 am. 

Yours can be a combination of those or totally different. Try to do the same or very similar type of task across different times of the day and rate from 1 to 10 how hard it was to get started, how often you got distracted, and how much work you did by the end of the session. Then, all you have to do is compare. 

You can also start tracking down on a journal or a digital document how motivated you feel on a daily basis by rating your motivation from 0 to 10 in the morning, noon, afternoon, early evening, and late evening if you are still awake. 

It will take some time, but it’s absolutely worth it. One month of tracking and reflecting on your chronotype is worth a lifetime of higher productivity and motivation. 

Being more in synch with how you feel throughout the day can make it easier to tap into zones of higher productivity and reduce the needless mental strain of trying to work when you just can't. Knowing when you are most capable of working can be a huge productivity boost, but it's also very helpful to know when you are feeling under the weather and unable to work.

In those days, you can do the bare minimum required and try to rest and preserve your energy. Otherwise, you'd be forcing yourself to work when your body simply can’t, leading to more mental exhaustion and a higher risk of burnout.

Key Takeaways

When you feel motivated, the length and intensity of your motivation can vary significantly from day to day if you have ADHD. But just because it is challenging to stay motivated doesn't mean you should give up altogether. 

You can achieve significant results by optimizing your environment, using different methods for motivation, scheduling to make the most out of every motivational peak, and gradually learning how to create motivation out of nothing.