Kill Your Darling, Darling
Want to murder your creative instincts and nuke your output while supercharging your worst ADHD impulses? Ignore this advice.
“We are forever elsewhere” - Sherry Turkle
If you want to get shit done, especially creative shit, and ESPECIALLY as an ADHDer, I have a very simple piece of advice for you. One you’re probably not going to take but fuck it, I’m going to give it anyway. I’m a parent, I spend all day giving advice that gets ignored, usually very good advice (like “don’t lick the cat”, and “that is a dead fly, not a raisin.")
Fire your phone into the sun.
Gone. Finito. Put it in an envelope, and post it to someone you hate. Give it a humane death in the freezer. Don’t replace it, when you inevitably drop it in the toilet, or shatter the screen, or leave it on the train. Bitch I mean it. Don’t just nod sagely, hit the wee heart button and move on to the next article, which will overwrite this one in your donut of a short term memory.
Yes, I’m late to the party on this issue. I’m always late to the party, I have ADHD, so I have to manage by making a scene when I arrive. The handwringing articles have been done to death and we’ve reached the squabbling-over-research stage in the discourse, so I’m not going to spend too much time lecturing you on the generic evils of smartphone use. Firstly, it’s boring and you’ve probably heard most of it before. But more importantly, you already know.
In psychotherapy, we talk about there being two distinct types of knowing. There’s intellectual knowing, which is when you have heard all the reasons and can recite them back, blah blah blah. Then, there’s felt knowing. That’s when, as the name suggests, you feel the truth of the knowledge echoing through your bones and vibrating up through your flesh like the tolling of a church bell. When you reach this stage, you know what you’re doing is bad for you because you feel it, like a full-body layer of scunge after a night of sweaty moshing.
Once you reach the stage of felt knowing, you’re ready for action.
Read on, and maybe you’ll get there … because I’m about to tell you why your phone is uniquely bad for our particular brand of neurodiversity.
How smartphones make ADHD worse
Heavy users of social media have been shown to have worsening ADHD symptoms over time,1 and it’s hardly surprising. Smartphone use fragments our attention, which is not exactly functioning optimally to begin with. It also negatively impacts emotional regulation and relational functioning, and poses particular challenges for ADHDers around time blindness, visualisation, and (terrifyingly) the ability to tolerate boredom and generate dopamine. It’s also addictive as fuck, and deliberately created to be so.
In essence, if you were to sit down and design a device that would make life harder and worse for an ADHD brain, you would come up with the device you are currently reading this on.
1. Deficits in visualisation and task breakdown make online imagery more problematic for ADHDers
There’s some complex science behind this that I’m not going to get into and that we still don’t fully understand. But basically, ADHD involves deficits in internal visualisation.2 We can’t easily imagine things in images, we need the picture right there in front of us before we can internalise and integrate it. This is why taking a picture of everything we need when we leave the house, then referring back to it each morning works so much better than using a list (if you haven’t already discovered this hack, you’re welcome). It’s why we need sticker charts and vision boards. We can’t “hold things in mind” very well.
In addition, we can’t easily break things down into their individual parts. This means we get stressed by a task like “clean the bathroom”, because it’s ten smaller interconnected tasks in one and brain goes brrrrr. It also means whenever we see an image, we take it at face value and it’s harder for us to think what went into making that image? For example, I remember seeing a glorious, aspirational, smiling, soft-toned Christmas photo one of my mom friends uploaded with her toddler. Looking at it, I felt a bit icky and unsure of myself. No way could I get my kid to sit still happily and take a photo with Santa. Maybe I’m doing something wrong? Maybe there’s something not going well in my kid’s development? Anyway, I told her they were lovely photos, and she sheepishly admitted it had taken about 30 attempts, three tantrums, an iPad, snack bribery, 200 photos, portable lighting, and tears from both parents to produce that one image.
Normal brains are bad at filling in the life and process that exists outside a given curated image, and ADHD brains are particularly bad at it. What this means is that we see (for example) a finished artwork, or a beautifully tidy walnut writing desk, and we take it very concretely. We don’t see the messy process, the mad hair, the failed attempts, the slammed laptops, the paint smears, the piles of paper. We are witnesses to the whole of our own process, but we don’t see the in-between bits of other’s processes online - just snapshots, and because we can’t fill in what we don’t see it messes with our brains.
We think there’s something wrong with us far more readily than other people. We get lost in the fantasy the image presents so easily.
2. ADHD brains need off-ramps, and on the Internet there are none
As the saying goes, “you cannot scroll to the end”. You cannot drink the infinite content river, but you’d best believe you can drown attempting it.
