For me, a major part of ADHD management consists of forcing myself to do something, multiple times a day. It's work, learning, chores-like tasks, sport, hygiene, regular sleep, cold morning shower, unprocessed food preparation - pretty much everything that isn't immediately pleasurable.
I'm "unhappy" multiple times a day when I start doing something that doesn't usually have to be done right away. But it's often a choice not between doing something now or later, but doing something now, not never.
However weirdly this may sound - I constantly do things against myself, for myself. I don't get much satisfaction from finishing those tasks but my life quality has increased drastically and I wouldn't go back from moments of discomfort to an ongoing discomfort.
Oh wow this resonates - I'm exactly the same. I basically try to minimize the time I spend thinking on most things. I have to consciously tell myself "I'm going to stop thinking and just do this task". It's amazing how when you do this, all of the sudden all of the stuff that's on the back of your mind (chores, exercise, etc) just get done in time and your anxiety goes away
> how it feels for normal people who get there shit done
My perspective is that once I took a step back and really looked, I noticed almost nobody is getting ANY shit done, and perhaps that’s OK. I was just holding myself to unreasonable standards of what “shit done” is that I don’t hold other people to and that was the root cause of my exhaustion. Society progressing is really just a series of extremely tiny things with the occasional rare major event pushed up to human population scale, something that one individual can’t compete against without burning out.
I'm not saying there are absolutely no people out there who are actually getting shit done and making it look easy, and somehow never burning out, but they are by far the exception and in no way "normal" people (and in many cases they are ticking time bombs, but the fallout may be well hidden)
I'm "unhappy" multiple times a day when I start doing something that doesn't usually have to be done right away. But it's often a choice not between doing something now or later, but doing something now, not never.
However weirdly this may sound - I constantly do things against myself, for myself. I don't get much satisfaction from finishing those tasks but my life quality has increased drastically and I wouldn't go back from moments of discomfort to an ongoing discomfort.