Finishing My PhD with ADHD

One of the most important concepts that a (very) late diagnosis of ADHD brings is that of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD). I’m relatively successful school teacher who moved into academia in my early 40s, and since then I’ve developed a thickish skin by dealing with the emergencies and client-management events that come with leading an ITT programme that straddles university, and school based learning. I didn’t think that RSD applied to me, just as I used to constantly doubt whether the overall diagnosis was accurate, or just another example of the attention seeking that I often internally accused myself of.

You’ll already see the irony – the internalised negative self-talk which is one of the things that ADHD does to oneself, and how that scarring and thickening of the skin also contributes to the self-protectionism and avoidance of demands, social, workplace, emotional, whatever, which is an important characteristic of RSD.

I’ve got many annoying and un-helpful characteristics, and quite a few of them are RSD adjacent. That’s not to say that I have to behave in those ways, but that RSD is a useful concept for me, which enables me (sometimes) to catch myself thinking or acting in those ways, and thereby (sometimes) avoid or reduce them.

But…that’s not always what happens, especially when the behaviours and feelings are less dramatic, more insidious. One of my least favourite, but quite common, examples is sticking my head in the sand when not wanting to confront what I anticipate will be negative feelings or conversations about things I have done, achieved (or failed to do or achieve). This can lead to all sorts of odd proctastination, perfectionism and putting off contact.

One of the things I hate doing, for instance, is confirming social arrangements. I think that this has come from all the times I got things mixed up, double booked, or plain forgot them even though they were in my diary. See also booking trains, flights, tickets for gigs.

That’s serious enough, and if i didn’t have some great friends it would have been quite socially isolating for me, but in the workplace and in study it can lead to other, very material, difficulties. This is especially the case when we consider the ADHDer’s habit of biting off more than they can chew. So, I might over promise, and then retreat into a dark hole when the extent of the demand becomes clear. Or, I might be able to continue to plod away on a project, but be unable to contact the folks I’m working with until I’ve got something big and shiny to show them, or something important to tell them, rather than keeping them informed about the much more human scale progress that they’re expecting.

Recently this has been an important feature of my relationship with my supervisors, both of whom have been very understanding, calm even, in the face of the difficulties that are a feature of my part time PhD and full time HE job (and family responsibilities). Though their attention and kindness make it harder to understand why I’ve (until yesterday) not been in touch with them since late May (!), the RSD and the resulting slow build of delay, putting off, putting head in the sand and then full on crisis thinking are probably important features.

I’ve been thinking about how I can avoid this cycle building up, and I think partly the problem arises in my planning. I’m great at a gant chart – but I massively overestimate how much I can get done in the timescales I’ve alotted to tasks. In otherwords I’m creating a situation in which I’ll feel bad about not doing what I’ve said I’ll do, and that leads to a request to re-arrange a meeting, and then to increased feelings of uselessnesss.

The second way of addressing this has come out of some middle of the night e-book reading that I’ve been doing about music practice, which has some relevance for my PhD generally, but mainly because I’m a fairly bad saxophonist, and I’d like to get better. Anyway, the Practice of Practice by Jonathan Harnum has an interesting chapter on the idea of goals, which explores some of the ways that we might think about them, so that they’re more of a help than a stick to beat ourselves with. His ideas chime with somethings I’ve been thinking about for a while connected with the way that universities (and probably other institutions) set goals which are really outcomes of other goals, (“Achieve Gold TEF”, for instance), and hardly ever talk about strategies and tactics. Often the ‘strategic aims’ of an organisation are written as targets for things to attain (often numerical or regulatory), rather than descriptions of strategies and tactics that are likely to get us to that point of success. We’re big on aspiration for recognition, but quiet about what should be done.

For the ADHD’er, that’s especially important because of the need for salience, especially when confronted by strategies or aims that are in conflict, and with an inbox and to-do list that groan under their own weight.

When I look back at last year’s plan I realised that I’m not giving myself a chance to experience that sense of progress, because my plan is a set of things I need to achieve in unreasonably short time frames. To make things worse, there’s no sense of what I need to do. I can work out what to do – and sometimes, especially when planning or if the pressure is either entirely off, or if there’s a crisis.

The trouble is I’m not making space in order to do the first, and waiting for the second to occur before I can act. Sometimes a mirage of salience or urgency can gather around a task, such as writing this blog(!). But, a quick discussion with calmer third parties could perhaps help me see that making a dent in some long term work actually deserves to be much higher in the pecking order than a piece of work that a colleague is urging me to do, or preparing for teaching or a meeting, even though that is next in the queue of events.

So, I’ve re-written my plan with space for incremental weekly milestones, based on Harnum’s recommendation that we recognise that there are different types of goal:

• ultimate – our life goals, values, aspirations
• long term – projects that take sustained attention over time frames that might last years, such as a PhD, or learning to play the saxophone.
• mid term – steps along the way to the long term goals, taking months or years themselves.
• short term – steps that contribute or build to mid-term goals, within the timeframe of months or weeks.
• immediate – mini steps or targets that are achieved over days
• micro – your task goals for a particular session of work or practice.
• nano – sub-divisions of the tasks for achievement within minutes.

At the moment I’ve been looking at the levle of short term and immediate weekly goals, with the hope that these will be more motivating, and less daunting than ‘finish data analysis’ type deadlines that I’ve relied on in the past.

So, why do I feel silly? Because when I had the meeting with my supervisors they were both (characteristically) supportive and empathetic, even if they were anxious to help me understand how important it is to maintain contact. That feeling of having dug a hole for myself in an imaginary hostile environment was re-inforced when we talked about the things I have been doing, which made me realise that I hadn’t been wasting time, but working slowly through some difficult things. I finished the meeting as I always do, enthused and more confident. Why, when those are my only experiences of supervisions, would I be daft enough to avoid them?

Image – Theen Moy – https://flic.kr/p/bDkoQK