March 24th, 2025
If you have spent any amount of time with me you will quickly recognize that I have ADHD.
My mind moves 1000 miles a minute and I am easily capable of maintaining 5 different conversations at once as well as letting you know what is going on in our surroundings at any point in time.
In fact, one of the most challenging aspects of this, is while I can tell you about all of these conversations, one of the most challenging places to be is in a one on one conversation, like a date with my wife, in a noisy and crowded restaurant.
Good. Luck.
This is just one of the many tendencies I learned about while reading a book called “Your Brain’s Not Broken” by Tamara Rosier.
Interestingly enough, one of the tendencies I wanted to bring to light to you today is the All or Nothing Trap.
What you will learn in this book is that there are many different flavors of the ADHD person for the “neurotypical” person to observe.
To us – the ADHD crowd – we just assume everyone is like us.
This means that as a person with ADHD, we quickly recognize who has it and we are attracted to those people because we have similar tendencies.
This is a low energy exchange environment.
One of those characteristics is the principle of all or nothing thinking, especially when we are fixated on something.
The examples I can give you in my own life fall into a few categories: books, Lego, Puzzles.
If I love a book, I can usually read it in an entire weekend and recount the entire thing to you for the rest of my life.
If I sit down to do Lego, I will not get up till the set is finished.
When I start a puzzle, good luck getting my attention.
During these activities, you will be hard pressed to have a conversation with me and you may think that I am just being dismissive, however, I have learned that I am just wired that way.
I call this the All or Nothing Trap.
This can be healthy for the ADHD Person…but it can wreak havoc on those who are not.
An example…
A few weeks ago I got some blood work done just to check my progress on my health journey.
I became fixated on a few numbers that were “slightly elevated” or not changed year over year.
Fixated to the point that I was ready to eliminate everything that would potentially cause those factors to be elevated, no matter the destruction it caused to my family, my business, my social life.
To be honest, this was the “best option” for my brain to use the least amount of energy possible.
The alternative would be to find a state of balance which for some ADHD people (me specifically) is incredibly energy expensive.
And to be quite honest, while I have gotten better at creating structured discipline around it, every now and then I find myself naturally slipping into the all or nothing paradigm
For some of my habits, it has caused great success and in others it has caused significant harm which I am working at repairing and getting better at navigating.
Ultimately, if you are someone who struggles in this category, I want you to know that you are not alone.
I want you to know that there are thousands of us, just like you, who use all or nothing as a way to avoid expensive energy costs and to navigate the world.
In fact, as my mom would say, we are the people who transform the world.
To outsiders, it may not make sense until they read this. To us, you totally understand what I am talking about.
For both of you, you are wondering what the solution is?
That, I don’t have.
But I can leave you with a quote that might give you some guidance.
“Virtues do not simply form from Heaven. They are the fruit of labor, long and arduous work.”
So, the best encouragement I can give you is this.
- If you are in the All or Nothing Trap, step back for a minute, maybe an hour, maybe a day or two.
- Take the situation you are presented with and pray about it, bring it up to a secondary person who has knowledge of the situation that you can trust and ask them about it.
- Organize your energy throughout the day to ensure you do not exhaust your stores and revert to default tendencies
- Breathe!
- Work to harness your all or nothing for the good, and when it becomes toxic learn to step back, pause, and regroup.
- Go and use your biological gift to radically transform the world.
Remember…it’s 4:45 AM…one of my All or Nothing Habits that allows me to be the best version of myself…and if you are walking with me, wherever you are in the world, know that I am praying for you and willfully suffering with you.
Till next week.
