5 ms·

It reminds me that ADHD is really not that useful of a name, executive function disorder would be a more accurate name from when I was looking into ADHD in the

It reminds me that ADHD is really not that useful of a name, executive function disorder would be a more accurate name from when I was looking into ADHD in the past. It's not about attention deficit per se, as that's downstream of struggling with executive functioning. At least it's the definition that lines up with my experience best (I have ADHD). I'll make lists in order to keep track of important tasks (which in theory would help with attention deficit) but then I'll sit down to do the things on the list and... can't. It's such a hard thing to explain, but no amount of attention hacks can get me over the hump of doing the tasks I'm dreading. That seems much more related to executive functioning.

Extropy_ 6mo ago
I find similar behaviour in myself, particularly that dreading a task makes it significantly more difficult to start. I find that if I can manage to do just a little bit, even just open the application and maybe look around a bit at what I need to do, it really gets the momentum going for me. Do you think there's anything that differentiates what we might call "general task dread" that perhaps anyone experiences to a certain degree from a more broad executive function disorder? Or is it that dreading leading to task paralysis is one of many symptoms of an executive function disorder?
- hirvi74 6mo ago
  I think the frequency and level of impairment is what differentiates normal executive dysfunction from an executive functioning disorder. Perhaps a bit rhetorical, but how often does this task dread occur? Does it also ever occur for things you want to do, not just obligated to do? For me, I experience this issue for many tasks everyday. Then again, I have never had a normal executive functioning, so I cannot claim to know what it is like for normies. I’ll also add that ADHD is more than just executive dysfunction too.
  - Extropy_ 6mo ago
    I'm really bad at it for things that aren't novel or really interesting, especially repetitive tasks, like doing illustrations for a customer for example, I know what to do, I've done it hundreds of times, but I'd just rather be doing something else. It does also happen for things I want to do but only usually if it's something I'm not confident about. Like I want to do a really comprehensive gardening setup this year, I've done all the research and planning, I just have no experience sewing seeds or growing vines, or how to setup indoor seed hatching, and I'm just dreading the whole starting process and have put it off too long- I should've started mid-April.
- retrac 6mo ago
  How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupted by almost anything. Oh, I forgot to send that message. Oh, I forgot to check for the parcel. Oh, I need to go to the store today still. And I will walk away and forget to come back and finish.
  - TJSomething 6mo ago
    I love moving all my laundry to the dryer and forgetting to start the dryer. Probably happens once or twice a month.
  - Extropy_ 6mo ago
    Pretty good. I don't find I get derailed by other tasks but I do find others related to what I'm doing like "Oh, dishwasher's done, let's empty it, but oh wait let's clean the counter first" and then end up cleaning the sink and emptying the garbage as well
- lachlan_gray 6mo ago
  [dead]
colechristensen 6mo ago
[flagged]
- EA-3167 6mo ago
  It’s amazing to see a disproven and frankly ancient viewpoint espoused with a straight face here. When I was a kid in the eighties your way of thinking was already defunct.
  - Akronymus 6mo ago
    And that viewpoint doesnt even account for adult ADHD/executive dysfunction.
    - EA-3167 6mo ago
      Exactly. It also ignores recent genetic testing that's showing how different mental illnesses and developmental disorders cluster around the same dysfunctional gene cohorts. To very little surprise ADHD and Autism appear to be closely related for example.
  - nkmnz 6mo ago
    This isn't defunct in any way. To the contrary. I've been diagnosed with ADHD myself and creating an environment that is accommodating to my individual needs has absolutely been in line with what experts recommended to be, and it's been a corner stone of my success. CBT teaches you to evaluate how to shape the environments your living in so that you can benefit the most from your resources and weaknesses and suffer the least from your weaknesses. For some people, this can include taking stimulants, and this is where I do not condone your parent comment's undertone. Nevertheless, it's been proven over and over again that the rigid system that we call schools does not welcome neuro-atypical students and that we could do a lot more to help those who do not react well to stimulants, who do not want to use them (for whatever individual reason), or simply haven't been diagnosed yet! Allowing for movement instead of forcing to suppress it is a very good example for what could be done. One shouldn't make the mistake to think that this alone would be enough for every single child with ADHD, though. But for some, it could be enough.
dgellow 6mo ago
Yeah, it’s a common topic of discussion in the various adhd discussion groups across the internet. Unfortunately changing the name would have some unintended effects because a bunch of regulations and other things are using the current denomination
nkmnz 6mo ago
In my mental model of ADHD, executive functioning is at the center of an hourglass-shaped graph. The bottom half consists of multiple "internal" layers/systems (neurological, psychological), in which some deficiency or deficiencies cause a lack of executive functioning (arrows point up from layers down below upwards to the central element of "executive functioning" to visualize the direction of causation). The upper half shows the outward facing layers/system behavior, social relationships, skills; the arrows point only upwards. I don't have any scientific source for this graph, but I never experienced any "ADHD"-related problem that I couldn't understand through this lens. Happy to share my sketch if anyone is interested.
- dostick 6mo ago
  Please do! This is very original and maybe most interesting conceptualisation in this thread.
teekert 6mo ago
Ah man I feel you. What helped a bit for me is relentlessly trying to get your career focused on only fun things. It's a long term strategy, but I am now a not-so-successful-yet entrepreneur but I do love about 95% of what I do and that makes me do things fast and without it feeling like effort.
- yuye 6mo ago
  >What helped a bit for me is relentlessly trying to get your career focused on only fun things. That's what I did. But now AI is threatening to ruin that.
  - teekert 6mo ago
    The world is what it is, change is the only constant. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. It is a mantra that brings positive outcomes. Try to love something in the improvise/adapt/overcome process that like or may learn to like, with time. Don't drop your own agency in a world filled with agents. You can do it.
zeroonetwothree 6mo ago
As they often say, ADHD is about having _too much_ attention and not being able to control it.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jcims 6mo ago
I experience the same thing very frequently. I likened it to activation energy in a reaction, that no matter what I did I couldn't create the required electrochemical bias in my brain needed to put ideas into action. It's like being stranded in your own mind, you know what you need to do, but the 'go' just never arrives. I eventually discovered that the adrenaline response from extreme stress ('if I don't get this fucking thing done by 7:30am I'm fired' kind of thing) allows me to lock in and do the thing.
- saltyoldman 6mo ago
  We need two kinds of managers. Normal managers that manages normal people and ADHD managers that manage the ADHD folk. The ADHD manager has one extra responsibility. Make the thing due 1 week earlier.
  - niccl 6mo ago
    That wouldn't work (for me, at least). As soon as I figured out the pattern, I'd know I had a week after the 'deadline' and then the pressure is off until that week is passed/nearly up
    - smj-edison 6mo ago
      That's been my experience with tricks. I'll think of some clever trick to work around my ADHD, and it'll work great for about two weeks. Then after that I'll start anticipating it and working around it. The self-defeating nature of ADHD might be one of the most frustrating things.
      - kgwxd 6mo ago
        Everything is due NOW, seems to work best for me. Just a list to make empty, so I can sleep. Give me deadlines, or ask for estimates, and the task is doomed.
        saltyoldman 6mo ago
nkrisc 6mo ago
For me it’s that as soon as I intend to begin a task, I start thinking about every step, and everything that might go wrong at every step, and planning contingencies for every hypothetical problem, and on and on. So suddenly the task seems totally overwhelming, when I could just… not do it. So I find a time later I can attempt it and after a few times it is no longer novel and I forget about it. If anything is hyper-active, it’s the executive function part of my brain that is driven to plan out every tiny, hypothetical detail before I can start. What’s missing is the reward and internal incentives for doing things when there are other things that do feel good to do (that aren’t what I need to do).
- 121789 6mo ago
  I'm the same way and I've found there's no real way around it. I've found it's actually a really useful way of thinking for complex projects and planning and prioritization, but bad for getting things done. The only things that work for me to manage this: 1. Relentlessly make distractions high friction. Block websites, go to the office if you get distracted at home, etc. 2. Use time-based daily planning instead of goal-based (stuff like pomodoro helps). If I put "create work plan for project Z" on my to-do list, it is ambiguous and I will put it off forever. If I just say "Spend 25 minutes on work plan for project Z, no pressure on outcome/output", I make tons of progress (and often can continue the task for a while) 3. music 4. the obvious diet/sleep/meds advice
- kristianp 6mo ago
  This is a great insight, I wonder if that's a sign of Innatentive type ADHD. But I would say that the process of thinking of other things that also need to be done, is not done by the executive function part of the brain. The executive disfunction is the decision not to begin the task.
- abadar 6mo ago
  I, too, experience that. I am anxious and I overthink and I am avoidant. Vyvanse helped a ton, but it was producing health complications, so I am taking something else that's not as good. It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart. Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."
laserlight 6mo ago
Executive function problems are symptoms of ADHD, therefore renaming it as executive function disorder would omit the root cause. Dr. Edward Hallowell proposes Variable Attention Stimulus Trait (VAST) as a better name.
louthy 6mo ago
> It's not about attention deficit per se I've always considered it Too Much Attention Disorder. The way I like to think about it is that neurotypical people have a beam of light shining out in front of them, wherever they turn their head the light shines and that's where their attention is. Nothing else distracts them from where the light is shining. With ADHD (for me at least) it's like 50 beams of light scanning the entire room constantly for 'something'. This is too much attention to things that I'm not really interested in, but can distract me from anything I'm trying to do or wan't to do. For things that I am really interested in (like writing code) the 50 beams of light all manage to synchronise and focus in the same place and that's hyperfocus.
- hnlmorg 6mo ago
  That’s such a beautiful way of putting it
- orphea 6mo ago
  Attention means an ability to ignore unimportant things. This is why the disorder is attention deficit - your ability to ignore distractions is diminished.
  - gausswho 6mo ago
    It's a confounding definition for me because of the inherent ambiguity, along the lines of a double negative. A disorder of ignoring, what does that tell us about what we attend to?
    - Terr_ 6mo ago
      I often like to point out that we are completely blind to the most common thing around us, nitrogen gas. This blindness is good, because it allows us to attend to everything else, instead of stumbling around through a fog and over cliffs and into the maws of ambush predators. While it's usually part of a rant about false color pictures in astronomy, it applies cognitively too. It's about the signal to noise ratio, and what constitutes signal versus noise can change in an instant.
zenoprax 6mo ago
It was even called "minimal brain damage" at one point early on! I'm also reminded that "Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" and "Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder" are different in kind but necessarily in magnitude. The former comcerns more localized obsessions and the latter is more of a global "default state of perfectionism".
SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago
I always picture it like trying to force and hold a strong magnet flush against the like pole of another. It seems like it will be easy at first, but the closer they get, the harder it becomes and just as you are about to manage it, they fly apart and the magnet gets stuck to an even stronger one nearby. You manage to pry them apart, but it goes flying through the air and only to get stuck on an even stronger magnet still. And on it goes, over and over, until the magnet is stuck on the biggest, strongest magnet. Your attention is constantly being repelled from less engaging activities to more highly engaging activities, and eventually you land on whatever the most engaging activity is nearby. Sometimes without even realizing it
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
shinryuu 6mo ago
How are you dealing with that executive dysfunction in the end?
Weryj 6mo ago
It’s that I try and then can’t. When stuck in bed I can feel this momentum building in my head to push for movement and the a surge of will and then nothing. I didn’t reach the threshold of exerting my will and now I’m waiting for the next wave. Guess we’ll see how my diagnosis goes.
naikrovek 6mo ago
to me it is definitely "attention deficit", and it is a deficit in attention in two distinct ways: 1) it's a deficit in that i can't put my attention where i want to put it when i want to put it there. this is definitely "attention deficit" to me. 2) when my attention wants to focus on something on its own somehow, i can't prevent it from putting its attention on that; that thing becomes my main focus for some amount of time that I can't really control. that's also definitely "attention deficit" to me, but in another way than the first way.
butlike 6mo ago
Someone else who describes it like I do. You sit down to do a task, and there's an "invisible wall" between you and the objective. You physically CAN'T type on the keyboard if it pertains to the task at hand. You get up to go on a walk, and all of a sudden CANNOT WAIT to get back home to start the task. It sounds like the most enjoyable thing ever! Until... you get home and are greeted by the "invisible wall" again...
- yuye 6mo ago
  When I was a teenager, this would sometimes get so extremely bad that I could only describe the feeling of forcing yourself to push through this wall as almost painful. My body would tense up to the point of shaking and I could feel my brain absolutely SCREAMING "NO. NO. NO."

Extropy_ 6mo ago

I find similar behaviour in myself, particularly that dreading a task makes it significantly more difficult to start. I find that if I can manage to do just a little bit, even just open the application and maybe look around a bit at what I need to do, it really gets the momentum going for me. Do you think there's anything that differentiates what we might call "general task dread" that perhaps anyone experiences to a certain degree from a more broad executive function disorder? Or is it that dreading leading to task paralysis is one of many symptoms of an executive function disorder?

hirvi74 6mo ago
I think the frequency and level of impairment is what differentiates normal executive dysfunction from an executive functioning disorder. Perhaps a bit rhetorical, but how often does this task dread occur? Does it also ever occur for things you want to do, not just obligated to do? For me, I experience this issue for many tasks everyday. Then again, I have never had a normal executive functioning, so I cannot claim to know what it is like for normies. I’ll also add that ADHD is more than just executive dysfunction too.
- Extropy_ 6mo ago
  I'm really bad at it for things that aren't novel or really interesting, especially repetitive tasks, like doing illustrations for a customer for example, I know what to do, I've done it hundreds of times, but I'd just rather be doing something else. It does also happen for things I want to do but only usually if it's something I'm not confident about. Like I want to do a really comprehensive gardening setup this year, I've done all the research and planning, I just have no experience sewing seeds or growing vines, or how to setup indoor seed hatching, and I'm just dreading the whole starting process and have put it off too long- I should've started mid-April.
retrac 6mo ago
How are you for task completion? For me, transferring a load of laundry from the washer to dryer is not an atomic operation. There is ample room to get derailed and wander off during the twenty seconds it should take. It can be interrupted by almost anything. Oh, I forgot to send that message. Oh, I forgot to check for the parcel. Oh, I need to go to the store today still. And I will walk away and forget to come back and finish.
- TJSomething 6mo ago
  I love moving all my laundry to the dryer and forgetting to start the dryer. Probably happens once or twice a month.
- Extropy_ 6mo ago
  Pretty good. I don't find I get derailed by other tasks but I do find others related to what I'm doing like "Oh, dishwasher's done, let's empty it, but oh wait let's clean the counter first" and then end up cleaning the sink and emptying the garbage as well
lachlan_gray 6mo ago
[dead]

colechristensen 6mo ago

[flagged]

EA-3167 6mo ago
It’s amazing to see a disproven and frankly ancient viewpoint espoused with a straight face here. When I was a kid in the eighties your way of thinking was already defunct.
- Akronymus 6mo ago
  And that viewpoint doesnt even account for adult ADHD/executive dysfunction.
  - EA-3167 6mo ago
    Exactly. It also ignores recent genetic testing that's showing how different mental illnesses and developmental disorders cluster around the same dysfunctional gene cohorts. To very little surprise ADHD and Autism appear to be closely related for example.
- nkmnz 6mo ago
  This isn't defunct in any way. To the contrary. I've been diagnosed with ADHD myself and creating an environment that is accommodating to my individual needs has absolutely been in line with what experts recommended to be, and it's been a corner stone of my success. CBT teaches you to evaluate how to shape the environments your living in so that you can benefit the most from your resources and weaknesses and suffer the least from your weaknesses. For some people, this can include taking stimulants, and this is where I do not condone your parent comment's undertone. Nevertheless, it's been proven over and over again that the rigid system that we call schools does not welcome neuro-atypical students and that we could do a lot more to help those who do not react well to stimulants, who do not want to use them (for whatever individual reason), or simply haven't been diagnosed yet! Allowing for movement instead of forcing to suppress it is a very good example for what could be done. One shouldn't make the mistake to think that this alone would be enough for every single child with ADHD, though. But for some, it could be enough.

dgellow 6mo ago

Yeah, it’s a common topic of discussion in the various adhd discussion groups across the internet. Unfortunately changing the name would have some unintended effects because a bunch of regulations and other things are using the current denomination

nkmnz 6mo ago

In my mental model of ADHD, executive functioning is at the center of an hourglass-shaped graph. The bottom half consists of multiple "internal" layers/systems (neurological, psychological), in which some deficiency or deficiencies cause a lack of executive functioning (arrows point up from layers down below upwards to the central element of "executive functioning" to visualize the direction of causation). The upper half shows the outward facing layers/system behavior, social relationships, skills; the arrows point only upwards. I don't have any scientific source for this graph, but I never experienced any "ADHD"-related problem that I couldn't understand through this lens. Happy to share my sketch if anyone is interested.

dostick 6mo ago
Please do! This is very original and maybe most interesting conceptualisation in this thread.

teekert 6mo ago

Ah man I feel you. What helped a bit for me is relentlessly trying to get your career focused on only fun things. It's a long term strategy, but I am now a not-so-successful-yet entrepreneur but I do love about 95% of what I do and that makes me do things fast and without it feeling like effort.

yuye 6mo ago
>What helped a bit for me is relentlessly trying to get your career focused on only fun things. That's what I did. But now AI is threatening to ruin that.
- teekert 6mo ago
  The world is what it is, change is the only constant. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. It is a mantra that brings positive outcomes. Try to love something in the improvise/adapt/overcome process that like or may learn to like, with time. Don't drop your own agency in a world filled with agents. You can do it.

zeroonetwothree 6mo ago

As they often say, ADHD is about having _too much_ attention and not being able to control it.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jcims 6mo ago

I experience the same thing very frequently. I likened it to activation energy in a reaction, that no matter what I did I couldn't create the required electrochemical bias in my brain needed to put ideas into action. It's like being stranded in your own mind, you know what you need to do, but the 'go' just never arrives. I eventually discovered that the adrenaline response from extreme stress ('if I don't get this fucking thing done by 7:30am I'm fired' kind of thing) allows me to lock in and do the thing.

saltyoldman 6mo ago
We need two kinds of managers. Normal managers that manages normal people and ADHD managers that manage the ADHD folk. The ADHD manager has one extra responsibility. Make the thing due 1 week earlier.
- niccl 6mo ago
  That wouldn't work (for me, at least). As soon as I figured out the pattern, I'd know I had a week after the 'deadline' and then the pressure is off until that week is passed/nearly up
  - smj-edison 6mo ago
    That's been my experience with tricks. I'll think of some clever trick to work around my ADHD, and it'll work great for about two weeks. Then after that I'll start anticipating it and working around it. The self-defeating nature of ADHD might be one of the most frustrating things.
    - kgwxd 6mo ago
      Everything is due NOW, seems to work best for me. Just a list to make empty, so I can sleep. Give me deadlines, or ask for estimates, and the task is doomed.
      - saltyoldman 6mo ago

nkrisc 6mo ago

For me it’s that as soon as I intend to begin a task, I start thinking about every step, and everything that might go wrong at every step, and planning contingencies for every hypothetical problem, and on and on. So suddenly the task seems totally overwhelming, when I could just… not do it. So I find a time later I can attempt it and after a few times it is no longer novel and I forget about it. If anything is hyper-active, it’s the executive function part of my brain that is driven to plan out every tiny, hypothetical detail before I can start. What’s missing is the reward and internal incentives for doing things when there are other things that do feel good to do (that aren’t what I need to do).

121789 6mo ago
I'm the same way and I've found there's no real way around it. I've found it's actually a really useful way of thinking for complex projects and planning and prioritization, but bad for getting things done. The only things that work for me to manage this: 1. Relentlessly make distractions high friction. Block websites, go to the office if you get distracted at home, etc. 2. Use time-based daily planning instead of goal-based (stuff like pomodoro helps). If I put "create work plan for project Z" on my to-do list, it is ambiguous and I will put it off forever. If I just say "Spend 25 minutes on work plan for project Z, no pressure on outcome/output", I make tons of progress (and often can continue the task for a while) 3. music 4. the obvious diet/sleep/meds advice
kristianp 6mo ago
This is a great insight, I wonder if that's a sign of Innatentive type ADHD. But I would say that the process of thinking of other things that also need to be done, is not done by the executive function part of the brain. The executive disfunction is the decision not to begin the task.
abadar 6mo ago
I, too, experience that. I am anxious and I overthink and I am avoidant. Vyvanse helped a ton, but it was producing health complications, so I am taking something else that's not as good. It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart. Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."

laserlight 6mo ago

Executive function problems are symptoms of ADHD, therefore renaming it as executive function disorder would omit the root cause. Dr. Edward Hallowell proposes Variable Attention Stimulus Trait (VAST) as a better name.

louthy 6mo ago

> It's not about attention deficit per se I've always considered it Too Much Attention Disorder. The way I like to think about it is that neurotypical people have a beam of light shining out in front of them, wherever they turn their head the light shines and that's where their attention is. Nothing else distracts them from where the light is shining. With ADHD (for me at least) it's like 50 beams of light scanning the entire room constantly for 'something'. This is too much attention to things that I'm not really interested in, but can distract me from anything I'm trying to do or wan't to do. For things that I am really interested in (like writing code) the 50 beams of light all manage to synchronise and focus in the same place and that's hyperfocus.

hnlmorg 6mo ago
That’s such a beautiful way of putting it
orphea 6mo ago
Attention means an ability to ignore unimportant things. This is why the disorder is attention deficit - your ability to ignore distractions is diminished.
- gausswho 6mo ago
  It's a confounding definition for me because of the inherent ambiguity, along the lines of a double negative. A disorder of ignoring, what does that tell us about what we attend to?
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    I often like to point out that we are completely blind to the most common thing around us, nitrogen gas. This blindness is good, because it allows us to attend to everything else, instead of stumbling around through a fog and over cliffs and into the maws of ambush predators. While it's usually part of a rant about false color pictures in astronomy, it applies cognitively too. It's about the signal to noise ratio, and what constitutes signal versus noise can change in an instant.

zenoprax 6mo ago

It was even called "minimal brain damage" at one point early on! I'm also reminded that "Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" and "Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder" are different in kind but necessarily in magnitude. The former comcerns more localized obsessions and the latter is more of a global "default state of perfectionism".

SmirkingRevenge 6mo ago

I always picture it like trying to force and hold a strong magnet flush against the like pole of another. It seems like it will be easy at first, but the closer they get, the harder it becomes and just as you are about to manage it, they fly apart and the magnet gets stuck to an even stronger one nearby. You manage to pry them apart, but it goes flying through the air and only to get stuck on an even stronger magnet still. And on it goes, over and over, until the magnet is stuck on the biggest, strongest magnet. Your attention is constantly being repelled from less engaging activities to more highly engaging activities, and eventually you land on whatever the most engaging activity is nearby. Sometimes without even realizing it

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

shinryuu 6mo ago

How are you dealing with that executive dysfunction in the end?

Weryj 6mo ago

It’s that I try and then can’t. When stuck in bed I can feel this momentum building in my head to push for movement and the a surge of will and then nothing. I didn’t reach the threshold of exerting my will and now I’m waiting for the next wave. Guess we’ll see how my diagnosis goes.

naikrovek 6mo ago

to me it is definitely "attention deficit", and it is a deficit in attention in two distinct ways: 1) it's a deficit in that i can't put my attention where i want to put it when i want to put it there. this is definitely "attention deficit" to me. 2) when my attention wants to focus on something on its own somehow, i can't prevent it from putting its attention on that; that thing becomes my main focus for some amount of time that I can't really control. that's also definitely "attention deficit" to me, but in another way than the first way.

butlike 6mo ago

Someone else who describes it like I do. You sit down to do a task, and there's an "invisible wall" between you and the objective. You physically CAN'T type on the keyboard if it pertains to the task at hand. You get up to go on a walk, and all of a sudden CANNOT WAIT to get back home to start the task. It sounds like the most enjoyable thing ever! Until... you get home and are greeted by the "invisible wall" again...

yuye 6mo ago
When I was a teenager, this would sometimes get so extremely bad that I could only describe the feeling of forcing yourself to push through this wall as almost painful. My body would tense up to the point of shaking and I could feel my brain absolutely SCREAMING "NO. NO. NO."