over the last year or so ive come to appreciate how adhd is just as much an emotional dysregulation disorder as it is an executive function disorder  i visualize this as follows  1 reduced mental equipment inventory 2 emotional wrecking ball  we have the ability to function but our mental desk is much smaller than normal which means we get overwhelmed more easily which translates out to things like possibility paralysis  this means we simply need to use a two-brain system  1 physical brain use our minds for getting ideas  doing work 2 digital brain use this off-your-brain written system for managing lists of work checklists for how to do the work reminder alarms and timer  the emotional wrecking ball is a giant 10-foot-tall concrete wrecking ball that weighs 10000 pounds  as youre walking down the path towards your goal it manifests in several ways  1 in front of you blocking your path which is when you feel you just cant get over it 2 behind you pushing you along like when youve waited until the last minute to write the 10-page essay due tomorrow  now you feel the last-minute panic of the wrecking ball pushing you down your path 3 hitting you sideways when you either get distracted or something happens to knock you off your path to your goal  whammo   youre out of the game 4 dropping on your head from the top  just killing all forward progress which are those times when you just cant even  youre 100 done 5 sitting on top of the wrecking ball far above your path which is those times when youve just got so much stuff spinning around your head that you just pinball around life lighting touching on different tasks but never being able to really dive into doing any one thing in particular because youre just up in the air  not really in contact with anything  cant seem to get yourself down  my key word of the month is   surmountable  my ability to surmount stuff ie to wrap my intentionality around actually doing something is a flow sort of a like a faucet to a hose where you can turn the knob higher or lower  it waxes  wanes depending on a variety of things like how prepared i am how personally interested i am how much energy i have how distracted im feeling etc  sometimes things just seem insurmountable  my core definition of adhd is as follows   simple things are hard  for most people simple things like just doing the dishes is not only easy but a no-brainer  sure it may feel like a chore but that chore is a molehill compared to the everest that we have to scale to do simple things at times  which is why my ability to feel that things are surmountable is a flowsometimes it gets a kink in the hose  ill just stare at the dishes for awhile  then avoid them because its just too big  too insurmountable in the moment  and thats why ive come to appreciate the emotional dysregulation aspect to it when i feel that even simple things are too big  too hard it paralyzes my ability to do 2 things  1 think through the work required 2 take action on the work required  particularly when ive got a lot on my mind  im feeling like atlas holding up the world  feeling all of that pressure  so combining global pressure with the insurmountability of the task at hand is why i encounter that paralysis of will  have intermittent activation problems and why things are so fickle  1 it depends on the global weight sometimes i have a hurricane of everything in the universe swirling around my head and other times i have responsibility amnesia where my mind is 100 clear  free of everything im on the hook for so sometimes i feel super pressured  sometimes im as free as a bird 2 it depends on the local weight the surmountability i feel of the task at hand  the combination of those two things are driven by multiple factors energy interest distractions etc which is why i go up  down  its pretty lame