ADHD task paralysis is not a wanting problem. Brendan Mahan named the Wall of Awful, and he explains what is actually happening when a small task feels impossible.
There is something on your list right now. Not the big thing. The small one. The phone call, the form, the email you have opened four times and closed four times. At some point it stopped being a task and turned into evidence about you.
Brendan Mahan, M.Ed., M.S., is an ADHD and executive function coach and consultant, a former teacher and mental health counselor, and the host of the ADHD Essentials Podcast. He is not a clinician and does not practice as one. He is also the man who built the Wall of Awful, the model millions of people now use for that gap between wanting to do something and being able to start it.
He takes Ky back to the kitchen where he first said those words out loud, talking to a mother whose son would not start his homework. He explains why he refuses the word lazy, calling it an answer without a solution. And he draws a line that is hard to shake: if you forget to make a phone call, that is ADHD, that is working memory. If you know you should make it, pick the phone up, and put it back down, that is not ADHD. That is something else sitting on top of it.
They get into what forcing your way through by sheer will costs you, what changes when your bricks got built in doctors' offices instead of classrooms, and the smallest thing you can do tonight that costs nothing and needs nobody's permission.
Brendan's podcast, ADHD Essentials:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/adhd-essentials/id1332788588
His first book, Overcoming the Wall of Awful: Why It's Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety (and How to Do Them Anyway), out now from Balance:
https://brendanmahan.com/the-wall-of-awful-book/
Free mental health resources, no email required:
https://thevibewithky.com/mental-health-resources-hub/
Ky is a mental health advocate speaking from lived experience. He is not a clinician, and nothing in this episode is medical advice.
Much love. Good vibes. - Ky
