An ADHDers Guide to Motivation Part I: Intro
Motivation is a thorny issue for us. A lot of us have been repeatedly told we’re lazy, we just need to focus more or we’ll never get anywhere if we can’t stick to one thing. We’re constantly looking for motivation hacks so we can finally achieve what everyone else seems to do without trying.
Helpfully, a lot of psychological research has been done on motivation - both for neurotypical and neurodivergent people. Unhelpfully, the “common sense” principles of motivation in most people’s heads were mainstream before we had pocket calculators.
So my goal is to take you on a tour of more modern motivational theory. The overarching theory, how it applies to ADHDers and what that means in practice for us.
Caveats
A few caveats before we begin, to make sure you’re reading this with the right context.
I have ADHD - this naturally shapes my view of any material I read or consider
I am an Engineering Manager with an interest in motivation and psychology. I apply these in a professional setting, but I am not an academic or researcher.
I’m attempting to balance being understandable, accurate and giving people links to further research.
If you’d like to do the reading yourself, a large chunk of this article is drawn from this paper, I encourage you to go read it if you want to dig deeper.
If you have a personal or academic disagreement with anything I state - please let me know!
A brief look at Motivation Theory
Motivation theory is about what drives people towards goals. That could be getting out of bed in the morning or training and running a marathon. It’s a massive and complex topic, with a large number of different theories, ideas and research. But we normally see it as “simple” and “obvious”.
💰 If we want people to work harder, we should offer more bonuses.
👷♂️ Why would anyone work if we make social security too good?
🏫 He’s never going to learn unless his actions have consequences.
Unfortunately, these simple statements are not obvious, or even simple. They are thought terminating cliches. Humans are far more complex, and interesting, than that. You’re far more interesting than that.
So lets dive into where these ideas come from and what new ideas are out there that might help us understand ourselves better. We’ll start with the basis of almost all popular and common thinking about motivation: behaviourism!
Behaviourism
Behaviourism is guided by a set of principles, the 2 most relevant of which for this conversation are:
All behaviours are learned from the environment
The human brain is a blank slate that is altered by the environment
It is the study of the inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behaviours) of peoples minds, rather than trying to understand the internal workings of the brain. It broadly lays out 2 methods of “conditioning” people - changing their responses to certain inputs:
Classical Conditioning: learning by association. This is most commonly known through the famous “Pavlov’s Dogs” experiment, as well as lots of other psychological experiments on animals. When a certain stimulus triggers a response (food triggers salivation), another stimulus can start to be put before the stimulus (ring the bell before food) and eventually will transitively trigger the behaviour itself (ringing the bell triggers salivation).
Operant Conditioning: learning by consequence. When you behave in a certain way, and that has consequences, the frequency of that behaviour will change. This can happen in 3 ways:
Positive: good dog, have a cookie! (positive stimulus after behaviour)
Negative: I’ll stop making this annoying noise when you take the trash out (negative stimulus before behaviour)
Punishment: bad dog, have a shock! (negative stimulus after behaviour)
These map exactly to the thought terminating cliches mentioned earlier. In fact, when dug into, most people find that most of their beliefs about work, politics, crime, education, parenting and every other aspect of motivation is entirely in the realm of behaviourism.
But there are many issues with behaviourism, the 2 most important ones for our purposes being:
Natural Motivations: people are born with certain natural tendencies and motivations that are not environmentally conditioned. We are not blank slates that can be conditioned into whatever shape is desired.
Oversimplification: behaviourism is very much the “spherical chicken in a vacuum” of motivational theories. It tends to focus in on singular stimuli affecting behaviour in experimental settings. Behaviour in the real world is not that simple. Countless stimuli and complex interactions of behaviours produce real world results that just don’t fit this simplification.
So where do we look for something that takes these issues into account? My go to is…
Self-Determination Theory
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) thinks about what needs to be in place to let people make their own choice, or “self-determine” their actions. Humans have a lot of basic “needs” which need to be met before self-determination can happen: food, drink, safety etc. However, after that, substantial research has identified 3 other requirements for people to be psychologically healthy and make their own choices:
Autonomy: being able to make your own decisions
Competence: having the skills or ability to achieve what you’re aiming for
Relatedness: having a sense of belonging and safe relationships
Having more autonomy, competence and relatedness increases our ability to make our own choices, which is what we really want from our motivation.
There’s a lot of resources out there that talk about how to affect these 3 needs, but there’s one that is worth highlighting: rewards and punishments reduce autonomy and so reduce high quality motivation. The behaviourist approaches we explored before can work, especially for tasks that are inherently unpleasant. But when we apply behaviourist methods to things where we have an opportunity for autonomy, competence and relatedness, they make the situation worse.
Differences for ADHDers
These theories of motivation are broadly applicable, including to those of us with ADHD. But, there are some interesting, unique ways in which we interact with them:
Dopamine and Brain Structures
Dopamine is a crucial component in motivation. It activates the brain network that allow us to focus on cognitively difficult tasks, and switches off the network that allows our mind to wander. We ADHDers have a reduced sensitivity to dopamine, meaning it’s more likely for us to stay in our “mind wandering state” and harder to shift into our “achieving complex tasks” state.
Differences in these networks also cause ADHDers to take in more information (leading to distractibility, but also creativity) and be more sensitive to immediate feedback from an activity.
Higher desire for autonomy, competence and relatedness
Intrinsic motivation, powered by autonomy, competence and relatedness, produces the dopamine needed to activate our “complex tasks” network. When we then engage in these tasks, and succeed, we gain an increased sense of competence, increasing dopamine and increasing our focus. This positive cycle is an explanation for our “hyperfocus”. This loop is stronger for us due to our increased sensitivity to immediate feedback.
Conversely, it’s considerably harder to “get started”, and getting the autonomy, competence and relatedness right from the beginning is necessary to start this positive cycle.
Negative Patterns
There are lots of positive patterns of motivation that we can use. But there are a lot of really bad ones as well, and those are the ones we know most about. So, now we’re going to take a whirlwind tour of some of these bad patterns using what we’ve just learned, and see if we can spot why they cause us problems.
Then we’ll look at some positive patterns, which might help you going forward.
Negativity
ADHDers tend to have had a life full of negativity. We grow up in environments without much autonomy, which stop us being successful, which reduce our feeling of competence, which makes us less successful, and so people take away our autonomy. Repeat until burnout, diagnosis and eventually reading this article.
These experiences teach us that we can’t trust ourselves. We are not competent. Autonomy is dangerous. We are not accepted by those around us. But those messages aren’t true, and instead make the problem worse. We need autonomy. We are competent. We deserve to be accepted by those around us.
Shoulds
This lack of trust in ourselves means we start to rely on the opinions and advice of other people.
You should do a little bit every day
You have to stick with it
You must not daydream
We internalise all of these messages so strongly that we stop being aware that they come from someone outside us. They become us.
But even when these messages are internal, they still feel external. They strip us of autonomy and make it harder to actually do the things we feel we should be doing. Then comes the stress, the guilt, the shame. Things just get worse.
The anxiety spiral
These “shoulds” cause stress. Stress produces dopamine, which helps us do the task. For some activities we develop strategies to reach a state of such high stress that we consistently manage to do the tasks. Artificial deadlines, procrastinating till the last minute, getting angry at ourselves. But over time our body “down regulates”, it becomes less sensitive to the neurotransmitters that create this effect.
So we have to be more stressed, put more pressure on ourselves, be harder on ourselves. This cycle goes on and on, until something breaks it: depression, anxiety, burnout - all classic ADHD conditions.
Positive patterns of motivation for ADHDers
We can increase our motivation by focussing on the 3 key factors: autonomy, competence and relatedness. We cannot just “be motivated”, we have to switch on the right brain networks. This requires dopamine. We might be able to temporarily get a boost of dopamine through anxiety and stress, but that’s going to make things worse in the long term. Increasing the 3 key factors will help our motivation, we might just have to trust the process a bit.
So, what are some practical steps we can take to improve autonomy, competence and relatedness?
Autonomy
Work with your manager to understand the goals and outcomes they’re looking to achieve, and decide yourself how to meet them
Give yourself permission to not do some things
Focus on what seems motivating to you in the moment - the feeling of autonomy will help with motivation to do other tasks
Lean into whatever you’re excited about now, whether it’s “productive” or not
Competence
Learn new skills for the sake of learning new skills
Break down tasks into smaller, more obvious and more easily achievable chunks to build a better feedback cycle
Balance your work so that you never spend an extended period of time struggling too much with 1 type of thing
Relatedness
Invest in personal relationships for their intrinsic value, but also to help with your motivation
Get to know coworkers as people, and see it as a valuable exercise in productivity
Try talking to your manager about some more personal things, build up a relationship that feels safe
📖 Further Reading
An introduction to Behaviourism
Center for Self-Determination Theory
Paper about ADHD through an SDT Lens
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
