But if my cat meows at me and runs down the stairs (what she does when she wants out), I get up and let her out with no trouble. And similarly if one of my parents calls up the stairs asking for help with something. I guess those would count as triggers/prompts?

Luckily, the “stuckness” is not to the point of interfering with basic survival tasks. I do worry a bit about it getting worse in the future, though. I was on Adderal for 6-7 years, and since going off it 2-3 years ago this inertia feels very magnified. I was hoping my brain would adjust to being off of it after a few years, but it actually seems to be getting slightly worse with time. I had thought it was depression-related, but I’ve had that treated (and it’s better), but the “stuckness” seems unchanged.

Anyway, thanks for writing this blog article. It’s what made me notice that my cat was prompting me, and that though I don’t have massive trouble with this issue, that using prompts deliberately is something to think about (probably wouldn’t have thought of that on my own).

Once again I find a certain resonnance between my experiences as a person with ADD and your descriptions of the way the inside of your own brain works. It is rarely a precise correlation, but I often find that Amanda’s executive functioning issues seem to be simply a more extreme version of my own (for example, it might take me 10 to 20 steps to make a phone call versus the 70 that Amanda needs)

People with ADD often have difficulty with “transitioning” from one activity to another, and to some extent I experience this too. In my case, it can sometimes be like there is a boundary between one activity and the next and it occasionally becomes difficult to mentally release myself from one activity, shift out of the mental gear I was in for that, and then shift myself into mental gear for the next and overcome inertia to initiate the next. Actually I kind of need to overcome inertia twice because there can be a kind of inertia that sometimes makes it seem easier to carry on doing what I’m already doing than it does to stop(momentum)

My brain also seems to impose boundaries where other people do not seem to experience them. For example, some people faced with 10 emails that need a reply see “processing email” as all one task, and the 10 emails as simply minor components of a larger task. But for some reason my brain will simply not parse it this way, at least not consistently: it (sometimes/often) imposes a sort of boundary around each email and treats it as a separate task. On a good day this need not be a huge deal: it simply means I take maybe a few extra seconds or an extra minute to transition from handling one email to the next, so it just takes a little longer to get through my email than it might for others. It helps if I’m very highly motivated, which helps me overcome the inertia part of the boundary. But other days it can become more of a struggle even if I do still feel motivated–the inertia just seems heavier, the boundaries sharper and wider and harder to deal with.

Maybe I’m off base here … maybe I’m inappropriately projecting my experiences onto something that is really a different process altogether. But in some ways the difficulty you describe here sounds sort of similar.

one or two or three teaspoons a day, needs to be kept in the fridge as it is fragile

the human brain is not designed to work on the modern diet

Like other posters I don’t know if this is anything like what you mean, but it causes me all sorts of problems when I need things to STOP, people to go away, but actually what I’m doing seems to be encouraging the situation to continue, and I look like I’m doing better than I am, so no one else would think to stop or believe me afterwards if I tell what it was like.

That reminds me of how I act during a meltdown. I want to say ‘hug me, tell me you love me and reassure me’ but there’s a big wall in the way of saying that, so I find roundabout ways of saying it like ‘you don’t love me’. I know this is probably pretty different from what you’re talking about, but the whole ‘blocked so I find a different path’ thing is the same.

No matter how well I pass when it comes to flexibility, I always find myself wanting the dominoes to stop falling.

I probably don’t make any sense…sorry Amanda.