The perfect is the enemy of the good - especially when you have ADHD

All or nothing thinking, the fear of boredom, and task paralysis

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I’m really, really behind on a very important project at work. It’s something that will probably take 4-6 hours of solid concentration, and because my days are so filled with meetings, there just isn’t any time to work on it!

Or at least that’s the lie I tell myself so I feel justified not getting started.

What I’m really telling myself is that the conditions have to be perfect for any progress to be made on this, and because conditions aren’t perfect, I shouldn’t even try.

My hard-won solution to this erroneous form of thinking is this quote, apparently paraphrased from a poem by Voltaire:

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

All-or nothing thinking is not an uncommon feature of the ADHD brain. This is often framed as a ‘fear of failure’ but I never identified with that characterization of perfectionism.

I’m not afraid to fail. I’m actually pretty confident in my abilities. I’m afraid to start because getting started is BORING and I. Hate. Being. Bored. This is the number 1 reason why my dishwasher doesn’t get emptied when it needs to.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

One thing that’s hard to explain to non-ADHD folks is how painful boredom is when you have ADHD. I realize boredom is usually not a positive experience for everyone, not just ADHD folks. Boredom makes my skin crawl. It almost makes me feel panicked, like I want to run away from it as fast as I possibly can. I don’t physically run away obviously, but my mind would much rather run away by choosing to dopaminescroll than start something that might be boring.

So how does the perfect being the enemy of the good fit in here? Ultimately, I have to work on being ok with conditions not being perfect. I’m literally NEVER going to have 4-6 hours of uninterrupted time at work. If I wait for conditions to be perfect the thing I need to do will never get done.

I have had to work really hard to tolerate imperfect conditions. Literally telling myself, “yes, this is not optimal, but I can still get a little bit of this done, and it will feel really good to make progress” can help my brain chill out on the all-or-nothing thinking that drives my resistance to task initiation.

Here are some other examples of all-or-nothing thinking that leads to some form of disaster:

• “We need to avoid gaining too much weight and therefore we can ONLY buy healthy food and no snacks” leads to DoorDash because we’re starving, cranky and there’s nothing quick to eat, which leads to…..gaining weight. And also spending way too much money.

• “There are so many dishes they are going to take like 2 hours and I don’t have 2 hours!” therefore I ignore the dishes until they pile up and literally then actually take 2 hours to do, and in the meantime we have absolutely no clean forks (this also applies to laundry, just replace forks with underwear).

• “Getting ready for the beach (or some other fun outing) is a huge hassle to get everything we need together to go” results in never going out, when in reality we could just grab some towels and sunscreen and wing it. Would we maybe miss bringing some sand castle building materials or overspend on snacks at the beach? Maybe, but better than being stuck at home on screens.

I wish I had modeled this kind of flexible thinking for my elementary-school aged kiddo at an earlier age. I can definitely see the rigidity I’m prone to reflected in how she responds to challenging situations. Now that I’m aware of this, I can definitely do better, but this is one of those things I wish I hadn’t learned the hard way.