Freedom Through Commitment

by John Fleming, Ph.D., C.Psych.

Sounds like a pretty crazy contradiction. When you commit to doing one thing, doesn’t that prevent you from doing something else? If you study French, then you won’t get to study Latin or bookkeeping, or the mating habits of the arctic moose. Having too many choices will often cause someone with ADHD to make no choices at all. Instead, their fate is decided by chance or perhaps by someone acting very much like their mother. As painful as it sounds, people with ADHD need walls in order to be free.

Practically any good self-help book for people with ADHD will emphasize the importance of structure. It has consistently been my clinical experience that when someone adds greater structure to their life, they report greater satisfaction and less frustration. Never the less, getting people with ADHD to accept structure is like stuffing a badger into a gift box. The best type of structure can be compared to digging a large hole just outside your front door. Structure works best when you just fall into it. Commitment can be a brilliant solution to the need for structure but first we have to get over the slight problem that most people with ADHD begin to panic at the simple thought of it.

No Commitments – A weekend lesson

Before getting into commitment, let’s look at what happens when we give someone with ADHD boundless freedom; a wide open weekend perhaps. They might start with a little game of Solitaire on the computer. An hour and a half later they decide it’s already too late to make something happen on a Friday night, so they settle down in front of the TV for a little channel surfing. At 10:30 the phone rings and a friend asks if they want to go out for a beer. At 2:45 a.m. our intrepid free spirit is coming through the door after having “a little” more to drink than planned. Saturday gets off to a bit of a slow start, crawling out of bed with a bad case of cottonmouth somewhere on the generous side of morning. With a cup of coffee and then another, our heroine ponders the possibilities. Remembering that she gets the paper delivered, it is time to get comfy on the sofa. After carefully scanning the first paragraph of several dozen stories and an inspection of innumerable ads she wonders how it got to be 2:30 “I suppose I should take my medication, but hell, its the weekend, I only need that for work. Maybe I’ll call Mary and see what she’s up to tonight.” No answer, click on the TV to see what’s on. Two hours and 328 channel changes latter, our heroine is getting a little hungry and starts to peruse the fine cuisine in the fridge somehow hoping that something interesting might appear even though she hasn’t been shopping in a couple of weeks. Back to the couch and another attempt at the phone (still no answer), and back on goes the TV and the relentless pursuit of something worth watching.

Time slips away. Good intentions are felled by vague plans (maybe we’ll get together, maybe I’ll go to the gym, maybe I’ll clean the closet) and that restless churning keeps begging to be silenced. Eager for something, desperate with boredom, the weekend comes to a close with a whimper. Our heroine might appear to be free in that she was the master of her own fate. What is missing is any deliberate choice. Nothing about her choices could be said to reflect anything significant about her values, beliefs or true preferences. The weekend like so many others may have gotten a few chores out of the way but it did not lead to the creation of anything and would rate very low in personal satisfaction. In order celebrate your freedom it is critical to be able to look at what you are doing with your life and be able to say that your activities reflect your beliefs, values and priorities.

Many people with ADHD live in a terribly destructive illusion that they are most free if they live without structure and keep their options open. But leaving the options open means that a choice has not been made and the course of action has not been set. If you don’t choose a destination and get behind the wheel, someone or something else is going to do the driving. The world is full of powerful forces that will pull your life along and cause you to react in the spur of the moment without the benefit of preparation or consideration of your alternatives.   Rather than enjoying their freedom, so many people with ADHD end up being prisoners to their lack of planning, their lack of commitment. Keeping your options open means only that you maintain the potential for free choice. You don’t cross the line to real freedom until you make a choice, and commit to a course of action.

Fear of Commitment

Besides our illusions about freedom, why is commitment so hard? For some it has to do with fear of failure. People with ADHD typically have a fairly long history of seriously inconsistent performance and failure. Wasn’t being locked into13 years of school enough of an insult? Fear of failure and humiliation go a long way in limiting how much someone is willing to risk committing to a course of action. But the fear of failure, like all fears, needs to be confronted and not allowed to dominate your life like a schoolyard bully with a bad haircut.

Another difficult aspect of commitment is the fear of boredom. No one with ADHD wants to get locked into something boring. Again, endless hours of droning lectures come to mind. While it is impossible to always know a turkey when you see one, it is possible to better your odds. The potential for boredom can be limited by improving the selection process so that you know what is coming. Read about the class before you sign up. Is it hands on or all lecture? Is it going to cover new material or will it all be old news? Talk to someone who has gone through the activity you are interested in. What did they think? Finally, remember that commitment is not forever; it is for a fixed and limited period of time.

Another problem with commitment is the perception of already being so over committed that you have no time for yourself. This has a great deal to do with how and why a person gets committed. Are you over committed because you jumped, fell, or were pushed? It is important that your commitments be the result of a deliberate decision. Review what you are doing with your time outside of work; are these activities a good reflection of your beliefs, passions, and interests? If not, which commitments can you loose, give away, or ignore till they go away? What, you don’t have any time outside of work? Isn’t that a bit of a problem? It is all about choices. It is critical to recognize that you are continuously making choices, either explicitly or implicitly. Make your choices explicit because then they can be evaluated and changed. Leave them implicit and you will continue to feel like a victim of circumstance.

Commitment means deciding on something you think is important, worthy and good, and then locking yourself in for a limited period of time to test your faith. Unlike marriage, there is no real down side to serial commitment. It is okay to move on if you find a situation that does not really work for you.

Why commitment, is there not something else, something less scary? No, not unless you have the foresight and good planning to ensure that you reliably  reinvent the wheel every weekend and on at least some of those weeknights. And if your planning is really that good, you probably don’t have ADHD.

So, what would commitment look like? Say you decide that you want to read more, rather than watching TV. Joining a book club that meets every Tuesday should do the trick. Now you have routine, a deadline that will achieve your goal of reading. Will you only read books of interest to you? No. But what are the odds that you would change your behavior all on your own?

How about exercise? Joining a gym would be commitment, right? Yes, but most likely all you’re committing to is putting money in the hands of the gym owners. Effective commitment would look like joining a team that plays on a specific schedule and will count on your attendance. Or setting a schedule with a personal trainer; you have to be there at a specific time and someone is waiting for you.

Want to learn to speak French? You could order those tapes and learn at your own pace, which is likely to be extraordinarily slow since the damn things will never find their way out of the box. If you really want to do this spend the extra and sign up for a course. Yes, you still have to study all that annoying conjugation stuff, but at least you stand a chance of getting it done because the class meets tomorrow and you want to impress that cute classmate.

Commitment can be painful, it can be scary, it can add one more thing to keep track of, and it can make your life a whole lot more satisfying. It will not solve all the things that ail you but it will force you to face your demons while making sure that you are actually exercising your freedom. Flex those muscles, feel your power, and commit to what you believe in.

Don’t believe in commitment? Just test it. No leap of faith required. No money back guarantee, but try it free for 30 days and ask yourself whether you are you more satisfied with your life.