In this episode, Asher and Dusty explore the complexities of frustration tolerance and emotional regulation, particularly as they relate to living with ADHD. They discuss how frustration often arises from a misalignment between expectations and reality, especially when tasks take longer or prove more difficult than anticipated. Dusty shares personal experiences, including being “trapped” in Costco, to illustrate how emotional dysregulation can derail plans despite careful preparation. Both hosts emphasize the importance of managing expectations by either frontloading disappointment or detaching from specific outcomes to reduce the emotional impact of setbacks.
The conversation also delves into practical strategies for coping with frustration, such as pausing, disrupting negative thought patterns, and pivoting to self-soothing activities. They highlight the value of breaking down tasks into manageable steps, using written lists to counteract working memory challenges, and recognizing when to step away from a task to regain emotional control. Ultimately, the episode offers a nuanced view of how ADHD affects planning and emotional responses, encouraging listeners to develop patience, realistic expectations, and resilience in their daily lives.
Episode links + resources:
For more of the Translating ADHD podcast:
- Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode
- Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD
- Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com
Episode Transcript:
[00:02:10] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:14] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:13] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. [00:08:10] Dusty: Just a reminder, y’all. My next coaching group is starting in January. We meet Thursdays from 3 to 5 p.m. PST. It runs for four months, from January through to the end of April. There is still room. It’s a very small group so space is limited. It’s super affordable. It’s a great way to get your foot in the door with coaching if you’ve never tried coaching before. And I would love to coach you. So come see me. You can find out more at https://www.vancouveradhdcoaching.com/ or https://www.adhdstudio.ca/. [00:45:06] Asher: And as a reminder for our Patreon subscribers, our next monthly event will be Tuesday, November 18th at 8 p.m. EST. I’ll be doing a live coaching demonstration, so I will be coaching one participant, and then we’ll all talk about what happened in the coaching afterwards. I look forward to seeing you there.And if you’re not currently a Patreon subscriber, you can visit the website translatingadhd.com and click on the Patreon tab and for $5/month, you gain access to the Podcast Discord server and to our once monthly events with either myself or Dusty.
So Dusty, what are we talking about today?
[01:22:07] Dusty: Today we’re talking about frustration tolerance or intolerance, depending on how you look at it. [01:28:17] Asher: Oh yeah, timely topic because you had kind of a frustrating day today. [01:33:01] Dusty: Yes. Oh my gosh, you guys. I got trapped in a Costco. I really wanted to be on time for our recording with Asher today, but I really needed to go to Costco. So I was like, okay, I’m going to get there right as it opens at 9:00 am. I am going to be in and out of that Costco by 9:30 am.Have you ever spent only 30 minutes in Costco? Guess what I did? I was at the checkout at 9:30 am. Unfortunately, I really wanted to make sure that I was within a certain budget, so I decided to go to the self-checkout because that way I wouldn’t feel weird or embarrassed if I’m like, oh wait, no, this is over my budget, so I’m gonna put it back.
So anyway, before I went to the self-checkout, I did put a couple things away. But I nailed my time, was ideal on my budget and was going to be home on time. And then I proceeded to walk away and left the receipt because whenever I use a self-checkout at another grocery store, I never bother to take the receipt.
You can’t get out of Costco without a receipt. So then it took them 20 minutes to get me a reprinted receipt. And so all that hard work was just completely blown out the window. I had to text Ash in all caps, being like, oh, I’m trapped in Costco. And it was very frustrating because I planned, I tried so hard and got so far.
But that’s the thing, right? I think one of the things that at least for my ADHD, but I think for a lot of my clients too, that we don’t always talk about when we talk about things we need to anticipate with ADHD is the role that frustration plays in derailing us. Because we can plan for time management, we can plan for disorganization. We can plan for forgetting.
So often you plan carefully, you put in so much effort, and then something goes awry and we get dysregulated, right? Something doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to go. And I think especially when you’re really invested in that plan and you’re like, I’ve put a lot of effort into this but as soon as things go off the rails, frustration and even big emotions.
With ADHD, we’re more prone to bigger emotions more easily and we get what’s called emotional dysregulation. The way that I explain what makes dysregulation different from, say, experiencing regular emotion is an inability to tolerate distress, an inability to self-soothe, and an inability to work towards goal directed behavior.
Well, in an escalated state right. So I think other people have a greater capacity to compartmentalize and manage emotions, to modulate emotions and to self-soothe and tolerate the distress and so they’re able to get to the other side of that emotion. But because we can’t do all those things, the emotion is really, really big, especially frustration.
And so we experience, very often, an inability to work towards goal directed behavior, well, dysregulated or frustrated. So you can do all this careful planning and it almost kind of makes it worse when it goes off the rails so you’re more prone to frustration. And then after all that, the thing doesn’t get done. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve put time aside or organized things to take care of something really important. But due to emotional dysregulation, especially frustration, I just have to throw my hands up in the air and be like, I can’t do this. I’m completely done. I’m out of gas.
[04:52:24] Asher: Dusty, it can be so easy for us to either underestimate or on the opposite end, completely overestimate the time and effort it’s going to take to complete a task.I did an episode on this a while back, and we introduced a concept called red light and green light. Planning is sort of these two extremes where the idea is green light planning, like thinking about your trip to Costco.
Maybe part of your time estimation is that you’re going to hit every green light and red light planning is the exact opposite of that, right? Where you’re sort of over anticipating barriers or frustrations and so that itself can become sort of a stumbling block before you even get started.
It’s really hard to find that happy medium, that space between. And sometimes it’s not always possible with some tasks. I run into this with my clients at work a lot, where they don’t necessarily know what challenges they’re going to run into until they’re in something, right? So they’re on one hand feeling this expectation, perhaps they have a deadline that’s a week or 2 or 3 from now, they’re feeling this expectation that they should know precisely how to plot out the steps between here and there.
And so hitting anything unexpected can throw that sort of red light feeling that, oh, just forget it. I’m not going to do it. I myself ran into this a lot this past spring. I decided to spend a lot of time in my gardens, and my initial goal was to have all of my gardens look really nice by summer time.
Which was, by the way, way too much to bite off and chew for one spring season with the number of gardens I have in my yard and how overgrown they were. Something I did to cope with this is I would just carve out time to go out and start because I’ve never gardened before. Not really, not seriously, not by myself.
I would work for a while, sort of get the sense of how long something was going to take and then whenever I would hit a stumbling block, say, when I was weeding, I was like, there’s got to be a better way to do this. There’s got to be a tool or a process or something that’s faster than doing hand weeding, rather than sort of throwing up my hands and quitting. I would take a break. I would sit on my stoop, take a break, have some water, just kind of take a breath and then regroup.
And by the way, I only got through my front yard gardens. I did get them really nicely weeded and mulched, and they look much better than they did last season.
And because they are well weeded and mulched, they will be much less work next season, which will make more room for me to tackle other parts of my yard.
But, I had to adjust that expectation along the way, and that was a really difficult thing to stick with when I started with goal A, that I just wanted to clear the slate and get it all done, and then had to realize over time that it would take quite a bit longer than I would have anticipated, and there are quite a few more stumbling blocks than I would have imagined.
Moments where it’s like, oh, I really need X tool that I don’t currently own. So now I either have to pivot into something different to keep working in the yard right now, or I need to stop and go get X tool. I’m all sweaty and gross. I need to stop and clean up a little bit and get in my car. So I have to transition from one thing to another and go to the freaking hardware store.
So after me kind of building in those pause moments, recognizing it as a moment to pause and breathe and regroup – that was really helpful. What do you find helpful in situations like this, Dusty?
[08:37:00] Dusty: Yeah, I had so many thoughts and feelings while you were talking about that. I just want to take a second before I answer your question to talk about a book that I read and it wasn’t even about frustration. I think it was Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagasaki. I could be mistaken, but yeah, I think it must have been that book.And she was talking about how frustration functions in the brain, which I never thought about. She explains it’s like a thermostat. What causes frustration is the difference between your expectation of difficulty of a task and how difficult it actually is.
So if I think that something is going to be easy and it’s not, it’s like a little thermostat goes off in my brain and I become frustrated. But if I anticipate that something’s going to be difficult and it’s about as difficult as I anticipated it to be, I will not become frustrated. So the difference isn’t in how hard the task is or how off track the task gets. It’s actually in your mental construction of the task. And to me, that’s so interesting because it totally plays into everything we know about planning with ADHD, right?
It’s a working memory issue. If I am thinking about doing a task, say, building an Ikea bed, I’m picturing myself bringing the bed home, putting it together, and then moving it into position. I’m forgetting, oh, I don’t know where my tools are so I have to search around and find them, and I have to clean the bedroom first.
And there’s probably 3 or 4 steps that when my working memory sequence is off, it’s just forgetting or it’s under anticipating how long it’s going to take. And so when our brains scope tasks with ADHD, we usually are missing pieces. So of course our expectation of how easy that task is going to be is usually off.
I think that when you have ADHD, you are much more prone to frustration because it’s in the conceptualizing phase of doing something. We have a flaw in our programming that unintentionally is going to lead to frustrating outcomes. Even if you’re not doing what I would call “best case scenario thinking” or what you’re saying, green light thinking, right?
A lot of the time we’re thinking about the best case scenario, we’re planning for the version of ourselves who has the best executive function, who is able to do the thing flawlessly on a good day. We’re not often even planning with our own variable capacity in mind. But even when we are, we’re still often missing steps.
That’s certainly the case for me. It’s frustrating to no end when I try to plan something and then I’m like, oh, but I forgot this and I forgot that. So we’re going to experience that frustration more often. I was just thinking, as you were talking, I remembered how as a kid, I was almost constantly frustrated because I had a lot more inattentive type symptoms as a child, and I was often fantasizing.
I was always thinking about stuff I wanted to do, especially when it came to art. I would think about some drawing I wanted to make or some craft I wanted to make, and I’d get into this expectation of the outcome. I get really jazzed. And so my ADHD likeness got really invested in doing this thing. But when I would go to do it, maybe I didn’t have the right tools like you were talking about, like I needed hot glue and I only had Elmer’s glue. Often, I didn’t have the skill level and so I would get totally frustrated.
The end product would not look the way I wanted it to look and instead of having a fun time doing crafts, I’d be in tears. But this happened to me all the time as a kid, and often I wasn’t communicating to the adults or the other people around me what my expectations were. So I would just try to go do something and my mom would be like, oh, you can’t do that and I’d get really frustrated. And that must have looked like positionality. But what it actually was, was in my head, I had the whole thing planned out – maybe it was cleaning my room and she didn’t know that so she would kind of ruin my plan without meaning to. And I flip out and she’d be like, what the heck?
It’s so interesting because I absolutely see that with my kid and the kids that are staying with me right now. It just happened the other night that one of the kids was doing a painting and just got so frustrated because it wasn’t turning out the way she wanted it to. And I’ve seen that with my daughter as well, where she gets frustrated and it seems like it comes out of nowhere.
I kind of think the reason she’s getting frustrated isn’t because I’m telling her what to do but it’s because she already had a sequence in her mind of what she was doing and how she wanted to do it, and now I’m pivoting her from her plans. So that’s kind of neither here nor there, but I see it a lot with the kids, and I think it does relate back to, like you said, expectation.
I feel like I’m the worst content creator to follow because instead of being like, here’s one easy hack to fix this problem, whenever I think of how to solve the problem, I’m like, okay, listen guys, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take you a long time. I’m not very good at it myself. It took me years. So buckle up. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry everyone.
I wish I had an easy answer for you around frustration tolerance, but I think there’s two parts. One is recognizing the inability to tolerate distress and learning distress tolerance skills. I have a great therapist who practices dialectical behavioral therapy like DBT, and I have found DBT skills so helpful for me in the areas of emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
Once you’re frustrated, you need to know how to get out of the frustration. And the first thing is to stop doing what you’re doing. The worst thing when you’re frustrated is to just keep going and then break the thing. Once you’re escalated, just back away. Just be like, I can’t do this right now. I’ve learned to do that, because I’ve messed up a lot of stuff like broken it, when I’m trying to go too fast and whatever.
You got to back away from a task. And once you’re frustrated, learning how to de-escalate yourself, which I can loop back around to in a minute, is really important. But I actually think it’s about avoiding frustration in the first place. And part of it is just general good ATC management. A lot of it relates back to not understanding the gaps in working memory, not understanding how to properly plan out a task.
So I sit down and I write out the steps of a task. If it’s a task that I do a lot and I time it, I’m less likely to miss steps, right? For example, I have a morning routine. I keep it written down. The morning routine is all the things I need to do to get out the door.
If I reference that written list, I will go through those steps and I’ll get out the door. But there’s still days where I’m like, oh yeah, you know, I can sleep in. So it takes me like half an hour to get out the door, and then I go to do a few things, and then I’m like, oh, shoot, but I haven’t fed the cat. Oh shoot, I forgot to get that. Oh, shoot. I don’t know where my keys are. If I don’t use that explicitly written list with all the steps, I will not do all the steps. My brain will not remember all the steps. I will be late. I will be frustrated. So my good ADHD management external brain thing prevents frustration by reminding me of what I’m forgetting.
The thing that kind of went off in my head like a light bulb when you just said that Asher, is that the flip side of expectations is disappointment. What my kid was experiencing when her painting didn’t go the way she wanted it – disappointment. When my other kid wanted to do something a certain way and I interrupted them or when you can’t weed the garden in the amount of time that you wanted to weed or I can’t build that Ikea bed today like I thought I was going to – those are all disappointments, right?
The thing is that for me, and finally, to answer your question, what I’ve realized the key thing is to pre-manage the disappointment is to talk myself off the expectation, which is so hard to do, but really it’s actually just front end disappointment versus back end disappointment. Front end disappointment is me going okay, this is probably going to be hard (anything is going to be because I’m always the one who’s under planning – I’m never the red light planner). Remember, this is going to take longer than you think. You might not have enough time. So if you can’t finish the bed today before you have to go to your next appointment, that’s the way it’s going to be. And it feels disappointing. But I can pre-cope with it because I can’t cope with it on the other end when I’m like, oh, but I wanted to have this done and so there is disappointment either way.
But when I front load the disappointment, like, just so you know, this might not work out. It’s easier to cope with the frustration.
[16:38:06] Asher: Just a couple of thoughts there. When you talk about front loading the disappointments, I tend to think of that a little differently. I tend to think of that as detaching from the outcome. So the example I gave with my gardening, I stopped looking for outcomes in my gardening sessions. Meaning I stopped saying I’m going to do X today and I stopped that real quickly.When X the first day was, I’m going to weed and mulch this one garden bed, and then two hours later, I was still just weeding the garden bed and I was getting increasingly frustrated. So rather than measuring success by what the completion is, I’ve started measuring success in a lot of areas of my life by looking at whether I moved it forward in some way?
Have I made meaningful progress? Have I spent an amount of time on this today? That’s meeting my goal, rather than expecting an explicit outcome. So adjusting the idea of disappointment and instead thinking about measuring success differently can be really helpful here. And then when you’re talking about learning how to manage frustration, pause, disrupt, pivot is really relevant here.
When I talked about those moments where I would stop and sit on my stoop and take a breath and drink some water, that was me putting my own model into practice there, and taking a pause rather than continuing through the frustration. Because like you, I’m a person who can continue through the frustration and then end up doing something wrong, or half assed, or breaking the thing.
In the case of the garden, I might have just sort of surface weeded, so it looked good. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to get down in and get the roots out so that way I have an easier time moving forward, maintaining said garden. And so rather than kind of giving into that frustration and let’s just barrel through and get it done so I don’t have to deal with it anymore, instead I sat down and took a moment to take a pause.
Sometimes the disrupt and pivot was hanging it up for the day. Saying to myself, I need to walk away from this and do something else with my time. I’m not going to be productive on this front anymore today, and that’s okay. But sometimes the disrupt pivot was being able to stop and take a breath and then figure out what the next step was and engage with that next step.
So listeners, pause for a pivot. That’s really relevant here, because so often in those moments where we do barrel through, there’s no pause. We’re in frustration. We’re not acknowledging it. We’re acting out of frustration. So much unwanted ADHD behavior comes from negative emotion, comes from being in a place of negative emotion, be it frustration or guilt or shame or anything else, and not really acknowledging or naming or recognizing that in a useful way until it’s too late.
[19:48:00] Dusty: Yeah. I think that when I say the first thing I have to do is take a step back from trying to do what I’m trying to do, that pause, disrupt pivot thing comes into play for me a lot when I’m already at that level, because I’ve learned that I just need to turn to self-soothing.And that feels very alien, very foreign. It’s not what comes naturally to me, but I’ve kind of learned how to do it. And, you know, it does help. The funniest thing is, whatever you do to self-soothe, it never feels like it’s going to help. When you’re on this side of frustration, you’re like, oh, it’s not going to make me feel any better.
I’ve had that happen with clients to where I’ve asked would you be willing to just try it and see but then I have to talk myself too into trying new things. And when you do try the new thing and lo and behold, you do feel better…
So for me, there’s some detaching from the outcome in some situations in my life that’s been really helpful and sort of getting more into journey thinking. One of those was exercise. Exercise was very frustrating. It was never sustainable. I never lost weight, I never got stronger, I never got any outcomes. And when I was able to completely let go of outcomes and just put the focus on what was enjoyable about working out, lo and behold, I got more of those outcomes. I was able to completely detach from outcomes in that area.
There is still this aspect of this term I just made up, which is like front loading disappointment because I think even from childhood, even though I’m not nearly so imaginative and so mental as I was (like up in my head all the time).
When I say mental, I don’t mean crazy, but I mean thinking mentally a lot. When I think about all the things I need to do in a day, I think my brain naturally does get a lot of dopamine from planning and from sort of visualizing and imagining what’s going to happen. My brain is very attached to getting its dopamine from like, oh yeah, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. It’s going to be like this, and I get really stoked about ideas and plans and dreams. My brain does that all the time to me and so I really have to actively be like okay brain let’s take this really back in. I know you want it to be like this, there’s a good chance it won’t be. That’s disappointing. It’s disappointing to not be able to just go all in on the fantasy outcome. And so I think for me, there is still a lot of coping with the disappointment of more realistic expectations. But it is like a muscle that I’m getting better at using because I prefer the feeling of not getting frustrated at having a meltdown.
And I learned that that is really the way to it. So in some areas I can totally detach, but in some areas I can’t exactly detach. It’s just the way my brain goes. But I just have to learn how to kind of be okay with things not going the way I want. And I don’t know, I feel like there’s some sort of maturity or wisdom there that’s very satisfying.
I feel very wise when I can be like, yes, disappointment is an emotion I must experience.
[22:43:11] Asher: I see a couple of parting thoughts there. First, back to pause, just for a pivot. I think it’s just important to talk about what’s actually happening there. When we take the walk for our mental health, or when I sit on my stoop and drink some water and take a breath or whatever else your pause might look like, what’s important about that moment, and what allows us to disrupt and pivot, is getting out of our limbic system, getting out of that emotional brain, coming back to a more regulated place where you can see what is possible and what is not possible from here.And again, sometimes the answer is I need to walk away from this for right now, because reengaging with it is just going to put me right back into frustration. And that’s okay. But we can’t think strategically when we’re in our limbic system. Fear and curiosity live in two different parts of the brain, right? When we are in our limbic system, when we are in frustration or fear or shame or guilt, we cannot think constructively.
We cannot think through things in a logical way. So those moments are really about getting out of that place or attempting to get out of that place so that you can then disrupt, disrupt meaning, disrupt what would normally happen, what the typical ADHD behavior for you would be there and then have a different experience by way of pivoting.
And as far as the last thing you said, I think this is another way where we’re very different. You said that you are primarily a green light planner. I think I’m primarily a red light planner, and I’m primarily the person that will anticipate roadblocks and strife and challenge all the way through before I even get started.
So I think that that’s why measuring success differently is a really good strategy for me across the board, because that gets me out of the oh, this is going to be so hard. Ooh, this is going to be impossible. I don’t know what the steps are. I’m scared to touch it and dig into it.
But I have to just engage with it. Because beginning to engage with it helps me start to see the steps. And more often than not, the steps aren’t as onerous, not true with my garden, but in other areas where I will throw up barriers for myself, the steps aren’t nearly as onerous as I’m making them out to be once I actually engage with the things.
So rather than being so attached to getting it done and freaking out about that, just putting some time in and measuring success that way can be a great way for me to kind of see the full picture and remove some of those red lights that I’m throwing up for myself along the way.
[25:19:26] Dusty: What occurred to me earlier, Ash, when you were talking about red light thinkers, is that there’s again frustration. It’s like front end versus back end, because when I’m under planning or I’m green light planning and then I go to do the thing and it’s harder than I think, back end frustration occurs, frustration during the task.But when you’re anticipating it to be harder than it’s going to be, then you procrastinate, then you put it off, and then it’s frustrating to procrastinate, and then you go to do it and it’s easier than you think it’s going to be.
And I’ve seen this happen so often. People get really frustrated with themselves for how long they’ve put things off when they’re like, oh my God, that only took so long. And so it’s a different kind or like a different flavor of frustration, but the frustration is still there. This is kind of interesting. It shows up in different ways when you plan one way or another.
And you’re right, there’s some Goldilocks, some magical Goldilocks zone of planning in between that I think we just have to keep striving for. Eventually you kind of settle in the middle in terms of your planning and the execution of that plan and managing your expectations.
[26:29:20] Asher: There’s a challenge on both sides. It’s just the challenge manifested differently and at different points. And you’re absolutely right. So much of my lived experience is frustration with myself for what I’m not doing that when I do do it, it was so easy. But it doesn’t feel better because I waited so long to do it. I’m just frustrated with myself that I didn’t do it sooner.So one thing I do for myself is I try to know and anticipate what those tasks are. Notice the thing that I am likely to put off, or likely to throw up red lights for myself and try to remember what it’s like to sit in that frustration and remember, I don’t have to do that, is there another choice here.
So thinking about the future me and what it looks like to take care of the future me can be a helpful strategy. I think this is a good place for us to wrap for today, Dusty.
[27:24:29] Dusty: I agree. [27:26:10] Asher: But before we wrap listeners, one thing you can do to help out the show is leave a review wherever you listen. So if you have a couple of extra moments and an episode you’ve listened to recently has been helpful for you, please take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast. This helps us show up in searches, helps let other people know that the show is a valuable resource, and it’s one small way that you can help us out.So we’d really appreciate it. And until next week. I’m Ash.
[27:50:03] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.[27:50:15] Asher: And this is the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
