In this episode of Translating ADHD, Asher and Dusty discuss the crucial role of fun and joy as essential tools for managing ADHD. They explore how many people with ADHD fall into the trap of endless to-do lists and feel they must “earn” their fun, which leads to burnout, depletion, and a life spent in procrastination or the “dark playground” — a place of unproductive scrolling and disengagement. By prioritizing fun and incorporating playfulness into daily routines, individuals can create the mental capacity and motivation needed to tackle tasks more effectively. Dusty shares a personal story about transforming the mundane task of taking calcium pills into a joyful ritual, highlighting how small changes in aesthetics and mindset can make a significant difference.
The hosts also introduce a framework called the “Forces of Fun,” breaking down fun into four categories: create, consume, commune, and cavort. They emphasize the importance of making space for pure fun, even when it feels difficult due to executive dysfunction or burnout. Strategies such as pre-deciding activities or creating dopamine menus help overcome barriers to engaging in enjoyable activities. The episode concludes with a reminder that fun is a birthright and an essential part of self-care for people with ADHD—not a reward to be earned but a necessary part of living well.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:10] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:17] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:20] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. Listeners, the next Translating ADHD live coaching demo for our Patreon subscribers will be Thursday, March 19th at 8 p.m. ET with me. The last one was supposed to be with me but ended up being with Dusty. Thanks for pinch hitting for me there, Dusty. So again next one Thursday, March 19th at 8 p.m. ET.Also, I am still taking new clients, so if you are looking for ADHD coaching, please hit me up. I do understand that the economy is tough right now, so I am offering a sliding scale. If finances are something that are keeping you from ADHD coaching and we’re otherwise a good fit, we can work something out. Hit me up. We’ll talk about it.
So Dusty, what are we talking about today?
[00:53:08] Dusty: Today we are talking about fun as medicine. [00:57:16] Asher: Yay! I love this topic and I actually kind of want to kick us off because prior to hitting record, you were talking about this type of client who is chronically behind and refuses to carve out time for fun and won’t allow themselves to carve out time for fun. And this made me think of a client I had years ago.This was when I was still mostly doing professional organizing and was in coach training. I was doing some coaching with this client, but she was primarily an organizing client, and she said something in a coaching session that just genuinely broke my heart, and that was that she felt like she wasn’t allowed to leave her house until it was organized.
And Dusty, by the way, this house was a lovely home. Like, did it have its little trouble spots of disorganization in the office, some kitchen cabinets that were too full and some things that could be better? Yes, but this was not a place that was in complete or even partial disarray. And yet this woman was just completely not allowing herself to live her life because she felt like she should be attending to this one thing.
She felt her house should be a certain way. And until she reached that marker, she wasn’t allowed to do anything else and that’s just always really stuck with me. That’s a pattern I see time and time again in my clients and one that I always, always call out when I’m seeing it.
[02:31:15] Dusty: I feel like that was definitely me back in the day, like in my early to mid 20s. It was just endless to-do lists, always feeling like my brain was always coming up with “shoulds”. I think my brain was getting dopamine from thinking about being organized or thinking about things that I could do that would make my life better.But then I would take those things as obligations. So endless crushing to-do lists, but struggling with just daily tasks, let alone getting to these things I thought I should be doing, and then always feeling behind, always feeling bad, and always feeling like I had to earn rest or fun and that I didn’t deserve it.
I see this in a lot of clients. This idea that, oh, I’ll have fun when I get to the end of my to-do list. I’ll allow myself to do this thing that is fun when I get to the end of all my things I’m backlogged on. Years could go by – your whole life could go by.
I’ve worked with people who have spent decades trying to get out from under their to-do list and it’s tragic. All those years pass by and you can’t get them back and you didn’t enjoy them, maybe didn’t even remember them because none of them were about just being present and enjoying your life. At some point you have to enjoy your life – it is what it is, whether it’s the life you want or not.
If you don’t enjoy it, it’s just going to keep going. And the more salient thing here is it’s not changing anything. There is no end to the to-do list. But what I realized, Ash, is that I had it backwards. It’s not like a to-do list is your dinner and then fun is your dessert.
With ADHD. it’s like we have to eat our dessert first to be hungry for dinner, right? I realized that actually doing the fun thing first, putting fun at the beginning of the day, proactively making time for fun and filling my tank actually gave me the wherewithal and the executive function to then tackle the to-do list.
And the to-do list never ends, so if you don’t make the time for fun, it’s never going to come. The reason I say that fun is medicine is because fun and joy, especially for an adult brain, creates capacity.
[04:35:13] Asher: That’s worth repeating. So I’m going to repeat it. Fun and joy with ADHD, create capacity Dusty in my coaching relationships 99% of the time.I like our first coaching topic to be in the realm of self-care. And when I say self-care, what I really mean is something that puts something back in the tank for you. Clients are coming to a coaching engagement with all of their “shoulds”, all of their guilt and all of their shame.
So let’s take a topic that’s completely disconnected from that, but also look for something that’s going to enable you down the road to tackle some of this the harder stuff, some of the yucky stuff that you’re bringing to the table because we’re starting with what’s going to put some energy, some bandwidth, some ability to engage back in the tank for you.
[05:34:29] Dusty: Yeah. And I think that investing in the things that make life feel splendid, joyful, whimsical, they’re not extras. They’re not superfluous. They actually like when I say they create capacity. I’ll give you a really small, simple example.For years, both my parents have dealt with osteoporosis. So growing up I was always worried about my bones. I don’t like milk, I never drink milk. So I was always like, oh, I probably have weak bones. So in my early 20s I was like, I should take calcium. But the calcium pills are really big so they’re hard to swallow.
They come in this big, ugly, black and green jug. And I tried everything to get myself to take calcium on a daily basis. I would split up the dose. I would put it in different rooms, I would put it right out in front of my face and yet I would always avoid it. One day I was at this little yard sale and I found a little, tiny, sterling silver sugar dish with a tiny little spoon. And I just bought it on a whim and brought it home because I was like, oh, this is cute. But I had nothing to do with it so it was just sitting around my house. I’m like, why did I buy this? There’s no purpose to it. And randomly one day I found it and had this idea to put the calcium pills in the little silver dish and then I put that in my bathroom, because it had a little lid so it would keep the moisture out.
I put it next to the sink so every time I went in the bathroom, first of all, I would notice it because of my ADHD brain, oh, shiny thing. So I’d see this shiny silver beautiful little thing that was very Victorian and royal, and then when I would lift the lid, it would make this very pleasant little ringing sound. Inside all my little calcium pills, looked like candy!
So then the act of taking a little calcium pill out and having it felt like a treat, whereas before it felt like I got to do this thing or I’m going to break my bones when I’m old. It felt like an obligation.
But now, I genuinely wanted to take these vitamins every day just by changing the receptacle that they were in and the little ritual that went along with it. And so it hit me then that the more I can make my life esthetic and cute or maybe play a fun song while I do it – those are very small ways I can enhance my daily tasks. In turn, this will actually cause my ADHD brain to want to do those things.
I really think this is where I see a lot of clients getting it backwards too. We get stuck in shame and obligation and we add a lot of weight to tasks.
The Wall of Awful – anybody listening to this? If you don’t know about the “Wall of Awful”, go watch a YouTube video about it. Google Wall of Awful on YouTube. And basically my understanding of this concept is that the Wall of Awful is like when we have to do something that already feels hard for us executive function wise, just for some reason, we’ll add weight to the task. We’ll build up this huge wall like the “shoulds”, the shame, the past and then the longer the task hasn’t been done, there’s like this feeling of, oh, it’s going to be so hard.
And sooner or later the only way to get to the other side of that task is to do what the author calls “Hulk smashing”. You build up so much adrenaline, you beat yourself up enough that you get into what Cam calls the adrenaline response cycle or riding the adrenaline pony. Or was it riding the adrenaline horse? Is that what it is?
[09:02:00] Asher: I think the adrenaline response cycle is definitely correct. The metaphor, I don’t know that I’m 100% remembering it, but that sounds right. That’s how I would say the adrenaline pot. Sounds like it sounds like a canvas. I’m in. [09:15:11] Dusty: Please do! Anyway, so you Hulk smash your way to the other side of the wall, but at what cost? And if it wears you down, and people get into adrenal fatigue, then they get into burnout. And certainly it just makes the next wall bigger, right? The thing is, our brains, like anything that is fun, our brains like things that are novel.I say this to clients all the time. The ADHD part of your brain is basically like a toddler, like the way that you would manage a toddler. It needs a lot of breaks and it needs a lot of play. Oh, you don’t want to eat your broccoli, let’s pretend we’re dinosaurs eating trees. It sounds so dumb, but, if it would work for a toddler, it may work for your ADHD.
So the more I think we can lean into making things silly, funny, fun, playful, etc. then our brains will want to do them because I feel like the ADHD brain is chronically under stimulated. It needs stimulation and fun is very stimulating, play is very stimulating, and if we’re not giving it that kind of stimulation – the need for stimulation doesn’t go away, it just tends to go to a negative place.
We’ll see a lot of people with ADHD who have a negativity bias, they’re always beating themselves up and they think that it’s true. They think that having this negativity bias is because they’re the worst person in the world. But what I see is that they’ve just become almost addicted to meeting their own need for stimulation by emotionally regulating themselves by beating themselves up because they don’t know how to get to the peak level of stimulation that their brain needs to do the task in another way.
Fun, playfulness and silliness can do that. Our brains like that naturally. So work with it.
[10:49:24] Asher: Dusty, I love your story about the calcium pills in the sugar bowl, and I just want to call it for listeners, that aesthetics are how Dusty makes it fun. That may not be how you make it fun. For me, putting on some music or actually, I really like to watch live streams, like a video game stream.So putting on a stream in the background, if I’m doing something boring so that I can engage with, that’s how I make it fun. Making something glittery would do absolutely nothing for my brain. So there is a bit of your context that matters here, but the moral of that story being, we can make the boring things or the hard things fun.
That’s one way we can look to engage with them. But let’s kind of bring it back to making space for pure fun. And I want to start by talking about what happens when we don’t do that. In addition to burnout, depletion, we’re not putting anything back in the tank – that time does end up going somewhere – the “Dark Playground”.
I really like this term. It was coined by Tim Urban in the blog “Wait, but Why” in an article about procrastination – the Dark Playground. The Dark playground is your Doomscrolling place, your endless YouTube videos that you don’t care about, etc. Places or activities you tend to do, where you’re not really enjoying what you’re doing. You’re not doing what you think you should or ought to do or you’re not allowing yourself to have fun either.
So instead, you’re in this weird middle place. For a lot of my clients in the modern day, that tends to look like some form of scrolling, some form of social media scrolling, app scrolling, just losing hours to this activity that is neither productive or constructive and just does nothing for us. But because we can’t engage with the should and we’re not allowing ourselves to engage with the fun, we end up in this yucky, yucky, bad place, this dark playground that is neither of those things that serves us in any way.
[13:03:20] Dusty: Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s sort of two aspects to this. You just need fun. You need joy for a couple different reasons. One, you only have one life. I mean, I guess depending on your beliefs.With ADHD we already lose time because it’s hard enough to be present. So years can go by where we’re just beating ourselves up trying to get out from this endless to-do list and that’s your life, right?
I think it’s really hard for a lot of people with ADHD to do that grieving process and to accept, it’s not that I just haven’t gotten there yet. And like next year, next month, next week, I’m just going to be this different person. And eventually I’m going to arrive at this other shore where I’m this perfect version of myself that I always see in my head and can never quite get to.
So there’s this waiting mode that we’re all in. We’re not living our real lives until we get to that idealized version of ourselves. You’ve got to let go of that. You’ve got to be like, this is my life here today. There’s some things I don’t like about it and there’s some things I’m not happy about.
But you have to find what you are happy about and what you do like about it, so that you can enjoy it while you have it. There’s something here about being present and just getting some quality out of what exists for the sake of it. But there’s also this idea of moral worth, right? That fun is something you have to earn, not something you deserve.
We have to take the Casey Davis approach of fun is morally neutral. You don’t need to have been a good person or a productive person. You don’t need to be a tidy person to deserve fun and joy in your life.
I think we really have to wrap our brains around this idea that fun is something that is our inherent birthright. Like enjoyment of life is something that’s our inherent birthright.
The third thing is that creating more space for rest and for fun increases your capacity in a general sense. I like to use fun as the conduit to be productive.
So if I can’t get something done or I’m avoiding a task or a task feels hard or boring, if I can think of a way to make it silly, fun, or whimsical, I lower the barrier to entry for that task, and it’s much more likely that I’ll get the task done more easily. So fun, in one sense, is like a tool for me to work with my ADHD, but in general, you need to be having some fun and some rest so that you can just have capacity for life every day.
I found this structure that I really like because for me, I have a lot of clients who are so deeply in burnout and they’re so behind that, even thinking about fun feels like work for them, like it feels heavy and hard. I found this framework that I really like called the Forces of Fun, and it breaks it into create, consume, cavort and commune.
So create, obviously there are different styles of fun. Create is outputting, you’re creating something. So it’s outputting imagination – maybe it’s food, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s starting an organization with your friends. Whatever. You’re creating something. Maybe it’s tidying and decorating your room.
Consume is taking, right? It’s your scrolling, show watching, playing video games, eating tasty foods, etc. It’s the intake. Intaking commune is your social connection, right? You’re connecting to others, whatever that looks like for you.
Cavort is being joyful, romping, you’re playing. When we talk about kids, we call it unstructured play, because there’s different kinds of play for kids. There’s digital play, imaginative play, this kind of play, that kind of play, etc.
One of our kinds of play with kids is unstructured play. It’s like when I’m just tickling my daughter and just being silly, and she wants me to pick her up and throw her on the couch. It’s not hide-n-seek, it’s not let’s play spies, it’s just free play in the moment.
And we have to have that with ourselves as adults too. It’s our dance parties, playing kick the can with your friends. I think cavorting as an adult is quite hard. We kind of lose that ability and we don’t get that many options.
It’s romping in a field. Or when’s the last time y’all rolled down a hill? I challenge you, most of you are in winter climates, maybe if you got some snow, go cavort in the snow. Just go cavort. Just go make a snow angel for like, five minutes. But when the weather’s better, y’all try rolling down a hill, that shit is therapeutic – pardon my french.
We need these different kinds of play. And I think if you’re kind of burned out, it can be hard, but you can start with whichever one feels accessible and build towards the others.
I don’t want to cram too many topics in at once, but I want to just shift gears and say another thing that I see happening with clients and this also happens with myself. I don’t know if you feel like this happens for you, Ash but somehow there’s like big FUN where we think of fun as our hobbies or the things that we are supposed to like to do, like painting or playing some board game or making music, for example. For me, it’s riding my bike, but it feels boring and hard when you think about it.
So I find this phenomenon with clients where when they think about something they know should be fun, it doesn’t feel fun, it doesn’t resonate. It’s like there’s no dopamine in their brain, so there’s no motivation. So when they think about it, it just feels like another chore. This happens to me, too, just so you guys know.
And I do sometimes think, I don’t want to say we have to force ourselves, but we might need, like, a structured tool or approach to get ourselves to the other side of starting the task. Because what I found is that very often it’s not that the thing that you think is fun is actually tiring and a chore, that is actually the feeling of executive dysfunction and the feeling of a task initiation issue. It’s literally just your brain doesn’t know how to get up to do the task. So if you can find a way to get to the other side of the task, often on one side of the task of having fun, riding your bike, whatever it is, once you start doing it, you’re like, yay! This is awesome! I’m having a great time. I’m so glad I did this.
But we’ll not do it time and time again because when we think about doing it, it feels hard. So it’s like an investment and we do have to get ourselves through the task initiation issue, but it pays really big dividends.
So I think it’s in your coaching practice, clients with ADHD, that it’s really important to invest in having a strategy and a structure to get yourself to engage with the fun thing, even if it doesn’t feel fun or feels hard. Because once you get to the other side of doing it, you’ll be like, oh my gosh, I’m having so much more quality of life here.
[19:29:02] Asher: Dusty, that is such a challenge for our clients and for ourselves as well – engaging with the fun thing, ADHD makes that challenging.Something that has worked for some of my clients – one of two things depending upon the client. For some clients, setting out options in advance. So I want to carve out this time in the morning for me or time at night for whatever that looks like.
We talked about this a little bit when we talked about routines, rather than hard committing to that – meaning I’m going to meditate and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to take these steps every day setting out options and allowing themselves to go with whatever feels good in that moment, however, that doesn’t work for every client.
So I have some clients for whom sort of the opposite thing works. This notion of pre-deciding. I was just coaching a client who was trying to break this habit of getting into information overload too early in the day. She actually loves to research stuff and can get really nerdy about it. A lot of her hobbies involve extensive research, she’s into DIY hair care. There’s just endless rabbit holes, you can go down there.
She also really enjoys informational podcasts, but she noticed that if she starts her weekend day there, she loses hours because there’s no structure, and then she feels depleted. It’s not helpful for her. She wants to just start somewhere else.
And where she wanted to start was with playing the piano. And so the rest of our coaching session was how to sort of remind your brain first thing in the morning that you’ve already decided that what you’re going to do is sit down at the piano?
Or, for a client that wanted to walk her dogs first thing in the morning, and that was meeting some needs of nature and fresh air or quiet time, sunshine. This was definitely in the realm of fun for her, but it felt really hard laying out her clothes the night before, making the process of getting out of bed and into her dog walking clothes just as easy as possible, and again leaving that signal that I’ve already decided this. I just have to do it at this point.
So again, that notion, the concept here is pre-decided. I’ve decided this is what I’m going to do and I’ve set myself up to do it at this time. So now all I have to do is do it. I don’t have to decide. I don’t have to activate, for I’ve already laid out the things, I’ve already set up the materials.
It kind of removes that ability for some of my clients to, to get in their own way, if that makes sense.
[22:23:18] Dusty: Yeah. Honestly, I could talk about this all day because there is something we didn’t even broach here which is the issue of impulsively being in the mood to do something, but then not being set up to do it, like, oh, I’m in the mood to paint, but I don’t know where my paints are and my paint station is all messy and so now, I’m suddenly in the mood to have fun, that’s what I want right now.But there’s about 6 or 7 steps because I’m very disorganized and I never clean up after myself, blah, blah, blah. And then for me, when that happens, by the time I get to the painting, I’m too tired and then I’m frustrated, then I’m angry. And something that was like a really wonderful feeling, like, wow, I’m inspired to paint a picture of an apple, gets twisted and turned into this absolute bitterness that I had to use up that energy cleaning and getting set up. And now I don’t even want to anymore.
So there’s a whole other topic here around making the stars align. I made a TikTok about this where I said, you can actually prepare to make the stars align with the whole other topic. I’m a big fan of the pre-deciding because I also get really overwhelmed with options.
And I think even having a list of options is kind of pre-deciding. So what you’re talking about I’ve heard discussed as what’s called a “dopamenu” because sometimes we’re in the mood to have fun or we have time to have fun, but then we’re like what do I like to do? And there’s this kind of overwhelm where suddenly you can’t even think about what the options are.
But of course, when you can’t do it, then you’re like, oh, I should do this, I should do that. Oh my gosh, it’d be so fun if I did this, so fun if I did that.
So if that’s like you listeners, it’s good to have what’s called a dopamenu. Make a list of things you like to do. You want a limited number of options, just like a menu has. And then that can make it a little easier with overwhelm. So that’s like one way to do it.
The other thing you were talking about for me, it’s often weirdly helpful to just pre-decide in specific, like, I’m going to listen to this album or I’m going to read this book so I don’t have to make choices because I’m like, oh it’s already been decided.
For me, this is the book I’m reading right now and this kind of brings me to a topic that I think is really important. I realized we come up with all these ideas for how to create structure so that we’ll actually do the thing we need to do and you can do that for your fun and your hobbies and your social connections.
And it’s not weird – if you need to have some sort of system or structure like every Wednesday night from 5-6 pm, I do diamond diamond painting. Perhaps you have all these diamond painting kits, you never open them. You keep thinking you’ll get around to it. You want to, but you never choose it over video games.
Okay, so just arbitrarily decide that Wednesday night is diamond kit time or something. Or pull one of the diamond kits out and decide I’m not starting a new video game till I finish this one. And it sounds like I’m making it feel like a chore, but honestly, that’s how I get myself to actually do my craft hobbies, which I don’t do a lot of.
It’s like I make it like a task, but then I’ll actually do it. But you can also do this with different kinds of fun and social time. You can gamify and create a raw sort of like messaging your friends or phoning your friends or finding different ways to engage socially.
All I’m saying is that, I think it’s a really revolutionary idea for a lot of people that they can bring this idea of structure and systems to hobbies, fun social stuff. But if you never get around to hobbies or fun social stuff, then using a system just like you would for getting yourself to clean your house, like a schedule, works too.
[26:02:18] Asher: See, I think there’s more to say here and I think maybe next week we will go to that topic of preparing to make the stars align because that’s so relevant to what we’re talking about here. And it sounds like you’ve got tons more you could say on that topic. [26:19:09] Dusty: I do. [26:20:12] Asher: But for this week we are out of time. So listeners until next week I’m Ash. [26:26:28] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.[26:27:08] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
