In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty explore the challenge many people with ADHD face in capturing moments of high motivation and inspiration, often described as “lightning strikes.” They discuss how the friction caused by disorganization or incomplete routines can prevent these moments from turning into productive or enjoyable experiences. Dusty introduces the concept of “making the stars align” — setting up one’s environment and habits in advance to reduce barriers, so when motivation hits, it’s easier to act on it. Both share personal examples, such as the frustration of not having clean clothes ready or art supplies prepared, illustrating how small daily habits can either support or hinder these moments of flow.
The hosts also emphasize the importance of shifting motivation from external “shoulds” to internal, meaningful reasons that resonate deeply with the individual. They suggest practical strategies like future forecasting—considering consequences of inaction—and celebrating small wins to build awareness and positive reinforcement. The episode concludes with advice for listeners to start small by choosing one area to reduce friction and prepare for future inspired moments, highlighting that even minor adjustments can lead to greater success and satisfaction in managing ADHD challenges.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:09] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:21] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:24] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD listeners, a reminder that I am doing a live coaching demonstration for our Patreon subscribers on Thursday, March 19th at 8 p.m. EST. If you’re not currently a subscriber but you would like to attend, you can visit the website www.translatingadhd.com and click on the Patreon tab. For $5/month, you gain access to these monthly live events and you also gain access to our podcast discord server. So, Dusty… [00:36:25] Dusty: Yes, Ash? [00:37:29] Asher: What are we talking about today? [00:39:16] Dusty: Today we’re talking about making the stars align. So what I mean – you know that ADHD experience you have where lightning strikes and you’re so inspired. You’re so in the mood, right?Last week, we were talking about not being in the mood to do things and how having fun and fun is medicine.
And sometimes you’re not even in the mood to have fun, but then sometimes you’ve got a bee in your bonnet or you get a crab in your car. I don’t know, but all of a sudden you’re in the mood to do something right now, right? You’re inspired. You’re motivated. It would feel so good.
The dopamine is hitting and it is imminent, right? Maybe it’s painting. You want to paint a picture, but your painting desk is totally covered in crap, and your paint brushes have dried, caked paint on them. And you don’t know where your easel is so you go around getting things set up and digging out, and then by the time it’s all set up, you’re exhausted and the moment is past.
Personally, for me, that feels like the most crushing feeling of frustration and disappointment. And then you miss the boat and you don’t get the dopamine. Plus you just spent like three hours cleaning up and now you’re just disappointed and grumpy. It’s like a sneeze that you held in, you know?
I talk about this with my clients a lot, and I made a TikTok about it. I kind of explained it as making the stars align. Basically, it’s this idea that you don’t know when lightning is going to strike. And the stars don’t always align on your schedule, but there are things that you can do to make them align more often.
There are pieces that we can build into our daily routine so that we will have more of those moments. I think that thinking about it this way also gives us more onus to want to lean into boring things like routine and cleaning up after ourselves, developing systems, giving things in our house a home and going to bed early.
Does this make sense?
[02:44:11] Asher: Absolutely Dusty. And I will add, you talk about this frustrating moment of having to do the pre-work, the cleaning up in order to be able to do the thing and sometimes that doesn’t even happen, right? Sometimes the lightning strikes, you want to do the thing, you realize you aren’t prepared to do the thing and then nothing happens.And that is equally or more frustrating because now you’ve made no progress towards the thing you wanted to do, and you’ve made no progress towards making it possible to do that in the future.
[03:21:08] Dusty: Exactly. So I think there’s a couple reasons this is important, right? One is that I think it’s so important for us to have those moments. The thing about having ADHD, dear listeners, is not that your goal in life is to not have ADHD. It’s to harness the natural cycle of ADHD and work better with it.We talk a lot about how to work with it in sort of the fallow periods, like when your energy is really low or when your capacity is low, how not to overwhelm yourself, how to honor your need for energy. But we also need to talk about what to do when it’s high and how do we capitalize on that?
Like, oh my gosh, I’m getting as much stuff done as three people. I’m having flashes of inspiration, because especially if you’re having to spend a lot of time in that low period, there’s nothing more frustrating than not getting to enjoy the high periods. Like when I am on it – I’m so on it. It reminds me of who I am and how powerful I am and how awesome life can be.
And I need to have those moments. So setting myself up for success, to be able to have those moments is really important, right? Even if it’s just going out with friends and I’m feeling really social and I’m in a great mood. If I have some nice clothes to put on and I can find my makeup and I can put together a nice outfit, I feel like I’m in a music video!
But if I have nothing to wear that fits me and all my laundry is dirty and I put all my makeup in a duffel bag somewhere so it’s buried in the pile of crap. Maybe I have to go out of the house in my sweatpants. I may still have a good time but it’s not as satisfying, right?
It’s those little moments of satisfaction that just push it over the edge. We need to see ourselves being competent, confident, talented, and inspirational. And we can’t have that if I’m in the mood to write something, but my laptop battery’s dead and I can’t find the charger, right?
So for me, I think personally it’s always that intersection of disorganization when I’m inspired. It might look a little bit different for other people, but largely this concept of making the stars align for me is about lowering the barrier and the threshold and reducing friction points between you and being ready to have those moments so that you can have them more often then you get to have them. And that really helps offset the low periods.
The other thing is and I’ll come back to this, but the other thing is this being a really good reason and a big “why” behind putting in that effort around the more boring stuff. But I’m going to make some space for you to respond here first.
[05:50:29] Asher: Dusty, I think it’s so interesting that you bring up laundry, because that is one of the things that I thought about when you first proposed this topic.I consider myself an invert. So, I am neither an extrovert or an introvert. I’m a little bit of both and swinging too far in either direction can be really bad for me.
And the friction point of not having something to wear will absolutely cause me to cancel plans at the last minute. And even if I do have something to wear, let’s say I haven’t brought the laundry upstairs, so I have to run up and down the stairs multiple times. I’m kind of in a frenzy looking for where’s this piece, where’s that piece, is this piece clean or dirty? I do not know, because I cannot check the one spot where it lives. All of those things will absolutely prevent me from leaving the house. What caused me to do the last minute bail out/cancel thing that I don’t do nearly so often these days, but certainly feel the impulse to do more often than I would like.
Whereas if I can just open up my closet and have choices and everything’s there, it’s so nice. I don’t remember what episode it was a while ago, but we talked about the idea of tolerance and how we don’t really realize, as people with ADHD, these things that we tolerate. Tolerating running up and down the stairs multiple times when I need to get dressed to leave the house is something I didn’t realize how much friction that was introducing until I changed the habit.
And here’s the thing, once you change the habit and you start to have that positive new experience with less friction, that becomes the positive motivation for doing the thing. I do not enjoy doing laundry any more than I did a couple of years ago, when I was running up and down the stairs all of the time. But I really, really enjoy being able to get ready to leave the house in a frictionless way where I have options in terms of what to wear, and I know where to find everything – it’s easy.
And that is the motivation for taking the final step and for not stopping at 80%. Okay, the laundry is clean and it’s folded and it’s hung up, but I’ll take it upstairs later. No, I’ll take it upstairs now, because tomorrow me is going to be so happy that I don’t have to run up and down the stairs to find my freaking clothes.
[08:23:15] Dusty: Exactly. And so this is kind of leading me to my next point, which is again a really common subject area topic of coaching – daily organization. Things like keeping your house clean, finding homes for things, busting clutter or having routines like getting up in the morning, going to bed at night are just a few things that get in the way of clients making progress in these areas.Many times not having a really good reason why, just feeling like these are things that they should do, but they’re very arbitrary and if you have had a tough day and you’re having a beer and watching Star Trek at 11:00pm on a Wednesday, needing to go to bed at 11:30pm can feel very arbitrary. And it’s like, no, I don’t want to do that. There’s no good reason to – if I go to bed at midnight, I’ll still get enough sleep.
We can talk ourselves out of anything in the moment when we’re not in the mood to do it, especially when it feels like the reason we’re doing it is just because we said we were going to do it. I don’t know about you, Ash, but in the moment that never works. Or I’m like, well, I promised myself that I wouldn’t x, y, z or that I would x, y, z, but I don’t want to do that now.
Right? And, and so I think this gives more of a big reason why.
[09:35:24] Asher: I had a client who had great language around that exact thing. She described these two voices in her head as the drill sergeant and the rebel. So the drill sergeant is the one that says this is what you’re supposed to do. And the rebel is the one in the moment who says, I don’t have to listen to me.And so with that client, this became a really interesting language to kind of look for the, the third voice, the real voice and the third voice, the real voice, the authentic voice. Her voice – looking at what’s the positive motivation, what is my reason for wanting to do this? And when you’re operating from that place and not operating from should, that also allows you to do it in the way that works for you.
I’ve talked about this same client’s dilemma with laundry in the past, where all the laundry would end up on the guest bedroom bed, it would end up laid out so that it didn’t wrinkle, but it would just stay on the guest bedroom bed until she had guests over. Her two part dilemma was her closet needed some amount of cleaning out and organizing so that it was functional again, but also she realized that she didn’t want to take the time to hang up her daily wear clothes.
She works in a school. Everything’s wash and where – it doesn’t wrinkle. So it became two bins, tops, bottoms, like two laundry baskets that lived in her walk in closet. Letting go of the shoulds allowed her to attach to the outcome she was looking for, which was to have a better experience getting ready in the mornings, which was solved by having the clothes all living in one place, and to have the guestroom be a functional guestroom all of the time and not be something that she had to labor on whenever people were coming in from out of town, right?
[11:32:02] Dusty: In the moment, it feels so arbitrary. And it was Dr. Russell Berkeley who said, ADHD is a disorder of time. I wish I could find this clip again and I probably will. But he said something like, we don’t travel to the past to think about what happened so that we can then travel to the future to do future forecasting.This is probably what is going to happen because of what happened in the past. And then draw a better inference or conclusion about what to do in the now. We’re living in this perpetual present moment with no connection to the lessons of the past or the consequences of the future. And so I think what we all have to do as people with ADHD – is we become time travelers, right?
We need to learn to very manually engage. It’s like everyone around us has this natural ability to phase in and out of time to travel to the past, to go to the future. They can move through time fluidly. We can do it, but we have to learn to do it very manually and we have to learn to ask ourselves a question. What happened the last time I didn’t do this? What is likely to happen the next time? Right? And so in the moment that you are really inspired to sit down and paint and then you become so frustrated because the table’s a big mess, you don’t have your paint brushes, you can’t find your easel. Right? So instead , we need to be like, okay, I don’t want this to happen next time.
So for me, if that were my client, I would say okay, one way we can lower the barrier is can we keep the brushes clean, perhaps put the solution right next to the sink. Make sure that the paint set up is near the sink so that washing the brushes is this.
How do we set up the environment for success, which is something that Dr. Russell Barkley also talks a lot about. So then in that moment, when that client is tempted to do the same thing over and over and just throw the brushes in a pile in this bin, there’s that pause, disrupt, pivot, that you talk about where they pause and go, okay, wait, what happened last time I did this?
That was so frustrating. When that happened, I had such a great inspired idea for painting a flower and then I just totally lost it. And I’ll never paint that flower ever again. I’m heartbroken about it and I don’t want that to happen to Future Dusty. So now, it’s going to be as easy for me to put the paint away, let the paint brushes soak in the solution in the sink as it is to put them away, because the solution, the sink and the little cup to put them in is right here.
We’ve pre-primed the environment for success so that making the right choice is almost as easy as making the wrong choice right. And so when you’re tempted to not do the thing, you’ve got a bigger reason to do it and you’ve got a bigger motivation to set your environment up for success and to actually follow through.
So really for me, it’s about having the motivation to do the right thing in the moment. But before you can do the right thing in the moment, there is that precursor where you have to set the environment up for success. In this case, maybe it’s making sure you have or can find the paint cleaning solution. You guys can tell I don’t do a lot of paintings.
I actually know what I’m talking about. It might involve a little bit of work, but it’s easier to get through that work when you already have so much other stuff on your plate that you could be doing when you’re able to tie it to this is going to make a really big difference in my future.
To give a really quick alternative example. One of the things that’s really hard for me is changing batteries in my Apple AirTags. I just didn’t know how to do it for a while so I was avoiding doing it. And then the AirTags did me no good because their batteries died, right? I would be like, oh, I’ve got to find my keys but can’t because the battery is dead. And believe me, this has been a constant source of frustration for me. I’ve had it happen where I can’t find my wallet, I can’t find my keys because I didn’t change the battery in the AirTag.
But it wasn’t until the battery in my cat’s collar started going low that I did not want to not be able to find the cat and be worried that he got hit by a car because the cat gets outside. Nobody come at me for having an outdoor cat.
He’s going to get out whether I like it or not. I want to make sure that if I can’t find him, I know that the AirTag is working so I’ve got this bigger motivation. Even though I hate changing batteries in the Apple AirTag, I’m future forecasting. How horrible would it be if one night I can’t find my cat and I’m worried something’s happened to him and I’m like, why didn’t I change the Apple AirTag when I had the chance?
[16:02:25] Asher: So, Dusty, you were describing the big dilemma of ADHD, right? That we’re in this ever present moment. We don’t necessarily learn from our past experiences organically so that we can apply that learning to the future. That’s actually why coaching is such a great modality for people with ADHD. In large part that’s what we’re doing in coaching, we’re building that awareness in a useful way.But I do want to toss in that once you start having a different experience, we can also be unaware of that. We can be unaware of the positive change unless we take some time to reflect and notice that it’s better.
[16:49:24] Dusty: Yeah, that’s very true. I see that a lot with my clients that they’re making improvements, but their story stays the same. I often say that our stories have to catch up to our reality and they tend to lag a little bit, you know. [17:01:29] Asher: Yeah. So a couple of thoughts on that front. How do you catch yourself doing something right? How do you build that awareness? I had a client who had this really adorable practice with her adult daughter, who also had ADHD, called getting my confetti. When one of them did something, no matter how big or how small or how silly or whatever, they would text the other, that they did the thing and the response would be a GIF of confetti.Getting your confetti. So just taking a moment to externalize in one way or another that you’ve done the thing built off of that same premise. There is a celebration channel in the podcast discord, that exists for that reason. The way that I’ve been doing this recently, and I actually completely stole this from a friend because I noticed her doing it.
I think it’s such a great practice is, you know, that moment where you pleasantly surprised yourself that the thing is already done, that, oh, I am more prepared than I thought I was. Oh, I did take care of this thing. Oh, I did set myself up.
Well, this friend of mine will just think to herself out loud in that moment. Thank you past me. And so I will say, out loud to myself with nobody else around, thank you past Asher for doing this thing, for thinking ahead, for setting this up, for preparing in whatever way.
The point here is the mechanism doesn’t necessarily matter. But if you can find some way to sort of externalize, to notice, to build real awareness about what the different experience you’re having is based on the behavior change.
Because when you build that awareness that then becomes reinforcement of the positive motivation, which makes the friction of doing the thing so much less.
[18:51:29] Dusty: So yeah. For me, I think this is a really great tool to have to start building some of those routines and systems because there’s that group of clients that I work with where routine is a dirty word to them. You always get a couple people in the door who are like, I hate routines. They’re the bane of my existence.And again, I always say there’s this concept of freedom to and freedom from. And I think the reason that people hate the concept of routines is it feels like it prevents them from freedom to because it’s something they’re supposed to do. It is at a time when they’d rather do something else.
So it prevents that freedom to do what you feel like doing when you’re supposed to do your routine. But for me, it’s the freedom from. Routines provide freedom from the stress of disorganization or being unprepared or whatever. So if I have a routine around cleaning up my art space, I probably don’t want to do that at that moment but doing it gives me the freedom from being prevented from making a beautiful painting when the inspiration hits.
I think it can provide a powerful motivation to get to those things, because, again, there’s often so many things that we could be doing at any time. I can continue to put off changing the Apple AirTag in my cat’s collar time and time again because the kids need something or the laundry needs to get done, or there’s this urgent work deadline. I can always find some reason to put it off, but I have this powerful motivator to to prioritize it now.
[20:27:13] Asher: So, Dusty, the danger with a topic like this is – listeners, I know some of you are making a huge laundry list of things you want to change. So how do you put this into practice? Start by picking one thing. You want to lower the barrier, you want to reduce friction, and it doesn’t have to be a whole huge routine.It doesn’t have to be a consistent laundry practice. My newest one is that I’ve decided since I have to eat every day and I have to cook for myself, I’ve decided this is relevant to our last episode, that I’m going to make it fun. But part of it being fun for me is the kitchen being clean.
But cleaning the kitchen every day is hard – really hard for people with ADHD. So this can be as simple as setting out the materials, setting the intention for yourself. I’ve had several clients in different contexts, one who wanted to journal in the morning, so she set her journal out. So it’s there as an option. One who is an artist who wanted to work on a particular type of project, who set out the materials in advance.
So pick one thing and pick the thing that you’re most motivated by right now. Where do I want to take care of future me? Where do I want to be able to jump in and engage when the lightning does strike and start with that. And it doesn’t have to be something huge. It can be as simple as creating the right space for it, setting the things out for yourself.
I think this is a good place for us to wrap for this week. So, listeners, until next week, I’m Ash.
[22:20:18] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[22:20:29] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
