Written by Sayr Motz

Sayr Motz (they/them) grew up in West Milton, Ohio, is the oldest sibling in a family of six, and has always had a strong affinity for turtles. They attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduating with a bachelor’s in Physics in 2020, and are currently in the Netherlands pursuing a master’s in Applied Physics and researching quantum technology at Delft University of Technology. In addition to their professional scientific interests, Sayr is passionate about queer and transgender community building/politics and can be found frequently volunteering at Outsite. Right now, they consider themself a creative, a scientist, and a student of collective care, and their future work will intersect all of these identities. sayr.motz@gmail.com

A Letter on Energy Building

Hello,

My name is Sayr. I’m 24 years old, and was diagnosed with ADHD a month ago after years of struggling alone with untreated symptoms. Until very recently, I believed that I struggled so much to keep my house/life organized and to do my coursework properly because I was lazy or incompetent, and that persistent belief catalyzed an anxiety disorder. I’m still struggling with managing my life and mind, but not as much and not in the same way I was before. There’s been some nuggets of wisdom and useful tips that I’ve picked up over the past few months that I think can help many other people, no matter how your brain is wired. Please know that all the advice, observations, and explanations I offer in this post are derived from my interpretation of my own lived experience–I am not a mental health professional!

Diversifying Rest

For me, the biggest symptom of my ADHD is executive dysfunction, meaning that my brain often struggles with attention, memory, flexible thinking, organization, and time management, and this gets exacerbated when I’m anxious. I have to find a certain amount of activation energy in order to get started on a task–the bigger, important, anxiety-ridden the task, the more activation energy I need to apply. Thus, I spend a lot of time feeling exhausted and guilty about not starting things that I want to get done. And when I’m not doing anything, but feeling guilty or anxious about that, that’s not rest; it’s another kind of draining emotional paralysis. 

For me, there are two kinds of rest: sleep (inactive rest) and pleasure (active rest). Last fall, I realized that although I was sleeping a lot, I still felt exhausted because I wasn’t practicing enough pleasure in my life. I have five areas of active rest that are themed by connection with certain things:

1. Embodiment:

   To remind myself what it feels like to live in my body vs my mind via kickboxing, weightlifting, and swimming (what are these things for you?)

2. Creativity:

   To create something simply for pleasure (not profit) via playing piano, oil painting, or practicing drag

3. Nature:

   To feel more connected to the land I’m on via hiking, foraging, and visiting the beach

4. Community:

   To reinforce my relationship to my communities through sharing time with others. I want my relationships to others to be reciprocal, well-balanced, intentional, and in pursuit of building collective care and power.

5. Self:

   To identify and nourish my needs through alone free of expectation and judgment from myself. I want my self-connection to be luxurious, and cultivating that can be through taking extra good care of my body, reading things that empower me, journaling about my emotional state, doing some somatic techniques, or simply eating great dinner in bed with whatever anime I’m watching.

I realize that all of these forms of active rest are super time-consuming! But many can overlap. For example, if I go on a hiking trip with friends, that’s nature, community, and embodiment connection. I need to be strategic about doing things that optimize all the rest I need because it’s easy for me to neglect my self-connection and over-indulge in community connection to the point where it becomes draining instead of restful. So to help keep my pleasure diversified, I track it using a chart like this:

	MON	TUES	WED	THURS	FRI	SAT	SUN
EMBODIMENT	X		X			X
CREATIVITY		X			X		X
NATURE	X					X
COMMUNITY		X		X		X
SELF			X		X		X

Beyond a Conventional Workday

Diversifying my rest has been helpful, but not the complete solution to building energy throughout my day. The way I’ve been living day-to-day has been super draining because I keep trying to force myself to go about my day in the way I’ve been taught it “should” go; wake up early, put in a full 9-5 workday, recover from the energy expenditure from the day in the evening, sleep, then repeat. I can’t do it. I have trouble waking up, getting started on my tasks, sustaining focus, and taking guilt-free rest on a schedule. I waste a lot of my energy trying to coax myself into a schedule and then berating myself when I fail my expectations. And I think I don’t do enough things that I look forward to and that give me energy, like moving, enjoying, and expressing.

I’m currently a student, which gives me more freedom in how I choose to go about my day, and I acknowledge that my socioeconomic background has greatly privileged me in this way. If you are also in a position to experiment with your schedule, here are some strategies that I’ve been using to sustain energy through the day and make the transition between rest and work easier:

• Plan to do something first thing in the morning that I’m excited about.

  I need to start my day with something that feels better to me than laying in my bed. It has to be an activity that doesn’t require much activation energy (i.e. not working out at the gym because getting myself to bike to campus in the cold, rainy Dutch weather first thing won’t make me excited to get up). For me, this is often eating a nice breakfast and then taking time to express myself through creating a new look through fashion and makeup.

• Measure my productive times in terms of my flow state.

  I produce my best work when I’m hyperfocused or ‘in the zone’, which I term my flow. When I tell myself “ok work for X hours right now”, I either end up having to stop when I’m on a roll or launching myself into a mental burn out because I forced myself to do something that I really wasn’t up to at that moment. Instead, I’ll find the activation energy to start, get into my flow, and not stop until I notice my flow naturally ending. I release expectations for how long my flow should last and record the start/stop times of my flow so I avoid accidentally overworking myself.

• Pavlov’s dog my brain into starting a flow.

  I’ve developed a little productivity pre-game ritual that chemically alerts my brain it’s time to work and preps my work environment (drink a shot of espresso, smell a strong peppermint scent, turn on 8D audio lofi playlist, enable do not disturb button on my phone, go pee, kill extra tabs, review my motivations for doing the work). And after I’m done, I do a cool down ritual, like rehydrating, moving, and eating a little snack before moving on to what I’m going to do after.

• Break up productivity with pleasure.

  Between flows, I want to take breaks that incorporate either naps or my active rest activities. Defaulting my break activities to escapist stuff like media consumption doesn’t actually give my brain the reset it needs after flow. Because of alternating between productivity and pleasure, I don’t have a 9-5 workday, I just have a day. There’s no differentiation between work and play hours.

• Give myself a menu of tasks and pleasure for the day and do energy check-ins.

  If I don’t give myself structure to make the transitions between work and pleasure easy, then I fall into executive dysfunction. Before the day begins, I’ll make a small list of the most time-sensitive tasks that need doing and rate them in terms of energy expenditure. Before I start a flow, I’ll assess my emotional/energetic state and use it to decide which task(s) to start. After the flow is done, having a small menu of active rest activities helps me not to fall prey to spending time on things that don’t properly rest my brain, like scrolling through tiktok. It usually looks something like this:

• Create flexible structure for the week through minimum and stretch goal setting.

  Too much scheduling and structure drains me, but I need enough structure to prevent executive dysfunction. To optimize this, I’ve started planning the tasks I want to get done at the beginning of the week and sharing it with someone else for accountability. The most important piece of this planning has been categorizing minimum goals (the least amount of work that I can get away with doing that day) and stretch goals (what would be impressive yet doable to get done that day). The stretch goal for the one day becomes the min goal for the next. After each day, I will record what my energy/focus level actually allowed me to get done to help create the task menu for the next day. Sometimes, things will happen that will require me to take some time for myself, and I modify my expectations mid-week. Here’s an example of how it works:

I hope some of these strategies are helpful to you! They’ve been beneficial to me, but that doesn’t mean my life is now perfectly managed. I still have low-energy days where I abandon these techniques, fall into a spiral of anxiety/executive dysfunction, and get nothing done, and in these times I’m trying to be gentle with myself. It takes a lot of (unprofitable) work to heal from experiences that have hurt you, and we must expand our definition of productivity to encompass this type of work too. We have worth beyond our productivity, and healing is not our purpose. If some days all you do is simply exist, that’s okay. Good luck!

XOXO, Sayr