Executive Dysfunction Inferno

Post Reply New Topic

I came across this reply while reading through the forum at a thread called "Anyone here have trouble taking showers":

I find that maintaining a routine for good or for ill seems to work for me in those situations. If I leave it to just deciding randomly on my own, I'd never do a lot of things.

I feel the same way. Sometimes I just have to make the decision to do something and ignore all the extraneous issues I have. Socially I think it's similar. Watching the way certain family members have imploded because they had isolated themselves too much combined with the fact that I became depressed a few years back in part because I had completely isolated myself from human contact made me realize that in spite of the stress that it may cause me there is a certain level of human contact that I need to maintain to be healthy and successful in my chosen profession. This doesn't mean that I am extremely social, just that from time to time I put in the effort to hang out with a few people or I make an effort to talk to colleagues at work. I even put reminders in my phone to tell me when I need to do something social.

I do go to therapy to help with with learning those social skills and dealing with the resulting stress from non-routine social interactions and it's still a struggle, but I'm slowly getting more flexible in my ability to deal with people. There will always be situations and people that I can't handle, but if I can get enough social skills and the support of helpful people (therapists, teachers, friends, etc.) I can deal with the jerks of the world. As for long term relationships, I think I'll just have to deal with that in a structured way, too. Slowly get to know someone and do things to show interest in that person (invite for coffee or hiking, etc) and accept that things may turn out badly or not; there isn't a right answer.

sometimes i'm social and sometimes i'm not, and a relationship is out of the question.i know my nld has alot to do w/ this but i never thought of it in those terms before(interesting).
there are things in a relationship that i could never deal with. in my youth, when i tryed i could never see womens true intentions, and even when i did get into a relationship i couldn't see signs and ended up as an ass**** because i was suppose to do something(follow her, say something, do something) and at the point where someone told me i was all ready stressed to the point that i couldn't w/ out an anxiety attack.

Ooh yes. At times I procrastinate like crazy. Most of the mistakes I make are silly mistakes. It kills me to see myself throwing away points likes that

I know the "weigh up all the pros and cons" syndrome well. I always thought that was the proper way to conduct myself, i.e. with scientific rigour, so all my decisions would be of high quality.

But I started to see that it wasn't always the best way to go. As most folks here know, the big problem is that things tend never to get started, because the perfect decision takes an infinite amount of time to make.

Perhaps I'm lucky that I don't only get worried by the risks of forging ahead and doing a thing.......I also worry about the risks of NOT doing it, and I have been known to respond to that pressure and get off my butt occasionally. I've noticed how I can spend hours trying to find out the absolute best way of doing a thing, only to find that when I finally begin, unexpected factors still come into play. So over-preparation from my armchair doesn't really work for me, and my failures have fed back into my behaviour as if this procrastination thing were not a fixed brain-wiring thing at all but just another bad habit which can be changed. I often get quite excited when I realise I have the option of having a go at something, of doing a pilot run, like an explorer who loves the idea of going to a place simply because nothing much is known about it, just to see what happens.

I've also stumbled on the discovery that most of the time it doesn't much matter what I do. Life as it is, with my current habits, routines and tendencies, isn't bad. Most of my ideas are reasonably practicable, with tolerable risks and little in the way of dire consequenses whether I plough on spontaneously or procrastinate and never get to begin. So I understand that I have a lot of freedom, and can afford to go about things in any way that looks reasonable at the time. I think in the past I was hampered by a strange idea that everything I intended to do was somehow vitally important.

With social things, it's mostly the same, except that sometimes I find myself not getting in touch with people even though I told myself I should. I don't think it's quite the same thing as procrastination about material tasks. I think I still have a lot of social anxiety and social inadequacy feelings, and these probably put a damper on my tendency to keep in touch with people. But when it's important enough to me, I just get angry with myself and start saying things like "Oh, for God's sake stop cocking about and just call them!" - and then I do. I've not found myself going into shutdown or making a particular mess of the call, in spite of the suddenness of my decision.

Okay so, I feel comfortable with the idea of creating a routine to follow for good or for ill, actually sounds perfect.
I still feel clueless about the social things, the only scenario I could envision would be someone that needed to schedule things as much as I do and then we could shut everything else together, but any sort of social thing that demanded my initiative from my part has always made me feel so reluctant to do it, I guess I am so sick of the cornucopia of mistakes one can make that I just have developed an attitude towards social initiative, even if it is to find someone else that had the same needs as me.