Joy as ADHD motivation
There is a film that I have watched countless times. To understand the importance of that statement, you have to understand that I rarely watch anything as I find it hard to focus that long. This film though, I find so heartbreakingly beautiful that I have watched it many times. The film is ‘Michael’ and not the Michael Jackson one with the same title, but the one from 1996 (showing my age here) about the archangel Michael who is on earth for what he knows is the last time.
He loves earth, loves the beauty of the people, the animals, and the land. And therefore he grieves throughout for what he knows he will not experience again. He comes across as thoroughly hedonistic - brawling with a bull, smoking cigarettes, and scratching his B*lls. John Travolta for me has always had that see-sawing quality of both brilliance and failure. Some films feel like a disasters but then there are the others, like Michael, that make me know that he has that spiritual connection, that understanding of deep empathy, intense beauty of this world, loss, grief, and love. Through this combination of beauty and grief, he shows the others in the film, who are reporters focused on getting their story, what is truly important in life.
I was reminded of that in a post on LinkedIn where the following question was asked:
For me wellbeing comes first. It is the foundation of everything in life. And Joy underlies wellbeing. In positive psychology a separation is made between hedonic wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing, where the first is about short-term pleasures and the latter about longer term fulfilment and purpose. The idea behind it is that short-term pleasure will not lead to happiness.
I can’t help thinking that for neurodivergent (and especially ADHD) people that is not true. There is a difference between the short-term dopamine hits you would get from playing games or scrolling on your phone and the short-term joy you get when watching fireflies dance in the garden, even though both probably take the same amount of time.
I don’t deny that eudaimonic wellbeing (the one about longer term fulfilment and finding your purpose) is extremely important. Frankly, doing the work I do now (working with couples like you) creates that long-term wellbeing for me, but I think we do a disservice to those people (like me) who need, absolutely need, those short-term bursts of joy in order to function.
Those bursts of joy are what gives us motivation. It is what gets us going. What helps us to start work. Because our brain prioritises novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion, our reward system works differently. Delayed gratification rarely works. We require immediate feedback. This gives us the choice of working on adrenaline (as in ‘wait for the urgency to kick in’) or dopamine (as in those bursts that come from hearing that ‘ping’ that signals a message coming in). What sensory bursts of joy give us is more of a cocktail of neurotransmitters. A combination of dopamine (reward system), serotonin (mood), endorphins (euphoric/pain killing), and oxytocin (love hormone). I strongly feel that it is this cocktail that allows us to motivate ourselves without the stress that working purely from adrenaline and/or dopamine gives us.
Filling our being up with joy is filling up that metaphorical bucket of resilience and motivation. From that bucket we can pour what we need. Right now the world feels unsafe and stress is everywhere. Joy is what can help us navigate the world. It provides balance, motivation, and yes, wellbeing.
If you want to receive these blogs straight to your inbox, do subscribe!
