Overcoming ADHD and OCD

From Survival to Heroism

Disclaimer: Nothing in this essay constitutes medical advice. I’m sharing my personal experience with practices that helped me. Please consult qualified medical and mental health professionals for your specific situation.

I kept getting promoted at Google while being unable to turn on my stove.

The promotions made sense to anyone watching from the outside. The stove made no sense to anyone, including me. I’d stand in my kitchen, paralyzed by intrusive thoughts of burning down my apartment. I’d obsessively wash my hands before eating. I’d check and re-check the door lock. I couldn’t pay my bills on time, couldn’t take out the trash consistently, couldn’t keep commitments I’d made to myself.

That last one defined my life. I’d make a considered, values-aligned commitment on a Sunday, and by Thursday I’d have forgotten it existed. Not failed to do it. Forgotten it existed. As if the thought had never happened. I tried to-do lists, Pomodoro, “mindfulness” practices. They’d last days at most before the same pattern swallowed them whole. I’d lived this way for as long as I could remember, and I’d accumulated a proportionate amount of shame along the way. My entire life was organized around anxiety and stress as fuel sources.

I was eventually diagnosed with ADHD and OCD as an adult. This is a story of a practice I used to rapidly bring my symptoms under control, and live a fuller live. If you can relate to the symptoms below, I hope this story encourages you.

ADHD/OCD are just labels. It’s okay if you don’t resonate with them. This essay may still be for you if you resonate with the symptoms described below. Nothing here is medical advice, although if any of it resonates I’d recommend talking to a qualified therapist.

My symptoms had a clear pattern that would start with me living my life in a good mood until some experience triggered an uncomfortable emotion. These triggers were many and varied, and included everything from the anxiety of turning on a stove to feeling “rejected” in a work meeting. I’d be especially vulnerable if I was already feeling lonely or misunderstood. It wouldn’t even have to be an extreme situation, but rather one that crossed some invisible threshold that changed day-over-day and week-over-week. This unpredictability itself eventually became a sort of dread that made self-trust difficult.

Each trigger’s discomfort would lead to an immediate and simultaneous push/pull within my body. I’d get pushed away from fully experiencing the uncomfortable emotion. It’d be as if I’d get set on fire if I actually sat down to experience it. Simultaneously, I’d get pulled towards some self-soothing compulsion. These included binging on refined sugar, social media, alcohol, checking and re-checking things or vomiting my feelings on someone else.

My brain would get “locked” towards the compulsion’s object. My body would get autonomously possessed and move towards it. It was obvious these compulsions were self-destructive, but I felt utterly powerless in their wake. They brought forth unending self-hatred and shame. I especially hated myself for the times these compulsions brought me joy. To this day, I love chocolate chip cookies. Fortunately, they’re no longer a “problem” for me.

Not feeding the compulsion was intolerable. The more I resisted, the more brutal my anxiety and discomfort would become. I have vivid memories from my Sydney apartment, of crouching in the corner in the darkness waiting for the emotional storm to pass. Grim with the knowledge that the following day would be another war with myself.

Indulging each compulsion would usually have some immediate negative consequence that would narrow my agency the following day. An upset stomach from binge eating, a hangover, wasted time, insomnia, etc. I’d then be that much more sensitive to the subsequent trigger.

It’d all eventually add up and I’d “crash”. I’d have lower-than-normal productivity at work, avoid friends, hermit in my apartment, etc. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t get clean rest when I crashed. I’d shield myself from the world but fill that time with things that weren’t genuinely restorative. I’d stay up late binging on TV or playing video games. I’d eat whatever required the least work even if it wasn’t good for me. I was hiding from the triggering stimuli but I wasn’t recovering, I was surviving.

My energy would eventually trickle back not because I’d healed, but because I’d hidden long enough for the acute distress to subside. Unfortunately, this “recovery” was often accompanied by shame. “This isn’t me. I can be better than this.” That shame would turn into self-contempt, fueling a resolution to find a habit or skill to finally fix myself. Predictably, I’d get triggered by something new and once again it’d all go to shit.

I’d bleed self-trust during each round of this cycle, and the world increasingly became hollower and paler. I stopped trusting myself, other people and eventually lost the ability to truly trust anyone or even hope itself. I internalized the idea that I was lazy, stupid, weird and crazy. My nervous system was like a racecar that only had two speeds, stationary and Mach 7. It had no ability to do gentle right turns without careening off the road. It’d get totally derailed by a small pebble on the road.

The only organizing force in my life were my external commitments. I held down a demanding job doing deep learning research at Google by wielding anxiety, stress and adrenaline, which exacerbated my insecurities and anxieties.

It wasn’t all bad. I developed lots of compensatory skills that were professionally useful. Having essentially no executive control over my body forced me to improve my ability to prioritize. I got really good at ingesting lots of information to find the one high-leverage action for the week, even if everything else burned, because I could only do one action a week. This allowed me to consistently make “magical” bets at work. It looked like I was thriving on the outside, but on the inside I was held together by duct tape and chicken wire.

I could see all the cool things I’d do with my life if only I could figure out how to do more than one thing a week. Forget about finding meaning in life or following a deeper purpose. I wanted to convince myself that I was capable of more than survival. To prove to myself and the world that I was actually worth something, and not the piece of shit I feared I actually was. I wanted to publish high-impact research in AI, get jacked, find a loving girlfriend and have meaningful friendships. I’d spent my whole life surviving and I was so tired.

I was torn between two competing narratives. The first was that I wasn’t trying hard enough because I was acting lazy, stupid, weird, unstable or crazy. That I was a mess because I simply didn’t care enough. That I needed to buckle down, essentially the way every adult had scolded me for since I was a child. I was already trying as hard as I could and nothing was working, so this option brought nothing but despair. The second was to give up and accept that not only was my life a mess but it’d always be a mess, because I was inherently broken. That the adults from my childhood were right and I’d always be a fuck-up or broken in the head.

Both narratives simultaneously fueled my downward spiral. Trying harder was the on-phase of the cycle where I believed some specific skill would save me. Giving up was the off-phase of the cycle where I recovered from the crash. Neither option gave me any real agency, or changed things in any meaningful way.

I’d lived this way all my life until I started therapy at the age of 29 with the right therapist. She changed my life, and I’ll be forever grateful. Everything good in my life from that point on, has been due to the space she held for me during my crisis.

Therapy gave me the official ADHD/OCD diagnosis, helped me see the deeper wounds driving this process and gave me more clarity on what was actually happening.

There was an asymmetry between my internal and external commitments. My issues were especially pronounced when keeping commitments I’d made with myself rather than commitments I’d made with others. Social sanctioning was terrifying and extremely organizing for a nervous system hypersensitive to rejection and abandonment. This terror would easily override any other fears blocking me from meeting my external commitments. Internal commitments provided no such overrides so they’d never get respected. This wasn’t purely about childhood abandonment wounds, although those were significant. My nervous system was also likely more sensitive than the average person’s to begin with. That is, it was predisposed to sound the alarm far sooner than the average person’s.

Every failure to overcome the alarm would reinforce the fears that produced the alarm. This caused my nervous system to rapidly lose all proportionate calibration for fear. So my life rapidly conformed to revolve around it. I was in a permanent state of hyper-vigilance making me extra susceptible to triggering the downward spirals. My world eventually narrowed until I was largely driven by the fears of social abandonment if I didn’t meet my external commitments, and the fear of “wasting my life” if I didn’t have external commitments because I fundamentally lacked self-trust and self-worth.

This is why none of my one-off interventions worked. Shallow therapy via Lyra gave me emotional support, but lacked insight and support for changing my observable behavior. Meditation temporarily created calm but didn’t change the underlying fear dynamics. So a skipped day would bring everything back. “Eating the frog” demanded I confront my biggest fear first, which was inappropriate for a nervous system prone to over-triggering.

Moreover, none of these interventions worked with my shame. Shame was the cycle’s fuel, not the byproduct. My “recovery” was actually shame performing as hope, and the energy to “try again” came from self-contempt rather than self-trust. That’s exactly why it was so brittle. The compensatory skills that were rewarded at work further amplified my shame by reinforcing the idea that the unmasked version of me was unacceptable. I couldn’t build self-trust while masking who I was because every success belonged to the performance, not to me. The shame led me to hide, and prevented exactly the kind of honest contact with fear that could have changed things.

At root, my fear response was incredibly miscalibrated. I’d built my entire life around avoiding the alarm rather than building the capacity to question whether the alarm was telling the truth.

I wasn’t lazy, stupid or crazy. I was in survival mode, spending every ounce of energy I had to get through the day with a foghorn of an alarm constantly blaring in the background.

I needed a shift from survival to heroism. Specifically, the psychologically developmental capacity to defend against fear’s disorganizing effects and act with intentionality despite them. The quiet, daily heroism of choosing to face what scared me and acting skillfully in its presence.

I couldn’t build heroism when my entire bandwidth was consumed by survival. Every one-off skill I tried assumed bandwidth that simply didn’t exist. I needed a meta-skill that increased my capacity to defend against fear’s disorganizing effects, while being robust to wild swings in my bandwidth.

Every specific skill I’d tried thus far presented itself as a finite game. Breaking a streak or completing a goal would evaporate its motivational energy. I needed an infinite game with a clear curriculum of sub-goals that would provide motivation for the next thing the moment a sub-goal was completed.

Every avoided task sat atop a fear. I use “fear” broadly here to capture the felt sense of some internal resistance, and the quality of being energetically or unconsciously repelled from certain tasks. I realized that these fears were cross-cutting across all the domains of my life. It was the same nervous system underneath avoiding the difficult email, a difficult gym session or a difficult conversation. The set of all my avoidances was the curriculum I needed for my infinite game.

I needed to cultivate the meta-skill of systematically facing my avoidances, from the easiest to the hardest, to “master” the infinite game of growing braver.

This flipped everything on its head. The dopamine-hungry nervous system that once chased compulsions with ferocity started to chase the positive goal of psychological development with that same ferocity! The goal wasn’t to suppress my superpowers, but rather to redirect them towards some positive purpose.

“Eating the frog” had the right insight of regularly facing avoidance, but got the curriculum wrong for my nervous system. My practice did something similar, but with the right curriculum.

Within nine months I went from being unable to turn on the stove to keeping a clean apartment, reliably engaging with challenging conversations at work, holding responsibility, expressing intimacy and gained the courage to move to NYC.

With that said, let’s take a step back from my story to understand the mechanics of how the practice works, and why it works.

The practice is not complicated to state:

1. I’d find a quiet moment in my day, sit down, put my phone away, take a few deep breaths to calm myself. Then I’d close my eyes and ask myself honestly - “What are all the things I’m avoiding which, if I stopped avoiding, my life would improve?”

2. My mind would answer without restraint when asked calmly and earnestly. I’d usually get hit with a flood of tasks.

3. I’d acknowledge each task that came up, constantly asking “What else?” until nothing else came up. Each task would have some difficulty on a scale of 1-10, and I’d compassionately acknowledge each one.

4. I’d sit and reflect until I found a task at 4/10 difficulty.

   • 4/10 is what my nervous system found to be both safe and scary.

   • Note that I’d adjust what 4/10 meant based on my nervous system at the moment when I asked the question in step 1.

     • Some days 4/10 involved doing the laundry or eating slightly healthier food.

     • Other days 4/10 involved having a very charged crucial conversation at work.

   • This is a relative rating scale, rather than an absolute one. It’s benchmarked against what I found “easiest” and “hardest” on the specific day that I asked this question.

5. I’d make a contract with myself to not fall asleep until I’d finished the 4/10 task. I’d hype myself up and congratulate myself whenever I completed the task.

6. I’d lower the threshold for every 5 contiguous days that I couldn’t sustain the practice. I’d increase the threshold for every 5-day streak. I’d never exceed the threshold above 4/10.

7. If a particular task showed up again and again, or whenever the threshold dropped below 1/10, I’d discuss the specific obstacle with my therapist.

This practice has two functions - recalibration and diagnosis. Each successful daily contact with fear provides experiential data to recalibrate the fear response. This is what compounds over time. Steps 5 and 6 were a diagnostic mirror. They helped me practice adjusting my threshold, and building self-trust on that day’s capacity. They’d inevitably shine a light on shame, resentment, frustration, etc. that kept fueling my downward spirals, but at a level of scope that wasn’t overwhelming.

Discussing these internal resistances with my therapist was often extremely efficient. Especially because the practice’s diagnostic function continuously generated a stream of specific, observable targets. “I keep trying to write this email and I just can’t do it” is enormously more useful to bring to a therapist than “I have trouble with avoidance”. The practice narrowed the search space from “everything that’s wrong with me” to “this specific thing, on this specific day, at this specific threshold is hard to accomplish”. That specificity transformed and rapidly accelerated my therapeutic work.

In that sense, this practice is part of a broader system rather than a standalone tool. I didn’t do it practice in a vacuum. I was in therapy, on medication and was rapidly developing a healthy community around me. It all operated in a gigantic positive feedback loop.

Understanding the principles below will help you customize the practice to your needs.

• The low starting dose bypassed my miscalibrated machinery.

  • Sudden changes in bandwidth didn’t matter if the dose was low enough, and benchmarked to my current conditions.

  • In the limit, if I didn’t have the energy to actually do any of the tasks, I’d just sit there and visualize myself successfully completing the task.

• Consistency over intensity.

  • A smaller dose every day is better than a larger dose three times a week.

  • Also note that the easiest tasks weren’t “easy”. They were actually the “easiest” tasks from the “hardest” tasks in my life, because they were tasks I was systematically avoiding.

• Calibrating to that day’s nervous system.

  • The “difficulty rating” of each task was a moving target. Yesterday’s 3/10 might be today’s 7/10 because I slept badly last night, or was in the tail end of a crash. The practice adapted to me, rather than the other way around and always gave me something valuable to do.

  • Everyday was an opportunity to practice calibrating myself with what was sustainable for my body.

• The gains compound.

  • Doing the practice more often caused the body to do the practice unbidden outside my conscious “practice time”. This would only reinforce the behavior.

  • On an absolute scale the practice ebbed and flowed, but it rapidly compounded because there was always some non-zero dose fed into my system every day. And everything operated in feedback with everything else.

  • Therapy, medication and supportive people around me both fed the practice, and were fed by the practice.

• It’s cross-cutting.

  • The core fears driving avoidance in one domain often share similar roots with another domain. They often share similar underlying stories.

  • The practice is holistic by design because it asked what I’m avoiding across the scope of my entire life. It’d provide an organic curriculum cutting through every dimension of my life.

I wasn’t on medication when I started this practice, but getting onto a daily SSRI substantially accelerated my progress. I had substantial initial aversion to being on medication, but on balance, I’m glad I went on them. The SSRI gave me enough stability to allow a practice like this to substantially widen my field of agency. Starting a stimulant for my ADHD further accelerated the potency of this practice. It was incredibly helpful to work with a good psychiatrist to consider the broader implications of being on medication. This is yet another reminder that this practice wasn’t a standalone tool, but part of a broader system. This practice’s role was to act as an integrator for all the different interventions within my life.

I still experience intrusive thoughts and triggers, and I’m not perfect. However, they don’t govern my life the way they once did.

My fears have now become my friends, and actively help me skillfully navigate challenging decisions. However, I first needed to get out of survival into heroism before I’d have been able to authentically befriend my fears.

Despite the suffering, I’m grateful for what I went through. This journey was a gift in showing me how to develop conscious competence in growing my capacity for courage, and many other psychological traits. Also, I did get everything I wanted in the end. I worked on some exciting AI projects, got fitter, had a loving and meaningful romantic relationship and rebuilt my life with deep self-trust. The version of me from 2021 wouldn’t recognize who I am now.

If any of this resonated with you, please feel to reach varun@doubleascent.com or drop a comment below.

Disclaimer

Nothing in this essay constitutes medical advice. I’m sharing my personal experience with practices that helped me. Please consult qualified medical and mental health professionals for your specific situation.

Acknowledgements

• I’m deeply grateful to my therapist for everything she’s done for me.

• The following lecture series had a profound impact on me and helped me formulate this practice:

  • John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

  • Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning

  • Jordan Peterson’s Personality and its Transformations

• The following books were invaluable:

  • Brain Lock by Jeffrey Schwartz

  • You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder by Kate Kelly, Peggy Ramundo and Edward Hallowell

• Brian Whetten and Charlie Awbury for improving the clarity around the ideas discussed here.

• Calvin Nguyen for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this post.