The Friction Before Doing the Thing Tends to Be a Facade

I don't know how normal this is but I learned some time ago about myself that when I have this strong aversion to trying something, it doesn't really signal anything of importance. I don't necessarily mean a strong intuition against something fishy or sketchy. I mean something like trying a movie, an experience, something new and/or different that I just don't feel like doing. It may even be a gig or an opportunity. Sometimes, there is genuinely something off about it. In those moments, when I ignore myself, i tend to regret it in some way. But in the moments where I can't pinpoint anything and just have this strong resistance to do something, it's usually a poor indicator of how that thing will actually be or feel. And usually, when I muster the strength to push past that specific feeling, I realise it was a lie.

I say it a lot that "my biggest issue is pressing play". That pretty much sums up the feeling. If we use a movie as a placeholder, you could tell me all the great reviews, all the fun stuff, give me all the fascinating clips, but that difficulty of just pressing play will still remain if I have that feeling.

Apparently, a technical term for this is "task aversion." and it's quite normal. But, if you have ADHD it can likely be more pronounced. The unpleasantness you anticipate feels so strong that it stops you from initiating a task. And that feeling does not match whatsoever to the real thing. It may even be the opposite.

Of course, if you aren't depressed and you have a deadline, those feelings go out the window. It's also the case for if you're excited about it. But if it's something that's not urgent or something without a lot of stakes in the moment, this feeling can present itself and manufacture stakes in a different direction. Rather than pushing you to get things done, it does the opposite.

At some point I started learning to ignore it but along the way I forgot. Usually a stimulus shows you something important but this is one of those where it's not doing anything good. It's like shame in the sense that it's useless in many of the situations you find yourself in, even though the emotion itself isn't necessarily useless.

So, I'm back again, reminding myself that task aversion is often worthless in the moment and you can quite literally just do the thing and worry about how it feels as you're doing it. You can press play on the movie and dip if it's boring. You can try that new thing and dump it if it doesn't work. You can and should start that task if it needs to get done.

Anticipated feeling is often a bad predictor of the actual feeling.

Remembering that may make it much easier to be in motion than to never press play.