I don’t feel anything positive when I complete stuff. It makes daily chores exceptionally difficult. The only coping mechanism I’ve found that kind of works is a stupid little game I made on my home assistant dashboard. I get a point every time I complete a task and every six hours it deducts a point. I have it track current and high score. I have a high score of 24 because one weekend I got fed up at myself for spending weeks never getting more than 3 points. I’m sitting down around 10 points now as I try to slowly prevent the score from trickling all the way to zero. I don’t even require it to be a big task either. Take out trash, cook a meal, do dishes, clean out fridge, clean counters, burn boxes. Everything I do feels like an internal battle for me to do and once I’m done I know I’m just going to have to do it again. Oh yay, did the laundry, good thing that’s just going to need done again in a week. I don’t even enjoy eating, everything is a constant stream of chores and bs that doesn’t accomplish anything.
its called anhedonia and its a symptom of many psychiatric issues. i had it for like 40 years and it got worse as my cptsd bloomed and i acquired depression that was treatment-resistant. it was severe. i had many meds and ect and ketamine. ketamine fuckin works but it takes a toll on my dissociative disorder and tbh my sense of what is real and it likely triggered the clinical paranoia. however, i now take atomoxetine and it fixes the anhedonia really well in comparison to before. now i get up and simple shit makes me feel good. not great, not ecstatic, just good. it turns out i can like everyday stuff. also, being trans with the wrong endogenous hormones also made it worse. so, to sum up, estradiol, lamictal, and atomoxetine are a magic combo for me. now its just life stress that makes me want to turn myself off. at least every single thing in my life is no longer a sisyphean grind like a real life mmo that never gives you coin or an epic.
My mom after I finished some inane chores she’d force me to do when I was a kid:
“There that wasn’t so bad was it? Don’t you feel accomplished now, after a job well done?”
Me:
"1. Yes, it was. All of that sucked. 2. No. I feel like I want to be left alone. We will definitely struggle again next time you tell me to stop what I’m doing on a Saturday to mow your lawn for free, or whatever. "
I’ve since grown up and have my own lawn I neglect. But, I do understand the value of chores now. I just don’t force them on others, and if I ask for help, it isn’t a veiled threat that says “You say yes and help, or else…”
You can only get so excited about making someone else rich.
No ADHD, just autism here. When finishing I get a small relief and no accomplishment, just emptiness if anything. I have to revisit a job well done 6mo later to get the feeling of accomplishment for a job well done.
That’s an interesting variation. I’m happy that get your fix eventually.
That is actually one of the major things that medication changes for me - things other than my current hyperfocus can be rewarding. Mind you I still suck at choosing the right activity, but at least I stick with whatever I’m doing.
Or the feeling of , that should gave taken way less time, man I suck. Did I do it right? Better redo it (6 hours later…)
I usually feel anger at myself that it took that long/wasn’t better/something else my brain had decided to keep me from getting any good brain chemicals
“Anyone else would have done this in their sleep and done a better job than me”
Not if they had the same struggles that you do—they would have done exactly what you did.
Irrelevant. The brain doesn’t acknowledge the accuracy of your words
Dopamine after an accomplishment? Nah.
Yeah. I struggled to finish my graduation thesis, for many reasons, but chief among them was that I took on a project I didn’t know I wasn’t prepared for (it went way, waaay beyond what my education gave me, including economic and social issues I definitely was not prepared to explore, nevermind explain) and my supervisor was as inexperienced in it as I was. Me being the perfectionist that I am, being unable to produce what I imagined meant I’d rather do nothing.
Took me about 2y to get a decent research paper together (it really didn’t need to take that long, it was a qualitative study on gentrification in my city), and by the time I was able to guilt myself into actually finishing it, I got a decent looking project in about 2 weeks, hyperfocusing through the absolute rage the entire thing was giving me. The terna (experts assigned to judge) loved it, from the research to the execution. I asked for the degree to be handed to me on site instead of through a ceremony. I was just absolutely done with it, lol.
I don’t really feel proud about it even though I should be, I’m just glad I got through it at all.
I don’t even get the sense of relief. I could stop 1 second short of finishing and feel no difference.
For me the relief comes from finally being able to let go of the guilt I felt for not getting it done before. Maybe you don’t feel guilty so you don’t get the relief after the guilt?
Im quite sure I dont have ADHD, and I can absolutely relate. When I finally wrote my last exam of my highschool everyone was kinda hyped afterwards and I was like “and now? That’s it?”
I was quite sure I didn’t have ADHD, too.
Not feeling a sense of accomplishment is not normal. You deserve better. Just check into it, okay?
I’m no brainologist but I wonder if things like this might be more related to autistic cognition. There seems to be something similar in the space of not attaching the same significance to events others find emotionally charged.
Nah this is purely a malfunction in the rewards and punishment functions of the brain that keeps you motivated. Autistic people don’t have any problem with motivation unless they have some other diagnosis. If there is a connection, it would be with something like depression or RADS.
ADHD and ASD go hand in hand. Not all ASD people have ADHD, but if someone’s on the spectrum, ADHD might want to be looked at if they’re having issues that are similar.
eh, kind of hit or miss with autistic people, afaik.
hyperfocus is a big thing for autists, which is a problem with attention, since it keeps you from choosing what you want to focus on.
so if you’ve got an assignment due, and your brain decides we’re gonna focus on [different thing] right now, possibly for days on end, that can be a serious problem.
it can also look basically identical to ADHD for outside observers, since the result is often the same “they didn’t to [the thing]!”…
and that then gets mistaken for a lack of motivation, which it isn’t really:
it’s a lack of ability to choose what to be motivated about.
it’s one of the reasons that there’s so much overlap in diagnosis of ADHD and ASD: symptoms can present very similarly to outside observers
No, I have both and I can tell you for sure that the hyperfocus from my autism and the hyperfocus from the ADHD are very different experiences. The ADHD hyperfocus feels more like addiction, in a sense, since it feels like I sink into the bullshit task like mud and I can’t pull myself back out without help. And it’s never actually helpful. The autism hyperfocus I can sometimes engage on purpose, and it’s more related to my enthusiasm for the task.
The thing that autistic people have that I think can be mistaken for adhd is the difficulty in switching tasks without warning. This must be a new thing, tbh. When I was a kid, I got called the r word a lot for not being able to switch tasks as fast as the people I was with. This isn’t focus, it’s an aversion to the inconvenience of being unable to complete a task.
I’ve also got both, kinda; no hyperactivity just the attention deficit…
and yeah, i agree: that’s why I said it can look the same to an outside observer, not that it feels or works the same.
the term I’ve heard for the task switching problem you describe is “autistic inertia”; basically just means that it’s more difficult to start a task, and end a task (or switching to a new task), but once a task is underway there isn’t an issue. it’s just the starting/stopping part that’s hard…
That’s a nice explanation, I’m ASD and wife is ADHD and it makes sense in our case. I just used my son as an excuse for underperforming at work because instead of programming whatever I was programming a different thing.
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“How much longer do I have to do this shit? I’m too afraid to live, and more afraid to die. Well, not afraid of a painless death. Fuck, I’m bored.”
No finished project without some force that provided the focus to get it done.
How can any feeling of accomplishment fill the mind when there is the bad feeling of being forced?
