Caught between “I can’t start” and runaway hyperfocus, many of us feel like passengers in our own minds rather than pilots of our days. In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we explore how wandering minds and ADHD can move from stuckness and self-blame toward genuine agency, ease, and purposeful action.

We reflect on why “I don’t wanna” feelings are not failures of willpower but signals from our emotional world, and how redefining motivation can help us align emotion and intention without shame or force. We also walk through the Eight Gears of Focus, a gentle framework for moving from simple awareness into meaningful action, completion, and performance in a sustainable way.

Listeners will learn:

– How to see emotions as waves moving through awareness, rather than enemies to overpower.

– How “force-based” productivity (shame, urgency, pressure) quietly erodes our sense of agency—and what to do instead.

– How to use the Eight Gears of Focus to locate where flow is blocked and create kinder, more rhythmic next steps.

This episode also features an original piano composition that mirrors the movement from hesitation into grounded focus, supporting a calmer nervous system as we listen. To stay with us on this journey of mindful productivity for wandering minds, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com for more resources and practice invitations.

Hashtags

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulProductivity #EmotionalRegulation #Hyperfocus #Agency #Motivation #Neurodivergent #PianoMeditation #RhythmsOfFocus

Transcript

Stuck Between Inaction and Hyperfocus

I cannot act. If I act, I’m in hyperfocus and my emotions. Well, they’re dysregulated, as they say. Why are there so many problems? Where’s the commonality between these? What can I do?

 ADHD, Wandering Minds, and the Question of Action

 I continue to search for some commonality, some simplicity that would explain the wandering mind. With ADHD, the central character in the coterie of wandering minds, it’s useful to hear out the experts.

Dr. Russell Barkley says, “ADHD is not a disorder of knowing what to do, it’s a disorder of doing what you know at the right times and places.”

Is It Willpower, Free Will, or Something Else?

What is it to not be able to act? Is it a lack of free will? The alignment of emotion and action are disrupted at the moments that would otherwise be meaningful to us? Sometimes we point at motivation. There’s something can be said about this, but often that idea of motivation, this messy word can raise the cackles on the back of our collective necks, conjures the idea of willpower.

Redefining Motivation for the ADHD Brain

But these depend on our definitions. I define motivation as the degree to which our emotions align with our intentions. One trouble, however, are these pesky, “I don’t want our feelings,” powerful and complex as they can be, and they don’t align. So how do we align our emotions and our intentions?

Defining Emotion

Well, first, let’s consider what emotions even are.

Certainly there are multiple approaches from the spiritual to the practical, to the molecular and beyond. Rather than say what’s right, I’m simply going to define it here, and now.

Emotions are that which flows into consciousness, whether by brush or by storm.

Essentially, whatever comes to mind. Is the cresting of an emotion.

Perception as Emotion and the Role of Resonance

Now, this is a very different definition than what you’re likely used to. Words, ideas, actions all crest into and through consciousness from emotion. What that means is that perception is also an emotion. Something outside of us resonates with something inside of us. If there was nothing within us with which to resonate, it wouldn’t register. It would not reach conscious awareness.

But as emotion arrives, we cannot argue with them. We might find new perspectives, the so-called insight, but even these need to resonate deeply with the most fundamental emotion that of trust without which our reality itself crumbles. In order to affect an emotion, we can only do so through affecting the conditions in which it exists, internal and external.

Where “I Don’t Wanna” Feelings Come From

The “I don’t wanna” feelings can stem from multiple sources. One perspective is the biological, which simply states it is. The physical structures, the chemistry, the like. All represent objects outside of our sense of agency, perhaps reached indirectly with chemicals, sex, and ice baths.

A psychoanalytic approach is one in which we examine the ideas, sensations that come to mind, consider potential meaning. Meaning is this depth and breadth of connection, conscious, unconscious, and beyond comprising the storehouses, the capacitors, the antenna from which our emotional waves emanate. Story.

We may not want to do something for any number of reasons, such as fear, worry, overwhelm, despair. There are also positive emotions that can throw us off, like excitement for something else, distraction, even playfulness. Any of these in turn might only come to mind Manifesting in ideas and words like,

“I fear what this would say about me. If I were to begin it would mean that I’d have to finish it. And what if I can’t finish it? And I’ve rarely have ever been able to finish things. And what if the thing just stinks anyway?”

More fundamentally though, saying “I don’t wanna,” can be this foundational stage of our will trying to assert itself, our attempt to regain, if not create a sense of agency. It says, I’m alive. I exist because you want me to go this way and I wanna go that way.

Check out episode nine for more on that.

The Trap of Defining Yourself by Opposition

But being in this way of being has many troubles as the things still need doing. If we only operate out of opposition, we rely on the things we oppose. In this way, we’re still being driven by the thing we oppose.

If we define ourselves by not being the opposing side, we’ve allowed the opposing side to effectively define us, and then we can get angry at the thing that seems to force us the seemingly uncaring others, the deadlines that don’t cooperate with each other as well as ourselves for having to work this way.

How Shame, Urgency, and Force Undermine Agency

So we rely on the things we’ve learned to rely on those things we can trust to circumvent the, “I don’t wanna” feelings, namely force. Force is the negative emotions like shame, urgency, and more perhaps is represented by the deadlines and other matters where stakes are involved.

Something’s at risk. It doesn’t care if we don’t wanna.

And so the injuries to our sense of agency perpetuate. Not just biologically, but in the world of meaning, if not identity.

But I’d rather not take the position that we’re helpless against ourselves. If we can examine and engage these emotions as they are, learn how we might sail with them, tack against them, we can start directing ourselves in a more deliberate manner.

Over time, we can even learn how to create the conditions for those emotions such as such that their waves are more and more in our favor.

Revisiting the Eight Gears of Focus

In a recent podcast and webinar, I presented what I call the eight Gears of focus. This sort of stretch between one side and another of the types of focus and the flow that can happen throughout.

Zero is being the awareness of what’s in mind. One is approach. Aligning our intention with attention. Where we choose a feeling we follow, a tension that we try to form into ease. Two.

Consideration -picturing something in our mind.

Three is a visit where we’re there with the work. Four is where we begin, we take action confronting the reality of ourselves within the work. Five is where we complete something, a task, a project. We bind ourselves to the external world and structures of things. Six, we schedule where we attempt to synchronize our internal sense of time, the waves as they exist within us with the clocks that we share with others.

And seven, performance where we’re examined, assessed in real time, whether on stage or maybe the console is on fire.

Bringing Vitality Through Every Gear

Between all of these, there’s a flow from the zero to the seventh. We bring our sense of being, our vitality throughout. The more powerfully we do. So the more practiced we are, the more powerful the performance might be. The more vitality it has at any one of these stages, the more engaged we are.

When I can perform at the piano for an audience, when I can fully be there with my sense of knowledge of therapy and understanding mind for my clients, I can resonate at depth with them. At the zeroth gear of being. We have a sense of meaning, a depth of self-conscious, unconscious, and beyond. At the other end, we’re held in place by performance.

Structure Can Trigger “I Don’t Wanna” Feelings

These latter gears show increasing structure, but as a result, have increasing tendency to stir emotions such as the, I don’t want to feelings. And using these eight gears, figuring out where we can support ourselves throughout. We can assess where and how our flow might be impeded. Whether you use the tools of the waves of focus, like anchoring, guides and visits, maybe something beyond it like meditation, therapy, or practice of schedules and clocks.

We’re attempting to find a way to connect with the world such that it supports us in turn a flow and flowing state of success. We start being able to act from our sense of self.