When every choice feels like too much—what to do, where to go, even what to eat—indecision can quietly drain our focus and energy. In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we reflect on the psychology and mindfulness of decision-making for adults with ADHD and wandering minds. Together, we explore how to turn hesitation into awareness and uncertainty into creative flow.

Listeners will discover practical ways to approach decisions with clarity and gentleness, learning how to work with their ADHD rhythms instead of against them. This is not about forcing productivity—it’s about developing mindful structure, emotional insight, and trust in our intuitive process.

In this episode, we explore:

• How emotions guide decision-making and shape focus for ADHD minds.

• A mindfulness-based technique to ease decision fatigue and anxiety.

• How to transform choices into creative, intentional acts of agency.

The episode closes with an original piano composition, Icicle Drips, to help listeners ground in reflection and calm.

For more, subscribe and visit rhythmsoffocus.com.

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulFocus #ADHDMindfulness #DecisionFatigue #NeurodivergentCreativity #CreativeFocus #IntentionalLiving #ADHDWellness #MindfulProductivity

Transcript

Should I or shouldn’t I? What should I have for dinner? What if I did this or maybe I should do that. But if I do this, then what if it goes wrong? Well, if I don’t decide, well, that’s a decision too, isn’t it?

Decisions do weigh heavy, don’t they? What gives?

Matters of Great and Little Concern

There’s a quote I like that I got from, watching this movie called Ghost Dog. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film, main character, quotes from the book Hagakure, the Book of the Samurai,

” Matters of great concern, should be treated lightly matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”

I dunno how well I follow that advice, but it is something curious.

The Weight of Decisions

Decisions are in no way simple. Even the seemingly small ones, like deciding what to order at a restaurant, making small purchase, these can weigh us down into paralysis. Meanwhile, large ones like considering a change of professions, a move and more, these can plague us. They occupy the crevices of our every day, miring us in this anxieties, fears, regrets, and more.

Sometimes we don’t even realize we had a decision we could make until some regret form somewhere later, too little, too late. Or we leave them undecided as they create and sustain multiple waves and storms within us, worsening that scatter of a wandering mind.

So decisions can certainly weigh heavy. When we decide, we cut, the word having the same Latin root as homicide, for example.

We go this way and not any of the others. The universe of possibilities collapse into one.

In fact, one piece of advice for decision leverages this, where we use a coin flip, not because we follow where it lands so much as we realize what’s important to us. Something that we don’t see or feel in our emotional landscapes until that coin is in the air. And this gives us a clue.

Risk and Loss – Decisions and Consciousness

Every decision involves risk or loss. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a decision. We’d simply act. Consciousness itself may only exist for the reason of decision if we are to adopt a neuropsych analytic point of view. That even echoes William James from 1890 who had said “consciousness seems to arise only in response to a problem.”

It’s like the brain doesn’t call attention to itself until some system of pattern matching is off.

We have tension, frustration, excitement, play care. Emotion- all of these cresting into thought as they brush into consciousness.

Decisions rest on the sea of sensation, intention and emotion. Emotions connect into and through the deepest recesses of our mind and beyond emanating from meaning that we can only partially understand.

We sail these seas from a singular point flowing on and within this moment of now, and we think we decide which emotion, which wave of focus will I sail.

Agency. This ability and skill to decide and engage non-reactivity begins when we pause, examining these emotions as they are. We can maybe sense the meanings behind them.

What are the associations? What comes to mind?

Decisions as Creative Acts

What we might sense then is that decisions themselves could even be a creative act. As these ideas do come to mind, we can place one with another. Set this option with that until no new information comes to mind there.

And if decisions can be a creative act, well, what if we supported them in the ways we would support a creative act?

For example, what if we were to hold that intention to decide to capture it in the power of a task? But not just any task, a regularly repeating considered task.

For example, let’s say we’re ruminating on the decision to move, the ideas keep coming to mind, weighing us down. They do so because the decision’s never completed and it has no boundaries. It doesn’t have a place. So it is given free reign to spill over into every thought. By writing a regularly repeating task that says something like, “consider moving.” We can give that decision a place, a time within our day for us to reflect, to be creative with it.

We can give it our full attention, at least for a few moments, and sometimes that makes all the difference. If that task can appear somewhere we trust we can see it, if we can take that moment that maybe a deep breath worth of time, we can allow the thoughts and more importantly, the emotions, the reflections to come to mind.

Ideally, we would give these thoughts space to form and settle.

At that point. We’ve fully acknowledged the decision and the options that are there. We might feel the risk, we might feel the anxiety, but they’re not changing.

With this structure, we have a place for a decision to rest, to build with that caring, creative spirit, rather than only be fueled by anxiety and the fear of regret.

It’s there that we can feel the risk of one option or another. Mount the courage and then cut.