Episode 028: Frustrated with your frustration tolerance?
David begins by naming that dealing with a lot of a frustration is part and parcel of ADHD—and yet, we don’t want to make everything easy, some things are supposed to be hard. Essentially, there is a certain amount of frustration and discomfort that someone with ADHD has to be ready to experience. Isabelle is hit with that and explains that frustration tolerance is how much discomfort we can handle—when we’re waiting, someone’s running late, we’ve lost an item, pick a thing—and as much as it might be nice to hit the easy button and want this all to be squeegee’d away (so satisfying), it cannot be. It’s more like an old rag that barely gets the soap off. David names that Noah and him have long conversations about it, and his friend focuses on what you can do to experience discomfort, tolerate it, and build accommodations about it. He’s the kind of person who sees a big scary book and decides to read it, and David oppositionally wonders why you would put yourself through that? He sat down and taught himself how to read—David wonders at what it takes to sit down, take time, stare at a book, and flip pages, and reread a page or paragraph over and over again. For David, a lot of those hurdles felt unfair and unjustifiably frustrating, so watching Noah tackle a task simply for the mastery of it was a new idea. In very general terms, the grey matter around our brain gives us a little more impulse control. The more time you spend practicing something, the act of practice—a puzzle, a book, sitting and breathing, going for a daily walk, etc.—the act of continuing to do it even if you don’t want to builds grey matter, it builds your frustration tolerance for the thing you’re trying to do. Isabelle clarifies that this is a task that you can’t require your hyper focus to do, because you’re not as interested in the thing. David describes how he was struggling with fifteen minute car rides, and then got stuck with the first to be picked up, last to be dropped off slot on the bus route for school—hour long experiences. Suddenly, after having practice taking the bus, which sucked, it happened that he gained a greater tolerance from that. Isabelle asks if the the strife and frustration got him something, that wasn’t needless suffering: short term gain v. long term gain? David names that it is important to honor that it is more painful for us to do things we don’t want to do than people understand. You want to ball up your hands and stomp your feet, the amount of restraint it took to not swear more than once in traffic—there are so many places where we don’t fit. We encounter the pain of not doing the things the first time, then the double pain of judgment—is it me, or them? What’s the best way, and how do I know? Folx with ADHD tolerance for distress is much higher for a lot of things than others understand, but not for all things (like people walking slowly, waiting in a long line with a delay, being stuck in traffic). The example of people walking slowly made Isabelle cringing at the very thought of the moment: it is actual, physiological pain. It makes Isabelle think about childbirth and the practice she underwent called mindful birthing, which meant she slowly tried to acclimate herself to discomfort and pain (such as from holding an ice cube) and then to practice different approaches to noticing it mindfully and riding it out. She describes how she noticed in the labor process, which took many days, that there was this internal, full-body sensation (beyond the contraction) in response to the discomfort she was in, not dissimilar to the response she feels when she’s stuck behind people walking slowly, and she noticed that her endurance surprised her, not being naturally athletic or very physically gifted in that way. She describes telling herself “it’s only one minute” or “it’s only ten more minutes,” like a button to counter the impatience she feels (similar to the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”). David is stunned and wants to relate to what Isabelle is saying because though he cannot fathom childbirth, he resonates with something for him. He goes back to his psychology class sophomore year and names that it’s a duration measure: something that has a beginning and an end. Everything that is crappy has a beginning, and an end. He had the kind of learning that things stink, so you avoid them, but it gets in the way as he gets older. All of a sudden, something clicked, that he learned if you get something over with, it’s over with. When we’re talking about how much pain people with ADHD experience and how much we need to experience those things, we need to remember that the time you’re doing the thing you really hate, it’s going to be over with. Maybe you’re only going to have to do it once, or twice, or six times. “I can’t do that thing, I have no more room for pain.” Which David understands, and if you have any in the tank, “let’s do this thing so you don’t have to do it again.” Isabelle describes that often feels like there are only two times: Now v. Not now, which reminds her of how little ones think, developmentally: there’s a sense of “I don’t wanna,” and how quick it is to forget that you still have to get it over with, which reminds Isabelle there’s more than now or not now. It wasn’t until David was in grad school that he recognized that not now matters. He started calling it Past Dave and Future Dave—thanking Past Dave for making things easier for Future Dave. David walked past a Brita filter and filled it up with water, and said “I got you, Future Dave.” I saw that I had cold water the next day, and he said “Thank you, Past Dave!” Any special comfortable sock is a good day sock—he plays with Future Dave. This is how we get through the little moments and things that have no immediate gratification.
Mindful Birthing questions? Here’s a link to the organization that does it, and to the book, and even an excerpt.
Behave (book briefly mentioned by David) by Robert Sapolsky
DAVID’S DEFINITIONS
Frustration Tolerance: this is directly related to how much BS/or annoyance we can take for any given situation. The way we build it is by practicing tolerating the BS/annoyance. One of the more basic examples of this, would be getting used to being in the car for long drives by taking long drives in the car. Yes, even the idea of building a tolerance to frustration can require building your frustration tolerance.
Duration measure: The thing between a start and a finish, recognizing how long something takes.
Tips for accommodations:
Where does the behavior NOT happen?
Get clues about the environment.
Figure out what works for you.
Embrace it. Radically accept it.
Throw out what doesn’t work for you.
Don’t look at it as a failure.
How to tell what to outsource: you can tell someone what to do, but you can’t tell them how to do it.
What do you want done in a specific way?
This goes both ways: how to give instructions to someone with ADHD (see above).
Practice asking for time or for less when someone is giving you a big list or keeps talking
"I need one thing!” when getting distracted by inputs
Don’t give instructions to do things a dead person could do.
eg. Sit still, stay quiet, don’t move, don’t touch, wait five minutes, etc.
Instead, think of a specific thing that is active to do in that time/moment.
Collaboration is a key accommodation, but dependency fosters aggression.
Ask for the assist you need, but don't make it an expectation, you are still accountable for getting that thing done
"Can you make the kids' lunches for tomorrow?" instead of expecting the kids lunches are always going to get made
When asking for accommodations
Remember, folx with ADHD are often more reluctant to ask because we hear “no" so much, so it does involve practice and tolerating the distress of hearing a “no”
DARE (taken from DBT’s Dear Man technique)
D=Describe the dilemma
(e.g. “I really want to ask for a raise because I think I deserve one but I don't know how to do it.")
A=Ask
(e.g. “I would really like a raise.”)
R=Reinforce the other person, no matter what they say
(e.g. “Thank you for telling me no, I appreciate your honesty and being up front with me.”)
E=Empathize with the other person, remember they’re human and negotiate closer to what you want
(e.g. “I hear you, when's a good time to come back to this conversation?”)
Sometimes it has to be hard and it can be so hard and frustrating it hurts.
You will have to endure more frustration than most. Sometimes it helps to remember that this will end, that sometimes you only have to the hard thing once, or it only lasts x amount of time. Remind yourself of the duration of the thing.
Practice builds grey matter and makes it later easier to do the thing that once was harder. No way out but through.
Say to Your Future Self : "I got you!" and thank your Past Self when they showed up for you.
Cover Art by: Sol Vázquez
Technical Support by: Bobby Richards