Are you me? I can sit in front of a computer for hours looking at the most braindead/useless slop, yet I can’t drag my ass to do things I actually WANT to do (like write a novel), or sometimes, even the things I NEED to do (like brush my teeth). ADHD meds work to a certain degree, but even then there’s still a bit of a block between wanting to do something and then following through with it. It sucks. I wish I didn’t struggle with it so much but that’s the brain I’m stuck with.

Read Unlearning Shame by Dr. Devon Price

https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D671BD3535F0C10BFEFF889C2336719C

That sounds like some sort of attention deficit disorder. You’re not lazy. Very few people, if any, are. Treating this like a moral failing is not only addressing the wrong issue and doing nothing to help, it is also making things worse.

You should seriously look into your options for getting tested for ADHD and having medication. It is not a miracle cure but it is still a huge improvement. For me, it was like 90% of the noise that made thinking and acting so God damn hard was lifted.

Best of luck to you. I hope you get better.

If you find it enjoyable to put off tasks then you are lazy. Most people who think they are lazy are actually dealing with stuff like depression, executive dysfunction, and conditions that affect mood or energy levels (medication side effects, POTS, chronic fatigue, sleep apnoea etc.)

It sounds like you have a lot of tasks that you genuinely want to do but you don’t have the resources to tackle them, and it sounds like you aren’t relishing the opportunity to put them off. That doesn’t sound like laziness imo.

ADHD?

I deal with the same issue and find myself in the same mindset pretty often. One thing I can say is that we aren’t lazy failures, there is a lot of nuance to the way an ADHD/Anxiety/OCD brain functions. One of them is executive dysfunction, another the subsequent act of blaming ourselves for it.

One thing I can say that helps me is taking a step back, getting a high level view of all the tasks, and looking for the lowest hanging fruit. Completing one small item gives me the feeling of accomplishment and urge to check a few more items off the list.

Hope that helps. You aren’t alone!

lots of good replies already, just wanna chime in and repeat that you’re really not lazy, you’re clearly suffering from executive dysfunction related to one or more neurodivergences. I’m autistic and have chronic MDD and I relate extremely hard to your struggle. I will say please try to be kinder to yourself, I always encourage people like us to strive towards altogether avoiding the word lazy, it is basically a form of bullying yourself inherited from NT society’s expectations. I know it can be a hard viewpoint to shake and it may not happen overnight, but looking at yourself that way is not constructive to fixing the things you wanna fix and may do more harm than good. I wish you all the best in finding healthy coping methods and accomodations for your executive dysfunction. it’s really hard. being able to talk about it is good but in future try not to put yourself down like this!!!

Yeah, I’ve always been lazy too. Never did my homework, rarely could be bothered to do my chores, one million unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, couldn’t hold down a job for long, etc. I was completely convinced I’m just a lazy, useless, unmotivated sack of dookie, until one day, when a psychiatrist introduced me to the concept of “executive dysfunction”, something I’d never heard of before. One ADHD diagnosis and years of therapy later I am in a pretty decent spot. The most important thing is that I have become much better at being kind to myself. I was never truly lazy, I’d just spent most of my life trying to fit my square-peg self into a round-hole society and become too hopelessly burned out by trying to fulfill the round-hole expectations to do pretty much anything, ever. You mentioned your dad has ADHD, and it is apparently hereditary as fuck, so I think you should at least look into it. My mom and most of her siblings have it, some of my cousins have it, and my brother has it as well.

When I start feeling bad about being lazy, I like to think about it like there’s good lazy and bad lazy. Like, my cats are good lazy. They don’t do shit. They just fuckin lay around all day and they seem to love it. In fact, I think most animals would just fuckin lay around all day if they had the opportunity. Fuckin laying around all day seems to be the peak of existence in nature. If I’m feeling bad about getting to experience the sheer bliss of fuckin laying around all day, then it’s likely I’m not being good lazy, but rather bad lazy. Bad lazy is in fact not laziness at all, but executive dysfunction in a laziness disguise.

A big thing for me was learning that I never accepted “being tired” (mentally or physically) as a valid excuse to rest, so I’d spiral into bad laziness because I was too tired to do the thing, but couldn’t rest until I’d done the thing, so I’d try to somehow escape from the impossible contradiction by scrolling instagram reels or whatever until I either forced myself to doing the thing and hating it, or gave up on doing the thing and hating myself for being bad lazy and wasting so much time. It turns out that I can, in fact, just say “I am simply too tired right now, I will do it later”. No use trying to fit my square-peg ass into a round-hole expectation, I’ll just burn myself out again. I’ll make square holes. I can just eat a snack now and make dinner at 10PM instead. People won’t die if I don’t fold the laundry today. The shop is still open for hours, there’s no rush. Yes, honey, I know I said I’ll deal with it after work, but I need a couple of hours to rest. It doesn’t make the things any easier to do per se, but just knowing that it’s okay to be tired and that I’m “allowed” to take some time to rest takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m still learning this shit, and it’s ironically a chore in itself to remind myself to let myself rest and be good lazy when I need it.

You’re not irredeemably dysfunctional! There’s probably square holes for you as well.

its a mood. I’m currently not doing the one thing I have to do to not get fired at my fake ass job, I’ve been trying to do it since friday and just utterly failing, mostly posting or watching youtube (quarantining due to covid exposure so I can’t go out and do much tbf, but I have plenty to do at home too)

I don’t think we are lazy. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. I’ve done slightly better since I started framing it in my mind less as “what’s wrong with me?” and more as “what can I do about it?”. Sometimes the answer is just “idk try and push through you’ve got no other choice” but usually taking care of myself better, trying again when I’m more caffeinated or got some sleep, or some other combination of things helps a little bit.

I’m still a hot mess (don’t look at my work performance or how messy my place is), but I mostly get by. I got hormones, for a few months earlier this year I was even reading books and shit.

I do think about trying to get tested for audhd and get medicated, but I also kinda hate psychiatrists so I haven’t yet.

What I hear is procrastination combined with self-shaming, and comrade, the first is fine and the latter is only okay in small doses, you deserve better than a heaping spoonful.

Procrastination isn’t even a bad thing unless it is impacting you negatively, like there is something you really do need to get done and something is a roadblock. Even then, don’t forget to have perspective: is the thing getting done more of an external imposition or something you do want to do? Most things are the former IMO and it isn’t your fault to not want to do them right away. In addition, it is totally fine to push things off when overwhelmed so long as they don’t put you in a much worse position. So… forgive yourself, comrade, and then divvy up your to-dos into a real priority list and how you will ensure you take care of yourself by doing the stuff that really needs doing vs. the stuff you might be 100% needlessly feeling bad about. And then forgive yourself again because it isn’t easy to work through these patterns of thought and you won’t be perfect at this next attempt either. And that’s okay because you’ll be getting better at taking care of yourself!

Re: self-shaming, please always remind yourself that this is only something in your head and it is only useful in small, friendly doses. Like, “oh I said I would read that next chapter before my next meeting, I had better do that so I don’t waste my time there”. By the time it is at the “I suck” level it really just isn’t accurate or good for you. I would also say that a lot of this is probably not a conscious decision despite how I am talking about it, so also give yourself a break there. Some things are learned patterns from our lives (e.g. someone making us feel inadequate), sometimes our brains impose this stuff on us, sometimes it is something beaten into us by bad experiences, etc. It can take real work to counter these thought patterns even if sometimes we know they are not accurate. Please feel welcome to vent here and don’t sleep on talking to a pro IRL if that is available to you. It really can help a lot.

As an autistic person, so am I without my ADHD and depression meds

Hey, go do one small thing for red_stapler.

I am exactly like that. I was like that in school (no homework in 9 years of school, not a single one), now grown up and with family, it is now the home tasks / hobby ideas, that I just not feel like having energy to do. And I always have an apology: looking after our son, which doesn’t make stuff more easy… But with a lot of talking with GF and writing stuff down, it keeps on working, until it starts to fail again, where my girlfriend remembers me, and stuff starts to work again…

🥳at end of year, I get checked against ADHS, hope I get to a more permanent solution

Pain is temporary