Everything’s On Fire. Now What?
When everything is on fire, how do you escape the flames? For people with ADHD, overwhelm can consume our days in a blazing mess of forgotten tasks, ignored priorities, and competing demands. Like a wildfire swallowing the horizon, the urgent eclipses the important until catastrophe looms. Fortunately, firefighters don't panic in the face of infernos. They methodically suppress the flames by targeting fuels one at a time. We can borrow their approach. Tackle the smallest task first for a quick win. Preserve your critical relationships, health, and finances. Let go of time-wasters that won't devastate. Once the blaze subsides, sift through the ashes and rebuild. Learn from the near-disaster to prepare for the next. With level-headed focus, even the most raging overwhelm can be contained. Don't let the flames consume you. Become the firefighter, armed and ready.
It’s possible we’re overdoing the fire metaphor. But that’s what we do on the ADHD podcast... we lean in, even when it’s too hot to handle.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
I just want to say.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We were presented with topics because, fair listener, things are on fire for us ...
Nikki Kinzer:
A little bit.
Pete Wright:
... together, me and Nikki. And we're working on a project with a very tight deadline and it's coming right up. And so we rely on, count on, depend on the resources of intellectual, cognitive resources of the rest of the ADHD team. And Melissa has been an incredible producer behind the scenes continuing to make the show happen in spite of us.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because otherwise we would just be talking about random things.
Pete Wright:
We'd be talking about the expanse, I'm sure, because that's what's in front of me right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And so, Melissa keeps a list of topics that we need to talk about, and presented three of them. And I picked one that was really resonant for me, and you picked this one. And I do think it's perfect because we are talking today about what happens when your entire life is on fire. And the original joke was, when everything, everywhere, all at once is on fire, what do you do now? Right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And so, do you want to talk just briefly before we get started about why you're so inspired by this particular topic this week?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, it's because it's all I've been thinking about. So, we're in the middle of finishing a manuscript, and so it's around planning and it's around prioritizing, and it's around time and all of this stuff, right? And so when we were looking at the topics, I'm like, "Oh, yes, this, this! I can talk about this really easily." And it's so relevant for everyone, all the time. Ours is just a little on fire right now because we have a strict deadline that's next week. But I think that this feeling that we have, people feel all the time with all kinds of deadlines, we just happen to be living this one right now.
Pete Wright:
And it's not like we haven't had a lot of time. The fact is we're at the point now where it's super detail oriented. It's keeping a lot of things tied together, and that is hard for my brain to do. And so it just feels like ...
Nikki Kinzer:
Mine, too.
Pete Wright:
... dropping everything else as a ...
Nikki Kinzer:
I've had to.
Pete Wright:
... as a result of this.
Nikki Kinzer:
And when we talk about disappoint, I mean, I have some clear examples of that.
Pete Wright:
Huge.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Huge, huge, huge. So that's what we're going to talk about today. As usual, before we get started, we're going to head over to takecontroladhd.com and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show on the website if you want, or subscribe to the mailing list. And we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. And I say all that, you can listen to the website or you can get it at via email. But hey, you know what? We're in podcast directories.
Go find us in Spotify or Apple Podcasts or my favorite podcast app, Overcast, if you're on iOS or Pocket Casts, if you're everywhere else. These are people who make great podcast apps, Overcast and Pocket Casts, and they deserve some attention, too. So check them out in those directories or in those podcasts.
If you listen to your podcasts in Apple Podcasts, you deserve to evaluate some really great podcast apps because there are bespoke podcast apps that are fantastic and will level up your podcast listening experience. So I hope you do that. Anyway, you can also join us and chat with us in the ADHD Discord community. It is fantastic.
There are a bunch of free channels, but if you really want to level up your experience with us, head over to patreon.com/theADHDpodcast and subscribe there. For a few bucks a month you can support the show and what we do, and it really is, Patreon is the thing. It's the engine that propels the podcast experience for ADHD.
Everything we do around the podcast is propelled by Patreon. And so if you are into supporting podcasts by independent creators like us, again, patreon.com/theADHDpodcast to learn more. And with that, we're on fire.
Nikki, we've got a five alarm productivity blaze, and we got to answer the call.
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow!
Pete Wright:
Good. How was the sound effects.
Nikki Kinzer:
That was great.
Pete Wright:
I came with sound effects.
Nikki Kinzer:
You sure did. I didn't know what you were going to do. I thought you were going to holler at your dog.
Pete Wright:
Just burp or whatever. I did this ...
Nikki Kinzer:
I did not know.
Pete Wright:
... hold on a second, and then leaned away. And, that's what happens. That's how strongly I feel about how on fire we are. And I just want to prepare you because I have prepared a list of firefighting terms that I'm going to weave into our conversation today.
Nikki Kinzer:
There's a lot of metaphor going on here.
Pete Wright:
Very excited. Oh, so much.
Nikki Kinzer:
Which is cool because people love that. So, I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot about fighting fires. Really, for real.
Pete Wright:
I didn't even intend it. Right.
Where do you want to start with how this comes about?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay, so let's see. Everything's on fire, everywhere, all at once. Now what? Okay, so this is that feeling of there's so much to do and I don't know where to start. It's so big. Everything is important. Everything is urgent. Everything is late. I'm a terrible person. I should have started this a long time ago. This is my fault. Why do I keep doing this? This is frustrating. I'm going to go back to my bed and I'm going to go to sleep.
Pete Wright:
Of course. That's my safe space.
Nikki Kinzer:
So those are a lot of emotions, a lot of heavy emotions going on at once. When we look at our... And this is specifically around things to do, right? This is all the stuff you have to do. So, it's strong emotions around what we see when we look at our to-do list.
Pete Wright:
When you're introduced to fight or flight, right? Those common amygdalic responses, there's a third one, which is fawn, right? Just to roll over and put your paws in the air because it's just too much. It's too much overwhelm. And that's what I think about when you talk about going back to bed.
That's the fawn response. That's like, "I'm not even actively running so much, I'm just giving up." And I think that's really important to look at what your personal response is as we're talking about this. And so it is not an apt metaphor, but we're going to use it anyway. Everything's on fire, and yet here we are talking about the snowball effect.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, that's ironic, isn't it?
Pete Wright:
It is, a little bit.
Nikki Kinzer:
All right.
Pete Wright:
The snowball covered in gasoline.
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
So it's a very short, short effect snowball.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Right. So, starts with procrastination, probably a little bit, right? It's interesting about procrastination because you can do a lot of research around it and there's all these different kinds of procrastination styles and there's all these different reasons why. And a lot of times I think it's because of this timeblindness, is that we think that things aren't going to take as long as you think they're going to take.
And so it's okay to push them out a little bit. It's not so much that you're really purposely avoiding it. It's more like, "Well, I have all day tomorrow, I can do it tomorrow." And that's where that kind of starts to fall. Forgetfulness, I mean, I think that's just part of ADHD is the memory piece, is that you can't really rely on your memory. And so if you don't have a list that is trustworthy and you're thinking that you're going to remember things, that's not going to probably happen. Things are going to get missed.
Pete Wright:
Right. Right. Why can't I think of the word right now? It's that procrastivity or procrastination perfectness.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. That's what it is.
Pete Wright:
Right?
Nikki Kinzer:
And basically it's avoidance. I mean, it's you're doing other things that makes you feel busy and you feel good about it because you get to accomplish these things, right? You get to say, "Done, done, done, done." But you're not doing what's most important. And so the guilt is still there, right? In the moment you may feel great, but then 10 minutes later you're going to feel like crap again because I really didn't do what I was supposed to be doing.
Pete Wright:
Well, I've been reflecting a lot on that, thinking about my experience in college. Right? The first time I had agency over my own productivity. I didn't have teachers that were going to follow me around and there were just days where it was time for me to play some Madden Football and skip class.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sure.
Pete Wright:
And the lesson for me is, do you know what doesn't go down when you start skipping class? Class anxiety. The avoidance just causes things to pile up behind you. Right? So that feels like step one is to recognize that the cost of procrastination or forgetfulness, and we'll wrap forgetfulness into this set of behaviors that emerges from a poor work box, a poor calendar management, right? Poor management of incoming signals, all of the things that we deal with every day. It causes this giant backlog, this traffic jam behind us that we are either choosing or not choosing to acknowledge. And not acknowledging it is the thing that causes it to light itself on fire.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. Well, and then there's more to the snowball effect, right? Because here you're already feeling on fire and then there's this tendency to not want to say no. And so then something happens and there's extra work coming your way and you take it or you go ahead and accept that someone has asked you to volunteer for something, so you're taking more on than you really have time for.
And so now you're adding those things, which can also add a little bit of resentment, right? Because maybe you do want to do this, but you just don't have time, but you're doing it anyway and it's frustrating. So that's something. And then, of course, you manage, or you talked about the work box, which is that task management system that you have and the calendar.
So if you're not looking at those things or you don't have one that's trustworthy, you really don't know how much time you have available. You really don't know if you can do something or not. Right? And then on top of it, not only the ADHD distractions that happen, the internal and external that come to you every day, distractions in general, right? We're always distracted. And then you top on the ADHD, which makes it just 10 times worse. So there's a lot of things that can happen and go catch on fire. There's a lot of things that catch on fire.
Pete Wright:
They're sure are a lot of things.
Nikki Kinzer:
And it's a three alarm fire, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Three alarm.
Nikki Kinzer:
What is that sound? Is that the sound that you started with? I can't remember.
Pete Wright:
No, that was the opening sound.
Nikki Kinzer:
That was the opening sound. Okay.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Do you want to do that again or ...?
Pete Wright:
But it's important to get the spatial effect, right? It's the passing. The, [sound effect] goes by.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it.
Pete Wright:
It goes by because you're probably not in it, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
You're waiting for the resources to come.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm just looking.
Pete Wright:
Which, to continue our ADHD on fire metaphor, waiting for the resources to come is an interesting strategy. And I think that's something that I really resonate with, this idea that maybe I'm so far gone that I should just stop. Maybe the act of waiting is enough of a choice and it will burn itself out. I'll just ignore it long enough that I won't have to think about it anymore. And there are a couple of challenges that go into this strategy.
Nikki Kinzer:
This is what don't necessarily, we don't recommend this.
Pete Wright:
No, we don't recommend this. And let's go back to Pete in college, skipping class to play Madden Football and Cyberia. Ugh, I forgot the hours I played this game, Cyberia. Look it up. Awesome game. Spelled with C, C-Y-B-E-R.
Nikki Kinzer:
I used to play Tetris, on a little Game Boy.
Pete Wright:
You were playing Tetris?
Nikki Kinzer:
On a little ...
Pete Wright:
You were a Game Boy Tetris player?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yeah. And there was one person ...
Pete Wright:
But were you doing it in class because I can't imagine you ever skipping class.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. Well, I did skip class, but not that much. No, it was a girl in my sorority and she had one, and so everybody would take turns playing it. And I totally remember. It was my sophomore or junior year in college. It was one of those, because those were the two years that I lived in the house and she had this little Game Boy, and I played Tetris all the time. Addicted to it. I loved it.
Pete Wright:
You are a gamer from the beginning. Old school?
Nikki Kinzer:
See, I know.
Pete Wright:
OG. [inaudible 00:13:58]
Nikki Kinzer:
I never thought I was, but I totally, I am. I played Asteroids and Pac-Man on the Atari in the 80s. I'm totally aging myself. So, anyway, back to the fire.
Pete Wright:
Here's the thing that doesn't work. When I go back to Pete skipping class to play Cyberia, the thing that is on fire is my participation in a thing that I'm paying for. Eventually my grade goes down. Eventually I struggle academically because I have chosen to fawn, right? To choose inaction over any action at all. To choose willful ignorance of the state, of the world around me. And that's a hard lesson. That is a hard lesson to recover from if you let that happen too much. And I think that's one of the reasons we want to talk about this, right? Is because talking about it is the central cure for what happens when things are on fire. It's like the central thing. The first step you have to take is to acknowledge things aren't great.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think ...
Pete Wright:
Talk about what's not great.
Nikki Kinzer:
Acknowledge it and talk about it and know that there's a way to stop the fire. It will go out. So we don't want to stay in that, whatever you just said, when I referred it to going back to bed and falling, go back to bed and go asleep.
Pete Wright:
Fight, flight or fawn.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh yeah, I'm sorry. I thought you just said hold on.
Pete Wright:
When you get in bed, Nikki. Hold on. That's weird.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm like, what? Okay. Anyway, I'm a little distracted this morning.
Pete Wright:
The deal is this. What we're trying to get to is what we, according to this is again, Melissa in our notes, prepared an entire litany of lessons learned from the Department of the Interior, and I am so here for it. The first step is suppression. When firefighters are battling wildfires across the US, they use a method called suppression when extinguishing fires. Here's the quote. "Suppression involves extinguishing a wildfire, preventing or modifying the movement of unwanted fire or managing a fire when it provides benefits like vegetation reduction or improved wildlife habitat, firefighters control a fire spread by removing one of the three ingredients fire needs to burn. Heat, oxygen or fuel."
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Pete Wright:
I know. Things we learned from fighting fires. Now the important piece here is to be able to talk about what is it specifically that's on fire in your productivity system. Whatever it is, we have to remove elements to simplify the scope of awareness that you have. Because clearly, when you have too many elements, the scope is too big and you can't take it in, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
We need to narrow the field of view so that you can actually see the next thing. And when we're talking about overwhelm, it's usually because there are too many next things and we have failed to prioritize the most important. And I think this is a great opportunity to talk a little bit about the perils of persnickety prioritization.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, for sure.
Pete Wright:
Persnickety is not the word, but I needed alliteration there.
Nikki Kinzer:
I like it.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
It works.
Pete Wright:
Text me about prioritization, why it's so important.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's interesting because prioritizing, it's such a difficult thing to do when you are looking at the whole fire because you want to just get the fire out and do you start on one corner or do you go in the middle? Where do you start? And I think that's part of the issue that you were just explaining. And so prioritizing is a way to figure out how to start, but it's scary when you don't know how to make those decisions. And I think that that's what is happening is the ADHD brain is so overwhelmed and so all over the place that it's hard to zero in on a decision. And so, what I teach and what I talk to my clients about is that you have to have some kind of guideline to go back to to ask yourself these questions so that you can at least get to a starting point.
And the first one is always going to be the real deadline. Is there a real deadline to your projects or your tasks and figure out what they are? Because if something is due tomorrow, it is always going to take priority over something that's due next week. It has to, right? Now, I'm not saying that you can't work on the thing that's due next week, but you got to make sure you get the thing that's done tomorrow, so we can start eliminating our choices. We can start not burning, we can start putting water on certain trees, so now it's less fire, right? So we've got that that we can go back to. And then we also look at impact because that's also important. What is the impact 'cos if you don't have a real deadline, which a lot of things don't have real deadlines, right? A lot of things don't.
So if you can't find the real deadline, we have to look at impact. And the impact is either going to be positive or negative and it's either going to have a high or low impact on yourself and other people. And it can be a financial, it can be that ADHD tax that we talked about. It could be your reputation, it could be somebody's waiting for you to do their work and until you have to get yours done first, all of these things. And if it has a high impact and it has a deadline, that's a priority. You got to make that a priority, whatever that is. You got to go look at your calendar and say, "All right, well when am I going to get this stuff done?" Which means that sometimes you have to disappoint people and sometimes you have to reschedule things and postpone things to make sure that those high priority, high real deadline, high impact things get done.
Maybe it doesn't have a deadline, but it's high impact. You want to make sure you get it done. So now you have to rearrange your schedule. So there's three points to it, but if you have a way to remember what we're talking about, then it doesn't feel like you don't have the firefighters with you. Now you have firefighters with you. You have tools that you can start to burn, I keep wanting to say burn, but to keep ...
Pete Wright:
Your animals march to the sea.
Nikki Kinzer:
Now you have the sprayers to spray the fire. I am obviously not a firefighter.
Pete Wright:
All I could think about is now you have the wee bottles of Windex.
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly. Whatever it is.
Pete Wright:
I think that ...
Nikki Kinzer:
I think of the fire hose, the backyard fire hose?
Pete Wright:
You have the hose ...
Nikki Kinzer:
Your hoses.
Pete Wright:
Sprayers are not enough. The thing that I go back to is making it super simple and making it something that you can do to rationalize your place in the world. And as much as there are so many mnemonics and acronyms and ways to remember strategies around prioritization, as simple as you can make the process is as simple as it's going to be to get yourself out of it, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
If you have to remember too many steps, then you're not going to be able to do it and you'll feel like freezing, fawning. You'll feel like giving up. And I do like Casey Dixon, when she was on the show, she introduced us to her five Ds. We have five steps there, Delete, Delay, Diminish, Delegate or Disappoint. Those are the things that you're going to do in Casey Dixon's model to prioritize. For me, it goes along the lines of yours.
What's the real deadline? What are the costs? Either human costs or monetary costs. And who am I disappointing? And I have to weigh those things and that allows me to build a list. In my case of skipping class, well, I'm damaging my own reputation because I'm not in class. It's probably at that point is a self-fulfilling shame because I didn't want to walk into class embarrassed of having missed as much as I did and feeling like it's an insurmountable feat to learn the stuff that I had missed because I was playing Cyberia and Madden Football.
Nikki Kinzer:
You just explained my anxiety dream. That's my dream where I'm always unprepared because I didn't go to class. It is almost always it, in some form.
Pete Wright:
It was just a dream for you, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know.
Pete Wright:
I lived it.
Nikki Kinzer:
You lived it.
Pete Wright:
It was my lived nightmare. That was it. Because once the overwhelm became such that it became easier to skip class than to go, right? For some reason or another, it became easier to skip than to go. And it wasn't about Madden Football, it wasn't about Cyberia. It was about something in that class and overcoming that, figuring out what those costs were and who I was disappointing? Ultimately stakeholders were my parents. They were covering college for me at the time, and that became the calculus through which I approached that overwhelm. But I think, until you start to outline what is it specifically about the experience that's causing things to feel like they're on fire, you won't be able to suppress the fire. You won't be able to create the defensible space around yourself and your system to account for overwhelm, right? We talked about margin, now years ago, right? Building margin into your life, into your schedule so that when it feels like you are in a period of overwhelm, you have a little bit of space to give of yourself, to be able to accommodate.
Nikki Kinzer:
We should actually redo that. We should do that podcast again. I would love for you to talk about that again.
Pete Wright:
I loved it.
Nikki Kinzer:
That was a long time ago, and I think it's such an important piece to what we're talking about.
Pete Wright:
Credit to Sean Blanc and I reached out to Sean at the time and asked him if he would join the show, and I think he was on sabbatical or something at the time, so maybe we could get him or somebody on his team to talk about it because it's really important and I think worth talking about, again. In the case of our firefighting model, it really is, it's called defensible space, right? The area around the building where vegetation and other fire hazards have been reduced to slow spreading fire, right? That's margin. That's all we're talking about, is give ourselves time to account for the world on fire and being able to combat overwhelm.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and I want to talk a little bit more about the disappointing piece. 'Cos I think that that's a really important part. So many of what I've witnessed is a lot of the things that are put on to-do lists are things that people think they should do, and there are things that they feel pressure to do, but when they go through the prioritization, they realize, okay, it probably isn't as important. It doesn't have this deadline. The impact is medium. It probably could wait. And so once they start questioning it, they can start to eliminate. And part of that is disappointing is that you have to decide who are you willing to disappoint upfront? And this is what our conversation was with Casey, and let them know right up front. And what you responded to her, which you probably don't remember, but you were like, that's like telling RSD, I've got this.
I'm in control of this. I'm going to take control of this. Before you get to be disappointed in me, I'm going to go ahead and disappoint you and let you know I can't do this right now, or this needs to be postponed. And in the fire that we're in right now, I've had to cancel monthly events that I do. I've had to let go of the GPS membership for two weeks and Melissa has had to take it over for me. I don't want to do those things. I absolutely do not want to do those things. And it's disappointing.
Pete Wright:
Don't want to cancel those things.
Nikki Kinzer:
No, not at all. I mean, I want to be able to show up and be there and do my normal thing. I want to show up the way I normally show up, but I couldn't do it.
Pete Wright:
That's where the beating heart of this episode is. It's like we're at the point now where I think you are so resilient and such a role model of this behavior that we can sort of laugh about it and use all kinds of funny firefighting metaphors. But the truth is we had to prioritize.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
We had to say for a short time, there is a real deadline and we're going to have to disappoint some people and count on the resources of others. And that's the example of making a go of it. It's the example of Pete as an eighteen-year-old going into his professor that he's ghosted, who doesn't probably even know his name and say, "I screwed up and I need to just, at a bare minimum, pass this class. Help me prioritize. Help me figure out how to eat my losses, at least a little bit, and learn what you're trying to teach me." It's admitting that I've made choices and I now have to prioritize those against reality. I have to prioritize against reality no matter what, and I think that's what leads us back to normal. That's what leads us out of the fire. It's what leads us back to a state of calm is being able to admit when things are out of control enough that you can fight it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. With the hoses.
Pete Wright:
With the hoses and the sprayers.
Nikki Kinzer:
Or with Windex. Whatever you got.
Pete Wright:
Whatever you need. I think authorities would recommend not using Windex to fight a fire.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think so, too.
Pete Wright:
This is not fire advice.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. But you know what I love about the outline that Melissa did as a wrap up. I love that she's asking us, a special thank you to those who serve to help fight fires in communities and in the wild in any capacity. We recognize how important your work is to keep us safe. Amen to that. I 100% agree. Those folks are first responders and they are wonderful people. Strong people. And we appreciate you very much.
Pete Wright:
Is that what we have to contribute today? Is that it?
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's great.
Pete Wright:
Talk about airing of grievances. That was a lot today.
Nikki Kinzer:
And we're still in the middle of it, so we'll see how it all turns out.
Pete Wright:
Results may vary.
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly. Do they have a book coming out or do they not? I don't know.
Pete Wright:
Is it real? We don't know at this point.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Well, super fun. Thank you everybody for putting up with us today. Some weird fire energy going on today, but we're here for it. Thank you for hanging out and listening to the show, for supporting us as patrons. We sure appreciate you and thanks for your time and attention.
If you want to hang out and talk with us more about this or any other fire related metaphors or gifs, you can find us at the Showtalk Channel over in our Discord server, and you can join us right there, but becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better over on Patreon. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
