You Can Let Go of Shame With or Without an ADHD Diagnosis

If you procrastinate, you’ve probably wondered: is this ADHD, or just the way I am?

Finding out whether you have ADHD is really helpful if you can get a diagnosis. But even if you can’t, or you’re told you don’t have ADHD, that doesn’t mean you “have no excuse” for procrastinating. And neither answer means you’re stuck with this procrastination habit forever.

Diagnoses Help

Getting a diagnosis can be transformative in the lives of people with ADHD:

• They can get life-changing medication
• They can get accommodations
• The diagnosis explains why they’ve struggled with things that come easily to others, so that they don’t blame themselves for having those struggles
• They can learn more about ADHD, which makes sense of aspects of their lives they hadn’t even realized were related
• They can get tips designed especially for ADHD people, that work for them
• They can seek out ADHD spaces where they feel supported and understood

Increased awareness of ADHD is helping lots of people get diagnosed and get the support they need.

Diagnoses are hard to get

Unfortunately, getting that diagnosis isn’t simple. It requires access to the right kind of provider, and it can take a lot of time and a lot of money. I’ve heard of wait lists years long in some places!

On top of that, some providers have biases and come to the wrong conclusions. Women, for instance, are underdiagnosed for ADHD because it was first understood as conditions boys have, so the way it presents in boys got mistaken for the way it presents, period.

As a result of all these challenges, the ADHD community tends to validate self-diagnosis. But even that can be hard, since some of us have ADHD traits but to a “subclinical” level, or what ADHD experts Edward Hallowell and John Ratey call pseudo-ADHD, where it doesn’t count as true ADHD.

You Can Drop the Shame Either Way

Whether you get a formal diagnosis, diagnose yourself, or throw up your arms and say I just am whatever I am, I support it. All I want you to know is that there’s one crucial benefit that people tend to get from diagnosis that you can actually get no matter what. And that’s the un-shaming.

Whether you have a specific gene or not,

Whether you have a chemical imbalance or not,

Whether you have a certain neurotype or not,

Whether you were traumatized as a child or not,

Whether you have a certain label or not,

You don’t procrastinate because you’re a bad person.

You don’t need a diagnosis to prove that. It’s true no matter what.

In order to understand why, first we need to look at why blaming procrastination on biology feels necessary for removing the shame.

Procrastination has a cause

In our culture, there’s a subtle belief that you have a body, but you are your mind. 

Furthermore, we tend to assume that bodies operate through cause and effect, while you control your mind with free will.

Under this belief, if your body does something unusual with dopamine that causes you to procrastinate, it’s not your fault. It’s just cause and effect – a chemical was missing, so motivation couldn’t happen. But if your mind decides to procrastinate, that supposedly says something about your character, about what kind of person you are: a lazy person, an indulgent person, a person lacking in willpower, discipline, or fortitude.

I have good, though slightly unsettling news for you: you have way less control over your mind than that.

First of all, lots of what our minds do is subconscious. Procrastination is a great example of this – people often don’t realize they’re procrastinating until a few minutes into doing it! If you’ve ever suddenly realized you’re on Reddit or Instagram when you fully intended to be working, you know what I mean.

Secondly, even when you’re consciously choosing your actions, a lot of your habits and preferences are conditioned by your past experiences and the beliefs that those experiences instilled in you. For instance, if your parents or schoolteachers were nitpicky, you might find it hard to do a “good enough” first draft, so you might get overwhelmed trying to do things perfectly the first time. If you were prevented from expressing yourself and making your own choices as a kid, you might find yourself procrastinating just to escape the feeling that you’re being controlled and made to do something you didn’t choose.

Even if you don’t currently have an explanation for your procrastination, and it seems like you do it “for no reason,” there is a cause. You don’t have to be able to see the cause on an X-ray or a blood test or in your official file for it to exist.

You’re Not Lazy

And the cause isn’t “you’re lazy.” “Lazy” is just a cover word for “I don’t know why, so I’m blaming it on your free will.” But in reality, there is a cause, we just don’t know it yet.

How do I know? Because one of the first things we do in my coaching program, Painless Productivity, is look inside the mind and find the cause. With the right techniques, the part of you that procrastinates can actually tell you why it procrastinates. 

For instance, one common answer that procrastinating parts give is “it’s better not to try than to try and fail, because trying and failing would prove that I’m incompetent.” In this case, the procrastinating part is so laser-focused on avoiding the feeling of incompetence that it’s willing to bring on all kinds of other problems instead.

As a whole person, you know that it’s often better to feel dumb for a few minutes than to let people down, risk getting fired, and miss out on cool projects. But until you talk to the procrastinating part of you, it doesn’t know that. It has one job: avoid feeling incompetent. 

Once you understand that one job, you can see how the part is actually the opposite of lazy: it’s pulling out all the stops to protect you from feeling incompetent. It sees a project that might make you feel stupid, and pulls you towards your email inbox instead. When it runs out of emails to distract you with, it decides today is finally the day you clean the gutters. It’s creative! It’s dedicated! It’s just pointed at solving the wrong problem.

When you feel the reality of this part’s dedication to its job, it dissolves the shame you had about procrastinating. You can feel in your bones that it’s not “for no reason” and it’s not because you’re “lazy.” It turns out, emotional explanations remove shame just as much as biological explanations do.

So, regardless of whether you have ADHD or any other recognized condition that could explain your procrastination, you’re not procrastinating because you’re a lazy good-for-nothing. It simply doesn’t work that way. 

And that means you can let go of the shame right now. Even if you don’t know your reason yet, you can bet that you have one.

You Can Get Help Without a Diagnosis

But you don’t just want to feel less bad about procrastinating. You also want procrastination to stop running your life. How does a diagnosis factor in there?

I wondered the same thing when I started helping people with their procrastination. I based my offering on my own past experiences, and I don’t fit all the criteria for ADHD. So would my offering help true ADHDers? Painless Productivity helps people regulate their emotions so they can move forward, but is that what ADHDers need? If ADHD is an unchangeable neurotype, can an ADHD person change their procrastination patterns?

But my experience has been clear: emotional regulation work helps both ADHD and non-ADHD clients feel better and get more done.

Emotional regulation work in ADHDers

ADHD experts find that emotional dysregulation is very common in ADHD, though not a required component of it. They also regularly give advice on how to improve your emotional regulation, showing that while it may be conditioned by ADHD, it’s not fixed.

One of the really interesting things I’ve gotten to observe about ADHD clients is how their medication can work together with our coaching. A few times, I’ve had ADHD clients who are normally unmedicated come to session medicated. On those medicated days, these clients were able to go deeper into their psyches and uncover inner resources that they hadn’t been aware of. Once a client has uncovered an inner resource, it becomes easier for them to do that again in the future. So the medication helped them get more out of coaching, and the coaching helped them really take advantage of those medicated days in ways that will pay off even on later unmedicated days.

My productivity is so much better now. I feel like I’m actually working during the times that I want to work, I’m actually getting things done for school. I’ve made so much progress in my dissertation. I feel like I’m generally more on top of things when it comes to little odds and ends. For as long as I can remember, there have been things in my To Do list that I would look at it every day or every week and be like, “I should do this thing but I really don’t want to.” And now, it took a lot of work, but I finally got to the point where there isn’t anything on my To Do list right now that’s hanging over me that way.

Marc, an ADHD client

Emotional regulation work in non-ADHDers

But of course, plenty of people have trouble regulating their emotions without having ADHD! In fact, I think Western culture is so afraid of emotions that most of us could use some help learning how to process them instead of hiding from them.

I was turned down for an ADHD diagnosis, and Painless Productivity is based on my personal experiences! My procrastination was motivated by perfectionism and fear of failure. I was used to proving my worth by doing things well, and when I succeeded enough to get into a PhD program or to get a job in tech, it felt like the bar for doing things well had gotten too high. I could do a good enough job and iterate from there, but I couldn’t just pump out a perfect paper or flawless code like it was nothing. And that was scary enough to freeze me in my tracks.

My non-ADHD clients are typically people who are hard on themselves — perfectionists, over-achievers, Type A, workaholics, people who do more for others than for themselves. When they’re afraid they can’t meet their own high expectations, they shy away from trying. And when they work through that perfectionism, then they can accomplish more.

I used to really dread writing my inspection reports for work. I would let them pile up for a long time and then I would have to do a lot at once. That was overwhelming, and would burn me out.

Now, I don’t feel that deep dread, and I’m more capable of working through things a little at a time to avoid burnout. When I get stuck, I use the checklist Presley gave me to figure out why and work through it. I caught up on my backlog of reports, and I’m excited to keep getting better at chipping away at them consistently now that I have tools to help me do that.

I’ve actually seen the biggest improvement in my personal life. I feel a real willingness to get up and start my day, to keep up with laundry, to make time to move my body. And that’s really important, because I have a tendency to deny myself, but if I can’t function then I can’t do work or take care of my dogs or anything. And now, those things are just chugging along.

Overall, this has been a really wonderful experience and I’m so glad I did it.

Nicole, a non-ADHD client

Does Procrastination Always Involve Emotional Dysregulation?

I have heard of some types of procrastination that don’t seem to involve emotional dysregulation:

• The happy procrastinator: some people put things off until the last minute and then work really hard right before the deadline, and tell me that they love it that way! More power to ’em. Since they’re not complaining, I’m not seeing any emotional issues.
• The unemotional procrastinator: some people report a type of executive dysfunction where they can’t mobilize themselves to do something even though it’s easy, they enjoy it, they’re not feeling anxious or depressed, there’s really no downside to doing the thing. It’s as if they’re mentally pressing the “do the thing” button but nothing is happening. My understanding is that physical movement is one of the best ways to get the button in working order again, but this kind of procrastination is out of my wheelhouse.

But my experience has been that when someone is unhappy about their procrastination (so they’re not the happy procrastinator) and their procrastination is triggered by certain tasks and not others (so they’re not procrastinating on, like, eating ice cream, as the unemotional procrastinator might), then it tends to be due to emotional dysregulation. And when I say dysregulation here, I don’t mean people are flying off the handle or anything. I just mean there’s an inner conflict that’s making them feel stuck.

If you tend to procrastinate on tasks that are:

• intimidating, or will lead to an intimidating next step
• unclear how to do
• boring
• too big to do in a sitting, and/or
• not enforced by anyone but you,

then emotional work is likely to help you.

Emotional Dysregulation Is Changeable

Having an emotional component to your procrastination may sound like a bad thing, because it’s so unpleasant, but there’s really good news that comes with that unpleasantness: your emotional landscape can absolutely change.

• You can learn how to quickly exit overwhelm
• You can release built-up stress that’s making you anxious
• You can resolve inner conflicts

The more regulated your emotions get, the easier it becomes to get things done!

The Takeaway

Learning that you’re ADHD is helpful is so many ways, but you don’t have to wait for that discovery to stop shaming yourself for procrastinating. You procrastinate for a good reason, even if you don’t know what it is yet.

Want a quick-and-dirty idea of what that reason is for you? Try my free quiz, What’s Your Procrastination Type?