Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
Part 13 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
Belief: I’m not productive because I’m missing the magic strategy to be productive.
Reality: ADHD isn’t just an attention disorder — emotional dysregulation is a root, and avoidance is how it shows up at work.
Action: Before you reach for a productivity strategy, ask what emotion is driving the avoidance.
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.
My first manager at Amazon once told me I tend to avoid hard things.
He was right. There was a project he asked me to complete — a complex SQL query to make an animated Tableau dashboard (which was cool as hell at the time), I’d been putting off for months. Every time it came up, I found a reason to defer it. Too busy. Not the right moment. I’ll get to it.
When he finally called me out, I sat down and did it. It took fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes. Months of avoidance for a task that took fifteen minutes.
The SQL wasn’t the problem. I knew how to do it. The problem was the fear of finding out I couldn’t — and the shame that would follow. My emotionally dysregulated brain decided that not trying was safer than trying and failing. And so I didn’t try. Until I had no choice.
That’s not a productivity or attention problem; it’s an emotional regulation one.
In tech, we love a good productivity “thing”. A new task manager. A better calendar system. A smarter way to prioritize the backlog.
The belief underneath all of it is the same: if I just find (or create) the right system, I’ll stop avoiding the hard things, or I’ll finally work as hard as I think I should be.
I believed this for years. And the systems never stuck — not because they were bad, but because they were solving the wrong problem.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my ADHD: It’s an emotional regulation disorder at its core. The difficulties with attention and focus that define the diagnosis are real — but for me, they are byproducts. The root is emotion.
Executive function is the brain’s system for managing tasks, decisions, and behavior. It includes things like planning, working memory, impulse control — and emotional regulation. In ADHD, executive function is impaired across the board. But emotional regulation is the piece that gets overlooked when we’re trying to figure out what’s wrong. And I’d argue it drives the most impact.
I still have a Fulbright archive sitting untouched. Hundreds of hours of Thai Kickboxing music I recorded across Thailand — one of the largest collections of its kind. I was supposed to submit it to a university music library. I never did. That was sixteen years ago, and I still carry it.
It’s not that I don’t know how. It’s not that I’ve forgotten. It’s that every time I think about reaching out to a school or archive, the fear shows up — of being judged, of being told it’s too late, of finding out the thing I was most proud of doesn’t matter anymore. And it’s easier to keep carrying the shame quietly than to risk the rejection out loud.
That’s emotional dysregulation getting in the way of something I’m fully capable of doing. The cost of avoidance isn’t zero. It accumulates.
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is common in ADHD — it’s an intense emotional response to perceived failure or rejection, often disproportionate to what actually happened.
For me, the “hyperactivity” in ADHD has always been emotional. My feelings don’t stay proportional. They spike, they shift, they respond to how well I slept, what I ate, and what someone’s tone was in a Slack message. And when they spike in the direction of fear or shame, avoidance becomes the path of least resistance.
Emotional regulation is shaped by both neurochemistry — the biology we were born with or have shaped — and biography — the stories we learned about our feelings growing up. For me, success was the condition for love. Failure wasn’t just uncomfortable; it was a threat to belonging. That lesson didn’t disappear when I grew up. It just started showing up in SQL queries and Fulbright archives.
The reason productivity strategies so often fail neurodivergent people isn’t that we don’t understand the strategy. It’s that we’re trying to execute it while emotionally dysregulated. You can’t out-system fear. You have to move through it.
The goal isn’t to eliminate emotional dysregulation. It won’t go away. Medication helps. Therapy helps. But the feelings will still show up — the fear, the RSD, the avoidance instinct. The goal is to get better at recognizing them before they’re running the show.
Build a self-reflection practice. Find what creates space between the feeling and the reaction. For me it’s running and writing this newsletter. For you it might be journaling, meditation, or a walk without your phone. Whatever slows the loop down enough to ask: is what I’m feeling proportional to what’s actually in front of me?
Use the above/below the line framework. Brené Brown (taken from her book Strong Ground) describes it this way: when you’re below the line, you’re operating from fear and insecurity. Decisions made from below the line tend to protect the ego rather than move things forward. When you’re above the line, you can see clearly — you’re regulated enough to respond rather than react.
In practice: when you notice you’re below the line — in a hard conversation, facing a daunting task, about to send that email you’ve been avoiding — name it. Say it out loud if you need to: I’m not in a good place to handle this right now. Then change the condition. Take a walk. Give yourself twenty minutes. Ask to revisit the conversation later. You’re not running away. You’re regulating so you can actually show up.
The things we avoid don’t disappear. They sit in the background, quietly drawing on our emotional capacity — the Fulbright archive, the SQL query, the conversation we’ve been putting off for weeks. We think we’ve set them aside. We haven’t. They’re just running in the background, taking up space.
I don’t care how cool a second brain or productivity app you built is. If you haven’t confronted the underlying emotion, it will fail.
That’s what I wish I’d known sooner — not a better system, but a better understanding of what was driving the avoidance in the first place. Once I understood that, I could start working with my fear instead of hiding from it.
It’s still hard. But fifteen minutes of hard is better than sixteen years of carrying it.
Get coaching that helps you find what works for your unique brain and situation.
Processing grief in a world of layoffs and bad news.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.