How to Handle Low Capacity Days
One of the ideas I’ve been playing with a lot recently is that I don’t need to always push myself when I have the energy to do so. For many of us with ADHD we find that we have days when we’re off and not getting much done and then we have those days where our brain is clicking and it feels like we can do anything. It’s on days like those that I tend to really push because it feels like if I give up that momentum I’m wasting it because I don’t know when I’m going to have a day like that again. And I certainly know that tomorrow isn’t going to be like that, because I know I tend to crash after having those super productive days.
The idea I’ve been playing with is that that crash isn’t inevitable. And when I lay it out like this it feels fairly clear that when I crash it’s really because I was pushing too hard the day before.
There is a concept in sports training called overtraining - when we watch sports movies we see the protagonist training night and day. They never give up they push through any adversity. That they are always pushing harder and harder. But in reality that isn’t a good method of training. In reality that leads to overtraining, which is a syndrome that occurs when you don’t give yourself the adequate amount of time to recover. It can create fatigue, lower performance levels, and increase your chance for injury. In short, it hurts your progress.
There are two stages of overtraining - the first is overreaching, this is where you’re experiencing muscle soreness beyond what you’d typically expect between workouts. It typically happens when you’ve been training hard for too many days in a row and can lead you to feel run down. Overtraining happens when you are experiencing the effects of overreaching but keep pushing.
And the importance of the difference is that with overreaching you can easily come back from that with a little rest and recovery. However, with overtraining, you can hit points where it will take you weeks or months off time off from training to recover.
To me, this sounds a lot like a physical version of burnout.
And this is an idea I’ve been playing with in conjunction with capacity - because I feel like this all plays out the same way whether we’re pushing ourselves physically or we’re pushing ourselves mentally. While there is talk about the mind-body connection, that’s overcomplicating the matter, because it’s just one system.
With this in mind we have to think how hard we’re pushing ourselves day-to-day. With ADHD we often have to work harder to achieve the same results as neurotypicals, but we then don’t turn around and then give ourselves a proportional amount of rest to how much harder we worked. In fact, because it was harder for us we often choose to go the path of believing that we deserve less rest.
Because I had to psyche myself up and I procrastinated on the task I don’t deserve to get as much credit. I mean I wasn’t doing any work when I was procrastinating, that’s the same as resting right? Or at least, it feels like those of us around us are going to judge it to be that way.
While we are procrastinating we are not getting genuine rest - I know it can seem like it, I mean often we’re not doing anything when we’re procrastinating... except most of the time when I’m procrastinating on doing something else what I’m actually doing is anything but the thing I’m supposed to be doing. Even if I’m just scrolling on my phone I’m not creating real downtime for myself. More often than not, I find the procrastination more stressful than actually doing the task - it’s just that sometimes I can’t get myself to do the thing that I’m supposed to be doing.
I want to be clear here that rest is important but it’s also important that we actually internalize this point - and I understand this is not easy with ADHD. We want to be doing things. Rest is about giving into the rest. About being okay with letting ourselves recover.
So let’s try and let go of this idea that we can’t take a break because we were procrastinating, unfortunately, that procrastination didn’t count for downtime either, and regardless of how productive we’ve been throughout the day we all still need downtime.
And we need to focus on this need for downtime because this is exactly what’s leading to our low capacity. We’re overtraining our brains because we’re not giving ourselves even close to enough time for recovery.
Part of what’s been going on for everyone is what I talked about during the beginning - we’re all experiencing pandemic fatigue and our surge capacity is wearing thin. As my friend from the ADHD Essentials Podcast, Brendan Mahan, would say, we’re all going through a global trauma event right now. And that fatigue we’re feeling from it isn’t something that we can just turn off because it’s inconvenient.
And here’s where I want to dive into a little how capacity differs from energy because often it can feel like we’re talking about the same thing.
This a deep-seated mental fatigue that feels like it is constantly draining me. And it's lowering the bar of how high my energy can go. Because the reason I think it's important to differentiate low energy from low capacity is that capacity is more like my ceiling - low energy is where I might be at some days, but with low capacity it's about how much I can take on. Even on days where I'm feeling more energetic, I'm still finding myself able to only accomplish so much - especially in regards to borrowing from tomorrow's capacity.
I've kind of been thinking of like energy tanks from a video game - there is only so much energy I can fill into those tanks and I drain the tank over the course of the day and refill it doing various activities. But let's also imagine that it's mid-way through the game and to give some added challenge the developer hit me with a magic spell that limits how much I can fill those tanks up. Or maybe how much energy get's stored into those tanks when I do something recharging.
But really perhaps what is going on is that I used to have a reserve tank - just an extra stash of energy that I could tap into whenever I was getting low. It wasn't what I normally ran on, but it was there and it helped out when I needed it.
This is perhaps a good way to think about our surge capacity. When the pandemic started we could tap in and use that extra capacity. But now things have stretched on longer and longer and when I try and tap my reserve tank I keep finding that it's empty. That despite taking time off and trying to recharge I haven't been able to refill that tank - at least as much as I’d like to.
What’s really happening is that I’m draining my reserves far more than I believe I am. Because while I am doing many of the things to help restore myself, the truth is that, again, we’re going through a global trauma event. There are constantly things draining my tanks and there are absolutely things that are doing to accelerate that drain. While it’s okay to take a break to check social media and scroll for a little bit we want to try and avoid just sitting there doom scrolling and reading bad news.
We also need to realize that our mental fatigue is not just mental. It turns out it's also physical, emotional, and psychological. All of our various types of energy are connected and when we’re low on one it affects us everywhere else.
When I’m feeling that mental fatigue it isn’t just hard for me to do mental tasks like writing. It’s hard for me to make any decision. It’s hard for me to get off the couch, it’s hard for me to process my emotions and it’s hard for me to even care about my goals. To make it worse it feels like this feeling is never going to change - it feels like this is the new me forever. Of course that isn’t true. I can say that pretty easily right now because I’m not feeling that way, but yesterday? I couldn’t imagine feeling like I did today. This is part of the Hot Cold Empathy gap and for more on that go checkout Episode 83: Why We Make Decisions We Don't Understand - but the premise is that the hot-cold empathy gap is when we fail to predict how our emotions are going to affect our decision-making when we’re in a different emotional state.
This is important for our low capacity days because when we’re at low capacity it feels like we’re just in our new normal. We’re not tired, we’re beat and it’s never going to be any different. Fortunately this isn’t true. Our energy levels are going to fluctuate and even on those bad days there are still things we can do to help make us feel better.
Dealing with a low capacity day starts off with accepting the fact that we’re going to be having low capacity days - seems obvious but for a long time my go-to was denying how I was feeling and trying to just push through. This led to a lot of guilt as most of the time that didn’t work well and I’d find myself constantly procrastinating throughout the day, trying to get work done but unable to actually focus on anything.
As we established in the last section, all that procrastinating isn’t helping refuel me either. So instead what I often try to do now - and I say try because this is still hard to always get myself to do, is focus on doing things that are going to get me ready for the next day.
We have to accept reality, however, how we frame our mentality around that can help us cope as well. We don’t have to write off our entire day because we’re at low capacity, but it does mean we should whittle our tasks down for the day to just the most important things that need to get done that day. This also means considering what we’re going to be capable of that day. This is about meeting ourselves where we’re at and then doing our best.
We can embrace the idea of “both-and” thinking. With ADHD we can often find ourselves slipping into binary thinking where things either are or are not. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We can say things like, I’m having a low capacity day and I’m going to do the dishes. Or perhaps I am on top of things and I also am the new hot mess, a spicy disaster.
The point being that we don’t have to look at our low capacity days as a complete waste - and we really shouldn’t view them as a waste at all. Often the low capacity comes from us pushing too hard for too long, so these are just days to help us get back on track. We can use that “both-and” thinking to say, “I’m having a low capacity day and I deserve a break.”
And so we have this idea that we don’t always have to push harder, we can also start doing the things that are going to make us feel better tomorrow.
One of the most overlooked ways of recharging is doing creative tasks - now I want to be clear here, I’m not talking about creative work, what I’m talking about is just fun creative stuff that we are doing for the enjoyment of doing it. Most of the writing I do has a creative element to it, but I’m also doing it for work and that doesn’t create the same kind of recharging energy.
What we’re looking for here is something that’ll stretch our brains but won’t stress us out. Think things like drawing, coloring, playing with Legos, writing a poem, making music, or maybe even doing a puzzle. I also like to try and get away from screens for this kind of creativity - not because the screens are bad per say, but more that when I’m on that screen I’m more likely to be drawn into some other app I see instead of what I intended to do.
And these are just some examples of a few ideas if none of them sound good to you, don’t do them, I’m sure you can think of something that a better fit for you. The only criteria really are that it should be something that gets you to be creative or at least works your brain and that it isn’t work-related.
I think this is also a great place to use some accountability. I know, accountability for something fun? Oh absolutely. We’ve already established that we’re not doing enough of these things so we need some sort of reinforcement system. Maybe you’re just texting your bestie a doodle that you did on a post-it note every morning. We don’t have to a big production for the accountability but I think having accountability for self-care tasks can be even more important than accountability for work because I’m way more like to try and put off self-care.
And diving a little more into self-care let’s think of some other ways we can work on recharging ourselves. Social time is a vital for our mental health and a lot of us haven’t been getting nearly enough of it recently. While it can absolutely be harder with pandemic fears you could think of something like going for a walk with a friend outside. Tons of benefits there, light exercise, being outside, getting some sunlight (hopefully) and of course that social time. All things that are easier to handle when you’re feeling at low capacity.
And I’m just going to quickly run through a few more ideas here - meditation, stretching, taking a shower, reading, 5 minutes of cleaning, planning, eating a healthy meal, watch an inspiring video, listen to a podcast, get a massage, do some journaling, exercise, get out into nature, take a break from your screens, have a warm drink - or a cold one.
There are a lot of things that we can do and the point here is to try and do something that lets us focus on ourselves for a little bit.
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We can hit low capacity when we’ve been pushing too hard for too long. Our capacity differs from our energy levels in that we can think of it as the total amount of energy we have for a day. Having a low capacity means that we’re not recovering and that when we do recover we’re only coming back to a low base rate of energy.
When we’re at low capacity we need to slow down and focus on the things we can do - this means prioritizing and thinking about ways we can apply “both-and” thinking where we accept reality and how we can function within it.
A great way to help build back up our capacity is creating some accountability around our self-care tasks so that we actually follow through with those intentions.
