Today I want to focus on a more complex topic, but it has been on my mind ever since I have been in ADHD diagnostics, and it is, by the way, an important topic for my work, although alcohol is more an addendum less related to my work.

First off: What is flow. Simply and shortly put, it is a state of mind introduced by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975. Flow is described as a state of mind in which you are so fully immersed, that you forget about everything around you and about the time passing, letting you pull a lot of positive energy from the activity you are performing. The idea is, that it is a challenge just difficult enough to motivate you, but it mustn’t be too boring.

Hyperfocus is the capability of a person with ADHD to immerse into an activity or a receptive action that the person can spend mere hours on one single activity and drawing any possible positive energy form it without noticing time passing. It is hard for an ADHD person to end the activity he/she is immersed in.

Procrastination is when you postpone urgent activities because they feel unrewarding, uninteresting or just too hard or overwhelming to overcome the necessary barriers to start work on what you should do, instead you start doing something different and claim it is more important than the task at hand.

Alcohol then, well, you know what it does…

How to put all this together?

Well, when I drank, I did so to suppress anxiety, feelings of being overwhelmed, ineptitude or shame. Drinking in itself will not get me into one of the states mentioned above, but it fuels the possibility to all of them coming together.

First off, drinking to suppress the bad feelings is not so far from procrastination. It gave me an excuse to be too tired not in the correct situation to deal with an important task, so I would (logical in that moment of being under alcohol influence) choose an activity that seemingly was important to me that I had the feeling had to be done (to give me the feeling to do something meaningful while drinking, which, of course was just procrastination). So there you have it: Alcohol induced the feeling of having the need to do something else.

I, for myself, found out that drinking alcohol suggests to you that you can do very meaningful things on paper or in your mind, like planning a new project or have a great idea what you could do… Only that in the end I never finished or even started one of the projects I laid out in detail in my head while being drunk. Just you wait, I thought, once I stop drinking, tomorrow for sure, I will pull this through and it’s gonna be awesome!

This, and other things, even doomscrolling and watching endless videos on Youtube or gaming or what-not-else, can lead you into a state of hyper focus, or something similar. Ever tried to escape a doomscrolling when you were drinking? I couldn’t stop. I would even take time to get another beer just to have an excuse to continue doomscrolling, or I doom scrolled because I needed to finish my beer. Selfreinforcing vicious circle.

If this is really flow, I am not sure. I guess there were activities I was drunk, in hyper focus (while procrastinating) and I ended up in the state of Flow.

Even if it wasn’t genuine flow, the rewarded dopamine for so interlinked activities was enough to build toxic habits and habit loops out of it.

In the end, what I took away from that, is the fact that after I finally quit drinking and dealt more and more with reframing and building new habits, Flow can be a very important and interesting tool:

I was able to reframe habits and habit loops in a way that I didn’t have cravings anymore. After the Pink Cloud left, I found out that rewarding is nothing you necessarily need a quick-fix substance for. Building habits that are meaningful and I can focus on (maybe in hyper focus, maybe not) give me the possibility to get into Flow and thus generate rewards that make me want to raise my challenge to try the activity again. This way, I will very probably be able to run my first half-marathon next year.

For other activities: If there is an activity or goal that makes me want procrastinate, I have found and will find a way to motivate myself in small steps to lower the boundaries and to avoid the feeling of overwhelming or ineptitude that leads to procrastination. And if it’s easy and fun enough, I will be able to focus deeply on that activity and then I can get into flow. All without procrastination or alcohol.

Nuff said.

Until next time: Keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.

PS: If that argumentation doesn’t make any sense to you, I’m sorry. It does for me. That gives me a good feeling and I will follow this chain of my logic.