I am a lazy failure who can’t do anything. Basic shit I consistently just… don’t do. Its embarrassing. I don’t even want to list all of it. I have hobby stuff I’ve wanted to for years that I’ve just never gotten set up. Homework? More like I’m not fucking doing that. I’ve been wanting to take steps for months to get myself on hormones and get clothes but have I done them? No? Of course not, because I’m fucking lazy. All I do is rot. Its been this way for a long time, I can’t even remember when the last time I didn’t struggle with this. And it doesn’t feel like its getting better. If it really is my autism I’m not sure how it ever can get better.
Are you me? I can sit in front of a computer for hours looking at the most braindead/useless slop, yet I can’t drag my ass to do things I actually WANT to do (like write a novel), or sometimes, even the things I NEED to do (like brush my teeth). ADHD meds work to a certain degree, but even then there’s still a bit of a block between wanting to do something and then following through with it. It sucks. I wish I didn’t struggle with it so much but that’s the brain I’m stuck with.
literally me rn rotting away in bed not arsed enough to do nightly routine stuff, get out of my head
Also me. It’s bad.
Stop being me. It’s like, copyright or something.
(But
it’s straight-up tough all the time. I wish you the best of luck, comrade)Its possible
If that’s the case, good to know ADHD meds do something.The main issue of course is that at least here, getting an adult ADHD diagnosis is a puzzle specifically designed to filter out people with ADHD and that also costs $7000 in a country with a public health system.
If you decide to look into it, just be aware that it may take a while to find the right meds and dosage that works for you. I was so excited to finally have an end to this problem after hearing so many people talk about how miraculous meds were for them, but it took me a few months of trial and error to find the right dosage (something that I think I’m getting closer to but we’re still figuring it out). They do help but don’t get your hopes up expecting miracles (like me, stupidly).
Read Unlearning Shame by Dr. Devon Price
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D671BD3535F0C10BFEFF889C2336719C
Thank you for the recommendation. I’ll try and take a look. Unlearning this would be nice
That sounds like some sort of attention deficit disorder. You’re not lazy. Very few people, if any, are. Treating this like a moral failing is not only addressing the wrong issue and doing nothing to help, it is also making things worse.
You should seriously look into your options for getting tested for ADHD and having medication. It is not a miracle cure but it is still a huge improvement. For me, it was like 90% of the noise that made thinking and acting so God damn hard was lifted.
Best of luck to you. I hope you get better.
Thank you. I’m actually very surprised how many people think this is me having adhd. Unfortunately meds will probably be hard for me to get, but I’ll look into it.
If you find it enjoyable to put off tasks then you are lazy. Most people who think they are lazy are actually dealing with stuff like depression, executive dysfunction, and conditions that affect mood or energy levels (medication side effects, POTS, chronic fatigue, sleep apnoea etc.)
It sounds like you have a lot of tasks that you genuinely want to do but you don’t have the resources to tackle them, and it sounds like you aren’t relishing the opportunity to put them off. That doesn’t sound like laziness imo.
If you find it enjoyable to put off tasks then you are lazy.
I think I’m burned out after taking on too many tasks, so to just cancel things and gently close my eyes is enjoyable in some sense.
I feel like there is a certain sort of sociopathic laziness where you just kinda shirk work because you know the people around you will pick up after you, like never taking out the bin despite having the capacity to do so, but that’s pretty rare compared to the swathe of other neurodivergent people or burned out people. It’s also hard to tell from the outside. The existence of the former is used to police the latter (and obviously the ruling classes have always been motivated to moralise a failure to be productive).
(I’ve seen enough abusive relationships where some guy apparently has the energy to break their partner’s arm, but apparently no energy to do the dishes or prep dinner) (Why have I seen so many of these?)
I think I’m burned out after taking on too many tasks, so to just cancel things and gently close my eyes is enjoyable in some sense.
For me I’d want to make a distinction between a feeling of relief or respite, which you appreciate, and a feeling of enjoyment.
If your “laziness” gives you that sense of relief, sort of like when you’ve been wearing uncomfortable shoes all day and you finally get home and take them off, then imo that’s qualitatively different from actively looking forward to avoiding doing your tasks and finding it gratifying to not do them.
ADHD?
I’m not sure. There are some signs, idk. My dad has it but he acts differently? I’ve thought about looking more into it but it feels like an excuse…
I definitely have autism though.
Here is a way to rethink the word lazy:
Lazy is if you can enjoy inaction: It is Sunday, I wanted to clean up my basement and work out. The sun is shining and a friend wants to hang out by the lake. I agree and we spent half the day loafing around, drinking beer by the lake. I was lazy and that’s alright because I had a good day. Maybe I feel a mild sense of guilt but so what. I know I will get around to it another day and no real harm was done.
Lazy is not: I want to get up but can’t. I want to clean my room, but don’t know where to start so I don’t. I want to do my work but can’t. I want to do things for myself that I know will be good for me, but yet I still have only moved from bed to couch and back. For days, weeks, months. Years?
If your chronic inaction creates suffering and regret, you are not lazy. Your brain fails at providing you with a baseline of motivation, often stemming from both a chemical imbalance and long term acquired behavioural patterns.
ADHD is a very typical reason, depression another one. Sometimes one masks the other and autism correlates so strongly with ADHD, that people have coined the term AuDHD.
Please be kind to yourself and if you can, seek help from a psychiatrist or other mental health provider.
If your chronic inaction creates suffering and regret, you are not lazy.
Thank you
So much suffering and regret.I will look into adhd. I’ll try to be kind to myself, it is difficult.
Edit: also this forum isn’t the worst place to start. User ReadFanon has written great posts and comments about ADHD and AuDHD, which I found very helpful.
Seconded! I have learned so much about AuDHD from ReadFanon.
GOOD comment
I’ve seen some different takes out there that basically say that ADHD is essentially in the diagnostic criteria for autism. I’m not a doctor, but the takes I heard from were doctors.
I have ADHD and this basically sounds like myself. Not much to lose by trying a medication.
I literally cried the first several times I took my medicine, cause it opened up a whole new world for what I was capable of willing myself to do.
Sounds like depression is hitting her pretty hard too
Them? Her pronouns are there
Was pretty tired and distracted when I made the post. Didn’t notice the pronouns. Usually default to they and them when I’m not sure given the nearly thousand years of us doing that in English
Regardless if you’re tired or not the pronouns are there to stop misgendering . In this case they/them was innapropiate as she/her is stated right there.
Hence why I corrected it
As you should have, but if you can take the time to post a link you can certainly check a pronoun to correct yourself there too
I deal with the same issue and find myself in the same mindset pretty often. One thing I can say is that we aren’t lazy failures, there is a lot of nuance to the way an ADHD/Anxiety/OCD brain functions. One of them is executive dysfunction, another the subsequent act of blaming ourselves for it.
One thing I can say that helps me is taking a step back, getting a high level view of all the tasks, and looking for the lowest hanging fruit. Completing one small item gives me the feeling of accomplishment and urge to check a few more items off the list.
Hope that helps. You aren’t alone!
lots of good replies already, just wanna chime in and repeat that you’re really not lazy, you’re clearly suffering from executive dysfunction related to one or more neurodivergences. I’m autistic and have chronic MDD and I relate extremely hard to your struggle. I will say please try to be kinder to yourself, I always encourage people like us to strive towards altogether avoiding the word lazy, it is basically a form of bullying yourself inherited from NT society’s expectations. I know it can be a hard viewpoint to shake and it may not happen overnight, but looking at yourself that way is not constructive to fixing the things you wanna fix and may do more harm than good. I wish you all the best in finding healthy coping methods and accomodations for your executive dysfunction. it’s really hard. being able to talk about it is good but in future try not to put yourself down like this!!!
Thank you
can never have enough nice replies. I will try to quit the self bullying, its been a thing for too long.
What I hear is procrastination combined with self-shaming, and comrade, the first is fine and the latter is only okay in small doses, you deserve better than a heaping spoonful.
Procrastination isn’t even a bad thing unless it is impacting you negatively, like there is something you really do need to get done and something is a roadblock. Even then, don’t forget to have perspective: is the thing getting done more of an external imposition or something you do want to do? Most things are the former IMO and it isn’t your fault to not want to do them right away. In addition, it is totally fine to push things off when overwhelmed so long as they don’t put you in a much worse position. So… forgive yourself, comrade, and then divvy up your to-dos into a real priority list and how you will ensure you take care of yourself by doing the stuff that really needs doing vs. the stuff you might be 100% needlessly feeling bad about. And then forgive yourself again because it isn’t easy to work through these patterns of thought and you won’t be perfect at this next attempt either. And that’s okay because you’ll be getting better at taking care of yourself!
Re: self-shaming, please always remind yourself that this is only something in your head and it is only useful in small, friendly doses. Like, “oh I said I would read that next chapter before my next meeting, I had better do that so I don’t waste my time there”. By the time it is at the “I suck” level it really just isn’t accurate or good for you. I would also say that a lot of this is probably not a conscious decision despite how I am talking about it, so also give yourself a break there. Some things are learned patterns from our lives (e.g. someone making us feel inadequate), sometimes our brains impose this stuff on us, sometimes it is something beaten into us by bad experiences, etc. It can take real work to counter these thought patterns even if sometimes we know they are not accurate. Please feel welcome to vent here and don’t sleep on talking to a pro IRL if that is available to you. It really can help a lot.
I think there’s a disconnect here.
Imagine not having anything important to do, having a complex and interesting hobby you’ll really enjoy doing scheduled, and then not doing it and doom scrolling all day because of the work required in setup vs lying in bed.
This isn’t a problem you can solve with positive thinking and some project management software.
It really depends on what the underlying psychology and environment is like.
Organization and reminders will help in some instances because sometimes all it takes is retraining your brain to think A instead of B when you use a space or do a particular activity. Or to make something less overwhelming by breaking it down into pieces. Something along the lines of CBT.
But this can also be totally inadequate if something like depression or ADHD or something else like this is a contributing factor.
normalize procrastinating taxes
collectively procrastinate taxes until the government goes bankruptbtw I was just kidding don’t actually do this
It really is effecting me negatively, unfortunately. There’s a lot of both, things that need to get done vs things I want to do but just… haven’t. Maybe making a list will help me. Its a little overwhelming.
Thank you, I will try. The self shaming runs very deep for me, but I will try.
If you don’t mind me asking, do any of these statements resonate with you? It’s also okay to not answer or to go to PMs.
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Just plain forgetting to do things.
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A feeling of anxiety that builds up with this backlog and, ironically, prevents you from doing them, leading to a spiral.
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Not really enjoying these things you used to enjoy.
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Not really enjoying anything.
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Difficulty getting out of bed for hours at a time.
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While it can be difficult to get started, once you start a task that can be completed in one go, you will complete it in one go.
Yes, I forget often. My parents would never believe me as a child but it’s always been pretty bad imo.
Yes, absolutely
This one depends. I definitely spiral pretty badly sometimes and don’t enjoy anything, but overall I do still enjoy stuff, when I’m feeling good. I’ve dealt with depression and I don’t think that’s it, when I was depressed it was all the time.
This is a little harder to say, sometimes I’ll force myself to start but I’ll very quickly abandon it (like, usually within 2 minutes and it’s basically in the same state it was before). But if I’m actually doing it I think so?
I would say that talking to a pro isn’t a bad idea! They can help pinpoint potential causes and come up with interventions with you.
There are constellations of things that sometimes come together and in forms that aren’t always intuitive, including ADHD, anxiety, and depression. I 100% cannot provide any kind of diagnosis (talking to a pro is so much better!) but some of your answers overlap with some of those things. Like you mention, depression sometimes comes as a significant episode where you feel very down, where it is acute. But it can also feel like a lack of motivation and really just not wanting to do anything in response to anxiety. Re: enjoying things, I was asking to get a sense if anhedonia, which can also be intermittent. Brains can be very troublesome.
Also, I don’t want to overmedicalize this, as these things all depend on context. There may be no diagnosis and these are just responses to an environment that will decrease with a change in environment, for example. I just want to suggest a pro because they can help with knowing the difference.
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Yeah, I’ve always been lazy too. Never did my homework, rarely could be bothered to do my chores, one million unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, couldn’t hold down a job for long, etc. I was completely convinced I’m just a lazy, useless, unmotivated sack of dookie, until one day, when a psychiatrist introduced me to the concept of “executive dysfunction”, something I’d never heard of before. One ADHD diagnosis and years of therapy later I am in a pretty decent spot. The most important thing is that I have become much better at being kind to myself. I was never truly lazy, I’d just spent most of my life trying to fit my square-peg self into a round-hole society and become too hopelessly burned out by trying to fulfill the round-hole expectations to do pretty much anything, ever. You mentioned your dad has ADHD, and it is apparently hereditary as fuck, so I think you should at least look into it. My mom and most of her siblings have it, some of my cousins have it, and my brother has it as well.
When I start feeling bad about being lazy, I like to think about it like there’s good lazy and bad lazy. Like, my cats are good lazy. They don’t do shit. They just fuckin lay around all day and they seem to love it. In fact, I think most animals would just fuckin lay around all day if they had the opportunity. Fuckin laying around all day seems to be the peak of existence in nature. If I’m feeling bad about getting to experience the sheer bliss of fuckin laying around all day, then it’s likely I’m not being good lazy, but rather bad lazy. Bad lazy is in fact not laziness at all, but executive dysfunction in a laziness disguise.
A big thing for me was learning that I never accepted “being tired” (mentally or physically) as a valid excuse to rest, so I’d spiral into bad laziness because I was too tired to do the thing, but couldn’t rest until I’d done the thing, so I’d try to somehow escape from the impossible contradiction by scrolling instagram reels or whatever until I either forced myself to doing the thing and hating it, or gave up on doing the thing and hating myself for being bad lazy and wasting so much time. It turns out that I can, in fact, just say “I am simply too tired right now, I will do it later”. No use trying to fit my square-peg ass into a round-hole expectation, I’ll just burn myself out again. I’ll make square holes. I can just eat a snack now and make dinner at 10PM instead. People won’t die if I don’t fold the laundry today. The shop is still open for hours, there’s no rush. Yes, honey, I know I said I’ll deal with it after work, but I need a couple of hours to rest. It doesn’t make the things any easier to do per se, but just knowing that it’s okay to be tired and that I’m “allowed” to take some time to rest takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m still learning this shit, and it’s ironically a chore in itself to remind myself to let myself rest and be good lazy when I need it.
You’re not irredeemably dysfunctional! There’s probably square holes for you as well.
its a mood. I’m currently not doing the one thing I have to do to not get fired at my fake ass job, I’ve been trying to do it since friday and just utterly failing, mostly posting or watching youtube (quarantining due to covid exposure so I can’t go out and do much tbf, but I have plenty to do at home too)
I don’t think we are lazy. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. I’ve done slightly better since I started framing it in my mind less as “what’s wrong with me?” and more as “what can I do about it?”. Sometimes the answer is just “idk try and push through you’ve got no other choice” but usually taking care of myself better, trying again when I’m more caffeinated or got some sleep, or some other combination of things helps a little bit.
I’m still a hot mess (don’t look at my work performance or how messy my place is), but I mostly get by. I got hormones, for a few months earlier this year I was even reading books and shit.
I do think about trying to get tested for audhd and get medicated, but I also kinda hate psychiatrists so I haven’t yet.
As an autistic person, so am I without my ADHD and depression meds
Hey, go do one small thing for red_stapler.
I am exactly like that. I was like that in school (no homework in 9 years of school, not a single one), now grown up and with family, it is now the home tasks / hobby ideas, that I just not feel like having energy to do. And I always have an apology: looking after our son, which doesn’t make stuff more easy… But with a lot of talking with GF and writing stuff down, it keeps on working, until it starts to fail again, where my girlfriend remembers me, and stuff starts to work again…
🥳at end of year, I get checked against ADHS, hope I get to a more permanent solution
Pain is temporary
