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Post by Gina on Mar 25, 2021 17:58:38 GMT
Hey,
So I have ADHD, I’m 25 and was only diagnosed around a year and a half ago. I’ve realised that I reaaaally struggle with rejection sensitivity disorder and I’m seeing it pop up in a lot of ways. Most recently it has affected my ability to write songs. I’m in a band with my boyfriend, and if any idea of mine is shafted it chips away more and more to the point where I actively avoid a writing session, even though I know I can do it.
Has anyone got any tips on how to get yourself in the mood to be creative?? Struggling to find motivation/inspiration to even do the things I enjoy is really getting me down!
Thanks
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Post by cassandro on Mar 27, 2021 17:38:28 GMT
Hey, So I have ADHD, I’m 25 and was only diagnosed around a year and a half ago. I’ve realised that I reaaaally struggle with rejection sensitivity disorder and I’m seeing it pop up in a lot of ways. Most recently it has affected my ability to write songs. I’m in a band with my boyfriend, and if any idea of mine is shafted it chips away more and more to the point where I actively avoid a writing session, even though I know I can do it. Has anyone got any tips on how to get yourself in the mood to be creative?? Struggling to find motivation/inspiration to even do the things I enjoy is really getting me down! Thanks Hello Gina. I've not really looked into rejection sensitivity but I'd say it's pretty common in general, and also in atypical depression. Most people produce their best when they get a ratio of about five compliments or rewards for every criticism. I've had times when I feel I'm getting as many setbacks and adverse experiences as successes and it's really not surprising it was hard to keep going with things. I'm a lot older now, but when I was your age I had loads of ideas for fiction I wanted to write, a SF novel and short stories. But could I get any of these down on paper? Hardly ever. One thing that made it worse was being a bit perfectionist (which might come from my other diagnosis of autism) and struggling over every sentence. So I was pretty self-critical and discouraging to myself. You need some internal critic or you've no idea if what you produce is good, but it needs to be balanced. If you're having trouble writing, lower your standards; try something for fun rather than worrying how good it is. Somewhere there's a TED talk about creativity saying every project goes through stages of: this will be awesome, this is harder than I thought, this is terrible, (I am terrible), this is OK, this is awesome. The important thing turns out to be to avoid the 'I am terrible' trap and go on to produce _something_, anything. One thing I tried was trying to work alongside someone else, say if they were being creative in a studio. I found this only works if they're an introvert, otherwise you end up chatting and getting distracted. But I recognised even before my ADHD diagnosis that some external discipline would help. I find ideas are easy to come by, but coming back to them and feeling inspired is a harder. I do feel a bit better if I write some ideas down very quickly in rough notes, as if that's making way for more ideas. Sometimes things will gestate for a bit and unexpectedly bear fruit. To get a bit inspired, one thing that might help is to immerse yourself in related work, browsing through ancient verse or taking yourself on a trip to a gallery. Think about the ideas, criticise the work and see how you could do it even better, or at least differently. And if you have lots of ideas but don't know how to fit them together (plotting is hard) a long walk can help. Julian Cope used to compose songs while on his bicycle then sing them down the phone line to his answering machine. Then you come to the motivation, initiation, progress and completion side of things. Some of this is habit. Writers give all kinds of varied advice depending on how they work themselves but many say the secret of writing is just to write. 'Morning pages' is a habit of writing a certain number of words a day (say 500) regardless of quality, thus taming the internal critic and developing the habit over a course of weeks. And if you're stuck on a project and finding it hard to face, just promising to yourself that you will do ten minutes in the day to make progress can mean avoiding being completely blocked. And the 'Pomodoro' technique is used by a lot of people: 20-25 minutes of work and then 5-10 minutes of reflection or doing something different. I use two free apps: Loop habit tracker to remind me of daily habits, and a visual timer called 'I'm on it!' that can ping every few minutes during a 'pomodoro' to remind me I'm on a task. Have you come across Jess's 'Motivation Bridge'? I've only just heard about it: One of the things suggested is to make the task more interesting. For some people that's using stimulating coloured pens. For me it's seeing if I can slip in some whimsical in-jokes. Then there's explaining to people around you that you want interim deadlines that make sense to help 'bridge' the gap between intention and reward from action. Hope you see this. These forums aren't that busy and have some quirks and spam at the moment (first posts seem to disappear if not approved by the admin).
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Post by Deleted on Apr 5, 2021 19:03:35 GMT
Your immediate environment needs to be either extremely calming or extremely novel, I think.
Try working in the bathroom, in the back of your car, in your shed, etc.
I quite often have breakthroughs when I leave the 'work area' and I'm just googling the same problem on my phone whilst on the bog.
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