Taking Responsibility for Your Own Life With ADHD

Most texts on this subject begin with the same sentence: everything is in your hands.

That sentence is wrong. Not everyone holds the same cards. Some start in debt, some start ill, some are thirty and still learning to look after themselves because nobody looked after them as a child. Some things really are unfair and really are not your fault. Let's write that down on the side, because the rest of this article is built on that acceptance.

Once it is written down, the sentence that remains is this: something not being your fault does not mean that fixing it is not your job.

I first wrote this sentence to myself in the diary entry titled the mediocrity of responsibility and blame. There I described the feeling. Here I want to describe the mechanism: what responsibility is exactly, what it is not, where it separates out in ADHD, and what you do with it on Monday morning.

Responsibility is not a feeling, it is a position

The most common misunderstanding starts here. People measure taking responsibility by how bad they feel. The more pangs of conscience, the more responsibility.

But most people with ADHD already have plenty of pangs of conscience. There is no need to teach you to produce more. You are already someone who, once in bed, goes through the day's list from start to finish, counts what you did not do one by one, and remembers a sentence from three months ago and blushes. That feeling is not called responsibility. Its name is shame, and the only thing it does is keep you where you are.

Responsibility is not a feeling. It is a position. It is the answer to the question "where in this matter can I reach out my hand?"

There is a simple way to test the difference: look at what is left after a moment in which you thought you were taking responsibility. A sentence, or an action? "I am such a bad friend" is a sentence. "I will write to her tomorrow at noon" is an action. However many times you repeat the first, the message does not get sent.

The place where this distinction shows most clearly is work. Think of a late delivery. Waking at night thinking about that job, starting the morning with the same dread, apologizing inside your head all day. Someone watching from the outside would say "what a developed sense of responsibility." Yet as long as one honest sentence is not said to the other side, the feeling has hit the ceiling and the responsibility has stayed at zero.

The measure of responsibility is not how bad you feel. It is what the other person learns from you.

Locus of control: how much is in my hands

Psychology has an old and solid name for this matter. Rotter (1966) described, with the concept of "locus of control," whether people attribute what happens to them to their own behavior or to luck, fate and other people. An internal locus of control is the expectation that the outcome depends on your own action. An external locus of control is the expectation that the outcome is determined by forces outside yourself.

The point to notice here is this: it is not a character trait, it is an expectation. And expectations are formed by experience.

Now think about the experience of someone with ADHD. For years you made an effort and the effort did not turn into results. You applied the same method as everyone else, in the same way, and it worked for them and not for you. You tried getting up early, you bought a planner, you made lists, and all of it lasted two weeks. What does an experience like that teach a person? It teaches something very clear: the link between what I do and what happens to me is weak.

That learning is logical. It is not fraud, and it is not laziness. It is a conclusion drawn from data.

And it leaves a trace in the literature. In a study of 180 adults by Rucklidge and colleagues (2007), participants with ADHD reported a more external locus of control, lower self-esteem and a more maladaptive attributional style than the comparison group. Depression and anxiety were also higher in the same group.

So it is not "people with ADHD run from responsibility." It is "people with ADHD grow up with a data set in which effort does not pay back for years, and they draw a reasonable conclusion from that data." That the conclusion costs you dearly today does not mean you were wrong to draw it.

A warning is needed here too, otherwise the idea of locus of control turns into a new stick. Too much turning inward is not healthy either. Writing an outcome that is not in your hands onto your own account produces guilt, not a sense of control. A delayed plane, an economic crisis, someone else's bad decision are not in your area of control, and taking them in does not make you stronger, only more tired. What works is not turning your locus of control entirely inward but drawing its border correctly.

I told how this is built in detail in the article on the "not living up to your potential" label. Rereading this history after the diagnosis is also a job in itself, and I gave it a separate place in the article on grief after diagnosis.

ADHD explains, it does not excuse

Now let's get to the hard part of the matter, because the next step after the paragraph above is a trap.

I got my diagnosis at 23. That day a lot fell into place. Time blindness had a name, not being able to start had a name, twenty-three years of disorder had an explanation. The explanation was healing.

But an explanation, repeated, can turn into a shield. "I have ADHD, these things happen" is relieving the first time it is said. The second time it makes things easier. By the third you have stopped thinking, and that sentence has become a blanket that covers everything untried.

The way I found useful to draw the line is this: ADHD tells you why the work is so hard. It does not send the bill for the work not being done to third parties.

Let me make it concrete. You kept a friend waiting for forty minutes.

"There was traffic, and anyway I have ADHD" is a shield. The other person's forty minutes are still lost, and you are withdrawing from being the one who answers for that loss.

"I'm late, sorry, my time estimation really does run faulty. From now on I will leave half an hour before the times I give you" is a sentence of responsibility. ADHD's name appears in it, and the bill still is not sent to anyone.

The second is also the sentence of a person with ADHD. The difference is not that it denies the obstacle, but that it owns the work behind the obstacle.

This line also sits on a technical footing. Not being able to start a task is not a moral weakness; as I explained in the article on task paralysis, it is a real blockage tied to difficulty with initiation. Telling apart whether the thing you are putting off is something you are actually avoiding is a separate skill, and the article on procrastination or avoidance is exactly about that. Taking responsibility does not mean ignoring these blockages. It means naming them and placing the next move beside them.

Blaming yourself is not responsibility

At the other end of locus of control there is another trap, and the reader with ADHD usually stands closer to this end.

Throwing everything onto yourself looks like responsibility. "Am I stupid," "I'm the only one who can't manage," "I've reached thirty and still" sound very responsible. Yet these are another bench in the same courtroom. The hearing goes on, only now you are the one sitting in the dock. Reaching a verdict changes nothing.

We do not have to guess why this does not work; it has been measured. In Sirois's (2014) study with four samples, those with a high tendency to procrastinate had low self-compassion and high stress, and self-compassion mediated the relationship between procrastination and stress. In other words, harshness toward yourself is not the cure for procrastination; it is part of the stress that fuels procrastination.

Self-compassion, as Neff (2003) describes it, does not mean lowering the standard either. The only thing it changes is how many days it takes you to get back to work after a mistake. I opened up this whole subject in the article on shame and self-compassion.

I can squeeze the practical distinction into this: blaming yourself puts you at the center of the event but keeps you offstage. Responsibility brings you onto the stage, without needing to put you at the center.

The voice of self-blame is loud. The voice of responsibility is usually about this loud: okay, this is how it happened, what do I do now.

The unit of responsibility: the percentage in your hands

When something goes wrong, the question to ask is not "whose fault is it." It is "what percentage of this is in my hands."

Sometimes the answer is five percent. Five percent is still something, and it is the only thing there is to work on.

If you were deceived, the fault is the deceiver's. Not sitting at the same table again is your five percent.

If the job you were given really is a two-person job, the weight of the load is real. Saying "this is a two-person job, in the third quarter I need to hand off this part" is your five percent.

If the medication is not working, biology is not your choice. Making the appointment and bringing a concrete observation to your doctor is your five percent.

I do the cooking at home, so the most everyday example comes from there. Walking into the kitchen at six in the evening and seeing that nothing is ready feels like a moment of failure. There are two ways of looking for a culprit: either the work piled up over the day, or the person being someone who "can never plan at all." Both can be true, and neither is any use at six in the evening. The five percent in hand is this much: looking in the fridge once in the morning. One move, thirty seconds. It does not change the whole evening, but it makes the evening salvageable.

The nice thing about this approach is that it does not ask you to take on everything. On the contrary, it narrows the area you take on. You are able to let go of ninety-five percent. Letting go is also a kind of responsibility, because every hour you spend struggling with something not in your hands is an hour stolen from what is.

In Deci and Ryan's (2000) self-determination theory, autonomy is defined as starting your own behavior from a source you yourself endorse, and in that theory autonomy, together with competence and relatedness, is one of the load-bearing pillars of motivation. Seeing your own share does exactly that: it makes you the source of your own action. Motivation does not arrive as a feeling; it arrives as a by-product of a position.

What you can try today

What follows is not a life-changing program. If you do even one of them this week, that is enough.

Translate one sentence. Take the harshest sentence you said to yourself today and pull an action out of it. Instead of "my system is a disgrace," "on Tuesday evening I will empty the kitchen cupboard for thirty minutes." The first is a verdict, the second is an appointment. Nothing can be built on a verdict.

Add an "and" after the blame sentence. Do not deny the blame, just do not leave the sentence half finished. If "the team didn't inform me in time" is true, let it stay, and add after it: "and in the next project I will ask for the delivery date every week." This exercise cuts the link between being right and being helpless.

Describe the next move physically. In ADHD, "I'll exercise" is not an intention, it is a wish. What Gollwitzer (1999) called an implementation intention takes this form: "if X happens, then I will do Y." The meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006), which combined 94 independent tests, reports that plans made in this form produced a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals. I wrote out step by step how to set one up in the article on how to build an if-then plan.

Openly own one thing and openly let one thing go. Two lines on a piece of paper: "this is my job" and "this is not my job." Writing the second line is as important as the first. When I did this, I saw that what I wrote on the second line was most often managing someone else's feelings.

Listen to yourself once, without being angry at yourself. When something doesn't work, ask not "why couldn't I manage it" first, but "what was there that day, what is missing today." The answers will be boring: I was sleep deprived, my phone was beside me, the medication had worn off, I started on an empty stomach. Boring answers are good answers, because all of them are things that can be changed. Verdicts about character cannot be changed, conditions can.

Write the apology sentence today for something you were late with. No defense, no explanation, no excuse. One sentence and a date behind it. This is the cheapest and fastest-returning form of responsibility.

This has a limit

The article up to here was written to get you moving. Now let me write its limit too, otherwise this text will be like the others sitting on the shelf.

Sometimes none of it works. Sometimes you do everything right and it still doesn't work. I wrote about this in the diary entry titled sometimes it doesn't work, and my reason for repeating it here is this: the ethics of responsibility can easily turn into a form of blame. "If you had taken responsibility it would have worked" is the adult disguise of "you are not living up to your potential."

Taking responsibility does not guarantee the outcome. It only keeps you in the game.

The second limit: if the reason you cannot do it is a collapse, the language of responsibility does not work. Telling someone who is depressed to "look at your five percent" is like giving walking advice to someone with a broken leg. What needs to be done in that situation is different, and it is done with a specialist.

The third: taking responsibility is not a polite way of putting on you an injustice done to you. If you are experiencing violence, being exploited, or being systematically obstructed, nothing here is telling you to "look at yourself." The five percent in your hands there is often the leaving itself.

Let me say this honestly too

For me this work is not finished. Hearings still go on inside my head, I still want to be proven right, and on some evenings it is still very tempting to dump the day on someone.

What has changed is the speed. I used to circle around an injustice for weeks. Now it usually takes a day, and in the end I come to the same boring question: so where am I in this.

That question is not heroism. It just works. And after a while you notice that the real reward of responsibility is not virtue: it is your life becoming yours again. The person who blames may be right, but has to wait. The person who takes responsibility cannot undo the injustice, but can at least do something.

Starting with five percent is enough. Nowhere else is there to start from anyway.