ADHD

"The fastest way to kill motivation is to make your identity depend on the outcome. This is called " Ego Involvement" - when failing becomes failing as a person, your brain starts avoiding the whole thing. It's not because you don't care, or are lazy, but because you care too much.

To overhaul this thought process and it's resultant consequences on your life, it's important to recognize that this is what's happening, and to detach your self worth from everyday tasks/work that needs to be done.

This is part of the reason that doing for others when you can't do for yourself works.

It also sort of explains why body doubling works for some. It adds an outside pressure we care more about, and demotes the self worth aspect we place on whatever task needs to be done.

This does not mean that you'll be able to use the coping mechanisms of others to achieve your goal though, sometimes getting proper medical care and mental health care is what allows you to develope coping mechanisms that work for you.

Annoyance at others motivates me. If I put a dish in the sink? That's fine. The only person I can be mad at is me and my self worth is attached to it, but that's a problem for later me. If my husband puts a plate in the sink? I'm annoyed, both at him and at the fact that there's clutter and I'm more motivated to deal with it before it becomes a stack of plates etc.

This is a coping mechanism I have that doesn't necessarily work for other people. Maybe they don't live with someone else. Maybe they have a different dynamic and relationship with the people they do live with. But it works for us.

Another of my coping mechanisms is lists, and I have lists for everything. But I separate the lists into categories. This helps me break things down so I don't become overwhelmed.

I know for a fact that this absolutely does not work for a lot of people I have known with ADHD.

As I have gotten older I have cared less and less about what people think. Somehow this includes myself. Who am I? Why should my thoughts and feelings be any more or less valid than some random person on the street who I not only wouldn't take advice from, but also might tell where to stick it if I felt judged by them in specific circumstances?

That's not really something that you can implement necessarily using strategy. And it's probably not something that happens to everyone, certainly not to the same degree.

Sometimes for me it's as simple as recognizing that I do need help and then the problem becomes asking for help or being honest about needing it. I loathe asking for help. It feels like failure to me. In the right circumstances that's enough to motivate me to do it myself. The anxiety of having to ask for help is worse than the lost feeling of missing executive function.

I don't know how to explain how to do that for another person. I spent 40 years developing a haphazard and cobbled together house of random coping mechanisms that work for me and I'm not sure how another person would implement them.

But I will say that what you describe does sound like a disorder with your executive function and not laziness. And I will say that ADHD is not the only Neurodivergent condition that has executive dysfunction.

Because that is the case it may be beneficial to you to get a second opinion not just about the ADHD but about just having executive dysfunction and the likely cause given your medical and psychological background.