Author Brendan Mahan on Overcoming the Wall of Awful

Debbie:
Hey Brendan, welcome to the podcast.

Brendan Mahan:
Hi Debbie, how are you?

Debbie:
I’m good. I should say welcome back to the podcast. This is not your first.

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, it’s awesome to be here.

Debbie:
Yeah. It’s so good to have you back. I am really excited about your new book, which I just read. I’m gonna even just name it right off the get go. It’s called Overcoming the Wall of Awful, Why It’s Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism and Anxiety, and How to Do Them Anyway. And just on a personal level, like I really love this stuff. Like, you know, how to get things done is like I’m fascinated with it. I hack myself to death. And I just so appreciated the way that you make this so accessible for those of us who need it ourselves and for those of us who have kids who struggle with getting things done. So congratulations on the book.

Brendan Mahan:
Thank you. Yeah, and I know I already said this, but I’m deeply honored that you liked it. Like you were literally one of the people I was thinking about as I was writing it, there was a short list of like a dozen, maybe a little more, maybe a half dozen people that I was like, this person has to dig it when they read it. So

Debbie:
Wow. Okay. I’m super honored. And I totally did. I was saying before we hit record that it’s really, really accessible. And as someone who’s working on my own book right now, it’s just like it’s so hard to take, I think, sometimes these concepts and make it not just like something that we can digest, but then how do you make it so gettable that it’s like, okay. And then you can take it and run with it as a reader. So you did that. And you know, you’ve been on the show. It’s been a couple of years since you’ve been on the podcast and we touched upon this concept of the Wall of Awful. But would you just before we even get into the book, kind of talk about the evolution of this concept in your own world?

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, so the Wall of Awful is my model for the emotional impact of repeated struggle and failure as it relates to a specific task or like a flavor of task, right? So personally, I have a Wall of Awful for email. So when I encounter email, I gotta get past some stuff before I’m gonna be able to navigate those emails effectively. And other people might have walls of awful for other things, right? Like a kid in school might have a Wall of Awful for homework or for math. If they have a Wall of Awful for both of those things, then math homework is going to be especially difficult because they have to get past the homework one and then they have to get past the math one. And I’ve worked with adult clients who are like, I struggle to pay bills. I’m like, cool, how was math in middle school? And they’re like, I hated math in middle school. And I’m like, yeah, paying bills is kind of math homework, right? Like it’s sort of the same thing in some ways. So that’s what I mean when I say sort of like if it’s conceptually similar, those walls of awful from middle school math can bleed into paying bills. And it, on the one hand, it’s important to know that these things are there, that these emotions are there, right? I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’m feeling ashamed of my middle school self, I’m feeling guilty for myself now because I’m having trouble paying this bill or whatever. But also there’s a layer of it that’s like, yeah, but you still have to do it, right? You still have to get past this thing. So that’s the Wall of Awful, is that emotional barrier between us and the task that we have to deal with. And then the book is all about how to get past it. It sort of walks us through what it is and then talks about how we get past it.

Debbie:
Yeah. I mean, just that concept that when you hear the term Wall of Awful like most of us kind of like, yeah, okay. Like I hadn’t thought of it that way. But you kind of have a sense of what it’s about. And I will have a link as well. And I love that you did this in the book in the beginning. You’re like, I actually did a video about the Wall of Awful with my friend Jessica McCabe, who’s the How to ADHD YouTube phenom and an author as well. And you’re like, if you want to watch that, you skip this chapter. And I was like, I love that. It’s just that’s how that works for me. So I appreciate that. But I think that idea too of the Wall of Awful as you just described it, you know, you kind of talk about how brick by brick it gets built up with these experiences and emotions. So is it multiple walls or is it kind of one consistent wall that shows up for different tasks?

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, I think whatever works best for someone to visualize the thing is how they should visualize it, in my opinion. So if you’re listening and you’re like a parent or an adult listening and you’re like, wall, my kid’s got a Wall of Awful over homework, right? Cool, dope. That’s all you need to think about. But I’m sure there’s clinicians listening to this as well. You guys might want to break it down into smaller individual walls and think more precisely about it. Because then you can be more effective when you’re helping people, right? Cause now a clinician or a coach can go, all right, yeah, it makes sense that you have this difficulty talking, like I tell a story in the book about a client who had trouble talking to her partner about bills and money and all that stuff as they were beginning to merge their finances. That person had a math disability, grew up struggling and in poverty and also always had trouble with self-advocacy. So talking to a partner is those three different things coming together, right? And that’s how it’s useful to be able to split stuff up is like, okay, which of these is impacting us most severely? Is it all three? How do we pick it apart and figure out which one we can make a little bit easier to navigate? Which one is gonna just be hard and we’re just gonna have to do the hard thing. So it depends on what’s most useful as to whether or not you want to break it into pieces or just go, yeah, it’s a Wall of Awful for homework. And that means I know my kid’s gonna struggle with homework. And when I talk to them about it, I’m gonna just say, we got to climb the Wall of Awful for homework. Cause I’m gonna overwhelm them if I break it into, well, you sort of have a Wall of Awful for homework, but really it’s about writing essays and forming thoughts and things like that. That’s just not as helpful when you’re talking to a 12-year-old.

Debbie:
Yeah, that makes total sense. Okay. So I would love to talk about your view on the role anxiety plays in the Wall of Awful. You had a section in the book that was called A Double Edged Sword, Anxiety and Adrenaline. I found that super fascinating.

Brendan Mahan:
Anxiety is tricky because we use it to activate so much of the time, right? It’s that urgency mode, right? I have ADHD. Importance doesn’t make me want to do stuff. It doesn’t activate me. Urgency does. And sometimes I think things are important because they’re urgent, but that’s not true, right? That just means it’s urgent. And a trap I see my clients fall into is someone else’s urgency becomes their activator. Even though it’s not important to them, right? So it’s important to recognize that sometimes we use that anxiety to activate, sometimes we even need it. But it’s not gonna work in the long term. It’s a straight road to burnout if you’re constantly trying to use anxiety to activate. Because anxiety’s the only thing we can burn for fuel and wind up with more of it when we’re done, right? Like it doesn’t go away just because we used it for fuel. It sticks around. So knowing how to manage that and keep it balanced is important. One option is to use it to activate, but then get out of that anxiety as quickly as you can. Right? Like settle into the task, become comfortable with the task, those sorts of things. I talk a lot about acceptance in the course of the book, and it’s important to accept the task we have to do. It’s important to accept the emotions that are coming up. I don’t have to be mad at myself because I’m having feelings of inadequacy or feelings of overwhelm or feelings of being an outsider or rejected. Like that stuff happens. And it may or may not be true, but I can still accept that I feel like I’m being left out, even if maybe I’m not, or I still feel like I’m not good enough, even though I probably am. And then move through, right? Keep going. And particularly for the adults in the audience, cause this won’t work as well for kids because, and you’ll see why. One of the things I like to do is I literally call that part of me middle school Brendan. Right. Most of your kids are probably in middle school or elementary school. It doesn’t work yet. But as we get older, even a high school kid can do this. I call that person middle school Brendan, those emotions a lot of the time. Cause I’m like, I’m doing fine. I got a book coming out. Like professionally, I’m doing okay. Even though sometimes I’m like, man, why would anybody want to help me get the word out about this book? And then I have to just listen to that, honor that, and go, yeah, Brendan, when you were in middle school, nobody would have wanted to help you with this because you didn’t have a lot of friends. Now you do. Let’s move through that and into the reality of almost fifty year old Brendan and the network of people who care about him.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, that is a higher level skill. And my, I have Little Debbie, which is both what I call myself, but also then it makes me think of those like candy cakes that I ate as a little girl. But yeah, I just thought this was so interesting, also because I think for a lot of our kids, like, you know, that urgency, it does, it seems to work. Right. And so like I think that’s the challenge is like, well, this is working for me. And but sometimes our kids because of the way they’re wired or just their age and stage of development, they don’t really necessarily recognize that there’s like there’s a cost to that and that, you know, and so I think that’s where a lot of the tension for those of us with these kids lies. It’s like we can see it happening, but you know, we also have kids often who need a lot of autonomy and they like, no, I can figure this out on my own.

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah. And even as parents, we lean into that sometimes without meaning to, right? Like sometimes we’re causing that urgency. That’s the whole job of yelling is just to make stuff urgent. Like that’s really all it does. And that’s me teaching my kid that urgency is what will activate you. Right. And it, coming from where I am, because I’ve probably become emotionally dysregulated and now I’m yelling, right? So it’s one thing to yell to your kid across a football field to get their attention to have them come over, right? Like that’s different. But if it’s like, go do the thing now, roar. You’re just trying to activate fear and that leads to urgency. And now the kid goes and does it. And I’m not saying never yell at your kids, but often there’s other ways to do it that doesn’t instill in them I have to be feeling anxious in order to do something. And we don’t think of it that way. We don’t consider that that’s what we’re inadvertently teaching our kids, but we totally are, depending on what kind of parenting style we’re approaching them with.

Debbie:
Oof. Yeah, felt that one. Yeah, I just, you know, I’ve heard my kiddo who’s, you know, starting at year three of university next month, you know, has said to me more than once, like the thing that motivates me more than anything is fear. Fear of not doing the thing or that the consequences are worse than, and while I recognize that that can work. And again there’s a price for that being your key motivator. Can we just talk for a few minutes about avoidance? Because that’s also something, like that’s a, I guess that would be one of the massive barriers in the brick or in the wall is this kind of giant avoidance. And I know that it’s an anxiety response. And I know that with our demand avoidant kids, it’s really strong. Like the power and desire to avoid things is really strong. So can you talk about the role of avoidance and the Wall of Awful?

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, it’s one of the ways that, I say there’s five ways people try to get past the wall. Two don’t work, one works but is damaging, and two work, right? The two that don’t work are staring at it and going around it. Staring at it is just, that’s a really big wall, and I’m totally overwhelmed, and I’m not engaging with the wall, let alone the task behind it. That’s freezing. And then going around it is avoidance, it’s flight of the fight, flight, and freeze response, right? So it’s like there’s the wall. I totally want to do my homework, but first I want to do this other thing. And from the outside looking in, I’m gonna argue a little bit with avoidance. Like probably there’s avoidance there, sure. But sometimes it’s a kid or even an adult using the best idea they have at the moment to regulate their emotions. So the kid might go, I will do my homework, but first can I watch an episode of Bob’s Burgers? And what they really mean is I’m feeling overwhelmed and scared. And I know that if I watch Bob’s Burgers and I hang out with the Belchers for a little while, I will feel better. So I just want to watch an episode of Bob’s Burgers and then I’ll do my homework. Or let me listen to this song and then I’ll do it or whatever. Or let me watch YouTube. The problem is that one video stops and another one starts, right? And now I’m stuck in the dopamine hole of distraction. Instead of I’m now regulated and I can move into the task at hand. So the two ways that work are putting the door in the wall, which is changing your emotional state, and climbing it, which is like accepting the emotions and the task at hand and stuff. If I watch an episode of Bob’s Burgers, I feel calmer, I feel a little connected to the Belchers, and now I feel like I can do my homework. I’ve put a door in my wall. It took me 20 minutes, but I put a door in my wall. I changed my emotions. Cool. But if I don’t stop at that episode. If I don’t do this really intentionally, I end up watching two or three episodes because mom and dad wandered off and were like, okay, do that. And then now they’re like, we can’t trust you. Right. Now we’re in this trap. So I have to know that I’m doing it. I have to know that I’m intentionally trying to put a door in it. But avoidance is there too. Absolutely. And it’s often not the task that’s being avoided. It’s the emotions that the kid doesn’t want to feel. So that becomes talking about the task and wondering even as a parent, is this a thing my kid can even do? Like, are they feeling overwhelmed because this task is beyond them? Or are they feeling overwhelmed because the effort of this task is difficult? And I tend to think that we can reduce some of that avoidance by just making it safe to fail. Like I did this with my kids earlier this week. I was like, guys, the lawnmower’s broken. It won’t start. I’m in the middle of a book launch. I’m not gonna have time to try to figure this out. Can you just take the lawnmower apart and look up YouTube videos and stuff and try to figure out what the heck is going on? I don’t care if you figure it out or not. If you do, it’ll be great. But if you don’t, I’m not gonna be upset about it. I just want you to see what you can do. And just don’t take apart things like the gas tank or the oil or the string part, because those three things will be an extra bonus nightmare of difficulty to figure out if they’re broken too much. But see what you can do. And they were like, okay. They didn’t figure it out. I’m not upset about that. I was like, all right, cool. Thanks for trying. The next time I ask them to do something weird like that, they’re going to be more comfortable doing it because I didn’t care about success or failure. I only cared that they tried.

Debbie:
Yeah. That’s a good story. And I can imagine as a teen, that probably was kind of exciting to get to take it apart. Yeah. With permission.

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, probably. Yeah, and they put it back together too. So.

Debbie:
I would have done that without permission and that would have been a problem. But yeah. Okay, so one of the quotes that I pulled out is you said that the more we care about a task, the higher our walls can become. So I thought that was very insightful and good to know, good information. And you talk about one of the ways that people sometimes try to deal with the walls, just like, you know, becoming the Hulk and, you know, just powering through, just smashing through it and motivating ourselves with, you know, maybe not so kind words to ourselves or whatever we have to do. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the pitfalls of smashing? Again, it could, because it could be effective, you know, I’m using air quotes, it could be an effective strategy, but what’s the problem with using that as an ongoing strategy?

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, smashing is fight of the fight, flight, and freeze response, right? We did the other two already, now we’re at fight. And it’s usually using anxiety or anger to power through the wall. The wall is made entirely of emotions. They’re emotions that tend to either repel us or slow us down, one or the other. Smashing is just bringing counter emotional power to those emotions, right? Like the stuff that’s pushing me away, the stuff that’s slowing me down. I have to find an emotion that is strong enough and propels me forward enough to get me through those feelings. Anxiety can go either way. Anxiety might make me activate and push through the wall, but anxiety is also the mortar that makes up the wall. So there’s pieces of the wall that is pushing me away. So I have to get extra anxious to push through the anxiety that is built into the wall. And anger is the externalized version of that, right? Anxiety is kind of internal. What’s wrong with me? Why do I suck? Why can’t I just do this? I have to do this. Oh my God. If I don’t do this, then I’m not a cool enough person. My mom won’t love me. My dad won’t think I’m gonna be successful. Whatever, right? I’m gonna lose my job or something. And anger is now I’m mad at you for even asking me to do this, right? Or, potentially, and this one is always kind of entertaining to me. There’s this task that I don’t want to do. That is, I’ve got this huge Wall of Awful for it. And I’m kind of flirting with doing it. And then someone asks me to do something else entirely. And I get mad at them for keeping me from doing this thing that I need to do. And I use that anger to push me through the wall to do the thing that I was actually avoiding. But it became obvious when they asked me to not do that and do something else instead. That one always entertains me. So sometimes I’m not even smashing at the person making the request of me. I might be smashing at someone just in the vicinity. Like your kids are making noise and you’re like, I need you to be quiet, I have to pay the bills. And maybe that matters, maybe that doesn’t. But I don’t need to be so short with them when I ask them to turn down the volume, right? So anger and smashing is about anger and anxiety and using those powerful emotions to get through the wall.

Debbie:
Right. Right. Which is probably again like maybe a comfortable space for some of our kids. But also one of the things that you wrote is that motivating ourselves that way, like we consciously choose to motivate ourselves in that way, it will shape how we see the world in a negative way. And it will also interfere with us seeing the strengths that we have or give ourselves credit for what we’re capable of doing.

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, absolutely. Right. Cause if I’m always fighting, then it’s nothing but me versus the whole time. And it doesn’t have to be like enemy stuff necessarily. I don’t have to go that far, but it’s still me versus the world. It’s me versus the task. It’s me versus mom and dad or my boss or my brother or my friend. When it could be me and them working together to do the thing that I need to do. But if I’m used to activating with anger, frustration, smashing, it gets more difficult.

Debbie:
Yeah. Let’s talk for a minute about rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is, you know, RSD. And there’s a lot of folks listening to this who are navigating that. And, you know, for kids with RSD or who have kind of like a glass half empty maybe temperament or if something’s hard, why even bother? Cause I’m gonna fail anyway. Like they kind of go into things with that feeling. I’m just wondering how can we help those kids start to challenge that narrative in a way that kind of doesn’t trigger their demand avoidance or their RSD? Because again, on paper, like that story is working for them, right? It’s kind of protecting them in some way. So I’m just wondering, do you have thoughts about how we can kind of push our kids to challenge that narrative in a way that would be accepted?

Brendan Mahan:
I think that rejection is even bigger than we look at it as. Right. We often think of rejection in like friendships and stuff. But I already told a story about that, kind of. I’m convinced that once we get past survival, once we get past like if I lose my job, I’m gonna die. Like I’m not gonna have enough food or shelter or that kind of stuff. Once we get past that, I really think that most of our fear of failure is really a fear of rejection. If I don’t do this right, my boss won’t like me, my spouse will be upset with me, whatever, right? My client won’t want to work with me anymore, fill in the blanks. So rejection and rejection sensitivity ends up bleeding into all kinds of relationships beyond friendship. When I asked my kids to go check out the lawnmower, in advance, I was like, I don’t care what happens here. I don’t care how this turns out. I didn’t even insist that they didn’t take apart the oil stuff. I was just like, please try not to open up the gas tank or whatever. For all I know, you can’t. I’d never opened up a lawnmower. I have no idea if you can take that stuff apart easily or not. But because I in advance said to them, this is fine. However this goes is cool. The subtext of that is, I am not going to reject you if this goes south, right? Like we’re still good. Our relationship is fine. So I’m thinking of rejection at that tier of psychological safety type stuff. Because it increases anxiety, right? The more I’m worrying about risking rejection, the more likely I am to feel anxious. So helping our kids to navigate that one by letting them know when there is no fear of rejection, it’s just their imagination. Which might mean we need to communicate a little bit more than we usually do. We might need to go a little further. And then also expose them to rejection. Cause that matters too, right? Put them in spots where they’re gonna be rejected, but coach them and prepare them in advance for it. When I started in this field, I was rebuilding myself and my career. I didn’t have a job. I was trying to figure stuff out, which means I had a lot of time on my hands. And I would drive to clients’ houses and do one on one work with them that way because I could. I had that much time. Now it’s all virtual stuff because I don’t. One of the things I used to do when I was driving around is any place I thought might want a workshop on ADHD, I would just stop there and ask. So preschools, I went into coffee shops and asked them if they would be interested in having me show up there to draw people in. I got rejected all the time. And that was part of why I was doing it. I was hoping I would get the workshops and I did. I got enough of them. But I probably got rejected seventy-five percent of the time, or no one called me back or whatever. They’re like, let me take your phone number down and we’ll call you. And then they didn’t. But it exposed me to rejection and I got a lot more comfortable with it as a result. You can do the same thing with your kids. There’s all kinds of wacky entrepreneur exercises where they like go into McDonald’s and ask to get twenty five cents off of a cheeseburger or something, or two cheeseburgers for the price of one. Because they wanna get rejected. Like they’re trying to make this weird request. There’s no reason a fifteen year old can’t do the same thing.

Debbie:
Right. It’s practicing and building that muscle and knowing it’s survivable. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you talked about there’s five ways to deal with the wall and I want to talk about one of the ways that you say is a more positive way or can be more effective, and that is having a door in the wall. So can you kind of explain that to us?

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, putting a door in the wall is about emotional regulation, basically. And it’s just got way different ways to do it. So it’s got two tiers, two steps. You might need one of them, you might need both of them. Either we need to soothe our emotions, right? If I’m feeling really anxious, I have to calm that anxiety down first. And then once I’m feeling calm and balanced again, I probably need to activate. I need to do something to motivate myself to feel emotionally like I want to do this thing. But not always. Sometimes just because I’m calm, I might be like, all right, now I can check my email, do my homework, whatever. So the two steps are to soothe the emotions if necessary, then activate if necessary. There’s so many ways to do it. A lot of it boils down to Bill Dodson’s INCUP strategies, his model for the interest-based nervous system, which I already touched on a little bit without mentioning it. So that’s the ADHD nervous system, according to Bill Dodson, its importance doesn’t make us motivated. It doesn’t activate us. Instead, we want to look at things that are interesting, novel, challenging, urgent, or connected to our passions. I make a little bit of an adjustment on passions and I start thinking about values too, like I kind of bleed that in because I tend to think interesting and passions, it’s kind of the same thing, right? They’re two different sides of the same coin. If it’s interesting, it’s gonna compel me cognitively. If it’s connected to my passions, it’s gonna get me going emotionally. Values are right there waiting to be blended in. So I bring those in. Cause I think that that’s important. Oftentimes I don’t want to do something until I realize how it connects to my values. And now all of a sudden I’m ready, right? Like I don’t really want to do this, but my wife or my kids will be benefited if I do this thing. Okay, cool. Family is a value for me. I’m gonna do that. Or plenty of times I’m like, I don’t really want to do a podcast, but my audience would really be benefited by that and I value them and all that stuff. My podcast is very hit or miss right now because I’ve been out straight. But when I do get to it, that’s usually how I’m getting to it. So putting a door in the wall, it looks like that, right? And some of it is, can I make this situation novel by going and working in a coffee shop, right? Like I have a workbook that’s gonna accompany the book that comes out in February, last I heard. I worked in coffee shops to get that done. I worked in the library to get that done. I just had to be somewhere else. I had to be in a novel situation, a novel spot. And there were times when I spent like a half an hour researching places to go do work. And I was like, this feels like a waste of time, but I know I’m gonna get way more stuff done if I take this half an hour to find a good place to work. Or music is a good way, it’s gonna engage us with our passions, with our interest. It makes the situation a little novel. And the whole job of music is emotional communication. That’s what it does. So if I want to regulate I might listen to songs that are calmer. If I want to activate I might listen to songs that are more motivating. Interesting podcast episodes like this help me get going. If I am stuck and I’m just like, I don’t wanna. I got a wicked case of the I don’t wannas. If I listen to two intelligent people talk about stuff that they’re passionate and interested in, suddenly I’m feeling more like going in that direction myself. It’s easier for me to do the kind of work that I do. And even with my kids, right? Like they put their laundry away, they do their laundry all by themselves. Like they don’t need me to do it. And it’s because when they were little, laundry was a game. So it was fun. It wasn’t like go put your laundry away. I would fold the clothes, and their job was to sneak over and steal like a handful of socks or a t-shirt or something from me before I could tag them and then run off and put it in their drawer. So how can we add some playfulness and some fun to the task that we have to do? Maybe we can’t. Not every task can do that. But a lot of them can. I’ll shout out right now to my friend Dani Donovan, who created a thing called the anti-planner. It’s just a bunch of ways to add fun to your day and to your tasks and to the to-do list. It’s a phenomenal product that I can’t recommend highly enough, and a good companion piece to Overcoming the Wall of Awful.

Debbie:
Yeah. I actually saw you mention it in your book and I looked it up and I’m considering getting it for my kiddo. So I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. So okay, so that’s the door in the wall. And that is one strategy, but you really like, from what I gathered from reading your book, like the best way to deal with the Wall of Awful is to climb it. So can I have more questions about the door, but let’s talk about climbing the wall first. So yeah, what does that entail?

Brendan Mahan:
Climbing the wall is the work. Like it’s the thing that gets us the long-term benefit. Putting a door on your wall is a short-term strategy. It’s not gonna last forever. Even if you always use that strategy, at some point it’s just not gonna work. You’re gonna have to come up with something else. Climbing the wall is where we look at the task, figure out why this task is so overwhelming. And in thinking that through, we might find ways to make it less overwhelming. It’s about coming to terms with the emotions that are storming and roiling inside of us so that we can better manage them and get a handle on them. It’s the stuff we often don’t want to do, right? It’s the stuff that, like, I don’t want to look at that. That feels gross. It feels yucky. Yeah, but you might have a Wall of Awful for climbing your Wall of Awful, but you still got to climb your Wall of Awful at some point. And that’s hard, but that’s where coaches and clinicians can all help people learn how to do that. Even just listening to podcasts like this one can help people climb their walls. Cause you can have a Wall of Awful for helping your kid with homework. You can have a Wall of Awful for paying your bills. You can have a Wall of Awful for that really hard conversation with your spouse. There’s all sorts of things. And I ended up doing even more thinking about climbing as we wrote the book and split it into two different kinds. A lot of this I did a lot of splitting. One is active and one is passive. So active climbing is when I’m engaged with the task, right? I’m just like, that makes me feel overwhelmed. It makes me feel uncomfortable. How come? Why, what are the emotions going on? How can I come to terms with them? And how can I become stronger and more skilled at this? And then passive is doing it in the background without intentionally. But I think part of why climbing is as difficult and intimidating as it tends to be for some people, I think a big piece of that is our phones. Because we’re not getting like the background climbing, right? We’re not getting the passive climbing. Passive climbing happens when we’re in the default mode network of the brain and our minds are wandering and we’re just sort of like letting it drift and space out. And that’s part of what happens in that mode is we’re creative, we learn better, and we regulate our emotions. Wall of Awful, emotions. So if we’re always on our phone, we’re not getting the benefit of background emotional regulation. So I encourage people to put their phones down. Like go to the supermarket and don’t bring your phone. Bring a piece of paper with a list on it, like a maniac, right? And just stand there in line, bored out of your mind, with nothing to do. Right now, and I’m not gonna pretend that I’m not immune to this at all. Like of course this affects me. You’re bored for seven seconds maybe and all of a sudden your phone’s in your hand and you’re looking at Instagram or you’re looking at Reddit or whatever it is that you’re doing, YouTube, that’s not great. We need that six seconds to expand into six minutes so that our brain gets some time to flush out all the nonsense.

Debbie:
Yeah. You know, I wrote down the word brave because that’s how I feel every time I run an errand and I decide not to listen to a podcast while I’m doing the errand. I’m like, wow, I just left the house without multitasking on three different things. And I feel like I should win an award. It is really hard to do because everything is so accessible to us now. It takes intention. Okay. So I want to go back to one of my questions then about the door versus the wall, because as I was reading that, I have so many doors and I’m really good at making doors. And I will use a door until that door stops and then I create a completely brand new door. And that has been my strategy for doing most things. Is I just keep reinventing systems, coming up with a new strategy. This is good, working for me now. I’m gonna do this. And I go all in until it burns out. And then I’m like, okay, time to pivot and come up with something completely different. So as I’m talking with you and as I was reading this, I’m like, is that a form of avoidance of climbing the wall? Am I just like, can I just keep building doors? Or yeah, I just would love to know your thoughts on that. Making it about me here, but you know.

Brendan Mahan:
No, totally. Why have a podcast if you can’t make it about you sometimes? I don’t know that I know enough about you to wonder if you’re right. To kind of be like, no, that, that’s not the impression of you that I have. My guess is that you’re spending time climbing without knowing that. I think you probably do a lot of background climbing, like if you’re out for a run or exercising or something like that, you’re climbing, even if you’re listening to music, unless you’re like, I’m gonna go and do sit ups while reading a book, which I’ve done. It’s not easy. If you’re that level of like I have to be productive and get everything done, okay, you’re not getting any background climbing in. But any sort of physical activity that is not being accompanied with an audiobook or something, if it’s being accompanied by music, you’re doing some background climbing. This podcast is climbing, I would imagine. I know mine is for me, so it’s gotta be true for you too. Where you’re talking to someone and like you just demonstrated, it makes you think about this thing in your life that you did that you’re doing. I wonder what that means and how I am connecting these dots. Like that’s potentially climbing. That’s potentially learning about yourself and how you work and figuring things out. We don’t always have to climb immediately prior to the task. And then when you get to the wall, if you have to climb, you’re stronger and more skilled because you’ve been training away from the task in the same way that football players go to the gym to get bigger and stronger. Even though they’re not playing football in the gym, it still applies to football. They watch tape, it still applies to the game. So this podcast is sort of your version of watching tape in a lot of ways, I would think. And when it comes to people asking me about the wall, a question I get a lot is, how do I make the wall go away or how do I make the wall smaller? And my answer is, you don’t. That’s not a thing. And I don’t want anyone to think that way because it’s self-defeating, which seems backwards. I want people to think, I don’t make the wall smaller. I don’t make the wall go away. I get stronger and more skilled. So the wall seems like it’s easier to get over. It seems smaller because I’m just better at getting past it. That way, if life gets difficult and a wall is suddenly harder than it used to be, you can go, yeah, that makes sense because that wall has always been the same size. But I just moved to another country and I’m dealing with time zones and not sleeping and trying to put stuff away. Of course that thing is hard for me now. Everything is harder for me now. It’ll pass. Like I’ll acclimate in a month or two or three and that wall will go back to the easy breezy thing it used to be.

Debbie:
Yeah, as you were saying that, I was thinking, you know, comparing that or relating that to nervous system regulation, you know, the goal isn’t that we become people who are regulated at all times. The goal is to be flexible so that we know how to come down when we’re activated and we know how to bring ourselves up when we’re feeling too low. So it’s having a more nimble nervous system. So it sounds like it’s the same thing with the Wall of Awful.

Brendan Mahan:
Yeah, we’re dealing with the nervous system, right? Like the Wall of Awful is just another frame for emotional regulation and nervous system regulation.

Debbie:
Right. So interesting. I guess my last question, because we’re gonna wrap up and I’m just gonna encourage listeners to check out Brendan’s book, which is out today as this episode drops. So you can find it. It’s called, yay, you’re there, you’re at the finish line. Overcoming the Wall of Awful, Why It’s Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism and Anxiety, and How to Do Them Anyway. And just for listeners knowing most of my listeners are parents. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, we just got to see the cover. Very good cover, great simple design. How can parents kind of use this resource to support their kids who struggle with their own walls of awful?

Brendan Mahan:
It helps you talk about it. That’s the benefit of the Wall of Awful as a phrase. It’s hard to say, you seem like you’re having trouble with your homework. And the kid’s like, no, I totally understand math. I just don’t want to do it. Right. Or they’re like, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how to answer that question. So the kid’s stuck. But if you go, do you have a Wall of Awful for this math homework? Now the kid’s like, yeah, I think I do. Instead of getting defensive, no, I know what I’m doing. You’re not, I’m not talking about whether you know how to do your math or not. I’m talking about how you haven’t started in the last 10 minutes, right? So talking to them about the Wall of Awful and what it is, how it works, lets us talk about it later too. It lets us at any moment go, hey, you seem like you have a Wall of Awful for this. Or, yeah, I really want to talk about this thing, but I think I’m crashing into a Wall of Awful and I’m really having trouble engaging in this conversation with you. Or I have a Wall of Awful and I’m stuck and need help. Right? Like all of a sudden we can get a lot further because it doesn’t feel as dangerous. It doesn’t feel as threatening to say, I have a Wall of Awful for this thing. Please help, as compared to I just get really overwhelmed and scared whenever you bring up money or whenever I see my homework folder or whatever. Right. Like no one wants to have that conversation. So it provides language for stuff that’s usually fairly hard to talk about. And then within the book itself, there’s even more language and models and stuff to make it that much easier to talk about things. I used to be an English teacher. Like my whole deal is the more we can communicate the more easily, right? I taught sixth grade English. So like let’s make this as straightforward as possible. That’s the idea. That’s the biggest benefit of the book and the model.

Debbie:
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. And there’s a great appendix with resources. It’s very, again, practical. You have, you know, at the end of every chapter, like, here are the steps to do, try this. And really helpful. So I can see that’s really supporting a lot of families. So I will have an extensive show notes page for this episode. Is there any special place or your favorite places to hang out online that you’d want people to check out?

Brendan Mahan:
So the website is wallofawful.com. That’ll send you to the book page. There’ll be free resources there. Like it’s one of those send me your receipt and I’ll send you these documents. Some of which are how to use it in both work and as a parent to better communicate. And other than that, like I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram. Most of it is ADHD Essentials as opposed to the Wall of Awful. But I keep talking about it. So if you Google it or search it on Instagram or something, I’m sure stuff will come up. But yeah, mostly wallofawful.com and I hope folks check out the book. It’s my life’s work. So I’m hopeful it will help people.

Debbie:
Yeah. I know that it will. And congratulations. And I love how you just came up with this metaphor that is so simple and clear and I think has so much potential to help so many people and already is. So congratulations and thank you for everything you shared today. This was a super fun conversation.

Brendan Mahan:
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Debbie:
Ditto.