Being Socially Motivated is Not a Disorder
Unpacking body doubling, "executive dysfunction," and the pathology model of ADHD.
Skye is passionate about the craft of needle felting. With a few overstuffed bags of wool roving, a pack of needles, and her callused hands, she’s constructed everything from hats and vests, to small decorative dolls, to an entire barnyard scene complete with pigs, cows, a feeding trough, tiny felted chickens, and a massive, two-story needled felted barn.
Holding up a small needle-felted BB-8 from Star Wars, Skye laughs and tells me, “This is what keeps me from losing my shit at my boss. I stab this cute little guy so I don’t stab anybody else.”
Skye’s been active at needle felting conferences and selling her work at craft shows for over 25 years; there’s no questioning her dedication to the hobby. But unless another person is in the room near her, working on some craft of their own, Skye can’t focus enough to do any felting at all.
“When I’m alone, there’s too much going on all at once in my brain,” she explains. “And there’s also, somehow, nothing at all? There’s this void of no motivation. Even my meds don’t help.”
Skye is a 46-year-old ADHDer, a person with attention deficit hyperactive disorder. She was diagnosed and began taking medication in her early 30s, after being fired from numerous jobs, and she does find that being on a stimulant makes it easier to stay on-task at her desk during the day. But when it comes to activities that benefit Skye rather than her boss, like cleaning her house, baking cookies with her kids, or attending to her hobbies, she finds it nearly impossible to get started without a little social support.
“I started going to crafting nights at this yarn store that used to be on Thorndale,” she explains. “I hadn’t done any felting for over three years when I first walked in there. And I was really beating myself up over it. But being around other people crocheting and knitting and watching a movie, my hands just went back to work again…And I’ve been getting events like that together ever since.”
If you have ADHD and you need help initiating an activity, or you’re the loved one of an ADHDer who’s feeling stuck and you want to offer them support, then body doubling is one of the most practical tools you can use. Body doubling is very simple: the ADHDer who is having trouble starting or staying on task simply sits down with another person who is also working on a focus-intensive project, and the ADHDer feeds off the other person’s social energy and attention in order to get things done.
Skye says that when she’s with her crafting group, the world narrows, and her attention becomes grounded in the job at hand. Her mind stops racing with worries about all the other responsibilities she’s forgetting: the dishwasher that needs to be loaded, the milk that’s running low, the kids’ tee-ball uniforms she needs to pick up. Time stops flashing forward so unpredictably, and settles around her and her crafting partner with ease.
Many organizations for people with ADHD swear by body doubling, as do numerous individual ADHDers themselves. Pina Varnell, an illustrator and the author of the comic series ADHD Alien says that she engages in body doubling by opening up a voice chat with a friend while she draws. Marta Rose of Divergent Design Studies holds joint house-decluttering sessions via Zoom. And a close friend of mine, Jess, used to hold weekly productivity circles at their house every Sunday because having people gathered around and working helped them write more and get more watercolor painting done.
Jess would also occasionally ask people to give them specific writing prompts, because the structure and modest social pressure of having to write for somebody else was far more motivating than anything they could do for themselves. Benefitting from external prompting is a common ADHDer experience; my friend and livestreaming co-host Madeline has told me that she’s gotten far more done creatively since we’ve started working on a show together than when she was trying to complete her own projects.
Despite how popular and effective body doubling appears to be, empirical research has not tested it as an intervention for people with ADHD at all. It’s a shockingly simple way to address a variety of problems, from a child struggling to complete his homework, to a grown adult who can’t tackle the massive pile of used clothes on her couch. Doctors prescribe stimulants to ADHDers facing “executive functioning” difficulties like these all the time. Yet no clinician has ever examined whether prescribing a body double would be an effective treatment — despite the fact that anecdotally, it addresses the problem more directly than meds do, and it doesn’t come with the risk of building up a physical tolerance or any unwanted side-effects.
To understand why body doubling is so neglected by professionals, we have to look at the flawed way that psychiatry and psychology conceptualizes the ADHDer’s experience. Professionals largely view ADHD as a disorder of motivation and attention, a disability located inside the mind that must be solved on a solely individual level. This framing makes it impossible to understand the ADHDer as a unique, neurodivergent social being interacting with a broader cultural and economic context.
Every feature of ADHD, as it is clinically described, is one of pathology and lack. ADHDers are “time blind”: they don’t have an instinct for what hour of the day it is, or how long a task takes. Nevermind that humans have relied upon time-keeping technologies for as far back as recorded history goes, suggesting that none of us approach time by instinct.
Time Sickness
reject squirrel time, embrace slug timesluggish.substack.com
ADHDers lack focus, except for when they don’t, in which case they’re suffering from hyperfocus, and that’s actually a problem too. ADHDers are emotionally volatile — but they’re also too spacy. They dissociate from reality too much, but when they take steps to address this, they are guilty of needing too much stimulation and being too active. And they’re lazy — except for when they’re staying up very late at night working, being most productive during the hours society tells them they ought to be asleep.
If the many complex features of Autism can be best summed up by saying that we have a bottom-up processing style in a world built for top-down processors, then the best way to summarize ADHD is this: people with ADHD are highly socially motivated, but they live in a world where independence is prioritized.
It’s odd that having a strong social motivation is considered a pathology at all, when we consider that nearly all of us are social animals. The majority of humans throughout history have lived, worked, cooked, cleaned, gathered resources, and played together, feeding off of one another’s energy and encouragement, the natural movements of their lives lending structure to each other’s days. Being observed makes all human beings more productive, and collaborating on a task improves focus, motivation, and performance for nearly everyone. When people feel that they are a valued member of a team, they do more and actually enjoy their efforts, plus they’re just happier in general, because of the company; when we toil alone, we often feel work is meaningless. And since our lives as humans center around our relationships, a life of nothing but isolated work is a meaningless one in a very real way.
In the past, human beings could rely upon the rhythms of the seasons to keep their calendars, and the activity of their communities and the movements of the sun helped them monitor the time. (They also worked less and weren’t guided by an industrial schedule, so keeping precise measure of time was not as important.) Historically, most people cooked and distributed food collectively, harvested together, washed their laundry together, bathed together, and communally raised their children. Everybody was able to body double nearly all of the time.
One of the the primary deficits observed in ADHDers, according to clinicians, is in something the neurosurgeon Karl Pribram named “executive functioning”: the ability to plan, sequence, and execute tasks on one’s own, without external assistance or prompting.
E02: Kill the Executive In Your Head w/ Marta Rose
Listen now (94 min) | Is executive function "a set of capitalist values masquerading as skills"? Neurodivergent…wokescientist.substack.com
As a concept, executive functioning essentially demands that each one of us be high-powered corporate executives, managing the business that is our own lives. If we aren’t able to set our own agendas, keep track of our own schedules, create measurable goals for ourselves, and sequence all the steps necessary to meet those goals while also maintaining our own homes and families and feeding ourselves, then we are not functioning adults.
But the corporation is a modern-day invention that doesn’t resemble most other human communities very well at all, and no actual CEO is responsible for that many life duties. Elon Musk sleeps on a mattress with a hole in it and does not raise his kids. He’s also notably terrible at following through on the projects he starts. It’s absurd that psychiatry and psychology expects the average grocery store clerk or legal secretary who commutes by bus for an hour each day to juggle more life tasks with less help than the wealthiest man on the planet does and still fails at. Not meeting such an unrealistic, ahistoric standard should hardly qualify as a disorder.
ADHD is a real neurotype that is distinct from other neurotypes in observable ways. Many ADHDers genuinely benefit from being on medication, attending therapy, and receiving disability accommodations, as having ADHD is unquestionably disabling. But so much of what makes this neurotype disabling is the extremely restrictive way that humans are expected to function today, and how little community support most people are provided while going about their lives.
ADHDers benefit from having an external structure to their days, whether that’s a set schedule maintained by their workplace or school, or by having specific goals and assignments laid out for them, with an external party holding them accountable. As a professor, I tend to be incredibly lax about late penalties; I’ve even tried getting rid of all due dates entirely. But I’ve learned that my students with ADHD actually want due dates to help guide their progress throughout the semester.
ADHDers also benefit from visible cues that remind them of their responsibilities: a pill bottle out on the counter can prompt a person to take their meds, for example, and hanging the keys on the front door can help prevent a person from locking themselves out. In more communal living situations where groups of people share tools and equipment, ADHDers don’t have to deal with the negative consequences of “clutter blindness” nearly so much. Frequent, reliable public transit also soothes the anxieties of ADHDers who are always running late, or those who don’t feel safe driving a car.
Because many of them have been unfairly deemed “lazy” by their teachers or bosses, and insulted by their caregivers for struggling to complete tasks, ADHDers also thrive off of encouragement. A little attention and praise can go a long way in motivating many of them, and they also tend to take intense criticism to heart. This quality, sometimes deemed “rejection sensitive dysphoria,” is a fundamental aspect of the human condition.
The Biological Causes of Mental Illness Cannot Be Separated From the Social Ones
Case in point: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in kids with ADHD or Autism.devonprice.medium.com
Most human beings care about how others view them. Without others showing us care and lightening our workloads, we do very poorly mentally and physically. When our social isolation is profound enough, we die. Craving positive social recognition after a lifetime of negative feedback therefore hardly seems disordered. It is a sensible alignment between a person’s needs and their motivations — an outcome that clinicians who treat ADHD should supposedly be looking for.
Many of the challenges of having ADHD could easily be addressed with interventions that are social rather than medical — but such an approach is nearly impossible for our current mental healthcare system to make sense of, or profit from. And so, for now, ADHDers and those of us who love them are stuck inventing our own solutions, and providing one another with the best support that we can.
I first met Skye at one of her crafting circles over a decade ago. I was living alone in a studio apartment on Granville, just a couple blocks away from her favorite yarn shop. I was desperately lonely during that period of my life, toiling away on my dissertation by day, languishing on my cheap foam mattress reading books and shivering with anemic exhaustion by night.
On one random evening, I spotted a flyer advertising a free screening of the Star Wars Holiday Special & crafting group at the store. I shuffled in, with no crafting materials of my own, and plopped down shyly at a table to watch the film. Skye was near me, shaping a bundle of wool into a plump Santa Claus. We got to talking and trading jokes as the horrible film played before us. She encouraged me to come again — I was terrified that I was too inexpert of a crafter to belong there, but she was simply happy to have more people to body double with.
With Skye’s help, I eventually learned how to needle felt, too. The repetitive stabbing motion was grounding to me, and the sculptural task of pressing fluffy wool into compact shapes was incredibly rewarding. At last there was an artistic challenge my awkward Autistic fingers could complete! And it gave me an outlet for my more neurotic impulses that wasn’t destructive or self-harming!
Years later, long after the yarn shop had shuttered its doors, Skye asked me for help completing her applications for graduate school. I was happy to do it, after all the social support that she’d given me. Keeping track of an academic calendar’s submission dates and crafting an appealing personal statement came naturally to me, just as befriending strangers and putting together casual crafting parties came naturally to her.
Our needs and strengths interlocked perfectly, as is so often the case in ADHer-Autistic friendships. When psychology and psychiatry had little to offer us but stigma and self-blame, we took care of one another. We each needed other people. And that was the exact opposite of being disordered.
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Wonderful essay Devon, and thanks so much for the shoutout. As an autistic ADHDer (AuDHD as the kids have so cleverly named it), who is also extremely introverted to the point of nearly (and mostly happily) being a hermit, I *still* need social support and external motivation—I have found for me that virtual body doubling, with a check-in and check-out at the beginning and end, is a perfect balance. We call this “Studio Time” in DDS and have multiple sessions every week.
I also recently did a set of workshops in DDS about so-called “executive functioning” skills, noting, as you have, that they are really only compulsory for people with less power in a relationship — I’m expected to be on time, but my doctor, for whom I wait sometimes hours in a nightmare of a waiting room, is not. Also, anyone who can hire someone to do their executive functioning for them, or better yet get it done free by a spouse or family member (usually a wife or mother), isn’t required to have these “skills” and can be freed up to go make art or design things in non-linear, iterative ways. In the second in that series of workshops, which I called “Enchantment Functioning Skills,” I proposed that when many of those tasks of daily living are shared and valued and can be done without rush, there can be real ritual and community and enchantment in many of them—if you look at monastic life, for example, there is a slow, steady, unrushed rhythm of daily chores and daily prayer, all performed to a set schedule and done in community. It’s actually possible to find folding the laundry a meditative practice when you aren’t already late to a job you hate but can’t survive without.
Thank you for finally explaining this social motivation thing clearly! I'm an AuDHDer with chronic catatonia/autistic inertia, and the most useful insights I've gained about how to make my life actually *work* have been related to harnessing that social motivation and just... largely giving up on trying to be self-motivated in isolation. It doesn't work.
It took a long time for me to figure out though since I'm a habitual loner due to childhood emotional neglect + sensory and social overload have often caused me to shut down in "social" settings that are too loud or have too many (especially unfamiliar) people. So it's still a really difficult path to seek out the right level of companionship and stimulation to keep me capable of moving and initiating action, but at least it's a path that *will work* vs ineffective solutions like meds, individualistic self-help strategies for executive function, or self-blame and shame.