Doing less without disappearing

Energy, ideas, and living with an AuDHD brain in a world that never shuts up

I didn’t plan to write this piece. It arrived sideways, which is how most of the important things in my life seem to arrive, ideas included. I was tired, undercharged, and mid-conversation when something quietly clicked. Not a revelation exactly. More a gentle thud, like a book finally landing flat on the table after years of being carried around under one arm.

I’m 67. I’m a psychologist. I have an ADHD brain and I’m autistic. I also live in a culture that remains deeply convinced that if you’re not producing something visible, preferably on a schedule and ideally with a pleasing graph attached, then you’re at best underachieving and at worst morally suspect.

I have spent a large part of my adult life unconvinced by this argument, and the rest of it actively damaged by trying to live as though it were true.

Ideas are plentiful. Energy is not.

One of the enduring myths about ADHD is that the problem is a lack of ideas. Anyone who has actually lived inside an ADHD brain for more than five minutes knows this is nonsense. Ideas are not scarce. They are legion. They arrive with enthusiasm, urgency, and an unhelpful optimism about how much energy you have and how late it is.

Add autism into the mix and those ideas don’t just sparkle, they grip. They want depth, immersion, precision, and full cognitive surrender. You don’t dabble, you disappear. Three days later you resurface, pleased with what you’ve made, faintly surprised that the sun is still doing its thing, and completely knackered.

For years, I treated the arrival of an idea as an instruction. If something felt alive, I assumed it needed to be acted on immediately. If I was excited, I must be ready. This logic has the internal consistency of a toddler who’s just discovered sugar.

The pattern was always the same. A burst of focus. A satisfying plunge into depth. Then the crash. And a brief, solemn vow to be more sensible next time, which lasted right up until the next idea arrived.

The battery problem nobody warns you about

What I’ve learned, somewhat later than ideal, is that my internal energy system is not linear. It is volatile. When it moves from empty to slightly less empty, my brain behaves as though I’m fully charged. A marginal improvement in how I feel is interpreted as total recovery, and I fling myself back into life with the enthusiasm of someone who has apparently learned nothing from previous experience.

This is not a character flaw. It’s a calibration problem.

An idea returning does not mean energy has returned. It means the nervous system has noticed a change. That distinction becomes rather important once you’ve had a few decades of evidence that your internal fuel gauge is, at best, optimistic.

Western productivity culture is spectacularly unhelpful here. It treats capacity as binary. You are either “on” or you are “off”. Rest is something you earn after effort, not something you need in order for effort to be possible at all. For neurodivergent people, this is a fast track to living permanently on fumes while being told to smile about it.

Eventually, the body objects.

Not politely.

Why doing less feels like giving up (and isn’t)

An article that recently landed in my inbox written by Josh Schachnow argued that our brains are wired to add rather than subtract, and that in modern life this bias pushes us toward doing more even when doing more is precisely the problem (Schachnow, 2026). From an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense. More once meant safer. More food, more tools, more allies.

Unfortunately, “more” now looks like commitments, notifications, projects, obligations, and a constant background hum of cognitive noise that never quite switches off. Psychologists call this cognitive load, the mental effort required to juggle information, decisions, and competing demands. When cognitive load stays high for too long, clarity drops, emotional regulation frays, and even small decisions start to feel oddly taxing (Sweller et al., 2019).

In plain English, the mind gets cluttered, the nervous system starts twitching, and everyone pretends this is normal.

Doing less feels wrong because subtraction looks like failure in a culture obsessed with addition. We are rarely taught how to remove demands without also removing our sense of worth.

ADHD, autism, and mistaking spark for fuel

This is where AuDHD really matters.

ADHD brings spark. Autism brings depth. Together, they can produce extraordinary insight and creativity, along with a near-religious faith in the idea that excitement equals capacity. A good idea feels like fuel. It is not fuel. It is a dashboard light.

Treating it like petrol is how people like me repeatedly end up stranded on the side of the road, slightly baffled, wondering how this has happened again when we were being so enthusiastic at the time.

There is one sentence I keep coming back to lately, because it lands every time.

I am not broken, I am depleted.

Once you accept that, the question shifts. It stops being “How do I get back to doing more?” and becomes “How do I stop burning what little energy I have the moment it reappears?”

Letting ideas exist without immediately obeying them

One of the most effective changes I’ve made is also the least dramatic. When an idea arrives, I acknowledge it and put it somewhere external, then I leave it alone.

That “somewhere” can be a notebook, a single trusted Word document, Apple Notes, Evernote, Google Docs, or an old-fashioned bit of paper and a pen. Pen and paper still deserve respect here. They slow the mind just enough to prevent ideas from turning into projects before anyone’s checked whether that’s a good idea.

The important part is this: writing an idea down is not the first step of doing it. It is a parking manoeuvre. Once the idea is out of my head and safely stored, my brain stops re-presenting it as urgent. I don’t outline it. I don’t improve it. I don’t “just check one thing”. I note it, close the document, and go back to resting.

Ideas do not die because they are ignored. They die because they are overused too early.

Pacing without turning life into a management seminar

I don’t keep a diary. I don’t follow a weekly rhythm. I don’t run my life through a system, however compassionate or beautifully colour-coded it claims to be. ADHD brains are notoriously allergic to imposed structure, and mine has always reacted to it like a cat being offered a bath.

Pacing, for me, looks much simpler and far less impressive. It means stopping while I still have interest left. It means deliberately leaving energy unused, which feels faintly rebellious after a lifetime of pushing through. It means ending things before I’m empty, even when the momentum is good, because I know exactly how that story ends if I don’t.

That discomfort is not failure. It’s foresight.

Regulation is not productivity, and that’s the point

Some of the most restorative things I do would never make it onto a productivity blog. Taking the dog for a quiet walk. Going out mid-week with a camera when there’s no one else around and the world hasn’t started shouting yet. Driving in the country, if you’re lucky enough to have access to a car, sometimes with music, sometimes without, letting the mind slow down by a percentage point or two.

Noise exhausts ADHD brains. People exhaust them too, often in ways we don’t notice until it’s too late. Solitude, quiet, and visual attention are not indulgences. They are regulation.

You don’t come back from these activities with something to show for them. You come back with a nervous system that’s stopped bracing.

Human productivity versus cultural productivity

There is a difference between being productive in a human sense and being productive in a Western cultural sense. Human productivity includes recovery, reflection, wandering, and periods of apparent inactivity where something quieter is taking place under the surface. Cultural productivity tends to notice only what can be counted, published, uploaded, or monetised.

As a psychologist, I am increasingly convinced that many of the difficulties we label as motivational or behavioural are actually physiological responses to systems that never stop asking for more.

Doing less is not opting out of life. It is how some of us stay in it.

If any of this sounds familiar

If you live with an ADHD brain, an autistic nervous system, or both, and you find yourself cycling between intense engagement and complete exhaustion, there is nothing uniquely wrong with you. You may simply be running on strategies that once worked but now cost more than they give back.

Letting ideas exist without acting on them is not suppression. It is stewardship. Allowing rest without justification is not laziness. It is maintenance. Subtracting demands is not giving up. It is making space.

Sometimes the most psychologically sound thing you can do is stop trying to optimise yourself and start listening to what your body has been saying for years.

[p.s. I wrote a book about the near-fanatical obsession the West has with optimisation: You’re not imagining it, it IS this weird: Notes on surviving the optimisation trap]

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). DSM-5-TR: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). APA Publishing.

Hopkins, L. (2025). You’re not imagining it, it IS this weird: Notes on surviving the optimisation trap. degrees138

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Northrup, K. (2019). Do less: A revolutionary approach to time and energy management for busy mums. Hay House.

Schachnow, J. (2026). Here’s why you need to do less. Learn Your Brain. https://open.substack.com/pub/learnyourbrain/p/heres-why-you-need-to-do-less

Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2019). Cognitive load theory (2nd ed.). Springer.