Feeling trapped by rigid productivity hacks or the pressure to “just start”? This episode of Rhythms of Focus invites you to reimagine focus—not as a battle of willpower, but as a gentle practice of agency.

For adults with ADHD and wandering minds, agency is the skill of deciding and engaging non-reactively, even when emotions or distractions surge like waves. Instead of forcing yourself forward, you’ll discover how to nurture a sense of agency that honors your rhythms and restores trust in your own choices.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why agency—not force—is the missing ingredient for meaningful productivity and self-trust
• How to move from shame-based or deadline-driven habits to a visit-based approach that supports your creative mind
• Practical ways to pause, sense your options, and make decisions that feel true to you

Key takeaways

• Practice “visits” instead of forcing action, building agency one gentle step at a time
• Use mindful pauses to transform overwhelm into clarity and choice
• Reframe “I don’t wanna” moments as signals to honor your agency, not shame yourself

Enjoy an original piano composition, Wind at Play, highlighting the practice between play and agency.

Subscribe to Rhythms of Focus and visit rhythmsoffocus.com for more resources, support, and inspiration designed for creative, wandering minds.

Keywords

#ADHD, #WanderingMinds, #agency, #gentleproductivity, #mindfulfocus, #visitbasedproductivity, #selftrust, #creativity, #selfcompassion, #rhythmsoffocus

Links

• Episode S01E04 - From Force to Flow with a Visit
• Episode S01E07 - Cautions of Dopamine and a Lean into Mastery
• “I just don’t wanna” and the Power of a Visit - Neurodivergent Insights
• What’s the Difference Between PDA and Demand Avoidance? - Neurodivergent Insights

Transcript

"I just don't wanna,"

it's a familiar refrain for those with wandering minds. So what do we do when we just don't wanna.

 Agency, Not Force, Unlocks Gentle Productivity

You may well know that once you're in it, you're good to go, but getting there can be terribly difficult. Yelling, "just start" hardly works. And when it does, it carries this host of troubles.

In earlier episodes, I talked about dopamine and the "interest-based nervous system" as it's been called, and how we might use these ideas against ourselves to say that we need some chemical or preexisting emotion to get to work. We adopt a sense that we cannot work by our own will.

But I did also hint at a third point of view.

We often focus on attention. For example, one type of wandering mind often carries such a diagnosis. ADHD. It's right there in the title, right? Attention Deficit hyperactivity Disorder. And there's even the inattentive type where we say that is the main focus.

But what's profoundly missing from the title and other wandering minds, such as the anxious, the creative, the absent-minded, and the like, is the sense of agency.

Now, what is that? It sounds simple. Maybe boring. Why bother with such an abstract idea? What does agency have to do with anything?

This central idea is a pillar to everything I write about, how I function as a psychoanalyst, and how I function as a teacher.

If you want to know the secret to what makes me stand out as a productivity talking head, I believe it comes from this focus on supporting our sense of agency and not about doing things.

So I hope you'll indulge me for a moment as we take this concept apart because I strongly believe that this not so simple skill is a trellis that supports so much, if not all, meaningful growth.

Deciding Without Drama: The Skill of Agency

Now, what do I mean by agency? Here's the definition.

Agency is the skill and degree to which we can decide and engage non-reactivity.

Let me repeat that definition: agency is the skill and degree to which we can decide and engage non-reactivity.

Alright, so let's take that apart and see what we get. Hopefully. I'll be able to convey what is so vital about this.

When I use the phrase "non-reactive", that's the end of the sentence there, that deciding and engage non-reactively, it means that we can sense our world within us, that emotional, thoughtful world without being swept away.

It is far too easy and maybe even the default to be carried by these waves. When we catch ourselves in the middle of an email, not realizing how we even got there, we're reactive. When we worry and can't decide on something, we're reactive to that worry. When we flip off that person that almost ran us off the road, were reactive to that anger.

Our interests, wants, needs, impulses, worries, and cares- they all touch, wash over, if not crash into us as waves. But when we can sense these emotions, these feelings, these thoughts to whatever degree we can and begin seeing them as information, we start to recognize the options they represent. Hearing that information, these messengers from within, were much more likely to engage from a place of meaning rather than one of reaction.

As such, we can now decide from the options they give us, connecting to whatever we find most meaningful in that moment.

And from this point, we can begin to engage. Here, the decision starts to take shape. We begin closing, collapsing the cloud of possibilities that once had been perhaps mourning the fantasies of what could have been.

From this non-reactive space, we can deliberately choose our next path, whether that's about deciding to have a cup of tea instead of diving into cleaning the closet, or planning out the next quarter's business plans.

In that nameless space where we form our options from our experience, non-reactively, we act with our greatest clarity.

Agency Is a Practice, Not a Trait

The beauty of agency is that it's a skill, something we can nurture and strengthen over time. Every time we notice a wave and choose a response, we're practicing agency. It's like a musician learning a new piece. We improve not by perfection, but by returning to the practice again and again.

And of course we all get swept away from time to time. That's not failure. It's part of being human. But every time we can catch ourselves or we can notice and realize we have a choice, we strengthen our skill.

A Simple Example

As a simple example, I'm writing and I notice this message alert at the top of my screen.

"Oh, hey, message from someone I've been waiting for,"

so I click it.

"Maybe I could just take care of that real quick."

And somewhere on the way to that message, maybe even as I'm writing it, there's this brief flicker of awareness that comes to mind.

"I'm wandering,"

I may not even remember where I'd wandered from, but in that skill, that pause, that's where I can start to sense my options.

"Oh, I'm writing a message here, but I have this vague feeling that I was just doing something else. Oh wait, I was writing."

And then maybe I feel a disappointment that I even wandered off, or maybe I feel an excitement for what I'm about to write to the friend of mine.

And maybe a thought about being thirsty comes to mind too.

And while I'm waiting in that pause, I wonder how I drifted from writing. It's not just distractibility, it's that I hit a wall of confusion while I was writing. I didn't know what to write. I didn't know the order.

"Oh no, people are gonna think that I'm full of it, and I don't know what I'm talking about."

That message that showed up in the corner of my screen gave me a way out. And my magnified mind, the small work table from which I can work, can easily have its contents knocked aside.

It's not just distractibility, it's that the emotions as they are, are huge. And they flash past quickly.

But as I paused, I thought,

"You know, if I can sit with that confusion in the writing, I often can find a path forward discover something useful and interesting along the way.

The work is to be with it.

I bring the document back, and I leave it in front of me as I wait there, seeing what comes to mind, maybe starting to nudge something forward.

That decision came from heightened agency that came from an acknowledgement of my world within which came from consideration, which ultimately, came from the birthplace of it all: a pause, the simplest and most difficult of any form of meaningful productivity.

A Skill to Practice

But because this is a skill means we can practice. It is something we can get better at.

Behind this practice of agency is the agent itself .

Some of the neuropsycho analytic community, for example, might argue that the purpose of consciousness itself is decision agency.

We might wonder whether we have free will or if everything's determined. But rather than view things through this dichotomy, what if we instead focused on this sense of our ability to make a decision non-reactively something we can practice and then have more or less of.

Agency and the Wandering Mind

Now, when it comes to a wandering mind, we often struggle. We lose things, we drop things, we lock ourselves outta the house. We dive deep, but then connect, we wade through scatter. We can do well here, but not there. But only today and not tomorrow. And not yesterday. And it's not clear why.

We might fear that if we decide to do something, we might choose poorly. And maybe that's because we have in the past.

When we struggle to get things done while others nearby make their calls, do their work, get to the things they enjoy with little difficulty, we might wonder

"What gives?"

And well-meaning others alongside our own internal voice might point out our problems and ask,

"Why can't you just?"

These gaffes, these stumbles, these insults over and over hit us.

Many of us start to believe that there's something wrong with us.

We lose trust in ourselves, and more specifically in the sense of agency: our ability to decide and engage non-reactivity.

In other words, this core sense of agency becomes raw, injured and hurt.

"Why can't you just?"

And other statements like these reinforce the injury. When we tell ourselves or hear from others to do the laundry, the taxes, the whatever, and then some sensation holds us back- what's that?

Some call it demand avoidance or pathological demand avoidance. Author Megan Anna Neff has a nicely considered article on her blog in which she makes a case for calling it Pervasive Drive for Autonomy.

Embedded within is this feeling of,

"I don't want to,"

or it's close cousin,

"I can't be bothered."

When I hear these phrases from others or myself I hear it as this cry of injured agency. Beyond decision is this agent, the self, the person making the decision. The center of consciousness becomes this marker that we exist.

When we don't trust ourselves to make decisions that feel meaningful, that feel to be in our best interest and the best interest of those we love and care for, we can feel lost.

And in those moments, someone tells us what to do, they're taking away not only our decision, but our sense of personhood. Losing autonomy, we collapse, rebel, yell with the raw power of the time in our lives where we began to insist on our being.

The toddler within.

"I don't wanna! No!"

These simple but powerful ways, tell the world,

"I exist."

We instantly create this contrast through contest, through opposition, separating ourselves from the world. This injured sense of agency screams,

"I am!"

Even if that looks like lying on the couch.

And in those moments we managed to fight through and stumble into some flow forward and someone else says,

"Hey, can you go do that thing?"

That thing that we were just about to do anyway, we collapse. Not because of some chemical, , but because of that sense of agency, our personhood, our place to practice and grow from feels like it's been taken.

Crashing waves in the seas of a wandering minds, times of stress a only make it worse. Our desire to simply exist, becoming that much more profound striving as we are not to drown.

It might sound strange. But when agency is injured, some part of us absolutely resents being told what to do, even if that person is ourselves. And every attempt to force ourselves makes this rejecting part of us stronger, if not louder.

Our sense of,

"Hey, I should go do that thing"

becomes this authority to which our injured sense of agency says,

"no."

Worsening the Spiral through Force

When we're in this position where we can't make ourselves do the things and yet feel we must, we often resort to force.

This can take many forms: waiting for deadlines, creating fake deadlines. Overscheduling ourselves, shaming ourselves, staking our reputation on something through public declarations of goals that are impossible. Waiting until we feel like it, trying to fake feeling like it, asking others to remind us over and over, among many other possibilities.

However we do so, it comes from this feeling that we cannot do it on our own. We do not trust ourselves.

Still, once the momentum is there, from whatever means we got there, once we quote, just start, sometimes we can keep going. We might even support this, with our tendency to conflate morality with sacrifice: maybe our desire to be a good person requires pain.

And with that idea in mind, we now have this recipe for an ever worsening spiral, an awful torrential wind that creates a swing back and forth between tremendous effort and terrible collapse .

And perhaps worse seeming success at using force directly says we need force, that our sense of agency doesn't work. We cannot decide we have no free will, and that to get any work done, any emotion that says otherwise should simply be ignored.

Navigating can feel like moving through quicksand.

Hollow Wins

And just as an aside, let me make things a little worse. The wins we achieve are often hollow. Even if the results outwardly look like we've done well, there's a fragility that comes from this forced nature.

For example, let's say you get an A on a test, you've crammed for it the night before, but the knowledge disappears quickly. This emptiness comes not just from the superficial nature of the achievement, but from how we got it.

Had we absorbed the same material over the same timeframe, driven by genuine curiosity, a desire to learn, we would likely have remembered it much differently. We would likely have remembered it much differently embedded within at our disposal, rather than held in some fragile box of rote memory

Agency is injured. "I don't wanna," is the cry of an injured self.

We double down on the things we can count on. Maybe that next deadline will light the fire of that fickle and dangerous fuel of anxiety maybe.

The Pause that Powers Gentle Productivity

So of course the question comes back, how do we regain agency? How do we heal it? How do we do what we want to when we just don't want to? The simplest though, also most difficult answer comes from the definition.

Once again,

Agency is the skill and degree to which we can decide and engage non-reactively.

To reach this state of being non-reactive means that we pause. We pause with that experience and with that decision, whatever the feeling, the object, the thing is that we are trying to confront and we wait with that.

We wait for our thoughts, for our feelings about it to come to mind about that experience, that decision, whatever focus we've chosen. And when those feelings of anxiety, excitement, and the rest no longer tell you anything new, whether they've come to a standstill or they're simply repeating, they've come to this point of being settled.

When we reach this point, we've let our ideas and sensations about something come to this standstill, we now have our options before us.

We see the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations. We translate the messages they present, as well as we can. At least for this moment, we've reached a height of agency.

Simple, but not at all easy.

Two Approaches

I can tell you that I personally approach this in two ways, and I'll start with the more complex one first. The first is my being a psychoanalyst.

In psychoanalysis, we look at a person's world through the lenses of meaning, motivation, and experience. We recognize the emotions, the thoughts, the winds, the waters, whether they caress or bash into this vessel of consciousness. We consider how in our attempts to survive these seas, we might even inadvertently create and worsen conditions for ourselves.

By examining these thoughts as they come to mind, their potential meanings that resonate from the stories within, we try to know where we might regain, discover, or create a sense of agency so we can start taking charge of our lives once again.

The human mind is a deep, vast, rich, and complex world, and the work can be considerable.

But I believe there's also this second simpler approach, at least, it has a much simpler beginning.

And I've mentioned it already and I'll mention it again.

Pause.

Quite likely you're in the middle of something. When aren't you?

Maybe you're deciding what to do next. Maybe you're working on something, maybe you're having dinner, maybe you're spending time with someone.

But in that pause, if you're able to do so, see what comes to mind about whatever it is you're doing.

Some things might seem related, some may well not. You might even be surprised.

You don't need to do a thing. But in being there, at least to whatever degree that's caring to yourself, you connect more strongly with those forces within, including the subtle complexities that run beneath a deceptively simple, "I don't wanna."

Be there. And when no new information comes to mind, the options are before you. Thoughts from your past self- past intentions, memories- considerations for your future self -desire, worry- these are brought together in a respect for present self- your energies, the conditions where you are in this moment.

At this height of agency, you can decide to engage wherever you'd like, including doing nothing.

Certainly there's more to say. Certainly there are means of structuring our decisions. In fact, that's the nature of story of games, of tasks over very existence.

In fact, in my Waves of Focus course, I outline several places where pausing can help, and then the structured decisions that can guide easing the burdens of a workflow, particularly for a wandering mind.

Takeaway

So as a takeaway, maybe sometime this week, try to notice some moment where you feel swept away by a wave of emotion or some impulse. Can you pause even briefly and see what comes to mind? Maybe ask yourself, what are my options here? What feels most meaningful...