Creative Recharging for Low-Capacity Days

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Often the lowcapacity comes from us pushing too hard for too long. So these are just days to help us get back on track to where we should be.
We should use that both and thinking and say, I'm having a lowcapacity day and I deserve a break.
And so we have this idea that we don't always have to push harder. We can also start doing the things that are going to make us feel better tomorrow.
One of the most overlooked ways of recharging is doing creative things. What I'm talking about is just fun creative stuff that we're doing for the enjoyment of doing it.
Most of the writing I do has a creative element to it, but I'm doing it for work and that doesn't create the same kind of recharging energy.
What we're looking for here is something that'll stretch our brains but won't stress us out.
Think things like drawing, coloring, playing with Legos, writing a poem, making music, or maybe even doing a puzzle.
You're doing that wordle, right?
But of course, I also like to try and get away from screens for this kind of creativity. Not because screens are bad per se, but more to that, when I'm on that screen, I'm more likely to be drawn into some other app instead of what I intended to do.
And these are just some examples of a few ideas.

One of the ideas that I was presented with during the pandemic was that of surge capacity - this is the idea that we all have reserves of emotional energy that we can call on when we’re in a crisis situation. And this was an important idea for people to grasp as the pandemic wore on because people were finding themselves depleted. Despite having been able to handle everything they eventually came to a wall where they didn’t have any more to give.

This is an important concept, but not specifically what I want to talk about today because what I want to talk about is what I gleaned from this idea. That we because we have surge capacity, we also have a normal capacity. This seems like a fairly obvious point, but also one I think that a lot of us with ADHD often overlook. Despite everything I know about planning it is still far too easy for me to try and squeeze too much into one day. And this isn’t just in terms of how much time I have or how much energy I have, but just how much I can reasonably take on.

In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring this idea of capacity and how it can impact our ability to get anything done. We be looking at what we can do on these days and how we can actually use them to help ourselves to recover.

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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/LowCapacity

This Episode’s Top Tips

We can hit low capacity when we’ve been pushing too hard for too long. Our capacity differs from our energy levels in that we can think of it as the total amount of energy we have for a day. Having a low capacity means that we’re not recovering and that when we do recover we’re only coming back to a low base rate of energy.
When we’re at low capacity we need to slow down and focus on the things we can do - this means prioritizing and thinking about ways we can apply “both-and” thinking where we accept reality and how we can function within it.
A great way to help build back up our capacity is creating some accountability around our self-care tasks so that we actually follow through with those intentions.