576 - The Anti-System: For When Normal Habits, Productivity, and Wellness Practices Aren’t Working

Creative Pep Talk

The host explains why conventional self-help, productivity, and wellness systems frequently fail neurodivergent or highly creative individuals. He introduces the 'Hunting Journal' as a functional

Key takeaways

• Host reveals that as an ADHD person, certainty and predictability increase his stress rather than calm him, making novelty-seeking essential for mental regulation.
• He contrasts traditional gratitude journals with his proposed 'Hunting Journal,' which tracks progress in body, work, and social areas to satisfy a psychological need for active pursuit.

Main topics

• Neurodivergence & ADHD
• Creative productivity systems

Notable quotes

Screw gratitude journals, man. It doesn't work for me.

Conclusion

The episode provides a practical framework for neurodivergent and creative individuals

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Is your approach to life not working as well as you hoped it would or as well as you would like it to? You've tried everything. You've got the habit system, the meditation app, the box breathing, the things that supposedly work for most people. You've tried all of them and they're just not quite cutting it for you. I have been there more times than I'd like to count or admit. I am a neurodivergent, creative chaos Muppet. And I have become a self-help addict, a junkie at times in my life, trying to figure out how to keep all of this together. But in this episode, I want to share the big shift that really started to help. And it wasn't. gratitude journal. It was something very, very different. And it has helped me to do better at email, sure, and also health and also work and allowed me to do the projects and books that I wanted to make. And I'm calling it The Hunting Journal. Okay. And it's very, very different to a gratitude journal. And we'll get to that. But first we got to talk about the three needs that you have that you need to take seriously and how to approach them in a way that might actually be successful. Let's go. Speaker 1 (1:40) We would all like to survive. We would love it if we could thrive. I know I feel like that. And we've all heard the same advice about how to do that. You got to have habits. You got to have a routine. You got to stay calm. Don't get too stressed. You got to be grateful. You got to... know that eight out of 10 people are happier with the gratitude journal and six out of 10 people found that box breathing saved their marriage. You've heard all of this stuff before, right? And when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I became a self-help junkie because things weren't going well for me. I was. struggling to become an adult and do that in any way that felt like it was working. And so I was just desperately consuming as much self-help information as I could find. And I found that a lot of it I couldn't do. It just wasn't taking for me. And when I got my ADHD diagnosis, initially I felt like... Maybe I'm just a different kind of animal and that means I can't be trained and I'm going to be doomed to being feral and just scrape by for the rest of my existence. And speaking of feral, we just got a puppy, a new puppy who is at times very feral and completely... like a demon, and then other times a complete angel that we are just obsessed with. Her name is Zelda after the video game, of course. We love her and she's adorable. But she's a little bit different than the dogs we've had in the past because the dogs we've had in the past were small dogs and she is 50 % Great Pyrenees. Now, it looks like she's not gonna be like mega, mega huge, but she's gonna be bigger than any dog we've ever had. And so this time around, we're afraid and we're taking training so much more seriously. We're taking her to puppy preschool on Saturdays. And sometimes I think that the teacher can see that we're a little bit anxious and she encourages us. Like at one point, Zelda at the end of class didn't want to do the playtime with all the other puppies and just hid under a chair and started sleeping. And the teacher must have noticed that we were like worried, like, come on, Zelda, come on, Zelda. And she was like, yeah, like Zelda is going to be a big dog. She is a different animal. And what she didn't say was, therefore, she can't be trained. She's doomed to be feral and just scrape by. No, she didn't say that. She said that Zelda is a different animal and will need different training. You'll have to have a different approach. You'll have to have different concessions. It's going to be different. And the biggest leap in growth towards having a more thriving life for me came from when I realized as an ADHD person, as a creative person, that I'm a different animal. And it doesn't mean that I can't thrive or I am doomed to be feral. It means that I have to have a different approach, that it doesn't matter what works for most people. I'm not like most people. And I might be the two out of 10 that it doesn't work for. And I have to figure out what do those people do? And I have to figure out what do I need to do as an individual that, and forget about what anyone else thinks about it. And this show, we talk a lot about creativity. We talk about, I mentioned a lot about being ADHD. I know that some people that listen to this show are neurodivergent. Some people aren't. Some people come here just for the creative stuff. I've become more and more suspicious and convinced that whether you are neurodivergent or not, that taking the ADHD neurodivergent approach is helpful in doing most creative things. That the creative state of the brain, no matter who you are, that every person has access to, it might work a little bit more like being neurodivergent and that we can all kind of learn from each other. And so if you're trying to do creative things,