ADHDers Learn to Avoid the “Learning Process”

ADHD in 5-Minutes: From Frustration to Understanding [#007]

I absolutely hated school growing up.

To this day, my friends and family can regularly hear me ranting about our notions and methods of public schooling, particularly in the USA.

After being diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s, it’s becoming increasingly easy to see why I hated school. And it’s taken me a while to understand how damaging it’s been to be ‘educated’ the way I have. Also, at least in this issue, I’m not interested in exploring or acknowledging specifically how I’ve benefited;

I’m grateful, I truly am. Instead I want to focus on how fucking toxic it’s been, not only to my life but to so many other ADHDers I’ve talked with.

Passing through this particular educational system with its singular focus on “outcome” has (in an awesomely tragic way) completely failed.

Because the blind fixation on outcome fails to recognize a fundamental reality: Outcomes always arise from Processes.

And, I could bet that anything you’ve created or produced, that you deemed “good,” was likely a result of being engaged in a process.

So the way we’ve been educated, to fixate on outcome, usually leads to a particular fixation of skipping over the process:

Give me the summary!

Give me the step-by-step!!

Give me the easily skimmed recap!!!

Just take me to that place or give me the information. You know? So I can have the outcome of highest value for the lowest cost.

Without getting completely mired in the historical, sociocultural, economic and political context that produced an educational system with this outcome, I want to focus specifically on why ADHDers are impacted in such a severe way.

In a society whose singular focus is outcome, the neurotypical brain has some ability to reverse-engineer a process and then slowly refine it so a desired outcome becomes moderately reliable.

However, the ADHD brain can't play these "games" for many reasons.

And here's where it gets particularly cruel for ADHDers: our educational system trains us to avoid the learning process altogether.

The Birth of "Disappointment Aversion"

What I've come to understand (after years of wondering why I'd rather deep clean my entire house than create an online course) is that most ADHDers develop what I call "Disappointment Aversion,” which is a deeply ingrained habit of avoiding situations where there’s a decent chance our expectations won’t be met.

What can appear as laziness or lack of motivation is actually a learned protective response that gets hardwired into our brains after years of unexpected and confusing outcomes.

Here's how it happens:

Your Brain's Glitchy Early Warning System

Picture this: You're working on something, feeling pretty good about it, when suddenly you're drowning in frustration and it’s not clear how you got there.

That's because your ADHD brain has difficulty detecting its own internal states and various needs. Remember, from the last issue, this is called Diminished Interoceptive Awareness.

The part of your brain responsible for this (called the insula) that's supposed to produce apparent, early warnings about state changes—"Hey, you're getting overwhelmed," "Heads up, there’s already a lot of confusing information in front of us"—is inconsistently activated. So you don't realize you're getting frustrated, overwhelmed, or confused until you're already deep in those feelings. Meanwhile, another part of your brain (the amygdala) is primed to react intensely to negative emotional triggers.

Together, it's like having a smoke detector that doesn't go off until your house is already on fire, but when it finally does go off, it's a remarkably jarring alarm…because you notice that a third of your house is already burned down…

In school, this looked like: feeling confident about that essay you wrote, turning it in, then getting it back covered in red ink and feeling like you'd been emotionally sucker-punched. The shock hits harder because your brain gives you zero warning that anything was wrong.

While this just sounds like the learning process, which has a certain amount of disappointment baked into it, the ADHDer’s experience of emotions is actually far more intense than their neurotypical peers.

After enough of these jarring experiences, the ADHD brain starts to build a model of what happened, and eventually thinks: “Better to avoid figuring out what went ‘wrong’ than risk experiencing disappointment.”

Excuse Me: Only “Small Effort, Big Rewards” Please

Here's the second cruel twist.

Remember, from the last issue, your ADHD brain's reward-process system is quite different. The parts of your brain (namely the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex) that are supposed to detect and process rewards—which are little hits of “satisfaction” that help keep you focused and motivated—are basically running with a remarkable bias towards ‘low effort, high reward’ activities.

While neurotypical brains seem to get energized by getting a good grade making steady progress, the ADHD brain barely registers (or recognizes) progress.

Learning, especially complex systems and nuanced concepts, is inherently about delayed gratification.

The process generally looks like this: gather information, build mental models, test those models, encounter lapses or mistakes in understanding, feel confused, amend those mental models through gathering information or reflecting on experience, then eventually (after passing through this process enough) achieve understanding.

But if your brain can't detect those incremental, often low-level, rewards along the way—"oh, it’s this way instead!"—the whole process can feel incredibly exhausting and frustrating.

The Disappointment Aversion Cycle

After enough cycles of this pattern, your brain learns a devastatingly simple model based on its consistent experience: Trying for an Outcome = Unpredictable, Intense Emotional Pain.

So you start avoiding. Not just the hard stuff—eventually, you start avoiding anything that resembles a learning process. You skip over explanations and go straight to summaries ("Just give me the TL;DR, Michael!"). You avoid courses that might challenge you. You develop elaborate procrastination habits that keep you from starting things that might lead to “failure.”

This becomes particularly sneaky because it masquerades as preference: "I just like to get to the point quickly" or "I learn better when I can see the big picture first." And while this is likely true in many cases, if you’re not careful you will miss that it is disappointment aversion in disguise.

The tragedy is that this aversion to process-based learning robs you of the very thing that could help you succeed. Learning requires iteration, experimentation, and (unavoidably so) failure. But when your brain has been trained to interpret the feeling of disappointment as an emotional assault then avoiding the process is the safest choice.

Calibrated to Cause Disappointment Aversion

Our educational system (and society) couldn't have been better designed to create disappointment aversion in ADHD brains:

• Grades focus on end results, not learning processes

• Mistakes are marked in angry colors rather than treated as valuable information

• Time constraints that favor brains who can more easily detect and respond to progress signals

For neurotypicals, this system is suboptimal but workable. Their brains can reverse-engineer successful processes, and their reward systems can sustain them as they troubleshoot inaccurate models.

For ADHD brains, this system is like asking someone with a broken leg to run a marathon, then berating them when they say they hate running.

The Long-term Damage

The real tragedy? This doesn’t just stay in a school setting.

Disappointment aversion follows you everywhere.

• You put off learning new, and necessary, skills at work.

• You resist trying hobbies that take time to develop.

• You run away from interpersonal conflict, leading to broken relationships.

You can quickly become afraid of any experience that involves any appreciable risk of an unexpected and discomforting outcome.

I teach clients all the time about this topic, and I still catch myself regularly falling for this belief: trying = emotional pain.

Here’s something that happens frequently for me: I'll buy a course (even for something I’m truly interested in), get really excited about it, and maybe complete the first module that talks about the outline for the course to never pick it up again because some part of my brain is convinced it's going to end badly.

My brain tells me: Better to keep it as a possibility than to risk another disappointment.

…I felt like crying while writing that…

Breaking the Pattern

Just as it took time to learn, understanding disappointment aversion and addressing it takes a fair bit of time as well.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy “step-by-step” for this.

The “fastest” way out I’ve pieced together comes through (1) psychoeducation, (2) practicing acceptance, and then (3) setting up certain supports to make ‘learning’ enjoyable again.

Hopefully, some of the first two items an be gleaned through this issue, as well as others. As for (3), I’m working on an actionable guide that I’m going to send to my subscribers later this month.

There’s a lot that ADHDers can do to address this, I promise, and hopefully the guide I’m working on will give you the tools necessary to rekindle a love for learning.

You’re not to blame for many of the challenges you face.

But, as you learn more about ADHD, you become more and more responsible to do something about those challenges.

Learning who you are and what you need can be a painful process; please, please, be gentle with yourself.

---

If you read this far, thank you for your attention!

In today’s age, your attention is literally one of the most valuable things on the planet right now; I’m grateful you invested it here.

Also, if you found this information and issue interesting, and/or want to receive that free guide in the near future, please subscribe to ADHDn5!

As always, sending you many, many good vibes! Till next week.

Cheers,
Michael