The ADHD Money Problem Nobody Talks About

Overcoming the resistance that keeps you stuck

Keeping up with finances when you have ADHD can feel like running into an invisible wall every day.

You know exactly what you need to do: Open the app. Check the balance. Look at what came in, what went out, what’s overdue.

It’ll take ten minutes! Maybe fifteen, you tell yourself. This is what you always tell yourself, and yet, it never seems to work.

Instead you fritter away two hours on Instagram, watching strangers on vacation and before-and-after kitchen renovations. Suddenly it’s late and you’re tired and the moment has passed. Again.

Then, the shame spiral commences.

You feel lazy and irresponsible; yet, what’s happening to you is neither of these things. It’s what ADHD educator Brendan Mahan calls “The Wall of Awful.”

The Wall of Awful gets created, brick by brick, with every repeated failure, disappointment, rejection, or instance of guilt. It’s an emotional barrier which makes starting objectively simple tasks excruciatingly difficult. You’d rather do anything else.

From the outside, the Wall is invisible. No one can see what you’re struggling with, and it just looks like inaction. Yet, the avoidance of the task leads to more disappointment and guilt.

Money management might be the ultimate brick-making factory for the wall of awful.

The time you charged your way through a vacation without paying attention to the amounts.
The debt you took on before you were old enough to legally drink.
The way your partner doesn’t trust you around money.
The impulse spending that seemed so minor at the time.

The bricks build up until it takes so much effort to just look at your retirement account, to start a conversation about money, to pay those late fees, that you stop trying to scale the Wall at all.

Eventually, you lose not just the ability to tackle individual tasks, but any motivation to work on your overall financial status or improve your financial skills. But no one wins if you can’t get over the Wall.

Money touches almost everything in your life, so to turn away from it is to live a smaller, restrained life.

It’s like sitting in a world-class Italian restaurant and never turning past the first page of the menu. Do you only want to eat antipasti for the rest of your life?! (Nevermind, don’t answer that.)

Photo by David B Townsend on Unsplash

Assuming that you don’t want to live in the paralyzing shadow of the Wall of Awful, what can you do? Brendan Mahan has some helpful suggestions:

1. Create handholds to climb the Wall.

Become aware of the emotions that come up around money and acknowledge them out loud. Take action on the feelings: talk to a friend or therapist, and try being kinder to yourself about the resistance you’re feeling.

2. Or, forget climbing the Wall and look for a door!

Photo by Zulian Firmansyah on Unsplash

Mahan recommends changing your emotional state with music or altering your environment. He writes, “The Wall of Awful is often strongest at home because we’re surrounded by our responsibilities, struggles, failures, distractions, and concerns.”

The wonderful part of this metaphor is that it doesn’t absolve us from dealing with our money. Instead, it acknowledges the struggle as an obstacle instead of pretending it’s not there.

For me, Mahan is putting his finger on why I was able to stick with YNAB even though I had previously struggled to implement basic personal-finance advice. Willpower is overrated, but self-awareness is gold.

I’d love to hear from my ADHD friends in the comments:
What’s the one thing (a tool, habit, mindset shift, or even a weird trick that works for you) that finally made money feel a little easier to face?

Until next time,

Dan