Stop Yelling at Your Car

I know what you’re thinking. Who is yelling at their car?

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you are.

In this scenario, you are the car. And you keep yelling at yourself.

Do more. Start already. Stop scrolling. Eat healthier. Walk more. Sleep earlier. Wake up earlier. Start on the task. Stop doing this. Talk to X. Stop talking to Y.

I wonder how effective it is to talk to a car like that. Not very, I assume.

We are sort of like cars. Or at least, that’s what I think of systems.

For example, look at someone who yells at their car for not having fuel versus someone who knows that their car needs fuel.

In both instances, the problem is the same. The car is low on fuel.

But one person is yelling at their car as if the fuel will spontaneously appear in the engine, while the other knows that the car normally needs fuel around this time if it needs to drive to point Y.

The difference isn’t that one car is better behaved.

The difference is that one person understands the system.

This article is less about self-criticism and more about why it is important to be self-aware and to have systems for managing yourself.

Let’s look at each individually.

Why you need self-awareness

There are two ways of operating in general: reactive and responsive.

Reactive people wait until there is an input to react to. They eat when they’re hungry. They go to bed when they’re tired. They start when the deadline is close. Something happens, and then they respond to it.

Then there are people who are more proactive. They understand the bigger picture and any expectations there might be, and their actions are based on the information they already have.

Of course, nobody is completely one or the other, and there are times when being reactive is exactly what is needed.

But if you are going to be with yourself for the rest of your life, then it might be worth taking some time to understand yourself and start responding to your needs because you know they’ll be there, rather than constantly reacting to them in the moment.

I call the reactive people firefighters.

And ADHDers are very good at firefighting.

We can wait until the last possible moment, suddenly find the urgency we needed, and somehow get the thing done.

But it is a very exhausting way to live.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The problem with firefighting is that you are always waiting for something to catch fire before you do anything about it.

Self-awareness allows you to notice the patterns before they become emergencies.

If I know that I tend to get hungry at night but don’t have the capacity to cook when I’m very hungry, that’s useful information.

If I know that I don’t usually feel urgency until a project is very close to its deadline, that’s useful information.

If I know that I struggle to go to bed when I leave everything involved in “getting ready for bed” until the moment I am supposed to go to bed, that’s useful information too.

None of this is a character flaw.

It’s information.

And information is useful when you actually do something with it.

The second thing is routines

Routines are essentially leveraging the information you learn from your self-awareness experiments and designing systems that meet those needs.

For example, let’s say I don’t usually feel very hungry in the morning. But by 11pm, I am usually too hungry to start doing anything, including cooking something healthy. In that case, when I wake up in the morning, I might make my meal for the day. Not because I’m hungry or need to eat at that moment, but because I know that by the time I am hungry, that version of me will not have all the capacity needed to make a healthy meal.

I’m not forcing myself to be different.

I’m working with the information I have about myself.

If I know that I don’t usually feel urgency until a project is really close to the due date, then I might rope in a colleague so we can check in with each other periodically on our projects. Now I have intermediate deadlines instead of just one final deadline.
That creates some of the drive I need to start before the project becomes an emergency.

This is what I mean when I talk about systems.

The system is not there because I am incapable of doing the thing.

It’s there because I know something about myself that makes doing the thing harder under certain conditions.

And instead of waiting until I’m stuck and then yelling at myself to do better, I can change the conditions.

It’s the difference between yelling at the car because it won’t move and checking the fuel gauge because you know the car needs fuel.

The truth is, you are going to be with yourself for as long as you live.

You might as well get to know yourself.

Pay attention to what drains you, what gives you energy, when you tend to struggle, what makes things easier, what makes things harder, and what you repeatedly find yourself doing.

Then use that information.

Not to find more reasons to yell at yourself.

But to build systems that actually work for you.