Why I'm like Joey Tribbiani and his baby-proofed fridge

Beholden to my own energy

As someone with ADHD, I feel ridiculously beholden to my own energy. My dopamine levels, my motivation, my focus, it's not something I get to choose. I cannot predict who I'm going to be on any given day. What I'll be able to focus on. What I'll actually be able to do.

Some days I'm sat there, frozen in executive dysfunction, unable to do the simplest task. Nothing complicated. Stuff that should take five minutes. And I just cannot bring myself to do it. That's a scary feeling, how out of control it is. An inability to just dig deep and find the motivation, no matter how much I want to.

And then, when I am motivated, when I do feel focused, I feel like I'm at serious risk of burnout. Because suddenly I've got this tiny wisp of energy, and who knows when I'll get it again? So I try to do everything I possibly can with it, right now, because the dopamine, the novelty, the focus all lining up like this feels rare.

The Joey Tribbiani moment I can't shake

There's an episode of Friends I always think about with this one (I'm a millennial so of course I can compare all of my life events to episodes of Friends!)

Rachel's just had Emma, and she's baby-proofing the apartment, including the fridge. Joey cannot get into that fridge. He's desperately trying and trying. And when he finally gets in pretty much by accident, he fills his arms with as much food and drink as he can carry, and as he walks away he says, "who knows when I'll be able to get in here again."

That is EXACTLY how it feels when I suddenly have motivation and focus. Like I've got to grab everything I possibly can, right now, because I have no idea when I'll get back in that fridge. In hyperfocus I often mutter to myself in a Joey voice, 'who knows when I'll be able to get in here again'.

The lack of control over it, the unpredictability, not knowing when the whim's going to hit, is one of the harder parts of having ADHD for me. I can't say "next week I'll do this, this, and this" with any real confidence, because I don't actually know what my brain is going to allow me to do.

Medication has helped a lot with the extreme end of this. But it hasn't fixed it completely, and I'm on a relatively low dose because I struggle with side effects. So it's still a constant tug of war.

Grabbing everything the second the fridge's open isn't the healthiest move either. That instinct to cram in as much as possible while the motivation's there is often exactly what tips me into burnout.

Why this matters for every workplace, not just ADHD brains

But there are people like this in every workplace. People whose energy, focus and motivation don't run on a steady nine-to-five clock. Understanding that pattern in your colleagues, rather than expecting everyone's motivation to look the same, makes a real difference.

Not everyone's fridge opens on the same schedule (I'm really rinsing this analogy now!!). The workplaces that get the best out of people are the ones that make room for that.