Subconscious Sludge Makes ADHD Worse (How To Achieve Lasting Mental Clarity)

Last updated: December 22nd, 2019

When you have ADHD, most of your attention revolves around the core aspects of surviving planet Earth.

Most of your attention probably goes towards:

• Family
• Friends
• Work
• Kids
• School
• Food, water, shelter & clothing

Life can be difficult on this planet. Which is why it’s entirely normal to focus on the basic “survival” aspects of living on planet Earth. People with ADHD are stressed out enough as it is.

But, would you believe me if I told you there’s a way to drastically reduce the amount of pain and suffering in your life in a relatively short period of time?

What if I told you that you can finally start to experience the best aspects of life (like achieving lasting mental clarity) as soon as you begin the process of removing your subconscious pains, trumas and blockages?

It’s estimated that the subconscious mind is at least 1000x more powerful than the conscious mind.

What’s interesting is that almost no one is talking about the power of the subconscious.

Except for some psychologists, performance coaches, professional athletes and fans of Sigmund Freud.

While ADHD continues to be an enormous challenge for millions of people around the world, your subconscious sludge is most likely adding fuel to the fire of ADHD.

This article is designed to help you remove your subconscious sludge (subconscious blockages) so that you can finally feel mentally refreshed once again.

How Subconscious Sludge or Subconscious Blockages Add Serious Mental Baggage To Your Life

It’s long been believed that children are creative, loving, freethinking and stress-free until “society gets to them.”

In the Western world, many children are pushed into 12+ years of public schooling, which is usually followed by a stressful corporate career.

Is there any wonder why so many people with ADHD are dealing with so much pain and discomfort?

On top of dealing with ADHD, there’s a chance that your subconscious mind has also been filled to the brim with unfinished tasks, bad memories, traumatic experiences and other unresolved problems dating back months, years or decades.

But there is a good side to all of this…

You will experience some of the most satisfying mental clarity of your life as soon as you start eliminating junk from your subconscious mind.

The rest of this article reveals how.

But first, let’s get started with the most basic, fundamental aspects of removing subconscious sludge from your life.

Side note: This article applies specifically to people with ADHD but can also be used by people without ADHD as well!

People with ADHD have an abundance of “subconscious sludge” that’s weighing us down mentally (why this article truly matters)

People with ADHD tend to have far more subconscious blockages and traumas than the average person.

For example, it’s common for people with ADHD to avoid completing tasks for weeks, months or sometimes even years.

When you avoid completing tasks for weeks, months or years, you might feel extremely good in the moment. But you’re also sacrificing your long-term mental well-being at the same exact time.

People with ADHD are also more likely to engage in risky behavior like excessive partying and drinking.

On average, it’s clear that people with ADHD experience more destructive behavioral patterns that can lead to more subconscious blockages and traumas than the average human being.

Your brain never forgets stuff at the subconscious level

This might sound surprising to you.

But pretty much everything that you say and do is being “recorded” by your subconscious.

Your subconscious remembers all.

Feeling creeped out yet?

One of the best tweets I’ve ever read mentioned that your brain is like a third-party observer that’s constantly watching and recording everything you do.

While that’s pretty freaky to think about, it’s an accurate representation of how your subconscious works.

When you avoid doing something that needs to be done, you’re actually adding more sludge (dead weight) to your subconscious mind.

According to Freud past thoughts and memories which are deleted from conscious thought are stored by the unconscious and these thoughts help direct the thoughts and feelings of an individual and influence their decision making processes. Freud believed that the Unconscious’ influence on thoughts can be accessed by training one’s mind through meditation, or by random association, dream analysis and paying attention to Freudian slips

Unconscious cognition (Wikipedia)

Your ADHD brain is essentially an extremely powerful supercomputer.

But the kicker is you only have a limited amount of space (memory) in your “hard drive” to work with at the conscious level, before you have to start transferring your data (memories) to your unconscious in order to free up space.

For example, if you’ve ever recorded one too many videos on your iPhone, your iPhone might have started operating more sluggishly as a result.

Your iPhone probably instructed you to free up some of your iPhone’s memory in order to keep recording new videos.

See the pattern yet?

This is how your brain works too.

Avoiding tasks and not fulfilling your obligations is equal to filling your brain’s memory bank with subconscious baggage, which negatively affects your entire existence on this planet.

Of course, this is an extremely oversimplified version of how your subconscious mind and ADHD brain operates.

The human brain, mind, conscious and subconscious are all incredibly complex.

Human consciousness is still a mystery in general.

However, at this point, we know enough about human consciousness to influence our lives in a positive way.

At the end of the day, what you really need to know is task avoidance, procrastination, and avoiding life’s problems is infinitely more harmful compared to simply addressing problems as soon as they occur.

Solving problems as soon as they happen is one of the secrets to living an incredible life with ADHD.

As a general rule, when you’re procrastinating, the unresolved task gets stored in your subconscious as a “background memory” and will remain there until you remove the memory from your subconscious and resolve it.

Why I avoided updating the ADHD Boss website for 6 months and caused myself significant subconscious pain in the process

I feel pretty embarrassed to be writing this section of the blog post to be perfectly honest.

Because up until this week, I’d been delaying working on the ADHD Boss website for about about 6 months.

This pained me on a subconscious level every single day for about half a year.

Every once in a while, ADHD Boss would pop into the conscious layer of my mind.

I’d think about all the unread emails and unapproved comments racking up.

This was extremely overwhelming.

So I’d formulate a strategy for working on the ADHD Boss website again as a way to cope with the pain (which is a form of procrastination really, AKA one of the most common coping methods for ADHD).

Then I’d totally ignore my plans to update the ADHD Boss website, go back to my ordinary life, and the idea of updating ADHD Boss would sink back into my subconscious and pain me again.

This viscous cycle happened every day for about 180 days.

But how could anyone let this happen in the first place?

What normal people are thinking when they hear about someone with ADHD taking procrastination to the extreme

Subconscious blockages and negative patterns can be extremely destructive and I am not immune to this.

Everyone is dealing with subconscious pains and blockages all of the time.

The good news is that by reading this article, you’re one of the relatively few people who are aware of the pain caused by unresolved subconscious blockages.

The vast majority of people on this planet have no idea it’s primarily their subconscious blockages causing them so much pain in life.

I hope you take away some value from my own subconscious pains and prevent something similar from happening in your own life.

Learn from my mistakes!

Side note: There are many people who are dealing with far worse pain and suffering in life. I am not claiming my situation was that bad or saying I’m some kind of victim. While ADHD does play an influential role in our decision-making abilities, this particular situation was entirely self-inflicted and completely avoidable.

Knowledge and awareness is the answer.

You have to become aware of the decisions that will add subconscious sludge to your life.

Prevention is the best medicine.

Other examples of how people with ADHD add subconscious sludge to their lives

Here’s a quick rundown of common subconscious blockages and traumas in people with ADHD:

• Every once in a while, you might remember a certain task you’ve been putting off for weeks, months or even years (like me, with procrastinating on updating the ADHD Boss website)

• You occasionally think about extremely embarrassing moments or terrible jobs you’ve had in the past

• You occasionally think about promises you’ve broken

• Bad decisions that you’ve made in the past randomly pop into your conscious mind while you’re relaxing or running errands

By the way, everyone screws up in life and this article is not intended to make you feel bad.

However, it’s important to accept that you will feel bad temporarily while you’re addressing your subconscious blockages and traumas.

The mental pain is only temporary.

The mental pain needs to be brought to the surface layer and removed once and for all.

If you ignore this process, you will suffer far more in the long-run.

Trust me.

I know this from experience.

By addressing your most painful subconscious blockages and ultimately resolving them right now, you will experience more mental clarity than you’ve ever felt in your life.

This is the path to setting yourself free mentally.

You are literally going to feel like a new person afterwards. Like you’ve just returned home from a six-month vacation in the Caribbean.

How to finally resolve your subconscious blockages and feel incredibly refreshed mentally

OK, this is where things start to get really good.

This is where you’re going to create a gigantic “will-do list” of every subconscious blockage that needs to be resolved in your life.

Anything that’s holding you back mentally…write it down.

• You have 1000 unread emails in your inbox? Add “organize email” to your will-do list.

• Haven’t spoken with your old best friend in the last 10 years? Write down “Call ex best friend.”

• Have an incredible business idea, but haven’t found the time to implement it yet? Write it down.

• Been telling people about the book you plan to write? Write down that task.

As mentioned above, anything that’s been lingering in the back of your mind needs to be removed from your subconscious and transferred onto a piece of paper.

This is an important first step in removing subconscious blockages because this initial step is extremely therapeutic in itself.

You’re literally removing blockages from your subconscious and transferring all of that negative empty dead weight onto paper.

Anyway, you’re going to write out everything that has been weighing you down mentally.

Expect this to turn into an “ongoing will-do list.”

Listing out all of your subconscious blockages could take you a few days or weeks.

Once you start this process, subconscious blockages will rush to the surface layer of your conscious like the Mississippi river.

Write down everything that comes to mind.

This is going to feel absolutely amazing.

I actually keep my gigantic “will-do” master list of subconscious blockages inside Microsoft OneNote.

“New” subconscious blockages keep floating to the conscious layer of my mind. I keep writing these blockages down. And I keep resolving them. Slowly but surely. One by one.

As a result, my life continues to improve significantly every single time I resolve another subconscious blockage.

This is a major part of the reason why I’m back here working on ADHD Boss.

Writing this blog is like therapy to me.

Attack your most painful subconscious blockages like a surgeon

When I had a gigantic cavity in one of my molars, it was literally the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life.

It was far worse than the time my lung collapsed during a soccer match.

I remember drinking a bottle of red wine that night to numb the pain of the cavity.

I was living in Budapest at the time. All the local English-speaking dentists were closed that night, on a Sunday.

I was the first person in the dentist office the next morning.

I told the dentist to do whatever it takes to end the pain.

In that moment I was willing to do anything to end the pain.

Being a great dentist, she drilled my most painful cavitied tooth first (the one that was driving me crazy) even though I had 3 other cavities to deal with at the time too (for a total of 4 cavities).

The dental surgeon attacked my most painful problem first, which gave me the most immediate relief and mental clarity.

My Sunday night of intense painful suffering was followed by one of the most gratifying days of my life.

This is how you need to think about attacking your most painful blockages in life too.

Intense pain is followed by immense pleasure.

Attack the most painful blockages in your life first because your life will continue to get better and better from that point forward.

This ensures you’ll gain more positive momentum each time you remove another subconscious blockage from your life.

A technical breakdown of how to resolve your most painful subconscious blockages, traumas, bad memories & more

Some subconscious blockages are incredibly easy to resolve.

For example, if you told your cousin you were going to mail them a birthday present, and you never mailed your cousin a birthday present, you can simply mail your cousin a late birthday gift.

It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you broke that promise to your cousin and subsequently created a subconscious blockage.

It’s better to resolve the subconscious blockage late than leave it unresolved and lingering in the back of your mind forever.

This is about making things right for you.

If anyone else benefits during the process, that’s an added bonus.

Now that was just an example of an easy subconscious blockage to resolve.

Other subconscious blockages can be far more complicated and may require the help of a medical professional.

If you’ve had a traumatic experience in the past, you’ll want to set aside time to revisit that traumatic experience in your mind and re-experience the traumatic experience all over again.

This is exposure therapy in a nutshell.

I’ve written a bit more about revisiting traumatic experiences in a separate article on overcoming bad memories.

Just as a side note, some people will tell you it’s possible to imagine that your bad memories never existed in the first place, as if they belong to a reality TV show or movie.

I definitely believe that option has merit and is worth exploring.

In my case, I prefer to either resolve my subconscious blockages in the real-world or re-visit my more traumatic experiences through exposure therapy.

You should do whatever works best for you.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as you’re actively putting forth the effort to resolve your subconscious blockages.

Attack your most painful problems early in the day (when you have the most willpower)

Your willpower is like an iPhone battery that starts out fully charged and weakens throughout the day.

Studies show that humans lose willpower even when we’re forced to make simple decisions like deciding what to eat for breakfast or choosing which outfit to wear.

You will lose willpower throughout the day.

Just as a side note, this is why it’s so easy for people to casually hit the pub after work or buy a greasy fast food hamburger meal around 6:30PM.

After making 100+ little decisions throughout the day, it’s going to feel almost impossible to turn down some delicious fast food or a similar temptation.

This is why you have to attack your biggest and most painful problems early in the day.

Mornings are when humans have the most willpower (or free will, if you believe in such a thing).

This is one of the absolute best methods for attacking your subconscious blockages and drastically improving your mental clarity in a relatively short period of time.

What would your life look like if you had nothing to worry about?

Imagine feeling completely carefree and clearheaded as if nothing in the world could ever bother you.

That would be pretty awesome right?

While that does in fact sound amazing, it’s also very unrealistic. There’s no state of “completion” or permanent happiness to be found on this planet. Everyone is constantly fighting their own battles in one way or another.

With this being said, I do believe resolving your subconscious blockages is as close as it gets to experiencing one version of heaven on Earth.

Resolving your subconscious blockages will take you pretty close to that carefree, child-like state of happiness that most of us experienced before being pushed into public schools and corporations.

Get ready to experience real mental clarity and happiness.

One sheet of paper and some willpower is all that you need to get started.