The Dopamine Chase ( and why I can’t just slow down)

It’s really hard to slow down when you have ADHD ( my kind anyway).

Not won’t. Can’t. There’s a difference, and I need you to understand that before we go any further.

When your brain is constantly chasing dopamine, stillness isn’t peaceful — it’s threatening. So when the hard days stack up, one after another, I don’t rest. I do more. I clean something. I write something. I dream up something new. Anything to feel the hit of forward motion.

Sick kids. My own stuff — which is a completely different article I’m not sure I’m brave enough to write yet. And then work, sitting there in the background, full of ambition and meaning and the quiet knowledge that it would make me genuinely happy. Except family comes first. It always comes first. So the ambition waits, and the stress builds, and my brain goes hunting.

The cruel part? The coping strategies aren’t even bad ones. Cleaning, creating, dreaming — these aren’t self-destruction. But I’m running on empty while I do them. And the debt always comes due.

First comes the exhaustion. Then the crankiness. Then the people I love most — the ones who are safe, the ones who aren’t going anywhere — they get the yucky parts of me. The parts I wish I could protect them from.

I don’t have a tidy resolution for this. Some days I just notice the cycle while I’m inside it, which feels like both progress and not enough.

But I’m writing it down. And maybe that’s the dopamine hit I actually needed, and of course I’ll end this with my usual type of ending for connection.

If you’re in this cycle too — the doing, the crashing, the guilt — I want to hear how you hold it. Not the polished version. The real one. Drop it in the comments or reply to this. We’re not solving it today, but we don’t have to carry it alone either.

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Originally published on Substack.