Easy Mode

My favorite video games are action RPGs like Elden Ring. This is the kind of game where you might die thirty times over the course of two hours before you beat the boss. While playing ER, there are certainly times when I”m having fun, but there are plenty of times when I’m infuriated, blood pressure elevated, muscles tight. In those times, am I having fun?

In the last year something shifted. Those intense, visually busy games started, after an hour or so, to make me nauseous — and even trigger a migraine-like episode called cyclical vomiting syndrome. Maybe my sixty-year-old nervous system just can't take that much stimulation anymore. That's a humbling sentence to type.

So I sat with the obvious question for a while before I'd let myself answer it: maybe I can still play, but I have to play in a new way. What about playing on Easy Mode?

The problem of course, as many gamers will tell you, Easy Mode is boring!  A part of me complained about this very loudly. This was antithetical to decades of how I game — how I think a game is even supposed to feel. And yet, as someone who has ADHD and who works with people who have ADHD, I already knew the thing my gamer part didn't want to hear: we function better when we're regulated. When I'm fighting a boss in Elden Ring, I'm usually in some version of fighting-for-my-life mode, and that gradually — or not so gradually — dysregulates me. What I actually needed was a level of ease that kept me lightly stimulated instead of maxed out.

That's when I started playing around with the idea of “Easy Mode” being an ethos that might be helpful for folks with ADHD. This post, and a couple that follow it, are me playing with that idea in real time — not a system I've finished, just some things I'm trying.

It was never a willpower problem

In my experience, supported by research, ADHD isn't a knowledge problem. It's a performance problem.

Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the most respected researchers in the field, describes ADHD as a developmental disorder of executive function — the brain's system for regulating attention, time, emotion, and goal-directed action. His key point is that people with ADHD usually know exactly what they're supposed to do. They just can't reliably do it in the moment, even when they want to and even when it matters. ADHD, as he puts it, is more of a performance issue than an attention one. The gap isn't between you and the instructions. It's between knowing and doing.

That's why just try harder is such counterproductive advice. You can't willpower your way across a gap that willpower was never the bridge for. And it's why so many of us carry a heavy load of shame — years of receiving the message, spoken or not, that there's something wrong with us, wrong with our character, when the difficulty actually stems from how we're wired. Barkley's framing lifts that shame. If the issue is executive function, the solution isn't becoming a better person. It's better skills, supports, and environments.

The gaming story made one more piece of this vivid for me. Emotional regulation isn't separate from executive function — Barkley argues it's a core part of ADHD. When we get flooded, the executive system more or less goes offline, and the research backs this up: emotion dysregulation now shows up in systematic reviews as a core feature of adult ADHD, not a side effect. So when I'm white-knuckling a boss fight and tipping into nausea, that's not just unpleasant. That's the state in which my brain works worst.

We run on interest, not importance

Dr. William Dodson popularized the idea of the interest-based nervous system. Most people, the theory goes, can summon focus based on importance — this matters, so I'll do it — even when the task is dull. ADHD brains mostly can't summon focus this way. We engage based on interest. Dodson bundles the activators into the acronym INCUP: interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, passion. When one of those is in the room, you can get a twelve-hour hyperfocus binge. When none of them is, you can stare at a ten-minute form for a week. Or, more likely in my case, you follow a link in an email down a fascinating YouTube rabbit hole, or sit down for one game of Hearthstone and surface two hours later having completely forgotten about that annoying form.

Regarding 2 of these activators in particular — urgency and challenge — here you find the trap a lot of us fall into. Because we avoid boredom like the plague, we unconsciously switch ourselves into Hard Mode. We put the project off until we're stressed enough — until the deadline looms and the consequences are real and a little or a lot scary — and then the outside pressure finally motivates us and we frantically crank it out at the last minute. At least it wasn't boring!

The funny thing is that this often works. We even get rewarded for it, if only by the relief of not having crashed and burned. But it's the same mistake as the boss fight. I'm generating just enough crisis to feel engaged, and dysregulating myself steadily to get there. Hard Mode isn't more noble. It's just the version where I pay for the focus with my nervous system which can snowball into all kinds of adverse effects on our physical, emotional, and mental health.

Lower the difficulty on purpose

We’re not folks with something wrong with us, waiting to be fixed by sufficient effort. We have a particular kind of engine, and a lot of us have spent years redlining it to move forward when we'd cover far more ground staying in the green.

The next two posts are about what I'm actually doing with this — the small mechanical moves that lower the difficulty at the start of a task, and the genuinely harder skill of teaching a nervous system to enjoy ease instead of reading it as failure. For now the whole suggestion is just this: lower the difficulty on purpose, and see what happens. The boss will still go down.

Russell A. Barkley — Executive Functioning and Self-Regulation in ADHD→ https://www.russellbarkley.org/factsheets/ADHD_EF_and_SR.pdf

Child Mind Institute — ADHD and Executive Function→ https://childmind.org/article/adhd-and-executive-function/

PLOS One — Emotion Dysregulation as a Core Symptom of Adult ADHD→ https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280131

ADDitude — DESR: Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation→ https://www.additudemag.com/desr-adhd-emotional-regulation/

Neurodivergent Insights — Interest-Based Nervous System and ADHD→ https://neurodivergentinsights.com/interest-based-nervous-system/