ADHD and the Need to Please: What Can We Do About ‘Recognition Responsive Euphoria’?
Is chasing praise the answer or the issue for those with ADHD? While some experts offer it as an answer to our problems, this post explores doing just the opposite.
There are moments in life that stay with you, shaping your perspective in ways you don’t immediately realize. One such moment for me occurred during my stint as a volunteer kitchen manager at a Buddhist meditation centre last spring. The role was daunting; my nerves were frayed, and my Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) was in full swing, conjuring up myriad scenarios of potential failure. What if I burnt the food? What if I messed up a recipe? Ironically, the guests couldn't voice complaints even if they wanted to—they were all observing silence. But still, the fear of screwing up lingered.
Then something wonderful happened. The centre’s supervisor took notice of my workflow organization system and praised my efforts. He even requested a photo of my setup to replicate it in future. I was elated, brimming with pride, I couldn't help but exclaim something akin to "yay me!”
But in that moment of triumph, the supervisor, an experienced Buddhist meditator, gently tempered my excitement. “Careful,” he said. “Letting yourself be so affected by the good stands to bring you just as much suffering as the bad”.
His words struck a chord. While I was aware that my tendency to amplify negative feedback caused me considerable distress (courtesy of my Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria), I hadn't considered how the exaggerated joy I often felt when receiving praise could equally tether me to suffering. As much as his comment initially triggered my RSD (the irony is not lost on me here), I recognized the truth in what he was saying. An image came to mind of my favourite amusement park ride, a pendulum-style pirate ship that starts with a gentle sway and quickly gains momentum until it swings wildly back and forth. Just as the ride reaches a peak on one side, it inevitably swings just as high in the opposite direction. I realized what he was saying was that letting myself be so affected by praise left me just as vulnerable to the crash of rejection. The higher I soared on one end, the harder I swung back on the other.
The flip-side of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: Recognition Response Euphoria
I had long been aware that I placed far more weight on other people’s opinions than most but never understood why. Eventually I came to learn that this heightened response to recognition is a common phenomenon among those with ADHD. ADHD pioneers Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey refer to this as Recognition Responsive Euphoria (RRE), describing it as the "flip-side" of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Through their extensive work with patients, they observed that just as a minor rejection (perceived or real) can feel like a "sonic boom" for people with ADHD, so too can a small bit of recognition. Once again, I was so impressed by the work of these experts who continue to bring to light aspects of the ADHD experience that desperately need to be talked about.
A few months ago, I was listening to Dr. Hallowell and Dr. Ratey on a podcast advocating for the use of Recognition Responsive Euphoria as a "positive tool" for those with ADHD to help us with motivation and energy. Recognizing the extreme emotional value people with ADHD place on others' opinions and the emotional fluctuations this brings, they suggested that individuals should try to mitigate this pain by avoiding negative people and situations and instead seek out people and situations likely to shower us with encouragement and praise - pursue the positive and evade the negative.
As I reflected on their advice, the words of my old supervisor echoed in my mind: “Letting yourself be so affected by the good stands to bring you just as much suffering as the bad”. I eventually came to understand that he was inviting me to get off the pirate ship altogether, step my feet onto solid ground and look back at what a dizzying ride I had been on. Alternatively, Dr. Hallowell and Dr. Ratey seemed to be advocating for an approach where I’d try to control my external environment so thoroughly that I could somehow keep the ship permanently tilted toward praise. I imagined myself out there, tirelessly building contraptions to prop up the ship, desperate to keep it from ever descending from its lofty height.
This advice might have seemed sound to me if I hadn’t spent my first 29 years following it fruitlessly. After finally admitting defeat a couple of years ago, I’ve learnt that this suggestion — to intensify our focus on external factors and try to control them — is actually the quickest route to misery and away from true happiness. Doubling down on our attachment to the outside world being just the way we want it to be, I’ve discovered, leads us straight towards suffering.
An “end to suffering”
Having lived most of my life with undiagnosed ADHD, I’m no stranger to suffering. For years, negative thoughts and beliefs ruled my mind; I struggled to regulate my emotions, and my self-concept was steeped in negativity. My relentless attempts to escape my own mind through destructive means had taken a significant toll on me over the years. By my late 20s, still without an explanation for my brain's functioning, I felt I had exhausted all my options until I stumbled upon four sentences known as Buddha's Four Noble Truths which make up the cornerstone of his teachings:
The Four Noble Truths:
Life involves inevitable suffering.
There is a cause to our suffering.
There is an end to suffering.
The end of suffering is contained in the Eightfold Path.
While I had long considered myself to be “spiritual, not religious”, when I saw the three words “end to suffering”, one thing was clear:
I wasn’t going to be leaving this rock unturned.
Buddhism beyond religion: understanding suffering and the path to true happiness
I soon discovered that many consider the teachings of the Buddha to be more psychological in nature, than religious. Siddhartha Gautama, born around 563 BCE in what is now Nepal, who later became known as the Buddha, was not interested in creating a religion; his focus was on understanding the nature of human suffering and finding a path to alleviate it. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, a contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher, is quoted as saying “Buddhism is primarily a study of mind and a system for training the mind. It is spiritual in nature, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven.” As philosopher Alan Watts famously remarked, the Buddha was "more of a psychotherapist than a theologian," concerned with the practical aspects of overcoming suffering.
With these insights, I embarked on a transformative journey into Buddha's teachings, which would ultimately lead me to that industrial kitchen hearing those fateful words from a volunteer supervisor. I would come to learn that at the heart of Buddha's philosophy lies the understanding that suffering stems from our insatiable desires—our constant pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain (I.e. riding the pirate ship).
Covering the whole world in leather vs. putting on leather shoes
If we surrender ourselves to this idea that chasing pleasure and avoiding pain isn’t going to bring us happiness, what then will bring us the feeling we are all looking for?
The answer to this can best be summed up by Shantideva, an 8th-century CE Indian philosopher, Buddhist monk, and poet, who once said: “Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it’s as if the whole world has been covered.”
What Shantideva is saying here is that attempting to control our environment to maximize praise and minimize rejection is the equivalent of trying to cover the whole world in leather — an impossible and futile task. Instead, what we can do is put on some shoes and walk out the door.
But how do we don these metaphorical shoes?
I’ll be exploring this in my next post!
These posts just keep getting better! Thank you, thank you, thank you