The reply has been sitting in your drafts for three weeks. It would take ninety seconds to finish, and you have known that every single day. Every day you open the laptop, look at the message, feel your chest go heavy and slightly sick, and close the laptop again.
That stuck feeling has a name. ADHD coach Brendan Mahan calls it the wall of awful, and once you can see it for what it is, the whole experience stops reading like a character flaw.
This is not a lecture about trying harder. The wall is not built from laziness, and willpower is not the tool that gets you over it.
TL;DR
Most people land here mid-stall, frozen in front of something small. These are the questions worth answering before you try to shove your way through again:
- What is the wall of awful, and who actually came up with it?
- Why does an easy task carry so much weight when you have ADHD?
- What is the wall built from, and where do the bricks come from?
- What gets people genuinely through it, instead of around it?
- When is the stuck feeling pointing at something bigger than a hard start?
A quick note first: this is educational, not a clinical evaluation or a replacement for working with a professional. If starting tasks is a daily struggle rather than an occasional one, use this alongside that support, not instead of it.
What the Wall of Awful Actually Is (and Who Named It)
The wall of awful is the emotional barrier that builds up in front of a task you have struggled with before. It is not a measure of how capable you are or how much you care. It is the weight of feeling, stacked over time, standing between you and something that should be simple.
The term comes from Brendan Mahan, an ADHD coach and former teacher who lived it before he named it. He started using the phrase around 2016 and expands it in his 2026 book Overcoming the Wall of Awful, with a foreword by Jessica McCabe of How to ADHD.
His picture is deliberately physical. The wall is built one brick at a time, and each brick is a past experience the task is tied to: a time it went badly, a comment that stung, a deadline missed. The brick is not the task. It is everything the task reminds you of.
Term
What it means
Source
Wall of Awful
The emotional barrier that builds in front of a task you have struggled with before, made of past failure, criticism, and shame rather than a lack of ability.
Brendan Mahan
Who named it
ADHD coach Brendan Mahan, around 2016; expanded in his 2026 book, with a foreword by Jessica McCabe.
Brendan Mahan
The bricks
Each brick is a past failure, criticism, rejection, or moment of shame tied to the task. Walls tend to be taller for neurodivergent people.
Brendan Mahan
Climb it / put a door in it
The two moves Mahan points to for getting through: feel the emotion and start anyway, or change your state so the wall is lower when you reach it.
Brendan Mahan
Why ADHD walls feel taller
ADHD involves real differences in emotional regulation, so the same task can land with more emotional weight.
World Federation of ADHD, 2021
Why the Wall of Awful Feels Taller With ADHD
If the wall feels higher for you than it seems to for everyone else, you are not imagining it. The bricks are the same kind for everyone. ADHD brains just lay them faster and stack them higher.
The Bricks: What the Wall Is Built From
A missed deadline is rarely just a missed deadline. It gets filed with the last one, and the one before that, until a single unanswered message can carry years of the ADHD shame spiral behind it.
The task in front of you is small, but the pile it sits on is not.
Rejection lands especially hard for a lot of people, sharp enough to have earned its own name worth knowing: rejection sensitive dysphoria. When a brick is made of “what will they think of me,” it gets heavy fast.
Where the Extra Height Comes From
Two things stack the deck. The first is emotional regulation. A 2021 international consensus statement on ADHD found that adults with ADHD show much higher levels of emotional dysregulation than their peers, the broader story behind emotional regulation and ADHD: feelings attached to a task arrive louder and are harder to set down.
The second is wiring. ADHD motivation tends to follow interest, urgency, or novelty rather than plain importance, the interest-based nervous system at work. When a task is important but dull, there is little internal pull to begin, so the wall keeps growing while you wait to feel like it.
There is one more layer for adults identified late. Many spent decades being called careless or told to just apply themselves, long before anyone said the word ADHD. Those years become extra bricks, which is why late-identified adults so often describe the densest walls.
None of that makes the wall permanent.
Worth saying plainly: the wall is a coaching picture, not something a doctor measures. It is useful because it matches the felt experience, not because it shows up on a test.
How People Actually Get Through the Wall of Awful
Here is where most advice about the wall goes thin: it assumes there is one right way over. Mahan’s model is more honest. It starts by naming the moves people already make, including the ones that keep them stuck.
Some people stare at the wall, frozen, waiting to feel ready. Readiness never shows up, and the staring becomes another brick.
Others go around it, filling the time with something easier and calling it productive. That works right until the avoided task starts leaking into everything else.
A third group smashes through by force, on adrenaline or anger or panic. The task gets done, but that route scorches the people nearby and leaves you wrung out.
Mahan points to two moves that get you through without that cost, and neither runs on willpower.
Climb It
Climbing means feeling the emotion on purpose instead of waiting for it to leave. You name what is there, whether dread, embarrassment, or the certainty you will do it wrong, and you let it be true. Then you start anyway, with the feeling still in the room. The point is not to feel better first. It is to stop charging “better” as the price of starting.
Put a Door in It
Putting a door in the wall means changing your emotional state so the wall is lower when you reach it. A short walk, a song that moves you, a few minutes of something funny, or starting beside another person (body doubling) can shift your state enough that the same task feels reachable. You are not avoiding the wall. You are walking up to it as a slightly different version of yourself.
None of this makes the wall disappear. On a good day a door opens fast. On a harder day you climb the same wall twice before noon, which is normal, not failure. Getting through steadies with practice; it is not a switch that flips once.
Practical Tactics That Help You Start
When the wall is right in front of you and you need to move, a few concrete tactics shrink the first step until it is small enough to take.
Shrink the first action until it is almost embarrassing. Not “answer the email” but “open the email and read it.” Not “do the taxes” but “find the folder.” A first step you cannot fail is one you are far more likely to take, and momentum usually shows up once you are moving.
Borrow someone else’s presence. Body doubling works because another person, in the room or on a video, changes the emotional temperature of the task. You are not asking them to help. Hard things just feel smaller in company.
Trade willpower for self-kindness. Talking to yourself the way you would talk to a friend lowers shame, and shame is the mortar holding the wall together. Self-criticism feels productive and almost never is.
It also helps to expect the feeling instead of being ambushed by it. The same wave of ADHD overwhelm shows up around starting, so planning for it beats being surprised every time.
Task initiation is a skill you build, not a trait you have or lack. It is the kind of thing the Real-Life Executive Functioning Workbook (by Chris Hanson and Amy Sippl) is built around.
When the Wall Is Really Something Else
Sometimes the stuck feeling is not the wall of awful at all, and the difference matters. A starting move will not fix a problem that needs rest or support.
If the same heaviness covers everything, not just the hard tasks, it may be burnout or low mood, which ask for care rather than a clever first step. If your body will not switch from one mode to another even on things you want to do, that can be autistic inertia, which responds to different supports.
This is also where the line between coaching and therapy is worth drawing. Therapy supports mental health. Coaching is educational and skills-focused, built around the habits that make starting easier.
Executive function coaching is one option if the wall keeps winning and you want a person in your corner while you practice. There is no prize for sorting this out alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who coined the term “wall of awful”?
ADHD coach Brendan Mahan came up with it. A former teacher who was identified with ADHD as an adult, he started using the phrase around 2016 and built it out in his 2026 book on the subject.
Is the wall of awful just procrastination or laziness?
No. Procrastination is a behavior and laziness is a judgment, while the wall is the emotion underneath both. You can want to do the task, know exactly how, and still hit the wall, because the barrier is built from feeling, not from missing skill or missing effort.
How do you tell if you are climbing the wall or just staring at it?
This is one of the most common real questions people ask, and the honest answer is that it comes down to movement, not mood. Climbing feels uncomfortable on purpose: you have named the feeling, you are letting it be there, and you have taken some small action while it is still present, even if that action is tiny. Staring feels like waiting. You are in front of the task, the dread is running the show, and you keep hoping the urge to start will arrive on its own. If an hour has passed and you have not touched even the smallest piece of it, you are probably staring, and the fix is a smaller first step or a door, not a longer wait.
Why does the wall feel taller for late-identified adults?
Because they have had more time to stack bricks without a name for any of it. Years of being told they were careless, disorganized, or not trying hard enough get absorbed as evidence of a personal flaw rather than a sign of unsupported ADHD. By the time the identification arrives, a simple task can carry a decade or two of accumulated self-blame, which is a lot of weight for one email to hold.
Can you get rid of the wall of awful for good?
Probably not, and that turns out to be okay. The wall is built from being someone who has tried things and sometimes struggled, which is not a state anyone fully outgrows. What changes is your relationship to it: the wall stops being a verdict on your character and becomes a familiar thing you know how to get through.
Next Steps
Pick the smallest possible version of the thing you have been avoiding and start there today, before the wall gets any taller.
- Name the feeling out loud before you start. Saying “I am dreading this and I am opening it anyway” does more than it sounds like it should.
- Find out where your wall is highest. The free executive functioning assessment points to the skills that create the most friction, which is usually where the tallest walls live.
- Get a person in your corner if the wall keeps winning, whether that is a friend to body double with or executive function coaching built around this exact kind of skill.
- Keep score of what works. When a door opens fast or a tiny step gets you moving, write down what you did, so next time you reach for it on purpose instead of from scratch.
