Overcoming the Wall of Awful: Why It’s Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety

by Brendan Mahan

We're afraid to talk about it - that feeling we all get when we need to do something as simple as cleaning the kitchen or sending an email and we just... can't. It's not because we don't want to, it's because we feel paralyzed. We're not aimless. We're not lazy. Our brains are working against us! We have purpose, we just need guidance.

This is that guide. Just like bricks, negative emotions and experiences can build up until they feel like an impenetrable wall between us and our goals. Brendan Mahan, MEd., MS. calls this the Wall of Awful - and he's lived it. Diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, Mahan has made it his life's work to help people overcome their own Walls of Awful and accomplish their biggest, scariest ambitions.

Mahan draws on twenty years in teaching, counseling, and coaching people with anxiety, ADHD, autism, and trauma. He teams up with writer Alex Hughes Capell in Overcoming the Wall of Awful to present his comprehensive model. The book

-How anxiety works and why it gets in the way
-Why anxiety shuts down your brain
-Ways people try to get past the Wall that don't work-and what does
-How to climb your Wall of Awful and take back control

Learn how to identify key emotions, the bricks in your Wall. Then, learn the tricks, systems, and habits you'll need to not just climb one Wall - but to overcome your blocks throughout your life, one step at a time. The Wall is real, but you are stronger than you know.

Genres: Adhd, Nonfiction, Self Help, Mental Health, Science, Health, Psychology

304 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2026

Reviews

[Bookbubble · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: 2 ⭐

This book does not deliver on it's promise as a practical guide to overcome task initiation or ADHD paralysis.

The blurb sells this as a “groundbreaking, practical guide” for people with ADHD, autism, trauma, and anxiety who struggle to get things done. It specifically talks about that awful stuck place where you need to do something as basic as clean the kitchen or send an email and you just… can’t. That sounded like a book about task initiation, ADHD paralysis, executive dysfunction, and what to actually do when your brain will not start the task.

That is not what this book delivers.

The first issue is credibility. In Chapter 1, the author describes himself as a “mental health clinician turned ADHD coach,” but an online search, including LinkedIn, did not back that up with a matching clinical credential. The book reads like coaching material because the author is a coach: stories, acronyms, affirmations, broad claims, reflection prompts, and repeated motivational language. That would be one thing if the book stayed in a clear coaching lane. But it covers ADHD, autism, anxiety, trauma, emotional regulation, executive function, avoidance, and task initiation. For a book covering that much mental health territory, the claims need more support on the page.

The Wall of Awful itself is the biggest problem. It is supposed to explain why certain tasks become hard to start, especially for people with ADHD, autism, and anxiety. But as the book lays it out, the Wall becomes an abstract catch-all label for anything that feels bad: shame, anxiety, sensory discomfort, boredom, unclear tasks, money stress, social fear, time blindness, procrastination, transitions, ordinary adult stress, and past failure.

Those are not the same problem.

A task blocked by sensory disgust is not the same as a task blocked by shame. A tax return, a phone call, a shower, a work email, a medical appointment, and a messy kitchen do not all need the same solution just because they all feel bad.

That is where the metaphor falls apart. The Wall does not clarify the problem. It muddies it. If the problem is anxiety, say anxiety. If the problem is shame, say shame. If the problem is sensory load, task ambiguity, missing resources, time blindness, autistic inertia, shutdown, burnout, or executive dysfunction, name that. Turning every possible barrier into another brick in the Wall makes the reader do extra translation work.

The subtitle promises to explain why it is hard to get things done with ADHD, autism, and anxiety, and how to do them anyway. The book mostly treats the problem as emotional avoidance. That misses a lot of what makes ADHD and autism different from ordinary procrastination or anxiety. ADHD task initiation is not just “this task feels bad.” It can be low activation, no urgency, working memory collapse, task ambiguity, transition friction, low reward, inconsistent access to skills, sensory overload, or the task disappearing from your brain until the consequence is on fire. Autism can involve inertia, sensory load, shutdown, demand pressure, masking costs, and routines breaking in ways that are not solved by naming emotions.

The book keeps giving more language for how tasks feel, but not enough concrete help for getting the task done.

The “smashing through the Wall” chapter was one of the least accurate examples. The actual idea seems to be using anger, panic, shame, defiance, or crisis pressure as activation fuel. That should have been said plainly. “Smashing” is a bad label for a neurodivergent audience because it sounds literal and physical. What is the reader supposed to do? Yell? Hit something? Break the keyboard? Let themselves get angry enough to act? The chapter explains that this pattern can cause damage, but it does not give a concrete replacement at the exact point where someone is stuck.

Also, let’s be real: for something like taxes, “smashing” probably means waiting until April 14, panicking, hating yourself, and either filing under pressure or filing late. That is not a strategy. It's fight/flight failure mode.

The “door” and “climb” language did not fix this. Putting a "door in the Wall" mostly means soothing your anxiety, adding some dopamine, using music, movement, novelty, body doubling, or support, and then trying again. "Climbing the Wall" mostly means sitting with the hard emotions, naming them, accepting them, changing self-talk, reflecting on values, and moving forward while uncomfortable. Again: this may describe emotional processing. It does not give task-level instruction or practical outcomes. And if there's one thing ADHDers know, it's that not having a path forward (such as a task broken into microsteps), it's not going to get done anytime soon.

A book about task initiation needs to survive contact with a real task. Taxes are a good example because they involve shame, money stress, missing documents, confusing forms, deadlines, logins, fear of owing, past mistakes, and avoidance. There is nothing enjoyable about the activity. This book’s advice mostly sends the reader toward naming feelings, soothing anxiety, reflecting on values, journaling, making plans, and asking for support.

But taxes don't get done because you journaled your shame.

For example, useful advice would be concrete: find one document, make one folder, open last year’s return, open the tax software, write a missing-documents list, file an extension, book a preparer, use a checklist, use IRS Free File, use VITA if eligible, or outsource the job. That is the kind of help I expected from a book promising practical strategies. The book rarely gets that deep. It stays at “soothe, reflect, plan, and try again.”

There is also a lot of recycled ADHD/self-help advice here: timers, checklists, planners, body doubling, reminders, music, movement, systems, friction, habits, values, habit stacking, sticky notes, reflection, asking for help, and making things fun. Some of those tools can help. They are also in virtually every ADHD advice guide. The book keeps repackaging repetitive ideas inside the Wall metaphor instead of giving something sharper.

Part 3, which covers change, systems and habits, and planning, comes straight out of the generic life-coaching syllabus. Make a plan. Connect to values. Reduce friction. Use reminders. Use checklists. Stack habits. Think about rewards. Reflect. Persist. None of this is new. More importantly, it does not get deep enough into ADHD or autism. There's not enough about autistic inertia, sensory overload, shutdown, demand avoidance, masking costs, novelty decay, inconsistent skill access, or what happens when a system works for three days and then disappears into the wallpaper.

The book also has a class and resource problem. It suggests support, coaching, therapy, hiring help, asking friends, leaning on systems, or using other people, but it doesn't spend enough time on what happens when people don't have those resources, or when asking for help is unsafe, expensive, embarrassing, or unrealistic. “Ask for support” isn't a universal solution. For many adult tasks, the support needed is technical, paid, private, or structural. A friend cannot always help with taxes, workplace disclosure, medical issues, money problems, or legal/admin tasks.

The tone leans on motivational language: you can do this, you're not broken, the good things are on the other side, keep going, change is hard, you are stronger than you know. Some readers may find that validating. I wanted less cheerleading and more direct instruction. Neurodivergent people do not have time for performative help. Say the useful thing. Don't talk around it for chapters.

The strongest idea in the book is simple: repeated failure, shame, anxiety, or stress can make a task emotionally loaded, and that emotional load can make the task harder to start. But I don't think it needed a whole book discussing it. The concept gets stretched until it covers almost everything, and the more the author stretches it, the more useless it becomes.

This is too abstract to be a practical ADHD/ASD task-initiation book, it completely misses the mark. The concept is opaque, advice is generic, clinical authority is questionable, and practical application is much thinner than promised.

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book but ultimately DNFed it about halfway because it is so incredibly long and wordy without saying much of anything helpful. Even with bolded lines and TLDR summaries at the end of each chapter, it was just so droning and dull. I didn’t encounter anything new or helpful. I think one problem is that he lumps every reason for difficulty in doing things together, along with every possible thing you want to accomplish. In my case, it’s housework and exercise that are my paralyzing tasks, but all his examples are of things I am fine with. And I don’t have ADHD or autism, but severe trauma can lead to a lot of the same struggles. The whole book just felt like an infomercial for something he was selling, instead of an actual helpful and supportive guide.

I read a temporary online copy of this book for review.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Architecture of a Failed Start
“Overcoming the Wall of Awful” gives emotional resistance bricks, mortar, doors, and handholds – then asks how much psychological weight one metaphor can bear
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 19th, 2026

Difficult tasks do not always look difficult. A child can spend ten minutes unpacking a backpack while an adult watches, unable to see why notebooks and loose papers have acquired the gravity of wet sand. An email can sit unanswered for days though composing it might take three minutes. Brendan Mahan’s most useful idea in “Overcoming the Wall of Awful,” co-written with Alex Hughes Capell, begins in that mismatch between visible triviality and invisible load. Failure, disappointment, rejection, guilt and shame become bricks; anxiety supplies the mortar. Eventually there is a Wall between intention and action, and “just do it” begins to sound less like advice than directions shouted through masonry.

Even before Mahan offers a technique, the metaphor grants the reader a reprieve from prosecution. One client, Peter, wonders whether the adults who called him lazy were right. Mahan dislikes “lazy” partly because it is so useless: once the judgment has been delivered, there is nowhere to go. Take it away and the questions improve. Is a skill missing? A resource? Sleep? Money? Clarity? Support? Is the environment making the task harder than it needs to be? Or is the resistance not a Wall at all, but a boundary warning that the thing being asked violates something the person values? Here the book makes its best move. Difficulty becomes information before it becomes character.

Mahan coined the Wall while working with a family around 2015, then carried it into coaching, conferences, podcasts and a collaboration with Jessica McCabe, whose “How to ADHD” helped spread the idea. The book enlarges that metaphor for readers dealing with ADHD, autism, anxiety, trauma, depression and related difficulties. Its subject is the maddening interval between knowing and doing. A person can understand what matters, know how to proceed, sincerely want the result and still fail to begin until panic, urgency or anger supplies enough force. The Wall gives that interval a shape, and shape is useful when the alternative is a blur of self-reproach.

Explanations arrive in three parts and ten chapters, though the cleaner map is diagnosis, intervention, maintenance. Part One defines the Wall, links it to anxiety, and asks readers to inventory skills and resources before condemning themselves. Part Two is where the book becomes more interesting: staring at the Wall and going around it are forms of avoidance; smashing through can work while doing damage; putting in a door makes action easier; climbing means engaging the emotions underneath. Part Three moves into change, habits, systems, friction, time and planning. By placing smashing between failure and healthier action, Mahan makes a point many productivity manuals miss. Finishing something is not sufficient evidence that the way you finished it was good for you.

The smashing chapter is where that distinction stops being theoretical. Anger can focus attention. Panic can manufacture urgency. Shame can bully someone across a deadline. The report gets finished, the paper appears at 3 a.m., the family gets out the door. The method has still extracted a price. Mahan’s pandemic-era account works because the collapse comes after the strategy has repeatedly succeeded. Distress has been an efficient ignition system. Then, eventually, the key turns and nothing happens. Burnout is not presented as mysterious depletion so much as the bill for teaching yourself that emergency is the only dependable route to motion.

Relief, when it comes, is almost comically ordinary. Eat something. Work beside another person. Change rooms. Put on music. Make the dull task slightly novel. Remove a sensory irritation. Set a reminder that does not depend on remembering to remember. These are “doors,” temporary alterations that make the Wall easier to cross. The acronyms multiply – URPU, CCAW, INCUP, SHRED – until the book occasionally resembles a small municipal code for the nervous system. Yet the distinction beneath them is sound. Some problems yield when the conditions change. Others require the slower work of naming an emotion, tolerating it and moving while it is still there. That is climbing.

In one of its better safeguards against its own metaphor, the book refuses to locate every difficulty inside the person experiencing it. Chapter Three is particularly alert to resources and environment. Someone may need instruction rather than motivation, money rather than grit, a workplace that does not grind them down rather than a more heroic supply of resilience. Mahan also separates Walls from boundaries. Strong resistance to an unethical demand is not necessarily an emotional obstacle awaiting conquest. Sometimes the line should hold. Sometimes the useful intervention is an exit. That distinction matters because a metaphor about overcoming resistance can become coercive very quickly if it cannot recognize when resistance deserves respect.

Plainness is part of the book’s technique. Mahan writes in a speech-shaped coaching register: short declaratives, rhetorical questions, lists, client stories, parenthetical jokes and bursts of direct encouragement. Capell’s presence is mostly architectural; the finished voice sounds consistently like Mahan talking across a table rather than two writers taking turns at the microphone. The images are built for recall rather than beauty. Walls, bricks, mortar, doors, climbing, toolboxes, friction, seeds and, often enough to become a scavenger hunt, cookies: these are things the mind can find again under stress. The book wants to survive a bad Tuesday, not pose elegantly on a quiet Sunday.

As an object, it anticipates imperfect attention with unusual seriousness. Readers are told to skip around, return months later, scribble in margins, lean on bolded ideas, summaries, cheat sheets, action steps, cross-references and appendices. A book about executive-function difficulty that demanded perfect sequential attention would have been a fairly expensive practical joke. Curiously, though, “Overcoming the Wall of Awful” is better on a first read when taken in order. Avoidance gives way to smashing; smashing to doors; doors to climbing; climbing to systems. The later sections become more useful because the earlier ones have changed what “getting it done” is supposed to mean. Read straight through once, then cannibalize as needed.

Part Two also keeps the governing image from going stale. The Wall changes jobs. First it names the invisible barrier. Then bricks and mortar explain how the barrier acquired weight. Soon it becomes a map of behavior: stare, evade, smash, modify, climb. Later it is a design problem that support, habits and planning might shrink. By the conclusion, the important question is no longer whether the Wall exists but what the reader has learned to do when one appears. That is more development than most self-help metaphors receive, though Mahan occasionally enjoys his masonry enough to keep building after the house is habitable.

As the Wall’s jurisdiction expands, however, its usefulness becomes harder to separate from its appetite. It comes to organize ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, sensory overload, motivation, burnout, habits, planning and perceptions of time. A portable model should travel. This one sometimes travels so far that distinct difficulties begin to resemble differently furnished rooms in the same building. The problem is easiest to state in the book’s own terms: “Wall” is excellent when it prompts the question “What is making this hard?” It is less reliable when it begins answering before the investigation has taken place.

Danger is clearest in Chapter Two’s brain shorthand. Mahan offers an easily pictured contest between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, then describes ADHD through an “underpowered” prefrontal cortex, anxiety and trauma through an “overpowered” amygdala, and autism through sensory overwhelm that more readily trips the threat system. The language is memorable. It is also broad enough to make very different conditions sound tidier and more internally uniform than they are. The notes acknowledge simplification, and the book is plainly trying to give distressed readers a usable map rather than a neuroscience textbook. Still, the distinction matters. The Wall is persuasive as a language for experience. Its authority weakens when metaphor, diagnosis and brain story begin to look like one comprehensive mechanism.

Intentional repetition suits a book meant to be reopened. Someone landing in Chapter Nine six months after Chapter Two may genuinely need an earlier idea returned to working memory. But repetition has a cumulative weight of its own. Acronyms sit beside stages, scales, planning steps, pre-mortems, post-mortems, habit cues, friction checks, cheat sheets and appendices. By the final third, the book has furnished the room rather enthusiastically. The conclusion tells readers not to worry about remembering everything and recasts unused ideas as seeds that may matter later. Sensible advice. It also functions as an amnesty program for the furniture.

Mahan is on slightly less secure ground when he starts policing the border between compassion and permission. The Wall, he repeatedly says, is a reason rather than an excuse. Often that distinction is exactly right: understanding why you avoided the bill does not pay it. But the phrasing can rub against the book’s more perceptive passages on boundaries, disability, inadequate resources and bad systems. Mahan does not want self-understanding to become another hiding place. Once or twice, in guarding against that possibility, he sounds as though he is checking whether everyone has returned to work. The tension is revealing precisely because the rest of the book has worked so hard to separate usefulness from punishment.

In KC Davis’s “How to Keep House While Drowning,” care tasks are stripped of their moral halo: a clean sink does not make its owner virtuous, and a dirty one does not make her deficient. Mahan is working nearby, though he is more interested in the history attached to the sink. What happened the last five times you tried? Thomas E. Brown’s “Smart but Stuck” offers another useful neighbor in its attention to emotion and executive functioning; McCabe’s “How to ADHD” belongs to this book’s lineage more directly. Mahan and Capell’s distinctive contribution is the piece of architecture between intention and behavior, visible enough that two people can point to it before they start arguing about effort.

The cultural moment gives that architecture additional uses without creating the phenomenon it describes. More adults now encounter ADHD and neurodivergence as explanations for difficulties once narrated through words such as lazy, careless, undisciplined or flaky. “Overcoming the Wall of Awful” is less interested in diagnosis as a badge than in what happens after years of carrying the wrong explanation. Its thinking also travels naturally into discussions of burnout and accommodation. Families and workplaces often ask how to extract more resilience from a person when it may be cheaper, kinder and more effective to clarify the task, supply the missing resource, remove pointless friction or stop arranging work so that terror is the only dependable deadline.

Read against its own ambitions, “Overcoming the Wall of Awful” earns 81/100, or 4/5 stars. The number reflects a memorable practical model, a warm and unusually competent coaching voice, high usefulness after the first read, and a middle section sharper than the usual catalogue of self-help techniques. The deductions are not housekeeping. The metaphor stretches too far; the brain science sometimes hardens shorthand into explanation; the frameworks crowd one another; the rhetoric of responsibility occasionally jars against the book’s anti-shame intelligence; and the final chapters on habits and planning are useful without being equally distinctive. Mahan is most trustworthy when he observes, asks, adjusts and experiments. Certainty is where he becomes less interesting.

One person will find the recaps exhausting; another will be grateful that an essential idea has been left in three places instead of one. That difference is not trivial for this book. Its ideal reader may be opening it precisely when sustained attention, recall or confidence is scarce. Someone who prefers compressed argument and heavily qualified scientific prose will feel the scaffolding. Someone halfway through a brutal week may be glad it is there. Mahan and Capell have chosen usefulness over sleekness, and the choice is mostly justified.

Precisely what survives after the acronyms fade may be much smaller than a productivity system. The book changes what a failed start is allowed to testify about. The unanswered email, untouched assignment or overdue bill need not immediately become evidence in a prosecution of the self. It can be a clue. Fear, perhaps. Confusion. Shame carried forward from the last attempt. Missing skill, sleep, money or support. A task that needs a door. An emotion that has to be climbed with rather than eliminated first. Or a supposed Wall that is really a boundary and ought to stay put.

Once the conclusion begins talking about seeds, total mastery would almost violate the book’s own logic. Readers will forget strategies, revert to old patterns, enter new circumstances, need help, redesign systems and discover that yesterday’s door has jammed. No final climb abolishes the terrain. The gain is less dramatic and more believable: another way to begin, another way to recover, another instance in which stuckness was investigated instead of obeyed. Failure stops being the only evidence accumulating.

Underneath all the masonry is the reversal worth keeping. The Wall first appears as a monument to what went wrong before, each brick seeming to record another failure of nerve, discipline or competence. By the end, the same structure can mark the place where somebody learned to pause before turning difficulty into identity and to ask what, exactly, is making the next movement hard. The bricks remain. What changes is the inscription. They stop spelling your name.

[Voyager ADHD · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Overcoming the wall of awful

- Here we go
- What doesn’t work:
- Staring at it | trying to go around it
- What works but does damaged: smashing into it
- What does work: putting a door the wall | climbing over it
- The wall is an anxiety response and look different person to person
- Definition: the emotional impact of repeated failures and struggle related to certain tasks. It is built from strong negative emotions and held together by anxiety. It shows up when we try to activate or begin or resume a project or task
- How we respond to failure - historically I have responded terribly
- Criticism and feedback wrongly interpreted as rejection
- A reason is an explanation while maintaining responsibility
- An excuse is avoiding the responsibility

Anxiety and the wall of awful
- The wall is in the 3-8 anxiety level
- Freeze or flight
- Two acronyms
- CCAW - reduces anxiety
- Connection, certainty, agency, welling practices


Skills and resources
- SHRED: sleep, habits, relationships, exercise, diet
- So much better than NEMS
- Three skills: technical, executive function, social | all can be learned

Smashing through the wall
- This is my preferred method
- Anger, self loathing, shame, negative emotions - they are all effective at getting through the wall but they have negative long term consequences
- They reenforce the negative emotions, overtime the emotions become less effective, they decrease social skills
- Your negative emotions will impact how you interact with others
- This is a great chapter

Putting a door in the wall
- CCAW
- INCUP: interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, passion
- This was a great chapter, that I don’t have notes on. I will mark up this section in the physical copy
- Default mode network
- Dopamine


Part 3 - systems and change
- The stages of change
- Transitions
- Changing habits is difficult for anyone. As with most things, it can be harder for the neurodivergent
- Emotional v cognitive processing
- Cognitive is more effective for change
- Values and our why
- Not will power

Systems and habits
- The science of habits
- Friction and making things easier
- Fun is the antidote to anxiety
- Ability, comfort, and willingness are important
- Make forgiveness a part of habit formation and your life
- Set up, do up, clean up

- Planning and preparation reduce anxiety
- The six steps of making a plan


This is a fantastic book. I highly recommend this to anyone challenged by neurodivergence.

The highlight was hearing my close friend Zach’s name in the acknowledgments

[Heidi Lynn’s BookReviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, I want to thank Brendan Mahan, MEd, MS., Alex Huges Campbell, and Grand Central Publishing for providing me with this book so I can bring this review to you.

Brendan made me smile as dedicated this book to his father, Bill Mahan, who has always supported his writing and without this book wouldn’t have happened. He also tugged on my heart strings when he dedicated this book in memory of his Mom, Peggy Mahan. He wishes you were here to see what all that studying you helped him do lead to. Brendan, I bet she would be extremely proud of all your accomplishments!

Brendan starts out his book with a very beautifully written and insightful forward from Jessica McCabe who is a creator and host of How to ADHD. She shares with the readers how she first met Brendan and how she learned about The Wall of Awful. She shares all the invaluable lessons that she had learned from attending his program. Jessica is proud of Brendan for climbing the Wall of Awful! If both Jessica and Brendan can do it then for sure anyone that picks up this book can do it as well!!

Brendan was very mindful when planning on writing this book! He wanted this book to be geared towards every reader! I appreciate how considerate he was of the population that would be reading this specific book. Specifically the neurodivergent community. So to help with this he put in multiple supports that can help. For example the parts he found important he stressed in bold print.

You will see side bars, bullet lists, landmarks at each chapter level at the beginning of each chapter you will have one sentence summary at the beginning of the chapter a mini review and action step guide at the end of the guide.

I think it was very important to know upfront that this book does not have to be read in order from start to finish. That for this book of ideas and that you can pick and choose which section you would like to focus on.

I found this crutial and I actually think Brendan should have mentioned this sooner in the book. If you are reading this and suffering a mental health crisis this is not the book for you. Getting help in stability is the first step.

However, if you are in a non crisis situation or managing a chronic or long term mental health condition then yes this book could serve you additional help. You would have never guessed it but for years I have suffered from anxiety, overthinking, ptsd, and social awkwardness (or so my sister calls it). It wasn’t till I changed my mental health therapist from a male to female to get a different perspective on things over this summer and was introduced to an low dose anxiety med. Let me tell you those two changes and a few others have really made an impact on my life in a positive way! So, when I was offered to read and review this book by the publisher it was a no brainer that I agree to it. It came at the perfect time when I was open to taking it all in and learning more about what could help better myself. So, thank you Grand Central Publishing for sending this book and for Brendan for writing it.

Small world! Brendan is friends with author Caroline Maguire who is the author of Friendship Skills for Neurodivergents that ironically I just read and reviewed for her. It is a phenomenal eye opening book if you have not read it you definitely should. In his book he refers to her under the topic of social skills.

For me change has always been hard. So accepting the situation and changing your self talk of the situation is very hard for me. Then bravely moving on from it sometimes is not so easy.

At the end of the book in the appendix Brendan gives a great extra bonus tool kit with breathing exercises, the 5-4-3-2-1 method, sensory regulation strategies, the mammalian driving technique and Immediate distraction technique. You will also find a climbing the wall of awful quick start worksheet.

After reading this book you can tell Brendan really has a gift for what he does for a living. Not only that but a passion for helping people seek help they need. If you or anyone you know are suffering from anxiety I highly suggest you read this book! This book would also be a great addition to any mental health office, school library, etc.

[Patrick Kelly · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Overcoming the wall of awful

- Here we go
- What doesn’t work:
- Staring at it | trying to go around it
- What works but does damaged: smashing into it
- What does work: putting a door the wall | climbing over it
- The wall is an anxiety response and look different person to person
- Definition: the emotional impact of repeated failures and struggle related to certain tasks. It is built from strong negative emotions and held together by anxiety. It shows up when we try to activate or begin or resume a project or task
- How we respond to failure - historically I have responded terribly
- Criticism and feedback wrongly interpreted as rejection
- A reason is an explanation while maintaining responsibility
- An excuse is avoiding the responsibility

Anxiety and the wall of awful
- The wall is in the 3-8 anxiety level
- Freeze or flight
- Two acronyms
- CCAW - reduces anxiety
- Connection, certainty, agency, welling practices


Skills and resources
- SHRED: sleep, habits, relationships, exercise, diet
- So much better than NEMS
- Three skills: technical, executive function, social | all can be learned

Smashing through the wall
- This is my preferred method
- Anger, self loathing, shame, negative emotions - they are all effective at getting through the wall but they have negative long term consequences
- They reenforce the negative emotions, overtime the emotions become less effective, they decrease social skills
- Your negative emotions will impact how you interact with others
- This is a great chapter

Putting a door in the wall
- CCAW
- INCUP: interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, passion
- This was a great chapter, that I don’t have notes on. I will mark up this section in the physical copy
- Default mode network
- Dopamine


Part 3 - systems and change
- The stages of change
- Transitions
- Changing habits is difficult for anyone. As with most things, it can be harder for the neurodivergent
- Emotional v cognitive processing
- Cognitive is more effective for change
- Values and our why
- Not will power

Systems and habits
- The science of habits
- Friction and making things easier
- Fun is the antidote to anxiety
- Ability, comfort, and willingness are important
- Make forgiveness a part of habit formation and your life
- Set up, do up, clean up

- Planning and preparation reduce anxiety
- The six steps of making a plan


This is a fantastic book. I highly recommend this to anyone challenged by neurodivergence.

The highlight was hearing my close friend Zach’s name in the acknowledgments

[Braden Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most books I have read with strategies for helping ADHD or Autism tend to sugar coat the fact that you are going to have to build resilience in order to get past a lot of the hurdles (AKA the Wall of Awful). This book does this, while also showing you that resilience is not only possible, but shows you a direct path to get there by offering solid advice on how to effectivly climb your wall and/or build a door to walk through it. Brendan breaks down each chapter into digestible chunks and offers a quick TL;DR at the end of each chapter so you can quickly go find the quick take-aways. I read through this book in record time and I'm so glad that Brendan's Wall of Awful concept has finally been made into an officially official book :) I HIGHLY recommend this for anybody that has ever dealt with the anxiety that comes with living with ADHD and/or ASD your whole life and all of the criticism that comes with it. 5 STARS

[Savvy_ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overcoming the Wall of Awful by Brendan Mahan and Alex Hughes Capell is well worth the read, not just for those with ADHD. The authors draw you in with honest accounts of personal experiences and distill valuable research in a fun and easy-to-understand way. There are helpful sidebars throughout the book to highlight the most important items to remember. There are useful acronyms that are also helpful in remembering important steps for success. I especially appreciated the stories that helped illuminate each strategy. This book would be a great resource for coaches to use with clients, though it is appropriate for the individual as well.

I am thankful to Net Galley and Grand Central Publishing|Balance for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book.

[Chelsea Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Game-Changing Look at ADHD Paralysis

Overcoming the Wall of Awful by Brendan Mahan is a highly validating read for anyone struggling with adult ADHD or chronic executive dysfunction.

Pros
Brilliant Metaphor: Visualizing task paralysis as an emotional barrier of past failures makes immediate sense.
Neurodiversity-Affirming: Detours completely around toxic "just try harder" productivity advice.
Actionable Strategies: Teaches you how to dismantle or bypass the wall rather than painfully smashing through it.

Cons
Repetitive : The narrative stretches a great concept a bit thin, hitting several repetitive lulls in the middle chapters.

Verdict
An excellent, compassionate blueprint for shifting from self-blame to productivity.