Waiting Mode: Why ADHD Can Make “Doing Nothing” Feel Impossible

If you’ve ever had an appointment at 3 pm and found yourself completely unable to do anything beforehand, welcome to waiting mode.

You’re not resting. You’re not relaxing. You’re not even procrastinating properly.

You’re stuck.

Among people with ADHD, “waiting mode” is a widely recognised experience: hours of mental paralysis before an event, during which starting any other task feels impossible. While it’s not a formal clinical term, the science behind it is very real.

What Is Waiting Mode?

Waiting mode describes a state where anticipation of a future event — a meeting, appointment, phone call, delivery — shuts down your ability to initiate other tasks.

People often describe:

• staring at the clock,
• scrolling aimlessly,
• feeling tense and restless,
• knowing they have time, but not being able to use it.

Crucially, this isn’t laziness or poor planning. It’s an interaction between several core ADHD traits that collide in particularly unhelpful ways.

Time Blindness: When “Later” Has No Shape

One of the biggest drivers of waiting mode is time blindness — difficulty accurately sensing, estimating, or trusting time.

For many people with ADHD, time isn’t experienced as a smooth, predictable flow. Instead, it tends to collapse into two categories:

• now
• not now

That 3 pm appointment doesn’t feel safely distant at 10 am. It feels imminent. Without a reliable internal sense of time, your brain doesn’t trust itself to notice when it’s time to switch tasks or get ready.

So, your brain compensates. It does this by keeping the appointment in the front of your mind, constantly; your brain is trying to make sure you don’t forget it. Unfortunately, that safety strategy comes at a cost.

Working Memory Gets Jammed

To “keep something in mind”, your brain uses working memory — the mental workspace that holds information you’re actively using.

ADHD is strongly associated with reduced working-memory capacity. When you load a high-stakes future task into that workspace (“Do NOT miss the appointment”), it can take up most of the available space.

That means there’s very little room left to:

• plan a new task,
• hold instructions in mind,
• or initiate something else.

In practical terms, your mental RAM is full.

This is why waiting mode doesn’t feel like a choice. You’re not deciding not to start something. Your brain literally doesn’t have the capacity to load anything new.

Why You Can’t “Just Do a Small Task”

People often suggest, “Why don’t you just do something quick while you wait?”

Here’s the problem. Starting a task isn’t a single action. It requires:

• deciding what to do,
• planning the steps,
• estimating how long it will take,
• holding all of that in mind while you begin.

Each of those steps relies on executive function — an area where ADHD brains already work harder than average.

When your working memory is already saturated by waiting, task initiation becomes mechanically difficult. This is why even tiny tasks can feel overwhelming in waiting mode.

It’s not about motivation. It’s about cognitive load.

Waiting Feels Bad — And That Matters

Waiting mode isn’t calm. It’s uncomfortable, restless, and often anxiety-provoking.

This links to a well-established ADHD trait called delay aversion — a heightened emotional discomfort associated with waiting.

Neuroimaging studies show that when people with ADHD anticipate delays, brain regions involved in threat and emotion (including the amygdala) become more active than in non-ADHD brains.

In simple terms: waiting feels stressful at a biological level.

That creates a paradox:

• Waiting feels bad, so your brain wants to escape it by doing something.
• But doing something risks forgetting the appointment.
• So your brain freezes instead.

This is why waiting mode often feels tense rather than restful — a high-stress “do nothing” state.

Anxiety Makes It Worse

ADHD and anxiety frequently co-occur, and anxiety further reduces working-memory capacity.

Worrying about missing the appointment increases the need to keep it in mind, while simultaneously shrinking the mental space available to do so.

This feedback loop can push the brain into full shutdown. Neither action nor rest feels possible.

Why This Matters

Understanding waiting mode helps shift the narrative from:

“Why can’t I just get on with things?” to: “My brain is overloaded, and this is how that shows up.”

That reframe matters. It reduces shame, and it points towards strategies that externalise time and memory, rather than relying on internal systems that are already stretched.

Waiting mode isn’t a flaw.

It’s a signal.

And once you understand why it happens, you can start designing your life around your brain, instead of blaming yourself for having one.

Author: James Brown, PhD.