Managing Money with ADHD? Here’s How to Tear Down “The Wall of Awful”

‍This post is adapted from YNAB’s twice-monthly newsletter, Loose Change.

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What ADHD educator Brendan Mahan calls “The Wall of Awful” often begins something like this: You come home from school, set down your bag, and there’s some invisible, magnetic force that repels you from homework.

You get a snack, walk around, lie in your bed, play with your stuffed animals, and then suddenly the spell gets broken by a grumpy, remote-working parent who storms into your room and snaps, “What the heck have you been doing for the last 30 minutes!”

You immediately start to apologize, but your parent has this tired, resigned look as if they expected nothing less. So you trudge back downstairs and sit next to your homework, but the force field is still there. You try to break through. But you can’t, day after day.

The Wall of Awful gets created, brick by brick, with every repeated failure, disappointment, rejection, or instance of guilt. It’s an emotional barrier which makes starting seemingly simple tasks excruciatingly difficult. You’d rather do anything else. 

From the outside, the Wall is invisible. No one can see what you’re struggling with, it just looks like inaction. And the avoidance of the task leads to more disappointment, more guilt, and maybe rejection.

I think it’s fair to say that money offers similar brick-making opportunities. The time you charged your way through a vacation without paying attention to the amounts. The debt you took on before you were old enough to legally drink. The way your partner doesn’t trust you around money. The bricks build up until it takes so much effort to just look at your retirement account, to start a conversation about money, that you stop trying to scale the Wall at all.

But no one wins if you can’t get over the Wall. Money touches almost everything in your life, so to turn away from it is to live a smaller, restrained life. It’s like sitting in a world-class Italian restaurant and never turning past the first page of the menu. 

You wanna only eat antipasti for the rest your life?! (Don’t answer that.)

How to Tear Down the Wall of Awful

Assuming that you don’t want to live in the paralyzing shadow of the Wall of Awful, what to do? Brendan Mahan to the rescue.

1)      Create handholds to climb the Wall.

• Become aware of the emotions that come up around money.
• Acknowledge them.
• Take action on the feelings: talk to a friend or therapist, and try being kind to yourself.

2)      Or, forget climbing the Wall—look for a door!

Mahan recommends changing your emotional state with music or varying your environment. He writes, “The Wall of Awful is often strongest at home because we’re surrounded by our responsibilities, struggles, failures, distractions, and concerns.”

The wonderful part of this metaphor is that it doesn’t absolve us from dealing with our money. It’s just acknowledging an obstacle instead of pretending it’s not there. For me, Mahan is putting his finger on why I was able to stick with YNAB even though I had previously struggled to implement basic personal-finance advice. Willpower is overrated, but self-awareness is gold.

Think of YNAB as your personal butler, handling the heavy lifting of money management. The result? Simplified, streamlined, and stress-free finances. Try it free for 34 days!

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YNAB IRL: “My YNAB Win” with ADHD

The YNAB Reddit community is 200,000 strong, but this powerful story from @coffee_powered jumped right out at us!

I discovered YNAB at the end of November, it clicked in my ADHD brain super quick and makes perfect sense to me.
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I’m 42, earn a reasonable income, yet have lived my entire adult life paycheck to paycheck and often overdrawn. I closed my eyes to my money, and trusted that it would all be ok by payday. For decades.
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I’ve just been paid (end of the month, call it feb arrears or march, whatever) but before that landed in my account this morning I still had a positive balance of over £1000, and I know what job every one of those pounds has.
I don’t feel like I’ve sacrificed spending, if anything I feel like I’ve spent more on myself in the past two months than the past few years and don’t feel guilty about it.

Also, my joint budget squeaked over the line without going overdrawn despite my projection of a £100 underfunded shortfall by the end of the month, and amazingly my personal budget already had £100 set aside to cover any overdraft, the power of the budget has been life changing.
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Sure, YNAB cost me £100 for the year, but oh my word has that paid for itself quickly.
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Edit: I think I found my people!