The Mental Cost of Suboptimal Tolerance
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
ADHD, executive function and the hidden mental cost of tolerating the suboptimal - how raising your standards can reset your focus, energy and life.
In February, my laptop stopped working.
Not slow.
Not glitchy.
Dead.
Of course, it happened on the day I was invited to be a guest on a podcast. I was ready and excited for the conversation, but I couldn’t log in.
But the real insight didn’t come from the laptop breaking.
It came from realising how long I had tolerated it being semi-broken.
The lag.
The glitches.
The endless little workarounds.
I had adapted.
And that moment stayed with me.
A few weeks later, it became the theme of the March ADHD Supper Club: Reset.
Because for many people with ADHD, life rarely collapses in dramatic ways.
It quietly drains through things that almost work.
Suboptimal Tolerance
Many neurodivergent people become highly skilled at tolerating the suboptimal.
A system that drains you.
A routine that exhausts you.
A space that scatters your attention
Sometimes, even a belief that you are the problem.
So you adapt.
You become resourceful.
You push harder.
You learn to navigate around what doesn’t quite work.
Until one day you realise something uncomfortable:
You have built your life around coping with things that should have been fixed long ago.
Not only systems.
People.
Objects.
Environments.
Habits.
All quietly lowering the standard of what your life could be.
What Is the Broken Laptop in Your Life?
Mine was literal.
But most broken laptops in life are invisible.
A chaotic workspace that drains your mind every day.
A habit that slowly erodes your energy.
An environment that constantly pulls you out of focus.
A relationship that quietly shrinks your sense of self.
Or the silent belief that something about you is defective.
So here is the real question:
What is the broken laptop in your life you have been quietly ignoring or tolerating?
The Vision of Reset
At the ADHD Supper Club Reset in March, we spoke about something powerful:
Reset is not motivation.
Reset is standards.
It is the moment you raise the floor of what you are willing to tolerate.
The shift from surviving your systems…
to optimising your life.
From:
“I’ll manage.”
to
“My life deserves its optimal level.”
Some people with ADHD say they thrive in chaos - and sometimes novelty does energise the brain. But stimulation is not the same as living surrounded by things that constantly drain your energy.
One expands your life.
The other slowly contracts it.
Telos
The ancient Greeks had a word: telos.
It means the highest expression of something’s nature.
Its fullest potential.
A seed’s telos is to become a tree. A mind’s telos is to flourish.
Not merely cope. Flourish.
Every time we tolerate the suboptimal - in our systems, our spaces, our habits, our environments - we drift further away from that telos.
Further away from the life we once imagined.
But the moment we raise our standards…
something begins to change.
Reset Is a Choice
Raising your standards is not arrogance.
It is clarity.
It is deciding that your life is not meant to run in constant workaround mode.
It is about choosing tools, environments, relationships, and habits that support you.
And sometimes it means rewriting something even deeper:
a different story about yourself.
Not the story of someone broken.
But the story of someone who simply spent years navigating systems that were.
Living suboptimally is rarely about a lack of intelligence or ambition. More often it reflects a gap between how our mind actually functions and the systems we try to force ourselves into. Executive function plays a central role in this gap. If you would like to better understand how your own executive function profile may be shaping your behaviour, decisions and productivity, you can explore it through my Executive Function Predictor.
One Last Question
And drawing from my Greek roots, if your life moved closer to its telos - its fullest expression
What would you stop tolerating today?
Sometimes the biggest reset in life begins the moment we stop tolerating the suboptimal.
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