When Values Increase Capacity: An Internal Compass for ADHD

... how orienting priorities reduce internal friction and strengthen sustainable effort

Photo by Valentin Antonucci from pexels.com

In this module on Strengths, I’ve been using the word strengths in a very specific way.
Not as personality traits or virtues, but as usable capacity — the things that increase what your system can hold, engage with, and tolerate without collapse.

Across the previous articles, we’ve looked at different ways that capacity can be expanded.

🧠 ADHD Isn’t Just in the Mind
→ how supporting the body and nervous system reduces strain and increases what’s possible

🪞 The Strengths of ADHD
→ how dignity, identity, and reframing lived traits can restore capacity

🎯 From Hyperfocus to Flow
→ how understanding salience and reducing friction can support engagement without depletion

This final article in the Strengths module turns to values — not as moral imperatives or ideals to live up to, but as another way of organising attention, meaning, and effort so that capacity isn’t just bigger, but more coherently directed — like a compass.

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Why this framing of strengths matters

Framing strengths in this way — as expanding capacity through orienting your internal compass — does something quietly radical.

• It moves the focus away from strengths as character traits that are either present (good) or absent (shame-generating).
• It removes the moral pressure to have or develop the “right” qualities.
• It stops asking the self to perform improvement.

Instead, it asks a practical and compassionate question:

What makes it easier for this system to function without collapse?

This matters because unadapted CBT can sometimes unintentionally fail ADHDers by focusing too quickly on dismantling existing life-scaffolding or “taking things out.” For many people with ADHD, it already feels as though very little is holding things together. Being asked to remove habits, strategies, or identities — even when they’re costly — can feel like being asked to let go of what enabled survival in the first place.

My approach starts somewhere else.

We don’t begin by dismantling what you’ve already put in place to support yourself.
We begin by stabilising the nervous system.
And we add signposts that arise from lived experience, so that change becomes navigable and tolerable.

Seen this way, values belong naturally as the final piece in the Strengths module. They aren’t about pruning the self or becoming better. They’re about adding coherence, meaning, and direction — another way of increasing capacity without shame.

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Why ADHD systems leak energy — and how coherence restores capacity

A great deal of ADHD exhaustion doesn’t come from effort or doing too much.
It comes from doing things without a unifying why.

When effort isn’t anchored to something that feels personally meaningful, the ADHD nervous system has to rely on urgency, fear, novelty, or external pressure to keep going. These strategies do work — but they’re metabolically expensive.

You can often detect the difference viscerally, by comparing how you feel when you’re doing something because you care about it versus because you have to.

Doing something you care about may still be tiring, but it usually feels coherent.
Doing something that cuts across your priorities often feels draining in a different way — restless, resentful, or quietly corrosive.

This is where values, used properly, start to matter.

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Photo by James Wheeler from pixels.com

Values as orienting priorities

When people talk about values, they often mean something abstract and static: honesty, kindness, integrity, fairness.

The problem is that values framed this way don’t actually help very much in real life — especially not in moments of strain.

Real life rarely asks us whether we value honesty in general.
It asks what to do when honesty competes with care, safety, loyalty, or responsibility.

This is why I’m using the term orienting priorities.

Orienting priorities are not fixed ideals. They are directional choices that only become visible when more than one thing matters at once. They answer questions like:

• What comes first here?

• What am I willing to carry — and what am I not?

• If something has to give, what gives first?

Another way of thinking about this is as an internal compass.

A compass doesn’t tell you where to go, or how hard the journey will be. It doesn’t remove obstacles or guarantee the terrain will be kind. What it does is help you keep your bearings when there are multiple possible directions — especially when visibility is poor and the ground is uneven.

Orienting priorities function in much the same way. They don’t eliminate difficulty, but they help you decide which direction of effort keeps you internally aligned, rather than pulled apart.

Seen this way, values stop being moral badges and start becoming practical guides under constraint. They are values in motion — expressed through prioritisation, sequencing, and trade-offs.

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Coherence increases capacity

This is the link back to capacity.

Orienting priorities increase usable capacity not by removing difficulty, but by reducing internal friction.

When effort is aligned with what matters, the system no longer has to fight itself at the same time. There is less internal negotiation, less second-guessing, less quiet resentment.

That kind of coherence doesn’t make life easier — but it does make energy go further.

Values don’t add fuel.
They reduce leakage.

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A different question

So instead of asking:

What kind of person should I be?
What do I value most?

I think a more workable question is this:

How can I make sustained effort for something I care about without creating unnecessary internal strain?

That wording matters.

Values don’t exist to eliminate effort. Some of the things we care about most are costly — emotionally, physically, relationally. Orienting priorities don’t make those costs disappear.

What they do is help distinguish between necessary strain and avoidable strain.

They help you notice the difference between being tired because something genuinely matters, and being drained because you’re carrying more than is yours, or fighting yourself as you go.

Another way to ask the same thing is:

How can I keep caring — and acting — without burning out my system?

That question doesn’t ask for ease.
It asks for sustainability.

And that’s exactly where an internal values compass does its quiet work.

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Orienting priorities are discovered, not chosen

One important reassurance before going any further:

I can’t give you a checklist of orienting priorities.

Not because I don’t want to — but because they don’t really work that way.

They aren’t something most people sit down and decide. They tend to be extracted over time, often through difficulty.

In my own life, the orienting priorities I now rely on weren’t taught to me in CBT training, at school, or at home. They emerged slowly through lived experience — particularly through moments of strain and misalignment.

For example, one priority I’ve had to learn the hard way is that disagreement between partners is tolerable, but asymmetry of responsibility triggered by disagreement is not. Shared responsibility needs to hold even when shared understanding does not.

Another is that not every situation calls for the best solution — only the least harmful one. When circumstances are constrained or resistant, striving for an ideal outcome often leads me to overreach, over-explain, or take on more responsibility than is mine. Choosing instead the option that causes the least cumulative damage to both me and others — even if imperfect — has proved far more sustainable.

These orienting priorities aren’t exemplars — they’re instances.

They aren’t things to copy.
They’re examples of what orienting priorities can look like once they’ve been named.

Most people only begin to recognise theirs when something breaks — burnout, resentment, repeated conflict, or a sense of chronic over-responsibility.

Before that point, these priorities are often operating implicitly, shaping behaviour without language.

So if you’re reading this and thinking, “I like this, but I don’t know what my orienting priorities are” — that’s not a failure of insight.

It’s exactly where most people start.

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Beginning to notice your own orienting priorities

If orienting priorities aren’t chosen, then what can you do?

The work here isn’t generative.
It’s observational.

You’re not trying to invent values.
You’re noticing where effort remains tolerable — and where it becomes corrosive over time.

Some gentle questions that can help orient this noticing:

• When I’m tired by my effort, but still intact afterwards, what was guiding my actions?

• When I feel drained or resentful after effort, what was I prioritising — and what was being overridden?

• What situations leave me thinking, “I shouldn’t have had to carry that”?

• When I say yes, what am I protecting — and when I say no, what am I protecting?

You’re not looking for what feels easy.
You’re looking for what feels worth the cost, and what quietly erodes you.

Often, an orienting priority first shows up not as a value statement, but as a repeated realisation:

• I keep getting hurt when I prioritise X over Y.

• Things go better when I put A before B, even though it’s uncomfortable.

• I function better when I choose C over D, even when both matter.

Over time, these patterns can be named — not as rules, but as directional priorities:

X before Y.
This before that.
Not at the cost of this.

That’s usually how an internal values compass begins to come into view.

For many people, these priorities become clearer not in isolation, but in conversation — where patterns can be gently noticed, named, and tested over time. That’s one of the ways I use formulation-based CBT in my work: not to impose values, but to help people hear the ones that are already operating.

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