You don't want to call them bad things, because then the piling up would become overwhelming, and before long you would have to start thinking of your life as intolerable. Instead of "bad," you think of them as difficult; challenges, to be divided and conquered. You sort of hyperfocus and try not to notice all of them at once. This (you say, surveying the wreckage) is only difficult, I only worry about the problem that's in front of me, a mountain to be scaled, nothing more. And after that, it will be the next mountain, and the next, instead of some intolerable mess of suffocating badness, like being strangled in a sea of cooked spaghetti.

It works, most of the time. I think a lot of people do this.

Here's the dilemma; how do you do one mountain at a time when you're ADHD? Seriously. I've recently observed that I can jump into something and stay consistent, put time into it every day--for more or less three weeks, at which point my attention attempts mutiny. Problems don't seem to come in bite size chunks. . . God forbid I should need a bigger mouth?