What is Demand Avoidance?

How does Demand Avoidance affect neurodivergent individuals?

The use of gamification to trick your brain into doing what you said you’d do

The Airport Parking Lot Analogy

Demand avoidance occurs when an individual's brain resists completing a task after being directed or prompted to do so.

This common issue affects many neurodivergent individuals, impairing their ability to accomplish desired tasks, even if they had planned to do them in the first place.

Gamification can be an effective strategy to overcome demand avoidance by distracting the brain and triggering a dopamine response.

"One of the ways to distract the brain from this demand avoidance thing is to turn stuff into a game because if you gamify it, you get a little bit of the dopamine. We love the dopamine! The dopamine is a neuro divergence, just… catnip."

"I just make a list of 20 things, 20 things that I could do in roughly 10 minutes, and then I roll a D20, a 20-sided die, and then I do the thing that's on there! That's why my plants aren't dead, because occasionally I roll the number that makes me water my plants."

What does the research says about Pathological Demand Avoidance? According to PDA first appeared in a journal article in 2003. The last five years have seen an increase in the number of research papers written about PDA or EDA. However, the research remains extremely limited. (Source: National Autistic Society UK)

'Pathological demand avoidance' has been criticized as a name for various reasons including the negative connotations some confronted with the word 'pathological' might have,[14] and alternative names like RDA for 'Rational Demand Avoidance'[15][16] or 'Pervasive Drive for Autonomy'[17][18] have been proposed and used. (Source: Wikipedia)