A recognition I did not see coming
This week I went to a talk by Alex Partridge, host of the ADHD Chatter podcast, and Dr Alex George. Right at the start, before the conversation had really begun, Alex Partridge mentioned, almost in passing, that he had been in waiting mode all day.
I was caught off guard, because the phrase landed in me before my mind had caught up with it. And then, slightly more uncomfortably, I realised that despite spending my professional life in mental health, I had not actually come across the term as a named phenomenon. I had come across the experience, of course. I just had not thought of it as a thing with a name.
This is a small admission to make publicly, but I think it matters. Sometimes the language we have not yet met is the language that turns out to describe us most accurately.
What waiting mode is
"Waiting mode" is a term that has emerged from neurodivergent communities, particularly the ADHD community, over the last few years. It is not a clinical diagnosis. You will not find it in any manual. But it describes something that clinicians, researchers, and the people who live with it all recognise immediately.
Waiting mode is the state of being unable to settle into anything else when you know you have something coming up later in the day. The looming event takes up a disproportionate amount of cognitive space, and the time before it becomes a kind of suspended limbo. There may be hours of perfectly usable time available. There may be tasks you genuinely want to do. None of that helps. The brain has locked on, and it will not release until the event has passed.
It is most strongly associated with ADHD, where it is usually understood to arise from the combined effects of time blindness, executive dysfunction, and anticipatory anxiety. But it is also commonly described by autistic people, and by those living with depression, anxiety, or PTSD. It travels widely.
The patterns I noticed in myself
Once the term had landed, I started to notice how many of my own patterns sit inside, or alongside, this idea.
Looking back, it goes a long way. At school, I worked hard. It was what was expected, and I did it naturally. I think I was quite inefficient with it, if I am honest. Everything had to be perfect and neatly presented, with generous use of coloured pens. And I will not even start on the lavish revision timetables I used to produce, which were themselves works of art and took about as long as the revising would have done. It did not occur to me then that this was anything other than how you did school.
By the time I reached university, I had streamlined. I always did my assignments the moment they were set. I did well, and I did not think about it at the time. It was simply what I did. Only now can I see the same pattern at play, even then: a quiet discomfort with the assignment sitting open, a need to close the loop before I could properly settle into anything else.
I have always frontloaded my week. If Monday is the busiest day of the week, that suits me. I would rather get the heavy lifting out of the way and have the rest of the week to breathe. If I am starting work later in the day, I find it almost impossible to use the morning well. I drift, I half-do things, I feel guilty for not working, and the not-working is somehow more tiring than the working would have been.
I cannot leave the kitchen until it is cleared. The thought of relaxing with the dishes still on the side is genuinely unsettling, even when I am tired. And once I have stopped for the evening, I find it very difficult to start again. I have never been able to exercise after work; it has always been mornings or not at all. I suspect this also explains the quiet reluctance I sometimes feel about evening social plans, even ones I am looking forward to.
These have always felt like personality traits. They have served me well in some ways. They are also, I now suspect, all variations on the same theme.
It is worth pausing here to say something important. These patterns have served me well. They got me through medical school. They carried me through almost twenty years as an NHS GP. They have helped me build a practice, write the things I have written, and do the work I do now. They are not flaws. In many ways, they are the reason I have achieved what I have achieved. Any reflection that dismissed that would be missing half the picture.
And yet.
What is waiting mode and what is something else
Some of what I have just described is waiting mode in the strictest sense. The morning before a later work start is a textbook example. The looming start time dictates the available cognitive space, and even though there is plenty of time to do something useful, the brain refuses to release attention to it. The evening reluctance is also recognisable: once stopped, the prospect of starting again, with all the transitions involved (changing, leaving, getting somewhere, coming back), is exactly the kind of stacked task-switch that waiting mode tends to refuse.
But the Monday frontloading and the post-dinner kitchen are slightly different. They are about an intolerance of open loops. There is a well-known psychological idea here, sometimes called the Zeigarnik effect, which describes the way unfinished tasks occupy more mental bandwidth than finished ones. They pull at attention even when we are trying to think about something else. For some of us, that pull is loud. We are not at ease until the loop is closed.
These are not quite the same as waiting mode, but they are close cousins. They share a family resemblance, and they often live in the same person.
The thread that runs through
What unites them, I think, is a low tolerance for cognitive pending-ness. A quiet, persistent quest to never have anything hanging over us.
This is a common psychological style, and it is not a pathology. In some ways it can look highly functional. The person who frontloads, who closes loops, who never lets anything sit, who gets things done. From the outside, this looks like competence. From the inside, it can be quite different. Because if the nervous system cannot truly stand down until everything is closed, and there is always something open, then there is no real rest. Only the gaps between vigilance.
This is where my clinical antennae start to twitch. As a former GP and now as a therapist, I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about burnout, and one of the most reliable warning signs is exactly this pattern: a person whose sense of okay-ness depends on completion, on closure, on nothing pending. It can drive a great deal of achievement. It can also, very quietly, drive a person into the ground.
What to do with this kind of recognition
I am wary of label-collecting. There is a fashion at the moment for accumulating diagnostic and quasi-diagnostic terms, and I do not think more labels automatically equal more self-understanding. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do the opposite, by giving us a tidy explanation that closes off further enquiry.
But naming a pattern is different from labelling oneself. Naming makes the unconscious visible. And once a pattern is visible, it becomes choosable. We can ask new questions of it. Is this serving me here, in this moment, or not? What would it cost me to leave the kitchen for the morning? What might I notice if I let myself sit with the pending thing instead of rushing to close it?
For me, the quiet recognition this week has not been "I have waiting mode and now I need to fix it." It has been something more like: oh, this is a pattern, and it has a shape, and it has a cost as well as a benefit. That is a useful thing to know. It is the kind of knowing that does not demand action, only attention.
If any of this resonates, you might find it worth noticing your own version of it. The morning that disappears before an afternoon appointment. The reluctance to start anything when something else is scheduled. The need to clear the decks before you can rest. The exhaustion that arrives the moment a long-anticipated event ends.
These are not character flaws. They are not laziness. They are not failures of discipline. They are patterns, often deeply protective in their origins, that may or may not still be serving you now.
That is worth knowing. And it is worth saying out loud, because so many people are quietly running themselves on these patterns and assuming that everyone else just copes better.
Vicky Froome is an integrative psychotherapist and former NHS GP. She runs Dragonfly Psychotherapy in Guildford and East Horsley, Surrey, working with adults and young people from age 11. She writes regularly about mental health, neurodiversity, and the quiet patterns that shape our lives.
www.dragonflypsychotherapy.co.uk