ADHD rants and memes

1. If you want a kid to clean, first you have to teach them to even see mess. They don’t! But it does stress them out.

“Okay, let’s look for something out of its place. If it’s on the floor, it’s out of place. If it’s on your bed and it’s not a blanket, it’s out of place.”

2. Go by category, it’s easier to find stuff to put away if your search engine has a specific target, and it’s more satisfying and efficient to put away a big chunk of mess at once.

“Got something? Ok, are there other things like it? Let’s find all the BOOKS. I will HELP YOU.”

3. Important!! Don’t walk away from a kid with focus issues expecting them to instantly learn a task and finish it! You are setting them up to fail! The first several times you need to be there for the whole process and demonstrate by helping. That motivates them. They feel less panic that you’ll bail and they’ll be stuck alone not knowing what to do next. Narrate what you’re doing, too. Help and supervise less as they seem to need you less.

“I’ll get the books on the floor, can you help me get the ones under your bed? I can’t fit!”

4. In my experience most kids, but especially kids with ADHD would walk to the fucking moon to help you, they just need a clear plan, keep the criticism light, short, and to the point, and ffs PRAISE THEM when they do things right, cause we’ve all (I hope) seen the statistics on how much more negative interaction they get compared to other kids (and rejection sensitive dysphoria is a motherfucker). But more than praise you need to show them how what they did was good for THEM. Do nooooooooot take this opportunity for an ‘I told you so’ or a ‘finally’ or you will suck out all their accomplishment.

“Hey, great job, you found that horse you were missing because you cleaned! And your room looks so nice! It’s really comfortable to play in now, and you did that.”

5. Emphasize it does not have to be perfect or complete to be worth doing. I don’t want to will my kids my paralysis of inaction because I can’t start part of something unless I can do all of it.

“We don’t have time to do the whole room, but let’s pick up the legos before bed so you don’t hurt your feet. And then it’ll already be done tomorrow!”

Why are we expected to just know?

And, for God’s own sake, why were we never exposed to the idea that being good at something often happens After being bad at something and doing it imperfectly anyway?

I dont have the motivation to brush my teeth every night and I feel like i'm glued in place

I can't shower at least every other day because of the same reason

I wait until I'm out of clothes to do my laundry because it's so many steps and takes sooooo long

And I can't clean my room because its soooo muchhh workkkkkk except not actually it takes 5 mins and I hyperfocus thru it but before I actually start it feels impossible to do

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Anger, outbursts, anxiety, irritability, impatience: more than most people, ADHDers can be driven by emotions.

by Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D., author of Smart but Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD

Emotions Rule

Few doctors factor in emotional challenges when making an ADHD diagnosis. In fact, current diagnostic criteria for ADHD include no mention of “problems with emotions.” Yet recent research reveals that those with ADHD have significantly more difficulty with low frustration tolerance, impatience, hot temper, and excitability than a control group.

Processing Emotion: A Brain Thing

Challenges with emotions start in the brain itself. Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong, flooding the brain with one intense emotion. At other times, the person with ADHD seems insensitive or unaware of the emotions of others. Brain connectivity networks carrying information related to emotion seem to be somewhat more limited in individuals with ADHD.

Fastening on a Feeling

When an adolescent with ADHD becomes enraged when a parent refuses him use of the car, for example, his extreme response may be due to “flooding” – a momentary emotion that can gobble up all of the space in an ADHDer’s head just like a computer virus can gobble up all of the space on a hard drive. This focus on one emotion crowds out other important information that might help him modulate his anger and regulate his behavior.

Extreme Sensitivity to Disapproval

ADHDers often become quickly immersed in one salient emotion and have problems shifting their focus to other aspects of a situation. Hearing a slight uncertainty in a coworker’s reaction to a suggestion may lead to interpreting this as criticism and an outburst of inappropriate self-defense without having listened carefully to the coworker’s response.

Bottled Up by Fear

Significant social anxiety is a chronic difficulty experienced by more than one third of teens and adults with ADHD. They live almost constantly with exaggerated fears of being seen by others as incompetent, unappealing, or uncool.

Giving In to Avoidance and Denial

Some people with ADHD don’t suffer from a lack of awareness of important emotions but from an inability to tolerate those emotions enough to deal effectively with them. They become caught up in behavior patterns to avoid painful emotions that seem too overwhelming – looming deadlines or meeting an unfamiliar group of people.

Carried Away with Emotion

For many ADHDers, the brain’s gating mechanism for regulating emotion does not distinguish between dangerous threats and more minor problems. These individuals are often thrown into panic mode by thoughts or perceptions that do not warrant such a reaction. As a result, the ADHD brain can’t deal more rationally and realistically with events that are stressful.

Sadness and Low Self-Esteem

People with untreated ADHD can suffer from dysthymia – a mild but long-term form of depression or sadness. It is often brought on by living with the frustrations, failures, negative feedback, and stresses of life due to untreated or inadequately treated ADHD. People who are dysthymic suffer almost every day from low energy and self-esteem.

Emotions and Getting Started

Emotions motivate action­ – action to engage or action to avoid. Many people with untreated ADHD can readily mobilize interest only for activities offering very immediate gratification. They tend to have severe difficulty in activating and sustaining effort for tasks that offer rewards over the longer term.

Emotions and Getting Started 2

Brain imaging studies demonstrate that chemicals that activate reward-recognizing circuits in the brain tend to bind on significantly fewer receptor sites in people with ADHD than do those in a comparison group. People with ADHD are less able to anticipate pleasure or register satisfaction with tasks for which the payoff is delayed.

Emotions and Working Memory

Working memory brings into play, consciously and/or unconsciously, the emotional energy needed to help us organize, sustain focus, monitor and self-regulate. Many ADHDers, though, have inadequate working memory, which may explain why they are often disorganized, lose their temper, or procrastinate.

Emotions and Working Memory 2

Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong. At other times, working memory impairments leave the person with insufficient sensitivity to the importance of a particular emotion because he or she hasn’t kept other relevant information in mind.

Treating Emotional Challenges

Showering

Showering still feels Way Too Big for me a lot but I found that listening to music while getting ready for showering + the actual shower helps a lot for some reason!

If showering feels too big, it’s okay. I bought a bottle of dry shampoo at one point so I always had a backup in case I couldn’t get myself to shower, maybe you could use that in addition to baby wipes?

Dishes

I usually didn’t struggle too much with the dishes but it still got tricky sometimes. If it’s just too hard for you to keep up you could buy throwaway plates, cups and cutlery? (I know it’s not very environment-friendly but it’s more important for you to eat well and live in a clean environment!)

If you can’t get yourself to clean and scrub everything thorougly, at least try to soak it in hot/boiling water! That will get rid of most of the food usually, and you don’t want mold growing.

Food

This was the hardest part of living on my own for me. I have to decide what to eat + get that food + prepare it for myself AND I have to do dishes after???? The Worst.

make a list of dishes/food options you like. if you are too tired to think of what to eat whip out the list

make!! a!!! backup!!! food!!!! stash!!! I always made sure I had at least 4 bags of soup at home as backup for bad executive dysfunction days. I picked soup because it’s a) relatively healthy, b) v easy to prepare because you only have to yeet it in a bowl and toss it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, c) you are only using a spoon and a bowl, which are the easiest to clean and d) you can save them for more than a year. You don’t have to pick soup of course but try to find something that is healthy/healthy-ish, easy to prepare/clean up and can be stored for a long time!

Remember that small steps are good too.

make a list of ‘easy foods’. there is a document floating around on tumblr that is filled with a lot of low spoon recipes. I can’t find it right now but maybe someone else can link it?

If you can afford it/if this is an option where you live, you could see if groceries can be delivered to you so you don’t have to go to the supermarket?

Most important things

Remember that small steps are good too. If you only clean one dish from the big pile that is good too!!! If you managed to take a shower that day but can’t muster up the energy to do the dishes after that’s okay too!!!!

Alternative methods are your friends.

How you get clean matters so much less than that you get clean. If using a garden hose in the back yard is what works for you? Do that. If you want to fill a beer mug and splash it on your junk? Fantastic. Embace the whores bath which is to say - wet washcloth to key places. I spent months washing my hair in the sink because showering was a lot. It’s your life. HOW DOESNT MATTER

Multiples of things. Trash cans and clothes hampers everywhere you are. I have like 5 toothbrushes scattered around my house - at two sinks & in the shower etc cuz it has to happen in at all. The best weapon against ADL breakdown is immediacy.

Kitchen:

Disposables are your friends. Throw that shit away. They’re adaptive anyway and executive dysfunction is a tremendous disability even if we don’t get the acknowledgment visual disability does.

If it’s half empty don’t keep. You won’t be punished if you don’t finish the thing.

If you have days you’re good too cook? Batch cook and freeze.

Forgive yourself for takeout and other things that take the pressure off on a given day.

Overall:

The single best piece of advice I have when looking at these kinds of spoon things if you have executive dysfunction is to examine the things you do that fuck you up and ask “what am I running from/hurt about/sure will happen? Is there another way to do this than the way I’ve always been told to do that might make me feel that way less?” You may find there there is. This seems like a something impossible ? But it’s not. Because here’s a radical truth: most of what we know about How To Adult is what neurotypical parents imposed on us as children as chores and mandatory tasks. There’s a standard and you met it because structure is good for kids, actually, and learning that these tasks are important is too. It works as a teaching method too because these “normal” systems work for most people because most people don’t have executive dysfunction.They can work for us too alright when we had someone outside us making us do it but if you are on your own with executive dysfunction, those normal practices might not work because the programs necessary to do them in our brains don’t fucking run. They just don’t. So you have to figure out for yourself what you want to do and then realize that the stuff your family of origin taught you about how to care for yourself doesn’t fucking matter at all compared to the end game of being cared for and well. Debugging what stops you from reaching the point of having care is the key.

Example: for me one of those was just…not putting clothes in drawers anymore. When I shifted from “putting away my clothes”=“shoving them on a shelf” instead of =“putting them in a drawer” whichw as the task for 30 years? the task of “putting my clothes” away became less daunting because I couldn’t close the fucking drawers and my upbringing says that’s the last step. My space was a mess because I never closed the drawers so that task never ended. So I would not put the clothes away at all and they’d sit in piles, multiple loads of clean laundry stacked like logs get dirty again. Shifting from drawers to shelf allowed me to cut out that part that of the task “putting clothes away” that threw a wrench into the whole thing and now my space is cleaner, my clothes get put away faster and I actually finish the task. But everyone else uses drawers. Not me. Never again. Doesn’t work.

1. The “5-second rule” can help some people.

No, not the one where you eat food off the floor (not that I’m judging).

I’m talking about Mel Robbins’ 5-second rule. When she was too depressed to get up in the morning, she heard the NASA “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” countdown in her head and got up on 1. She couldn’t get up before noon for months before that, but did that morning.

I’ve turned it into the “3-second-rule” because 2 other seconds are superfluous imo. Idk if it’ll work for everyone, and the very idea of it seems to really piss some people off, which is fine, idrc.

in my experience, you CAN burn out on it with ADHD and its obligatory co-morbidities, particularly bad depression. I don’t recommend doing it like every half hour of every day (on average) or something if you have reason to be wary of that. In other words, you might want to change up your motivation methods.

2. Laughing about it all helps, sometimes. Be dramatic. Throw yourself on the floor and whine loudly to whoever you live with when you don’t want to shower. Stare at the bathroom door with exaggerated forlornness. Crawl there while fake crying.

I’ve been surprised by how being silly about this stuff sometimes…reduces its heaviness.

Again, idk if this will work/always work for everyone. It’s just something that occasionally works for me.

3. If you have a chance, even the SLIMMEST chance to make The Thing You Need To Be Doing a habit–especially exercise–FREAKING TAKE IT, and do NOT take breaks.

I say especially exercise because–and don’t ask me why–it seems to form a really good bedrock on which to build a lot of other good things in life.