Neurodivergent Studying

idk if these will help anyone else but here goes

Downy Wrinkle Release Spray

Do you pull your clothes out of the dryer and leave them sitting for hours or days on end? I do! It’s a habit I’ve been trying to break for years. They’d get wrinkled and I wouldn’t notice until it was time to leave, then I’d throw them in the dryer for 20 minutes when I was already late and it was always a disaster. 

So what’s the better option? Wrinkle release spray. Spritz it on your shirt, smooth it down and you’re good to go! It also takes care of static cling! 

Lunch Boxes

Making breakfast is hard. I’m not a morning person, and I don’t want to have to think in the first three hours after I wake up. I’ve done everything I can to streamline mornings, but the need for breakfast always catches me off guard. And because I’m usually in a rush, if I’ve run out of my usual quick options I’m not likely to notice until I need it. Getting a lunch box means I’m free to make food the night before! Easy! You might think this is just common sense, but it took me far too long to realize I needed it.

Working Wallpaper

So you know how they say that you should always do certain things in the same place? Like if you want to sleep well, use your bed for nothing but sleep. That way your brain makes the association that bed=sleep and will decide it’s sleep time as soon as you lay down. Well I’ve found that the same applies to work. I can focus much better when I’m in a “work place”. Unfortunately, I can only be in the work place half the time. The other half I’m working from home. What then? 

It might be silly but I chose a desktop wallpaper to be my “work wallpaper”. Every time I’m ready to work I change my background to that one, and when I’m done I change it to something else. It seems to work! Anyway brains are weird.

Have trouble doing small household chores like doing the dishes?

When you go to bed and you are calm enough to think, think about all the things you want to do tomorrow. Make an effort to break them down into steps. Visualize going through those steps one by one. The more detailed, the better. Try to do this as close to the time you fall asleep as possible. Think about what you will do once you finish all your tasks too. Think about achieving everything. Imagine that the task has already been done.

Next morning when you wake up, it is just a tiny bit possible that you will be able to do everything you planned on autopilot like people without executive dysfunction can. You might still need to narrate it in your mind but it can make it easier. I think the trick is that you prepare the instructions beforehand and then when you move to doing the task it doesn’t overwhelm you as much because it feels like you’ve already done it.

dont be afraid to just ask someone what they think you should do right now 

Initiation (starting a task) is an executive function. What can help is establishing a routine that will trigger you to start working.

First decide where you’re going to study. Choose a location that you will only use for doing schoolwork (i.e., studying, completing homework). Set it up so that you have the things you most often need, like highlighters and pens and pencils, paper, and your schoolbooks (probably keeping them in your backpack is a good idea, so keep your backpack in this location).

Now you have a location that will trigger you into schoolwork mode.

Next decide what you need for doing your work. Maybe a study time playlist on iTunes or Pandora or Spotify (or whatever) and a snack of some kind are in order. Get the music playing and make your snack, then sit down in your study space.

If you’re finding that you’re getting distracted by computer stuff, you might want to install an app that blocks certain web sites at certain times of the day.

Speaking of time of day, it can be helpful to always study at the same time every day, or at least to have a regular schedule for studying. Then you’ll have a trigger of a location, the time of day, your background music, and a snack.

The other thing you need to make sure you have is a list of what you need to do. Just sitting down and saying “I’m going to study now” won’t really be helpful. But being able to sit down and look at your list of what you need to study and what projects you need to work on can be really helpful because you won’t have to worry about where to start: it’s all on your list already. So make a list to help you in this area.

Beyond that, the easiest thing to do is find one little thing to do and then see if just starting gets you going. Like for a project, writing your name on the page is one little thing, and sometimes doing that will get you to do the whole thing. So reading one sentence could be a little thing and then you get pulled in to read an entire paragraph and that snowballs.

Okay so if you have depression, adhd, you’re chronically ill, disabled, autistic, or cleaning is just hard for you well me too. I feel you. Thinking is hard. Cleaning is hard. Thinking about cleaning is hard. Here are some steps that might make it easier.

1. You don’t have to clean everything right now! No really, you don’t. You don’t have to do every single one of those dishes. You don’t have to get that room spotless. However much you can get done is perfectly fine.

2. Start with a general group of things that you don’t have to think about will make things much easier. Telling you to just not think about it doesn’t help and I feel that.

What’s the biggest group of things in the room? If it’s your room with your bed and clothes, try picking up all the fabric items. Anything that might need to make it’s way to the washing machine, stick it in a pile. You might be surprised at how much cleaner the room is.

The other large group of things you can tackle? Trash. Are you sitting around your desk, and you tend to eat snacks there but don’t have a trash can within reach? Well you’re probably like me and you just set your tissue/kleenex, bag of chips, energy bar wrapper, what have you on the desk to throw away later. And then you never do. Well now’s your chance!

3. Anything you don’t want to throw away? Grab a big box. Cardboard, plastic, whatever works. If it holds things, it works. Anything that doesn’t go in the trash or recycling can go in that box. Congratulations, the room is clean for the most part.

4. Take as long as you need, hours, days, months, years, forever, and just grab a random item from the box and put it away. Maybe it’s every time you get up, every time you pass the box, or maybe you manage to get to a day where you tackle that box and spend a good few hours putting everything away. Either way, it helps make cleaning easier, faster, and less daunting when you can just put things into groups and you truly don’t have to think about what you need to do.

The box might be forever full, and you might end up always putting stuff in there to clean up and so you never really put the stuff at the bottom away, and obviously you don’t want to place your breakables in there, but it can definitely help. And if it helps one person then that’s good enough for me.

EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION TIP:

Write reminders directly onto your bathroom mirror with an expo marker so it’s one of the first things you see in the morning and one of the last things you see before you go to bed.

If you’re having trouble getting yourself to start something, try making yourself just do the first few steps.

For example, if you know you need to draw but you’re struggling to get yourself to do it, don’t worry about the actual drawing process right now. Just set up your computer, grab your tablet and pen, plug in your tablet, open the drawing, zoom in, and click on the necessary brush (or whatever your specific process may be).