I was diagnosed very late in life (I was 44), so I stumbled upon some strategies for coping with ADHD without knowing that’s what I was doing. A late diagnosis is both immensely frustrating and kind of like winning a weird award at the same time. I live with regret about my lost “potential” and a lifetime of firebombing of my own goals, and wondering what I might have managed to accomplish by now if I’d known I was different, but I also get to have a not-insignificant amount of pride about what I’ve managed to accomplish in spite of having a fucked up brain.
To address the usual assumptions: no, my ADHD wasn’t missed because I have “girl ADHD” or a milder, less disruptive version. I have severe, hyperactive-impulsive ADHD. Then as now, girls aren’t given the same benefit of the doubt that boys so often are. Also, since ADHD is almost always inherited, my behaviour and struggles were never considered weird or concerning to my mother or to my grandmother, to whom my behaviour was completely familiar, so they weren’t going to flag any of it as anything other than normal.
The first thing a diagnosis gives us is permission to take care of ourselves the way we need to. There were lots of things I would like to have done to help myself complete tasks, but they look to others like going overboard or overthinking things, and people always tell me that I’m going too far, so I didn’t allow my coping mechanisms be what they needed to be. The diagnosis lets me ignore those criticisms and hesitations. All ADHD hacks and coping strategies seem like “too much” to other people, so I have accepted that that criticism is meaningless and ableist, and I let myself ignore it. That alone is probably one of the best reasons to get a formal diagnosis, and the best coping strategy I have.
If something I try fails, I begin with the assumption that the issue is a missing step in the process, not that I just didn’t try hard enough. Self-blame is useless and an obstacle. If a process requires me to try harder, it’s a broken process. The goal is to create systems that guide me towards success and feel easy and seamless, and blaming myself doesn’t help me get there. I feel badly about hurting other people or letting them down, but I have stopped blaming myself. The problem was never that I didn’t care or wasn’t trying hard enough. It’s just the wrong systems and missing steps. Instead of feeling guilty, I apologize and explain to the person I’ve harmed how I’m working to avoid repeating my mistake. They can accept that or not.
One of the additional complications of ADHD is that it impacts all the executive functions, and the ability to recognize that you’re struggling with a task and why requires several of those. So one of the things I’ve accepted is that it’s okay that I don’t know why I’m struggling with something. I have spent my life making up reasons for my fuck ups that feel true, but that doesn’t mean they are. I’ve embraced the fact that not understanding why something is hard or why something failed only means I don’t understand how my deficits are at play in this situation yet, and I shouldn’t make assumptions about what will and won’t work. Now I try to design solutions based on a few core elements where I know I have deficits and see how it goes.
Having a deficit that impacts executive function means a person with ADHD will likely not recognize or be able to see their own symptoms. I never once even considered that I might have ADHD before the age of 40, and even then I only identified with the executive function issues, not “attention deficit”. I do not have an attention deficit, and I have never felt distracted. I am always laser-focused on something, it’s just that that what that is can change every 30 seconds (or not change for 30 hours) without me noticing. I can only recognize “distraction” (getting pushed off task by following an impulse) when medicated. If I could see that task-shift happening, I could choose to stop it and stay on task, but without medication, I can’t. ADHD is a form of inner blindness, a struggle with self-awareness and limited tool set for self-control. So another way to cope is to accept that you don’t know what you don’t know, and parts of you are on an auto-pilot. But you can connect with yourself to recognize, understand, and control all of these things. It just looks weird when you do it. And that’s okay.
Externalizing Habit Formation
I go with the assumption that I can’t form habits. It’s possible I can, but I find it more useful to assume I can’t. If I can’t form habits, then I need to find other ways to get habitual things accomplished regularly without needing to remember to do them, and without needing to think about it. I have externalized every habit I can, and I keep adding more. Externalizing basic stuff means I waste no energy trying to remember to do them, so I save my brain for bigger things.
I’ve found that the first task in any strategy is planning ahead, as much as that’s an agonizing concept to wrap my head around. 9 times out of 10, if something doesn’t work, it’s because there’s another, more basic plan missing that I need first. Like can’t plan meals without having a list of meals I like handy. I can’t do the recall and the planning at the same time. But that’s okay: I can just keep lists of meals once I know I need that.
I build my habits in a spreadsheet, beginning with the things I wish I were doing and when, and guessing how much time they take. This is how I learned that I need 90 minutes to have the morning I want to have, and for years I gave myself 20 minutes to do it. And I wondered why that wasn’t working!
My future self is like a floppy puppy, and I need to give that floppy puppy some structure to keep her going in the direction she wants to be going in. I need the floppy puppy to be a) rested, b) clean, c) clothed, d) fed on a schedule so that she can tackle the unplanned tasks of the day at her best, so I lay the groundwork so that the basics will be covered without her having to think about or remember to do any of it. For normal people this is just being an adult, but I am not normal people, so my process is different.
Figuring out what habits I should have sounds easy, but it’s harder than I thought. I have spent many hours designing and testing ideal routines (morning, evening, weekly, etc.), and it quickly realized that not only was I expecting to just magically do all these things without planning or a prompt before now, I wasn’t even completely sure what I wanted or needed to do at any given time, so no wonder I wasn’t reliably doing any of it. Determining how to offload “habits” and design prompts for them instead is an ongoing task.
To outsource habit-formation, I designed programmed audio and light prompts in daily and weekly routines via smart speakers that I keep in every room of my home. I find audio more powerful than visual screen prompts, and designing them as routines means they are regular and continuous and don’t require intervention from me. In sum, I program rooms to remind me what I should be doing, and to adjust the lighting accordingly. So lights will go off in rooms I shouldn’t be in, and go on in rooms i should be.
Anything I want to do habitually (like wash my face, brush my teeth, take a shower, eat breakfast, prep my lunch, plan dinner, wash my sheets, etc.) I plan and program a timed, daily or weekly prompt for. There are really no limits on this. I started by building a morning routine of prompts to keep me on task in the mornings, and then an evening routine (lay out clothes for tomorrow, get tomorrow’s dinner out of the freezer, etc.) I keep building more of them as time goes on. Not only does it keep me from having to remember what I need to do, it adds texture to time and helps me recognize that time is passing.
Sometimes just these reminder isn’t enough. I have learned that sometimes, to keep myself on schedule, I need to disrupt my hyperfocus. Figuring out how to do that is a task in itself. I use smart plugs on all my lamps so that I can set them to switch off on a schedule. I have created a playlist to start playing when I should be switching tasks (and getting ready for bed). Finally, I created a routine to cut power to my TV at a certain time. I can switch it back on, but it’s enough work that it shakes me out of a pointless next-episode loop if I’m in one. One of the most useful things I’ve done to help me get out of bed in the mornings is set the whole thing to start 5 minutes earlier than then giving myself the option to ignore it for 5 minutes. For some reason that works. Possibly it just stages the transition? Not sure.
I’ve recently learned that getting myself to make my bed the moment I get out of it is a good way to avoid getting back into it. Also, it makes my room look nice. Which leads me to…
Filling Necessary Tasks with Tiny Joys
In retrospect I can see that one of my first coping mechanisms is using enthusiasm to motivate myself. I can create enthusiasm about almost anything, and once I’m enthusiastic, I’m more likely to follow through on a task. I find deadlines and stress too stressful a motivator, so I opted with joy and delight instead.
I try to add elements of delight to things I need to do. A shower filled with products that don’t make me smile isn’t a shower I’ll avoid exactly, but it’s not one I’ll be pleased to jump into. So I put time and energy into finding out what shampoo and soap that I love. I let myself have scent obsessions. For a while I wanted everything to smell like desserts, but at the moment I’m into citrus. Is this silly? Yes. But I indulge it because it’s part of making necessary tasks easier to do.
I need to get myself to bed on time, so making my bedroom delightful is another indulgence to allow myself without guilt. That means paying attention to the aesthetics, and also to textures. I need to have clean sheets, and I need to have sheets I love that feel amazing. Currently really into silky bamboo sheets. And I will reject a laundry detergent, even if it’s a full bottle, if the smell of it doesn’t make me happy. Wasteful? Yes. But I will indulge myself in these ways because it’s part of the joy-forward plan.
I have struggled with breakfast for years, but have now solved it, partly just by making time for it, and partly by properly planning for it, but also by making it as delightful as a can. I’ve been making myself a honey latte using this very bougie honey + bee pollen honey I found at the market, and do I ever look forward to that latte! It’s a weird flex to see your fuck ups and respond by rewarding yourself, but I’ve found that joy and delight yields better results than any form of deprivation or punishment, and it’s results I’m after.
Externalizing Working Memory and Recall
My life is littered with evidence that I have a limited working memory, but the concept of working memory is relatively opaque to us. What’s the difference between short-term memory and working memory? How does recall fit in? Don’t ask me! All I know is that I need to externalize more than I think I do, so when things go pear-shaped, I try externalizing more information to see if it helps.
One of the ways I’ve externalized information relates to food. I have a long history of planning meals, buying all kinds of lovely ingredients, and then letting them rot in my fridge. I’ve deduced that part of the problem is that when I’m tired and thinking about other things, I don’t have the capacity to mentally go back into that plan and pull out the idea for this meal. That’s too much mental work for me at that point in the day. (Could I conjure up an entire novel’s worth of plot? Yes! But remembering what I had planned to eat for dinner? Nope.) Even opening the fridge might not trigger my recall. So now I have a whiteboard on my fridge where I write what meals I planned for the day so that I don’t have to remember. It’s always easier for me to pick from a list than the recall anything. So I give myself lists when I need them.
My most Helpful Purchases (so far)
Electric kettle: one that switches itself off. That way, if you forget you put the kettle on, no harm done.
Smart speakers: I use Alexa devices, but apple and google devices work basically the same way. You can build routines and have them triggered by command, or time, or proximity, etc. I haven’t needed to use IFTTT to accomplish anything yet, but I’m ready to. I use my phone all the time, but I also abandon it randomly, so I find apps less useful for controlling my behaviour than audio and light signals in my home. Most of my habits happen in my home anyway.
Magnetic Whiteboards: for my fridge. I have two little ones.
Robovac: Somehow I’m just more likely to let Kyle my robovac run loose than I am to vaccum myself.
Solid shampoo and conditioner: it’s less plastic and better for the environment, but mainly I use solid shampoo and conditioner because I can have a year’s worth of it in my bathroom without looking like a hoarder. I have a tendency to hoard things I fear forgetting to have with me. Solid shampoo is small and lasts a long time if you let it air out properly. I stack a year’s worth of them in a vase in my bathroom. It looks pretty and it smells nice, but it’s actually there because I fear forgetting to buy shampoo and running out. This way I literally can’t run out, and when I get to the point where I only have 6 months’ worth, the vase doesn’t look at pretty, so I re-stock months before I have to.
Multiple laundry baskets: You need as many laundry baskets as you sort into. If you do lights and darks, you need two. If you do lights, darks, and hot water wash, you need three. One laundry basket with three classes of item inside means more thinking required to do laundry, and that’s an obstacle. So multiple laundry baskets.
Weekly pill dispenser: I currently take 6 pills in the morning. That seems like a lot, but it’s really very mundane: 2 prescriptions (one is two pills to reach the right dose), an antihistamine, vitamin D, and black kohosh. That is too many pills for me to manage individually first thing in the morning. It was too many pills when it was 3 pills. That’s too much faffing around, I won’t do it consistently, or I won’t do it properly more often than not. So I dispense my 6 daily pills into a weekly dispenser. I dispense each day’s worth all at once into a beautiful earthenware egg cup, pop them all into my mouth in one go the moment I wake up, and then drink water from a matching beautiful earthenware cup. This means a) I don’t need to remember to take them all, and I don’t even notice how many of them I’m taking, 6 is the same as 1, b) I can easily add or subtract pills without altering my routine, c) there is beauty involved in the tools and that pleases me, d) I can confirm whether or not I took my pills that day because the dispenser has 7 slots in it.
Wireless phone charger: Why plug your phone in when you could create a home for your phone where a) you know where it is, and b) it charges?
Key dish: I keep my keys in a special dish (next to my wireless phone charger) to avoid the time and stress playing “the key game”, where you try to remember where you put your bloody keys. I spent weeks deciding exactly what dish I needed it to be. I ended up getting a on-the-verge-of-hideous second hand candy dish made by a now-defunct factory where my family would visit in the summer, and the weird bowl on display in that borrowed cottage. So it reminds me of happy childhood memories. I love that ugly dish. The fact that it’s meaningful seems trite, but that the meaningfulness helps me to remember to put my keys in it. Looking at it gives me happy memories, which helps me to remember to use it, and to remember where my keys are.
Valet stand: this is a piece of furniture. It has a shelf, rail, and a whatsit that looks like a hanger, a thing you could hang a jacket on. They make valet chairs as well and I want one. I use a valet stand to put my next day’s clothes on. It’s a place to put them, but also a reminder that I need to suit it up before I got to bed. It looks so refined, and it’s better than hanging things off my dresser, I figure.
More to come!
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
sarahthecoat
