Hacking Your ADHD

I'd say I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning, but that implies that there is a part of me that loves cleaning. There isn't. I like having cleaned and having a clean home, but I seldom enjoy the actual cleaning part. ADHD tends to not make cleaning any easier. Time blindness makes me think most of the cleaning tasks I need to do are going to take forever. I have a natural propensity for clutter, and that clutter often fades into the background of what I notice - so I just stop seeing that stack of mail on my counter. Today we're going to be looking at why we should stop treating cleaning our house like a project. Ways that we can make consistent cleaning easier and also how we can get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated in our homes. Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/cleaninghouse This Episode's Top Tips Stop thinking of cleaning your house as a project - we've got to understand that cleaning is about the small tasks that we do consistently that is going to keep our house clean. Work on creating that routine of small tasks that you can do every day to improve the base level clean of your house - focus on starting small at first. Think about what you can do in the morning and what you can do right before you go to bed. Time your cleaning tasks so that you know how long they actually take to do - a lot of the tasks that we put off doing actually take way less time than we think they do. Use temptation bundling and listen to a podcast while cleaning so that you can stay motivated while tidying up. Make sure everything in your house has a place to live - it doesn't have to be an exact spot, but if you know where to put something then you won't waste mental energy figuring out where stuff needs to go when picking up. Spend some time decluttering your house by asking better questions about the objects you are thinking of getting rid of - if we can identify the reason we want to keep something it makes it easier to pare down what we have.

My desk usually has a least a few fidget toys on top of it. I say usually only because my children sneak into my office and steal them. But the rest of the time I have a couple infinity cubes, a tangle and a piece of sea glass I use as a worry stone. I love having them to play with as I think through sentences while I'm writing and also as something to keep my hands busy while I'm reading. Today we're going to talk about the rise of fidgets in over the last few years and then dive into how they are supposed to work. We'll also be discussing what makes a good fidget. Show note at HackingYourADHD.com/fidgetscience Today's Top Tips There are a lot of sketchy claims about fidget toys. Be wary of marketing claims, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater - figure out which fidgets work best for you. Fidgets work by helping us manage our attention and focus. It can be hard for us to direct our attention when we're either over or under-stimulated. The best fidgets are things that we can do with our hands without looking at them - we don't want to be drawing too much of our attention to use them, just enough to help drown out the other outside stimuli around us.

Trying to plan in a pandemic has been... well really what's been a problem is all the plans that I made before the lockdown. Every week I look through my calendar and have canceled events and plans that just aren't going to happen. I mean this was the first Easter I didn't have to pretend to be sick during to avoid going over to the in-laws, but that's a pretty weak silver lining. We've got a lot going on so planning is more important than ever - I mean going to the grocery store takes a lot more forethought than it used to. But planning also seems harder than ever before as well, so today we're going to be looking at what to do when plans go awry and how to adjust our long-term planning. Find the show note for this episode at HackingYourADHD.com/BestLaidPlans This Episode's Top Tips No one really wanted to hear me read poetry. When our plans go wrong it can be frustrating and debilitating. We can mitigate some of this by thinking through what can go wrong with our plans and coming up with contingencies. Right now a lot of our long-term plans are disarray - while it is hard to plan for the future because when we are faced with uncertainty, we can still look at our underlying goals and base our planning around them. Give yourself a break - it's okay to do less. While it is still a good idea to plan our days, we can also just plan on doing less.

Going online has its perks - we've got a wealth of information at our fingertips - but with so much information it can be hard to find the truth. Often we can't find the signal for the noise because well, it is just really noisy. And by noisy, I mean there is a lot of bad information out there. In today's episode, we're going to be looking specifically at science journalism, but really most of what we're going to be talking about can be applied to everything that we read online. We want to be getting the best information and so we've got to be cautious about our sources. So we're going to be looking at ways that research can be manipulated to support a flimsy claim, why we've got to go beyond reading the headlines and what to watch out for when we are reading those articles. Find Today's Show Notes at HackingYourADHD.com/badscience Today's Top Tips While most scientist aren't trying to create bad science, lack of funding and time can make many studies suspect. To help validate claims, read into the study methodology and see what other research supports those claims. Make sure that you are reading beyond just headlines. Many over zealous reporters will embellish headlines to garner more clicks. Watch for words like "proved" about science. Science doesn't prove anything, it just creates evidence that supports a claim or refutes it. Be skeptical of claims that seem to good to be true, they usually are.

I hope everyone is staying home and staying safe. I know that everyone is going through a hard time right now and ADHD isn't making it any easier. So today we're going to be talking about what we can do to try and regain some of that control you may feel you have lost in your life. We'll be talking about staying in contact with friends, setting up routines and using accountability. We'll also be talking about ways to get in a little more self-care. For show notes go to HackingYourADHD.com/ControllingWhatYouCan Today's Top Tips Make sure you're scheduling time to be social - figure out ways to stay in contact while you are apart. Create a routine to follow and use accountability to help you follow through with your intentions. Prioritize self-care somewhere in your routine. Give yourself some slack.

When I'm working on this podcast sometimes I wish my boss would be a little harder on me because it can be easy for me to get behind - but my boss is kind of laid back and lets me get away with more than I should - and that's probably because my boss is me. When I can't count on myself to get the things I need to turn to others to help me out. A lot of us with ADHD can have trouble turning to others when we need help, but we don't have to do things alone. And one of the best ways others can help you is through accountability. Today I'm going to talk about what accountability is, what it isn't and ways that you can get some more into your life so that you can follow through with your intentions. Find the full show note on my web page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/CompassionateAssKicking Today's Top Tips Accountability is about stating what your intentions are to someone else so that you can accountable to them about whether or not you followed through with those intentions There are a lot of ways that you can build accountability into your life - like body doubling and accountability teams When forming an accountability team make sure everyone is on the same page when you are starting up so that everyone knows what to expect and what is expected of them

This week we're going to be hitting Working With Your ADHD. One of my biggest struggles with ADHD often comes from my belief that if I just tried harder I'd be able to overcome anything that my ADHD was throwing at me, but surprise surprise that just isn't the case. In today's episode, we're going to be looking at why we don't want to just keep trying to do the same things as neurotypicals, why we struggle so much with the idea of trying harder and also some of the strategies that are going to support us the best. Find the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/WorkingWith Today's Top Tips 1. Pretending that we're neurotypical is exhausting and will lead us to use the wrong strategies for our brains. 2. We shouldn't focus on just trying harder. It's okay for us to just do less, especially when we are staying focus on what matters most. 3. The best strategies for working with your ADHD starts with accepting your ADHD. Make time to educate yourself about what's really happening in your ADHD brain and get involved with the ADHD community.

When I was in school, I always wanted to be the kind of student who able to finish a project well before it needed to be turned in. I loved the idea that I could write a paper and still have a week left to polish it. Of course, I was never actually that student. For me to get started on a paper, I had to actually be able to feel that pressure from the deadline building up on me. That usually meant that I was mostly working on papers the night before - I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Since I was still able to get good grades with this strategy, I never really changed it - but I always wished that I wasn't always riding by the seat of my pants. Despite having a good track record, there were times that I missed those deadlines. And a funny thing about it was that I always wanted more time to write my papers. In my brain, if the deadline was pushed farther out I would have had more time to start, and yet experience has taught me that it really didn't matter how much time I was given to complete a paper. Given a week or month, I would still procrastinate until the last minute. When those deadlines were moving in on me, I was able to focus like no other. The time pressure allowed me to block out all those other distracting ideas vying for my attention. Today we're going to be exploring how we can use this time pressure to complete those nagging tasks that we otherwise might not get done and also those things we want to do but just can't seem to prioritize. We'll also be looking at better ways to set deadlines so that we can follow through with our intentions. Check out the show notes at HackingYourADHD.com/deadlines Today's Top Tips Time pressure from deadlines allows us to focus on the tasks in front of us and distill our work down to the most important parts. When setting deadlines we want to make sure that they are relevant to either us or the project. A great way to do this is through accountability and getting someone else to check in on your progress. Deadlines need to be realistic if we plan on meeting them. Time blindness can make it hard to know how long something is actually going to take, but if we break down our projects into chunks we can work on hitting milestones with mini-deadlines.

Exhausted, empty, overloaded, unable to cope - these are some of the words I'll find myself using when I'm feeling burned out or on the path to burnout. We tend to find ourselves in burnout after prolonged periods of stress - it isn't something that sets in all at once. It isn't that we finally have a straw that breaks the camel's back, instead we just eventually find ourselves waking up one morning and realizing we just can't even. We find that we've lost our passion and drive for everything in front of us. We might still find ways to be productive but we tend to be robotic about it and it just drains us more and more. Burnout is hard. Today we're going to start out by discussing what burnout actually is and I'm also going to talk about some of the times I hit burnout. We're also going to be looking at what we can do to prevent burn and then what to do if we still hit burnout anyways. For full show notes go to: HackingYourADHD.com/burnout Today's Top Tips Burnout consists of three parts - exhaustion (both mental and physical), loss of meaning in our work, and a feeling ineptitude. Burnout is a slow grind and we've got to pay attention to why we're feeling unmotivated when doing tasks we normally enjoy. We want to prevent burnout by setting healthy boundaries around our work, prioritizing self-care, and remembering to take time off. Not comparing ourselves to others and accepting that our ADHD makes things hard will also help us with not feeling like we're so far behind everyone else. If we do hit burnout, we need to reassess what are needs are and identify what was causing us to burnout. Take sometime off and figure out what really matters to you. We often hit burnout when our rewards don't match our efforts.

When you've got ADHD making reminders is a given. There's just too much going on in any one given day for me to keep track of it all and without reminders I know I'm going to drop the ball somewhere. I've got reminders for big things like when I need to leave to pick up my kids from school and little things like having a cup of tea in the evening but not too close to bedtime. So when I get told I just need to create a reminder to remember something I just want to shout that I already am using a lot of reminders. A big problem with a lot of reminders is that they just aren't effective at getting us to do the things they are supposed to be reminding us of. Today we're going to be exploring the ways that we can make better reminders so that we're actually following through on them. We'll be looking at what we're creating reminders for. How and when we are getting those reminders and also look at how we are creating our system of reminders. Find the full show note at: HackingYourADHD.com/EffectiveReminders Today's Top Tips The most important aspect of a reminder is having it delivered when you can do something about it - you can do this by thinking through the context of a reminder. If you need a reminder at work make sure you are getting it when you are at work. Reminders are great for reminding you of things, but not for doing unscheduled tasks. Leave projects on your to-do list and actually schedule a time for them instead of creating a reminder that you are never going to do. Reminders can either be short-term or long-term but regardless of what kind of reminder you are creating you want to make sure you are giving yourself enough information to follow through on what you were trying to remind yourself about. Create a combination of physical and digital reminders so that you can get the most out of your reminder systems. Physical reminders tend to be faster to set up but digital reminders can be more robust in how they are reminding you.