One of the common issues people take with their ADHD children or even with themselves if they have ADHD is the fact that our rooms and yes, sometimes our entire houses, seem to be a gigantic mess. While there are several reasons for this, including difficulty with motivation and discipline, I would like to discuss one very important, yet not very often talked about reason why this is often the case.
As I have discussed before, both in and outside of the blog, the things that people who have ADHD struggle with pertain mostly to executive functioning, the manager of the brain, which includes organizational tasks, and short-term (or working) memory. Part of this is nonverbal working memory, which includes the ability to predict the future based on past events or to envision what something would look like once it is completed.
Once one can envision an entire task, it gives them the ability to break it down into smaller parts, so a neurotypical person cleaning their room would easily be able to see breaking it down into smaller tasks such as putting all the laundry into the laundry basket or putting all the blocks into their container. Whereas a person with ADHD would look at their messy room, but instead of seeing several smaller tasks that need to be done, they see one large single task, which can be quite overwhelming. I like to think of it as the opposite of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Instead, we can’t see the trees, we just see forest.
There is a simple solution for those of us who have a difficult time perceiving a future finished project and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable tasks, but it may require some outside help.
When my son became of the age where it is normal to expect one to be able to clean up their rooms by themselves, he would fight me and procrastinate and have a meltdown. One day, I realized it would be easier for him if he knew what he was working towards. So I cleaned his room for him. I organized every book on his bookshelf, all the toys in his closet, and every item of clothing down to the last pair of socks. I made his bed, I hung up his jackets, and then….
I took pictures of everything.
I printed them out for him and put them into a binder along with a checklist he needed to make sure was completed before I would consider his room “clean.”
It took a fair amount of time before he could clean the room without the pictures, but now he gets it right (for the most part) and his room is clean a lot more often than it used to be.
The thing about the brain is that it’s malleable, and even though we may be at a disadvantage in some instances for the rest of our lives when it comes to utilizing our brains for certain tasks, we can find ways to still adapt. Our skills may never match those of a person with a neurotypical brain, but with a lot of practice, we might be able to get closer than we think.
