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Mastering the ADHD Brain: From Task Overwhelm to Intuitive Activity Alignment
Finding Your Flow With an Intuitive Approach to Task Overwhelm
It’s easy for people with ADHD to allow tasks to pile up, causing anxiety that could lead to negative self-talk and depression, sometimes worse.
In my last article, I shared three easy ways to halt the hamster wheel in your ADHD brain.
One of those is the brain dump, a timed activity in which you write down everything in your mind to “clear the mental cache”.
Why Clearing the Mental Cache is Key
For women with ADHD, hyperactivity is often inside our minds.
That, at its worst, it can feel like a spinning ball with lights and sounds a-blare, tumbling around a cage of ADHD that won’t let our thoughts settle down.
Sometimes, that cage prevents our thoughts from coming out in a logical sequence.
Clearing your mental cache, under full permission to just “get it out” without the pressure of organizing thoughts, gives you the mental space needed to get clarity from your thoughts.
Once you perform your brain dump, you can parse out your list of tasks to get you on the road to accomplishment.
Pro Tip: Rename Your Tasks to Activities & Connect with the Why
Leveraging the Liven app has encouraged me to rename my tasks to ‘activities’, which, as silly as it sounds, removes some of the weight from my to-do list.
Part of my morning journaling now includes connecting some of the ‘activities’ I want to complete that day to the ‘why’ of the activity, further motivating me to get it done.
For example, instead of writing “schedule car service”, I write, “I want my car to run well for a long time, so I will schedule and drive 35 miles each way to service my car.”
This approach will likely seem unnecessary to a neurotypical person, but for me, it forces me to slow down as I write the additional words and recognize why it’s important for me to accomplish that activity (or task). This adds purpose to the action, a critical component for ADHD brains.
