If you have a home and you have ADHD, perhaps you know how it feels to have unfinished chores hanging over your head.
The worst part? These are trivial chores. We’re ashamed to even admit we struggle with them. And yet they haunt us day after day, week after week.
Clean the spare bathroom.Schedule a donation pickup for those bags of clothes sitting in the basement.
Do something about the stack of school papers on the corner of the dining room table.
Unpack your suitcase from your most recent (but not actually recent) trip out of town.
Simple things, right? Adult things. And yet it’s like a force field keeps us from doing them.
Then one day our unsuspecting spouse mentions the suitcase, which we realize has sat on the bedroom floor for months now, and we melt down.
I talked about this In a Patreon video a few weeks ago. My downstairs bathroom had become a sore point for me. I used it to illustrate how checking off a small, stupid thing can help clear much bigger logjams from my task list.
Those logjams can create serious drag on our productivity, our mental health, and our relationships. Trivial chores, it turns out, aren’t trivial at all.
Those lingering undone tasks steal our free time — even though we’re not working on them!
I’ve noticed something about myself: when I have too many lingering, undone tasks, I don’t let myself relax. At least not deeply. Not in a way that feels restorative and guilt-free.
Even if I can’t bring it all to the front of my mind, my subconscious knows what I’ve let slip. Little, stupid stuff eventually drags me down. Stuff like that spare bathroom in the basement. I stop feeling truly finished, truly free, at the end of the day.
When I don’t feel free, I avoid my preferred unwinding activities: video games, pleasure reading, television shows.Consciously or not, I don’t think I deserve them. I haven’t earned them.
And yet I still need down time. We all do. When I’m burned out at the end of the day but don’t allow myself an actual leisure time activity, I drift to the time-wasters.
Usually this takes the form of mindless scrolling on my phone. I can try to justify it, saying I “need to keep up on news headlines” or “want to keep up with people on social media.” That doesn’t make it healthy. It’s not how I wanted to spend my evening.
Now, in addition to feeling guilty and ashamed about my lingering tasks, I feel guilty and ashamed that I can’t even relax correctly. In no universe should watching a favorite TV show be difficult to accomplish. What’s wrong with me?
And on and on.
Lingering tasks also set landmines in our relationships
Because these tasks weigh on the subconscious, they create a lot of accumulated self-judgement. Every time I use that spare bathroom, it reminds me of my failure to complete a basic, easy task. I add a little more shame and judgement to the pile.
Eventually, someone else in my household will make an offhand mention of the bathroom. Maybe they’ll casually observe the brown, scaly ring around the base of the soap dispenser. Not even in a judgemental way. Still, it becomes a lightning rod for a toxic stew of emotions.
Enter the ADHD meltdown.
The ADHD meltdown can blindside its target. All they know is they mentioned something in passing — something that felt completely neutral to them — and somehow triggered an explosion.
After enough of this, partners of ADHDers feel like they’re always walking on eggshells. They never know what will set us off.
So now that pile of little stuff — a suitcase on the floor, a bathroom in need of a scrub — has contributed to a big rift in the relationship. Little stuff has stopped feeling little.
It’s easy to believe we need to buckle down and make big progress — or not even bother
Once I get stuck in a cycle like this, I don’t want to settle for the small win. The shame has grown so big, a piddly effort will only make things worse. I want something to show for myself.
But will it make things worse?
Ever since I read Stephen Guise’s lovely little book Mini Habits several years ago, I’ve been obsessed with small wins. My husband read it and tried the one-pushup-per-day challenge. He eventually abandoned it. However, he told me something really fascinating afterward: he stuck with it longer than he could remember sticking to anything. Ever.
We need a taste of success, no matter how small
We ADHDers get too few opportunities to taste success. Real pride and accomplishment can feel abstract to us: things other people attain and experience relatively easily, but which we’ve never really felt at all.
Thanks to our brains’ fussy dopamine pathways, we already have a hard time acting in the best interest of our future selves. What happens when we have no memories of previous wins to give us a taste for what lies ahead?
That’s why I recommend picking the smallest, silliest thing to accomplish first. It’s why I chose the bathroom that day instead of making progress on painting my living room, which I’m really ticked off about not having done yet. The bathroom had several things going for it: the job wouldn’t take long, didn’t require a lot of brainpower or supplies, and could be completed in a single thirty-minute session.
And yet it lifted a burden from my shoulders. It reminded me I could accomplish something, even if it was a small thing. And it renewed my thirst for the next reward.
I did more than clean the bathroom that day. I tidied up a few real problem areas around the house and felt far more relaxed after dinner. Most important, I went to bed believing I could — and perhaps would — eventually find my way out of my backlog.
That belief can be hard to come by. We think it’s the big stuff that’ll give us confidence to keep going, but the opposite is more often true. The little stuff both brings us down and buoys us up.
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