ADHD-friendly guide to prevent overwhelm and plan without pressure
My partner and I decided to spend more mindful time together doing activities we both enjoy. So we’ve decided to make a loooong list of things we could do and we use it to plan our weekend adventures.
However, we quickly realized that our plans often fell through due to two crucial elements we hadn't considered: the weather and our energy levels.
The Importance of Flexibility
Planning a canoeing trip just to wake up on the day and see there’s a thunderstorm, or that you are so tired you can barely get out of bed can be quite demotivating.
And we never thought of having a backup plan, so whenever this happened, we would enter analysis paralysis. We had too many options and could not agree on one!
For ADHD-ers, spontaneity is key because our energy levels can vary greatly from day to day. It's no fun forcing yourself to do an activity you're not up for, which is why we decided to categorize our activities based on energy levels (high or low) and weather conditions (good or bad).
The scuba diving dilemma
Today, my partner and I discussed finally planning a much-postponed scuba diving trip to Belgium. This trip excites us every time we think about it - so many exotic fish to see in this diving center that used to be a coal mine (Here’s a link for those who are curious: https://www.todi.be/en).
The issue is… we kept postponing it. You might wonder why. We just need to set a date and book the trip. Simple, right?
Well, while talking about it, we realized that we had remarkably different ways of thinking about the trip. For me, the trip could go both ways and be either a low or high-energy activity. For my partner, on the other hand, it was definitely a high-energy activity.
That means that he needs to wake up fully refreshed and super energetic to be able to do this. And that is really difficult to plan for in advance, right?
While it is true that we can never be 100% sure that we will manage to plan our energy levels for a certain event, what we can do is focus on what we can control to create the right environment for a great day to happen. And the key to that is – as always – a bit of self-knowledge!
Understanding energy drains
To address this, we analyzed our different "batteries":
Social: drained by being surrounded by people for a long time.
Physical: drained by lack of sleep, improper nutrition, and sensory overload.
Cognitive: drained by intense use of executive functions like planning, prioritizing, organizing, making decisions, and learning and remembering information. This can be especially draining for ADHD-ers, whose executive functions are physically malfunctioning).
Emotional: ALL emotions can drain this battery. And this goes especially quickly for ADHD-ers who tend to feel emotions more intensely. Joy, sadness, excitement, or anger: they can all be equally draining when we feel them very intensely over a short time, or at normal intensity over a longer period.
This is how we rated our energy level needs for the different “batteries” we would use during our diving trip:
Table showing how my partner and I rated how much energy our diving trip would require along the four categories - social, physical, cognitive, and emotional.
Addressing the challenges
We agreed that the social aspect of the trip would be low-draining, as we wouldn't be around many people and the ones we do meet would be fellow excited divers.
The physical aspect was also quite straightforward.
Diving could be quite physically draining for some people. For others, it’s quite a relaxed activity. I like to move around a lot. When most people enjoy slowly moving around and watching the fish, I love to go and explore the area and see everything that is around before deciding where the best fish-viewing place is.
At the same time, diving is the most relaxing activity for me. Yes, it can be quite a workout. But underwater, I get to give some of my senses a rest. I can mostly only hear my breath. I usually don’t touch anything to make sure I don’t damage the ecosystem. I cannot smell or taste anything (otherwise I’d be drowning), and most of the things I see in the distance come in different shades of blue, so my eyes are also getting a rest from “too many colors”.
So overall, I would put diving as a low energy activity, because it does energize me by giving my senses a rest.
The cognitive aspect is where it got interesting.
For me, it was easy: the GPS drives us there, we pay for the entrance and equipment, we set everything up and dive. After we’re done, we jump in the car, the GPS takes us to our hotel for the night and from there, we see what we feel like doing.
But talking to my partner, I realized that it is actually a more cognitively draining activity than I thought: while getting there is easy, once we get out of the car we will need to learn the layout of a completely new place, learn the rules of the place, while everything is in a different language than Romanian, English or German. We will need to ensure we have all the equipment and do all safety checks before jumping in. As we are still not super experienced divers (although Open Water Diver certified), all of these checks are not routine yet and can be cognitively draining. Then we still need to plan the rest of the day (showering, meals, exploring a new city).
You see, while for a lot of people, these activities are not something to pay attention to, ADHD-ers usually need to count all of these in.
ADHD is not a deficit of attention. We are just unable to regulate what to direct our attention to. So while someone moves around a new place and looks for the bathroom and does not pay attention to anything else, we will notice and need to process everything else. We process so much more information than neurotypical people.
This is also the reason why we can be like the canary in a coal mine: we can predict how something will play out before others do because we notice and remember more details. And over time, we start seeing patterns others might not because we have more data to work with.
But this also means that we have a bigger cognitive load. So this battery gets drained more easily than usual.
And if our cognitive battery is running on empty and we face an unexpected event, for instance realizing all restaurants are closed and we have no place to get dinner from… Well, this can easily become an emotional rollercoaster.
Which led us to talk about our emotional battery. You see, my emotional battery is the most dependent on the other batteries not being empty. If I am physically exhausted, my senses are overloaded, my brain is too tired to make yet another decision, or I am surrounded by people who have strong emotions (which, if I don’t actively protect myself against, I might end up internalizing as my own), it’s more difficult to regulate my emotions.
So instead of going into problem-solving mode, I might have a meltdown because my brain is too busy trying to block out all the stimuli from the environment or is too tired to think of a solution.
Creating the right environment
So now what? Will we never go scuba diving?
Of course not. But understanding these dynamics, instead of pushing through no matter what, we planned how to create a successful environment for the trip:
Preparation:
We will prepare checklists for packing and equipment, list restaurant options, and save all addresses in Google Maps.
Avoiding burnout:
We will ensure we are not burning ourselves out the day before…. A lot of people describe hyperfocus as a superpower. And I get it: when we hyperfocus on a task, we can finish a week’s worth of work in a day. But this is incredibly energy-expensive. So while I might finish a week's worth of work in a day, I might need two days just to fully recover from a longer hyperfocus sprint.
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Actually, this might be a piece of super important information for employers: yes, your ADHD-er can be super-duper productive and have a huge output – please don’t exploit that, and don’t expect this to be consistent! We can do a lot, but we also need a lot of rest – which you can facilitate by allowing flexible working hours and measuring our performance based on the work done, not the hours spent in the office. And please, just because we have a lot of energy and can deliver a lot, don’t assume it’s ok to give us the work of three people for the salary of one – we do see the difference, and unfairness is a huge trigger for most of us (yes, studies confirm this). Witnessing or experiencing injustice might drain our emotional battery and burn us out for a long period of time.
Maximizing your chances for a great day
Ensuring we get the right sleep, nutrition, and exercise, and giving our brains some rest, increases our chances of having the resources needed for a great day. Here are some strategies we use to recharge depending on what drained us:
Social: carve out some alone time. Activities like long walks, yoga, exercise, or a calming bath help unwind without being around others.
Physical: prioritize sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Additionally, plan sensory downtime to prevent overload, such as sitting quietly in the dark or working from home if the office environment is overstimulating.
Cognitive: remove decision-making tasks for a while. Simplify your wardrobe, build automatic habits, and plan everything, to minimize having to prioritize or make up plans on the spot (like deciding on a restaurant when you’re already hungry). Leave time between activities to recharge, even if it's just staring out the window.
Emotional: Regularly plan downtime for mindfulness to stay in touch with your emotions. Talking to a friend or spending time with a pet can help. The idea is to feel and process your emotions rather than ignore them. And yes, sometimes it might be uncomfortable, and we might postpone crying or jumping with joy to a time when it’s more convenient to do it. That’s fine. As long as you give yourself time to process your emotions, feel them, and release them. Holding in those emotions is like pushing a balloon in a water bath: regardless of how hard you push, it will still want to come out. And if you don’t make space for it to come out, when you get tired of pushing, it might surface with a splash at the most inconvenient moment.
Your turn – what have you been postponing?
So this is what we will do for our diving weekend. Luckily, the weather does not make much of a difference. Except if it’s a thunderstorm, which might keep us from going in the water entirely. 😊
What activities have you been avoiding to plan because you were unsure about your energy levels? How can you use our example to ensure you have a great time? Share your thoughts and let's make our adventures more enjoyable and less stressful.