Gardening with ADHD: Building Routines and Having Fun

Gardening with ADHD: Building Routines and Having Fun

Hey team!

This week, we’re diving into another listener question.

“Hi, William. I'm Emily, and I live in Chicago, Illinois. I'm a lifelong gardener and love growing flowers, veggies, houseplants, and more. As someone with ADHD, plant care is something I either hyperfixate on or procrastinate and ignore because of all the things that my plants need to thrive. For some reason, creating routines around plant care has been really challenging for me.”

Hey Emily, I love this question because there are always all these things that we want to do that we find so difficult to get into unless we’re falling into hyperfocus. And really, I think that this addresses a key piece of ADHD: getting started can be the hardest part, even on the things that we want to do. So, I’m going to expand this to talking about more than just gardening, although I’ll try and keep your specifics in mind as I go. There are these things that we love to do yet find ourselves unable to do consistently. For a lot of hobbies, that isn’t always too much of a problem, but with plant care… well, I think we’ve all had a plant or two that we’ve lost because we forgot to water it for a week or two.

Honestly, as I started answering this question, I figured that I’d be adding a couple of other questions into this episode, but as I got going, there were a lot of things that I was able to get into. From the different types of fun, to blocking fun out on our calendars to how we can work on lower the resistance to getting started.

So, while gardening might not be your thing, there is still a lot you can get out of this episode because we cover a lot of ground.

If you’d like to send me a question answer on the show feel free to head over to hackingyouradhd.com/contact and click the orange button

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Ask me a question on my Contact Page

Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/189

This Episode’s Top Tips

  1. Block off dedicated time for gardening in your calendar to ensure it's prioritized and protected. Our brains are going to make time for us to take time off regardless, so be proactive and choose how you want to spend that time.
  2. To balance enjoyment and satisfaction, differentiate between Type 1 (immediate fun) and Type 2 (retrospective fun) activities.
  3. You can break down tasks into three parts: setup, doing, and clean-up to reduce resistance and ensure a smoother start (and finish).

Avsnitt(297)

Building Your Toolbox

Building Your Toolbox

ADHD can make it hard for us to work on our intentions. This is even harder when we forget the things that we want to do. When you are learning about new ADHD strategies while reading books or listening to podcasts (like this one!) it is really easy to forget your intention of implementing those strategies. In these instances when we learn about a new tool, what we can do is write down our intended strategy and put it into our ADHD Toolbox. Our toolbox is simply a way for us to record the strategies and ideas we have for working with our ADHD - a place we can go and look at our intentions when we are off track. While new strategies are fun to add to our toolbox, we should also focus on adding things that are already working in our life to our toolbox. If you've found a great bedtime routine? Stick it in your toolbox. Figured out a great way to plan your upcoming week? Stick it in your toolbox. Found a great tool for keeping you focused? Stick it in your toolbox. Just creating a toolbox for yourself isn't enough. We all know that we forget things. That we get off track. And sometimes when we are off track it takes us a while to realize what we are doing wrong. Use your toolbox to speed up the process of getting back in the groove of things. To do this you've got to set up regular times to check your toolbox. But we also know that sometimes even when we set aside time to check something we aren't always going to get to it, which means we've got to set up redundant reminders for ourselves to make sure we don't miss out on our most important intentions. This Episode’s Top Tips Set up a toolbox for yourself containing any tools or strategies you are currently using in your life Set up times to regularly read through your toolbox Create automated systems of redundant reminders so you don't forget about your toolbox For all the tools and other goodies mentioned in this episode go to the full show notes on our web page: HackingYourADHD.com/podcast/Toolbox

5 Okt 201912min

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