If you are neurodivergent — whether you have ADHD, Autism, or both (AuDHD) — you may struggle with simple tasks like cleaning and tidying. So why is this such a challenge for people with AuDHD?

AuDHD and tidying

Tidying is so much worse than cleaning in my opinion. Cleaning is satisfying; it’s measurable. You can see a dirty bench, and then suddenly, it’s clean. This feeds our dopamine, the shiny surfaces, the instant change, the visible results.

Putting away paperclips, odd coins, and a bread tag takes too long and drains too much mental energy to feed our dopamine. It sucks the life out of us!  Tidying requires executive function we just don’t always have. Especially when it comes to the unknown objects.

Fortunately, one of my neurodivergent cleaning strategies is that I attempt to have a place for all those annoying things. I have a jar for rubber bands. Go me! But I still don’t have a place for those rogue pens and pencils. Even if they did have a home, they are used far too frequently to be put away. This means, whenever I want a pen, I can’t find it – and whenever I am tidying the table, there are 20 sitting there!

There are just too many steps when it comes to tidying. For those people with AuDHD, you may empathise with these issues: I have to transition from room to room, (transitions as you may know are not an autistic person’s favourite thing). Then I have to work on not getting distracted there (a struggle for those ADHD minds).

Oooh, an AuDHD segue!

Fun fact! The reason why we forget things when going into a new room is because we have to drop what is in our working memory. Now this memory is not short-term memory. In fact, many people who are neurodivergent do not have an issue with short term memory, they have an issue with working memory.

Working memory is how many things you can hold in your brain before it overflows. For example, ‘I am going into the kitchen to get water, lip balm and put the dishwasher on’. Now for a neurotypical person. They will easily go into the kitchen, and simply do those three things because those are the only three things that enter and stay in their brain.

Their brain sees: kitchen > dishwasher > on button > water bottle > pick up > lip balm > collect.

An AuDHD person’s brain see’s things in much more detail. We walk into the kitchen and see this: kitchen > lounge room > rogue cup > walk to cup > walk to dishwasher > add cup to dishwasher > get dishwasher tablet > hand is stuck in stupid packaging > pull package out of cupboard > notice it’s half empty > put it down > add dishwashing tablets to shopping list > if we are lucky > return to dishwasher > put pod in the dishwasher > turn dishwasher on > “what else was I getting?”

Anyway, told you we get distracted – the working memory.

Working memory and AuDHD 

Now imagine each of the things you need to remember as balls in your hand, you can only carry so many. Many neurotypicals are fine to carry the three balls and do the three tasks because they don’t stop to pick up new balls with new information. They don’t take in the lounge room; therefore, they don’t even notice the rouge cup. So, they just potter in the kitchen with their three balls, and replace each ball with the item they were going in there to retrieve.

People with AuDHD have little hands and big perceptions, so we have to drop lots of balls to pick up all the new balls we see all the time.

This still isn’t the fun fact – the fun fact about this is because this comes from an evolutionary development. When we moved into a new environment, we wouldn’t need to remember what we were foraging for, berries, nuts, seeds – we needed to take in the environment first. Drop our balls so to speak. Because there are many dangers in that world, there could be a tiger lurking, a scorpion crawling, a member of an unfriendly tribe hunting. You don’t need your shopping list rolling around in your brain. It needs to be clear to scan for threats. People with ADHD specifically have been found to have better foraging skills in hunter gather situations as studied in this article.

Our brains simply haven’t evolved to work out that moving from one room to another isn’t the same as walking into enemy territory. So that is why, we often walk into a new room and forget what we were doing.

Good news!

First, neurotypical people do this too!

Secondly, we’d live longer in the hunter gatherer society.

Think about it – those neurotypical people were walking into new vegetation, only thinking about the berries they could see and stepping on the snakes in their path. Us people with AuDHD protected them, ‘Hey NT, there’s a snake’ we would yell. And they would thank us, and treat us as kings – showering us with all their berries in recognition of our superior observation skills.

Okay, so we may not have been treated as kings, but our observation skills are a wonderful trait. It just doesn’t sit well in today’s world. In fact, it is what makes shopping centres overstimulating, and putting things away way too overwhelming.

What are the problems with AuDHD people tidying?

Firstly, let’s identify what the problem is specifically.

The problem with too many steps

I hate, and I mean HATE putting my washing away. Despite having a place for it all and a hanger for every item. I have to body double to do it. It’s just boring and I have to change from hanging something up to folding something and the requirements for each item, fold, hang, roll – there’s too much variation.

I can easily come home and put my dress on the hanger as soon as I take it off. This is an extension of the activity I have already begun, taking off the dress (I used habit stacking for this – but that’s another article). But putting the washing away, there’s simply too many clothes, too many steps.

The problem of the homeless items

Are the things you struggle to put away something that have a place or something that does not have a place? Are you always finding that your handbag doesn’t have a home, so when you come in the door it ends up on one of the many random surfaces in your house? Or is there not enough space in your cupboard to put your coffee and sugar out of sight? Or is it things like sticky notes and light bulbs and hats that clutter your environment because where do you put these things?

When the thing needs to be actioned first

My worst nemesis are the things that require action to be taken on them before they can be put away. This is what fills my home!

Papers! Papers are the worst. I was recently sent a new bank card. I am thoroughly confused as my original one has not expired. First, it sat on the table for a week unopened because I don’t like opening mail. I don’t know what is in there, I don’t know what action will be required. I need a clear head and a full spoonage to tackle mail. But I opened it (with Adam, my husband by my side because I may get overwhelmed at any stage and either read it without taking in the information or not even get that far and put it down all together ignoring it).

So now what? Adam said I can check the account number against my online bank details or something, but my phone was over the other side of the room. If I opened my bank account then I’d notice something else and get distracted. Either I would have a notification I would see, open, because you can’t leave those unread! And then find myself messaging a friend. Or, I would go into my bank, get confused with the numbers not knowing what I am looking for. Then close the app and end up ignoring the card again for another few months because I tried it once, it was hard, I didn’t like it, and I don’t want to do it again.

So, the card is on the table. Waiting for me, to ask my husband, to hold my hand and deal with it. Unless he moves it – in which case it will go to card heaven, because then it will be truly lost forever.

Anyway, other than papers, there are things that need action before they can be put away. Like things you have to fix, make or wait.

Fix:

What do I do with the earring sitting on my kitchen bench that needs to be glued to its back again? Do I stop cleaning and glue it now? I don’t have a ‘work in progress’ section in my house. If I put it away, I will never see it again.

Make:

I have the ingredients for a cake out on my bench, but I am not in a position to make the cake today anymore because I ran out of steam and now have decided to do it tomorrow. I can’t put the stuff back; I’ll just waste energy bringing it out again tomorrow. But now it is out on the counter just staring at my lack of follow through.

Wait:

The eternal containers! So, the container is clean but I am still waiting on the lid to be washed and dried. I hate drying things with a tea towel so I want it to air dry. I could just wash the lid now and bite the bullet and dry it. But then I would get my hands wet. If my hands are wet, I don’t like that, I might as well do all the dishes at once. If I do all the dishes at once though – it will take too long and I’ll never get to putting the lid on the container to put away.

The most important thing to remember

The most important thing to know about being neurodivergent is that you are powerful. You are likely exceptional at pattern recognition, at problem solving, at creating systems and finding flaws in practices. You are likely highly creative. That doesn’t mean good at art, it means you have an imaginative mind. The kind of mind that can use creative solutions for life.

Think about it, whether you be autistic, ADHD or both (AuDHD), there’s a reason you are typecast in the media. Autistics with exception chess skills, ADHDers with incredible artistic talent. It is generic, and limited, but it hints at our abilities, not just our weaknesses.

You know you, so trust yourself. I know it can be hard to trust yourself when you’ve got only two demerit points left, because you didn’t open your mail to renew your licence. Or because you can’t even make dinner some days. But you are exceptional. And in that hunter gather world, you really would have saved lives (not joking).

But this world we live in, isn’t built for people who are AuDHD. And that sucks, but it is okay. Because people with AuDHD are brave, resilient, and ever so powerful!

In my next article, I will go in to how to use your neurodiverse brain, ADHD, Autistic, AuDHD or undiagnosed but ‘this whole article made sense to me’. I will go over the steps and options that allow people with AuDHD, to hack tidying up so that it isn’t overwhelming.

Follow me on my YouTube channel, or Instagram and come back soon here for the next one.

For more on how to manage life have a read of Life Hacks to Navigate a Neurotypical World