The Axioms of ADHD
The first principles discovered in three years of observing my brain.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an axiom is “a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true, and from which other statements can be derived.
For the last few months I’ve been writing down things that help me function with ADHD. These were short phrases, kind of like mantras: hurrying is kryptonite. Nothing is on the way to anything else. Choice is friction.
I started calling this my “Rules of ADHD”, and planned to write them up — but when I got to number sixteen, I realized that would make for a pretty complicated article. Also, who’s going to remember sixteen different rules, especially when there were likely to be more?
I’m lucky enough to be friends with Amber Beckett from The Hello Code and she suggested I look for over-arching themes, groupings that might simplify these rules into basic concepts from which the rules could be extrapolated to fit different ADHD experiences.
With a bit of searching, I discovered there’s a word for that: axiom. After the obligatory “If you don’t know, why don’t you axiom?” joke, the following six Axioms of ADHD emerged:
1. The Axiom of Stuff: Find out where things want to live, then help them return there.
That’s really all there is to keeping track of everything. Your items don’t get lost on purpose, nor does the universe try to hide them from you. They are trying to get back where they belong. A simple way to think of this is: when you are missing something, where do you usually find it? That’s probably close to where it should live — so make a home for it and make it welcome.
This first axiom is the simplest. If you can keep it top-of-mind, it makes all the others easier.
2. The Axiom of Transitions: Liminal spaces are dangerous.
This one started as “Hurrying is kryptonite.” For those who would like a more mathematical framework:
The speed at which you transition from one place to another is directly proportional to the likelihood that you will forget something AND the relative importance of the thing(s) you will forget.
ADHD brains are great at getting into flow on any given task they’re interested in, but moving from one place to another is so difficult that it has its own separate executive function, known as “task switching” or “cognitive flexibility.”
Flexibility is a great way to think of it, because we tend to understand the idea that the way to maintain physical flexibility is to do things like drinking water, yoga, or warming up before doing something strenuous. We also understand that all bodies are different, and things like age, genetics, stress, nutrition, and medications all make a difference in our capabilities.
It’s easy to draw parallels between these physical concepts and ways that our ADHD brains can build up and maintain our cognitive flexibility.
Meditation does for your brain what water does for your joints.
Journaling does for your brain what yoga does for your body
Checklists and rituals do for your brain what warm ups and cool downs do for your body.
And you don’t even have to make parallels for the rest of it: how much rest you get, whether your parents had ADHD, how stressed you are, the kinds of food you eat, and whether or not you take meds are directly relevant to how well you handle shifting activities, locations, or focus.
Hurrying is kryptonite.
The Axiom of Magical Thinking: Your brain sees the world through a kaleidoscope — vivid, shifting, and full of possibility.
Unfortunately, that is usually not aligned with reality.
Whatever amount of time your brain estimates, it is wrong.
That task will take longer than you think.
That deadline will happen sooner than you think.
If you don’t leave early for the appointment, you will be late.
When it comes to trying to estimate any kind of capacity — from time to energy to attention — your brain is kind of like your brother-in-law talking about cryptocurrency: wildly optimistic, totally unrealistic, and desperate to be right.
There is one very effective way to counter most of the time-related troubles with this particular axiom: No side quests.
If you find yourself thinking oh, on the way to this appointment I can just stop at this other place and quickly do that thing you will be late. It’s like monotasking (a word most of my friends with ADHD hate) but for GPS. You program a destination into your brain, and that’s the only place you go or thing you do until you deliberately choose something else.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do lots of things — just turn the side quest into a quest.
Here’s an example: I am a member of a local makerspace, and one Sunday I had a 3D print running overnight.
The natural thing to think would be “oh, I’ll just pick this up on our way to work in the morning.
But remember: nothing is on the way to anything else. Instead, I made sure we planned to leave fifteen minutes early, and deliberately stop by the makerspace to run in and pick up the print.
That worked flawlessly, and had a side benefit: we were a little rushed to get out the door and I forgot to take my ADHD med. I realized this on our way to the makerspace, which is about five minutes from my house.
But we had time for my partner to drop me at the door and then run home to get my pill and then pick me up as I’m coming out the door with the 3D print in hand.
(Now, my partner and I both have ADHD, and neither of us remembered the pill until after she’d dropped me off, driven away, then turned around to come back and give it to me. But hey, we take the victories we can, and ADHD never goes away.).
Intentionality is your battle cry and mantra: plan what you’re going to do, and then do it, and then evaluate what to do next. By planning it, there’s a greater chance you’ll give yourself enough time.
The Axiom of Options: Choice is friction.
The ADHD brain is really good at coming up with plans. Plan B? Pshaw! By the time a normal brain has come up with B we’re already at Q.7beta.
But that makes ADHD brains especially prone to both decision fatigue and choice paralysis. It creates a friction at every decision point — not because we’re trying to figure out the best option, but usually because we’re stuck trying to figure out the best metric to use to find the best option. Is it the fastest? The most robust? The cheapest? The most fun?
Ask any engineer: friction can be very useful — until it’s not. If you’re stuck, you may have too many choices. If you continually get slowed down at a particular decision point, you almost certainly have too many.
This leads to the corollary of the task list, which at first seems like the solution to your leaky memory. Unfortunately, while a “brain dump” is useful, you end up with a huge task list, and the difficulty in choosing what to do first.
Here’s a potentially useful ritual for working out the task list:
Pick out the tasks you want to do today.
Now, put some back. Some of those tasks you know would be grateful to have more time devoted to them — and the ones you move back to the Brain Dump will also benefit from more time.
No, more. Magical thinking is not your friend. Keep culling.
Nope. Still too many.
(Sigh) Ok, just pick one out of what’s left and hope for the best.
(Hat tip to the “pick your battles” meme).
The CRASH Axiom: Everything works until it doesn’t.
Possibly the most frustrating thing about ADHD is the apocalyptic effect of hedonic adaptation.
That is the completely common phenomenon of the human nervous system that makes something interesting and enjoyable when it’s new…but the more you do it, it becomes less of both.
For a neurotypical brain, this is a mild annoyance. But for a brain that relies on interest and novelty to function, it means an endless cycle:
Find something new that helps you with your ADHD
Investing time, money, energy, and attention to get it just right (aka laying out a bullet journal, installing a new app, buying a new device, signing up for another class)
Having it work…until it doesn’t.
Start looking for something else…and go back to step one.
Often this is accompanied by feelings of shame, failure, and hopelessness, perhaps even exacerbated by people around you who don’t understand why this thing you were so excited about last week is now gathering dust on your shelf.
There’s three words to remember when you feel that way: Not. Your. Fault.
Everything works until it doesn’t. That’s true for neurotypical brains too; people go through different phases of life and activities, and the systems they use for each change. A person rarely uses the same tools that helped them in college when they are in their first job, and often any new job means a new system to learn and adapt to.
That, dare I say it, is the ADHD superpower. Switching from Meta to Google? No problem. From Workplace to Slack? Got it. Changing payroll systems? Phone lines? Email addresses? Change is the air we breathe every day. Bring it on.
And that means that there will likely never be one system to rule them all. Sorry, Notion, Obsidian, TheBrain, Second Brain, Craft, Upnote, Amplenote, Apple notes, Evernote, Goodnotes, Notability, Affine, Capacities, PARA, Bujo, Cujo, Dujo…all of them are lovely systems that work for lots of people, including me.
For a while.
Then they start to get harder to maintain. Harder to pull out at the meeting, much less write in at the end of the day. Eventually the app’s bar is barely noticeable in your screen time stats…and then you lose track of some appointment, some data point, some file that the system was supposed to keep from happening.
And when you discover that — where the leak is, the point at which the information was lost, the appointment not made, the object not put in the place it belonged — you calmly find a way to reduce the chance of it happening again.
That’s being cognitively responsible. It’s saying “yes, my brain is like this, and I’m always finding ways to help it work better”.
That’s the C-R of CRASH.
The other part of it, though, is remembering that your brain is like this, and so far, we’re only really issued one per lifetime. So while you can find ways to externalize executive function and cognitively offload things and change your environment — you’re still going to have a brain with ADHD.
You’re going to be (clears throat, notices there are delicate eyes present) Cognitively responsible & aware stuff happens.
CRASH.
The Final Axiom: Your Brain is Beautiful
Now that we’ve talked about all the ways your brain doesn’t work so well, let me turn it all around on you: there’s nothing wrong with your brain.
Nothing. Zip. It not only works exactly the way it should, it has “…a particular set of skills” that make it able to do things that most brains can’t.
If that seems hard to accept, I get it. I’m still wrapping my head around it myself.
But here’s the thing: you know how there are all those examples of “people with ADHD who succeeded”? They all had one thing in common.
They changed their environment and their goals to fit their brains. Or, if they were really lucky, they had help doing it from their parents, teachers, friends, or partners.
The ways they changed their environment varied, of course. Some found a way to have medication, while others created the time to have meditation. Some used sticky notes, other pomodoro timers. They either found jobs that fit their brains, or convinced the jobs that didn’t to make accommodations, or created bespoke careers that might not have even existed before but that created enough value in society that they could put food on the table and a roof over their head.
It’s tempting to jump on the “adhd is only a problem because of capitalismbandwagon, sometimes, but that is probably both too simplistic and too controversialto justify throw out there. And besides, it’s kind of the only game in town in my experience, so how could I know?
What I do know is that about three years ago, when I finally began to understand how my brain actually works, a few things that had been happening for the previous five decades of my life stopped.
I stopped wondering why it felt like everyone had been given a “How to Adult” manual except me.
I stopped believing the eternal drone of ”you have such great potential, if you’d only apply yourself.
I stopped feeling guilty for my constant desire for learning, reading, music, or other forms of stimulation alongside mundane tasks like spreadsheets or laundry.
I stopped feeling guilty when some recent subject or hobby I’d been totally obsessed with for a couple of weeks/months/years that suddenly seemed completely boring.
I stopped telling myself I just needed to “try harder” to remember things or “just know” when it was time to leave, time to sleep, time anything.
The list goes on, and everyone who has dealt with ADHD probably could add a few dozen more. Thanks to understanding my brain with ADHD better, every area of my life — career, relationships, health, finances, writing, hobbies — has improved.
And it feels weird. Because I’m used to struggling with these things, with self-recrimination and depression and despair in all those areas. I still have those things at various times, but on the whole things are much easier — and “easy” is not something I’m used to.
My brain is beautiful. That’s the final axiom, and I wish we could all say it enough that we might actually believe it. As I mentioned, I’m only starting to feel that way. But the things my brain does well — hyperfocus, generating ideas, problem solving, finding the gaps between things and filling them in — I’ve learned to celebrate them, even lean into them and — once or twice — even leverage them into things that qualify as successes, even in this late-stage capitalist world we live in.
(and yes, there is a part of me that really both feels guilty and really resents that I have reached the point in my life where I finally feel Iike I’m figuring it all out, and the world seems to be hell-bent for the apocalypse. But there it is.)
Your Brain is Beautiful Too.
That’s the final axiom — the one that brings the others all together. It’s the one that lets you both endure the ways the world is not designed for the way your brain works, and also the ways your brain really is a magical time-traveling world-creating gestampkunstwerk.
Of course, you’re human, so not everything that goes wrong in your life can be blamed on ADHD.
But especially if you’re un- or late-diagnosed, it’s probably more than you think.
Your brain is just trying to exist in a strange and foreign land, doing the best it can to get you what you need and what you want.
If you can learn to work with that idea, rather than against it — you’ve got it made.
Listen to a podcast version of this article on the ADHD Open Space podcast! Many thanks to our new sponsor, Jennifer, who is helping keep this content coming!
Obsessed. I’ve been thinking about you all week for some reason. So incredibly happy to see you here.