Overwhelmed by Self-Care: ADHD Hygiene Without Shame

When self-care goes out the window

Good morning everyone. We’re talking about being overwhelmed with self-care. When I get overwhelmed or super busy, my self-care goes out the window. I forget to brush my teeth. I forget to take showers. I never used to be that person. I had a nighttime routine, I took showers, I did the thing. Now I have kids in my house, so there are more people on the shower schedule, and yes, you have to have a shower schedule, and mine is the one that’s lacking. My husband, the kids, everyone takes theirs; mine is the one that slips. And there’s a lot of shame around that. Like, I’m not showering, what?

So I figured out something that helped me, and it’s helped a lot of clients. Most women don’t wash their hair daily anyway. One, scientifically you don’t have to, and two, there’s all that styling that comes after. My overwhelm with showers was because of my hair. I didn’t like the way wet hair felt. If I washed it, it took a hundred years to dry. So I told myself, when the self-care overwhelm is super bad: we’ll take a shower, and we don’t have to wash our hair. I would take a shower, leave my hair up, wash all my skin, because I could handle that. And then later that day, if I needed to wash my hair, I would wash it separately, in the sink, because then I didn’t have to get my skin wet. It’s a thing, I know. But that’s what I did.

Good, better, best days

I think for me one of the biggest realizations with self-care was that I had good, better, best days. On a good day, I only stand under the water. No soap, no nothing. I stand under the water, that’s it. Yes, it may be gross, but my brain needs to get that message that I’m starting my day. And since having short hair especially, my hair will stand on end in the morning and I have to get it wet. I have tried everything; nothing will make it lay down flat once it’s standing up.

Funny, I used to have a pixie haircut and I loved it, but when you have short hair you have to fix it every single day, because it stands on end and does crazy things, and you have to get it cut all the time to keep it in shape. That was one of the reasons I let my hair grow into a shoulder-length bob. And prior to all of that I had super long hair, which either gets fixed every day or always ends up in a ponytail.

So some days I stand under the water. Some days I do an everything shower, but the everything shower days are once a week, twice a week maybe. An everything shower for me is the facial scrub and the body scrub and the loofah and the moisturizing wash and all of the things. Most days are better days for me: I use soap and I wash my hair. I’m partially Italian, so washing my hair every day is actually a necessity, because my hair looks really gross otherwise. I was hoping as I got older, because people say your hair dries out, but no, that has not happened to me yet. And dry shampoo is the most disgusting thing in my world. I’ve tried it repeatedly and I hate it. I can’t touch it, it smells bad, it feels nasty, I just can’t do it. So a lot of self-care is just knowing what your sensory triggers are. I mean, I forget to brush my teeth until my teeth feel gross, and then I brush my teeth.

The bedtime menu and bathroom checklists

What we do at our house, and this is the other reason we started the bedtime menu: in dry-erase marker, I wrote it on the mirror. These are the things. Everybody knows the menu is for everybody: teeth, shower, all that stuff. And then we remind my son, “Hey, don’t forget to brush your teeth,” and he has a little bit of PDA, so he’s like, “Oh, I was going to do the thing and then she reminded me.” So I just point at the mirror: “Hey, don’t forget to look at the menu, make sure you’ve done all your stuff.”

It’s always that checklist thing. I have them. I’ve told you guys, I have checklists in my bathroom, because if I don’t, I forget to do the most simple things. There are days I don’t need to look at it, days when it’s just habit and I go through all the motions without having to think about it. That’s not most of the time, but I do have good days like that.

The therapist’s list and the shame underneath it

I saw a post in a Facebook group this weekend that was just heartbreaking to me. I think a lot of us have so much shame around this. It’s hard to get up in front of people and say, “Yeah, I get a lot of overwhelm around taking a shower, so sometimes I don’t.” This person got a list from their therapist of things they needed to do. I found it: create a structured routine, utilize time management techniques, implement organizational skills, minimize distractions. And she was really angry that her therapist sent this. But her therapist sent it because she was missing that this was an outline of the things they’re going to be working on together. And this woman is saying, “I can’t do that, I can’t do that, I can’t do that,” because, in her words, she would rather have autism with her ADHD than a nonverbal learning disorder. “I can’t learn how to do that.”

And I’m like, oh honey, yes you can. You need help, absolutely, but you can learn to have structure. And we hate structure. We have a freaking hard time putting structure in place. But we can get to that point. Structure is where ADHDers and AuDHDers find success, extreme structure. We also fight against it, so we have to have variations of structure. You can’t just have the same extreme structure every day, because we also have PDA energy, and some days we don’t want to do it, and that’s fine, as long as you understand that’s fine. But your goal needs to be to have good days, not wallow in the bad.

Most days are moderate, and moderate is success

It’s about giving yourself grace, and I know people say that all the time, but giving yourself enough space to realize that most days are moderate. Most days are moderately good or moderately bad, but they’re moderate. We survived, we got a few things done: that is a successful day. Those perfect 100 percent days are kind of a fairy tale. If they happen, it’s lightning in a bottle. And those really, really bad, “I hate everything about my life” days are also very rare. They just don’t happen as much as we think they do. We dwell on negativity, so we feel like they happen all the time, but if you charted them, the 100 percent days and the zero percent days don’t happen much. Most people live in the middle, and the middle is fine.

We live in a world, especially in the US, that expects us to have those perfect days all of the time, like that’s a possible thing. And I’m going to tell you, whether you’re ADHD or not, a perfect day should be a once-every-three-months, once-every-six-months expectation. In honest truth, for women, it happens probably once every 45 days. And yes, I’ve mapped this out, because I like to track things. Once every 45 days we have one of those perfect days. It’s probably the stars aligning with your hormone cycle and everything else.

I think it’s redefining what a successful day is. Those middle-level days are success, because we’re having those days consistently. You may not check everything off your to-do list, but you’re checking one or two things off, and that’s still a success. Success for most of us looks messy. It doesn’t look like an Instagram story, because those things are curated. Even neurotypical people don’t have perfect days as often as it looks on social media. We’re normal, average people, and that’s a good thing to celebrate.

Rich people staff their executive function

We are not the Serena Williamses or the Beyonces of the world. We don’t live in that world. They have people who do all of the things for them. They have people who are their executive functioning skills. We can’t afford to buy all of those people. And when you can’t afford those people, taking the everything shower every day, having the perfectly perfect schedule, the house always clean, the laundry always done: they hire people to do that.

Danielle knows some mega high-powered people. They don’t have one assistant, they have three, they have twelve. My mentor has twelve assistants. Twelve. They each have their own specialty, and he’s more ADHD than I am, but he has twelve people making sure all the things happen and making him do the things. He has one who sits next to him for his emails. They don’t write them for him. They sit next to him and poke him every time he gets off track. That’s their job. How amazing is it that he has someone specifically for that? I can’t afford that. Most of us can’t. But we body double. We can ask for support. Nobody’s living at that billionaire level with the twelve assistants and the email poker, and I do pick on him for that, I went to college with him, I knew him when.

But it’s understanding that all of those things you see online, even from the upper-middle-class person, they are staffing some of their executive dysfunction. I have friends who have housekeepers, somebody who does their lawn, somebody who does their laundry, somebody who does all of their grocery shopping and plans their meals. And people say, “That’s all they have.” I put that in quotation marks, because how much overwhelming executive function work is somebody else doing for them so they can do other things? That’s huge. We need to be in the reality of what is obtainable and actionable every single day. You guys hear me say it consistently: what’s obtainable, what’s actionable for you today? Not yesterday. Not last week’s version of you. What’s obtainable today?

The wall of jeans: why modern life is heavier

Have you ever read this book? It’s by Judith Kolberg, and it’s set up in little bullet-point vignettes. It talks about the things we talk about, like outsourcing if you can. But one of the first chapters is so important, because it talks about how life is so much more complicated than it was 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago. People, especially in the United States, get stuck in this weird 1950s nostalgia: “We should be able to do all these things.” In the first couple of chapters she talks about how, when you went and picked out a pair of jeans in 1950, there was one kind of jean. Just one. You picked out your size. Now, when you go pick out jeans, there are infinite choices, and you’ll just stand there at the wall of jeans looking at the infinite choices. That’s what has happened to our lives.

Everybody romanticizes the 1950s, but there was only one kind of jeans. The decision was, do you want jeans or not? Even buying a dress, back when dresses were what people wore all the time: you had three styles to choose from, end of story. Different colors and patterns, but three styles. The makeup section in a store was one tiny section. You went to buy soap and there was one bar soap, maybe two. There wasn’t this avalanche of choices and overwhelm.

And it’s the same with the amount of stuff we have. My kids struggle really hard with their laundry, but they also have enough clothing to outfit a middle school. I was talking to my husband today: they’ll freak out, but I need to show them how to do a capsule wardrobe, because they can manage that. If you only had 14 outfits, 14 pairs of underwear, and 14 pairs of socks, that’s much easier to maintain than a closet full of clothing, half of which never gets worn anyway because they can never find it, because it’s in a laundry basket.

Aim for a good day, not a perfect one

My suggestion for self-care overwhelm is basics. When things get super overwhelming, use Danielle’s good-better-best days. Sometimes we’re just standing under the water, and that’s okay. I think that’s one of the big things people have to realize: perfect is never what I’m working towards. I’m working towards having a good day. Good is my goal. If I have a better day, I feel amazingly accomplished, but I’m looking for a good day. My minimum day. Obtainable action. What is obtainable action for my brain today? What are you able to do?

Jessica says having accountability buddies. This is the whole reason we built our community the way we did. We have a daily intention thread, we have body doubling four days a week staffed by a coach, and we have unlimited body doubling where you can pair up, not managed by anyone, so you get as much accountability partnership as you need. And it really is a partnership, because the more you work with somebody in body doubling, the more they can check in: “How did that go for you last week? We were talking about XYZ, were you able to get that done?” You start building strong community relationships.

And think about this: rich people outsource their things, but we can still do things like that. We just have to rely on our community. It’s the whole “it takes a village” thing. We don’t get to pay an army of people for their service. We have to figure out what we can do and what we need to outsource within our community, within our house, within our friend group, and how we can all help each other.

Killing decision fatigue

One of the big things, and I think we often forget this, is that part of why we’re so overwhelmed, frustrated, and exhausted is decision fatigue. This is what body doubling in a community like ours is for: to help you get past the decision fatigue piece, because anybody in the world can help you with that piece. Sometimes that decision fatigue is, “I’m tired and I don’t know what I should get done today,” and somebody, and it doesn’t have to be an ADHD coach, can say, “Oh, I’ve done XYZ, why don’t you do that?” Decision fatigue gone. “I don’t know what order to do things on my task list today.” “Okay, here, do this one.” Just removing those pieces removes overwhelm instantly, just by talking to someone and having support.

We’re here for that. If you need support today, drop into our community. We are here to help you get back on track, and there are enough of us that even if I’m having an off day, Danielle’s on it, or if Danielle’s having an off day, I’m on it, or somebody else picks up the slack. That is the real secret sauce of the community: there’s always somebody having a decent day. Somebody else can step up and do the thing, so you can just have a better day. When I’m overwhelmed, somebody else can take overwhelm from me, whether that’s making a decision about which task I do next, or telling me to order dinner, or reminding me I don’t have to do all of the things. Because often that’s all we need: somebody to remind us that we don’t actually have to do all of the things.

I hope you all have a good day today. Good, better, best. A good day is all we need today. Have an amazing one. We will see you tomorrow morning.