Part 2: Stop Pushing Through – Smarter Ways to Manage ADHD and Conserve Cognitive Energy
Welcome back to this safe space for exploring strategies to conserve your cognitive energy.
If you have ADHD, you already know that you may start each day with less cognitive energy than neurotypical individuals. That energy is also more easily depleted as you move through your day handling your tasks and responsibilities.
In the first part of this 3-part series, we explored four methods to conserve your cognitive energy:
Adopting the mindset of a detective, always hunting for ways to make tasks easier for yourself.
Labeling shelves, cabinets, and drawers to create visual cues for quickly finding your belongings.
Building a habit of asking your loved ones for help and explaining your thought processes.
Engaging with your special interests daily to replenish your brain and help regulate your emotions.
Now, let’s dive into another strategy to help you work with your brain, not against it:
Automate Everything You Can
Managing multiple tasks mentally is overwhelming, and even writing them down in a to-do list can feel like too much. To reduce the burden, automate as many repetitive tasks as possible.
Groceries
One of the biggest ways to save energy is automating grocery shopping and meal prep. Eating is a daily necessity, but it involves significant time and effort. Let’s break it down:
The grocery shopping process involves transitions—those small shifts between tasks that drain your cognitive energy. For example:
Pre-Shopping: Planning your trip, creating a list, checking your supplies.
Getting to the Store: Gathering essentials, traveling, parking.
At the Store: Navigating aisles, comparing products, avoiding distractions, and remembering substitutions.
Checking Out and After: Waiting in line, unloading the cart, driving home, putting groceries away.
Reading that list might already feel exhausting. Now imagine doing it every week—or even more often!
By ordering groceries online, especially with home delivery, you can eliminate most of these transitions. Grocery delivery often costs as little as $10–$15, and many stores allow you to reorder frequently purchased items, saving even more mental effort. Instead of creating a list from scratch, you can scroll through your previous purchases and add what you need.
Cooking
Cooking doesn’t have to be a stressful, hands-on activity. Modern appliances like Instant Pots, slow cookers, rice cookers, and air fryers make meals much simpler. These “set it and forget it” devices allow you to focus on other things while your food cooks safely.
If you’re not sure where to start, search for recipes using the ingredients you already have and the appliance you want to use. Meal delivery services and batch cooking can also streamline meal prep. For example, you can cook a large batch of grains or proteins on the weekend and mix and match them throughout the week.
Medical
Automating medical tasks can ease another part of your life. For regular appointments, ask providers to call when it’s time to schedule. You can also set prescriptions to auto-renew and have them delivered, often for free or a small fee through services like Amazon’s PillPack.
Financial
Automating your finances is likely something you’ve already started, but it’s worth double-checking. Put recurring bills on autopay to avoid late fees and consider setting up monthly transfers to a savings account to build funds effortlessly. Tools like Mint can also send account balance notifications, saving you the mental effort of manual tracking.
Cleaning
Hiring a cleaning service may feel indulgent, but it can be transformative. Consider the cost in relation to other expenses like dining out or multiple streaming subscriptions. Redirecting those funds toward cleaning services might improve your quality of life more significantly.
If a cleaning service feels out of reach, a robot vacuum is another option. Prices have dropped considerably, and they can save time and energy by tackling one of the most transition-heavy cleaning tasks.
By automating even just a few of these areas, you can conserve your energy and focus on the things that matter most to you. What will you try automating first?
Citations:
Barkley, R. A. (2014). Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment.
Dawson, P., & Guare, R. (2018). Smart but Scattered: The Revolutionary "Executive Skills" Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential.
Willcutt, E. G., et al. (2005). "Neuropsychological analysis of ADHD in children and adolescents." Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.
Whillans, A. V., et al. (2017). "Buying time promotes happiness." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Part 3 is coming soon!
You've just read the second installment of a 3-part series focused on strategies to conserve and recharge your cognitive energy, so you can align with your brain’s needs.
More tips are coming soon to help you simplify your life and replenish your brain.
