Staying on Track When Life Throws You Curveballs

How to reset when everything falls apart

One of the most common sentiments I hear from moms with ADHD is “I can’t stick to any system long term.” But, when I dig deeper the problem isn’t the inability to follow through, it’s resetting when life gets in the away.

The core problem is that when life happens and it gets hard to follow through with your plan or system, you blame yourself instead of accepting that interruptions are just part of life that everyone experiences. The key is learning how to navigate when these interruptions come so that they don’t derail us.

If you throw in the towel or scrap every system or strategy everytime life provides interruptions, you’ll waste so much energy reinventing the wheel over and over. Learning to adjust and reset when life gets in the way is a critical skill for those of us with ADHD because creating systems takes so much of our energy.

What do I mean by life happening?

You know... the kids get sick. Or you get sick. Or the whole family gets sick. Or you go on a trip. Or school is cancelled because of a snow day. Or you have a tragedy in the family. Or your spouse has a two week long trip for work. Or the seasons change. Or your kids stop napping.

Let’s use the analogy of a train for your neurodivergent family. Creating systems and routines to help your family function is a lot like getting a train in to motion. It can take a lot of energy to get that train in to motion and then when you encounter a challenge or set back, it can feel impossible to get the train moving again.

And somehow instead of working to get it back in motion, the train goes off the rails and we throw out every good habit and routine that had helped us in our past because we think they must not work since the train came to a stop.

This is a very, very common thing for those of with ADHD and can create so much shame and frustration. We spend so much time and energy searching for and creating routines and systems and then with the slightest interruption it all gets flushed down the toilet.

We then spend an enormous amount of energy AGAIN finding new strategies to help us when in reality the routine wasn’t broken, we just weren’t able to get the train moving again.

Okay, I’m not completely sold on this train analogy but hopefully you’re still with me!

Why do we get so easily derailed?

Well, there are a few reasons.

Working Memory Challenges

Working Memory is a real thing and a big part of our executive functioning challenges. Our brains can easily forget the basic ongoing tasks of life and need help remembering our routines. If you have ADHD, you have to accept this challenge and find ways to accommodate. If you don’t have tools and strategies in place to help you remember your systems and strategies, it will take a lot more mental effort to get the train moving again.

We Blame Ourselves

Disruptions are inevitable parts of life. Unfortunately, we tend to blame ourselves and internalize when things happen instead of showing ourselves grace and compassion. We feel like it was OUR fault that life came to a halt and we expect that we should be able to get right back up to full speed right away. When that doesn’t happen, we blame ourselves and we blame the train and so we knock the train off the tracks thinking that we need a whole new system or strategy for doing life. We have to learn to give ourselves grace and realize that it might take a week or so to get back up to speed and that’s okay.

Mindset + Overwhelm

So the whole family gets sick and all of the bedding and towels need to be washed and the sink is full of dishes and it all feels chaotic and urgent and overwhelming. Sound familiar? I think part of that overwhelm comes when we feel like the state of our home is a reflection of us. If looking at the sink full of dishes sends you in o a shame spiral thinking “I’m the worst mom in the world” because I let it get this bad... you are headed towards derail territory. I definitely prefer a clean and tidy home and clutter stresses me out big time but when I don’t internalize it, it’s much easier to take small action to change it.

Lack of Margin

We tend to overcommit and overextend ourselves because busy feels more fun and energizing. This is itself is a whole other thing that I will unpack on the here soon, I promise! But when our lives have no margin for these messy things of life, it makes it really hard to recover. If you are relying on procrastination as your main tool to do the boring things of life, this means you are leaning in to chaos as your strategy for doing daily life. When the surprise chaos comes (sick kids, lost jobs, snow days), you don’t have the margin to deal with it.

How Do You Not Get Derailed When Life Happens?