What Didn’t Work for My Nervous System — and What I Learned Instead

I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child in the mid-80s but I had no idea that my diagnosis had any implications for my nervous system.

Do you remember that friends episode where Rachel tells Monica to “be breezy” and it totally backfires? Watch here for a reminder!

Well, I always wanted to be breezy but I’ve never in fact been breezy. I tried for a long time to pretend that I was breezy, but, my nervous system is sensitive and pretending to be breezy never actually worked. It let to dysregulation and burnout.

People ask me all of the time about learning to regulate my emotions as a mom with ADHD but the thing is that’s been an ongoing process for me that started with learning to pay attention to my nervous system.

I’ve learned micro tools to help myself calm down when I get dysregulated but that only came after I learned to make macro changes to how I was doing life.

When I was deep in ADHD burnout, I had an ADHD diagnosis and was on medicine. I’d been in therapy. I was regularly exercising. BUT, I was also still trying to be breezy. I wasn’t listening to my nervous system or allowing it to have needs and preferences.

Once I got honest about what worked for me and my nervous system and started making changes accordingly, all of life got easier.

Open Concept Floor Plan

We spent a year building a new home with a beautiful open floor plan.

This is the best picture that I can find of it. 😭

This was towards the end of that season and I’d moved the furniture around no less than one million times trying to make this space work.

Spoiler alert: the space never in fact worked for me.

It was beautiful and I loved the floors and the colors but I felt like I could never escape the noise of raising three loud kids. We didn’t have any kind of playroom and focusing to cook felt impossible. I was so dysregulated because my nervous system never had a break from the noise.

It didn’t help that during this season of life, the pandemic hit and then we continued to homeschool. I couldn’t have predicted that but even when my kids were still in school during our first year in this house, the noise level was really, really hard for me.

After living in this house, we intentionally sought out older homes where the kitchen had some separation from the common areas. Sadly, they are getting harder and harder to find.

My current kitchen has visibility in to the family room and is in the center of the home but there is enough separation that the kids can be playing video game or watching a movie and I can’t hear every word. My bedroom also has more separation so that I can go in there if I need down time. I can get boring tasks done if I put in noise blocking headphones and block off the extra distractions but there’s not separation, it leads to ongoing dysregulation.