Your ADHD Clutter Doesn't Need Another Bin

Sep 27

4 min read

Collage poster with flower and tray of letter blocks saying ADHD & Letting Go, You Don't Need More Brains; OrganizingAnADHDBrain.com

Have you ever bought bins instead of organizing?

Someone in the Organizing an ADHD Brain Community said this the other day that she just bought bins because it felt a lot easier than actually going and organizing.

Truth. Preach.

I LOVE that she said it out loud.

Letting go is a non preferred task, and clicking buy on a shiny solution is SO much easier than sitting down with the pile.

I say this as someone who does this for a living.

Last year my family sold 90% of what we owned and moved across the country from Colorado to Massachusetts in a five by eight trailer. I thought I had it all figured out.

This is my job!

Looking back, all I remember is being in fight or flight mode the whole time. And for years before that, I was already selling and moving and letting go of stuff.

But guess what I kept doing? Buying things and not giving things homes.

Letting go and accumulating, letting go and accumulating.

So if your ADHD clutter keeps coming back no matter how many times you purge, I see you.

What does ready even mean?

So often we go through life saying, I'll get to that, I'm just not ready yet. So of course I looked it up.

One definition of ready is being "prepared for what one is about to do or experience."

UGH. How could anyone ever be prepared for that? Then I found another one that was simply being willing. That one I like. You don't have to be prepared for the whole journey.

You just need a willingness to start.

A willingness to be bad at this.

A willingness to not know everything.

And no amount of new storage solutions is going to hand you that.

It's not just about the space

I was talking to an ADHD coach the other day who has been in the ADHD space for a really long time (I can't wait to have her on the podcast). She started out as an organizer, and she told me how confusing it was back then. She'd help a client get a space looking great, come back later, and it had all fallen apart. Sometimes it was almost worse than when she started.

If organizing were only about the space, that wouldn't keep happening, right?

It's not just about changing your environment. It's about changing it in a way that will work for your brain.

It's about the baby steps and the little habits that keep a space working after the organizer goes home. It's about a space that works with you, not against you.

Oh, I have the best story. My girls put their towels on the floor in their room every single time they shower. So I've been practicing, "Hey girls, I noticed your towels are on the floor." Sometimes I pick them up. Sometimes they go do it, begrudgingly and annoyed. Then the other night Charlotte gets this look and goes, "Mom, I have an idea.

What if we took the hooks that are in the bathroom and hung them up in here instead?"

Her face lit up. And honestly I was even more excited, because it wasn't my idea! My first thought was, hmm, but how does the towel get back to the bathroom? And then I caught myself. Wait. It's just a command strip. Let's play with it.

She identified what she was already doing. Not walking the 10 steps back to the bathroom, but hanging the towel up right where she already is. Her brain came up with a system that works for her brain. I just had to get out of the way.

So what do I do with this thing?

When we look at the whole ADHD piles of clutter, overwhelm pipes up.

Nope, that's way too many decisions to be made. So we walk away.

Or we pick something up, shrug, and set it on a different pile. A week later we pick it up again. Shrug. Different pile. Sound familiar?

Letting go is understanding what to do with one item at a time. Pick up the thing on the top of the pile and ask, do I keep this or do I let it go? Not what does grandma think. Not what does Instagram think. But what hat do I want?

If you don't know, change its location and see what you do with it in the next couple of months. If you're keeping it, where would you go to look for it if you were trying to find it? And if you're not sure, ask yourself this:

If I let go of it, would it be OK that I couldn't find it one day?

This is how we build trust in ourselves. And it's actually not supposed to feel good all the time. When I say letting go is hard, I mean emotional. You might feel sad or angry or upset or frustrated.

What helps me in these moments is thinking about the feeling I want more of in my life. What am I making space for when I let go? What are you making space for?