The Comfort of Constraints

Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an adult with ADHD, is to isolate activities. My brain works better in single-task mode, and I stay calm and more focused. I'm also more productive when I do these things, but that's not really the point. The point is that they make me calmer. I'm relaxed when I get shit done.

That's one of the best things about listening to music on vinyl records, for example. It's an isolated activity.

Of course I still stream music. Or listen to my iPod Classic, but the act of listening to records is a distinct activity. You need to be intentional about it: selecting the record, dusting it, loading it onto the turntable, playing it, sitting down to listen (or dancing to it), flipping it over when the first side is over, and repeating. It's a constrained activity even from the start: your options are limited to what you have in your collection¹.

I also started keeping the phone away when I watch TV or movies. I don't like to break my attention when I'm watching something interesting, and when my phone is with me, it inevitably leads to interruptions, not only from external stimuli, but also because of the urge to Google search for references from the show or movie, or, as a non-native English speaker who consumes 99% of their content in English, the occasional unknown word, whose meaning I can infer from the context anyways.

I usually don't listen to music when I'm working, because for my brain that's multitasking. I obsess over the things I like, and music is one of them, so it distracts me. Instead, I put my headphones on and play rain sounds. I love rain (seriously, I love almost everything about rain²), and its sounds, even when they're recorded, relax me, help me focus, and put me in a good mood.

I'm constantly looking to be more intentional and remove multitasking from as many activities as I can. I wish I could just leave my phone behind most of the time, but unfortunately I can't. I have two kids who live with me half of the time, and my anxiety can be brutal, so if I don't have my phone on me, I'm constantly thinking of the possibility of an emergency I'm not aware of. When they're physically with me, I can leave the phone behind, though, and I often do.

I'm currently trying to improve my nighttime reading. I suffer from revenge bedtime procrastination, meaning that I stay up at night mostly to catch up with the interests I couldn't catch up with during the day. One thing that helps me a lot to curb it is to read in bed before sleeping. Traditionally that was my /r/askreddit reading time, but with the Kindle I started to catch up on pending books, and lately I've been reading my RSS feeds at that moment. I like that I have these three options to choose from.

Listening to podcasts at nighttime also works wonders for helping me fall asleep. Probably the best³. I got a cheap pair of tiny Bluetooth earbuds for this purpose recently, after leaving my super-cheap headphone sleeping headband in an Airbnb, and they work wonders, but I can't go to sleep with headphones when my kids are at home. Anxiety tells me something might need my attention. It sucks and it doesn't. I decided podcast listening is a car-driving activity anyway.