The Faces of Cognitive Distortions
Emotional regulation is HARD when your mind distorts reality. This ‘Faces’ series is based on common distortions from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
ADHD and Laundry
Laundry is exhausting, especially for people with ADHD. It's a tedious, multi-hour sustained effort with so many steps and hurdles to stumble over. No wonder I feel like I failed before I even start.
Laundry is the chore that exposes the gap between knowing how to do something and being able to start it. The steps aren’t complicated. There are just four of them, and they don’t happen at once.
The same four hurdles, two different races
The comic draws laundry as a hurdle race with four hurdles: wash, dry, fold, put away.
In the non-ADHD lane, the hurdles are low and evenly spaced, and the runner is already sailing over the third one.
In the ADHD lane, the hurdles are identical in name but each one is taller than the last. Wash is low enough. Dry is higher. Fold is higher again. Put away towers over all of them. The runner is standing at the start, not moving.
Why the clean pile lives on the chair
The insight in the drawing is that the hurdles get taller as you go. Washing has a built-in prompt: you ran out of clean clothes. Drying has one too: the machine beeps. But folding and putting away have no prompt at all. Nothing external tells you to start, and by then the pressure that got you moving has gone.
Which is why the load usually gets washed, often gets dried, and then sits clean in a basket for a week. Not abandoned out of laziness, but stalled at the exact hurdle where the prompts run out.
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