PDA fae

Category: flat maintenance

  • A new tool

    I’m forever on the hunt for tools to use to make everyday tasks feel more manageable (it’s important to me to learn to become more functional than I have been for a long time).

    A new one that I’ve found is https://llamalife.co/. It’s very visual, which is great for the time-blind ADHD brain. It can help you stay on task with alerts during a task, and encourages focus on one task at a time.

    At the moment, it might simply be helping because it’s novel. Luckily there’s an entirely free version to use, so I’m happy to experiment and find out if it’s just that or if it’s useful beyond being a new toy.

    I do like ticking off tasks, it’s part of why body doubling pomodoros work for me as well. It gives a sense of achievement as you see things become completed.

    I don’t think this tool does much to reduce demands, and could actually increase them through it’s task list. I’d imagine many PDAers would set up a task, and then start work on something completely different (but that still gets things done, and might be a PDA friendly way to use tools like this).

  • Pomodoro stream

    Found another little thing that helped today, probably more so with ADHD avoidance and motivation issues than PDA. I think if my demand anxiety had been high, this wouldn’t have been so successful. I found a streamer on twitch doing pomodoros of 50 minutes followed by ten minute breaks. That’s longer than I can usually motivate myself to focus on something, but the body doubling effect of working alongside a streamer and her audience really helped.

    It definitely helps too to think of table tops and table legs (credit to Harry Thompson for that metaphor). When it comes to household care tasks, they’re the table leg towards the table top of eventually being considered independent enough to get a cat. I’ve come a long way on that goal, the main thing now is to learn to a. sustain the progress and b. keep on top of care tasks even during periods of blips. I’m no longer needing support sessions to achieve basic tidying care tasks, which I’m really proud of.

    Edited 8/3/23: I no longer recommend Harry Thompson as a resource.

  • Pretty big success

    For whatever reason, I’ve had a lot more demand capacity recently. Might be something to do with not having work at the moment (transport became untenably expensive), so I have a lot of spare time to get bored in. I’ve been trialling new strategies to help, and they’re making a real difference.

    The first thing that helped was setting a timer for five minutes and giving myself permission to stop after those five minutes if I wanted to. That was a long enough period of time that I could make a real difference in one small area of the flat. It’s a great strategy if I’ve got a middling amount of demand capacity.

    What I didn’t expect to be so effective was roleplaying being a carer. I pretended I was looking at someone else’s flat. Someone else in need of help. Looked, and thought ‘what would help you, pretend person, if I handled it today?’ Then whatever I felt I wanted dealt with was the pretend person’s ‘request’ and that just got me over the hump of demand avoidance. If I’m doing it because ‘I’m helping someone else’ in my head, it’s more like ‘Elliott the Carer’ is tackling the demand, and the threat response lowers.

    So today when I had my support session, especially given that I’d started preparing dinner beforehand, my keyworker was astounded. It was so nice that she was proud of me, but seemed to understand that there may be backwards steps after this rather than a new sustained way of being. I don’t think I’ve reached the stage yet where I will definitely sustain this way of functioning over time. I think it’s a lot more likely that I will have a good time, then a bad, in cycles.

    I think the ‘answer’ will be learning my own ebb and flow. Learning when I just can not, and allowing myself to avoid, learning how to get enough recuperation to rebuild demand capacity, and learning strategies that allow me to make progress when I’m doing a little better in terms of my demand cup.

  • Coping skill: tried/trying/to try

    I’m in the process of trialling coping skills to help me meet the demands of every day maintenance and upkeep of my flat, as that’s what I’m struggling with the most in terms of my functioning at the moment.

    So far I have tried:

    • Tidy one thing a day
      • This helps because I’m not trying to pretend to myself that I don’t have to tidy at all, but also doesn’t require too much of myself. This is especially useful when my capacity for this demand is very low, as one thing refers to literally one single item. One item in the bin, back in it’s place, one dish in the sink, just one, and I’m done.
    • Support sessions
      • I’ve used support sessions with staff to get these tasks done. I don’t love this, because it feels like it’s leveraging that I struggle to feel safe to avoid tasks in the presence of other people. It is possible though that it also helps because it provides body doubling, which feels more positive.

    I’m currently trying:

    • Just do five minutes
      • This is something I’ve started using now my capacity for the demand of housekeeping has increased a little. It involves setting a timer for five minutes, and working on a care task. You have permission to stop after the time is up if you want to, but if you got into the flow of the task, you keep going. I find five minutes is a time that I can handle, it’s a time frame I can easily conceptualise and imagine reaching the end of. It makes the task feel finite and thus achievable, as I know I can stop.
    • KC Davis’s five things method for tidying
      • This is most useful for ADHD executive dysfunction. She breaks the task of tidying a room into five categories: rubbish, dishes, laundry, things that have a place and things that do not have a place. This prevents me from looking at a room and just seeing ‘Mess!’ where I can’t work out what to do, and in what order.
    • Keeping laundry in bags for life, rather than putting them away in drawers
      • For a long time, I had been keeping my clean laundry in the bags that I took it down to the laundry in, and then leaving them in my living room. This was the cause of so much clutter, so I needed a better system that still worked for me. One thing KC emphasises is rethinking the ‘rules’ of laundry, and I found that moving all the bags I use into my bedroom, giving each a category of clothing and using one for actually doing laundry creates a system that works for me.

    Things to try:

    • From KC Davies:
      • Using music to aid transitioning to a task
      • Doing jobs partially, giving yourself permission to start
      • Using the wait time e.g. time to boil a kettle, to work on a task
      • Closing duties: a short list of tasks to make the next day easier
    • Role play
      • This is frequently listed as a coping strategy that PDAers make use of, but one that I am not in the habit of using. Having realised my PDA identity, it’s very tempting to explore this and see if it helps me. A common role play is one of being filmed performing care tasks. I think I would role play that I am a carer for someone else perhaps.
    • Telling myself to ‘do the opposite’ so the PDA brain says ‘No I will do it’
    • Reminding myself I can change my mind and stop when I want to
    • Distracting my thoughts from the demand
    • Making a list, and avoiding it with other tasks
    • Limiting the demands I meet each day
    • Adding novelty to the demand
    • First, then
    • Immediacy

  • Keeping house while drowning

    If you’re on tiktok, you might have come across K.C. Davis’s account, DomesticBlisters. You might even be aware of her book, ‘How to Keep House While Drowning’. Or this might be the first time you’re hearing of them.

    I’d known of them for a while, but wasn’t sure if they’d be helpful when it comes to PDA style issues with keeping house. I was persuaded to get the book when my therapist endorsed KC’s methods. KC has ADHD, and post-partum depression, and her advice feels to me as thought it’s very, very useful for those reasons to be struggling to keep house. It focuses on self-compassion and seeing care tasks (usually known as chores) as morally neutral, rather than something that defines you as good or bad. Great perspective when you’re struggling with low self-esteem, low motivation and low mood. She also has a lot of simple, clear explanations that help with poor executive functioning, e.g. her five things tidying method. This breaks a messy room into five categories: trash, laundry, dishes, things that have a place and things that do not have a place. She advises dealing with each category in turn in order to resolve a messy room. This is a brilliant antidote to the ADHD experience of looking at a messy room and seeing nowhere to begin, something I have frequently experienced.

    I do wish there was a book on keeping house for PDAers. Perhaps it would be the ‘small book of housekeeping demands’ and we’d all avoid even reading it? I feel I’d find it useful to have a resource which included strategies tailored to the PDA experience. It’s tempting to consider a goal of working towards creating that resource, as I find myself wanting to work in adult ND peer support and this would constitute a form of it.

    That sets me to thinking what would be included in such a book. I think Harry Thompson’s concept of table tops and table legs would have to be part of it. I’m not sure a PDAer would manage care tasks on a regular basis if they didn’t form a table leg towards a driving, autonomous PDA current. They are, after all, the very definition of a demand. Something you really should do, something you have to do in life. Something a PDAer is going to therefore avoid like the plague, because having to threatens our personal sense of control.

    I suppose something else I’d put a strong focus on would be outsourcing the care tasks. I would try and encourage people to be self-compassionate about needing to live in supported living, needing a carer or a house-keeper. PDAers need support in life (we all do), and perhaps drafting someone in better suited to meet those demands is the best solution. It might even be so for me, after I move out of supported living, though I’m not sure yet if I’d be allocated the funding for a carer after living here. Maybe over time that will have to be explored, because it would probably be deeply useful for me to have access to that support long term.

    Rest is something I would strongly emphasise. To be fair, KC already includes this in her book, which is good. Everyone needs and deserves rest. PDAers often have a strong need for downtime to recuperate after meeting demands, or to prepare for meeting demands. In particular, demand free time is useful. I would also talk about Tomlin Wilding’s concept of the demand cup, and the corresponding emotion cup. I would want to find some methods in which we can look after the state of both, in order to free up some demand capacity for keeping house.

    But alongside the goal of creating demand capacity for keeping house, I would echo KCs ethos that our space exists to serve us, not us our space. As a PDAer, we’re not going to want to focus all our demand capacity on housekeeping in order to keep up standards (unless, that’s where our PDA current lies, I suppose.) I would place my focus on how we can keep our space functional enough, and how we can accept ourselves and offer ourselves compassion when we just do not have the demand capacity to cope, That’s my favourite thing about KC’s approach: we’re worthy of love, support, and compassion where we are now. We don’t need to meet societal standards of tidy, hygienic, clean, perfect to be worthy. Care tasks are neutral.

  • Choice

    In a previous post, I asked ‘what does healthy look like for a PDAer?’

    My therapists opinion is that healthy looks like having choice. Freedom to choose to avoid or comply, rather than being ruled by nervous system activation and trauma responses.

    I suppose that means then, that it must always be an option to say no. There’s only true choice if you have the freedom to choose to refuse. I often don’t trust that there will be that freedom in interactions with other people, because so often growing up it was absolutely not an option. Perhaps practicing saying no more frequently would help me trust that I can do that.

    I wonder if I learnt to say ‘No’ more often, if it would help me choose to take on other demands in life as I’d feel more in control.

  • Continued success

    In further ‘tidy only one thing’ success, my dining table has a lot more free space on it now.

    This rule isn’t freeing up enough demand capacity to get this entire tiny flat sorted, but just enough to do one small piece on my own. I’m still recovering my demand capacity after my hospitalisation from August 2021 to April 2021- having to only meet the demands of ‘sleep at night, take meds when asked, eat enough to not worry us’ actually really depleted my demand capacity. There’s a video on youtube of a young boy talking about his PDA who says that allowing himself to avoid a demand makes it harder to return to meeting it later. I would say this year was a big example of that.. I left hospital thoroughly painfully understimulated, but with so little demand capacity that it took about a month of just watching tv on my laptop to repair the understimulation and start repairing my demand capacity.

    It’s been 6 months now. In many ways I’ve come on leaps and bounds – I’ve started a teaching assistant apprenticeship at a local SEN school. So obviously I can now meet an awful lot more demands than 6 months ago! It doesn’t feel like a truly accurate reflection of my capacity though, because that work fits exactly my PDA flow. I’m working with autistic learners, I’m very interested in education and the autistic experience of it after my year spent learning about autism as I realised I was PDA.

    So is that work ‘demanding’? Arguably not.

    Outside of work, I’m still struggling.

    But for tonight, one small success.

  • A small success

    I’ve been struggling with maintaining my flat for a while now. I experience it as a big ‘ought to’ and I also find that I rebound with avoidance on this sort of task after complying with externally induced demands from other people.

    Telling myself that it’s ok, I don’t need to tidy doesn’t work. Clearly, I do need to tidy, so it feels like I’m lying to myself. I end up spiralling back into ‘I do need to tidy’ which becomes ‘I need to tidy everything’ which leads to ‘I can’t tidy’.

    What seems to work a little better is telling myself all I have to do is tidy one single item a day. Just one thing, put away or thrown away. Then I’m not lying to myself. I’m slowly addressing the problem in a way that I find manageable – I can handle the demand to tidy one thing that I have choice over.

    A couple of times now not having to tidy any more has lead to feeling able and willing to tidy just a little more. Not everything, but more than just one thing. I think this might have been a hack I was looking for.