151: Is It Time to Add a Power Up to Your ADHD Brain?

Four Power-Ups to Spark Movement When You’re Stuck

We watched the Mario Brothers movie this weekend, and even though I never played much Mario growing up, the concept of a power-up stuck with me. So let’s talk about whether it’s time for you to use a power-up in your own home to get something moving.

First, some quick credit-giving loopholes

If you’re playing along with the bingo boards from bonus episode 20, here’s permission to stop being rigid about how you mark your progress. Every load of laundry gets its own mark, even five in one day, instead of limiting yourself to one mark per calendar day. Check your sink after every meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and give yourself a mark each time instead of waiting for one end-of-day check. For the timer card, mark a box for every 10 or 15 minute stretch you work, even if that adds up to two and a half hours straight in one sitting. Our hyperfocus deserves exactly as much credit as someone else’s steady fifteen-minutes-a-day. If two people’s rooms look identical at the end of the month, one from small daily effort and one from a single marathon session, they both got to the same answer. Don’t let rules you invented for yourself hold back the momentum when you finally feel ready to move.

Power-up one: introduce something new

Novelty genuinely powers up our brains. That might mean borrowing a piece of furniture from another room, rearranging what’s already there, or, if it’s the one thing you know will really spark you, bringing in something new before the space is finished rather than saving it as the reward for finishing. Just be honest with yourself about whether it’s the spark you need or an excuse to spend money.

Power-up two: embrace the urgency, even when it misfires

You know the pattern: a real deadline is approaching, like a vacation in a week, and instead of packing, you suddenly feel compelled to tackle a completely unrelated room you’ve been avoiding for months. When the deadline arrives, you’ll still scramble to do the actual necessary thing. But you’ll also walk past that newly finished room and feel genuinely proud of it. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of how our brains use urgency, even when it’s misdirected.

Power-up three: make it harder, on purpose

This one carries real risk, but sometimes the low-stakes, pull-a-little-out-here-and-there approach just doesn’t create enough visible progress to keep our brains engaged, and that lack of momentum can be what makes us walk away entirely. Emptying an entire space completely, cleaning it from scratch, and only bringing back what truly belongs is far more exhausting and risks turning one messy space into two temporarily messy ones. But for some of us, that all-or-nothing overhaul is the only version that actually gets our brain to engage.

Power-up four: chase what’s genuinely interesting

When I first set up my office, I did the fun stuff first, removable brick wallpaper, a painted accent wall, a millwork feature, a great filing cabinet find, colorful chairs I’d been storing without a purpose. None of it touched my actual arch nemesis, paperwork, but it made the space feel exciting enough to want to be in, and for a while that carried real momentum. When a space starts feeling flat again, adding one more layer of genuine visual interest, even something unrelated to the actual clutter, can be the thing that gets you back in the door.

The honest caveat

Power-ups run out. Just like in the game, something can knock you out of that hyperfocus zone before you’re done, and this approach carries real risk of things looking worse before they look better. But being stuck and doing nothing carries its own cost too. I can’t weigh that trade-off for you, but I think it’s usually worth the risk.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one space you’ve been avoiding and choose a single power-up to try today, introduce something new, lean into a real deadline’s misdirected energy, make the task harder on purpose, or add one genuinely interesting element first. Give yourself full credit for whatever momentum it creates, however it happens.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.