201: How to Reset Your Home When You Have ADHD

You Can’t Reset What Was Never Set

Those satisfying reset videos, the ones where a fridge or a bathroom gets restored to perfection in under a minute with soothing ASMR sounds, can actually be discouraging if resets are something you genuinely struggle with. I’ve been away from the podcast for a bit while life got overwhelmingly busy, and my own house shows it. So this felt like the right moment to talk honestly about why resetting is so hard for some of us, and what actually helps.

Why you can’t reset what was never set

Part of the struggle is executive function, but there’s a simpler concept underneath it: you can’t reset something that was never set in the first place. If you live life a little chaotically to begin with, if lots of things in your world don’t have a designated home, there’s no “back to normal” to return to. What feels like it should be a quick fix, just get it back to where it was, quietly turns into a full overhaul, because “where it was” was never actually functional or finished to begin with.

Stationary worlds versus swirling ones

Think about the monkey-brained, neurotypical people in your life. Their world is stationary. When a storm blows through, all they have to do is put the stumbling blocks back where they already belonged, because they know where everything already lives. New things, party favors after a birthday, whatever just entered their world, get folded into an existing system easily.

A fish brain’s world is a swirl. Set something down and it drifts. Even the things you do know where to put can vanish from memory, because your brain is a different place by the time you go looking, and the “safe place” that seemed impossible to forget doesn’t look the same from where you’re standing now. A stationary world lets you reset. A swirling one doesn’t have a fixed point to reset to.

Stop chasing “set to reset.” Aim for “chaos to pre-chaos” instead

Even that softer goal, just get back to pre-chaos, doesn’t quite work either, because pre-chaos wasn’t actually a place that made sense. So instead of seeing a messy space as something you can quickly reset, you end up seeing it as an overhaul, and overhauls don’t feel like short, easy fixes. What helps is dropping the whole idea of getting back to anything and replacing it with simply moving forward.

In my own office right now, the desk is set up, the bookshelves are set up, but there’s a table piled with things I never decided what to do with, plus a new pile in the corner, plus fresh chaos from a labeling project that shoved things out of the way. I don’t want it back to what it was, because what it was wasn’t finished or particularly good either. So I’m breaking it into separate tasks at separate times: reset the desk, reset the filing area, clear and figure out the table. None of it has to happen at once, and the table specifically was never set right to begin with, so there’s nothing to “get back to” there. Just forward motion.

Take the photos, even if no one else sees them

The second piece: take before and after photos, even if you never share them with a single person. It is nearly impossible for us to remember befores and afters on our own. The photos aren’t for an audience, they’re for your own brain, so you have proof the work happened and proof of what “good” looked like last time. Scrolling back through old photos to find a previous after-shot of a space you loved can jog your memory of what you were aiming for. Or skip the search entirely and just take a fresh before-and-after of whatever’s in front of you right now, even if all you accomplished was clearing one section of a table. That’s still a win, and the photo is what lets you actually see it.

Small chunks, no full-space requirement

This is the same approach my membership group has been using this month in what we’re calling before-and-after blitzes: fifteen minutes on a space, a before photo, an after photo, and sharing it with each other for accountability and encouragement. Sometimes the difference is dramatic, sometimes it’s small, and both count.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick a space that’s driving you crazy, and instead of asking how to get it “back,” ask what fifteen minutes of forward motion would look like. Take a before photo, work your fifteen minutes, take an after photo, and let that be the proof, since you likely won’t remember doing the work otherwise.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.