Running (Late)

Time-blindness and the complicated nature of exercising as a neurodivergent person

If you are neurotypical, imagine this scenario:

It is a Tuesday morning and you have to be at work or class by 10 AM. Normally you have to go in by 9:00, so the temptation to sleep in is strong. You turn on your phone and the weather app says that it is 36º F and raining. Last night, you told yourself that you would go to the gym in the morning before work for 30 minutes. The gym is a 15 minute drive away, so if you want to be able to shower before work, you will need to leave home at 8:45. You finally pull yourself out of bed at 7:15 and everything else runs smoothly from there.

Now, I don’t know if all of these thoughts run through your head. You might just be able to wing it without having a scheduled time to leave. People are different, and everyone has their own personal concerns, so it is impossible to capture the intricacies of individual situations without having to make generalizations. My goal is not to minimize personal situational concerns; instead, I am proposing a thought experiment to help people step out of their own shoes and begin to understand the experiences of people who are not like them.

Time-Blindness

With that in mind, now imagine the same situation for someone who is Neurodivergent. Let's start with a person with ADHD. One of the major symptoms of ADHD is time-blindness. This is defined as difficulty understanding and managing time resources (Bennett 2018). While research in this area is still limited, it is proposed that this inability to conceptualize time as a resource is related to deficiencies in working memory in this population. Working memory, or the ability to take in information, mentally manipulate it, and act on that information is well established as being a problem area for people with ADHD, so it makes sense that time-blindness is also a consideration for this population (Kofler 2017). To learn more about the effects that time-blindness can have on a person with ADHD, read Jaclyn Paul’s blog titled “How it really feels to be time-blind with ADHD,” where she shares an honest and detailed description of managing time in her life.

Time-blindness can mean that people with ADHD are constantly running late because they struggle to understand the amount of time it takes to do different tasks. By adulthood, many of these individuals have created the coping mechanism of leaving large periods of time for each task so that they are not constantly rushing places. It is a common joke in the ADHD community that we are either 45 minutes early or 5 minutes late.

So here is how the above scenario might be changed for this individual:

If you have to be at work at 10:00 AM, you need to plan to be there at 9:30. It is a 10 minute drive from the gym to your workplace, so you should plan for 20-30 minutes in case you run into complications leaving the gym or while driving. That means that you need to leave the gym by 9:10 at the latest. It will take at least 15 minutes to physically and mentally prepare to work out, so you need to be at the gym by 8:25 in order to get a 30 minute work-out in. While you are at the gym, you will also have to set multiple alarms to remind yourself of what time you need to prepare to leave. Since it is a 15 minute drive to the gym, you should probably leave 25 minutes for driving, meaning that you need to leave the house at 8:00. However, this means that you should shoot for 7:50 because there are always last minute concerns for you.

Did you get bored reading that? Did you maybe even skip over some of it? Surely people don’t think things through that deeply, right? Wrong. I cannot say that all people with ADHD have to go through this process, but I know that many do. So, the next question is if a person with ADHD has done all of this planning, why are they still running into the office holding loose papers at 10:05 AM? The answer? You guessed it—time-blindness. Even though many of us have developed coping mechanisms to help us plan our time, the truth of time-blindness is that if we are not actively looking at a clock, time becomes vague. Ten minutes can pass without our knowledge while we are doing something as simple as brushing our teeth. This may seem like an exaggeration, but it is not. It happened to me this morning.

My Morning with Time-Blindness

I needed to leave in 10 minutes and had to brush my teeth, which should only take 2 minutes. However, once I got to the sink, I realized that I hadn’t taken my meds yet. Therefore, I went back to my room and took my meds (which are in a pill container to help me organize and save time). On my way back to the bathroom, I realized that if I left my water bottle by my bed, I would forget to grab it before I left; therefore, I turned around and grabbed it. This made me think about how dehydrated I have been, so I stopped to drink water. Luckily, I had filled it up the night before, but that is not usually the case. This is where the time blindness kicked in. Even though I needed to leave soon, I stood in the middle of my room playing with the lid of my water bottle because it has been leaking recently. When most (neurotypical) people are late, they are able to prioritize their tasks and realize what things need to be done now and what can wait. When I finally snapped myself out of the hyperfocus, it was 2 minutes past when I was supposed to leave. I grabbed my bookbag and keys and rushed to the door. It wasn’t until I was turning the doorknob that I realized I had forgotten to brush my teeth.

Just in case you are currently thinking to yourself that you have done that before, so either 1) you must have ADHD or 2) it can’t really be that detrimental, let me stop you for a second. Not only do I do this every day, but I have to go through this process every time that I go anywhere during the day. Even something as simple as going to the bathroom between classes requires at least a 10-step plan.

Because over-scheduling is a coping strategy for an ADHD symptom and not a symptom itself, this is not a universal experience within the community. Some people use alerts to remind them to stay on task. Many others don’t use coping strategies like planning and instead just hope for the best when it comes to time management. Regardless of what an individual’s process looks like, the common patterns of procrastination, stress, and running late appear for most people with ADHD.

The Experience of Having ADHD

ADHD is much more than being hyperactive and struggling to focus during school—it is a difference in the way that our brains work that can impact every aspect of our lives. Just like with neurotypical people, every person with ADHD is different and has their own needs. Some people may have minimal struggles with time-blindness but experience high levels of impulsivity. Others may struggle with time-blindness but not realize that is a symptom of their ADHD which may lead to the shame that often comes from not understanding your difficulties. Regardless, the experience of having ADHD in a world that is not made to accommodate for our needs means that the best we can do is educate. Educate ourselves about the lesser-discussed symptoms of ADHD and learn how to accept and manage those differences. Educate others about the privileges that are associated with being neurotypical and help them understand how to be lenient with those of us who have additional concerns. Education and empowerment go hand-in-hand and we cannot make the world a more accepting place until we learn and educate and fight for our needs.

The thought experiment that began this discussion was about exercising, but the effects spilled into work, school, and general health. It was about making the decision of which expectation would be neglected. It is expected that everyone should exercise and everyone should be on time to work/school. For many people with ADHD, this is an either/or decision. Exercising is one example, but our world is filled with similar expectations (i.e. cooking, laundry, turning in work on time, managing school plus a job, etc.) that are more complicated for disabled people. And that is just for one symptom of one disorder—it only gets more complicated from there.

Going Forward

If you have ADHD or any other form of neurodivergency, let this be your call to action to begin or continue learning about yourself and your needs. If you are comfortable, share this journey with a trusted friend and try to learn how to advocate for yourself as you learn.

If you are not neurodivergent, I implore you to learn about the needs of people in your life who are and recognize that you may never fully understand what they go through. Listen to and enhance the voices of disabled people and when you are in the position to, don’t make them feel ashamed for not meeting every expectation and help them focus on what they did achieve. This is how the world will slowly begin to become more welcoming and accessible to all people regardless of their differences.

Sources:

Bennett, Arthur Lee. 2018. “The Relationship between Self-Regulation and the Impact of Timing Control on Academic Fluency in College Students with and without Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).” Dissertation, Santa Barbara, CA: Fielding Graduate University. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2138380751?fromopenview=true&pq-origsite=gscholar&parentSessionId=BVty3rsvqNy%2F7Roesr2oJGB6pezHZGNRpG8RLn2BLR8%3D.

Kofler, Michael J., Dustin E. Sarver, Sherelle L. Harmon, Allison Moltisanti, Paula A. Aduen, Elia F. Soto, and Nicole Ferretti. 2018. “Working Memory and Organizational Skills Problems in ADHD.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 59 (1): 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12773.

Paul, Jaclyn. 2018. “How It Really Feels to Be Time-Blind with ADHD.” The ADHD Homestead. April 11, 2018. https://adhdhomestead.net/time-blindness-feels/.