Hi! I’m Madison Marceaux and my passion is helping neurodivergents and trauma survivors learn to heal their nervous system, hear their intuition, and live a bold life without regrets.
“Return to nature” The first guiding principle of my work is unlearning capitalistic, ‘fast’ dopamine habits that make us feel disconnected from nature, our body and ourselves.
“Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t” This is the one! The idea that changed my life. As we train our subconscious to reorient around what we can control, we learn to overcome lifelong rumination that keeps us trapped in anxiety and depression.
THE NEURODIVERGENT WORKPLACE
Heal your nervous system and learn to thrive in a corporate system designed for neurotypicals
Hustle culture is alive and well in many industries, particularly in tech and startups.
This idea that we should “power through”: that we can forgo sleep, food and all basic body related needs, while churning out stellar work product.
Well the truth is that “hustle culture” works for a very narrow prototype of person: usually a male between the ages of 18-35, and often times one who has led a relatively privileged life free from experiences of trauma, whether that be childhood, generational or more recent.
I would argue that neurodivergents and people who have experienced significant are not the only ones who suffer at the hands of hustle culture, but they have the most extreme experiences.
Let’s zoom back for a second to examine the nervous system for people who are neurodivergent or who have trauma. Many such people wake up at the start of the day with a chronically over engaged nervous system. Their ‘baseline’ includes elevated states of cortisol, which puts their nervous system into a state of “fight or flight” mode.
For that reason, I am passionate about helping people learn to bring their body out of that state each day by doing an “active” guided meditation (you may keep your eyes open and allow your body to move if it wishes).
This is the number one tool I used to make every day go better than the last. By starting the day with a guided meditation, you are able to prime your subconscious to be present and positive, allowing yourself to let go of a lifetime of negative experiences that might otherwise be playing on repeat in your brain.
There are a range of tools one can use to ground yourself and to remain productive at work. All of these tools are about reconnecting to your body, figuring out what it needs and honoring that.
When you’re working and you feel your productivity slipping or you start making mistakes, instead of powering through, try doing one of these things:
5 Minute Guided Meditation Go for a walk around the block Eat a fruit, vegetable or seed/nut Drink some water Listen to a favorite song Stretch Smell an essential oil Watch a funny video Listen to nature sounds Open the window Go to the bathroom Wash your face
Don’t be afraid to let your conscious mind be completely blank. Because it is in that quietude that you can connect more deeply to your subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is a powerfully underused tool, and it has much more powerful and wise instincts than our conscious mind.
In that quiet space, when you are honoring your body and giving it what it’s asking for, the answer to the problem you’ve been hemming over just might come to you.
In the last blog post, I shared the walkthrough of the NDxReset Hour, which I’ll reiterate here for ease of use. Then, I’ll explain how your morning might look different by implementing this technique. For the extra tips for each item, check out my earlier blog post.
Do NOT check emails or texts. ❌ 📲
Listen to a 10-20 minute guided meditation in the morning, with a WINDOW open! A connection to the outside world is absolutely ESSENTIAL here. Meditations are best performed with open windows or in an outside environment.
If pressed for time, allow yourself to do an “active meditation” ^ Another great option is to listen to the guided meditation while showering! 🚿
If you really tune into the guided meditation, you will get an urge from your subconscious. The urge is typically body or nature related.Follow it. 🛣️
If you get a “quick dopamine” urge after the meditation, it’s a sign your body needs extra meditation. 📲
If you’ve been taking great care of your body, your subconscious might give you urges to do even cooler things such as teach yourself new skills, create or express yourself creatively, listen to music, 🤳
Let yourself do whatever it is that you feel the urge to, even if just for 20 minutes! Maybe it’s journaling or working out. The more you honor your intuition and give your body what it is asking for, the more you will be able to hear it in the future.
You wake up feeling stressed out. Your room is messy. You see some dishes in the corner that you didn’t wash last night. Your cat is meowing at you for breakfast. You hear texts coming in from your boss asking you for an update on a couple different projects. You catch a glimpse of yourself looking disheveled. You could use a shower.
You know that you have a bunch of requests coming in from people at work and you are feeling super behind. Your first instinct might be to start replying to everyone right away. So you hop on your phone and do so. A couple people respond back quickly and you get into some long conversations. Your stress just builds from there and the day gets away from you.
Here's why that's not a great way to start your day: it's setting you up to feel like you're not in control of your universe. 🌌
What if you had a magic wand you could wave to change all that? 🧙 🪄 ✨
Well you do. It’s that hour you saved to try out the NDxReset technique.
Here’s an alternate way to go about things:
You wake up feeling stressed. Your room is messy. You see some dishes in the corner that you didn’t wash last night. Your cat is meowing at you for breakfast. You hear texts coming in from your boss asking you for an update on a couple different projects. You catch a glimpse of yourself looking disheveled. You could use a shower.
You turn off the alarm on your phone. You don’t look at texts or notifications (Morning DND mode on). You open a window. You feel a gentle breeze coming in.
You notice thoughts coming in, worrying about projects you’re behind on at work. You keep thinking about one project you had to finish in a rush. It wasn’t your best work. You’re worried about what your boss will say when he reviews it.
Because you only have one hour for this, you decide to try the eyes open method.
The words deeply resonate with you. You’ve done everything you can do, and as thoughts come up to you of this project, you acknowledge them, and then gently envision these thoughts disappearing as you touch them, like bubbles floating by. The gentle breeze tickles your face and reminds you of the feeling of being outside playing as a child. You feel at peace. Thoughts float by but you keep yourself focused on the present moment. You recite the mantra carefully as a way to keep your overactive conscious mind occupied.
You find a sudden urge from your body to stand up and move the dishes to the sink. Without making a conscious decision, you find yourself moving the dishes as you continue to listen to the meditation, washing them and setting them to dry. You return to your room, finding yourself tidying things and feeding your cat.
After the meditation is over, you find yourself putting on a 10 minute “Workout from Bed” routine on the bed you’ve just made. Although you’d forgotten it, these short workouts really help with your chronic back pain.
After the workout, you take a shower. You really enjoy the earlier meditation, so you put on another one to listen to, this time a “Manifestation Meditation” because you really want to grow your photography side business.
With the hour nearly over, you find yourself putting on some Tate McRae that really gets you pumped for the day. Your room is looking neat and tidy, you did a quick workout, you smell good, your cat has been fed, and you even had an idea to reach out to a fellow photography friend and schedule a photography meet-up so you guys can exchange tips.
You almost feel ready to open your laptop and tackle the slew of emails and texts coming your way, but suddenly you have an idea to do a quick check in with your body.
You sit next to the window, close your eyes, and allow your mind to be still. What is it that you feel in your body? Hunger, thirst, pain?
You realize you feel quite thirsty and empty your water bottle, then notice your plants look a little thirsty as well. You touch their leaves to check, then water them.
How different is the day when you commit to the NDxReset Hour?
You listened to your body. You cleared your mind of worry and rumination. You did little but important things that proved to yourself: I AM in control of my day.
When you hop on and start work, you’re positive and upbeat. You come up with a couple clarifying questions that you should have asked your boss when you were doing that project. So you run it by her. Once she clarifies, you ask if you can have another day to make the edits and get it back to her. She agrees. Another co-worker reaches out to your boss, complimenting your attitude and efficiency in working with them to resolve a recent issue.
When it comes to people with trauma or neurotypical minds, we can spend so much time worrying about what other people might think or do. By letting go of all of this worry, we can be our most bold and confident self and when we do, the world opens up for us!
If you enjoyed this post, please like, subscribe, check out my YouTube channel. I am currently working on an eBook where I will be sharing more of my tips and tricks of how to rewire your brain to succeed in a world built for neurotypicals. If you’d like to support me, you can buy me a coffee here! ☕️ Contributions no matter how small help me keep making high quality content for you all and they’re appreciated more than you can imagine. 💖
The modern workplace was designed to encourage a certain subsection of individuals in the population to succeed. These individuals are generally referred to as “neuro-typicals”, usually extremely well adjusted individuals from privileged backgrounds who fit in well socially, usually without having experienced significant traumatic events and often times described as being “Type A”.
If you’e ever wondered why the advice from your boss or co-workers isn’t helping you, it might be because they haven’t gone through what you’ve gone through. But I have. And with that experience, I have a toolkit of resources you can use to rewire your brain to be highly present and to tackle your workday with confidence and positivity, no matter how much trauma or difficult you’ve faced due to neurodivergence, mental health issues, or difficult life experiences.
For anyone who has ever been diagnosed with ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, or any other mental health or developmental disorder, there are certain steps you can take to survive and thrive in today’s corporate world.
My #1 tip is this: Wake up at least 1 hour before you start work (or even check your email, notifications, etc), or better yet, at least 1.25 hours before. We’ll call this the NDxReset Hour
The guiding principle behind my tip is the following:
Focus on what you can control, not what you can't.
Tech and start-ups can be highly demanding environments. Often times, executives and founders running the place have experienced come from highly privileged backgrounds where they have endured less trauma, less difficult life situations, etc. Therefore, their brains are wired differently – with less negative experiences to ruminate on when they wake up, and with a feeling of greater control over their lives.
For neurodivergent people, we have typically gone through life experiences that cause our nervous system to get stuck in “fight or flight” mode. We have chronically high cortisol, which makes it difficult for us to fully thrive in stressful environments without intentional effort.
The great news is, no matter what kind of difficulties you have experienced during your life, by taking an hour for yourself in the morning, you can reclaim a feeling of control over your life. My tips help you learn to calm yourself down, stimulate your vagus nerve and shift your parasympathetic nervous system to take over. By doing so, you will experience the following:
Greater emotional regulation
Major improvements to your short term memory
Ability to refocus on things you have control over
Underlying feeling of positivity guiding you throughout the day
Deeper understanding of what your body needs
You might be wondering, how should I spend the NDxReset Hour?
Do NOT check emails or texts. ❌ 📲 This will seriously stress you out. I recommend creating a custom DND mode on your phone to allow calls but silence messages and any kind of app-related notifications
Listen to a 10-20 minute guided meditation in the morning, with a WINDOW open! 🧘🏼♀️ 🪟 I love any guided meditation by Boho Beautiful on YouTube. Adjust based on what thoughts are coming to you in the morning. If you’re worried about what someone is thinking or might do, try a “Meditation for Times of Uncertainty & Difficulty“. If you are worried about something dumb you said at a party last night, try “Meditation for Peace & Forgiveness“. A connection to the outside world is absolutely ESSENTIAL here. Meditations are best performed with open windows or in an outside environment.
If pressed for time, allow yourself to do an “active meditation” ^ 👀 I often keep my eyes open and allow my body to move while listening to these meditations. You are likely to find yourself tidying, doing dishes, or performing self care activities. Another great option is to listen to the guided meditation while showering! 🚿
If you really tune into the guided meditation, you will get an urge from your subconscious. The urge is typically body or nature related.Follow it. 🛣️ Here’s the types of urges I get after guided meditations: Shower. Go for a walk. Go for a bike ride. Make healthy food. Make a drs. appt. Brush my teeth. Check on something important. Do a workout. Take vitamins.
If you get a “quick dopamine” urge after the meditation, it’s a sign your body needs extra meditation. 📲 So if you have an urge to doom-scroll, online shop, eat sugary things: it usually means your body is not feeling super healthy. I recommend doing an extra meditation session, double checking if you might have some nutritional deficiency, and if so, take vitamins to supplement. Often times this means you are deficient in something, vitamin D, iron, or have abnormal levels of something, like high cholesterol, etc. If your body is stressed out because something is off balance, it will be hard for it to give you urges to do things that will give you slow dopamine or other happy brain chemicals.
If you’ve been taking great care of your body, your subconscious might give you urges to do even cooler things such as teach yourself new skills, create or express yourself creatively, listen to music, 🤳or it will even suggest new solutions to old problems. This is how I know I’m taking really good care of myself. You might look up how to do things. I’ve watched YouTube tutorials on growing my own gardening, how to braid hair, how to play the piano, how to dance, how to sell things on FB Marketplace. One of the coolest things I’ve experienced is that sometimes my brain decides to look up how to do “EASY” things that I just never properly learned, like how to soft boil eggs or tricks to cooking juicy chicken.
Let yourself do whatever it is that you feel the urge to, even if just for 20 minutes! Maybe it’s journaling or working out. The more you honor your intuition and give your body what it is asking for, the more you will be able to hear it in the future.
In my next blog post, I will share what these tips might look like in practice!
Many of us have one, although yours probably isn’t dramatic overspending. It might be daily nicotine or weed vape, doomscrolling, posting on social media for validation, swiping on dating apps, overeating, overexercising, the push-pull of situation-ships.
We can get addicted to literally anything–for more reading I recommend “The Mountain is You” by Brianna Wiest. It’s a great book that might give you insight into your maladaptive coping mechanisms.
Although it sounds like my elevated prolactin was the culprit behind my overspending, there was actually something else driving it as well: The trauma of an emotionally abusive relationship. I won’t be sharing too many details to keep the privacy of all involved. But as a highly sensitive person, having someone scream at you and scare you can leave lasting trauma that your brain might end up shielding from you later on.
emotional abuse -> overactivated nervous system , stuck in fight or flight mode -> repression of trauma and addiction to daily quick dopamine hits (maladaptive coping mechanisms)
The hurtful, shaming words and intimidation of my ex boyfriend had lowered my self esteem and made me deeply question my self worth. I was stuck in permanent fight or flight mode after that experience, until I fixed my prolactin and started meditating.
And in addition to accumulating all these physical things, I was accumulating lots of credit card debt. The credit card debt became a ‘wall’ or ‘barrier’ between me and potential dating partners. It was both bad and good.
How good?
It could keep me from partners who were judgmental and shaming like my ex.
How bad?
Obvious reasons. The debt was a way for my subconscious to create space to protect me from others. I wouldn’t have to get deep and be vulnerable with people because I had created these crazy out of control problems for myself.
Why did I do this to myself? Besides the obvious, that my body was stuck in fight or flight mode and it couldn’t plan for next month or year, I still struggled at times to control self sabotaging habits. But why? I believe there’s always a reason.
Deep down, the only conclusion I could draw was that I didn’t love myself and I didn’t feel deserving of happiness deep down.
The good news is by the time I discovered that I might not love myself deep down, I’d been almost a year into my meditation practice where I realized I can re-wire my brain to learn anything and do anything, even things I thought I couldn’t do before.
Since my subconscious had been wired to feel shame and dislike myself deep down due to my life experiences and emotionally abusive partner, I had to re-wire it.
So my subconscious doesn’t think I love myself?
What if I listened to daily affirmations that say I DO love myself, I DO deserve happiness, I DON’T beat myself for making mistakes because I’m human, I DO deserve a loving partner, I AM going to be successful, I AM going to overcome my problems and I AM worthy of love?
Could it be that simple?
Yes. Daily positive affirmations ARE working for me!
These two ^ have been critical for my personal growth and I practice them after my normal meditation every day.
I’d like to add a really important key insight here when it comes to self esteem and loving yourself:
Your subconcious might be hiding your true feelings from yourself.
As a child and teen, were you allowed to express your feelings in regards to having low self worth? Or did you feel shame for how you felt, and pressure to hide how you were feeling?
This doesn’t mean that your parents did anything wrong necessarily but in some societies and cultures people are taught to push down their feelings and hide them. We repress our feelings and trauma or incidents that contributed to those feelings. We use medication to feel better, but it’s a temporary band-aid. If you never deal with the things that made you feel that way, they will resurface eventually. But I believe dealing with things in the end is the only way to heal.
It doesn’t mean you need to trauma dump to everyone but I’ve learned there’s always a reason. You’re not depressed or anxious “just because”, with no reason, “just genetics”. There’s something deeper behind it.
Furthermore, I did not remember traumatic events until I got healthier. The brain is VERY good at hiding things from ourselves that it doesn’t think we can face.
In the end, everything is connected more than we think– so now, I’m going to circle back to my cleaning insights and ADHD messy girl/boy aesthetic:
So I’m still dealing with the aftermath of crazy overspending, living in a much smaller space and figuring out how to stay clean and organized.
I’ve had quite a few sessions of very deep meditative cleaning, and from those sessions I’ve started to pull out important tricks to cleaning.
The interesting thing about these insights is that they’re not deeply ingrained habits in my brain quite yet, so when I’m stressed, sleep deprived, or hungover, I forget them.
📦 Reduce the total surface area of things to sort through
Let’s say you have five half empty boxes of things to sort through. A great trick is to dump stuff together so it becomes 3 full boxes of things. Remove the empty boxes from your visual line of sight. This helps you feel a sense of accomplishment without having to do much.
🧘🏼♀️ Use a quick 5 minute guided meditation to check in with your body & energy levels
Us ADHD’ers often overestimate how much we can take on. By doing a quick check in with your body, you can figure out what it’s needing and how much time you realistically have left.
👂👀 Give your body what it needs to maximize your cleaning session
What did you learn from the 5 minute meditation? Maybe your body wanted water, a snack, a quick walk around the block, a shower, or some of your favorite music. Sometimes I realize my body just wants me to put on an extra pair of socks to keep my feet warm!
As someone who might even have “AuDHD”, I find that when I don’t tend to my body’s needs, I cannot keep going. I’ll do a terrible job cleaning, accidentally knock things over or spill things, or even break things I care about. When my intuition doesn’t feel like my basic needs are being met, it isn’t able to cue into more advanced planning like cleaning, organizing, and so on.
🛍️ Create a box or bag of items “to make decisions about later”
When I used to do big cleaning sessions before I fixed my health issue, I would often find myself trapped in an endless limbo of not knowing where an item goes, putting it somewhere else, finding it again 20 minutes later, and rinsing and repeating ad nauseum.
Big cleaning and organizing sessions force us to make a LOT of decisions, which can be stressful and take up our energy. We can be more intentional about not overexerting our decision making muscle.
🗑️ Always have a trash bag. Sometimes our will power to throw things away is stronger than other times
If it’s a sample from Sephora, an eye mask we don’t use, a cool looking cardboard box–our mood can make a huge difference in whether we can part with it.
I’ve become able to get rid of toiletries and anything skin and health care much more easily because of recent news about many of those products having unnecessary or harmful carcinogenic or endocrine disrupting chemicals in them. Turns out even using commercial cleaning products weekly is bad for us. Makes it easier to let go.
⏳ Find the moment you need to start packing up. Put everything you’re not done with in one area, hide it if possible, under the bed, or put scarfs over itto visually hide it
I was really bad at this before, but I’ve gotten better at accepting the moment in which I need to start packing things up to end my cleaning session. I started putting my Bali sarongs to visually hide the boxes. It makes me feel more happy and relaxed when I see it.
🎽 Put aside things that you use frequently
One of my biggest, if not THE biggest issue I have, is that when I’m cleaning I often don’t distinguish between things I’ll want later that DAY, and things I’ll want next month (or maybe never).
This is honestly a really tough one to wrap my brain around because I have a strongly ingrained sense of “I might want this other thing one day”. (Even though I never do).
Try putting things that you think you’ll want to use TODAY or TOMORROW in one area. Even if they’re different things like clothes and a camera.
So my problem is when I think of the thing I want, I absolutely DESTROY my progress in a flash looking for said item.
At the end of the day, it’s really important to remember that we are not cleaning/organizing machines. It’s really important to spend time every day eating healthy, working out, connecting with others and CREATING/learning. If you overdo it on cleaning, you’ll eventually tap out and end up throwing things away that you want, breaking things you love, or creating a terrible organizing system you don’t end up following.
Those are all my tips for now, thanks for reading. I wouldn’t say I’m a neat girl YET, but making pretty good progress I’d say. In my next few posts I’m going to tackle tips for people who have ADHD or AuDHD, and tools you can use to soothe your body and become a fully functioning person.
Now, through my life I’ve gone through periods where I managed to be more neat and tidy. In college my room was pretty neat and organized. My 20s, all over the place, 30s, ups and downs, at times my apartment would be really neat but the kitchen a mess because I really struggled with dishes prior to my ADHD diagnosis.
My messiness surged due to several factors: one being a response to several traumatic events (losing a parent, emotionally abusive relationship, end of career), and the other due to overspending coinciding with the elevated levels of prolactin.
Here’s my theory of what was happening in my brain when I began overspending (which led to having many items and then not being able to organize them):
When your brain is stuck in “fight or flight mode” as mine was, I was living with chronically elevated levels of cortisol.
I was *addicted* to daily “lil” treats: buying Starbucks every day, getting super heavy DoorDash meals multiple times a week, and buying a lot of things, mostly clothes from Shein.
What do these things have in common?
They were providing very quick “hits” of dopamine to my brain.
In fact, I would order the same meal from certain restaurants up to 5x a week. FOR YEARS! The same! It was giving me a quick boost of dopamine that was addictive.
I would mostly buy many SMALL, cheap things that couldn’t be returned. That is because that was more exciting, even though it meant that these items essentially lost all value as soon as I purchased them.
These purchases focused on rewarding the “today/tomorrow/next week me”, NEVER the next month’s me. My brain didn’t feel safe enough to make decisions that would reward me months or years down the line.
It was a dopamine addiction – the act of buying and looking forward to the item was most important. Actually owning the items was way less important, and often a burden.
Now, you might be wondering, what is prolactin?
Prolactin is a hormone produced by the pituitary region of the brain. Our prolactin should only be greater than a certain threshold (25) in women who are breastfeeding. I definitely was not.
This is VERY interesting because I made some STRANGE purchases that to me are indicative of “nesting”: community based in a strange way
Many things to give as gifts for friends, family members and acquaintances
Four cartons of “boxed water” after I read about people dying at a music festival I went to in part due to not having water
Materials to create gift bags for birthday parties, baby showers, bachelorettes, etc.
Weird AF, but it makes sense in the context of my elevated prolactin levels.
The traumatic events I endured put a lot of stress on my brain because they were situations in which I felt deeply out of control.
Losing a parent: The grief and trauma of unexpectedly losing a parent creates the very real possibility that we could all die today: tomorrow isn’t promised. So it makes sense that my subconscious was prioritizing feeling good today/tomorrow with quick dopamine hits.
Escaping from an emotionally abusive relationship: Subconsciously my spending ramped up dramatically when I was attempting to decouple from an emotionally abusive relationship. I let the things build up in my apartment so that it was really messy and I had an excuse that I had to go over there and clean it. When my ex came over, he didn’t like being there because it was so messy. So all of the stuff and messiness helped me get more space away from him to figure out how to end the relationship.
Absolute inability to find a new job and forced to change careers: After a decade working in my field, the job landscape dramatically changed. I applied to hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. I had deeply feared being unemployed again and had almost landed a new job immediately following my last layoff, but failed. I had SIXTY interviews with no job offers. My choices were to compromise my beliefs and lie/ overlook morally reprehensible activity to land a new job, or leave HR forever. I chose to leave HR. Statistically you’d think I’d have at least one job offer, but I believe that this was because the universe had a plan for me that didn’t involve HR anymore.
On the last point, it can be very stressful to have built your entire career and feel completely out of control and have your entire livelihood be under the whim of someone else choosing you for a job, or not. I feared losing my apartment, which I did. I feared losing everything, which I did.
Everything that I feared came true and ironically, the maladaptive coping mechanisms I used to soothe myself contributed to that demise.
Nevertheless, it taught me the most valuable lesson of all, which I’d already witnessed with my parents’ unfortunate business dealings.
TheSunk Cost Fallacy:
A phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it’s better to change course.
We double down on poor decisions, particularly financially, even when it’s logically better to abandon ship.
But at the end of the day, if I had just had one sh*tty job offer for another HR Generalist role, my life might not have changed at all. Not getting any job offers was a blessing in disguise.
Therefore, I finally accepted that spending any more time trying to get an HR job was an absolute waste of time and energy. I stopped applying and interviewing and decided to explore new careers. I was done with HR, and my old my life for that matter, including my apartment.
When I finally left my apartment, I had a LOT of stuff. Much of it unopened crap from Shein and Amazon.
Side note– as soon as I took medication to reduce my prolactin levels, I started daily meditation and began to overcome my overspending urges. It took only three doses or so before I completely stopped the crazy Shein purchases.
Unfortunately when I packed everything up into the storage unit, the really important things I owned, laptops with computer games of childhood memories, passport, priceless nostalgic mementos, were totally mixed in with the crap I bought and I was on a time crunch to get out of my apartment as soon as possible, so I stuffed it all in a storage unit that became an expensive and exhaustive Achilles’ heel for the next 9 months.
Even though I began to overcome the excessive spending habits largely helped by making my brain healthy, I still had deeply ingrained habits built up over a lifetime of giving into ‘quick dopamine hits’. It would take time and consistent effort to heal my brain and to rewire my neural pathways for more healthy, slow dopamine habits.
In the Part 3, I’ll share the insights I’ve learned to both overcome maladaptive coping mechanisms and messiness. ❤️
This post is dedicated to anyone whose ever been described as “messy.” Although I will speak more about this, if you’re more the “OCD” type, this post might not entirely resonate with you, and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that you might not relate to some of this, or maybe you have a friend, sister, girlfriend, brother, uncle, mom, dad or cousin who might relate to this in some way. This post can help you to understand them better.
Ever since I was little, my parents described me as “messy”. I had a LOT of books. A LOT of toys.
I would often embark on hugely aggressive “room reorganizations” where I would take everything I had out, reorganize it in some very complicated way, and then lose steam about 3/4 of the way through. So sometimes it would end up looking messier than it did when I started!!
As ridiculous as this might sound, it took 36 years, many diagnoses and treatments for me to really figure out why I had so much trouble with this.
ADHD. Autism or ‘the spectrum’. cPTSD. Social anxiety. Depression.
Probably all of them, and all related, but what it really comes down to is dysfunction in my prefrontal cortex.
How did I finally started to make sense of my outwardly chaotic world / tendency to be “messy”?
1. Getting a late diagnosis for ADHD and taking regular medication for that helped me to “see the forest for the trees“. 🌲
Simply put, prior to taking medication, I would be so overwhelmed by my messy space that I wouldn’t be able to know even how to start. Once I started taking medication for my ADHD, it increases my dopamine and gives me the ability to push through and finish projects (one of my very biggest issues).
But ADHD medication wasn’t the full story. The next huge insight came for me after I discovered & corrected an imbalance I had in my brain called a prolactinoma (story for another day).
To make a long story very short, it was the beginnings of a non-cancerous brain tumor, and once I started taking medication to shrink those cells, I quickly felt healthier, began supplementing my low Vitamin D, and picked up a daily (guided) meditation practice.
2. Correcting my abnormally high prolactin and low vitamin D immediately made me feel healthier and led to my consistent meditation practice, which then led to Meditate To Clean
Meditate to Clean is a running title of the book I am working on.
Now, it’s NOT what you think.
After awhile of listening to guided meditations, I started to let myself keep my eyes open. And while I was actively practicing the art of detaching from thoughts, I would feel urges to move my arms and legs.
So I went with it.
What happened?
My hands would reach out and fold anything in its immediate vicinity. (This is BEFORE taking my ADHD medication). They would clean, sweep, tidy.
My legs would walk me to the kitchen and my arms would start washing my dishes in the sink.
Now, I never CONSCIOUSLY decided, I am going to let myself clean when I meditate. I purposefully cleared my mind of all conscious thought.
But I realized that while I had tons of trouble trying to FORCE myself to clean, likely an ADHD symptom, purely by listening to these soothing guided meditations (with music, mantras, nature sounds), I was de-activating my sympathetic nervous system which I was primarily operating in, that was stuck in “freeze” mode. I was allowing my parasympathetic nervous system to take over.
Furthermore, I realized that
My subconscious mind was listening carefully to these guided meditations – the mantras of “focus on what you CAN control, not what you can’t. And it was guiding me, showing me that I can control my space, my own personal universe. I can make it neat and tidy, and that helps prove to myself that I AM in charge of my life.
As someone with ADHD, I hate being told what to do, even by myself! So the best way to get myself clean is not by forcing myself. It is by reconnecting with myself, by using meditation to stimulate my vagus nerve and move from fight or flight to rest & digest mode.
Even though Meditate To Clean has been incredibly helpful, I still have to pick up tools and insights from my meditative cleaning sessions in order to rewrite my neural pathways, since it will take some time for organizing & cleaning habits to become deeply ingrained within me. But before I mention those, I want to touch on another deeply important insight that came to me as part of this process.
3. Generational poverty plays an important role in our reluctance to let go of items. *
For people who grew up very poor or out in the country, away from others, and perhaps with a distrust of others or who had been ostracized from their community–they will naturally have a stronger inclination to hold onto items, fearing it might be hard to come by the items again and they could need them.
Let’s say both your parents grew up extremely poor, but they managed to make good money. It takes a very long time, possibly even decades or more, for people’s subconscious brain to feel secure that they will always have money. Perhaps they overspend because they fear that they might lose their job or because they’re not used to having money. Having possessions might feel safer to them because if they needed to, they could sell these items if they ran out of money.
Even though studies show we get stressed out by seeing clutter, seeing items could be a way of safety for them, helping them visually see that they have a “safety net” of sorts.
If you ever look on Tik Tok and see some of the “rich girl aesthetic” apartments in the city, they are almost always a very “minimalist” look. This is what many people aspire to– a home and life where we are so secure with our financial position that we don’t need to see or hold onto a myriad of things for a rainy day.
* Therefore, I began to put less pressure on myself to keep de-purging because I realized that my subconscious is not quite ready to let go of my items until I have built more of a financial nest egg. It sees these items as my “net worth”. Once I build up more savings, I have a gut instinct that my subconscious will feel ready to let go of more things.
In my next post, I’ll share about the role of trauma plays in this and the three biggest tools I’ve learned to improve my messy tendencies.
rebootmindandbody.com 