Have you ever noticed that leaving the house can feel like an oddly enormous task?
Not going somewhere complicated or packing for a trip,
Just leaving.
You know you need to go,
You may even want to go,
But somehow there are 12 little things standing between you and the front door.
And your brain seems to experience every single one of them.
There's actually a reason for that.
What we casually call leaving the house isn't one task from your brain's perspective.
It's a whole chain of cognitive processes that happen together.
Your brain has to remember where you're going and what you need to be there.
It has to estimate how long getting ready will take.
It has to stop whatever you're currently doing and shift to this completely different task.
Then there's the mental checklist.
Do I have my phone,
My keys,
My wallet,
My water,
My kids?
Do I need a jacket?
Did I feed the dog?
Where did I put my sunglasses?
And while you're doing all of that,
Your brain is also sequencing the steps in the right order and trying to keep the original goal,
Actually leaving,
Active in working memory.
That's a lot of executive functioning.
One piece of this is something called working memory.
Working memory is basically your brain's temporary workspace.
It helps you hold information in your mind long enough to do something with it.
So while you're putting on your shoes,
You may also be trying to hold on to,
I still need my keys.
I need to bring that thing for work.
And I need to leave in six minutes.
For some people,
Especially those of us with ADHD or other executive functioning differences,
That information doesn't reliably stay in the foreground.
It can get bumped out by whatever is happening right now.
Which is how you can walk back into the bedroom to grab your jacket,
Notice the laundry basket,
Pick up a shirt,
Remember something else you need to do,
And suddenly you're standing there thinking,
Wait.
Why did I come in here?
There's another piece too.
Task switching.
Before leaving,
You're usually already doing something.
You're working,
Scrolling,
Cleaning,
Watching something.
Answering an email,
Your brain has built a mental task set around whatever you're currently doing.
It has activated the information and attention needed for that activity.
Leaving means that your brain has to disengage from that task and load an entirely new set of information.
And switching has a cognitive cause.
For some brains,
That transition is relatively automatic.
For others,
Especially neurodivergent brains,
The transition itself can feel surprisingly effortful.
And sometimes there's a sensory component as well.
Leaving home means moving from a relatively predictable environment into one with a lot more uncertainty.
Different sounds,
Different temperatures,
Traffic,
People,
Bright lights,
Conversation,
Decisions.
Your brain may be doing a little bit of forecasting before you even walk out of the door.
So,
If leaving feels weirdly hard sometimes,
It doesn't mean that you're lazy,
Unmotivated,
Or just bad at adulting.
Your brain may simply be calculating a much larger task than the words leave the house might suggest.
And understanding that changes what might actually help.
Instead of telling yourself,
Come on,
Just go.
Try reducing the number of things your brain has to hold internally.
Here's one experiment.
Create a leaving spot,
One place near the door where you have the things that you regularly need.
Your keys,
Your wallet,
Your bag,
Sunglasses,
Whatever tends to send you searching through the house at the last minute.
The goal isn't perfect organization.
It's to move some of the work out of your working memory and into your environment.
Because sometimes the most helpful question isn't.
How do I make myself try harder?
It's how can I make this task require less from my brain power?
And that's a question that we're going to keep coming back to in this series.
Because a lot of the things that feel weirdly hard make much more sense once we understand what our brain is actually being asked to do.
In our house,
We have two spots for this.
We have a shoe tree or a hall tree in the hallway where we put our shoes on,
And that's where my purse is kept.
We also have a spot right by our door where all of our keys are kept,
Sunglasses,
And any kind of last minute things that we typically need to grab.
So that makes for us just leaving a little bit easier.
I'd love to hear what you implemented in your house that makes getting out the door that much easier for you in the comments.
Take care and thank you so much for joining me in this video today.
