Time Blindness and Finding Your Anchor Points

Do you ever feel like time is slipping through your fingers? In this quick episode, you’ll learn how to use simple "anchor points" to help your ADHD brain feel the flow of time, without strict schedules or rigid routines. 

Jess shares practical tools for navigating time blindness and encourages you to create just one grounding moment today. It’s not about doing more - it’s about noticing the moments that matter.

Transcript

0:01

hey. Welcome to Quick wins for ADHD Moms. I'm Jess, a mom with ADHD kids and working on figuring out my own ADHD as well. I'm so glad you're here. Today's quick win use anchor points to feel the flow of time. We're gonna be talking about time blindness a little bit later in the episode, but right now. A quick win Use anchor points to feel the flow of time. So this is all about helping your ADHD brain feel the passage of time without the strict schedules or color coded calendars, although color coded calendars do sound like a lot of fun. But okay, let's stay focused. So here's your win. Create one anchor point today, just one. Okay, so what is an anchor point? it's just a simple, repeatable moment that helps you feel grounded in your day, so a couple examples would be maybe pouring your coffee into the same mug every day and letting that be your morning signal, your morning routine. Maybe it's lighting a candle during dinner every evening, even if it's just leftovers. Maybe it's playing the same song every morning when you start your workday, creating a mental switch to focus mode. Tiny, meaningful markers or anchors. That tell you, Hey, this moment matters. It's not about doing more. It's about noticing the flow of your life one anchor point at a time. So I mentioned time blindness before, but let's revisit that. What is time blindness and why do these anchor points even matter? Does this really work? Because if you have ADHD, time can feel really slippery. It's called time blindness. And it's one of those things that can make you feel like, or maybe you are always late or always forgetting something. Always living in this weird now or not now space. If something isn't happening right now, it might as well be happening. Never. And if something is happening right now, it takes over everything. Whether that means you're in the middle of a creative project, maybe a kid is melting down or you're folding one sock and somehow end up cleaning out the whole closet. We don't feel time passing in a linear, reliable way, and that is called time Blindness and anchor points are just a really easy way to help your brain feel time again, they give you little touch points. Not to control time, but to just kinda slow down and notice it. So how does time blindness affect your daily life? Time. Blindness shows up when you underestimate how long things are going to take. It's just gonna take five minutes, right? And it ends up being 25 minutes. Or you're late, even though you set three different reminders, or maybe you feel rushed all the time, even on days when there's technically nothing. Urgent time blindness can also help you not be able to picture the future clearly, like everything's kind of foggy unless there's a crisis that puts everything into clarity and is pushing you. Or maybe you forget how long ago something happened. Wait, wasn't that last week? No, no. That was two months ago. So this time blindness, it's not laziness or poor planning, it's just how our brains are processing time in a really fragmented, non-linear way and time blindness isn't just logistical, it's really emotional. When we are constantly feeling behind or late or like we're bad at time, it can chip away at our self-esteem. And being a mom, you suddenly feel like you're grieving how fast your kids are growing, while also yelling at them to hurry up and brush their teeth. We already deal with mom guilt, and then we add forgetting appointments and the shame for always being rushed and frustration when we just can't seem to fix anything. But here's what I want you to know. You are not broken. Your brain's not broken, you're not lazy. Your brain just needs maybe a different approach to time, creating those anchor points throughout your day, your week, maybe your year, can help you feel more grounded in the flow of time. And making these anchor points aren't supposed to make you turn into this rigid routine kind of person. Because let's face it, we do not like rigid routines. But at the same time, we need some kind of structure And these anchor points just need to be really flexible. It gives our brain something to hook onto, like finding kind of a rhythm and the chaos but it's not rigid. And then over time these flexible anchor points build a sense of continuity. They help you say, oh yes, time is passing by and I am living it. So talking about time blindness, there's ways that you can work with your brain instead of against it. So here's a few tools that might be able to help you. Visual timers, ones that show the passage of time with the color or movement. So Amazon has a bunch of these and my 18-year-old daughter loves it. in fact, she never knew how long it actually took her to put her clothes away until she put the timer on and realized instead of two minutes to put her clothes away, it took like 30 minutes because of all the distractions. But she It's also good to have reminders with labels. So not just set an alarm at three o'clock because that alarm's gonna go off at three o'clock, and you're gonna say, what the heck did I set that timer for? So be really specific. You know, set a timer for putting laundry in the dryer, or leave now to pick up the kids. I've set timers that say, okay, leave in five minutes. That doesn't help because I forget, oh yeah, I was supposed to leave in five minutes, 10 minutes ago. Another thing you can do to help fight time blindness is being able to externalize time. So having your calendars on the wall, or sticky notes, or having a visual planner, you know, we've talked about this before. Get it out of your brain and onto the piece of paper. Don't try to keep it all in your head. Transitional cues like music or scents like lighting a candle that has a certain scent or even changing the mood lighting in the room Can tell your brain it's time to make a shift. You could also do time blocking with a lot of padding. So like instead of scheduling something back to back, build in a lot of white space in your day. In fact, put that in your calendar. Just put a block of time that has nothing to remind yourself that the project you have probably is gonna take five times as long as you think, but when you build in white space around it. It helps you kind of pad that time, blocking time in your calendar. You're doing better than you think. Listen, we live in a world that prizes precision and productivity, but our brains are a little different. They operate with creativity and intensity. And you just don't feel time, you experience it. So give yourself permission to create a life that actually works for you. Use anchor points, play with some of these time blindness tools and be kind when things fall through the cracks, because we all know they do. And remember, you are not the only one on this journey. There's a lot of us with this. Same kind of brain and same home situations too. So we're just here to encourage each other and keep moving forward. So thanks for spending just a little time with me today. If this episode resonated, I'd love if you could share it with a fellow, ADHD mom, who really needs to hear it. Let's help others find these gentle little reminders too. And hey, maybe today your anchor point is just you pressed play. You listened to the episode, you showed up, and that's enough. All right, go out. Have a wonderful day. Find your anchor points. I'll see you next time. I.