Mud, Hopscotch, and Micro Practices: Reclaiming Joy with ADHD

When did you last do something just for the fun of it, no purpose, no productivity, no plan?

On this episode of Organizing an ADHD Brain, ADHD coach Megs explores what it really means to give yourself permission to play and why your ADHD brain might need it more than you think. Whether you're looking for ADHD coaching, a supportive ADHD community, or practical ways to get organized, this episode meets you where you are.

By the end, you'll have a new way to think about joy, mess, and micro practices that interrupt the go-go-go mindset and bring you back to the present.

Megs opens with her daughter's observation that adults forget how to play and takes it seriously. Turning 40, watching her girls gleefully stomp through mud, and eventually joining them despite every instinct to stay clean became a turning point. From there she shares a series of playful experiments: ice skating, rollerblading, hopscotch on the school walk, a spontaneous lunch invitation, and using Command strips to try out home decor without the pressure of getting it perfect.

She connects rigid internal rules, shaped by church culture, parenting pressures, and strict routines, to a deeper fear of making mistakes, and explores how treating life and work more like play helped her run a summer-planning event smoothly despite tech mishaps, stay present with her family, and slowly retrain her body to pause instead of push.

The good news? Play doesn't have to be big or planned. It just has to be real and this episode gives you plenty of small places to start.

Megs has been part of the Mindful as a Mother community and wanted to share something she thinks is worth knowing about. If you're a mom of a neurodivergent kid, their small group might be exactly what you've been looking for, a 4-week space led by neurodivergent child counselors who live this stuff too. Real talk about regulation, RSD, meltdowns, and burnout, in a small group where you can finally stop masking and get into what actually works.

Learn more here: https://stan.store/Mindfulasamother/p/you-can-sit-with-us-

Also check out the Mindful as a Mother podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindful-as-a-mother/id1546749518

This episode is for anyone with ADHD who has been running on empty and is ready to remember what it feels like to just play.

2:54 — Turning 40 and the Mud Lesson 

5:45 — Micro Practices and Shifting the Go-Go-Go Mindset 

7:24 — Family Skating and Making Play Happen 

8:43 — Messy Social Play and the Lunch Invitation 

11:12 — Rigid Rules, Church Culture, and Bedtime Battles 

13:59 — Hopscotch on the School Walk 

15:51 — Why Play Is Really Practice 

18:03 — Home Decor Experiments Without Perfectionism 

19:50 — Making Faster Decisions by Lowering the Stakes 

21:16 — Running a Planning Event Like It's Play 

24:45 — Interrupting the Go-Go-Go in Real Time 

Would you like to learn more about hiring Megs as your ADHD coach? Start here> The Perfect Place to Start

The Community is OPEN! Join right here: Organizing an ADHD Brain

You can also learn more about the community HERE> OrganizinganADHDBrain.com

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants 0:00

What does it mean to have permission to play? When you, like, ask your parents to Play? Or like ask them if you can play with them. If you ask your parents if they can play with you. should parents play more? Yeah, they should do less work. Less work. And more play? More play. They should take a break from work. What do you think it means for adults to have permission to play? It means they have permission to do, like, their own things, do what they want. Oh. Do you think adults get to do what they want? Like, yeah, but also not, 'cause they don't get to do it all the time 'cause they still have a lot work to do. I see. What do you wanna do more of together? like Frisbee or like getting ice cream or playing at the park together, like, I like teaching you how to do cartwheels. Oh, yeah, I have been trying cartwheels, huh? Yeah. How, how am I doing? Good. Yeah. what would you like to teach adults about playing? Eh, nothing really, 'cause I-- They, they've been playing as kids, so I don't think they need anything to learn. Hmm. Do you think some of them maybe have forgot? Yeah. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Megs, and I am your host. If you're new here, I'm an ADHD coach and professional organizer, and I talk about not only organizing your life, but organizing your brain. And really what it looks like when ADHD is showing up in my life. I talk a lot about the work that I am doing, and then the work that I do with my clients as well. But today I want to talk about permission to play. And I had my daughter share a little bit because I realized there's a lot about play that I don't necessarily know anymore. Stick with me. If you're against playing, I bet you will still walk away with something, because what inspired me to do this is that I have not given myself permission to play in a very long time. I would say this episode is really inspired by me turning 40 on June 1st, because that is the reality of my life. I am now in my 40s, which I don't know that I ever thought that I would be here, and here I am. And yet, I bet a lot of you could relate to me with so many milestones that we hit in our life. On the last day that I was 39, I was looking at my girls, and I was so proud because they had discovered mud. these girls found a big pile of dirt that some sort of mole had dug up,

Turning 40 and the Mud Lesson

Audio Only - All Participants 2:54

and they mixed it with water, and they proceeded to play with mud all day. Like, I mean, they would play with mud, they'd come inside, they'd rinse off, and then they'd go back outside and play with mud again. There was mud on their face. There was mud on their legs. It was hilarious. In fact, I've come to measure how good I am of a mother by the amount of dirt my kids now have on them, and that is a level of pride I never thought that I would have, because for so long, I felt like I needed to prevent messes from happening, and now I'm so proud of that. But 39, right? I'm sitting there in my chair watching them play mud. I'm sitting outside, enjoying the peace And I look at Cora and I say, "Cora, why do you think adults don't play with mud?" And she goes, "Well, it's probably because it's really hard for them to get this low to the ground." I was like, "That's so rude," and also kind of true." So of course, I went and got on the ground and played in some mud with them. I would say the reason why I avoid it is because why would I wanna get dirty? I don't wanna get dirt all over my hands. I just wanna stay clean. And yet, when I got dirty, it was fine, and I realized I could just wash my hands after. That was fine. And then, of course, Adam brought me my chair over because it was not comfortable to sit on a stone floor playing in mud. But I continued to play in mud sitting on my chair. But I've been giving myself more permission to play lately, and it's been really freeing, freeing in ways that I never really thought were possible. So I just wanna riff with you here. I wanna share with you some of the examples of how I've been playing just to inspire you, give you some food for thought so that you can find some ways to play in your own life. I think it's important, and I also think it's uncomfortable sometimes. And part of that discomfort is it's so hard to break away from this go, go, go all the time that we don't know how to This all stemmed from thinking about micro practices. I've been talking about that since the beginning of the year. But really just kind of incorporating little things into my life here and there that aren't stopping my life, or I have to think of this whole big, huge thing I need to overhaul before I make a change. Kind of like a new workout routine. What I've been doing is when I notice something that I want to change, sometimes it goes immediately to shame or regret or things like that, and then I'm like, "Wait, what's one thing in this moment that I could do right now?" Because the truth is, is I can't go back in time, and then I don't have

Micro Practices and Shifting the Go-Go-Go Mindset

Audio Only - All Participants 5:45

tomorrow, and I don't actually want to stop and create this new workout regimen. So if I am looking in the mirror and I see something I don't necessarily like, I do an exercise right then and there. If I see that my butt needs a little lift, well, I'm not getting a butt lift tomorrow, and I'm also not gonna go to the gym for two hours, which would not actually give me the butt lift that I'm looking for, although it might feel really nice to be sore for a couple days after that. But I drop and I do 10 to 15 whatevers to make it feel like I've worked out my butt. That feels pretty good, and it's kinda nice to play around with that, right? I know I'm not making a huge difference, but if that's something I'm worried about every day, then I'm doing squats every day. I'm doing some butt lifts every day on my own account. I don't know. That feels kinda good. So playing around with that has been really interesting Last winter, we started ice skating, and at first I felt a little weird about spending the money, and then I was like, you know what? If this is fun and this brings us together, then let's do it. And because I decided to go all in as a family, I made more plans to make sure that we found free ice skating rinks or paid ice skating rinks, just things that we could do together. And even when I went out and didn't feel very comfortable, like I was gonna fall or like I didn't know how to stop, which is also still sometimes the case, I remind myself that the more I get out there and the more that I practice, the more I'll actually feel more confident getting out

Family Skating and Making Play Happen

Audio Only - All Participants 7:24

there and doing it more, and really enjoying it as I continue to practice. So that's been interesting, which is even more fun now because we decided to get rollerblades. Now, pause for just a second. This episode is not to inspire you to buy all of these things. You don't need to go out and do all of these things. If you are in your decluttering journey, go and find something you already have and play with it. Play. That is the idea behind this, not to go out and buy all these things. We just happened to have gotten rid of all of our stuff last year, and so it made sense to buy some toys so that we could have them here. Go and play. Play, play, play Another way I played recently was I've always been so nervous about doing it the wrong way, like saying the wrong thing. But someone said recently, and I think it's been going around social media, that human interactions are supposed to be messy. And I was like, "Oh yeah, they don't really know what they're doing either, do they?" And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, we all don't know what we're doing, and so of course we need to show up and try and practice and do the damn best we can until we can do better." Whether you're socially awkward or not, you're allowed to show up and just be weird

Messy Social Play and the Lunch Invitation

Audio Only - All Participants 8:43

until you're not, or until you are continuously, and that is acceptable too. I say this because I was able to recently find some local history that involved my grandfather, and I wanted to get it into the hands of some people who could benefit from it. And during that process over the winter, I was invited with my husband to go to, lunch locally. And it was just, you know, in passing, "We'd love to take you to lunch in the spring," blah, blah, blah. And I remembered that, and I thought, "You know what? I'm going to reach back out." And at first, I was like, "What do I say? Take me to lunch now?" No. That feels weird, right? So don't say that. But I did and we went and had lunch, and it was such a great conversation and just really nice to meet new people and to try something new and to be able to share stories and hear their stories and ask questions. It was really quite neat. It also reminded me of how, conversation is so important. My husband and I, on the way there, we were talking about conversations, and I said, "It's so important for us to answer the questions, but then to ask those questions back," because it, it's so fun to share, but it's also really good practice to listen and to hear other people share, because people love to tell you their stories. I love to tell my stories, and then I also want to reciprocate and truly hear those stories too, and that's how you get to know people. So we were talking about practicing remembering, showing up, and if someone asks you the question, finding a way to ask that question back, or genuinely get curious about what's going on in their life. And I actually came up with some questions before we even went, and what's the harm in that? It allows for the conversation to flow. That was really fun. The thing is with the permission to play is I've had these rules that I've grown up with my whole life. I grew up in the Catholic Church, and then I also went to an evangelical church when I was in high school and beyond. And when I was old enough, I, I realized that was not the place for me. The rules didn't feel right to me, but as I continued to live my life, I continued to live by my own rules in life, which were actually much more rigid than I would have liked to have had. A good example of this, is when I would put my kids to

Rigid Rules, Church Culture, and Bedtime Battles

Audio Only - All Participants 11:12

bed at eight o'clock. If they weren't in bed and sleeping by 8:15, my whole body would start to get really uncomfortable, as if they were stealing this time away from me, this precious time that I had dedicated to myself. And now every minute that they're awake, which was a lot of minutes that they stayed awake, they were taking away this time that I could finally disconnect from the craziness that is my world. It wasn't until I was listening to Mindful as a Mother, which is a really amazing podcast for those of you who are raising neurodivergent kids. In fact, they have a small group starting, I think, on June 18th or something soon. It is a fabulous course on understanding your own reactions to kids, I am in their membership, and I love it so much. Whenever I have a question, they always provide just this incredible insight into what might be happening and some creative solutions on how to proceed. Nothing crazy, nothing elaborate. It is literally things that I can incorporate into my life. I didn't even mean to plug them, but I love them so much, and I will plug them every day for the rest of my life regardless. I was listening to them, and they were reading from the book, Low Demand Parenting. I haven't read the book, but what spoke to me was just this idea of why do we hold onto that time so much? And what if we just dropped some of those demands? What if you just allowed it to be the fact that bedtime might go a little bit longer sometimes, and sometimes that might work out really well? What if you found some comfort in that? If you took a deep breath and you were just like, Actually, it's okay that they're not asleep yet, and I can work with this." I don't know. It was kind of interesting. But there's a lot of other rules, right? Like, I can't play with mud. I'm an adult. I don't play on swing sets. I'm an adult. I don't do hopscotch. I'm an adult. Which brings me to my next play thing, is that the girls-- We now live so close to school that we can walk to school every day, which is such an adventure and really neat for me 'cause I'm getting out walking more, and I love that. There's two painted on hopscotch boards, play things. What do we call them? Hopscotch squares? Outside the school. And the first time I saw them, my knees had actually been hurting, and so I was nervous to try it, and I'm like: What is this life? And I was like: Oh, I need to fix my knees before I play hopscotch. And then I was like: Oh, my gosh. It's two

Hopscotch on the School Walk

Audio Only - All Participants 13:59

hopscotches in a row. How could that hurt them? If anything, it would help them, right? And so I did it, and my knees kinda hurt afterwards, and then I moved on my merry little way. And then the next time I went by, I was like: Okay, I'm gonna do it again. And I did it, and I was like: Ugh, so why is jumping so hard? And then I continued to go on my way again, and now every time I go by, I hopscotch. And it's pretty funny when I do it when school is still in session because it's right next to the kindergarten room, so they can see me quite clearly when I'm hopscotching next to the windows. And the kindergarten teacher will yell out the window and cheer me on, which is pretty amazing. But I gave myself permission to play because it's this thing where if we don't start, we're never gonna get better. And if we have a plan, even having a plan doesn't actually allow us to get better sometimes. It's simply doing the action and taking the action that allows us to move forward. And I can now hopscotch a little bit easier, which is kinda neat. You know, one thing about the rules is I used to have this idea, this ingrained belief that if I wasn't good at something right away, then I just wasn't good at it. It hit me the other day as I was watching my daughter ride her bike, and she's been practicing using no hands. And I just thought that people were naturally good at it. as a kid, I simply thought because I couldn't do it on my first, second, or third try that I just wasn't good at it. And we didn't talk a lot about these things, so I just moved on my merry way and didn't

Why Play Is Really Practice

Audio Only - All Participants 15:51

think much more about it. I just accepted that I wouldn't be someone who would ride without any hands. And then I was watching my daughter do it, and every time she gets better and better and better. And it's fascinating to watch. She's also constantly doing cartwheels. Actually, both of them are constantly doing cartwheels and handstands. Uh, I mean, the amount of handstands they will do in a row just to get it right is fascinating. I mean, there's no prompting whatsoever by me. They're just playing, The reason why I'm giving you more permission to play is because as I notice in my own life and in my clients' life, when we give ourselves permission to play, it's almost like we give ourselves permission to make a mistake, that we're actually allowed to just show up and p- we're just playing. We're just playing. This isn't anything serious. And isn't that what life is all about? To play, to show up, to make a difference, to do something good in this world that makes you feel good? But we're holding ourselves back because we don't give ourselves permission to make mistakes. And you know, I will say for the longest time in the business, I was thinking like, "I'm not actually afraid of that. I'm just... I have so many things going on." Yes, I still do constantly. And there was this genuine fear that I was afraid of messing up, and I still have that to a degree. But I now know how to address this a little bit more. So as we're putting together our house, I am giving myself permission to play a little bit more. And when I hesitate, I, I'm like, "Why? Why am I hesitating? What could go wrong here?" Right? And, and who cares what could go wrong? What if I just did it and saw how it looked? Because at this point, I don't need to be a designer. I don't need to take a picture for Instagram. I can just give myself permission to be. When we first got here, I took some of the pictures that we had, and I got them all in one space. Hmm, they all needed to just be anything that's decor r- related, I got in one space.

Home Decor Experiments Without Perfectionism

Audio Only - All Participants 18:03

And then one day, I was like, "You know, I'm just gonna put them up around the house where I think they could look fine." And I started to do that, and then I, they, they sat on the floor for a little bit. And then one by one, I started to get these things up on the wall. The first two pictures I got up on the wall are pictures you've likely seen in the background sometimes in my podcasts, if you do happen to watch on YouTube when I do post videos. And I wanted to find the perfect spot, and I felt like I needed to go around the house and, like, literally look at every single spot before I settled. And then I found one spot, and I was like, "Oh, I could use Command strips." Yep, those damn Command strips. And I could just get them up on the wall and see what they look like, and then if I don't like it, they're Command strips, so I could just take them right back off. So I put them up, and they look awesome, and they're staying there, and that's really cool. So I had permission to play with these pictures, and now they're off the floor, they're on the wall, and they look really good. And I really enjoy them when I walk by them. So that was really, really cool So then I started to play around with it, with decisions I make in life. You ever had a decision you had to make, and then it takes you 80 million years to make the decision? I wanna buy new shorts, but like how do I find the perfect shorts? And what if I have a big belly or what if my butt doesn't look good? And then we have to research with AI, and then we've gotta find the right place, and then it's gotta be ethically sourced and all of these things. Okay. All of these things are important. And then what if you just made a decision? Last night, I was so exhausted, but I have needed a new bra forever. This has been the bane of my existence for a very long time. I have not

Making Faster Decisions by Lowering the Stakes

Audio Only - All Participants 19:50

enjoyed getting dressed lately because of my stupid bra. Anyway, I bought a bra so fast last night because one person on Threads recommended this site, and so I took their word for it. I found a bra that looked kinda nice. I was like, "This is the one." I put it in the size and I ordered it. I don't think I've ever bought a bra so fast before, but I was like, you know what? I'm allowed to return it. that was really helpful. So I've been doing that just a little bit more here and there, allowing it to just be natural to be able to go and get the things that we need to get without it being so much of a decision. And in the event that we don't like what we buy, then we return it, and that's okay too I recently had an event a couple weekends ago called Plan Your Summer Before It Plans You. It was so fun, and I was really nervous about putting this out there, but I have so many, like, just delicious things I wanna show you how to do. But the idea of doing the tech and stuff behind it gets really overwhelming to me. So that's where I've started to practice not being really great at it, and it's okay to not be really great at it. In fact, the coupon code didn't work initially. I put the wrong link in there initially,

Running a Planning Event Like It's Play

Audio Only - All Participants 21:16

and then I had named it the wrong thing I was so embarrassed, and then I was like, "Oh, I'm just playing. Just playing." I'm playing so that I can get out all the kinks. I'm playing around so that I can see if this is fun or not. And in the end, I sent a couple m- emails. No AI, I just wrote them from the bottom of my heart on why I like to plan out my summers. And not in a rigid, like, must do this every day kind of way, but more in a, "Hey, what's the overall vibe for the summer, and how do I incorporate some of the things that I actually wanna do into my days, including resting, including understanding that I might need a day off before and after I come home from vacation?" Things like that, and bake them in. And then how do we let our lives ebb and flow around it? Because nothing's gonna happen like we plan it. But if we have a plan, we're more likely to do the things that we set out to do. It's just about understanding how to work with it. It's gonna be a good summer, and I'm super excited about it. It was myself and a few other women who came and we played, and one woman said she couldn't believe how much control she had over her life. She was like, "Wow, this is kind of impressive how much I could actually do to get ahead." And another woman said that she couldn't believe that she was actually able to, you know, put something on the calendar and then change it. It felt like she needed to make the decision, and it had to be, like, this rigid, final decision before it ever went anywhere. And then another woman said that she just couldn't believe how, fun it was to be able to understand, how she could play around with her calendar and let it work for her. So I'm so glad that I played around, because by doing that, by, by playing around with being messy in this messy middle of trying something new in this business, I was able to influence people having a summer where they get to do what they wanna do. Think date nights, and do nothing days, and pool days, and beach days, and days where, let's be honest, we get to spend time with our family. That was the thing. Every single one of us were like, "We wanna spend more time with our family." None of us said, "Oh, I'd really like to work more. I really wish I could get more done at work." None of us. Nope. We really wanna spend time with our family That's the thing, right? We wanna have permission to play so that we can have time with our family, but we don't know how to anymore. We don't know how to play. I said in a couple podcasts ago how I paused a project to go outside to watch my daughter ride her bike. That was really uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable to stop in the middle of something that I was doing to go and watch my daughter. It felt like an inconvenience, right? And I was li- listening to my body and my emotions show up in what I was doing, and I thought that that was my truth. Except that that is my truth because I am used to not stopping. I am used to continuing to go, go, go. But I'm interrupting it now. I'm interrupting it because that's not actually

Interrupting the Go-Go-Go in Real Time

Audio Only - All Participants 24:45

the life I want to live. I don't want to have my life dictated by being in fight or flight all day long trying to get everything done, because my to-do list doesn't actually ever end. So by practicing interrupting what I'm doing, I get to retrain my body to actually be comfortable with the play, to be comfortable watching her enjoy life, to be comfortable ingraining this memory into my soul, because when I'm 80 years old and I look back on that moment, I would be so proud of myself, and that's sometimes what I think of. I also love to think... you know, 10 or 20 years from now, what would I give to have one more day with these girls? What would I give to just snuggle their little faces? The world. I would give anything to do that. Oh, now I'm gonna cry. So I'm interrupting my discomfort with pausing. I'm practicing showing up and being present in my life by giving myself permission to play and just permission to be wrong and permission to learn and permission to continue to grow because that's what this life is all about. On that note, I hope you have a beautiful week And I am sending you all lots of hope and love as we continue to shine our light and learn to shine our light in this world. I'll talk to you soon do you have anything else to say to my listeners? Is there anything you want them to know about your mom? She's kind That's nice She lets me do a lot of things But not everything Mm-hmm But maybe I can do those things when I grow up. What do you wanna do when you grow up? Be a teacher Ooh. But you're not ever letting me be a teacher. I'm not letting you grow up. No growing up is there anything you'd like them to know about your mom? She is the best mom ever, and she's also super crazy. She's also slay. Wow. Thank you Slay baddie. Toodly. Toodles.