Quick Wins for ADHD Moms - Short Episodes, Real Solutions for Burnout and Overwhelm
Quick Wins for ADHD Moms
For the ADHD mom who keeps trying and still feels behind.
You've read the books. You've bought the planners. You know what you're supposed to do, and somehow the chaos is still winning.
What if it was never about trying harder?
This podcast is for you: the ADHD mom who is smart, capable, and completely overwhelmed anyway. Not because you're doing it wrong. Because nobody designed these systems for your brain.
Every episode delivers small shifts backed by real neuroscience and conversations: fast, realistic resets for the moments when your executive function is shot, your mental load is maxed out, and mom life is winning. No complicated frameworks. Just the one small thing that actually moves you forward right now.
Short episodes built for your ADHD brain. Listen in the pickup line, doing dishes, or hiding in the bathroom for five minutes of quiet.
We're about designing a life that works with your brain and gives you: Permission to do life differently.
Practical support for adult women with ADHD, including neurodivergent moms navigating burnout, overwhelm, executive dysfunction, and the invisible weight of doing it all with a brain that works differently than everyone else's.
Ever stood in the hallway holding a dirty towel… and completely forgotten where you were taking it?
If your brain feels like a browser with 47 tabs open, and you can’t find the one playing music, this episode is for you.
Today we’re untangling something that changes everything:
Is this mom exhaustion? Or is this ADHD wiring?
Because those are not the same thing. And treating them the same keeps you stuck.
In This Episode
Low Fuel vs. Check Engine Light A simple framework to help you figure out whether you’re depleted… or whether your brain is asking for a different design.
The Resiliency Test If rest fixes it, it was fuel. If the same patterns show up again and again, even after rest, it’s wiring.
Cognitive Ergonomics Stop trying to “fix” your brain. Start designing your environment to support how it actually works. Inspired by my conversation with ADHD coach Jeff Copper.
The Hidden Restart Cost Interruptions don’t just annoy you. They tax your nervous system. We’ll talk about how to protect your capacity.
What White Space Really Is Not an empty calendar. Margin. Breathing room. The ability to respond instead of react.
The 4-Minute Reset A simple tool to move from paralysis to motion without trying to solve your entire life before lunch.
Quick Wins for ADHD Moms is a podcast for smart, high-functioning moms with ADHD who are tired of systems that don't work. Practical resets for ADHD burnout, mental overload, and everyday mom life. Find every episode at theADHDmom.com.
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Okay, so you're standing in the hallway, you're holding a dirty towel, and you have absolutely no idea where you are taking it. How many of you have done this? You were walking with purpose from the kitchen, you had momentum, you knew exactly where that dirty towel was going, and as soon as you hit the hallway, your mind goes blank. If your brain feels like a browser with 47 tabs open, three of them are playing music, and you can't figure out which one of them is playing music, stick with me. This is Quick Wins for ADHD moms. My name's Jessica Lynn Lewis, and I'm so glad you're here. We're gonna jump into today's Quick Win. Baskets. They're so underrated. If you've got some really cute baskets, all different sizes of baskets, figure out throughout your house where's a good place that you can place a basket so that it collects things. Now, at some point you're gonna have to go back and unclutter this, but it keeps in the moment, it allows you to just drop stuff in the bucket, so or basket is prettier. It allows you to put stuff in the basket so you can deal with it later and it keeps things cluttered. Nope, it keeps things uncluttered. We want you to stay uncluttered. That's where my brain is today. So some ideas, maybe put a basket at the bottom of the steps. So instead of taking that toy back up to the kids' rooms every time, you just drop it in the basket, and the basket collects things, and then the child can take their own toys back up to their room. Maybe they learn how to just put all their toys in that basket instead of them having to run it all the way up to their room and getting distracted and finding other toys to play with. So finding one basket that collects things and then eventually you take care of that later. You could do this in the kitchen. We use kitchen towels all the time. Um, I should have a basket because right now I just take the kitchen towels and like throw them against the floor, and they just I just watch them slide off into the distance and I collect them that way, but a basket would probably be prettier. Um, so yes, today's quick win is uh gather some baskets and figure out where are places in the house that just collect things all over the place that you can at least just take them and dump them into a basket to make it look just a quick cleanup and make it look nice. Okay, now we're just trying to figure out is this just mom brain? Because I haven't had a good night's sleep since 2017. For me, it's more like 2007. Or is your brain actually wired differently? How can we tell the difference? Well, here's a simple way that might help. When you're stuck, ask yourself, is this a low fuel problem or is this a check engine light problem? Let me explain. If it's just a low fuel problem, it's situational. You're dehydrated, you haven't eaten protein, the house is loud, you slept in 42-minute increments last night, you're overstimulated, brain fog, your brain's glitching. So it's not a character flaw, that's just biology, right? It's bound to happen, you're not fueling your body, it just slowly fades away. So when it's low fuel, you don't necessarily need a new planner or a new life. You just need water or protein, maybe a quick five minutes in the car, just turning the noise down, getting away from it all. So low fuel responds to recovery. But a check engine light problem feels a lot different. You have slept, you have eaten, there's no crisis happening, and you still can't seem to start the laundry because your brain can't hold the steps. Like you walk into a room and forget why. Or you stare at something simple and just feel weirdly paralyzed. So it's not exhaustion, it's working memory. It's related to executive functioning, and it's about your wiring. If you treat a wiring problem like a willpower problem, you're just gonna lose the entire afternoon. And if you treat a low-fuel problem like ADHD, you're gonna overcomplicate something that maybe just needs rest or water or some quiet time. Different problems require different solutions. This week I had a chance to talk with ADHD coach Jeff Copper. He's been in the ADHD coaching space for years, and he talks about something called cognitive ergonomics. He's very passionate about this idea, and he was telling me about this over Zoom the other day, and it makes complete sense. And I love this idea because most of us are trying to force our brains to operate like someone else's. We buy their course, we buy their book, and we think if we just follow their plan, maybe this will go away. But what I've come to find is that everybody's brain works a little different. And someone who has a, I'll say, normal brain, if I try to follow their steps, it's not gonna work for me because my brain works just a little bit differently, and I've learned that. So Jeff talks about cognitive ergonomics. He came up with this idea after just lots of studying and reading other research. I mean, that he has a whole page on that. You can go visit his website and talk, where he talks about how he came up with this cognitive ergonomics idea. But it's more about stop trying to fix the brain and start designing for your environment. It's more about being the engineer of your life. And when I heard that, I thought, yes, absolutely, because so many moms are burning capacity all day long, paying all of those hidden restart costs. You get interrupted, you forget where you were, then you restart, but you lose momentum, and then you have to restart again. And all of that costs energy. In a few episodes, we talked about the spoon theory. Leah Carroll was our guest, and she's like, I don't know if I like calling it the spoon theory. She likes to maybe associate it more with money, like you're spending money, which I totally agree with her. It makes more sense because spending spoons just doesn't make sense to me, but you know, whatever. Basically, you're spending energy. And when you multiply that by 200 tiny little moments a day in all of that decision making and the starting and the stopping, you're exhausted. Not because you need more protein or because you need some water. Yes, you might need that in addition. And it's not because you're weak, it's just your brain is doing so much hard work all day because it's an executive functioning problem. So, how do you know if it's a wiring problem and not just mom brain? Here's a simple lens. Mom brain is seasonal. When stress lifts, your brain comes back online after a good night's sleep, maybe after vacation, after the baby stage when they're actually sleeping through the night. But for ADHD wiring, it shows up across decades. Way before the kids showed up. Maybe during college, maybe when you were a kid in school, maybe even your first job. Were you losing the keys before you could blame your children? Were you staying up way too late because you just couldn't transition to bed? Did you need urgency to start things way back then? See, looking at that pattern really matters. And of course, let's throw in hormones that can absolutely amplify everything. Estrogen affects dopamine, and dopamine affects executive function. So sometimes it's not that you got worse at life, it's just there's been a chemical climate that shifted. So here's a resiliency test that you can use. If rest and self-care fix the stuckness, it's probably low fuel. And maybe you need to figure out how to get more water in your day, how to eat more protein during your day, so you're not hitting the highs and the lows in the brain fog. If rest helps a little, but the same patterns keep on repeating, that might be a wiring issue. And that is a design clue. So once you know it's wiring, you can stop blaming yourself and you can start redesigning. And that's why we're doing quick wins for ADHD moms, because these little quick wins are helping you do tiny little design changes in your brain, how you say things, your mindset, even physically in your house. Maybe put a whiteboard where decisions actually happen. I love keeping whiteboards in my kitchen and in the back of the back of the cupboards to remind me what's in there. Maybe you need to label the laundry basket instead of just having your memory expect to remember whose laundry basket is that. Maybe you have a color-coded thing with laundry baskets. So these quick wins are not really hacks. They're more about capacity protectors, protecting your capacity. And anything that reduces multiple steps reduces your exhaustion. And exhaustion is the tax that's stealing all of your time. So you're not broken. You're just living in this environment designed for someone else's brain. So you're an F1 car being asked to drive on a goat path. All right, I'm gonna pause here. So I have Muse. I that's Chat GPT. I call it my Muse. It helps me put all of my thoughts together, pulls all of this together when I have an idea, I just dump it in here and it helps organize. So I'm actually communicating what I want to communicate. Well, it, you know, it came up with the you're in F1 car being asked to drive on a goat path. And it made me have to think a little harder to, okay, F1 car, what does that look like? All right, okay, um, goat path right. Okay, so F1 car, massive engine, running all the time, like just so much force running on a goat path. It doesn't really have the right road to be its full potential. Okay, that took me a lot of time to get there, right? So I asked my muse, um, can you come up with some alternative metaphors? And I have to say they were not any better, but I'm gonna read them anyway because they're amazing. You're a sports car being asked to tow a trailer uphill. You're a dolphin being judged on your ability to climb trees. You're a Mac running Windows software. It'll work, but it's draining the battery twice as fast. You're a sprinter being asked to run a marathon in someone else's shoes. You're trying to stream HD video on dial up internet. So you can pick whatever one resonates with you the most, whether it's more of a tech thing or nature or performance-based. But in the end, and I love that Muse came up with this too, stop blaming the car and change the tires. Or stop blaming the dolphin, give it water to swim in. Stop judging the Mac, let it run its native software. Um, I'm a Mac girl, so I always say just stay away from PC and that'll solve all your problems. Stop pushing the sprinter and give them the right shoes. Stop buffering the stream and upgrade the connection. All right, so if your brain is trying to do everything all at once right now, that's basically what these metaphors are trying to say. If your brain's trying to do all of these things at once and you feel that paralysis just creeping in, it's exactly why I created the four-minute reset. This isn't to fix your life or fix your brain, and it's definitely not to turn you into the some productivity robot. But what it does is it helps shrink the size of the task or the overwhelm in your mind, helps you pick one next step and start moving without losing an hour to overwhelm. It's just four minutes. That's it. And the goal isn't perfection. The goal is to give you more white space, more breathing room, finding more capacity in your day. I've been talking with some of my mentors this week and some really, really great, honest, kind of heavy conversations. And one of them asked me, okay, Jess, what do you actually want your listeners to leave with? And I didn't hesitate because I know this is what I want for myself. More white space, more capacity, and not filling up that capacity. So, what exactly is white space? Well, it's definitely not an empty calendar because we're moms and we're busy, and an empty calendar is just not realistic. And it's also not about doing nothing. It's not about sitting on a porch for six hours with a cup of coffee, although that sounds absolutely lovely right now. But white space is breathing room. It's that feeling when your shoulders drop half an inch because your brain isn't trying to figure out 12 things at once. White space is capacity. It's having just enough margin in your nervous system that you can respond instead of react. It's all about protecting your time. It's about having the tools and the confidence to say no to the things that quietly drain you. And there's also a deeper layer. White space isn't just about saying no, it's about having clarity to even know what deserves a no. Because your brain is in survival mode. Everything feels urgent, everything feels important, and everything feels like it's gonna fall apart if you don't hold it. But that's not true. And white space is a space where you can just have a moment to step back and ask, does this actually align with what I value? Is this how I want to spend my very, very limited energy? Is this designed for my brain? Or am I forcing myself into something that costs me twice as much as it costs someone else? It costs me five spoons where somebody else, it costs them a half a spoon, right? It costs me $500 in energy where somebody else might spend $20 in energy. This white space gives you the margin to figure out what tools you actually need. So I love planners, but this isn't really about downloading another planner or trying harder. It's about designing your environment around how your brain processes information. And if you don't have white space, you don't have time to think about how your brain is working and how you can develop your environment to help you process better. So I'm helping you create that white space so you have time to figure this out, so you have more capacity in your day. And it takes time. And yes, it's a time investment, but think about how you're gonna feel on the other side of that. It means your thinking isn't frantic anymore. Maybe you get some creativity back. Maybe your curiosity comes back. Maybe a little bit more fun comes back. And you remember what it feels like to follow this creativity and this curiosity and fun because you're interested, not because you're panicking and in survival mode. And when I say I want that for you, I don't mean some aspirational someday, oh, that would be nice. I mean like today, right now. 10% more breathing room, 10% less friction. That's white space. And everything we're talking about in this episode about low fuel, wiring, ergonomics, it all funnels back to white space. I'm not trying to fix you, but I am trying to help you get some more space back. So let's try this today. What is one thing that's stealing your capacity? Is it low fuel? Do you need to eat something? Do you just need five minutes? Just plug your ears and not hear all of the chaos. Is it wiring? Or maybe it's a little bit of both. And what's one tiny move that can buy you back 10 minutes? That's how you stop surviving your day and you start designing it. So before you go, I'm gonna bring this full circle. We talked about low fuel. We talked about how your brain is wired differently, we talked about designing your life so your brain doesn't pay the hidden taxes all day. But none of that matters if you're frozen right now. So if you're sitting there thinking, okay, this is great, but I just I can't start the thing or I don't know where to start. That's why I created the four-minute reset to shrink the size of that task in your mind so you can begin. And it's just four minutes, that's it. Because sometimes what we call procrastination is actually overwhelm. Your brain is just trying to hold too many steps, too many decisions, too much pressure, too much information. And the four-minute reset helps you reduce that noise, choose one next move, and start without trying to solve the entire day at once. It gives you white space on demand, breathing room right now. So if you're feeling stuck today, go to theadhdmom.com and download the four-minute reset. Four minutes to get out of paralysis, four minutes to buy back some of that capacity, and four minutes to just start moving again. You just need a little white space in your day, and we can build that. One small reset at a time. Have a lovely week. Well, if you enjoyed this episode of the ADHD Mom, if you've found it helpful, if you know somebody who really needs to hear this, I would love for you to share it with a friend. And yes, go download that four minute reset. It's at the ADHDmom.com right now.
