Does vacation bring feelings of stress and loneliness, rather than feeling exciting? Can’t you rely enough on your energy levels to take action, invite someone over for dinner, or suggest an outing? In this blog, you’ll get smart tips on habits and routines to use from our occupational therapist, Matilda Utbult.
What’s your take on days off and holidays? You know that feeling when everyone is off work and diving into vacation plans, going on trips, planning parties and other fun activities. And you haven’t managed to plan anything at all.
Maybe you’ve learned not to over-plan to allow time to just relax. But the vast amounts of free time ahead seem more daunting than inviting. Or have you simply let work take up so much space that you no longer know what to do when you’re off?
No worries, we got help from our occupational therapist Matilda Utbult. Who often supports women with ADHD in planning for both work time and vacation. She shares her best tips on managing varying energy levels and the great need for recovery.
Tag along, here we go:
Many with ADHD struggle with time management. It will then be difficult to anticipate what’s reasonable to achieve or endure over a weekend or a week off.
👉 You might already have a great setup for your daily planning. But one tip to support time management skills and make planning easier is to use visual planning aids.
This could involve using a whiteboard or an app like Google Calendar allowing you to color-code activities by category, for example, based on how much energy they give or take.
One category that might be useful is activities that drain energy in the moment but also provide energy and joy in the long run – like fun things you do with friends.
It might sound like stating the obvious here, cause why would you need to plan for recovery during your vacation? Isn’t that implicated in the very concept?
Well, not if you ask many women with ADHD who love social settings, but recharge their social batteries when they’re alone.
“Saturday morning: recovery by sleep-in”
👉 By scheduling recovery in your calendar even during vacation, it can become clearer that you can indeed manage both recovery and a coffee date or theater visit.
Do you often feel like you contribute too little to your relationships? That it’s just a matter of time before your friends give up on you and stop reaching out because you find it so hard to remember to text them. Or get so drained by phone conversations.
“set goals for your social interactions.”
👉 Then it might be a good idea to reflect on your goals for your social interactions. How often would you realistically want (and have the energy) to see friends? Maybe you could set a goal to see a friend at least every other week or once every weekend.
👉 Look ahead in your calendar and think about whether you would like to plan a major outing once every couple of months and schedule it – before you even know what kind of outing it will be. But so that you mentally allocate energy for this in advance.
Of course, it can then be on a different weekend than the one you initially scheduled, but you can plan extra recovery for the weekend you had thought for the outing instead.
👉 Another thing you can plan is to regularly reach out to a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.
Are you one of us who wishes you were someone who easily invites friends over for dinners and parties? But in reality, you neither have the energy nor the executive functions to plan it. And execute all the steps required to shop, cook and host a group of friends for dinner.
👉 I suggest you try inviting friends over for a very low-effort dinner. A dinner where you don’t prepare anything but instead order pizza and eat from the box. Or serve pasta with jarred pesto and a ready-made salad mix.
It’s so easy to forget how enjoyable something can be when you haven’t done it for a long time. Even if you know you used to love it! A low-effort challenge like this can be a way to remind yourself of that feeling.
If you know that your energy levels can vary from day to day.
👉 Then it might be wise to be clear with both yourself and your friends that there is a chance you might need to reschedule. And that it’s completely okay!
Planning isn’t meant to force you into anything you can’t handle. It’s to make everyday life more predictable. So that you have the energy to be more flexible and do what you want.
Don’t forget – if you are one of us ADHD women who love your job but tend to let work take up so much space and energy in life – you might need to pay extra attention to the transitions between work and rest.
👉 It might be a good idea to build in a period for winding down and wrapping up before your vacation.
”This reduces the risk of crashing into your vacation.”
And minimizing the time spent the first two weeks of your hard-earned time off “detoxing” from work thrills. The goal is for work to be a part of life, and you should also have the energy for other things.
If work takes up so much time and energy that everything else in life suffers, I hope there’s a reasonable supervisor you can talk to. One that can ensure that you can return to a manageable workload after your vacation.
It’s also easy to get stuck in toxic algorithms on social media, comparing your own holiday plans with all the fantastic trips and social events others seem to be having. You probably already know this, but it’s worth repeating—social media only shows a snapshot of the surface of someone else’s life. It says nothing about how the people behind the pictures feel, think, or live.
👉 If you can, take a break from social media and instead look inward. What do you feel like doing right now? What is truly important in your life?
Maybe you can try some of the short mindfulness exercises in the app and see if you can feel the power of just being in your own body. That’s rest and recovery as good as any!
In conclusion, it’s not surprising to feel a bit stressed about time off when everyday life, however tough it may be, has provided structure and predictability. But as you’ve read, there are solutions.
Pick and choose the most beneficial tips for you and put them as reminders in the app, for some restful weeks ahead
Have a great summer and a wonderful vacation from all of us at Letterlife!
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