Moving furniture is ADHD medicine.
If you asked all my former roommates and family members about my most unusual way of handling stress, you’d probably get the same answer from all of them: rearranging the living space.
What they didn’t know (and neither did I, until recently) is that moving sofas and shaking out rugs did more than just help me de-stress. It has also been an accidental coping strategy for ADHD! I’ve talked to countless other folks who say they also do a little redecorating when times get tough.
For starters, there’s a lot of physical movement involved in changing things around the house. I might speed-clean the area by first gathering clutter, giving the whole area a good dusting and floor cleaning, and shaking out rugs or blankets. Vigorous physical activity provides an instant boost in circulation and neurotransmitter release.
Moving things around — especially large items like furniture — provides proprioceptive heavy work. Heavy work happens anytime we have to push or pull against resistance, weight or gravity. The resistance input through our muscles helps to calm the central nervous system and create a feeling of being grounded. It can help us enhance our body awareness too. You’ve witnessed a need for proprioceptive input if you’ve seen a child jump, twirl, crash and bang things as if driven by a motor. (Remind you of ADHD?)
My ADHD brain craves both novelty and simplicity. When I change the arrangement of a room, even just a little, there’s a spark of newness that keeps my mind engaged and interested. The process also almost always involves putting away or eliminating extraneous items, allowing my nervous system to breathe a sigh of relief from distraction.
There’s an idea called the “fresh start effect,” that allows us a brief moment of hope for what could be. A fresh start — or a refreshed room — is like temporarily suspending the idea that we are doomed to disorganization. It’s a window into what we want to become, and it’s a very powerful motivator. Changing the arrangement of living space offers a taste of the fresh start effect by putting a temporal and environmental boundary between “past me” and “future me.”
The room I rearrange most often these days is my office. I’m lucky to have a wide variety of options in this space, so that I can create a new perspective with each change. Making a literal shift in my point of view is instrumental in shifting my mental point of view, and often facilitates new insights to my work and other tasks.
As I meet and get to know more people with late-diagnosed ADHD, I’m constantly amazed by the coping strategies we have all developed over time without even realizing they were efforts to manage our minds. From moving furniture to choosing physically demanding jobs to color coding everything, it’s amazing how our ADHD minds can adapt when given the space.
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