ADHD is a fairly common condition, but it still tends to go undiagnosed pretty easily. Although symptoms start during childhood, sometimes medical providers just don’t catch it until later in life.
If you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible that you have undiagnosed ADHD, you might want to think about your habits. People often think of kids who have difficulty concentrating and are disruptive in class as being the typical patient, but that isn’t always true. There’s one small cleaning habit in particular that can signal you have the disorder.
According to an ADHD coach, it’s common for people with ADHD to hate putting away laundry.
Coach Jeff Rice explained that not wanting to put away your clean laundry doesn’t mean you’re just trying to get out of doing the chore. Instead, people with ADHD often have what the community calls a “floordrobe,” which he described as “a place, typically on the floor, where we leave either clean or not quite dirty clothes.”
The problem is that you think you’ll wear these clothes again soon, so they just sit in that pile and accumulate until it becomes an even bigger problem to tackle.
Rice offered two theories for the existence of the ADHD floordrobe. The first is that clothes that aren’t quite in need of a wash yet are left out as “a visual cue” to serve as a reminder that you want to wear them again. This sounds like a solid idea, but it doesn’t actually work out because your brain will just get used to seeing them and not really think about it anymore.
The second reason is that, as Rice said, ADHD brains like things that are “interesting, novel, urgent, or challenging.” Of course, a pile of clean laundry that needs to be put away is none of those things, so you just ignore it.
Rice has personal experience with the floordrobe and shared two solutions that have proved helpful for him.
“Having a floordrobe has been a challenge for me for a long time,” he admitted. But, as an ADHD coach, he has developed some tried and true methods that help him overcome the laundry clutter problem that could be beneficial for the rest of us as well.
The first thing is to put some rules in place. If you have a not-quite-dirty article of clothing that you’re planning on wearing again, you have to actually wear it. If you leave it draped over a chair to remind you to do so, but you never put it on, you’ve got to go ahead and either put it where it belongs or put it in your pile to wash before it just sits there for what feels like forever.
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Next, when dealing with actual clean clothes that you just don’t want to put away, collecting tangible information can make it feel a bit less daunting. Rice used the example of once having three baskets of clean laundry he needed to put away, but not wanting to do so because of how long he thought it would take. So, he timed himself and found out it took just seven minutes per basket. He can remind himself of that now when he’s dreading doing it again.
“Having that hard data about how long the task actually takes actually makes it easier for me to look at it when I don’t want to do it, take a breath, and think intellectually, ‘It’s only seven minutes,'” he said.
Having a floordrobe can be an indicator of ADHD, but it isn’t enough to make a diagnosis.
Obviously, not everyone with a floordrobe automatically has ADHD. Some people just really don’t like doing laundry. Dr. Alma Spaniardi, an assistant attending physician at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, explained this in more detail.
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“While the information might be valid, mental health diagnosis is more complicated than just the identification of one symptom alone,” she said. “There can be many other causes for this phenomenon, including avoidance of the task due to anxiety or just being very busy for a period of time, causing you to put off doing chores.”
Perhaps instead of qualifying the avoidance of putting laundry away as an ADHD trait, we can simply say that laundry is a universally disliked chore that we all would rather put off for another day. Unfortunately, like all chores, it must be done. Thanks to Rice, we now have two new tricks in our arsenal to utilize in the endless battle against floordrobes.
Madison Piering is a writer who covers relationships, culture, and human interest topics.
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