ADHD

I have adhd but love cooking. What I do, is make it rule-free, chaotic, and kind of like the other creative things my hyperfocus and natural interest kind of steer me to anyway.

So I don’t follow recipes; for new things, I experiment and kind of freestyle stuff, fail and learn, then over time I accumulate enough to understand why things happen and eventually when the fundamentals are kind of all “clicked”, it’s extremely fun to just apply them in different ways in practice.

I also love baking for the same reason.

But perhaps that only works because it’s very similar to my other interests like music, creative writing and programming. As in, creative, something to work within the bounds of rules that exist, without knowing them, and accumulating understanding through exploration which is always so exciting and can easily slurp up hours of each day in an eyeblink.

But probably worth a test to try and frame it like this! I know it works for me and I have a pretty severe case of adhd, even fully medicated

Edit: also, reading the other suggestions here, I realized there’s another thing I do: I never do the one thing. When I start cooking, I always take it as the one chance to do all the things I’ve been wanting to do, because it’s just easy when I’m already making a mess and piles of dishes and all.

I, same as most everyone, hate waiting around. So I never do; I just have several things going so I can always jump from one thing to the other and then to the other etc. so I never have to stop. It’s the natural way I work with software too and pretty much anything in my life, and most adhd peeps I know through support groups or otherwise have the same “superpower” (ugh).

So it helps for me to have a lot on my hands so I never have to think or stop and can just jump around doing many things. Start hydrating a sourdough base from the starter, then feed it, while those sit, start on a dessert by doing caramel/toffee, and as that sits, check up on and start kneading in flours to the bread, and once that sits again, start stirring the caramel, then put out of heat once ready, then feed the starter second time, knead the bread again, then start working the granulated soy to mimic ground beef (I’ve found egg whites and vegan butter at room temp, and slowly working those in while letting it soak them and spices works so well), then once that sits, and bread still has to rise, and can’t feed the starter yet to put it to fridge, I start packaging the caramel (good idea to do more than you think you’d need, so that allows something more next time more easily), then was a couple of dishes (so never try to do all at once, it’s so annoying and boring), then knead the bread, then feed the starter and fridge it, then continue working in the “ground beef-ish soy”, then pour a pile of flour on the same table already messy from kneading, break an egg or two, start making fresh pasta, and so on and so on… it’s a nice all-consuming flow with a lot of varying stuff to shuffle between and dance around, keeps me very occupied and I usually watch a tv series at the same time or listen to ebook