HealthyGamerGG - Time Blindness & Why You Keep Being Late

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

Dr. K explains time blindness in ADHD and how it is the hidden deficit that makes planning, punctuality, and follow-through so hard. He breaks down how an impaired internal clock and poor retrospective time perception (not tracking how long things actually take) lead to procrastination, chronic lateness, and undervaluing an hour. Then he offers clear, workable fixes that rebuild your sense of time. Topics include: Why ADHD brains misjudge how long tasks take (and why that wrecks planning) Over/under-estimating time: how it stalls motivation and starts the procrastination loop The “value of an hour” problem and why wasting time feels cheap Practical tools: timers, alarms, calendars, and logging real task durations Sensory-based learning to retrain time estimation (use a visible clock, write it down) Dr. Micaela’s tips: break routines into minute-by-minute steps and add distraction cushions This episode reframes lateness and “laziness” as solvable timing issues and gives you a simple system to start showing up on time. HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. Hey, y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey. So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinogia, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. It's noon on a Monday, and you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, man, I have homework. And your brain is like, yeah, it can be, at 1 p.m. on Monday, one hour from now, you could be done with that task. And then you're like, damn, this is the last piece of homework I have for the next three days.

I could have, I could relax for the next three days if I just sit down and do one hour of work right now. But if your brain is like, ah, this is going to take three days. This piece of homework has suddenly become a dissertation. So today, we're going to talk about time blindness in ADHD. As a psychiatrist, this is the thing that causes the most damage to my patient's lives that they are unaware of as a problem with ADHD. So what do I mean by that? So in ADHD, like we're all aware that there are attentional problems, right? I have difficulty concentrating.

I get distracted easily. We know that there are problems with things like emotional regulations. So it's hard to regulate my emotions. I sort of get angry easily or I get frustrated very easily. So we're aware of some of these deficits in ADHD. But time blindness is one of these deficits that we don't sort of think about quite as much, even though it has profound impacts on our life. So I've seen time blindness lead to things.

things like divorce. So these are spouses who are chronically late to things, who can't be counted on to follow through and stick with plans. I've also seen graduate students that I've worked with who will get sort of threatened or even kicked out of programs because they can't meet deadlines. So let's take something simple like procrastination. So we all know that people with ADHD procrastinate. It's a part of the disease, right? It's a part of this executive function deficit where we have difficulty planning and executing tasks. So if I were to ask you, if you've got ADHD, how long would it take you to do your homework? You'd say something like, I have no way of knowing because it could take 30 minutes or it could take three days because that's our experience with ADHD.

Our brain has no way to calculate how much time a task will take. Now, we make a fundamental mistake here, which is that we think that the reason we can't calculate it is because it's so inconsistent, but that's technically not true. There's actually an impairment in our brain's ability to estimate time. Now, if your brain cannot estimate time properly, right? So that's what if I ask you, how long will it take you to do your homework, you'll be like, I have no way of knowing. That is not a problem of procrastination or deficit of attention or things like that. That is literally, if I ask a neurotypical person, how long will it take you to do task X? Their brain is processing a bunch of information that allows them to produce an estimate. Oh, you need this paper written. I can get it done

in a week. Whereas if our brain lacks the capacity to estimate time, then how on earth are we supposed to plan? Right. So if I have no idea whether this piece of homework will take 30 minutes or three days, how am I supposed to make a plan for the week? How am I supposed to make a plan for a semester? How am I supposed to plan for a vacation? If I have no idea how long things will take. If you all want to dive deep into the most important topics for our community, check out HG memberships. The first thing to understand is that there needs to be no outcome from small talk. This is a Vassana too. Your mind is Vasanas all the way down.

So the key thing about detachment is not that you don't have wants. It is that your wants do not control you. Membership grants you access to monthly streams, as well as a back catalog of a year's worth of content, in addition to quests and so much more. If you're interested, you can sign up for $10 a month at healthygamer.gg.g. slash memberships or click the link in the description below. Hope to see you there. So I want you to think for a second about how difficult your life would be, and this may be easier

than it seems. If it was impossible for you to estimate the amount of time that actions would take, go to your neurotypical friends and ask them, like, okay, how are you supposed to plan a party if you have no way of estimating how much time a task will actually take to complete? So this is a really prime example of a deficit in ADHD, which is the estimation. of time, which then cascades out into the symptoms that we frequently see with ADHD. So we'll see a lot of like symptomatic problems like procrastination. We'll see problems with planning like we've already talked about.

But those are all rooted in these fundamental time blindness issues. So here's the really cool thing. So a lot of the times when I work with people with ADHD, they will work with, they will try a lot of things before they come to me, right? Because we're like, this is the internet generation. They're watching TikTok to get ADHD tips. The problem is that most of these tips around ADHD are sort of symptom focused. They're not looking at the root causes of ADHD.

They're trying to fix the emergent symptom. So my problem is procrastination. Or if you're in a relationship, your problem is chronic. You're always late. You're always late. You don't respect my time. It's really hard to be in a relationship with you, right? We'll get these kinds of really frustrating things.

And so if you're someone who's got ADHD and you're like, someone is telling you this, you're like, I'll try harder. I'll try harder, I'll try harder. But literally, if your brain is not able to estimate the amount of time that it takes to do things, how on earth can you be on time, right? If you were just colorblind to that, that's why we call it time blindness, it's going to be incredibly hard for you to ever be on time to anything. The challenges that our bosses, our spouses and other neurotypical people do not understand this deficit.

and our society is not built to correct for this deficit. So in today's video, what we're going to do is we're going to give you something of a power adapter, right? So this is kind of what I've realized when I work with people with ADHD. It's not that they're busted. It's that all of the sockets are like U.S. sockets that have this three-pin plug. And everyone with ADHD has an EU socket. So they have a socket that they'll try to jam into the wall, but it doesn't fit. And all we need to do is figure out the right adapter.

Right. So if I can create like this, you know, international travel adapter, then you can plug your socket in and you can plug into the rest of society in a functional way. So that's going to be our goal today. Okay. Now, the first thing that we have to do before we get into how to solve this problem of time blindness is we have to understand how time is perceived in our brain and what the deficits actually are. And once we understand the root of the deficit, we can solve the root of the deficit over here and the symptoms will naturally improve. on their own. The moment that your brain is able to estimate time better, your capacity to be on time, your chronic lateness, your procrastination, your ability to plan, all of those things will naturally improve with very little effort. Because now your brain is able to actually use those time estimates, okay? So we're going to have to get a little bit technical here. And we're going to have to understand, first of all, how our brain actually perceives and processes time. And we're going to have to understand how it utilizes time to sort of get things done. Now, I know that sounds kind of like abstract, but once I sort of start to break it down and we look at the brain regions, I think it'll

actually get easier, not harder. And my hope is that once you all sort of understand like these components of time, which no one ever talks about, by the way, because neurotypical people's brains just do this automatically. My hope is that it will empower you to solve a lot of your problems. Okay. So the first thing we're going to do is talk about the supra-chaismatic, nucleus. So this is the first kind of problem we have. This is our internal clock. So we as human beings have an internal biological clock, right? So you can wake up in the morning and you get a sense of what time it is. So there are a lot of things like, you know, when you're sitting there and you've been on the computer for a while, you've got,

you get a sense of how long, how much time is passed. So our internal clock is actually impaired in ADHD. So this part of our brain that basically is an internal clock and tells us how much time has passed is impaired. Now, this creates, this in and of itself explains so many of the problems with ADHD. Oh my God, I was hyper-focusing for four hours. I had no idea. Oh, I completely forgot that I was supposed to go pick someone up from the airport. Now, let's think about this.

How is a neurotypical person able to remember to pick up someone from the airport? It's because they literally have this part of their brain that's like a stop. watch that's keeping track of time. And once a certain amount of time passes, they know, okay, I have to pick up my friend at noon. It's 8 a.m. right now. Once two hours pass, I need to alert the consciousness that it is time to go. So if we want to have a healthy relationship with time, there is basically a balance of two things. We have an internal clock with external time reminders. So our internal clock is not always perfect. This is why we need to do things like set alarm clocks. need for a healthy relationship with time is an internal clock. And for the things that an internal

clock can't handle, we need external time reminders. So we sort of know this, right? So if you've got ADHD, you've kind of figured this stuff out. You realize that, okay, I need to set alarms. I need to use things like calendars. I need to get notifications to keep me on track. So we can sort of balance deficiencies in our internal clock with using external time reminders. And even in the case of neurotypical people, like they use things like alarm clocks and calendar reminders and notifications and things like that, right? So a healthy relationship with time involves these two things. Now, here's the key thing with ADHD and time blindness. There are a lot of things like, let's say, procrastination or planning or I don't know if being on time

kind of makes sense here. There are a lot of problems that we have with ADHD that we do not perceive as time benefits. We perceive them as laziness problems, willpower problems, emotional problems, when really their deficits of time blindness, okay? So this is the first thing. We have an internal clock, comes from the super chasmatic nucleus, and we'll get into more detail. So at the end of the video today, we're actually going to tap in a member of our scientific advisory board, Dr. Michaela Thorterson, who specializes in skilling up people with neurodiversity. So she specializes in skills building, uses a lot of worksheets and things like that. So I'm all about like theory and neuroscience and

spirituality and stuff. She's excellent at this stuff. She's going to be, we're going to be tapping her in at the end of the video because this is where she really specializes in helping people level up some of these skills that are necessary. She's also going to be holding a social skills workshop for neurodiversity if you all are interested in that. So stay tuned at the end of the video. There will be some info about that. Okay. Second problem that we have with ADHD is our estimation of time is impaired. So what does this mean? So this is basically our brain trying to figure out how long a task will take. A neurotypical person will be able to make a calculated guess how long a task will take.

But if you have ADHD, the brain's capacity to estimate that time will be deficient in some way. Now, we kind of already talked about this, but this is where we need to go into more detail because we will see how an inability to estimate time creates a lot of problems. So remember that when we can't estimate something properly, we could do an overestimate or an underestimate. And depending on which one we do, this creates a lot of the problems that chances are you struggle with. So if we overestimate the amount of time it takes. So what that means is, let's say that doing my homework actually takes an hour. But I tend to overestimate the time. Oh my God, it'll take me three days. If a task takes an hour and your brain thinks,

oh, it's going to take three days, how does that affect your capacity to work today? Right. So if something can't be finished in the next hour. It's noon on a Monday. And you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, man, I have homework. And your brain is like, yeah, it can be, you at 1 p.m. on Monday, one hour from now, you could be done with that task. And then you're like, damn, I could be done with this task Monday at 1 p.m. And then I can have the rest of the day. And not a just, this is the last piece of homework I have for the next three days. I can have, I could relax for the next three days. if I just sit down and do one hour of work right now. But if your brain is like, ah, this is going to take three days.

This piece of homework has suddenly become a dissertation. So now it's hard to get started, right? So our brain doesn't just get started on tasks that take a large amount of time. I don't wake up one day and be like, I'm just going to get my PhD today. You can't do that. So the larger amount of time something takes, the more preparer, our brain needs, the more guarantees it needs, right? So if I have to do a three-day task, I need to make sure that all the other stuff that I need to do over the next three days, I need to study for this test, I need to write this paper, I need to prepare for a birthday party, all these other things need to be taken care of because this thing takes three days to do.

But remember that my brain can't estimate any of those tasks either. either. So what ends up happening is that when our brain overestimates, the amount of time something takes, it becomes incredibly hard for us to get started. The second problem that we have with this is that it also drastically alters our value calculation. So when I sort of think about, okay, what is the value of finishing this homework? Well, the value of finishing the homework is like, you know, it's like one piece of homework that's done. Now, what is the cost of finishing that homework? It's about an hour's worth of effort, right? So, that's like a pretty good trade. Small gain, small cost. But if the homework getting done is like a

small, let's say it's 5% of my grade, but it takes three whole days to do, then my brain is like, this is not an efficient use of our time, right? This is not worth it to do such a small thing for it to take so long. It feels incredibly inefficient. And when our brain feels like something is inefficient, it decreases our motivation to actually complete the task. So we see that delays in getting started and decreased motivation, both are rooted in an improper estimate of time. And if we can fix that time estimate, our motivation will increase, our efficiency will increase, and it'll be easier to get things started very naturally. So kind of related to this, when I work with people with ADHD, their ability to estimate how much they can get done in a window of time is too low. So if I ask my patients

with ADHD, if I ask a neurotypical person, you know, how much can you get done in an hour? They'll say, I can get a lot done in an hour. If I ask my patients with ADHD, how much can you get done in an hour? They'll say, I can't get much done in an hour. So I want you all to think about that for a second, okay? So if my brain estimates that very little can be accomplished in one hour, I know I'm asking you all to be pretty abstract here. So if my brain estimates that the value of an hour is incredibly low, okay? like I can't get much done. So now I want you all to think about this.

If the value of an hour is low, what is the cost of wasting an hour, right? If I can get very little done in an hour, if my estimation of the value of an hour is actually artificially low, it makes it way easier to waste time. Because my brain is actually telling me like, oh, you can play one more game. It's like, like, and just think about this with ADHD, right? I'm making this so abstract. Just like, think about it. You're sitting there, like, literally, and you're like ready to do your homework. and you're like, oh my God, this is going to take me five hours to do like two questions.

So if it takes you five hours to do two questions, you know, playing one game for an hour is only worth, like it's not even worth half a question. So the relative value of time when we estimate it so lowly makes it way easier for us to engage in dopaminergic activity. Because if my time isn't worth very much, it's okay to waste hours and hours and hours. So this too, if you find yourself wasting a lot of time, chances are that if you've got ADHD, your ability to estimate time is off and then you are valuing your time at such a low level that it becomes affordable to waste it.

And this creates a vicious cycle where we end up wasting a lot of time. We don't get a lot of work done. And therefore, how much is our time worth? Not very much. Okay. So now we're going to dig a little bit deeper. What is it that actually makes it so that our brain can be? cannot accurately estimate the amount of time it takes.

So there is a problem in something called retrospective time perception. Okay. Now, this is fascinating to understand. So when a human being starts a task, we have an estimation of how long it's going to take to finish the task, right? So I think, like, okay, I have to do homework. It's going to take me an hour. Now, once I do the homework, let's say I reach this point, there is a separate function of our brain that looks back and says, okay, how long did this time take?

I mean, how long did this task take? Right. So there is a retrospective, i.e. looking back, perception of time. So if I were to ask you, how long did it take you to finish your homework? How long did it take you to write your dissertation? How long did it take you to go to the grocery store? A neurotypical brain is pretty good at calculating looking back in time and calculating how much time something actually took. This is the biggest deficit in ADHD.

This is the root of all of these time blindness problems. So we don't track, and that's going to be part of our solution, we don't track how long things actually take, right? I just go about my day, doing the things that I need to do. And then I trust that my brain is accurately measuring the amount of time that it takes to, complete tasks. If it accurately measures the amount of time it takes to complete tasks, then I have estimates of how long it takes to complete tasks. Once I have estimates for how long it takes to complete tasks, I can plan and execute tasks. But if my clock is shut off, if I don't have the ability to measure, right, and that's where the super chasmatic nucleus internal

biological clock comes from. If that is actually disabled, then my capacity to look back in time and say, okay, this homework took one hour for me to finish, that is impaired. So now we begin to see that this is kind of like how this looks. Okay, so I'm going to draw this out because I know I just said it, but I imagine it's confusing. So why is it that our brains have difficulty estimating the amount of time? So it turns out that there's a very specific deficit that is called a retrospective time perception deficit. So what does this mean? This means that when I'm over here and I am planning to complete a task, I have, I look forward and I say this task will take one hour. Then what happens if I'm neurotypical is I go over here, I complete the task. So I end up completing the task. The task is

done. Then what happens is my brain has this really interesting capacity where it's able to look back and say, oh my God, that didn't take an hour. That only took 30 minutes. I had to work on my resume. Turns out, and I'm sure you've experienced this before, turns out that it took way less time than I thought. Or the opposite can happen, where I thought it would only take one hour, and it ends up taking 1.5 hours, right?

Both are options. The key thing is that we have a time estimation capability and we have a retrospective, i.e. looking in the past, time perception capability as well. So our brain has this part that looks into the past and says, okay, how along this end up taking? Now, if this is impaired, let's think about what the effect is. So if I cannot do this, then how am I supposed to form my estimates, right?

So if I do a task, oh, I think it's going to take one hour, ends up taking 30 minutes. Now, the next time I have this task to do, my brain is like, oh, we know that. this takes 30 minutes. So if my retrospective time perception is intact, this will allow me to make a estimate that is accurate. So if I have an accurate estimate, then this solves all these other problems that we were talking about, about getting started and estimating that things take too long and undervaluing our time and all that kind of stuff, right? So if we can't look into the past and accurately estimate how much, or accurately measure how much time it took,

it becomes very hard to make estimates for the future. If we can't make estimates for the future, we can't plan things. Now, the question is, why does this deficit exist? Where is the root of this retrospective time perception problem? Why is it that my brain can't look back and say, this is how long it took?

Well, remember, what is our core problem? Our internal clock is impaired. The internal biological clock and the super-chaismatic nucleus cannot measure time. You don't have a stopwatch. So if you don't have a stopwatch in your body, how are you supposed to know how long something took to do? It's impossible, right?

If you don't measure the time, right? And this is what sounds kind of so crazy because like normal humans just do this all the time. Like if I, like, you just know how long something took. Like if I, like, I'm going to bake some bread. It's like how long that took about an hour, right? We just know that. But if that is impaired, that means that we can't accurately measure how long things take.

If we can't accurately measure how long things take, we can't estimate how long things will take. If we can't estimate how long things will take, it becomes impossible to be on time. So all these things that people think of is like, oh, I have ADHD, therefore I'm lazy. Like I'm chronically late. I have difficulty planning things. I have difficulty getting started. I have difficulty with motivation. All of these things kind of fall back to this core.

problem of time blindness, okay? And this is where it's like when people sort of figure this out and when they correct this kind of thing, which we'll talk about in just a second, it changes so much downstream stuff. I hope that makes sense. So one of the things that I've learned as a doctor is that like treating the root of the problem is way better than treating the symptom of the problem. Now, how do we know what's the symptom and what's the root? Very simple. The symptom is what you see. right so i'll give you all a simple example of this so asthma is a medical problem of hyperreactivity of the smooth muscle of our lungs okay so like asthma is a lung problem right that's what we sort of think of but the truth of the matter is that asthma isn't a problem in the lungs asthma is a hypersensitivity

of our immune system so when we give people medications like steroids steroids happen all over the body, right? Steroids just suppress the activity of our immune system. When we suppress the activity of our immune system, things like an acute asthma exacerbation will completely go away. That's like first-line treatment for like really severe asthma. But it's not specifically lung-specific. Lung is just where the problem manifests, but the root of the problem is in these little

like white blood cells and we get like histamine release and we get interleukin-1 release and interleukin-6 release. and all this kind of stuff. We get all these, like, these tiny little cells that are all over our body that are a little bit too hyperactive. And when they start activating, when they start panicking, we get all these problems in our lungs. But the lungs is not where the problem starts. It's just the symptom of the problem.

Now, the problem is that when it comes to ADHD, we are just now developing this sophistication of understanding of neuroscience. For a long time, we've been treating ADHD symptomologically, right? because we don't know what's going on in the brain. We haven't done all these fMRI studies and pet scans and eGs and all this kind of stuff. We don't know exactly what these deficits are. So we're taking a kid who has trouble sitting still and we're saying, hey, kid, take a stimulant because that'll help your ass sit still and stop getting in trouble at school.

We're treating these symptoms instead of treating the root cause. Okay, Dr. Kay, maybe you're right. Maybe time blindness has something to do with it. How do we fix it? So this is the cool thing. when I work with people with ADHD, there are some circuits of the brain that are intact. And in a neurotypical person, we have like, you know, circuit number one and circuit number two.

And we're going to like balance them, right? So both of them work pretty well. So I use 50% of this one and 50% of this one. Now, in ADHD, what happens is I have one circuit that is deficient in some way. So instead, what I need to do is that I have another circuit that's intact. So I need to utilize this circuit to overcome this. deficit. And I'll give you all a prime example of this, okay? So people with ADHD are distractible. They get distracted super easy, right? So I'm trying to focus on this video, but there's a light

blinking over there. So it's hard for me to concentrate, it's harder for me to focus if I get distracted over here. So what does this mean? This means I have a sensory hypersensitivity. So people with ADHD, people with neurodiversity, they also struggle a lot with things like too many textures in the food. There's this, you know, new diagnosis called Arphid, which is avoidant, restrictive food intake disorder. So people with ADHD are very, very sensory stimulated, right? Senses matter a lot. So what we're going to use is use our senses to correct for our time blindness. See, we learn through our senses, especially if we have ADHD. They're very sensory learners. So, you know, if I've got a kid like my daughter, who probably,

has ADHD. You know, when I'm trying to teach her about something, I'll give her something to play with. So if I'm like teaching her about gardening, I'm not going to sit down and have an abstract conversation. We're going to go out into the garden and I'm going to give her things to touch. So, for example, if I'm trying to teach her how to sit still, the way I'm going to teach her is not by telling her to sit still, it's by tickling her. And then I tell her, okay, I'm going to tickle you, don't move. If I sit there and I tell her, hey, sit still, don't move for five she won't be able to do it. She'll start wiggling.

But if I tell her, hey, I'm going to tickle you. Do your best not to move. If you move a little bit, I'm going to tickle you more. If you don't move at all, I'll stop. So it's really interesting. So when you engage in your senses with ADHD, you are harnessing this hypersensitive circuit. It's a potent circuit.

It's not hypersensitive. It is potent. That's the way that I want you to think about it. This means that especially with time perception, we need to use our senses. So what I strongly recommend for people who do this is to, first of all, literally measure and track and write down how much time it takes you to do everything. You cannot track it in your head. Now, this is important to understand. This is why you have to write it and record it.

See, when I think, here's my brain. And when I think that happens over here. These are the cortices. Here is my hippocampus. Okay. So when I think that happens over here and my hippocampus is over here. These two are pretty far apart. Thinking and learning in memory don't connect very clearly. I know this sounds kind of weird, but I know it sounds crazy. If you just think about it for a second, right? I cannot think through my problems and suddenly my behavior changes. I don't necessarily learn from my mistakes by thinking through them.

If anything, the hippocampus feeds our cortices, right? So the things that I've learned will show up in my thoughts, but the things that I think won't always become part of my memory. This is why if you have a great idea for a video game or a novel or a hilarious joke, if you don't write it down, you will forget it. Not all of your thoughts are put down into memory. In fact, your brain sort of uses thinking as a way of getting rid of stuff, like thinking is a way of processing stuff.

But what is in your memory will show up in your thoughts. What is in your thoughts doesn't always get put into your memory. Now, what does that have to do with ADHD? Over here, we have the thalamus. Now, the thalamus is our sensory gateway to the brain. So, our eyes go into the thalamus, our ears go into the thalamus, our olfactory senses go into the thalamus, all of these things go into the thalamus. And then the thalamus connects very, very, very tightly to the hippocampus.

So the first time that you're seeing a volcano, are you remembering it? Do you have to try hard to remember it? Of course not. The first time that you taste something, you know, that's absolutely delicious, do you have to try hard to remember it? Absolutely not. So our brain is literally anatomically wired so that our sensory portions and our memory are very closely linked together.

Very, very tightly connected. So if we want to learn and we have ADHD, we don't want to use our thoughts. We want to use our senses. So this is why the first thing that I recommend people do is get a clock. Okay? And we're going to do a couple of things with a clock. The first thing that we're going to do is measure ourselves. So anytime you do a task, okay, you want to literally like measure how long it takes and then put it into like an Excel spreadsheet or put it into a notebook or thing like that, something like that.

Now, you all may have some technical questions of, okay, like how, like when do I start the measurement? So what I would say is if you want to try to do homework, right? like literally grab all the stuff and you can procrastinate. Don't worry about procrastination. Sit down and start the clock and then do a real world assessment of when is the homework done. So over the course of four hours, I get very little done. Or in the middle, you sit down and actually start doing some work and so you set a second timer. You set a second timer and for 15 minutes I'm working, how much time did I, how much did I get done?

So it'll be a little bit dynamic when I work with people there isn't like a one size fits all solution. One thing that I find is that like using a calendar for big blocks of time, and an actual timer when you sit down is very, very helpful for like small blocks of time. So as we take measurements, what we're going to do is we're going to be feeding our senses. And this is the beautiful thing. When you feed your senses, your brain is going to learn on its own. So the problem here is that your brain doesn't have access to this internal clock from your super chasmatic nucleus. And so the super chiasmatic nucleus is connecting to your frontal lobes.

Let's say here's our hypothalamus somewhere over here. Here's our frontal lobes. These guys are trying to plan a day. This is our clock. Now, this guy normally talks to the frontal lobes. And it gives it information. It's not about right or wrong. It automatically is giving information.

The more information you feed to your frontal lobes, the easier it is to plan. Does that make sense? Like, the more data the frontal lobes have, the easier it is to make plans. So if I make, you know, if I make five measurements and then over time I spend a year practicing homework and then five years doing homework and then 10 years doing homework, then I'll figure out how long it takes for me to do homework.

Does that make sense? The more information we give our frontal lobes, the better they perform. Now, here's the problem in ADHD. We don't have this. So the frontal lobes are trying to plan without any info. So what we want to do is we want to take this bad boy the thalamus and we're going to use this to feed the frontal lobes. It doesn't matter.

It can be like low quality information. The more info you give it, the frontal lobes will do their job. They will start to make estimates. They will correct their estimates. So it'll make an estimate. You sit down tomorrow. You try to do it. It turns out that it's off.

You're off. You underestimated by 50%. The next day you overestimate by 50%. The next day you underestimate by 25%. The next day you overestimate by 25%. So as long as you continue feeding the thalamus, right? again and again and again, your estimates will improve over time. And this is what neurotypical people do on their own because the super-chaismatic nucleus

is doing it for them. They don't need this external scaffolding. Now, the second thing that we need to talk about, so remember we said that a healthy relationship with time involves some amount of internal clock and some amount of external clock. So if I'm neurotypical, you know, my brain can keep track of some things and I need to use an alarm some. If you've got ADHD, your internal clock is going to be.

impaired, but your sensory sensitivity is going to be higher. And our, so we're going to have to rely on external time signals, external trackers of time to help us out. So this is where calendars, reminders, you know, I use alarms all the time. Like, even when I'm like procrastinating, I'll use an alarm. So I have a 20 minute timer set on my phone. That's my procrastination timer. So I'll set it, like, if I want to play like, you know, a video game for 20 more minutes. Like I'm, let's say I'm playing Eldon Ring. So I'll live. Literally what I'll do is like, I'll set a 20-minute timer and I'll be like, okay, I should start working now, but I'm going to set a 20-minute timer.

And then 20 minutes rolls around. I'm like, okay, like, that's enough. Like I really think about it. When you're like procrastinating, you don't want to start work, but when you really look back, it has been my experience. When you look back at the 20 minutes that you wasted, you're like, was this really worth it to waste this time? And the answer is always no.

The problem is that you don't have that step because you don't have that external anchor that's pulling you in and like actually helping you realize what that. hell you're doing. So we want to create an external scaffold of reminders, timers, calendars, et cetera. So those are the two things that we're going to focus on. And now I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Thorterson because she's going to give you all some awesome tips that she's taught a bunch of people who have time blindness, ADHD, and this is what really works for like larger populations in terms of skills building. Dr. Kay's idea of timing yourself is one of my favorite tips to better learn how to manage your time. You can do this by timing yourself for the

whole project or you can do it by timing yourself. and increments. Both strategies are helpful because it's really useful to know how long is it really going to take me to get something done. With ADHD, we look at tasks and we're like, oh my God, it's going to be so much work. And we overestimate how much effort and time it's going to take us, which ends up leading to lots of procrastination. I don't know how many things I've had to do on my to do list. I'm like, oh, it's going to take forever. It's going to take forever. I put it off for months. And then I get to it and it takes me 10 minutes. Do I learn from that? Not often. and these strategies can help, right? Because then instead of looking at that, I'm being like,

oh my God, it's going to take hours, I can look at a task and say, hey, I don't like that task, and it's only going to take me 15 minutes if I can just get it done. On the flip side, for tasks that do take longer periods of time, it can be really helpful to set smaller increments. Any two-hour task is going to be, at least in my opinion, a little bit overwhelming, to get started with. And so it's helpful for me to look at, okay, what can I get done in 10 minutes of time? So that way, it's easier for me to approach because I can think, oh, this is all that I need to do. Or you can think about, well, I only have 10 minutes right now. And 10 minutes is still a meaningful amount of productivity to be able to be kind of like working away at that bigger picture.

Learning how much time things takes us is much easier because when we think about what we need to get done, instead of thinking, oh, yeah, that's fast or, oh, that's going to take forever, I can think concretely about the amount of time. So instead of relying on my sometimes impaired internal clock, I'm relying on my logic and learning about the facts about how much time things are going to take me. Part of having ADHD is getting distracted. You can map out routines or tasks to the exact number of minutes that it's going to take you, and still almost every time, blow that time. And you think, yourself over and over, how is it that this took me an hour and a half when I knew it was supposed to take me an hour? And the reason for that is we didn't factor in any cushions for distractions.

So let's think about a specific routine, right? Morning routines, we all do it. We all have to get up, get ready, and get on with our days. We know exactly what we need to do every morning. It's a pretty predictable experience. And so you can break down that routine into really specific increments of time. It takes me how many minutes to get dressed, brush my teeth, wash my face, use the restroom, right? I love my electric toothbrush because it times it for me. I don't have to think about it. I just know it takes two minutes, two and a half minutes, right? I know exactly how many active minutes a morning routine takes me. However, every morning, without fail, I manage to get distracted too. So I'm doing something in, oh, look, a text message. Or I'm brushing my teeth and wait a second,

I don't, do I need to be doing something with my eyebrow? So we need those cushions to account for the fact that we can reliably expect ourselves to be distracted. So if you are somebody who gets mildly distracted or slightly off task, you might factor in like five, ten extra minutes of cushion into that morning routine. If you're someone who is real slow moving in the morning or someone who is really highly distracted or has a very distractible environment in the morning, you might build in more than more like 15 to 20 minutes. So often time blindness is so like excruciating or confusing for us that we get really focused on what we're

trying to do. And it's a lot of effort to stay focused and stay on track and go step to step to step. What we then think about afterwards is the impact it has downstream, right? And a lot of those times, those impacts are social in nature. So I get so distracted in my morning. I'm late every day, even though I try so hard. And what that ends up doing is creating resentments, or kind of like feelings in my coworkers. We needed you here on time. We needed you at the start of this meeting. That can generate anxiety in me.

I'm like, ah, what's it going to be like when I get to work? I'm not sure if I'm doing this well. We can also think about tasks around the house that take a lot of time or more time than we're anticipated. And then we have frustrated partners and roommates. We can think about social events, right? Where we're expected to be somewhere at the start of an event or we made dinner reservations for 6.30.

So we get there at 645 or 7. And now we have a really frustrated and probably pretty hungry party of friends who are kind of like, why did I invite you in the first place, Dr. Michaela, right? Time blindness is hard in and of itself for us, but then layering on top of that, the people creates all these complicated ripples for us. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe.

Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.