When you finish a task or leave a meeting, do you find yourself needing time to sit and process before moving to your next task?
Do you find yourself spending a few minutes in your car before getting out to go inside whereever you’ve arrived to?
In a culture that promotes relentless time optimization and utility, these pauses can feel like “wasted time” — leading to self-shaming and judgment about being “inefficient” and not “getting enough done.”
But it’s actually the opposite: that transition time is necessary to maintaining high performance, especially for people with ADHD.
Transition time is crucial for decompressing, processing, and switching gears. It’s also a vital strategy for maintaining self-regulation, avoiding burnout, and lowering emotional reactivity.
Heaping shame on yourself for needing buffer time between activities can actually contribute to the cognitive and emotional overload that the transition time is meant to address.
3 Ways to Reframe Your Decompression Time
Here are 3 ways to reframe your decompression time to help you come into acceptance of your needs.
(1) A Necessary Recharge
Because of deficits in executive function, people with ADHD expend more effort than neurotypical people to manage attention, emotions, and behavior, and to self-regulate. These activities are a cognitive “heavy lift.” Just like in the weight room, a heavy lift requires a brief rest period after to recharge your energy.
(2) Transition Time
The brain needs time to disengage from one task and prepare for the next, a process called “task switching.” This is true even for neurotypical people. For ADHDers, this transition time can take 10 to 20 minutes — one reason that interruptions can be so expensive for the ADHD brain.
Without this transition time, the system becomes overloaded and confused, making the brain ineffective and contributing to increased fatigue and burnout.
(3) Prevent System Crashing
ADHD brains are like a light switch without a dimmer setting. We’re either fully on or fully off — no middle ground. In practice, this can look like extreme hyperfocus mode in one moment and catatonic in another moment.
Like race a car with faulty brakes, we tend to go full speed until we crash and burn out. Creating transition time between activities prevents this crashing and burnout.
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