ADHD in Summer: Why the Chaos Hits Moms Harder

How Summer Secretly Wrecks Your ADHD Brain

School's out, routines are gone, and if your ADHD brain feels extra chaotic right now, you're not lazy — you're just missing the structure summer quietly stole from you. In this episode of the Sane Mom Summer series, Caitlin breaks down why ADHD symptoms intensify in summer and shares real, low-effort supports that actually help.

Who Should Listen

• Moms with ADHD (diagnosed or self-suspected) who feel more scattered, emotional, or overstimulated once summer hits

• Parents managing shifting routines, camp schedules, and loosened structure

• Anyone in the Not Quite Grown Up "Sane Mom Summer" series looking for practical, non-glamorous coping tools

• Listeners who feel shame around not "enjoying summer enough"

Chapters / Timestamps

• 00:00 Summer ADHD Hits Hard

• 00:58 Welcome to Sane Mom Summer

• 02:09 Why Summer Derails Routines

• 02:58 ADHD Symptoms Turn Up

• 03:36 Guilt and Shame Spirals

• 05:23 Acceptance Over Self Blame

• 07:31 Simplify the Moving Parts

• 08:11 Visual Reminders That Work

• 09:15 Add Light Daily Structure

• 09:40 Start Small Before Motivation

• 10:50 Low Stakes Support Systems

• 12:28 Wrap Up and Next Episode

What You Get In This Episode

• A reframe for ADHD shame: scattered ≠ lazy—it means your brain needs different supports, not more willpower

• Why summer specifically wrecks ADHD coping mechanisms (hint: it's the missing structure, not you)

• The "acceptance before action" mindset, borrowed from an unexpected source (Amanda Knox)

• Five concrete, unglamorous tools: visible reminders, external structure, task-shrinking, action-before-motivation, and low-stakes systems (baskets, checklists, snack bins, alarms)

• Permission to stop chasing motivation and just start the smallest possible step

Host Bio

Caitlin Kindred is the host of Not Quite Grownup, a podcast for moms navigating the gap between who they're "supposed" to be and the messy, real version of adulthood. Diagnosed with ADHD at 38, she brings that lens to episodes like this one, talking openly about what actually helps rather than what's supposed to.

Sources & Mentions

• Sane Mom Summer series:

  • Episode 205 — Lowering the standard for summer

  • Episode 206 — Confidence

  • Episode 207 — Not letting the internet dictate your summer

  • Episode 208 (this one) — ADHD in summer mode

Next episode

Back-to-school without the mommy meltdown...

Read this Episode's Full Transcript

Caitlin: [00:00:00] One of my least favorite things about summer is that it somehow makes my ADHD symptoms feel, I guess, louder, more intense. It's just another layer of insanity on top of everything else, which is honestly just rude. Because I'm already the, you know, where are my keys? Why did I come in here? How is it 4:17 already kind of person.

And then you add this whole, uh, layer of like loosey-goosey summer vibes, and now I can't remember which camp my child is at or what time it closes and when I need to be there to pick him up, which is a problem, obviously, as a parent. For the record, my husband does remember, but it's hard when it's my day to pick him up.

Welcome back to Not Quite Grown Up.

[00:01:00] I'm Caitlin, and this is the podcast for moms who are just trying to keep it together every day with their watered-down iced coffee and, I don't know, vibes. This is my Sane Mom Summer series, which is basically just me trying to make the season more livable for me, uh, and a lot less like some sort of personality test that I've failed.

If you are new to the party, episode one in this series is about kinda lowering the standard for what summer needs to be. Episode two was about confidence. Three was about not letting the internet kind of dictate what your summer is supposed to be. But today I'm talking about my ADHD, probably yours too if you have it, in summer mode.

Because when that structure that you need disappears, a lot of brains kind of go haywire, right? So if you have ADHD and you're dealing with [00:02:00] those summer vibes, your brain probably feels a little off, and you're not imagining it. It's happening to a lot of us.

Summer changes everything, right? School is out.Problem number one, routines are loosened. Meals start to happen at weird times. Uh, bedtime gets pushed back and forth, and gets just fuzzy in general, especially if you're going on trips. Every day just starts to feel a little bit more unanchored. And that's annoying for everyone, right?

Or can be. But for someone like me with an ADHD brain, and again, someone else with ADHD, probably like you, it sort of feels like whatever supports normally hold the day together kind of vanished once that final school bell rang. So for [00:03:00] me, my tendencies to forget the things that I told myself to do three minutes ago, or start five things, finish none of them, or, I don't know, lose track of time in a way that makes my husband absolutely insane and other people find incredibly rude.

Um, somehow feel bored and overstimulated at the same time. That's a fun one. Or get weirdly emotional about something that's normally not that big of a deal, like when I can dish it out, but I can't take it. All of that is now worse over the summer, and it's compounded by guilt, because you're supposed to be, quote, unquote, "enjoying summer."

Dude, that's so much. It's a lot to handle.

So if you're not enjoying summer, you're not bad at it. You're just trying to run a brain that depends on [00:04:00] structure, that relies on structure, even though it gets bored with structure, in a season that is re- revered, reviled, I don't know what the word is, in a season that is celebrated, because it naturally removes most structure.

And because we live in this world where productivity is morality, for whatever reason, I think we're pivoting away from that, but it still exists. You start telling yourself that you're scattered and that means you're lazy or you're careless or disorganized or you're just not trying hard enough, even though you know that's not actually the case.

You're shame spiraling, right? And, and we've talked about this before, where shame is just sneaky because it makes you think that the problem is your character rather than the environment you're in. [00:05:00] ADHD and character are not the same thing. ADHD is not a character flaw. It can be hard to do things that adults do because of ADHD, but that doesn't mean you're failing at being an adult.

It just means that your brain needs different supports. We've talked about this over and over again. What works for other people doesn't work for you.

So for me anyway, I have to remind myself that the goal is to make life easier for the person that I am, and not the person that I think I'm supposed to be. So instead of asking myself, "How do I force myself to do summer better?" It's, "What would help my brain function better in this summer season?" I think that's a much saner question.[00:06:00]

It's kinder, right? It's a, it's a nicer question. Because anyone with ADHD already feels shame all the time. You're always feeling that way. And, and if you have ADHD, you know that you can't shame yourself into being more organized or less reactive. But over time, you can train yourself to come from a place of acceptance, right?

Because that's when you can start building the kind of supports that actually work for yourself. And I, I heard this on a, a podcast, um, It was Amanda Knox in an interview, and she was saying that when she was dealing with her ordeal being in Italian prison, she accepted where she was.

And I think a lot of people equate acceptance with giving up, and she, she was very clear about saying, "Acceptance doesn't mean giving up. It just [00:07:00] means facing the reality of where I was, and knowing that when I understood the reality of where I was, I could take the next step forward."

And I think that's what I'm talking about here, is coming from a place of acceptance and understanding that summer is a space and a time where your routines are messed up and your brain is going to be fuzzier than normal. And then creating additional supports around yourself.

So some of those additional supports, for me anyway, look like simplifying things.

Fewer moving parts. It's already a crazy time. Again, I j- I just told you, I don't sometimes, sometimes I don't remember which camp my son is at, and he's at the same one for the remainder of the summer. Like I, I have to think about where he is. So even that change in [00:08:00] structure has thrown me. So as many parts that I can hold stationary, I'm going to. Fewer moving parts.

Visible reminders. If it has to exist in my brain only, it will not stay there. It will be gone 12 minutes later. So doing random things to help yourself remember. For example, if I lock the door at my house when I leave, I will say, "Ooh, I locked the door." Or "Ooh, I closed the garage."

Something silly. Sometimes if I'm sitting at my desk and I think of something and I need to remember it later, I'll pick up something off my desk and I'll throw it into the middle of the floor so that when I turn around, there's something on the floor, and I'm like, "Why is that thing on the floor? Why is there, why, why is there a pen on the floor in the middle of this giant carpet?"[00:09:00]

And then I'm like, "Oh, wait, it's because I needed to remember that one thing." Visual reminders are helpful. And I don't just mean like sticky notes. Those help, but if you cover them up, they disappear, right? Don't do that.

Building any kind of external structure whenever I can. So maybe that's a loose rhythm for the day or recurring meal plans. Even that might help, right? Taco Tuesday. Come up with something that's going to hold a little bit of structure in place for you.

Make a task smaller than your resistance. So cleaning the kitchen, for example. If that feels impossible, maybe the first step is empty the dish rack. Like, the, the clean, dry [00:10:00] dishes that I stack there when I'm emptying the dishwasher, maybe the first step is just put the dish rack dishes away.

And then if more comes of it, great, but if not, then that's okay. You only said you were gonna do that one thing anyway. And along those lines, for the love of all things sane, stop expecting your motivation to show up first. It, it often doesn't, especially for an ADHD brain. I can sit here and say, "Oh my God, I'm so sick of myself," all day long and still do nothing about it, and that's because for an ADHD person, sometimes the action has to come before the motivation.

It's kind of like a, a hyperfixation, like you hy- you hyperfocus on something once you start it .

You can also consider some sort of low stakes support things. Um, for example, like a basket for random summer stuff. One [00:11:00] basket. You probably already have a basket. If you're an ADHD person, you have a basket sitting around with nothing in it.

Don't go buy another one. You don't need it, okay? You probably have an abundance. Put all the summer stuff in there.

If you haven't already put together a basket for all the keys and the sunglasses and other tiny objects that are likely to disappear, do that. Again, simple checklists for mornings or outings. I don't care how tacky it makes your door look, if a little, like, printed- out sign from Canva stuck to the back of your door helps you remember things, especially in summer, do that.

Like, for my son's camp, it's lunch, snacks, swimsuit, goggles, towel, change of clothes. That's very different from the school day routine, so I've had to write those things down and put them on sticky notes in places where I'll see them. If you're home with your kids, snack [00:12:00] bins so that they can go get their own snack.

Alarms that tell you what time it is. So that if your brain is kind of off in the middle of nowhere, you can come back to Earth. And again, it might be tacky, but none of it has to be glamorous. It just has to be useful, right? Just to keep yourself grounded during the summer.

Closing

Caitlin: So if you're like me and your brain just feels a little extra effed up, you're not behind and you're not doing anything wrong. You just need some more structure than this season naturally gives you, and it's totally okay. That's the whole point of a Sane Mom Summer. It's not to pretend that things are easy, it's just to see what in your life is making things more difficult, [00:13:00] and then make some thoughtful changes and decisions so that you're not fighting with yourself all day long

Next time we come together, I h- I, first of all, I hope that was a nice ADHD refresher. It's just been on my mind. But next time we're talking about back to school and going back to school without the meltdown for mom. Because summer, yes, is chaotic for sure. But so is that pivot back to the school year, and that's its own special kind of hellish chaos.

Anyway, join us for that. Us, me. Join me for that. Love you, mean it. See you next time. [00:14:00] Bye.