Sharon Collon is an award-winning PCC Credentialed ADHD coach, parenting expert, and founder of The Functional Family, where she has supported over 40,000 families to move from daily chaos to connection, function, and fun. She hosts the ADHD Families Podcast and, as a mum of three boys with ADHD, she understands the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it in the moment.

Inside this guest post, Sharon breaks down why ADHD families don’t need to try harder, they need to try differently, and shares the practical, real-life systems that actually work at home when traditional strategies keep falling apart.

I am a mother of three boys with ADHD. I have also spent years working alongside more than 40,000 families who are navigating exactly what you are navigating. I know this terrain from the inside.

And I know that voice. The one that says if you just tried harder, it would be different. That voice is wrong.

What I know, with absolute certainty, is that you do not have a trying hard enough problem.

You have a systems mismatch.

Most parenting strategies were never designed for ADHD brains. They assume children can hold instructions in working memory, regulate emotions on demand, and transition smoothly when asked. They assume the parent has capacity left to stay consistent.

That is a strategy designed for a different family. And you have been exhausting yourself trying to make it work in yours.

The Real Problem No One Names

ADHD parents know what to do. The challenge is doing it in the moment.

It has nothing to do with laziness or inconsistency. ADHD affects executive function and emotional regulation in both children and parents. And those are the exact skills you need to apply what you know, in real time, under pressure, on a Tuesday morning when no one has eaten breakfast yet and you have conflict explosions going off like landmines.

So the gap looks like this. You know you should stay calm, but your nervous system is already flooded. You know you should be consistent, but you are running on broken sleep. You know you should follow through, but you have already repeated yourself five times and the patience is gone.

There is also a mean girl who lives in most of our heads. The one who narrates every hard moment: you are doing this wrong, you are too reactive, you should know better by now. She keeps us over-functioning, hypervigilant, and burning through the last of our reserves.

She is not helping. And she is not right.

You need to try differently. And that is what shifts you from exhaustion to change.

The ADHD Family System workshop by Sharon

A free 60-minute live session for parents of kids with ADHD. You build one page together that maps your week, names what is really going on underneath the hard moments, and points to the one change that makes everything else easier. No cost, no catch, just bring a pen.

Save a free seat here: https://www.thefunctionalfamily.com/system

What 40,000 Families Have Taught Me

The families who see real, lasting change are not the ones who do more. They are the ones who shift the system around them to work for them.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. Start With the Environment

Move the thing the battle is about to where the action happens.

When a parent first comes to me, they almost always lead with behaviour. “He won’t listen.” “She melts down every afternoon.” “Nothing I try sticks.” And I understand why. Behaviour is what you see. But nine times out of ten, when I ask them to walk me through their mornings or afternoons in detail, what I find is an environment full of invisible friction points that nobody has ever addressed. The behaviour is the symptom. The environment is where the work starts.

Your home environment is never neutral. It is either making things easier or harder for your family. And the beautiful thing about environmental change is that it works before the moment even arrives. No one needs to be regulated for it to function.

Example: If your child cannot find their school shoes every morning and it turns into a daily battle, this is now a predictable friction point and we can start redesigning. It may be something as simple as changing the school shoes to live in the car so they are always there when you need them.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems,” James Clear. So we are better trialling and discovering what systems work for us, rather than setting goals.

2. Look for Barriers

Bring the task to your child, not your child to the task.

When you want to encourage your child to do an action, remove every barrier between your child and doing it. You are designing the path of least resistance.

One pattern I see constantly in families is that the task itself is actually fine. It is the steps to get to the task that have broken down. A child who will not brush their teeth is often not refusing the teeth brushing. They are refusing the trip back upstairs, the interruption to what they were doing, the ambiguity of when it needs to happen. When we remove those barriers, the resistance almost always drops.

Example: The barrier is your child having to go back upstairs to brush their teeth. So you both decide the toothbrush now lives in the centre of the dining table to brush teeth straight after meals. Barrier removed by design.

3. Give Every Task a Definite End

Tell them exactly what “done” looks like before they start.

ADHD brains struggle with open-ended, ambiguous tasks. “When is this done?” is genuinely difficult to answer when your working memory and sense of time are variable.

Visuals help with this, but not for the reason most people think. A visual schedule is a contract. It defines what done looks like, which is the thing ADHD brains need most.

Do not stack the next task on the moment you see movement. One task, one end point, then the next.

Example: Ambiguous instruction of “clean room.” Place a hula hoop over some items (or better yet, ask your child to throw it). And say for example “put away the lego inside the hula hoop.” Definite end.

4. Not Every Boundary Needs to Be Held

Pick the three battles that matter. Drop the rest.

One of the most common traps I see in families is holding too many battles at once, and I see it across the board, from exhausted first-timers to parents who have been doing this for years.

When everything is a boundary, nothing lands. Children become desensitised to constant correction, and parents exhaust the very reserves they need for the moments that actually matter.

Decide what truly matters in your home. Hold those things. Let the rest go without guilt.

Example: When my kids were young we used to battle about sitting at the dinner table when eating. When I actually broke this rule down, it is not even something I care about. Why was I letting this be a point of friction every day. It was not a hill I was prepared to die on. It was a boundary I was holding because it was important to other people but not actually to me. So we let that one go because we have more important boundaries to hold that are in line with my family’s values.

That is strategic parenting.

5. Repair Matters More Than Perfection

Build a repair phrase when you’re calm. Use it when you’re not.

Every family ruptures. Every parent loses patience, says the wrong thing, or misses what their child needed in a moment.

The measure of a healthy family is how reliably it repairs.

I have worked with so many parents who carry enormous guilt about their hard moments, and I always tell them the same thing. The repair is the work. A parent who repairs well is doing more for their child’s sense of security than a parent who never cracks but never comes back either.

Example: Practise a repair phrase with your child during a calm moment, not a crisis one. Something simple. In our house it might be: “Can we reset?” On a hard day when you have nothing left, you do not have to construct an apology from scratch. You just say the phrase. The repair ritual does the rest. You built it when you had capacity, so it works when you don’t.

6. Success Leaves Clues

Catch the moments that already work. Build them into the rhythm.

Pay attention to where your family already works. What time of day. What kind of activity. Inside or outside. Together or separately. Those moments are not accidents. They are data.

This is one of my favourite questions to ask in a first session: “Tell me about a time recently when things actually went well.” Most parents have to think hard. The moments are there, but we are wired to catalogue the hard ones first. When we start paying attention to what works, patterns emerge fast.

Example: You notice your child is always more regulated after time outside. So you make it structural. After school, the sequence is always: shoes off in the car, straight to the backyard for a snack. No decision required each afternoon. No one has to remember to suggest it. It is just what happens next. You followed the clue once, built it into the rhythm, and now the rhythm carries it.

Here Is What I Want You to Know

You are working incredibly hard with strategies designed for a different kind of brain, a different kind of family, a different kind of morning.

The problem was never your effort.

When you shift the system, things change. Because you finally have something that actually fits.

I hope this post gave you some ideas to try in your own home. Even one shift in the right place can change the shape of a morning.

💬 This week’s question

Name the boundary you keep holding because it matters to someone else, never to you.

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You poured your coffee and stood in the doorway looking at all of it.

It’s a quarter to noon now. The coffee’s gone cold beside you and you’re still in the chair. You haven’t opened a single box, and it isn’t for lack of time or energy, you have the whole day ahead of you.

Every time you settled on a place to start, the next thing felt just as important, so you moved to that one instead, and the morning went and nothing got done.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called Where to Start When Everything Feels Urgent. It gives you a simple way to pick one job to start with when they all feel the same, so you can get going instead of losing hours to it.

Why you couldn’t just pick one

To start something, your brain first has to pick which task to do. It does that by figuring out which one matters most right now. Most days this happens on its own and you just get going.

Some days it doesn’t.

In our brains, the part that figures out which job matters most doesn’t work as well. It has a hard time telling the jobs apart by how much they matter, so they all feel about the same. The garage, the filing cabinet, the boxes, the photos, none of them stands out as the one to do first.

When nothing stands out as most important, you can’t choose one, and if you can’t choose, you can’t start.

You get stuck at the very first step, choosing which job to do, before you even touch a box. That’s why “just push through it” never helped. Pushing harder does nothing when the thing you’re stuck on is the choice itself.

Announcement: Our Get Sh*t Done (body doubling) calls are back.

Every weekday morning at 11am Eastern, 45 minutes on Substack Live. Nobody can see you. You are a name and a task on a screen, and knowing everyone else is working is the whole trick.

Add the sessions to your calendar, so you don’t forget:

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In this worksheet, you’ll set up a simple way to choose one job to start with, so the next time everything feels the same you already know your move.

It pairs with this week’s newsletter on why you can’t pick where to start when every job feels just as important.

Walk away with one clear first job and a go-to way to pick it, so you don’t lose another day to a list you couldn’t start. Takes 5 minutes.

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The doctor goes through what she’s been like.

She loses her homework between her bag and the kitchen table. She falls apart when a plan changes. She starts one thing, forgets it halfway, and moves to another.

You nod along, but somewhere around the third item your chest goes tight, because the doctor is describing your granddaughter and describing you as a kid in the same breath.

While the adults talk, your granddaughter folds a corner of paper into smaller and smaller squares. You know that itch in your own hands. You did the same thing your whole life, in every waiting room, because you could never just sit still.

You’d started to suspect it before today. When the school first suggested testing her, you read up on ADHD, and a lot of it sounded like you.

But reading it late at night is one thing. Hearing a doctor say it out loud, about a kid you love, is another.

The main thing you feel is glad. She’s getting help now, while she’s young. She’ll grow up knowing what this is, instead of thinking she’s lazy or careless or not trying hard enough, the way you did.

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There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called What Changed Around Fifty. It walks you through what got harder and when, so you can see that it all started around menopause, instead of feeling like one more thing you failed at.

Why it got harder

Our brains run low on dopamine, the chemical that helps us start things, stick with them, and feel like they are worth doing. What almost no one explains is that estrogen had been helping that dopamine work. You can see it in women without ADHD too: as estrogen rises and falls across the month, their drive rises and falls with it, which means that for most of your life, estrogen was adding to a dopamine supply that was already low.

Around menopause, estrogen drops and stays low, so the help it was giving your dopamine drops too, and you were already running low to begin with. The researchers who study ADHD in women describe it like this: when estrogen falls in a brain that is already low on dopamine, the two shortfalls make each other worse. The habits that kept you on top of things for thirty years were leaning on that estrogen, so once it was gone, they stopped working.

Researchers think this is the best explanation for why so many women with ADHD hit a wall at this stage. No one has run the study that follows women with ADHD all the way through menopause, so it is not proven yet. But one thing is clear: the trouble started when menopause did.

From our members

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Things to try

You can’t get the estrogen back by trying harder, so these work with the brain you have now.

1. Re-date it 🥄

Think of one thing that used to be automatic and now takes real effort: keeping everyone’s appointments straight, walking into a room and remembering why you went in, running the week without writing anything down. Put a rough date on when it got hard, and for a lot of women it lines up with the hot flashes and the broken sleep. Once you can point to when it started, it stops feeling like proof that you are getting worse.

2. Protect the sleep menopause is taking 🥄🥄

The night sweats that wake you at 3am steal the next day’s focus, and poor sleep makes every ADHD symptom worse right when menopause is hardest on your sleep. Pick the one change that could buy you thirty more minutes: a cooler room, the phone charging in another room, a wind-down routine you stick to. If the night sweats keep waking you, ask your doctor about them, because better sleep gives you back the next day.

3. Ask about hormone therapy 🥄🥄🥄

Hormone therapy is the one option here with real evidence behind it. It works on the menopause symptoms that are making everything harder, the hot flashes, the broken sleep, the mood swings, which frees up some of your focus. Doctors who treat both will often add it rather than change your ADHD medication.

The catch is timing. It helps most when it is started within about ten years of menopause, so if you are near the change it is worth asking about, and if that window has passed, a doctor who knows your history can tell you what fits instead. Bring the pattern you have been noticing and ask.

This week’s Apply It worksheet

By the end of this worksheet, you will have it written down: what got harder, when it started, and how it lines up with menopause. The next time you catch yourself thinking you have gone downhill, you can look at it and see what happened. Takes 5 minutes.

See what changed

Partner Perspective

If someone close to you thinks you just stopped trying, tell them what changed: estrogen used to help your brain focus, and menopause lowered your estrogen, so focusing got harder even though you are trying just as hard as ever.

This week’s question

What’s the thing you chalked up to getting older, before anyone gave you another reason?

Leave a comment

Each week, one comment wins a $25 USD Amazon gift card.

How did you enjoy our newsletter today?

LOVED IT 😍

Was okayy 🙂

Could be better 😶

If this read helped you, pass it on: a like, comment, restack, or share helps more ADHDers feel understood and less alone :)

In this worksheet, you write down what got harder and roughly when, line it up against the changes your body was going through, and pick one or two things that fit the brain you have now. You also come away with a short summary ready to take to your doctor.

(Pairs with today’s newsletter, Why Everything Got Harder Around 50.)

See what changed around menopause, and stop carrying it as one more thing you failed at. Takes 5 minutes.

What Changed Around Fifty

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Sort out what menopause changed from what has always been you, and find what helps.

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As always, THANK YOU for reading, sharing, and supporting this work every week. We’re so grateful to have you here.

Datrie Allman is a nervous system educator, theta meditation practitioner of 6+ years, and the creator of FulfilledSoul, where she teaches subconscious reprogramming through somatic healing and brainwave work. After healing her own chronic anxiety and digestive issues through nervous system regulation, she wrote Safe to Receive, a guide to releasing the old programming that keeps us stuck and becoming safe enough to let a new life in. Her work has reached millions across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Inside this guest post, Datrie breaks down why understanding your ADHD isn’t enough to release the shame underneath, and what your nervous system actually needs instead. Her partner Christian (ADHD diagnosed) used a 90-second morning practice to shift the belief at its root, and Datrie walks through exactly how he started.

If you were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, there’s a very high chance you spent years wondering what was wrong with you before anyone gave it a name. It might be forgotten tasks, or the paralysis before a simple email or text. Or an inner shame spiral after another “I’ll do it tomorrow” that turns into never getting it done.

By the time you finally got the diagnosis, you’d already spent decades telling yourself you were lazy, broken, or just not trying hard enough. I don’t have ADHD, but I know that loop intimately.

I had anxiety being birthed out of the womb, or so my mother would tell me. From as early as 7 years old I remember the anxious thoughts and the gut-wrenching feeling deep in my stomach. Thoughts like: “But what if something bad happens.”

When I got diagnosed with anticipatory anxiety, the label almost made it worse: “Why can’t I just calm down. Just breathe, just BE NORMAL for once.” The diagnosis led to more anxious thoughts that endlessly looped into each other. I spent years trapped in this cycle.

Studying neuroscience and the nervous system, I learned something that finally cracked the loop open. From ages 1 to 7, our brainwaves are in theta. This is the “sponge” state, where we absorb everything around us and form our worldviews about ourselves and the world.

What we witnessed most in our parents (their words, the feelings they projected at themselves and at us) got sponged into our little nervous systems. This formed our subconscious mind. After age 7, we shift out of theta into alpha, then beta as we get older.

My subconscious beliefs were rooted in anxiety:

• Everyone is judging you

• The world is not safe

• You’re way too sensitive

For my partner Christian (ADHD diagnosed), his thoughts sounded more like:

• I’m lazy

• Why can’t I just do the thing

• Everyone else can handle this

Different statements but the same mechanism: beliefs and identity statements installed before the conscious mind had any say.

A diagnosis brings understanding, yes. But understanding alone doesn’t reach the body, which is where the belief is actually stored.

After my diagnosis, I read every article I could find and traced every family member running the same script of anxiety. But awareness didn’t change the felt experience. Positive thinking only made it worse, every affirmation felt fake to my body, because I had never actually experienced those positive thoughts. My nervous system rejected them as a lie.

To release those beliefs, I had to get back into the state I picked them up in: theta brainwaves, a receptive, open-to-suggestion state of mind.

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This used to make you laugh. You’re 65 now, and it stopped being funny.

You’ve started keeping track of them: the word that wouldn’t come at dinner, the appointment you forgot until they called to cancel, the neighbor’s name gone a second too long. And underneath it all, the thought you don’t say out loud: what if this is how it starts.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called The Forgetting You’ve Always Done. It helps you see whether the forgetting scaring you now is the same kind you’ve had all along, so you can stop reading every blank as a warning.

What’s going on when you forget

To hold a thought in your mind, you have to keep your attention on it, and in ADHD holding it there is harder. A thought you had a second ago can drop before you act on it. You stood up to get something in the kitchen, your attention moved to something else on the way, and by the time you got there the reason was gone.

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In this worksheet, you’ll put your own forgetting next to the kind that’s worth a second look, and see which one you’re dealing with.

It pairs with this week’s newsletter on telling ADHD forgetting from the kind you’re afraid of.

See whether the forgetting that scares you is the same kind you’ve always had, and stop turning every blank into a warning. Takes 5 minutes.

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She has no idea. To most people, even the ones closest to you, you’re the one who has it handled. You’ve been holding it together so long you barely notice you’re doing it anymore.

The version that got better reactions

The mask started early, not on purpose. You noticed that people responded better to a certain version of you, the one who showed up prepared, who laughed off forgetting instead of freezing, who said “I’m great” fast enough that nobody looked twice.

You practiced that version for decades. We learned to cover the gaps before anyone could see them, to have the answer ready, to make the outside match what everyone expected.

And they worked.

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The list by the coffee pot has three things on it. It’s had the same three things for a month. You keep meaning to start, and then the day’s over and nothing got done.

For thirty years you ran a department. A dozen things went wrong before lunch and you handled every one of them. People came to you when everything fell apart, and you were the one who kept it together.

Now there’s nothing on the calendar and no one waiting on you, and you can’t make yourself start the first thing on a list of three.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called What Was Holding You Up. It shows you why the open days feel so much harder than the busy ones ever did, and helps you put a piece of that structure back, so they stop getting away from you.

Why the empty days are the hard part

The work was never only keeping you busy. The deadlines, the schedule, the people who needed something from you by Friday, all of it was doing the one thing an ADHD brain finds hardest: deciding what comes first, when to start, and how to keep yourself moving through the day. For most of your working life the world outside you handled that part, and you were free to be good at everything else.

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In this worksheet you’ll see how much of your structure was coming from the outside, what went missing when work did, and pick one piece to put back so the open days stop getting away from you.

It pairs with this week’s newsletter on why retirement was supposed to be the easy part.

Make sense of why the open days got so hard, and put one piece of your structure back so they stop getting away from you. Takes 5 minutes.

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Amy Marie Hann is an ADHD mom of three raising kids with ADHD, and she has spent the last five years helping moms with ADHD find structure, calm, and genuine confidence in their everyday lives. She is the creator of Master the Mundane, a step-by-step system and support community that helps moms with ADHD manage their home, energy, and daily life in a way that actually works for their brain. She also offers Bye Bye Burnout for moms who are too exhausted to even know where to start. Amy writes weekly at ADHD and Motherhood on Substack and has 195,000+ followers on Instagram.

Inside this guest post, Amy shares the three things she wishes someone had told her about ADHD postpartum, from a mom who has been through it twice and coached thousands of women through it since.

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A couple of years ago you went looking for why everything felt like more effort for you than it seemed to take everyone else, and the ADHD diagnosis explained a lot of it. It didn’t quiet the voice, though. That still talks to you the way it always has, and part of you has started to wonder whether an answer that came this late can change how you see yourself.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called Where That Voice Came From. It helps you hear whose voice your inner critic really is, so the things it says stop landing like the truth about you.

Your brain never stops changing

That v…

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In this worksheet, you’ll trace that harsh voice back to where it came from, and find an easier way to be on your own side, whether it goes quiet today or not.

It pairs with this week’s newsletter on why the voice in your head is older than your diagnosis.

Make sense of where the self-blame came from, and the cruel things the voice says start to lose their grip. Takes 5 minutes.

Where That Voice Came From

373KB ∙ PDF file

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A look at whose voice your inner critic really is, and why it's not too late for it to soften.

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As always, THANK YOU for reading, sharing, and supporting this work every week. We’re so grateful to have you here.

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An envelope from your insurance company has been on the kitchen counter for three weeks, unopened. You could deal with it in less time than you just spent on the phone. You know exactly what it needs, and you walk past it every day.

Knowing exactly what to do and still not doing it is the part you can’t explain to yourself.

Smart enough to watch it happen

People keep telling you you’re smart. Teachers said it, bosses have said it, your partner has said it mid-argument, and it didn’t land the way they thought it would. Because when someone says you’re so smart while you’re staring at a task you’ve been avoiding for nine days, what you hear is: so what’s your excuse.

The intelligence doesn’t help us start the task. It only helps us understand, in perfect detail, that we should be able to. We can see every step and the deadline coming, and still feel the gap between what we know and what we’re doing about it grow wider every hour we sit there.

Most people who struggle get the small mercy of not understanding why. We get clarity instead. We watch ourselves not do it, narrating the whole thing as it happens. You’re doing it again. You know this is due tomorrow. You know you’ll feel better once you start. Why are you still sitting here.

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You hold it for a second, then fold it back over the hanger and tell yourself you’ll deal with it another day. The donation bag goes out one cardigan short, the same as last time.

At the end of this newsletter there’s a 5-minute worksheet called What Your Stuff Is Holding. It helps you understand why letting go feels so hard, and find a gentler way to keep the memories so the guilt around the full closet starts to lift.

Why you can’t put it in the bag

For years you’ve put this down to being sentimental, a bit of a pack rat, someone who’s just bad at letting things go, though none of that is the real reason. The cardigan is holding onto a piece of her, and that is why it never makes it into the bag.

The things we keep end up carrying our history: the trip you took, your kids when they were small, the people you’ve lost. An object stops being just an object and becomes where a piece of your past is kept, tied to the people you love and to who you are. That is why putting the cardigan in the bag feels so much bigger than clearing space. Giving it away can feel like losing a piece of her, and a piece of yourself.

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In this worksheet, you’ll look at what the things you can’t part with are holding for you, and find a way to keep the memory that loosens the guilt, whether you ever let the object go or not.

It pairs with this week’s newsletter on why letting go of one small thing can feel like losing a piece of yourself.

Make sense of why you can’t let these things go, and find a gentler way to keep the memories without the guilt. Takes 5 minutes.

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Lynne Edris is a Productivity & ADHD Coach and co-host of the award-winning ADHD Support Talk podcast. For more than 20 years, she’s helped overwhelmed professionals close the gap between what they intend to do and what actually gets done. You can take her free Productivity Breakthrough Quiz to uncover what’s really getting in your way.

Inside this guest post, Lynne breaks down why your best systems stop working at work, what's actually going on in the moment you stall, and how to tell the difference between a tools problem and something deeper.

You close your laptop, but you don’t really leave work. Because now it’s in your head. “I didn’t get to X.” “I should have done Y.” “So-and-so is going to ask me about Z tomorrow.”

So you’re home, but not really present. And if you’re like most professionals I’ve worked with over the last 20+ years, that’s where it starts to wear on you. Because you know you’re capable.

Here’s what I want you to understand. This usually isn’t a discipline issue. You’re probably trying to solve the wrong problem. And when the problem isn’t where you think it is, no solution will stick.

The real reason you’re not following through

Most people assume they need more focus, more motivation, or a better system. Sometimes those things help, for a while. But not all follow-through problems are the same.

They fall into two categories. External and Internal.

External causes are the structural things: an ineffective task or project management system, a calendar that doesn’t reflect reality, poor processes for planning and adjusting your time, environmental interruptions, lack of support. External problems need external solutions. Better systems, better tools, better strategies designed for the way you work.

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To everyone around you, you were the calm one, the dependable one, the person who always came through in the end. What they never saw was how much quiet worry it took to get you there, every time.

So when a doctor called it anxiety and wrote you a prescription, you believed them. The worry was real, it wore you out, and it never let up. It took you thirty years to start asking whether anxiety was ever the whole story.

There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called What Your Worry Was Doing. It takes you back through the times worry got you going and shows you what it was doing for you, so the next time it hits you’ll know what you’re looking at.

What the worry was doing

There’s a reason the boring things never got done until you were panicking about them. Our brains run under-stimulated, short on the everyday alertness most people have without trying, so an ordinary task with no urgency just doesn’t hold our attention. It can sit on the list for weeks while you do everything around it.

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