In winter 2022, when my ADHD burnout was at its peak, I stood in the health aisle at Publix ruminating over protein shakes. Thrown by the deaths of multiple loved ones, unhappy at work, processing the COVID-19 pandemic, and off my medication for a few days, I was beyond tired. Masking — pretending I was okay to appear “normal,” a classic neurodivergent coping mechanism — had exhausted me so much that I daydreamed about slipping into a coma. I felt like a skid mark on the road.
A jolt of electricity struck my brain, dark blobs clouded my vision, and I lurched forward, my hands reflexively cradling my temples. Then, back to life. Back to Publix. Back to protein shakes. My partner grabbed my hand, guided me to the checkout, and drove us home, where I waited for joy to return.
Usually at the grocery store, I’m excited and easily distracted, but that episode was an extreme example of burnout so intense it makes it impossible to stock a kitchen. It’s one of many real, distinct challenges that neurodivergent people face just to prepare dinner.
It took time — almost as long as it’s taken to write about this — to figure out how to circumnavigate my own wiring. For instance, ADHD makes mess a huge barrier to cooking, so I start cleaning before prepping a recipe; putting a kitchen towel underneath a cutting board helps catch stray bits of produce and helps me maintain momentum.
Margaret Eby, who is now deputy food editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and has edited and developed recipes for Food & Wine and Food52, relies on similar tricks to handle her ADHD.
“I think an enormous message in food media is: You’re doing something incorrectly. A professional chef does it this way, and therefore whatever your workaround is must be inherently inferior,” Eby says. But, she adds, “I don’t work in a Michelin-starred kitchen. My home kitchen is not the French Laundry.”
When she cooks, Eby — who is also the author of You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible — will clean up as she goes and set loud alarms so she doesn’t get distracted and let food burn. Those are deviations from the methods she learned in French culinary school, but they translate better to her everyday life. “Those systems [in culinary school] are a very old-school way of organizing back of house at a professional level, and I think that they’re a good model for a lot of places, but not [for] me, at home, realizing I need to make food because it is 4 p.m. and I am crying and I haven’t eaten yet.”
The professional kitchen — and all the rules it has created — is a fairly recent invention. People have been cooking and nourishing themselves however they want as long as people have existed. Though they may utilize hacks and workarounds, many neurodivergent chefs in particular have developed their own strategies to get food on the table and constructed kitchen environments that work for them.
Spencer Horovitz, of San Francisco pop-up Hadeem, also deals with ADHD. He relies heavily on kitchen timers to stay on task, a common tactic. He also keeps a flexible, plastic bowl scraper the size of a notecard in his apron pocket to literally brush distractions away.
“The bowl scraper helps me keep my cutting board clean,” he says. “It also keeps my knife sharp because I’m not dragging it against the cutting board [to clean it] every time and dulling the knife.”
Horovitz picked up his most ingenious trick, color-coded Post-it notes, working in the restaurant industry. He keeps stacks of sticky notes in his workspace, assigning tasks various colors based on the type or timing: pink (today), green (tomorrow), yellow (food orders), and orange (general notes). The system enables him to record thoughts without breaking away from the task at hand.
Ben Skolnick, executive sous chef at Boccalupo in Atlanta and half of Atlanta-based pop-up supper club Wick and Nick’s, implements what he calls “point-of-contact problem-solving.” He uses visual and auditory cues — timers, tape on pan handles, napkins placed over ingredients — as reminders to his future self.
He also sets himself up for success the day before cooking starts. “Despite every [instinct] to clean up and walk out the door [at the end of the day], you gotta write up a good prep list” for the following day, he says, “and start projects in an order that makes sense to your kitchen.”
Jessica Furniss, a food photographer and writer based in Birmingham, Alabama, relies on a number of kitchen tools to avoid overstimulation due to her autism.
“Food textures and smells first thing in the morning are extremely overstimulating for me,” she says. So she’s come to rely heavily on her high-powered blender. “I prep smoothies by adding fruit and vegetables into individual zip-top bags and then toss them in a blender with almond milk and yogurt, and I can have a very basic breakfast drink.”
Furniss also loves her stand mixer, which frees her from annoyances. “The cords and putting the right pieces in the right places” make operating a handheld mixer taxing, she says. Even something as simple as boiling water can become an overstimulating trap if she’s not properly prepared. “An electric kettle is a game-changer,” she adds. “Needing to get out a pot to boil water, or get a cup for microwaving and the cup being too hot and all those extra steps [can be overstimulating]. An electric kettle just has hot water all the time at the push of a button.”
But completing a kitchen project isn’t just about the physical steps. I experience a wide emotional spectrum when I cook, like frustration when I can’t perfectly peel a tomato or shame when I fumble a dish. I obsessively ruminate on errors, trapping myself in a whirlpool of shame that leads inevitably to executive paralysis. This deadly perfectionism is a mix of obsessive tendencies, anxiety, and rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), the inability to regulate your emotions in the face of failure or rejection.
Just like hacks for the physical kitchen environment, neurodivergence requires emotional and psychological strategies to complete a meal. Sometimes I summon a trance-like state of control called hyperfocus. Other times, survival mode kicks in, pushing me to rely on sources of sustenance — like those protein shakes at Publix — that don’t require more than a modicum of effort.
Skolnick tries not to get hung up on potential errors by repeating a derivative of Sun Tzu’s “Know thy enemy” — “Protect thy idiot” (himself) — as a mantra.
“I’m going to mess up or forget,” he says. “So as I do my tasks, I’m asking myself: How am I gonna remind myself to come back to this?” More broadly, he’s accepted that ADHD is a double-edged sword in the kitchen. “With ADHD, you can problem-solve rapidly. But if you get sideways, it all falls apart and you’ve gotta protect yourself from that,” he says. “You’ve gotta recognize that you can’t do 15 things well at once.”
Furniss invested a lot of effort to learn a number of recipes by heart. “Anything I can make without the exhausting, overstimulating task of following step-by-step directions is a big plus,” she says. “I know [the recipes] so well I can make adjustments, like switching which meat I use, or adding in new types of beans, or using a different brand of marinara.”
Sometimes chefs just need to jettison the “common knowledge” of the food world altogether in favor of their own intuitive methods.
“I had internalized all this shame about my messiness, and my own erratic systems, and the weird ways I would scrape together a meal when left to my own devices,” Eby says. For example, she noticed she makes the same dish over and over again when she’s in a bad spot with her depression or anxiety. Most recently it was tuna melts. “I used to be extremely embarrassed about those periods in my life,” she says. “Real cooks and food people, I surmised, would not be just making the same food every single day.”
However, she’s embraced repeating dishes as an opportunity to experiment. She began tweaking her tuna melt every time she made it, adding capers or pickles, using brine instead of lemon juice, substituting shredded cheddar for sliced Swiss, or throwing in a spice blend for the heck of it.
“What I realized is that weirdly, those funks made me a better recipe developer,” she says. “There isn’t a wrong way to feed yourself.”
Sarra Sedghi is a freelance writer and editor based in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Allrecipes, Atlas Obscura, Bon Appetit, Eater, and Polygon, and she will never turn down an opportunity to write about her brain.
