I was diagnosed as an adult about 5 years ago. I'll spare my life story, but I've spent those five years doing everything I can to give myself an environment where I can achieve my goals, and I have done a great job with that.

Apart from getting meds, I've built a strong task management/journaling system, I've built mental habits that help me overcome anxiety spirals, I've forgiven my ADHD for existing, and I have healthier sleep/diet habits to keep my baseline up.

Lately, though, some new obstacles have come up with the birth of my son (now almost 4mo old). Tbf, I've been aware of these things before, but my son has definitely exacerbated them.

With the attention and care a child requires, my windows to do things are a lot smaller. Sometimes only 20 minutes. This has made things more difficult in a few different ways:

1. For me to start doing a lot of things, even things I am excited to do, I have a "ramp-up" period before I can really dig into it. I think this is basically the time I need to plan, prioritize, and/or remember where I left off before I actually execute.

2. When I know something will inevitably interrupt me, I avoid starting anything because interruptions like, super-duper piss me off. And I don't want to be pissed off.

3. Not really related, but somewhat. In general, I would like to be able to do more in a day. I'd say my peak operating time is 9am-3pm, give or take. Outside these hours, it's a lot harder for me to do anything outside of "shut my brain off" tasks like house chores.

As many with ADHD know, an understimulated brain is unpleasant. And how shitty is it that ADHD also makes it difficult to do the things you find intellectually stimulating?

I hope all this makes sense. I've already accepted that this is my life now, and I'm okay with it. Even still, I would love some practical, actionable advice to help me make the most with what I have. Double points if it doesn't involved upping my Adderall dosage or self-medicating with caffeine. Thanks everyone!

I just got the official notice from my boss that I've been let go due to performance reasons. This wasn't a surprise to either of us at this point, as I'd been struggling to improve without sufficient improvement for a while up to this point. Can't really even blame my boss, as she really did try to gently help me get back on track over the last year. I think the likely culprit has been burnout all along -- I've been feeling like a fly stuck to fly paper for months at this point. Before getting fired I got some burnout leave started with my GP (it's not super hard to get medical leave for burnout here in Germany) but I initiated the process too late for it to make a difference for this job.

Luckily between my severance pay and eventually unemployment benefits, I'm not in any financial risk due to this change (advantages of moving to a country with a real social safety net). I can even get some free job training courses paid for by the state while I'm on unemployment. But between now and when that sort of thing starts, I'm wondering whether I should do something specific to help myself rest and recover from burnout. I'm planning on going back to therapy and talking to a professional about this, of course, but I'm curious whether anyone else here on Tildes has advice for how to recover from burnout other than just "take time off", since I've got that bit covered.