The Domino Effect: How to Remember Where You Left Your Car Keys

Posted on July 05, 2012 by Sunny Aldrich, One of Thousands of ADD ADHD Coaches on Noomii.

The most difficult thing for me to try and explain to people who don’t have ADD/ADHD is what it’s like not to be able to live up to your own expectations. Sure, everyone faces disappointment at different times in their lives, but for some reason individuals with ADHD seem prone to setting unusually high expectations for themselves. The list of “shoulds” varies from individual to individual, but typically we expect ourselves to be punctual, fiscally responsible, organized, meticulous, socially adept and follow through on all our undertakings. Our difficulty in estimating the scope and scale of responsibilities and tasks, when coupled with our impaired sense of time, frequently results in over-extending ourselves by taking on more than any sane person would ever agree to try and accomplish. Even when we set seemingly rational expectations for ourselves, we fail to consider the “ADD Factor” in anticipating the logical results.

Now, I’m not saying we should limit ourselves to setting safe, conservative goals that can reasonably be accomplished in a conservative amount of time. If you say you want to shoot for the moon, heaven knows I am usually the first person to say, “Yay! When do we leave?” However, I’m sure you’d agree that it’s rather unrealistic to shoot for the moon, plan to sail around the world AND organize the garage on the same weekend. But that’s just what many of us strive to do and then shame ourselves into feeling guilty, inadequate and irresponsible when the rocket fizzles, the yacht springs a leak and the colony of spiders populating the garage form a union and instigate a march to protest their abysmal living conditions.

It would be tough for anyone to live up to our standards, so the irony is simply dumbfounding when we realize we’ve applied this set of lofty ideals to a group of individuals who struggle to stay motivated, prioritize EVERYTHING as urgent or important and become easily side-tracked… OURSELVES! Not to mention that tendency we have for finding fun, meaningful or novel activities completely irresistible until they become mundane, repetitious or much more complicated than we initially expected. I have no doubt the quote “Well, it looked good on paper,” was first uttered by someone with ADHD.

Each time we tell ourselves we “should” be good at something we’re not, such as keeping track of the car keys, we set ourselves up for a failure (or series of failures) and the emotional wounds that will result. It can start innocently enough by failing to pay attention to where you set the keys when you walk in the front door. You tossed the keys “somewhere” convenient or momentarily logical while contemplating how you’ve managed to defy the laws of physics with the sheer volume of shoes that seem to have established permanent residence in the entryway. You sit down to unwind and watch TV even though you’re supposed to go to a family gathering which starts at 7pm. If you aren’t completely enthralled with a special report about killer bacteria on the Discovery Channel, you may realize around 5pm that you should start thinking about getting ready to go. At that time, you will calculate the exact amount of time it would take to walk into the bedroom, put clean clothes on, check your hair and/or makeup, grab the car keys and drive straight to your destination. You decide you can wait until only that amount of time is left and THEN start getting ready to go. Besides… bacteria are FASCINATING!

Chances are you’ll be so absorbed in whatever you’re doing that the calculated “window” will pass without fanfare or notice. You’ll be convinced only 15 minutes have gone by and realize you lost an entire hour somewhere in the house with the keys. Not until you walk into the bedroom in sheer panic does it occur to you that you forgot to do laundry, therefore you have no clean clothes. No big deal – in this day and age it should be perfectly acceptable to wear jeans and a t-shirt to a baptism, right? You check the time and realize if you leave RIGHT NOW and all the lights are green, you can still make it exactly on time… with a tail wind. Thirty minutes later you’ve located the keys inside a tennis shoe by the front door. You strategically placed them there because you had planned to take a walk after you got home and didn’t want to forget the keys and lock yourself out. Again. At least, that was the plan until a relative called and reminded you about the baptism and you responded with, “Of course I remembered that’s tonight, I have it on a sticky note right here on the fridge!” When you finally start the car and put it in gear, the “Low Fuel” light come on around the same moment your eyes land on that little orange needle stubbornly hanging out by the “E” on the gas gauge. Since you forgot all about the baptism because you decided to order out instead of getting dinner out of the fridge, you thought there would be an opportunity to refuel the car tomorrow on a leisurely trip to the grocery store. As my grandfather likes to say, “So much for that!”

To someone watching from the outside, it’s a cliché scenario that characterizes people with ADD in a scatterbrained, almost comical, manner that seems at least marginally familiar to just about everyone. We’ve all had days like this, or one or two of these things can happen to anyone on any given day. Now imagine your days are always like this, from sun up to sun down; and sometimes they are worse. Sound a bit frustrating? That’s not the half of it. All I’ve described so far are a few of the obvious thoughts, actions and events that led up to one isolated event. What I haven’t described to you are the judgments and feelings these events create within us. THAT is where the true damage to our self esteem and confidence occurs and it doesn’t take a trip to a shrink’s couch to figure out how it happens.

Change your perspective for a moment and view the same situation through a slightly different lens: You walk in the front door and spot the menagerie of footwear haphazardly strewn across the floor. Your eyes land on a pair of practically brand new athletic shoes you bought 6 months ago and have worn twice. You feel guilty at having impulsively spent the money and ashamed at not having made good of the shoes. Additionally, you’re bombarded on a daily basis with reminders that exercise is extremely important and something you “should” do daily, especially if you have ADD. You cave to the emotional “self-pressure” and decide to go for a walk after dinner. An unbidden image pops into your brain of the last time you put those shoes on; not wanting to come home to discover all of your valuables had also gone for a walk, you locked the front door and forgot to bring the keys. Adding salt to the wound was the fact you locked yourself out on the very same night as your boss’s birthday party. Rather than risk offending your boss after promising you “wouldn’t miss it for the world,” you showed up an hour late wearing a sweaty gym suit and had to borrow gas money from a co-worker since the locksmith cleaned you out.

As the memory plays, you feel chagrined – which I think is French for “resembling the intellectual aptitude of a crash-test dummy.” Thanks to your extraordinarily visual brain’s capacity for storing experience-oriented memories, you have now relived the embarrassment, humiliation, shame and frustration of that unpleasant memory in vivid, Techni-color detail. In addition to the pictures and emotions, you may have also experienced the scents and sounds of that past event and possibly even the feel of the sweaty warm-up suit which allowed you to recall exactly what we were wearing at the time with absolute precision.

Vowing to turn over a new leaf, you tossed the car keys smugly into your shoe and replaced the previous set of uncomfortable images with a happy little short-film of you walking to the front door in the clean, dry warm-up suit, slipping your feet into the tennis shoes to go for a walk, and finding the keys. For a fleeting moment, you were supremely proud of yourself for finding a way to make it IMPOSSIBLE to get locked out of your house tonight. What you can’t possibly foresee at that juncture is this immovable truth: the location of your car keys is now firmly glued to the task of taking a walk and the memory of the last walk we took. It’s is NOT attached to the act/memory of walking in the front door. Therefore, when you need to know where your keys went, retrieving the memory of coming into the house will not help one single bit unless you’re able to recall what you were THINKING ABOUT when you set them down. That poses an even bigger problem: You’ve had an estimated 143,622 thoughts since you arrived home and every thought had images and memories attached.

If you had simply been able to follow through and take a walk, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Instead, the “movie” you created in your head of how your evening was going to unfold now has an alternate ending. Unfortunately, the location of your car keys is attached to the FIRST ending. Now that your evening ends with a belated arrival at a baptism, you’ve lost access to all the information attached to the original sequence of events, just like the information about attending the baptism in the first place was attached to something else that got altered earlier in your day. Think of your memories like a row of dominoes: if you jump to the middle, turn one domino in a new direction and start adding pieces to the new path, the dominoes at the end of the original path will not fall.

Only when you’re able to backtrack to where your path “turned” away from the original ending are you able to reconnect with those memories. This is an important concept to understand when developing strategies staying on track and organizing your life. It’s much easier to create habits that take advantage of how your memory ACTUALLY operates rather than trying to force your memory to work in ways that are foreign and unnatural to it. Scurrying around the house in a panic, you finally spot the gym suit you had planned to wear on the walk. That triggers the memory about walking and you backtrack to the shoes, find your keys and head out for the evening. You’re only going to be 15 minutes late now. That’s still fashionable, right? Oh yeah… You forgot about the empty fuel tank. Again. Well, at least now you can finish that enthralling documentary about bacteria!