Why ADHD Is My Travel Superpower

For many people, the airport terminal can be a source of mild stress. But for travelers with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), you will feel like you are playing in the advanced mode of a video game, where you face hidden time traps, a million small decisions and many opportunities to lose something.

I know this firsthand.

I wasn’t formally diagnosed with ADHD until I was 30, even though everyone in my life knew it (the inability to sit still and ridiculously fast speech were the giveaways). And traveling is sometimes challenging. I left my wallet in an airplane seat pocket in DC, lost a passport in Croatia, and once forgot my passport entirely — and had to buy in-flight Wi-Fi to ask my husband to FedEx it to me before taking a cruise to Florida.

Here’s what worked for both of us.

Time-blindness in ADHD is an executive function deficit where the brain struggles to accurately perceive, track or estimate the passage of time. In travel, that can easily translate to being late at the airport and missing your flight.

If you don’t have access to a lounge, Kahn recommends simply using other motivators to get there early.

“So something like, ‘I’m going to be there at the right time, and I’m going to pick out that trashy magazine that I want to read on the plane,'” Kahn said. “Or, ‘I’m going to get that really special coffee so I can sit there and feel really warm and cool and relaxed.'”

Kahn recommends setting an alarm to pack, an alarm to leave the house, and, critically, an alarm to walk away from the airport coffee shop or lounge when boarding begins.

The TSA security line is a nightmare: You go from a long, boring line to a sudden barrage of high-pressure instructions, with pressure to act fast.

“The ADHD brain can’t filter out those stimuli — the noises, the movement, the people, the proximity, the sights and smells,” Kahn said. “When you have to navigate this line and feel time pressure, it turns off the thinking part of the brain. We actually go into fight-or-flight with ADHD.”

To avoid making mistakes like leaving things out, Kahn recommends going to the line fully prepared. This means preemptively removing keys, loose change and your phone from your pockets and placing them in an accessible pouch in your bag before you enter the queue.

These days, you can keep most of your important travel documents – your boarding passes, reservations, theme park tickets and even hotel room keys – on your phone. To me, this is a good thing.

I’ve lost my fair share of boarding passes, and I have to search through my bag to find a wet theme park ticket at the bottom. Now, I just opt ​​for digital forms of everything. For better or worse, I’m addicted to the phone, so when I store important documents on my phone, I know it’s safe.

Download your provider’s dedicated app, or add your passes directly to your Apple Wallet or Google Wallet for seamless access. As Kahn points out, eliminating physical clutter can prevent hidden stressors.

“If it’s on your phone, you can’t lose it unless you lose your phone,” he said.

In the same vein, skip backpacks with 20 different pockets. Multiple pockets are not a feature for people with ADHD. For me, more zippers means more black holes to lose my stuff until I open that obscure compartment a year from now.

I actually packed the earplugs in one pocket, and the headphones in another, and the eye mask in yet another – which I didn’t really need for my long flight because it was all buried in a pouch that was very difficult to access without spilling the entire contents of the bag in the aisle.

From there, Kahn recommends putting the same items in the same place every time.

“I always put my wallet and my keys in one (pocket), always put my phone in the other,” Kahn said. “When you break your rituals, you find that anxiety increases.”

If you have ADHD, working memory can be a weak area. Kahn says that weaknesses in working memory mean that people with ADHD absorb information in the moment but fail to properly store or rehearse it. So if you need to remember important details, make sure you have a backup.

I can never remember my hotel room number, so I use my phone to take a quick picture of the room door or the paper key sleeve the second I check in, plus a picture of where I parked.

Ultimately, successful travel with ADHD is all about identifying your specific friction points, creating smart routines to bypass them and letting your natural spontaneity and creativity shine.

For what it’s worth, though, I still make ADHD-related mistakes, and travel is literally my job.

“It’s OK to forget,” Kahn said. “Figuring out how to remember things that you usually forget is what makes us successful with ADHD. We can do everything with ADHD, but we just have to come up with some strategies.”