“We Have Five Minutes”: The Relativistic Time Warp of an ADHD Morning

Most “normal” people wake up to the gentle, respectful sound of a bird chirping. In an ADHD household, the day begins with the low, ominous rumble of a not-so-distant bin truck. And that sound triggers the sudden, unwelcome awareness that a bin exists at all.

Stay with me.

This is Object Permanence in real time, or pop psychology TikTok unfolding IRL. Because the bin lives outside, it offers no emotional reminders when it’s full; it effectively ceases to exist in this dimension until that auditory cue brings it screaming back into an alarm-level focus, no pun intended.

 This is the exact opposite of a toddler, who operates on a far more advanced alert system. Constantly hungry, highly reactive, and capable of erupting with the force of a thousand suns because a sandwich cannot, and I repeat, cannot, be cut into a circle. Although the experiments with that one, begrudgingly continue. The bin, on the other hand, remains forgotten.

At this stage, I’m painting a picture better than Bob Ross, but with significantly more chaotic strokes and fewer "happy little accidents."

The morning mayhem continues.

Thoughts are fast, many, and constant, while the body is slower. Like a Loch Ness Monster: rarely seen, mostly theoretical, and far more active in the depths of the mind than in the real-life swamp of getting tasks done.

Researchers like Adele Diamond describe this as a breakdown in Executive Functioning, which is a fancy way of saying: doing things and stuff. So while the mind is performing an Olympic-level mental gymnastics routine to the looping soundtrack of the latest, most intrusively enjoyable, viral TikTok song -  the body is somewhere closer to Elaine Benes from Seinfeld, dancing. Entirely uncoordinated, hard to watch and with thumbs, where they definitely shouldn't be.

These dance moves are fueled by what Neuropsychologist Russell Barkley calls Time Blindness. Which is surprisingly named as the visual impairment it actually behaves like. In practical terms, it looks like Salvador Dalí’s famous painting  "The Persistence of Memory," which depicts three melting clocks in a surreal landscape. This, I am convinced is a nod to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Which we can modernly call living with ADHD. Both these (undiagnosed) brilliant minds were detailing the non-linear aspects of time. Yes, I am the person diagnosing "everyone"  backed by a PhD in lived experience and a dusty psychology degree completed in 2001.

Hear me out, maybe Einstein wasn't just talking about quantum physics, he was living it! Five minutes can, in fact, stretch, collapse, disappear, or multiply depending entirely on what a neurodiverse brain has decided is interesting. ADHD might be more of a vintage brilliance than a new label afterall. 

So, when a well-intentioned self-help guru serves up the most blindingly obvious, 'well-intentioned' play-by-play of a disaster already in progress  (duck, Mel Robbins, incoming shade), and calls it a strategy such as the Let Them ‘Theory’, it can feel disorienting. 

So, when your neurotypical partner strolls in with the same unearned confidence and announces 'five more minutes'. And all it does is create a warm sensation in your body, and you consider if this would be a good enough reason to declare WW3.

Spoiler alert: it’s not. 

After all, to someone neurodiverse, time is less about a ticking clock and more about how it's melting.  But what a total ice cream cone of pure rage and six different flavours of misunderstanding, that is.

Despite popular belief, not "everyone is a little neurodiverse," and it isn't as relatable as the reels on your Instagram feed. It has been the silent engine of genius for centuries, often undetected or dubbed "eccentric." I see you, Nikola Tesla. These individuals had ideas that made time bend, stretch, and warp. Because when neurodiversity enters the room, it always leaves a trail…and it also changes the frequency while potentially falling in love with a pigeon (sorry, not sorry, Tesla).

And guess what? All of this can happen within the same ten-minute window! To the neurotypical observer, it looks like a low-budget robot vacuum trying to head in the right direction but gets stuck on the carpet, until it overheats (not like me, at all).

So, let's bring this Bob Ross masterpiece home.

Remember that toddler? Let’s call him Joey, the kangaroo-Easter-bunny hybrid with two hyper-fixations: how high can he go? And when is his circle sandwich coming?

Then, a seemingly fully grown adult, me, enters like that robot vacuum, programmed to function on specific instructions: find shoes, find phone, find keys.

Oh, here comes the carpet. 

Side quest mode initiated by the bunny's awful attempt at gaining height. Now we are both calculating which angle will catch the most air. Is Joey the next neurodiverse genius who’s undetected?

Meanwhile, the surreal backdrop begins to sharpen, where three melting clocks collide in the astrophysics of now. Strap in, we’re about to overcome the corner of the carpet and enter the weird and wonderful world of time travel and associative thinking, because our morning carries the same relativistic chaos as a star.

Let me explain this slowly: the glow of the star in the sky, which we see from Earth, is a shimmer that  technically died millions of years ago.

So while the neurotypical counterpart is in the not-so-fantastic now (on earth), Joey is in the air (aka, the sky). I am somewhere between here and there, as in, the reason why I went into the room died long before that five-minute announcement expired.  

Enter the theory of relativity in action. We’re all in our very own versions of a subjective hallucination. 

But, we aren’t actually light-years apart. We’re just tuned into different frequencies. Where one hears a ticking clock, another hears “lift-off!”, and I'm most likely about to fall in love with a pigeon, on the way to do something else.

IRL, we finally find the keys (they're in my hand), the bin truck is long gone, we somehow all become bunnies and hop into the car. As we plod along on the happiest accident of colliding with each other. That is, until the next time Joey wants his sandwich to be cut into a circle.