Heatwave or Hatewave? Surviving British Summer When You're AuDHD

Heatwave is an anagram of hatewave, which feels about right, because I hate this heat and the hate keeps arriving in waves. It is hot enough at time of writing that National Rail are telling people not to travel, A&E has just had its busiest month on record, but at least the ice cream van economy is booming.

However, I'm despairing due to the sensory ambush, and for my AuDHD brain that ambush runs deeper than feeling a bit sweaty. Heat makes my skin feel louder, compounded by the sticky clothes, the white glare, the fan that never shuts up and the sleep that feels out of reach, despite the exhaustion. Stack all of that on the cognitive load I haul around, and I am running on empty by mid-morning.

If you take ADHD medication, antidepressants or anything else on prescription like me, it is worth knowing that heat can land harder, because some of it changes how you sweat, how you hold your temperature, and how well you notice thirst in the first place. A glance at the leaflet or a quick chat with your pharmacist is time well spent. That is a nudge from someone who learned it the slow way, not medical advice.

Beyond that, here are some tried and tested tips!

Light is heat, and for a lot of us light is also overload, so I've been going full bunker. I stuck big blackout sheets over the worst windows and put one-way reflective film on the glass that takes the brunt of the afternoon sun, and that film turned out to be the quiet hero of the whole operation, bouncing the heat and the glare back outside before either one gets in while still letting me see out.

Blocking out the light and UV on non-essential windows through the hottest part of the day leaves you with a room that is dim, cool and quiet enough to think in properly. For the times you do have to go out, side glare is the thing that tends to finish me off, so our Focus Frames earn their keep by cutting the peripheral light that turns an ordinary sunny street into a strobe. Cave indoors, shields outdoors.

Fans come with a built-in trap, because the same machine that cools you down also winds you up, and that endless whirr is white noise that flatly refuses to be soothing. I am not about to tell you to switch it off and slow-roast, so the move is to keep the fan and lose the noise instead. A pair of sensory earplugs takes the edge off the drone without sealing you into total silence, which means you keep the cool air and your nervous system at the same time, and it is a small change that does an enormous amount at two in the morning - check out our ear plug rankings here.

Climbing into a parked car in this weather is roughly like climbing into a kiln, but there is a hack for it and it runs on pure physics. Roll one window all the way down, ideally one at the back, then walk round to the door on the diagonally opposite corner and open and shut it fully five to ten times, quickly but without slamming, and the door acts like a pump that forces all the trapped, superheated air out through the open window.

Hannah Fry (she's amazing isn't she!) did a lovely short clip on the fluid dynamics behind it if you want to see exactly why it works. I just know that it does, and that it spares me from sitting in a sweat box waiting for the air conditioning to catch up.

Interoception is the sense that reports back on what your body needs, and mine files those reports late at the best of times. In a heatwave that delay is how you end up shaky and lightheaded with no idea where it came from, so I stopped trusting thirst altogether, keep the (preferably vacuum/metal) bottle in my eyeline at all times so that when hyperfocus swallows my afternoon, I drink with no willpower required. Better than a headache!

Running cold water over the wrists when it gets really bad sounds far too simple to do anything, and then it does for some temporary relief. And fill up the tap while you're there!

This is the tip I wish someone had handed me years ago. You already spend a small fortune of energy navigating a world that was never built for you, and a heatwave quietly triples that bill. You are likely going to find yourself more irritable, more fried and more useless than usual and that's fine! It's not failure, it's your brain working overtime in survival mode.

One task and one win counts as a complete day in conditions like these. It is absolutely ok to cancel plans, and to sit in your cave with your earplugs doing something you want to do, and file it under success, because that is exactly what it is. Getting through a heatwave is the achievement during a heatwave.

Heat like this is apparently becoming the new normal, with the Met Office reckoning summers of this kind will only turn up more often, so we may as well get properly good at outlasting them. Stay cool, stay shaded, and be generous with the brain that is doing all the heavy lifting.

If glare and noise are the parts that get to you, Focus Frames and our sensory earplugs were built for precisely this.