Grocery Shopping and ADHD

I go to the shop to buy milk. I come out with eight things. Milk is not among them.

For years I explained this scene to myself as "absent-mindedness." Now I have a more accurate explanation, and that explanation turned the supermarket into a tolerable chore.

Why the supermarket is a hard place

The supermarket is an extremely tiring environment for attention, and there are four separate reasons for this.

High stimulation. Light, music, crowds, colors, announcements. It is almost an ideal environment for sensory overload. The reason you come out of the shop tired is not the bags you carry.

Constant decisions. Every shelf asks for a choice. Which brand, which size, the one on sale or the one you always buy. Hundreds of small decisions use you up quickly, and when the decision store runs out, what is left is buying on impulse.

A task that rests on memory. Keeping the list in your head leans directly on working memory, and this area works in a more limited way in ADHD (Kofler et al., 2010). The five-item list you were holding as you left the door drops to three by the third aisle.

Instant-reward design. Store layout is built to encourage deciding on the spot. Because the tendency toward impulsive spending is already higher in ADHD, the effect grows (Patros et al., 2016).

Coming out of the shop having forgotten things is lived as carelessness. In fact it is a task that leans on memory failing in a system whose memory is limited.

The fixed-list method

The single most useful intervention in this area was to stop rewriting the list every time.

I used to sit down before going to the shop and think "what do I need." That thinking was a bigger obstacle than the shopping itself. Because to remember something that is not in the house, you have to remember the moment you needed it, and that moment is usually the moment you are not in the shop.

How to set it up:

1. Write down everything you buy regularly, once. It will be thirty or forty items, which is normal.
2. Group the list by the order in the shop: vegetables, dairy, dry goods, cleaning.
3. Hang it somewhere visible in the kitchen and put a pen next to it.
4. Mark something when it starts to run out, not when it is finished.

The fourth point is the most important. When something has completely run out, you have to need it in order to remember it; marking it when it starts running out removes the job of remembering altogether.

Why it works: When the list is ready, the work before the shop drops from thinking "what do I need" to "looking at the list." The difference between the two is as large as the difference between the shopping getting done and not getting done. I described the general form of the same visibility logic in the article on the visible place system.

What works in the shop

Do not go hungry. The most repeated advice, and rightly so. When you shop hungry, you buy both too much and without a plan. The general side of meal structure is in the article on nutrition in ADHD.

Limit the time. Twenty minutes and a timer. Staying long produces both fatigue and overspending.

Use the same shop. Knowing where things are stops every visit from being a new exploration. A familiar environment asks for far less energy. In the weeks I changed shops, I noticed that I both stayed longer and forgot more things.

Choose a small basket. A big cart works as a space that has to be filled. In the shopping trips where I go in with a basket in my hand, I both buy less and get out faster.

Put on headphones. Noise-canceling headphones, or a familiar playlist, markedly reduce the stimulation in the environment.

Keep online shopping as an option. It removes the stimulation of the environment and impulsive additions. Reordering from a saved list asks for much less energy than walking around a shop. On the other hand, shopping on a screen brings its own trap: because adding to the basket requires no physical movement, adding extras gets easier. Reading the basket through once from the start before placing the order balances this.

The waiting rule. Instead of buying something that is not on the list and whose price is above a certain threshold right away, wait twenty-four hours. The wish often cannot survive that time. In the glossary it appears as the waiting rule.

Three common mistakes

Writing the list on the phone and not opening it. A list on the phone comes with the risk of slipping into something else the moment you open the phone. A paper list does not carry this risk. If you keep it on the phone, turning the list into a shortcut on the home screen shortens the distance.

Going more than once a week. Every shop visit is a new opportunity for impulsive spending. Reducing the frequency turns out to be more effective than dealing with decisions one by one.

Blaming the whole system when you forget something. You can forget something even when using a fixed list. The job of the system is not to produce perfection; it is to lower the number of things forgotten. Adding the forgotten thing to the list makes the system better for the next time.

Surpluses piling up at home

Buying the third of the same item is common in ADHD, and the reason is simple: you do not see what is at home, so you treat it as not there. This is the supermarket version of the object permanence issue.

Two things work against this:

• Transparent storage. Jars, open shelves, boxes without lids. You do not buy again what you can see inside.
• A single stock place. Having one place for every category removes the question "I wonder whether there was any." I covered the whole kitchen setup in the article on food and kitchen organization.

There is also the opposite: deliberately buying two of the small things you keep losing. The double copy rule looks like waste, but it is cheap once the time spent searching is counted.

The part after shopping

This is the most skipped part, and for me it was the part that lost the most money.

The bags stand at the door, some of it goes into the cupboard, the rest stays on the kitchen counter. Two days later the things on the counter go bad. The shopping itself was completed successfully but the result is the same: those things are missing again.

The rule that worked was this: the moment I step into the house, what has to go into the fridge is put away first, and the rest can wait. You do not have to empty the bags completely; separating what can spoil is enough. Also, putting the newly bought items at the back and the old ones at the front when putting things in the cupboard reduces buying the same thing a second time.

The bad-day version

Every system needs a small version of itself, and the supermarket system is no exception.

On a bad day, a full shop can be impossible. For those days I keep a short list of five items decided in advance: things that let me put a meal together with the least preparation when there is nothing in the house. Walking in through the door of the shop, getting those five things and walking out is better than not going at all.

As the review by Barkley and colleagues (2008) shows, the effect of ADHD on daily functioning spreads across a wide area, and this is within it. So failing at the supermarket is not a matter of willpower.

As long as the supermarket depends on memory and willpower, it is a game that gets lost. When it depends on a fixed list and decisions made in advance, it turns into an ordinary chore. I covered the spending side in the article on ADHD and money management.