Study Environment in ADHD: Home, Library or Café?

At home everything is ready: desk, lamp, silence, tea. I sit down, and an hour later I have tidied the desk, folded two items of laundry and answered one e-mail, but I have not started the real work.

I can finish the same work in a café, among the sounds of cups and people talking behind me.

For a while I saw this as my own inconsistency. Then I noticed that I was asking "Where should I work?" as if it were a question of character. Yet it is more a question of adjustment: which task, at which hour, in which environment.

Why silence is not good for everyone

I will keep this part short, because I explained it in detail in the article on music and focus. The gist is this: attention works best within a certain range of stimulation. When the environment falls below that range, the mind starts producing its own stimuli. In the glossary this is arousal level.

That is why the quiet room at home is sometimes the place where I work with the most difficulty. The silence calls, but it does not hold me.

The balance between the distractor and the workload

One of the findings that made me think most in this area comes from Forster and colleagues. Seventeen adults with ADHD and 17 control participants searched for a target letter on a screen while trying to ignore irrelevant cartoon images that appeared now and then. The task was presented at two levels of difficulty: in the easy search the target letter was among small "o" letters, and in the hard search it was among similar-looking angular letters.

The cost of being affected by the distractor in adults with ADHD was more than double that of the control group. But when the task became harder, that is, when perceptual load increased, distraction fell in the ADHD group as much as in the control group. The distraction of the ADHD participants in the hard task dropped to the same level as the controls in the easy task (Forster et al., 2014).

This is a laboratory task; carrying it over one to one to everyday studying would not be right. But it supports an intuition of mine: if the task is full enough, the environment pulls me less. Sometimes the problem at my desk is not the crowdedness of the surroundings but that the task leaves too much empty space. Reading a text with a pen, marking it and writing questions in the margin, instead of only reading it, is one way of filling the task.

Sometimes, instead of simplifying the environment, you need to fill the task.

If the phone is on the desk

This finding has no direct connection to ADHD, but for me it is perhaps the most applicable one. Stothart and colleagues sent notifications to participants' phones during a task that required attention. The participants did not even touch the phone. Even so, the notification itself disrupted performance significantly, and the disruption was close in size to the effect seen in people actively talking or texting on the phone (Stothart et al., 2015). The authors' explanation is that even a brief notification can trigger thoughts unrelated to the task.

In ADHD the mind is already prone to drifting on its own, and I do not want to add this trigger from outside. Putting the phone on silent is not enough for me; I need to take it out of my field of view. Clearing the environment of distractions in this way is called stimulus control. I gathered the rest of the digital side in the article on digital scatter.

Why café noise sometimes works

There is a study that may explain why I can write in a café. Mehta and colleagues looked at the effect of ambient noise in five experiments. Moderate noise (70 decibels) improved performance in creative tasks compared with a low level (50 decibels); high noise (85 decibels) lowered creativity (Mehta et al., 2012).

I pay attention to two things here. First, the participants did not have ADHD. Second, what was measured was creative thinking; attention to detail and memorization were not measured. So I use the café for generating ideas, drafting and building a subject in my head. I do not sit in a café to memorize a formula or to check a text line by line.

For someone with high sensory sensitivity the café may have exactly the opposite effect. I dealt with that side in the article on sensory overload.

The library and the presence of others

I think the strength of the library comes less from its silence than from the people working around you. Everyone is doing something, and without anyone saying a word, this builds a frame. This is called body doubling, and it is most likely the reason I can start in the library the tasks I cannot start alone at home.

Where you take your break is part of the environment too

I had written in my diary that I like walking. There is a small study suggesting this may have something to do with attention. Seventeen children diagnosed with ADHD took a guided twenty-minute walk in three different settings: in a city park and in two well-kept urban areas. Concentration measured after each walk was better after the walk in the park than after the other two (Faber Taylor & Kuo, 2009).

The sample is small and the participants are children. But turning a break into a short walk in a green space, instead of spending it on the phone, is an easy change to try.

The environment can also be built from the outside: I made the comparison of a course, a study center and studying alone in a separate article.

Making it possible to work at home

It is not possible to go to a café or library every day. For the days I have to work at home, I found a few things worth trying.

A corner set aside for one task. When I work in bed, at the dining table or on the sofa, the house becomes a little bit of work everywhere and fully work nowhere. A place, however small, where I sit only to work gives the mind the message "this, now" the moment I sit down.

Clearing the eye level. Unfolded laundry, a waiting bill or a half-finished task visible from my desk quietly calls my attention. Because trying to tidy the whole desk can turn into another form of procrastination, I remove only what is within my field of view.

A starting signal. Starting work at home has no outside signal: I do not leave through a door, I do not set off on a road. Instead I set up a small transition ritual. The same tea, the same playlist, the same light. As it is repeated, the ritual starts working like a door.

The hidden cost of changing places

Going to a café or library does not always count as a gain. Getting ready, setting off, finding a seat, connecting to the internet, deciding what to drink after sitting down... In ADHD each of these small steps can delay starting a little more. For an hour of work, forty-five minutes of preparation can eat up the advantage the café brings.

That is why I use changing places mostly for long work blocks. I do not leave home for half an hour of work. Keeping the bag ready beforehand also helps: if the computer, charger, headphones and notebook stay in the same bag, the distance between the decision "shall I go" and walking out of the door gets shorter.

The hour is also part of the environment. The same café can be quiet in the morning and crowded in the afternoon. For me, choosing the hour at which I use a place matters as much as choosing the place.

Choosing the place by the task

There is a rough matching I use today.

Ideas and drafting: in a café, with a moderate sound in the background.

Detail, checking and memorization: in a quiet corner of the library, or at home in a room without the phone.

Hard-to-start tasks I avoid: somewhere with someone beside me.

Short administrative tasks: at home, at the desk.

The twenty-minute rule. If you sit in one environment for twenty minutes and cannot start the task, do not keep forcing yourself; change your place. Move to another room, a café, a library. Changing place gives the mind a new starting signal, and it often gives a faster result than struggling at the same desk for another hour.

This matching is not a fixed rule. The shortest way to find your own matching is to do the same type of task in different places for a week and note two things each time: after how many minutes you were able to start and how long you were able to stay. After a few days you do not have to guess which place suits which task.

There is also the wearing out of places. A café becomes a place where I can work very well in the first weeks; a few months later I cannot find the same effect at the same table. The fading of novelty happens to me with places just as it does with hobbies. That is why using two or three places in rotation works for longer than attaching myself to a single "good place." I cannot base this observation on research; I am writing it as my own experience.

Sometimes a person finds the perfect study room and thinks everything will be fixed. The answer to the question "home, library or café" is, for me, "all of them, in turn." When I stopped looking for one flawless place, I began to use the places I had better.