Every morning, Nana Mouskouri arrives the moment I open the blinds.

“Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” firing up in my brain like an alarm clock nobody asked for, and stays for however long she pleases. She has been doing this for over a year. At this point, she is family.

This is how my mornings begin. And from there, things get interesting.

The Pipeline

My morning ritual is non-negotiable. It runs in a specific order, and deviations are not tolerated, by me, by my autism, or by my medication schedule:

Open blinds (Nana arrives). Brush teeth. Yoga. Meditate. Breakfast and coffee. Medication. Shower. Work.

Simple. Logical. Airtight.

Completely ambushed on a daily basis.

The Plants

The living room plants downstairs are always a risk factor.

My husband forgets to water them. I notice when I open the blinds. One critical look and a quick feel of the soil is all it takes, and suddenly I am heading for the watering can and the spray bottle to mist the leaves. While I’m at it, I notice the window sill is dirty. I weigh the option of cleaning it.

I decide not to. I am disciplined. I am focused. I head upstairs, quietly, so as not to wake the dogs or my husband still sleeping in the bedroom.

Where I discover that the kitchen window plants have been moved to the counter overnight to keep the window open for fresh air.

These plants also need watering and misting. They also need to be arranged in a specific way. But first I need to wipe the window sill. And possibly clean the window, which I can do really quickly. While I’m doing this, I remember that the toothbrush is waiting for me.

No problem. I can multitask.

The Tooth Brushing Ritual

The electric toothbrush basically runs itself. This is a well known fact. What this means, practically speaking, is that my right hand can hold the toothbrush while my left hand cleans the sink.

Or my left hand holds the toothbrush while my right hand cleans the sink.

The question of brushing technique accuracy is briefly considered and then set aside in the interest of efficiency. Three minutes is three minutes. Why waste them standing there doing only one thing?

The Yoga Gauntlet Situation

I can now proceed to yoga. I change into my yoga clothes, and yes, it has happened that I forgot this step entirely and did a full session in my pajamas, which I only noticed afterward. I have made my peace with this.

The laptop must be opened carefully. The browser must be navigated directly to the yoga teacher’s site, enlarged to full screen, earbuds in, workout tracker started. Yoga mat rolled out!

Under no circumstances should any other part of the browser be opened before any of this is done.

I cannot stress this enough.

One wrong click, one stray tab, one notification, one email subject line caught in peripheral vision, and yoga may not happen until considerably later. The pipeline has been derailed by less, like suddenly remembering that I should look up knee pads for yoga.

But if all goes according to plan, yoga happens. The body wakes up. A new song may or may not play in my brain.

Breakfast, Coffee, and the Refrigerator Situation

After yoga comes the meditation-vs-breakfast decision. Medication needs food. Food wins.

I wander into the kitchen and begin making breakfast and coffee. For efficiency, I always eat the exact same thing: Skyr quark, blueberries, a banana, six raw almonds and some frozen mixed berries. Every day. No variation. No deliberation. The decision was made once, over two years ago, and has not been revisited since.

The coffee is decaf, vanilla flavored beans, vanilla soy milk, sugar-free vanilla syrup and collagen powder. Why coffee with no caffeine? Because it’s the ritual. Caffeine and amphetamines don’t mix well if you’d like to sleep at night, but giving up the coffee would mean giving up the ritual, and that is simply not on the table. It‘s also a real problem when I travel for business!

I open the refrigerator. There is a spot of sauce.

I must clean this. One cannot have a dirty refrigerator. It is simply not possible to leave it there and make breakfast as if everything is fine.

And while I’m cleaning the inside, I might as well wipe down the outside doors. The glass cleaner I’m already holding will do nicely on the dishwasher door too. And the stainless steel trashcans. They’re right there. It would be strange not to.

Breakfast is eventually made. Fake coffee is poured. Medication is taken. The kitchen is significantly cleaner than it was twenty minutes ago. I can now meditate in peace.

The Shower Situation

After meditation comes the shower. I sing in here, whatever song is currently on rotation in my brain, or something I’ve invented on the spot. The lyrics are not always coherent. The performance is always committed.

I wash my hair and create what I can only describe as a spectacular shampoo Mohawk. I rinse, apply the conditioner and while it sits, I scrub the shower walls. This is efficient.This is why the shower only gets scrubbed on days when I wash my hair!

I feel rather magnificent.

The skin care routine follows, in the exact same order it has followed for years, because this is not negotiable, and one most not neglect one’s skin. This is accompanied by a series of faces in the mirror that no one else will ever see. However, sometimes I find myself so funny that I will take a selfie and send it to my unsuspecting sister, niece or friend. Then it’s off to the office, focus music on, and hyperfocus activated.

I will not surface for nine or ten hours.

The Part That Will Surprise You

All of the above, the plants, the sink multitasking, the refrigerator, the shower walls, the Mohawk, costs me approximately ten to fifteen extra minutes.

That’s it.

This is because speed is one of my superpowers. The same brain that cannot walk past a dirty surface without addressing it also cannot do anything slowly. Everything happens at full throttle. The detours are real, but they are fast detours, executed with the efficiency of someone who has been doing this their entire life and has never once considered that there might be another way.

The pipeline gets ambushed every morning. And every morning, I find my way back. Usually singing.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay I’m going off the rails on a crazy train I’m going off the rails on a crazy train

As I write this, I am humming “The Funk Soul Brother” by Fatboy Slim. I have been humming it for five days. I did not choose this. I was not consulted.
This is life with an AuDHD brain, and the soundtrack is not always one you would have selected yourself.

The Invisible Tape

There is an invisible tape running in my head at all times. It plays music on a loop – the same songs, rotating, repeating, occasionally swapping out for a new arrival that then refuses to leave for weeks, months, or in some cases, entire decades. I have songs in my head that have been there since childhood and show absolutely no intention of ever leaving. At this point I consider them roommates.

Every single morning, without fail, as soon as I get up, “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” by Nana Mouskouri begins playing in my head. Not because I put it on. Not because I heard it recently. Nana appeared after watching a series featuring this song and my brain went „Oh! I remember this one from childhood and it makes me happy!“ It’ll stay there forever now, and it simply starts, the way the sun rises – automatically, reliably, whether I want it or not. This has been happening every morning for at least a year. Nana and I have a relationship at this point. She doesn’t pay rent but she is now a permanent resident. I have been known to sing “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” out loud to my coworkers on a regular basis. One colleague has formally requested that I never sing it again in his presence because he hates it so much. I respect his feedback. I do not comply with it.

But Nana is practically a newcomer compared to the long-term squatters.

There are songs in my head that have been there since childhood. Decades. We are not talking about a catchy tune that overstayed its welcome, we are talking about permanent residents who moved in before I started school and never once considered leaving. The most legendary of these, the one even non-Germans will recognize, is Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street. Sung by Ernie. I have been hearing it, on and off, for most of my life. It arrives unannounced, stays as long as it pleases, and leaves without explanation, only to return weeks or months later as if nothing happened.

The rotation also includes “I Should Be So Lucky” by Kylie Minogue, which arrived after I watched her documentary and has shown absolutely no signs of leaving. Occasionally I find myself declaring loudly, and with complete dead seriousness, making full eye contact with whoever is nearest, usually my husband, that I am the egg man, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob. Then there are the days when nothing but The Final Countdown by Europe will do, which is dramatic and grandiose and frankly appropriate for how Mondays feel. And then, as of five days ago, Fatboy Slim joined the lineup. Right about now. I am also, as I write this, singing the Funk Soul Brother in the shower. Multitasking, as always.

The thing that makes this so distinctly AuDHD is not just that the songs get stuck – everyone gets earworms. It’s that they never fully stop. They play while I’m in meetings. While I’m having conversations. While I’m working, cleaning, trying to sleep. There is always a song running underneath everything else, like a radio left on in another room that you can never quite turn off.

My Friend and the Hostage Situation

I am not alone in this. A close friend of mine, also ADHD, diagnosed in her 50s,  has her own permanent resident.

Hers is “My Heart Will Go On” by Céline Dion.

The Titanic song. On permanent rotation. In her head. Against her will.

I cannot tell you how many times I have stood in front of her, arms spread wide, and launched into my best Céline impression: “Near… far… WHEREVER YOU AAAARRREE”

She responds with a face of pure resignation, a long sigh, and in her best Hamburg German: “Ich sach dir das….”

And then I laugh even harder, which does not help anyone.

The difference between us is telling. I have made peace with my musical squatters. I embrace them. I sing them out loud, to colleagues, to friends, to whoever happens to be nearby, mostly my poor husband. They are strange companions and so genuinely bizarre that I cannot help but find them funny. My friend, meanwhile, is in an ongoing hostage negotiation with Céline Dion and losing badly. She does not find her earworm charming. She finds it exhausting. And honestly, given that it’s a five-minute power ballad about a sinking ship, I understand.

What’s fascinating is that she didn’t choose this song any more than I chose Nana Mouskouri. The ADHD brain latches onto things, a rhythm, a melody, an emotional hook, and simply will not let go. The more you try to evict the song, the more stubbornly it stays. It knows it doesn’t have to leave. There is no mechanism for eviction.

The Conversation Loops

It’s not just music. The same phenomenon runs through thought patterns too, specifically the conversations that never happened but feel like they did and should have happened.

The rehearsed argument with a person who wronged me or a loved one years ago. The perfectly worded response I‘ve constructed to something someone said at a meeting last Tuesday. The imaginary confrontation where I finally say, clearly and calmly, everything I couldn’t say in the moment. These play on loop too, the brain running and rerunning scenarios, editing the script, landing on the perfect line, starting over.

I have, through therapy and meditation, gotten significantly better at letting these go. The trick is not to engage with them, but to observe the thought without climbing inside it. Meditation in particular has given me a kind of mental remote control: I can’t always turn the loop off, but I can lower the volume.

Some loops, though, are simply stuck. They have been there long enough that evicting them would require structural renovation. Those I have made a kind of peace with. They are part of the furniture now.

Why This Happens

The ADHD brain has a complicated relationship with repetition. On one hand, novelty is everything. We crave stimulation, get bored easily, need things to be interesting to stay engaged. On the other hand, when something catches in the brain’s groove, it can stay there indefinitely. The same mechanism that makes hyperfocus possible, the ability to lock onto something completely, also makes it very hard to unlock.

Earworms in particular tend to lodge themselves in the brain’s default mode network, the part that runs in the background when you’re not actively concentrating on something. For neurotypical people, this network quiets when they focus. For ADHD brains, it often keeps running, which is why the song is always there, underneath everything, waiting for a moment of quiet to get louder.

Nana Mouskouri has had unfettered access to my default mode network for over a year. She is, at this point, practically family.

The Upside (Yes, There Is One)

Here is what I have come to appreciate: a brain that runs music constantly is also a brain that is never truly alone. There is always something happening in there. Always a rhythm, a melody, a loop of thought connecting one thing to another.

And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the song that gets stuck is the right one. A piece of music that matches exactly what you’re feeling, that articulates something you couldn’t put into words, that arrives in the morning with its cheerful Nana Mouskouri energy and somehow sets the tone for the day.

I didn’t ask for “The Funk Soul Brother” this week. But honestly? It’s not the worst thing to have running underneath five days of work. There is something to be said for an involuntary soundtrack that keeps the energy up.

Right about now. The funk soul brother. Check it out now.

I’ll see myself out.

Let me ask you something. When you walk from one room to another, do you just… walk there? Empty handed? One trip, one purpose?

I cannot fathom this.

Every time I leave a room, I am conducting a rapid mental inventory of everything that needs to travel with me. Items get stacked, balanced, tucked under arms. My laptop, my tablet, a coffee cup, whatever mail needs to go downstairs, all of it, in one go. Never mind that a stack of electronics teetering precariously might not be the safest approach. The point is efficiency. The point is not wasting a single trip.

This is what it is like to live inside an AuDHD brain that has a complicated, exhausting, and occasionally hilarious relationship with time.

Time Doesn’t Walk. It Runs.

For most people, time is a steady background presence, something that passes at a predictable pace while life happens around it. For me, time is something that is always running out. It moves fast, it slips away, and there is never quite enough of it.

This creates a permanent state of optimization. If I have to go downstairs anyway, I am taking everything with me that belongs downstairs. If I am brushing my teeth, I am also wiping down the sink, maybe dusting the shelf. If I am watching TV in the evening, I am simultaneously playing a game on my tablet, not because I am bored, but because doing both actually helps me focus better than doing either one alone. Distractions, paradoxically, sometimes sharpen my attention.

I don’t know what day of the week it is half the time. Seriously. I have to stop and think about it. But ask me how many things I have accomplished today, and the list will be long enough to make most people tired just reading it. This is why I coined the phrase years ago: *one Carmen week equals one human year.*

I am not saying this to brag. I am saying it because it is genuinely how my brain works, not out of discipline or ambition, but out of an inability to experience time any other way. The engine doesn’t have an off switch.

The Ritual Problem

Here is where it gets interesting, because AuDHD is not just ADHD. The autism side adds another layer entirely: rituals.

My mornings are not flexible. I wake up, go upstairs, brush my teeth, shower, meditate, then open my laptop. In that order. Every day. The structure isn’t optional, it is what allows the rest of the day to function. Without it, something feels fundamentally wrong, like a song missing its opening notes.

But even inside the ritual, the efficiency brain cannot rest. Brushing my teeth is never just brushing my teeth. As I said before, it is brushing my teeth while cleaning the sink, or wiping the mirror, or straightening whatever is out of place. Because standing still for three minutes doing only one thing feels like waste.

The ritual and the efficiency instinct exist side by side, the autism providing the structure, the ADHD filling every available gap within it.

When the Ritual Breaks

The fragility of rituals becomes obvious the moment one gets disrupted.

I used to walk five kilometers every day with my dog Jack. It was non-negotiable, part of the rhythm, part of how I managed my energy and my brain. Then Jack got older and could no longer manage those distances. My other dog, Willow, could, but taking her alone felt wrong, disruptive to the household in the early morning hours. So I stopped. Just like that. The walk disappeared from the ritual and nothing replaced it.

I also used to do yoga every day. Then my circumstances changed, the space where I used to practice was no longer available, and the alternative spaces didn’t work. So that disappeared too.

This is the paradox: I am an efficiency machine, and yet I cannot easily retrofit a broken routine. The ADHD brain that can pivot instantly in some contexts becomes completely rigid when a ritual is broken. It is not laziness. It is not lack of motivation. It is that the brain needs the groove to already exist before it can run in it. Creating a new groove from scratch takes a different kind of energy, and in the meantime, the gap gets filled with work, because work is always there, always available, and always feels productive.

The Vacation Problem

I do not take vacations willingly.

This sounds strange, I know. But every day already feels like there is not enough time in it. The idea of stepping away, of deliberately not doing things, of letting time pass without filling it, it feels almost physically uncomfortable. So I don’t take time off until I am forced to. And then, inevitably, I spend the first stretch of the vacation feeling like time is running out, like I haven’t done anything, like I am somehow already behind.

The entire concept of leisure is built on an assumption my brain doesn’t share: that time is abundant, that rest is productive, that stopping is not the same as falling behind. My brain has never fully believed any of these things.

Clothes Without Pockets Are an Insult

I realize I need to address this separately, because it is important.

I hate clothes without pockets. Deeply, genuinely, unreasonably. Even my pajama pants need pockets. Even my lounge wear. Because at any given moment I might need to carry something from one place to another, and having to make a second trip just because my clothes have no pockets is exactly the kind of inefficiency that makes no sense to me.

This is perhaps the most relatable thing I have ever written, and I stand by every word.

Moving at Lightning Speed in a Snail Speed World

The hardest part of all of this is not the busyness, or the rituals, or the inability to sit still. The hardest part is the mismatch.

Most of the world moves at a pace that feels, to me, almost incomprehensibly slow. Meetings that could be emails. Processes that take weeks for no discernible reason. Conversations where I can already see where things are going and have to wait patiently while we get there. Sometimes I talk too much, give too much detail, over-explain, not because I love the sound of my own voice, but because people seem to need more runway than I do to follow a thought, and I am trying to build that runway for them in real time.

I am not impatient with people. I am impatient with the gap between how fast things could move and how fast they actually do.

Living at lightning speed in a snail speed world is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain. Not because I want to slow down, I genuinely don’t, but because the constant recalibration, the waiting, the translating of my pace into something the world can keep up with, takes energy that never quite gets replenished.

And yet. I would not trade this brain for a slower one. Not for a second. There is something extraordinary about experiencing the world at full intensity, about never being bored, about finding endless ways to fill time and endless things worth filling it with.

What I would trade, in a heartbeat, is the noise. The inside of my head is never quiet. Not for a moment. There is always something running, processing, replaying, planning. The speed I can live with. The silence I just wish I could find sometimes.

And, I just wish more clothes had pockets.