Why ADHD Is My Travel Superpower

For many people, the airport terminal can be a source of mild stress. But for travelers with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), it can feel like you’re playing advanced mode in a video game, where you’re faced with hidden time traps, a million tiny decisions and plenty of opportunities to lose something.

I know this firsthand.

I was not formally diagnosed with ADHD until I was 30, despite everyone in my life already knowing it (the inability to sit still and ridiculously fast talking were the giveaways). And traveling has been challenging at times. I’ve left my wallet in an airplane seat pocket in D.C., lost a passport in Croatia, and once forgot my passport entirely — and had to buy in-flight Wi-Fi to ask my husband back home to FedEx it to me before boarding a cruise in Florida.

Here’s what worked for both of us.

Time-blindness in ADHD is an executive function deficit where the brain struggles to accurately perceive, track or estimate the passage of time. In travel, that can easily translate to being late to the airport and missing your flight.

If you don’t have lounge access, Kahn more simply recommends using other motivators to get there early.

“So something like, ‘I’m going to get there on time, and I’m going to go pick out that really trashy magazine I want to read on the plane,’” Kahn says. “Or, ‘I’m going to go get that really special coffee so I can sit there and just feel really warm and chilled and relaxed.’”

Kahn recommends setting an alarm to pack, an alarm to leave the house, and, critically, an alarm to walk away from the airport coffee shop or lounge when boarding actually begins.

The TSA security line is a sensory nightmare: You go from a long, boring line to a sudden barrage of high-pressure instructions, with pressure to move fast.

“The ADHD brain can’t filter that stimuli — the noises, the movement, the people, the close proximity, the sights and smells,” Kahn says. “When you’re having to navigate this line and it feels time-pressured, this turns off the thinking part of the brain. We actually go into ADHD fight-or-flight.”

To prevent making goofy mistakes like leaving items behind, Kahn recommends going into the line completely prepared. This means preemptively removing keys, loose change and your phone from your pockets and placing them into an accessible pouch in your bag before you even step into the queue.

These days, you can keep most of your essential travel documents — your boarding passes, reservations, theme park tickets and even hotel room keys — on your phone. For me, this is a good thing.

I have lost my fair share of boarding passes, and I’ve had to hunt through my bag to find a soggy theme park ticket at the bottom. Now, I just opt into digital forms of everything. For better or for worse, I am phone-addicted, so if I store important documents on my phone, I know they’re safe.

Download your provider’s dedicated app, or add your passes directly to your Apple Wallet or Google Wallet for seamless access. As Kahn points out, eliminating physical clutter prevents hidden stressors.

“If it’s on your phone, then you can’t lose it unless you lose your phone,” he says.

In that same vein, skip the backpacks with 20 different pockets. More pockets are not a feature for people with ADHD. For me, more zippers just mean more black holes for my stuff to get lost in until I open that obscure compartment a year from now.

I’ve definitely packed the earplugs in one pocket, and the headphones in another, and the eye mask in yet another — only to have nothing I actually need for my long-haul flight because it was all buried away in a pouch too tough to access without spilling the whole bag’s contents into the aisle.

From there, Kahn recommends putting the same items in the same place every time.

“I always put my wallet and my keys in one [pocket], always put my phone in the other,” Kahn says. “If you break your rituals, you’re going to find that the anxiety surges.”

If you have ADHD, working memory can be a weak spot. Kahn notes that working memory weaknesses mean that people with ADHD absorb information in the moment but fail to properly store or rehearse it. So if you need to remember important details, make sure you have a backup.

I can never remember my hotel room number, so I use my phone to take a quick photo of the room door or the paper key sleeve the second I check in, plus a photo of where I parked.

Ultimately, traveling successfully with ADHD is all about recognizing your specific friction points, building smart routines to bypass them and letting your natural spontaneity and creativity shine.

For what it’s worth, though, I still make ADHD-related mistakes, and traveling is my literal job.

“Forgetting is OK,” Kahn says. “Figuring out how to remember the things you commonly forget is what makes us successful with ADHD. We can do everything with ADHD, but we just need to create some strategies.”

About the author

Sally French is co-host of the Smart Travel podcast and a writer on NerdWallet’s travel team. Before joining NerdWallet as a travel rewards expert in 2020, she wrote about travel and credit cards for The New York Times and its sibling site, Wirecutter.

Outside of work, she loves fitness, and she competes in both powerlifting and weightlifting (she can deadlift more than triple bodyweight). Naturally, her travels always involve a fitness component, including a week of cycling up the coastline of Vietnam and a camping trip to the Arctic Circle, where she biked over the sea ice. Other adventures have included hiking 25 miles in one day through Italy’s Cinque Terre and climbing the 1,260 steps to Tiger Cave Temple in Krabi, Thailand.

She lives in San Francisco.