ADHD and travel blogging (and why they’re really not friends)

ADHD, woefully under diagnosed in women and girls, makes it very difficult to form habits. After 10 years of running Inside Laura’s Head, this site should be a well oiled machine, I should have a regular posting schedule, a tried and tested method of promoting my content, be fixing broken links regularly, pitching to brands for collaborative work and absolutely smashing it. And, honestly, I don’t do most of those things consistently. I mostly feel like a fraud, when I say ‘oh I’m a travel blogger’, and it feels SHIT.

Proper bloggers, as I’d call them, have huge amounts of views, amazing content, and they seem like they’re spending most of their free time writing. They seem to really have their shit together with a loyal following, a real reason to read their posts over other peoples, oh and they are on trips ALLLL the time.

Before I met J, and before I bought my house, travel was my top priority. A big percentage of my wage went on trips, and I would book last minute flights frequently. My trips were jam packed full of rushing around to see things, and I felt like I always had content to write. I felt more like a travel blogger then than I do now, in all honesty.

But, on the flip side, some of my content back then wasn’t great. I would do a lot of posts that were ‘and then I saw this, and then I walked past to this, and I spotted this’ which is fine, but that style of content doesn’t add much value for a reader. I felt more of a travel blogger but looking back I was a person writing about their trips in a diary style. There’s a place for that for sure, but not on Inside Laura’s Head. I want this site to be informative, interesting, fun, full of personality and great photos. I want you to come back and read my posts because you’ve enjoyed them, but ultimately I want you to be able to enjoy your time in whichever city MORE, because you’ve read some tips on this blog. That’s the goal.

Since sitting down to write this post (a few weeks before it’s been posted, because I find it’s often useful to sit on these more personal posts for a while) I’ve made a plan for Inside Laura’s Head going forward. It’s going to allow me to write more local food content, which always does well, to cover some local cities as well as international ones, and to rewrite old content to make it far more useful to you as a reader. I’ve also thought about how to cover trips I wouldn’t have attempted to usually-like a summer wedding in Paphos in July can lead to a post about things to do in Paphos if you’re not a sun lounger and swimming pool sort of person, even if I wouldn’t have picked Paphos for a city break style trip.

My neurodiverse brain is unmedicated, as I’m not yet diagnosed with ADHD (thank you, super long waiting lists!) so for the vast majority of my life I feel like I’m swimming through treacle and getting nowhere. It’s no surprise that Inside Laura’s Head is in the same boat as every other aspect of my life. I need to be kinder to myself and accept that doing my best IS good enough, that this is a personal blog not the worlds best travel website, and that adding value doesn’t need to mean each post takes 6 weeks to research and write, and takes you 6 hours to read.

I have a chronic illness as well as ADHD, a full time job, a relationship, a Burnley FC season ticket, I do a lot of petsitting, I aim to run 3 times a week and gym twice and I travel as much as I can. Sometimes I do wonder where I’m supposed to find the time to write! Hilariously, I’m writing this post when I’m meant to be doing something totally different, but inspiration has struck and I’ve gone with it. This happens a lot, and I need to harness it better-if I want to write, I can drop everything and write for half an hour, most of the time. And posts can go up whenever, I’m not a failure if it takes me a few weeks rather than a few hours to get a post up about a city.

It’s okay to have periods of not writing much, too. After writing nothing at all for weeks, even though I’ve been opening the blog and just staring at it on a regular basis, over the past three days I’ve finished my complete guide to Porto post (which took me a month from my last trip, not bad going for a chunky post) written about packing for a two night trip in a Fjallraven Kanken, and now I’m writing this, weeks ahead of when I want it to go live. Will I carry on writing a post a day? Likely, for a few days. Will I then not write anything for three weeks? Even more likely. My brain hyperfocuses on a thing, I can’t get enough of it, I want to do it all the time-and then that focus just drops. It’s weird, I hate it, but I can’t change it. (Edited to add that in between starting and finishing this post, I wrote three more, but finishing this one took me weeks because ADHD brain)

I have posts half written from trips I’ve taken in summer 2023, yet I have posts half written that aren’t going to be posted until the end of 2025. I have at least three lists of post ideas, most of them I now hate, but my brain is always full of new posts I’m super excited to write. It is chaotic, and that’s a reflection of my whole life. Again, this is okay-I’m doing my best and my best is enough.

I’m never going to be the blogger who posts consistently every single Wednesday at 7am (though I’ll try-and might even succeed for chunks of time!) but I will carry on doing my best to grow Inside Laura’s Head, my own way, in my own timeframe. And I think I’m starting to accept that. I hope you’ll stick around!