If you have ADHD, you’ll probably recognise this: you know what you need to do. You’ve written a list, made yourself a cup of tea, and even opened the document. And then… nothing. You can’t seem to get started, and you find yourself scrolling, doing anything except the thing.
It’s not laziness, although it may well look like it. Your brain needs some help to get going, and one thing that that stack of productivity books likely won’t recommend is the presence of another human.
This is where body doubling comes in.
So what actually is body doubling?
It’s ridiculously simple. So simple that you may well have done it before and not realised.
Body doubling is working alongside someone else. Not necessarily talking to them, not asking for help, not even working on the same thing. Just not being alone with the task.
It’s worth noting what makes it different from co-working. Unlike a shared office or a co-working space, body doubling places no obligation on you to interact, and no restriction on the type of work. You can be paying bills, writing a novel, folding laundry, doing your tax return, or clearing your inbox. The other person is simply there. That’s enough.
Body doubling isn’t a new idea
People have been body doubling informally for years – the friend you call while you’re doing the washing up, or that busy coffee shop where somehow you always get more done than you do at home.
Interestingly, research into how adults with ADHD cope before diagnosis found that many had instinctively developed social strategies exactly like this – working alongside others, seeking out environments with people in them – long before anyone called it body doubling or explained why it worked (Canela et al., 2017). If you’re reading this and thinking “I’ve always done that,” you’re not alone.
The term itself appears to have emerged from clinical practice in the mid-1990s and the Attention Deficit Disorder Association say they published it on their website in 1996. It stayed largely within ADHD communities for years before the pandemic brought it to wider attention, when remote workers discovered that virtual body doubling (on a video call like Zoom or Teams) helped with the accountability and focus that a shared office had previously provided.
What does the science say?
Honestly, not a lot. As recently as 2024, a researcher at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology journal searched for peer-reviewed studies on body doubling and found just two studies with a combined 260 participants (Sanders, 2024). The science has been slow to catch up with what ADHD people have known for decades.
That said, the theoretical basis is solid, and the evidence – while still early – is beginning to build.
Dopamine
The most well-grounded explanation involves dopamine. ADHD involves disrupted dopamine signalling, particularly in the brain regions responsible for motivation, task initiation, and reward. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry, looking at more than 40 years of evidence, confirmed that dopamine dysregulation is central to ADHD. It’s not as simple as a deficit, but rather a disruption in how the brain processes reward and motivation (MacDonald et al., 2024). Social interaction is one of the most reliable natural triggers for dopamine activity, which helps explain why another person’s presence can shift an ADHD brain from stuck to started.
Motivation
Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985) put forward the idea that people can be internally or externally motivated. Russell Barkley, a prominent researcher in ADHD, explains that people with ADHD need to build structures outside of themselves to manage what other people’s brains handle internally. This might look like accountability, external rewards, or simply the presence of another person – external motivation is a longstanding, evidence-based approach to managing ADHD executive function (Barkley, 2012).
New research
And there is research coming through, albeit limited so far. A 2025 study by Ara et al. tested body doubling in a virtual reality environment, comparing participants working alone, with a human body double, and with an AI body double. Participants in both body double conditions finished tasks faster and reported greater sustained attention and perceived accuracy than those working alone. It really is a small study – just 12 participants – and it’s a preprint rather than a peer-reviewed publication. But it’s one of the first controlled experiments to test body doubling directly, and the results point in the same direction as everything the ADHD community has been saying for thirty years.
A master’s thesis from Virginia Tech (Annavarapu, 2024) also tested body doubling across in-person, video call, and mixed reality conditions with 40 participants, and found it helpful across modes – suggesting that the physical presence of another person matters less than the simple fact of not being alone.
What a body doubling session actually looks like
I run free monthly body doubling sessions on Zoom. We check in briefly at the start of the session and you’re invited to share what you’re working on, and what you want to achieve. Then we get started, camera on, mic on mute. I facilitate timed working blocks with short breaks in between and a Q&A, and then at the end there’s a few minutes to share how we’ve got on.
You bring whatever you’re working on. Emails, invoices, a creative project, a difficult phone call you’ve been putting off. We’ve even body doubled with a gardener. Anything that needs you to stay on task but keeps not getting done.
Want to try this for yourself?
These free body doubling sessions are open to anyone on my newsletter list. Sign up using this link and you’ll get an invitation to the next one. I’d love to see you there!
References
Annavarapu, S. (2024). Comparative study of body doubling in extended reality. Unpublished master’s thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Ara, Z., Rahim, I. B., Zhou, P., Yu, L., Esmaeili, B., Yu, L., & Hong, S. R. (2025). You are not alone: Designing body doubling for ADHD in virtual reality. arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12153.
Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive functioning and self-regulation. Guilford Press. Further reading: russellbarkley.org/factsheets/ADHD_EF_and_SR.pdf
Canela, C., Buadze, A., Dube, A., Eich, D., & Liebrenz, M. (2017). Skills and compensation strategies in adult ADHD: A qualitative study. PLoS ONE, 12(9), e0184964.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press.
MacDonald, H. J., Kleppe, R., Szigetvari, P. D., & Haavik, J. (2024). The dopamine hypothesis for ADHD: An evaluation of evidence accumulated from human studies and animal models. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, 1492126.
Sanders, A. M. F. (2024). ADHDing, one year later. The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 62(1).
About Natalie
I’m an ICF accredited ADHD coach working with creative professionals – actors, voiceover artists, writers, musicians, and anyone who works in ways that don’t fit the standard nine-to-five. I’m also a working voiceover artist with more than 25 years in the industry, and was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
I host the ADHD Green Room, a free online community for creatives with a monthly body doubling session open to all.