What is Body Doubling and What are the Benefits?

What is Body Doubling?

Body Doubling is where a person (a body double), accompanies a person who is completing a task that may struggle to complete the task if alone (Annavarapu, 2024). Body Doubling can be done either in person or virtually. Body Doubling is particularly effective for people with ADHD (Eagle, Baltaxe-Admony & Ringland, 2023).

The job of the body double is to support the person with ADHD. This can be done with the body double remaining silent and working on their tasks in the background, speaking up to keep the person with ADHD on track, or providing advice and assistance to complete tasks.

Over the years, I have successfully used Body Doubling with my children with ADHD, long before the term Body Doubling was coined. I found that some of their challenges included being overwhelmed with where to start, wanting to do a hundred things at once, getting distracted when doing a task - going down a rabbit hole so to speak, getting frustrated easily, starting a task and not finishing the task - instead going on to do something else, feeling overwhelmed and due to this, not even being able to start a task.

The Benefits of Body Doubling

if you spend some time researching Body Doubling, you will see that there are a plethora of positive reviews of Body Doubling directly from people with ADHD as well as numerous articles from medical professionals.

According to a study that surveyed 220 participants, Eagle et al. (2023) found that the majority of neurodivergent participants relied on body doubling to complete a wide range of tasks, from work and school assignments to household chores and cooking. Their preliminary data suggests that body doubling is frequently used and proves to be an effective strategy for initiating and completing tasks.

In line with Villines (2024), the benefits of Body Doubling include:

A body double can demonstrate more effective methods for completing everyday tasks.

Partnering with a body double can make tedious tasks less frustrating, providing motivation to finish them.

A body double can help alleviate feelings of isolation for individuals with ADHD, making them feel calmer and less irritated.

The presence of a body double also introduces a sense of accountability and may offer valuable feedback on distracting or counterproductive behaviours.

Body Doubling can foster a sense of mastery and self-efficacy, encouraging the development of further coping techniques for managing ADHD.

Individuals may acquire new skills through interaction with their body double.

Let us Help You with Our Body Doubling Service

We would love to help you stay on task with our Body Doubling service. If you are an NDIS participant, you may be able to use your NDIS funding to pay for our services. 

We will cater our Body Doubling service to suit your needs. You can decide whether you would like us to remain quiet in the background while working on tasks or if you wish for us to gently guide you to stay on task or offer advice. It is totally up to you and we can cater to your individual needs. We are non-judgmental and experienced in working with people with ADHD.

References

Annavarapu, S. (2024). Comparative Study of Body Doubling in Extended Reality. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/5fcc5824-46de-4614-b2b0- 835646e58dff/content.

Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2023). Proposing body doubling as a continuum of space/time and mutuality: An investigation with neurodivergent participants. The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597638.3614486.

Villines, Z (2024, August 24). What is 'body doubling' for ADHD? Medical News Today. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/body-doubling-adhd.