In 1996, an ADHD coach named Linda Anderson gave a name to something she noticed in a client's home office. Thirty years later the term is everywhere. This is the first extended conversation about body doubling and ADHD with the woman who coined the term.
Filmed at Linda Anderson's home, 2026. · Read the full transcript · Jump to a moment
What body doubling is
Body doubling is working on your own task while another person is quietly present, doing theirs. You agree on a start, an end, and how much to interact. Nobody supervises anybody. The other person is there to be an anchor, not a manager.
Coined 1996 by Linda Anderson · See the origin
What it is not
Anderson, on tape · 49:19
Before she became an ADHD coach, Linda Anderson was a professional organizer, driving to people's homes in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. One client — she calls him David in her 1996 article, which ADDA published — had been a corporate vice president before he retired. His home office was immaculate. So what did he need her for?
His trouble was in his head: he couldn't get started or follow through on his projects. Partway through the visit he admitted, a little embarrassed, that he could get focused when his wife sat in a chair across the room and did her own work, or even just knitted.
“The way he said it, almost like he was revealing a deep, dark secret. And the very fact that he said it sent a shiver down my spine, because I thought — I get it. I can understand how that would work.”
Anderson recognized it as something she had been doing accidentally with her own clients. Part of what helped them wasn't her advice or her systems. It was her being in the room.
“I realized that there was an aspect of my just being there that helped a person get something done.”
It became clear to her that she should try to share this intuitive tool.
“It is much more of an intuitive feeling. It is a hit… it really just kind of rippled through, like: this is a thing, this works, this is great. Other people could do this. I could hand this to them.”
Anderson got the name from an old John Travolta movie, Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), in which Travolta's character accidentally records a car going off a bridge. Something from the movie put the phrase in her head. She liked the phrase because it has a bit of humor in it.
“It wasn't a direct link. It was just like, oh, I'm going to call it this, body double. Because maybe that's an element of it. ‘That's a quiet me sitting over there working.’”
The odd name probably helped it spread, because it makes people stop and ask, 'wait, a what?' Awareness grew slowly in the ADHD community as Anderson began presenting it at meetings and seminars. Then the pandemic sent everyone home to work alone, and body doubling took off on TikTok.
When we asked her to define body doubling again in 2026, Anderson landed on three things: an invitation, a shared block of time, and no obligation to interact unless you choose to.
“Having someone you're willing to ask into your space — or not even your space — that you can work with for a time being. And in fact, it doesn't have to be just for you. That person could also do their work. … Now that we can do this across states and countries, you can be doing what you're going to do over there, and I'm going to be working on this. … I have a beginning, I'm going to work through it, and then there will be an end of it, and sort of a completion.”
Settle these before you start.
Works on their own thing, quietly and in view.
Agrees on the rules of engagement up front — how long it runs, whether you'll check in, whether there are breaks.
Sticks to what you agreed for the whole block, then stops when it ends.
Don't supervise. “They're not there to supervise you.”
Don't coach. “They're not your coach.”
Don't teach, watch or correct. “Not be tutored or taught or watched and coached.”
“Letting that person know that they're not there to supervise you. They're not your coach. They don't need to say, hey, how are you doing? Or did you get it done yet? … You've given yourself permission to go into that place and not be tutored or taught or watched and coached.”
Not quite. Their presence is to help you hold yourself accountable.
We read her Dr. Russell Barkley's description of body doubling as “finding ways for yourself to be publicly accountable to others.” The framing gave her pause:
“I felt a little bit more of a twinge when I read it, of somebody's making me accountable … that person's there, therefore I need to work — because that puts that element of judgment, or self-judgment, in there. So I like to say that the body double idea is meant to get rid of that part.”
So nobody is judging you, and nobody is checking whether you delivered. What you committed to was the time:
“Maybe you didn't quite work on what you said you would work on, but you committed to that time, and you did. What did you do? Okay, I did this.”
If you showed up and body doubled for the block, you did what you agreed to. You can reflect on and even share your progress, but the most important thing is that no one is there to keep score. This matters because the harshest scorekeeper is usually already in the room.
Anderson's point is that people with ADHD already carry a harsh critic around all day. Adding an external one makes it worse. A body doubling session has to be a judgment-free space.
“There's this internal voice that's always critiquing: what's wrong with you, why don't you just start this, you've been wasting a lot of time. That internal critic is so overdeveloped. And this is meant to take out the internal critic.”
Flow Club runs body doubling sessions for people around the world to get together and anchor each other's focus.
Anderson doesn't treat her 1996 definition as final. Even in our interview, she was still discovering new ways to understand and explain body doubling.
“Can you see there's intuition happening? Because I wasn't thinking — I didn't write about that, that the other person helps quiet down the inner critic. We need to put another paragraph in there, because that's really an element of it.”
Thirty years of other people practicing it taught her something about the thing she named.
We collected real reactions people had posted online and read them to her one at a time.
“Oh, no, no, no, no. I can't be watched. I would immediately wither and die.”
She recognized the feeling instantly. The anxiety wrapped up in a history of judgment.
“I can just feel, in my gut, the person's anxiety … there's some place in their past, maybe several of those places, where that was done. Somebody trying to get them to work, a mother over the shoulder, or a teacher.”
Her answer is one sentence.
“Nobody's going to be watching you. That's the nub of it right there.”
This is not just reassurance. It's how body doubling sessions work. Nobody watches you because everyone else is busy with their own thing.
“I cannot body double either, because I do not shut up. If someone's with me, it's social time.”
Anderson took this as a description of the person, not a reason it won't work. She gently pointed out that while body doubling, nobody talks back.
“That person has ADHD. And they're very verbal. So they're a verbal processor.”
“They just feel like, if there's somebody there, I'm going to be talking to them. You think you're going to be talking. But if nobody's talking back at you, you might find that it's very different than you think.”
“Whenever someone's in the room with me, I feel like I should be playing hostess … it feels rude.”
“The thing that shifts that, of course, is that that person isn't doing nothing over there in their space. They're busy doing their own work.”
“You're not going to be taking care of that person. They're going to be taking care of themselves. So you're going to be choosing the thing you want to put some attention to.”
There is no host, because there is no guest. Both people came for their own work.
Anderson is clear about the danger in this one. The questions came from someone whose partner had decided body doubling was his treatment plan.
“I've come to hate it, because my partner seems to think that me having to body double indefinitely for him to do basic stuff is fine — and a substitute for actually treating his disorder.”
“Did it start from my partner suggesting this would be something that would help me? Or am I thinking I will be helpful to my partner if I do this? Either way, danger. Danger, Will Robinson, danger.”
If body doubling weren't discussed clearly and renewed every time, it could lead to resentment and put significant strain on a relationship.
“It's awkward. Cringe. I can't do it because it's awkward.”
“I think that's great, that somebody's putting it out there, right on the table in front of you. It's cringey, whatever. If you have a conversation with that person, it's all about finding out where they're coming from, what's bothering them about it. Maybe they just need more time to wrap themselves around it.”
“When you're entering into this kind of agreement to do this, you are taking a bit of a step into an unknown container. And so, good for you. You're willing to do this.”
She never argues anyone out of the awkwardness. It is a little awkward. But she praises you for trying something new.
While there is no large controlled trial, there is plenty of adjacent research on the mechanisms underlying a body doubling session: social facilitation, task initiation, the effect of a bounded block of time, and what quiet company does to the voice in your head.
The explanation most often reached for is mirror neurons. Anderson raised the idea herself in the 1996 article — and is the first to say it was a guess.
“They'd done studies, I think, probably with some primate… but yet I don't believe it is scientific enough that it's been proven. … So who knows what the actual principle is. It's just that it does work.”
That is roughly where the evidence sits along with a large and consistent body of self-report from people with ADHD.
Our longer write-up of what the science does and doesn't support is here: Body doubling and ADHD — what the research actually says.
The hardest step is deciding to try something new and believing it can help. The next hardest is asking: who to ask, and how to explain it without it getting awkward. There are two ways around it.
“… when you're out there on your own trying to figure out, who could I ask to do this, and how do I explain it to them?”
Pick someone who is not close to you, then define the role out loud before you start. Make sure it has a clear start and end time.
“It's very hard to kind of just say … somebody in your family or a relative. But on the other hand, if you could define for somebody, this is your role. You can just sit over there and do your thing, I don't want to be asked questions. Just be there.”
There is no one correct format. How long it runs, how much you interact, whether there are breaks — all of it is yours to set before you start. You can use the body doubling agreement generator below to make it less awkward.
The other way is to not have to ask at all. Flow Club has considered the various formats and built a platform to make body doubling easy and reliably effective. On Flow Club, nobody is being inconvenienced because everyone is there to get their own things done. Anderson's word for the difference was convenience: “if you can look up and say, oh, somebody's going to be there, I want to do this this afternoon, or tomorrow at such a time.”
Asking someone yourself can feel like asking for a favor, even if the arrangement also benefits the person you are asking. Take the asking out of it and there's no favor left:
“That's right. So now this thing can be mutual.”
Try body doubling once and you'll know if it's for you. Do it again at the same time each week and it turns into a rhythm.
“Rhythm is a kind of container.”
The full conversation runs 1 hour 23 minutes across 45 chapters. If you only have ten minutes, start here.
Every word, speaker-labeled and timestamped to the video, across all 45 chapters. Every timecode plays that moment without leaving the page.
The term body doubling was coined in 1996 by Linda Anderson, an ADHD coach and former professional organizer in Pennsylvania, in an article describing a client she calls David. The practice of working alongside someone is older than the name; the name is hers.
1996, in an article Anderson wrote. It was published by the Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA), and it is still on ADDA's website today.
Not in the original definition. The effect can be achieved as long as there's another person present in the room, without any threat of judgment. However, if you want to share goals and report back for more accountability, that's a valid variation as long as everyone agrees to the arrangement and avoids judging.
No. It was developed in an ADHD coaching context and is most discussed there, but the mechanism — a bounded block of time with another person or group of people quietly present — is not diagnosis-specific. Plenty of people without ADHD practice it.
Body doubling describes the relationship: someone present while you work, without supervision. Virtual coworking describes the format: a scheduled online session where that happens. Most virtual coworking is body doubling; not all body doubling is virtual coworking. For example, inviting a friend over to work at your kitchen table counts.
Not in the sense of controlled trials showing improved task completion. There is related research on working alongside others online and a very large body of consistent self-report.
This page is the primary source for Linda Anderson's own account of coining the term. You're welcome to quote it. Timestamps match the edited video published above. Press inquiries and requests for stills: press@flow.club.
The easiest way to body double is in Flow Club. Give it a try for free today.
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