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Creating Lasting Habits with ADHD

Trying to stay mentally on task is a challenge for most people when it comes to creative pursuits. For writers with ADHD, there are days when it feels like wrangling greased pigs in a McDonald’s ball pit. Let me share with you 7 pro-life tips I’ve learned the hard way after 30 years of writing professionally with ADHD.

ADHD: How Do You Know If You Have It?

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition in which people have trouble paying attention, become too active, and act on impulses. This condition is linked to a lot of different behavior problems, some of which seem to be at odds with each other.

There are also problems with thinking, such as having a short attention span or forgetting things. But many people with ADHD can also focus on one thing for extended periods of time and understand and remember things quickly and easily.

People with ADHD often have mood swings, get bored, feel anxious, or feel depressed. No matter how high or low your IQ is, you can have any of these signs. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.

There are now online services run by medical professionals that can assist in diagnosing and treating the condition. Working with a doctor or mental health professional to figure out the best treatment plan is important.

The condition seems to range from mild to severe, and other neurological disorders like autism and bipolar disorder may also play a part in a person’s profile.

According to a recent article on the subject, “ADHD is now seen as a neurological, psychological, and psychiatric condition.”

According to some research, people with ADHD may have different brain structures and functions, particularly in the reward system and the prefrontal cortex. These regions play an important role in decision making and attention.

ADHD is not caused by a lack of discipline or a bad home environment, and it is not the result of a child being “difficult” or “lazy.” ADHD is a real and treatable medical condition that necessitates accurate diagnosis and treatment.

The Battle for Consistency

Now that we’ve gotten all the prerequisite public-service information out of the way, let’s get down to the real deal. How do we become successful and stay that way with the type of brain we’ve been given? There’s an old joke on the ADD subreddit: “How can this Adderall stuff be addictive if I can’t remember to take it every day?”

Many of us are naturally gifted in specific ways. However, to be successful, we have to go beyond our gifts. It’s not enough to be smart, fast, or agile (mentally or physically); we also have to be consistent in our actions and attitudes. That’s going to require some work. Here are my seven suggestions for making ADHD work in our favor as creative people in the long run.

Your Dominant Modality

Modalities are called representational systems; they are the ways we interpret reality through our senses. Vision, hearing, touching, tasting, and feeling are the modalities we are aware of. Our submodalities are the ways in which our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (touch) systems work best for us.

What is your dominant modality? For instance, most people tend to have a dominant visual modality. How we translate that visual information is unique to ourselves. We tend to forget that individuals experience reality in different ways.

We may experience the world through their eyes, but some find that their sense of touch and taste, as well as a hands-on approach to experiencing, offer greater satisfaction and results.

Modalities such as sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell connect us to the world outside of our bodies.

Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic

Having a better understanding of how your particular brain operates will help you train it to do what you want. For example, I’m an extremely visual person. This is my internal representation of the world. When someone says, “Visualize an apple moving at the speed of sound,” I see the movie instantly.

If your dominant internal representation is auditory, you might be stressing out trying to “see” what I’m talking about. However, you’ll be able to pick up the whooshing or the sonic boom as the apple goes whizzing past at 1,125 ft/s.

For those with an internal kinesthetic appreciation, you may feel the wind as the apple slices through the air. You may even experience the shockwaves of the sonic boom once the little fruit’s speed exceeds 175 miles per hour.

Understanding your internal representation of reality will help you with visualization, meditation, and self-talk. We’re coming to that.

Making Lists and Checking Them Twice

If you have been diagnosed with ADHD, you’ve been told endlessly that one of the best solutions to organizing your life is making lists. Writing lists and maintaining a schedule are great tips for success. That’s like saying the best way to lose weight and maintain your health is to eat right and get lots of exercise.

For most of us, the challenge isn’t about finding new solutions to fix the problems; it’s about finding a way to apply these solutions consistently. How do we make writing a list and following a schedule a consistent habit every day?

In my opinion, the primary goal is not to decide to make some changes in your life. The initial goal is to learn how habits work for you and master the art of building habits.

The Anatomy of Habits

Since humans are creatures of habit, sociologists and psychologists have figured out that there are specific steps that we take to build habits. We go through what is called a habit loop.

It starts with a cue. Our thoughts and feelings are set off by how we see the outside world, and our hormones respond to reward us.

1–2–3: The Apple Pie Equation

For example, your mom makes an apple pie every Saturday when you’re a kid. As an adult, whenever you go to a restaurant, you order apple pie; that’s your dessert of choice. You may have totally forgotten about mom’s apple pie from all those years ago.

1. The cue: We see “apple pie” on the menu at the restaurant.
2. The routine: Your mental image makes you remember how much fun it was to be a child or how much you love your mom. Then you start to think of your lunch or dinner at a restaurant as a way to feel good.
3. The payoff: Once we do something in the routine, we feel good about ourselves or are validated.

This cycle continues regardless of whether our habits are good or bad for us, physically or morally. Internally, our goal is to get that dopamine, norepinephrine, or serotonin hit. The actions may begin consciously but gradually become unconscious. Now we’re running on autopilot.

It’s Time to Get Hooked on the Right Stuff

People often call endorphins “feel-good” chemicals because they can make you feel happy and healthy. They are also believed to play a role in reducing stress and anxiety.

If you ever found yourself addicted to a videogame or mobile app, you will be able to understand the 1–2–3 process of building a habit. The key is to understand the reward system and how it relates to your activity and your mindset.

Let’s use the example of writing 5,000 words a day. You may have calculated that in order to finish your great American novel, you need to write 5,000 words a day for six months.

You decided to keep your system simple:

• Develop your morning routine.
• Check your list to see where you are in the writing process.
• Accomplish your goal in four hours.

Finally, at the end of the day, you check your list to verify that you’ve accomplished those milestones.

Pro Tips for Creating Habits

What we’re going to do here is use the 1–2–3 system to insert the habits we know we need to succeed. We are working with cues and reinforcing activities by rewarding our endorphins.

The challenge is to figure out the correct prompts to satisfy your brain. If your goal is to write 5,000 words a day, you have to go through the same three steps that it took to get you addicted to apple pie. This time, you’re going to need to pay attention to the process.

In this basic example, we’re not making writing a daily habit; we’re starting small. We want to make a habit of writing our daily checklist and reviewing it after work.

1. Understand the cues that will trigger our activities.

As mentioned before, cues kick off our habits; these can be thoughts, feelings, or images, as well as actions that occur outside of ourselves. If you determine that your main modality is visual, let’s set up a scenario. Let’s link something visually stimulating to the first step in your new habit.

You may love coffee in the morning, for example.

1. Exercise cues that release your endorphins.

If you can’t go a day without your morning Java, ensure that your notebook is on the table next to your cup. While your coffee is brewing in the morning, pick up your notebook and make a note of what needs to be done for the day. Consciously associate your notebook with your morning coffee.

1. Use visualization and self-talk to anchor your cues.

You’re going to be reinforcing the process on and off throughout the day. If you drink multiple cups of coffee per day, keep your notebook nearby and review it as you sip.

Take a few minutes out of the day to sit back, relax, and visualize taking notes. The act of going through the steps mentally will begin to offer the same reward as sitting down with your cup of coffee and your notebook. You want to connect taking notes every day with good feelings and reinforce the thoughts, feelings, sounds, or images that will make the dopamine hit happen.

Pay Attention to Routines

What we’re looking for is the endorphin release that happens when we drink our coffee and take our notes in the morning. We’re developing the routine based on the positive reward we get from our coffee-drinking activity. To strengthen this routine, we are going to use self-talk.

People whose main modality is hearing can understand that the way we talk to ourselves can both motivate and demotivate us. Self-talk is the inner voice or monologue that keeps us going, whether we want to or not. Self-talk helps our brain to process daily experiences and helps to reaffirm our identity.

FYI, there are people who don’t experience inner vocalization. Use the modality that best supports your inner working process.

Spend some time every day thinking about what you say to yourself and start promoting positive self-talk around the cues and habits you want to form. “I really get more things done and stay much more organized when I have my morning notebook session and my cup-o-Joe!”

Visualization for Creating a Daily Habit

“Visualization” refers to our ability to create pictures in our heads based on what we read or hear. When words are consciously used to create mental images, understanding is accelerated. “People who make use of visualization have an advanced ability to understand, learn, and remember, and even perform better.”

I do want to clear up a misconception about visualization. Others who are more inclined to be kinesthetic or auditory tend to feel left out when it comes to visualization training.

Maybe “mental rehearsal” is a more apt description of what we’re trying to achieve here. As a coffee lover, I want you to experience the sight, smell, taste, feel, and even the sounds associated with your guilty pleasure.

Your mental rehearsal should really reflect the feelings you get from the activity. During this time, you’re writing the best notes, checking them twice, and getting ready to take action while that wonderful caffeine courses through your bloodstream. Practice makes perfect.

Identify De-Motivators

You’re going to find, as you practice this process, that monkey wrenches mysteriously fall into your machinery. There will be distractions, obstacles, and activities that try to compete for your attention by promising to increase your endorphins faster. You’re also going to find fear, uncertainty, and overwhelm closing in fast to knock you off your game.

We’re no strangers to distraction. But we’re not going to worry about the distractions yet. When they do show up, we’re just going to take out our notebook and jot them down.

Identifying the de-motivators and distractions that occur and then getting back to our stated activity is part of the game we’re going to play. For now, let’s look at de-motivators, fear and overwhelm.

The fight-or-flight response is triggered by stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Our go-to strategy is overwhelm and avoidance. This causes even more stress and the downward spiral, which is similar to the vicious cycle.

While taking notes, jot down the obvious patterns that occur when stress kicks in. Draw a picture of the process and list both the good things that happen and the bad things that happen as a result.

We want to make a note of these so that we can address them in our next phase of the process. We don’t want to get rid of fear and worry; we want to put them in perspective.

Meditation: Working Out the Kinks

There has been a lot of discussion about mindfulness over the last few decades. For a while, this word appeared on a daily basis in my news feed.

Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to your thoughts and feelings without judgment in the here and now. Meditation is a great practice for achieving this state of being. It means focusing on the present moment and noticing your thoughts and feelings as they come up without getting caught up in them or trying to change them.

Meditation is one of the most effective ways of achieving mindfulness day-to-day, along with a laundry list of other benefits for people with ADHD. We can put aside the part of ourselves that is always reacting to things when we meditate.

Even 10 minutes a day of guided meditation can make a difference within a month. There are many potential benefits to meditation, including:

• Reducing stress and anxiety.
• Improving focus and concentration.
• Promoting relaxation.
• Reducing negative emotions.
• Improving sleep.
• Pain reduction.
• Lowering blood pressure.
• Reduce cortisol levels.
• Improve self-awareness.
• Lower impulsivity.
• Improve interpersonal relationships.
• Develop mindfulness.

Mindfulness can help you overcome the demotivators and roadblocks that stand in your way of developing a consistent meditation practice. There are a number of good meditation apps available to try for free or at a low cost.

Meditation and ADHD

Three important benefits of meditation for creative people with ADHD are improved self-awareness, improved concentration, and lowered impulsivity (in my opinion). As you get better at it, your ability to form daily habits in many areas becomes enhanced.

Everyone can benefit from daily meditation in a variety of ways. It can help people pay more attention, be less impulsive, and control their emotions better.

People with ADHD can also use meditation to deal with stress and improve their general health. It may also help reduce the symptoms of other conditions that people with ADHD often have, like anxiety and depression.

Meditation is not a replacement for tried-and-true treatments for ADHD, like medication and behavioral therapy. But for some people with ADHD, it may be a good way to build consistency in their actions.

All this work is geared toward satisfying your endorphins while getting you used to building effective habits. Start with something simple and work your way up!

Conclusion

So, how does drinking coffee and taking notes contribute to writing your daily 5,000 words? Focus on the most basic habits first. Find out what makes you feel good, then link the proper cues to the routine. Those cues must come with the appropriate reward to satisfy your endorphin needs. In NLP, we look at it this way:

1: Cues

2: The Routine

3: The Reward

Consistency in action will come soon enough. Focus on these three simple steps and incorporate these seven tips into your daily routine. Think about a simple action that relates to your writing goals and break it down into action steps.

Copy the tips into your notebook and review them regularly. Remember that success breeds more success if you pay attention. Soon, you’ll be on your way to finishing that sequel to War and Peace—right after that next cup of coffee.

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