Transcription
You've done the dopamine menu thing. You've tried body doubling. You've even set up little reward systems. None of it is changing your life in the way that you would like it to. Here are four strategies that, if you implement them, will change your life if you have ADHD. These are not quick fixes. These are not hacks. These are long-term solutions.
Number one, your life will run more smoothly when it's values-led, not habits-led. I'm not a habit hater. And if you are trying to live a habit-led life and you have ADHD, you're slowly going to start to think that something is wrong with you. Like that is inevitable. So, a habit-led life looks like, "Okay, here's this thing that I know that I should do. I need to meditate. I need to drink more water. I need to exercise. I need a journal. Whatever. I'm going to make a plan to do that thing every day at 7:00 a.m. I must be consistent with this thing." But a values-led life looks like, "I really value feeling blank: calm, invigorated, organized. So, I'm going to prioritize doing something regularly that helps me to feel that way."
The thing about habit-led living is that it often leads you to be more you-centered. So you start going, "Well, I have to check these boxes. I must do this thing. I must be consistent." And it becomes a lot less about the behavior. It becomes way less about the value and what you're trying to achieve. Much more about you and how consistent you are and how capable you are. You lose sight of the purpose of it all, really quickly. Values-led living, you're not attaching yourself to you and what you're capable of. You're attaching yourself to the value, to a greater purpose that's above and beyond you. And when you start caring more about what it is that you value versus how you express that you value that thing, how consistent you are, how disciplined you are, like none of it matters. Life gets easier. You get less self-centered. You end up doing the thing more because you're not so attached to how it's done. It's not a coincidence that the rigid habit stuff is often heavily promoted in spaces where people don't have kids. And I say that as someone who doesn't have a kid or where people who have a partner who takes care of a lot of the mental work. And there is nothing wrong with that. But if you can see, "Oh, my lifestyle does not match that person's," it's better to lean into a different way of approaching it.
Number two, you'll find that life gets easier when you develop more theories. So many people's method of improving their life just involves throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping things work, or seeing videos online, much like this one, and being like, "I'll do that," without really having a theory behind why it would work for them. If you want to win in any area of your life, you need to start with a theory about how you're going to win. In good news, I've never met a person with ADHD who doesn't love a theory. In fact, I would say people with ADHD are really good at theorizing. Here is the theory formula that you need that will immediately make your life better and make sort of the glowing up process or the improving your life process or resetting your life process more fun and less cumbersome and less fruitless: "I have a theory that if I blank, then blank will happen because blank."
I'll give you a few examples of that theory formula with the blanks filled in. "I have a theory that if I ditch recipe books and I replace them with recipe cards, making dinners throughout the week will feel a little easier because when I did that meal delivery service, I really liked the recipe cards. So, this could work, too." Or, "I have a theory that if I create a detailed cleaning checklist, that will make cleaning feel a lot easier because a lot of my struggles with cleaning is actually just not knowing what to do next. And if I have a checklist, that kind of solves that." Where people often go wrong with theories or with just making changes in their life in general is they forget the "because" part of that theory formula. For example, "I have a theory that if I put a lot of baskets around my house, then my house will be cleaner." That's not a theory because there's no "because." However, if you said, "I have a theory that putting baskets around my house will make cleaning easier because I actually find that I often put laundry straight in the laundry basket. Like, I'm a basket person. So, that basket thing could really work for me." That is a real theory because it's based on real-life experience or things that you've observed about yourself, the world around you that make you go, "Oh, I actually am a little invested in that. Like, I think it could work for me based on this."
If you really have no idea, like you're like, "I just genuinely have no clue how I could make that area of my life easier," of course, you have to start with throwing spaghetti at a wall, but you best be learning. For example, when I decluttered my sister's whole house and I recorded it, I put it on this YouTube channel. I went all in on open storage because that's what I had read was the best option for the ADHD brain. Very quickly, she figured out she hated open storage. It made her feel overwhelmed and less likely to tidy. She didn't go, "Oh my gosh, something's wrong with me because open storage didn't do it for me." She went, "Open storage makes me overwhelmed. I'm not going to do that again. Lesson learned. I just need easy-to-open storage that's closed."
Which leads to idea number three for making your life easier if you have ADHD, and that is you'll find that you get more out of removing the stuff that you hate than trying to make yourself like things. There is a lot of ADHD content that's really heavily focused on, "Here's how to get yourself to do stuff." There's a lot about adding rewards to your tasks, designing for dopamine, making things more gamified. And I recognize that this sounds like a very downer take, but if you stop focusing on trying to get yourself to like stuff and instead you start removing stuff that you hate, life gets easier. What I'm not saying is, "Okay, well, you hate replying to your texts. Stop replying to your texts. Remove what you hate." Instead, I'm saying pay attention to what you hate about replying to texts and then figure out how to remove that obstacle. For example, you can't get yourself to clean. And the reason you can't get yourself to clean is because you always end up in the middle of your kitchen feeling deeply overwhelmed, surrounded by dishes, and feeling like, "My gosh, I'm never going to get to the end of this." You don't need to make cleaning more fun with a dopamine playlist. That's not going to do it for you. It might work once, it's not going to solve your problems. And that's because it doesn't target the obstacle, the issue that's actually in your way, which is a feeling of overwhelm. Instead, you need to start creating some theories about how you can approach cleaning in a way that doesn't end up with you in a puddle of overwhelm.
The paradox of this idea is that when you keep on removing the things that you hate, you often end up with something that feels really easy and or is fun. Even though you weren't trying to make it easy, you weren't trying to make it fun. Little fun hacks are fun. Like, I like them. I love coming across a little fun hack. And usually they don't lead to a lot of long-term change, especially if they're focused on putting lipstick on a pig.
Strategy number four, you'll find that life gets easier when you lean out of revenge and into control. There's this phenomenon that you might have heard of, and it's called the 996 schedule. Basically, in some parts of China, there used to be people who worked from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., 6 days a week. And a lot of these people would get home at 9:00 p.m. and then they would stay up until the wee hours of the morning scrolling, binging, whatever, as almost a form of revenge. And that's because in their days they felt powerless. They felt like they had no time to themselves. They felt like they had no control. So they kind of took control in a really roundabout way that was unhelpful to them. And I'm telling you right now that if you have days in which you feel powerless, you feel like you don't have control, you feel like you have no free time, you too will take revenge upon yourself and your ADHD symptoms will go wild. You might not, you hopefully don't work a 996 schedule. I think that that's done and over. But if your life is you constantly doing things begrudgingly that you don't want to do, if you're never giving yourself time to rest, to play, to do the things that you want to do, if you people-please to your own detriment, or if you just live a life in which you feel very regularly like trapped and like you have no choice or power, you will find that you seek weird revenge and do weird things. You'll doom scroll, you'll procrastinate, you'll binge watch, so on and so forth.
Perceived helplessness can often be part of ADHD. It's also, interestingly, often a very big part of addiction and it often comes with depression. Two things that happen to go hand-in-hand with ADHD pretty frequently. And when you start to take action in those moments of perceived helplessness, those moments where you're like, "I just don't have control," what you'll notice is that your ADHD symptoms somehow end up feeling more manageable. So, how do you implement this strategy to make your life easier if you're someone with ADHD? How do you create a life where you have a little less of that perceived helplessness which leads you to do weird things in spite? And all that really involves is throughout your days paying attention to moments in time where you're sitting there and you're like, "Oh, I feel frustrated or I feel helpless or I feel hopeless because I don't really feel like I have a choice. I feel like I'm trapped. I feel like I'm cornered." And then really doing the cliché thing of focusing on what you can control. So sometimes that's literally writing down a list of, "Here are all the things that I can control here." And that could be the words that you say. It could be where you place your attention, but it can also be you going, "How do I take advantage of this situation so that I feel like I'm getting something out of it?"
For example, your boss goes, "Okay, we have this meeting." You are like, "There is no point in this meeting. This meeting is so stupid. There's no reason that we should be going to this, and I can see that clearly in my mind." Acknowledge, "Okay, well, I have no control over whether the meeting's happening, but how can I use this to my advantage?" For example, on the way to the venue, there's a grocery store, and I need some lettuce for my dinner tonight. I'm going to leave a little early and I'm going to grab some lettuce. And in the meeting, here are the things I can control: I can focus on action items. I can be really succinct so that the meeting goes quickly, and so on and so forth. There are almost always things that are in your control, but perceived helplessness is when your brain is telling you you are completely trapped and you have no choice when in reality there are lots of options available to you.
If you liked this video, I have a whole video on five ways to plan your day that aren't time blocking. Perfect video for someone who has ADHD. I'm going to have that video on the screen as well as down below. It may not have that exact name. I forget the name, but it'll be there. I appreciate you so much and I'll see you.