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No habit book I've read, including this article, has included effective strategies for habit forming for whatever funky funk my brain has going on - most psychs

No habit book I've read, including this article, has included effective strategies for habit forming for whatever funky funk my brain has going on - most psychs say ADHD, recently one said maybe a spritz of autism. Medicated or otherwise, the typical habit forming tactics don't work. Reward systems, identity based habit forming, habit trackers, leaving the gym shorts on top of my phone at night so I have to put them on before anything else, I can still kill a year long consistent habit overnight with a single disruption like an early meeting or by straight up forgetting. Gym shorts are there but I have to pee. Boom it's 10pm and I'm doing my habit tracker and damn I completely forgot to go to the gym today. Or I successfully pushed it off again and again until it was too late. I have no solutions to offer. I keep thinking I've solved it and get ready to write my magnum opus how-to-have-adhd-and-still-be-a-productive-member-of-society blog post and then lose a habit again. Probably pre planning times to do a habit a day ahead of time would help but I fail to do that daily, lol. Oh well. I've managed to track my calories for 278 days consistently, but only because I can go fill in the previous day if I forget the day of. One day I'll forget two days in a row and that streak will die too.

cnf 2y ago
Yeah, same, auDHD er , most of the ADHD people I know, and especially the auDHD people I know, including myself, can’t form habits our brain just isn’t wired for it. I stopped trying and focus on other coping mechanisms…
- Jach 2y ago
  I see plenty of such people who don't seem to have such a problem, at least not uniformly (some habits stick, some don't), so unfortunately I don't think such a simple excuse works. I think examining Big 5 personality traits, and the sub-facets within, would produce more reliable results, but I'll admit that's just a guess. Whatever the reasons, there's nevertheless broad variation on whether habits stick or not. I read Stephen Guise's Mini Habits a couple years ago on suggestion from some other HN thread, as expected it hasn't exactly "worked" for me in that I have no new habits since reading it that I've been able to maintain consistently on a periodic basis (daily/weekly/monthly, and I even failed a yearly goal streak of 3 years last year and am on track to fail again this year). Streaks get broken, and gaps last longer than streaks. I still think it was useful to read though for two reasons. First, it's one of the few sources that recognizes the huge variability: How Long Does It Take To Form A New Habit? It depends. Anyone who tells you differently is repeating what they've heard (which is wrong). It is NOT 21 or 30 days. ... The 21-day habit myth was possibly started by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. Dr. Maltz reportedly found that amputees took about 21 days to get used to the loss of a limb. So he argued that 21 days is how long it takes for people to adjust to any life changes. ... The most-cited viable study on habit formation duration was published in 2009 in the European Journal Of Social Psychology. Each participant chose an “eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.” And what did they find? The average time for a behavior to become habit was 66 days. But the range was wild, from 18 to 254 days, showing that there is huge variation in people's time to reach habit automaticity, and that it can end up taking a very long time in some cases. 21 and 30 day challenges are popular, but they're highly unlikely to form many types of habits. ... In my experience, the first sign of habit formation is decreased resistance, which makes perfect sense. Second, it uses a fun trick to motivate some things later. The trick is this: touch your nose, right now. I still like to think about that trick (and sometimes even do it) and what it could suggest. For me it makes me more suspect of concepts like "willpower" and "executive dysfunction". This trick is never a challenge to do, even to do multiple times. Yet, if I tried to turn it into a habit -- touch my nose every day between 1pm and 2pm -- I'm certain that would fail to take hold. But that's fine, action is what's important, not whether it's a habit.

cnf 2y ago

Yeah, same, auDHD er , most of the ADHD people I know, and especially the auDHD people I know, including myself, can’t form habits our brain just isn’t wired for it. I stopped trying and focus on other coping mechanisms…

Jach 2y ago
I see plenty of such people who don't seem to have such a problem, at least not uniformly (some habits stick, some don't), so unfortunately I don't think such a simple excuse works. I think examining Big 5 personality traits, and the sub-facets within, would produce more reliable results, but I'll admit that's just a guess. Whatever the reasons, there's nevertheless broad variation on whether habits stick or not. I read Stephen Guise's Mini Habits a couple years ago on suggestion from some other HN thread, as expected it hasn't exactly "worked" for me in that I have no new habits since reading it that I've been able to maintain consistently on a periodic basis (daily/weekly/monthly, and I even failed a yearly goal streak of 3 years last year and am on track to fail again this year). Streaks get broken, and gaps last longer than streaks. I still think it was useful to read though for two reasons. First, it's one of the few sources that recognizes the huge variability: How Long Does It Take To Form A New Habit? It depends. Anyone who tells you differently is repeating what they've heard (which is wrong). It is NOT 21 or 30 days. ... The 21-day habit myth was possibly started by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. Dr. Maltz reportedly found that amputees took about 21 days to get used to the loss of a limb. So he argued that 21 days is how long it takes for people to adjust to any life changes. ... The most-cited viable study on habit formation duration was published in 2009 in the European Journal Of Social Psychology. Each participant chose an “eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.” And what did they find? The average time for a behavior to become habit was 66 days. But the range was wild, from 18 to 254 days, showing that there is huge variation in people's time to reach habit automaticity, and that it can end up taking a very long time in some cases. 21 and 30 day challenges are popular, but they're highly unlikely to form many types of habits. ... In my experience, the first sign of habit formation is decreased resistance, which makes perfect sense. Second, it uses a fun trick to motivate some things later. The trick is this: touch your nose, right now. I still like to think about that trick (and sometimes even do it) and what it could suggest. For me it makes me more suspect of concepts like "willpower" and "executive dysfunction". This trick is never a challenge to do, even to do multiple times. Yet, if I tried to turn it into a habit -- touch my nose every day between 1pm and 2pm -- I'm certain that would fail to take hold. But that's fine, action is what's important, not whether it's a habit.