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Resolutions Too Rigid for Your ADHD Brain? Try Theming or Nudging Instead
Episode 243 • 31st December 2024 • ADHD-ish • Diann Wingert
00:00:00 00:16:59

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Happy New Year! 🎆

As we step into 2025, many of us are brimming with hopes, dreams, and maybe some New Year's resolutions. But if you're anything like me—and I know many of you are—traditional resolutions might last as long as bubbles in a can of carbonated water.  Fizzy, but fleeting. 

That's why I’ve dedicated the final episode of the year to exploring alternatives that are a bit more ADHD-friendly: Theming and Nudging.

These techniques are designed to work with our brain’s need for novelty and reward, while allow us to last beyond the two week fade effect and get some genuine consistency going.  

🔎 Theming: A Flexible Roadmap to Achievement 

When goals feel too rigid, we end up resenting, then rebelling, right?  That’s why theming might just be your golden ticket.

Instead of specific resolutions, choose a theme to guide your actions and choices. Think of it as steering your life in a desired direction, instead of the overly detailed GPS guidance.   

Example Themes: Strength, Connection, Creativity, Curiosity, Growth.

🌟 Pro tip: Choose three areas of your life—like health, money, and relationships—to apply your theme. Need a reminder? Create a screensaver or even use a sticker chart! 

🔄 Nudging: Gentle Reminders for Big Changes 

Nudging starts with the same letter as nagging, but that’s where the similarity ends. Introducing small nudges (friendly taps or tugs)  into your routine can lead to significant improvements over time.

Set up periodic reminders to guide you towards beneficial actions—like moving, drinking water, or taking short breaks. Everything counts and they really do add up. 

Real-Life Nudge: My client has reminders set for  "Walk" and "Water" to help her break up lengthy periods of hyper focus, which cause her to neglect her biological needs.

How to get Started:

  • Reflect on the past year.
  • Choose a theme that inspires and guides you.
  • Set up nudges to gently steer your behaviors.
  • Let go of guilt and embrace incremental progress.

With either approach, the key is flexibility. Adjust, adapt, and own these strategies to make them work for YOUR body, mind and brain. 

And remember, whether it's a theme, a nudge, or a mix of both—what truly matters is finding simply ways to align your behavior with your intentions, keeping you engaged without feeling overwhelmed or getting bored.

Resources Mentioned in this episode:


Thank you for being a part of the ADHD-ish podcast community. We're gearing up for some exciting new content in the next year, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the time. 

Apple Podcasts  - Spotify  -  Castbox  -  Overcast 


Here’s to a 2025 focused on embracing the journey of entrepreneurship, celebrating our unique brains, and thriving with intention. 


© 2024 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops  / All rights reserved. Outro music by Vladimir /  Bobi Music / All rights reserved. 

Transcripts

you like the idea of starting:

Regardless of the term we use, these declarations of future behavior probably won't work for those of us with ADHD traits. And, of course, I'm referring to New Year's resolutions, AKA intentions. There are several reasons for this. For one, we have difficulty with planning. People with ADHD typically struggle to translate intentions into actions, which can make it hard to stick to your resolutions or intentions, especially those that require multiple steps and consistency, we also tend to have difficulty with follow through.

Hey, I'll be the first one to admit, I'm terrific at starting things but can lose steam quickly after the initial novelty wears off, especially when the results don't happen quickly or just don't feel as meaningful as I expected them to. Hey, It's hard for all humans to maintain focus and motivation over time, but it's harder still for us. So our efforts become sporadic and this ultimately sabotages our accomplishment.

The third reason is impulsivity and time blindness. We may give into immediate gratification because we're chasing the dopamine hit while forgetting our bigger longer term goal and also lose sight of just how long it might actually take to reach our desired outcome. We might also think we can afford to procrastinate on getting started and then double down near the imaginary finish line and be dead wrong. So maybe instead of sticking with New Year's resolutions and the same disappointing results as last year, in this minisode, I wanna offer you a couple of options that I think have a better chance of success.

Now in the last few years, two alternatives to New Year's resolutions have been circulating in some various ADHD oriented online communities, including well known ones like Chad and the ADHD focused subreddits. So in the next few short minutes, I wanna give you a quick breakdown on 2 of them and what I would suggest you do if you'd like to give them a try. The first one is the theme year. Now this isn't brand new, but I'm gonna give you some ADHD friendly ways to own it if you decide to give it a shot.

is strength. Then for all of:

Now when I talk about categories, this could be domains of your life, different aspects of your life. So let's just say in the physical realm, strength could mean joining a gym or turning your daily round the block dog walk into a genuine hike, which your body and your pet will love you for. It could also be mental strength. So that could be deciding to deal with your trauma by finding an EMDR trained therapist or learning strategies to manage your rejection sensitivity in business and your personal life. All of these will make you stronger and are aligned with the theme of strength. Strength can also be applied to interpersonal relationships.

So speaking up for yourself when dealing with toxic relatives, or insisting that your clients actually pay on time, strength is strength. And like all human behavior, it can become habit forming, which is absolutely what we want when we try the theme year approach. So some of the ways that I like to recommend using this strategy to my own clients is choose 3 areas of your life to apply the theme to no more. So many of us have this all or none thinking that I'm gonna do this theme year thing, and I'm gonna apply it to absolutely every inch of my life.

Okay, you might not even make it to 2 weeks if you do that okay? So the goal is to stay again in the sweet spot between structure and flexibility, rejecting rigidity, and maintaining meaning. So the 3 broadest categories you could choose are health, money, and relationships. And you can niche down as far as you want within each of them. If you are a person who happens to have an itchy trigger finger like I do when it comes to boredom, you may want to think about shifting your 3 target areas every quarter. Hell, you can do it every month if you need to.

Own the strategy and adapt it to work for your brain and your preferences. The whole point to the theme here is to be successful and not to set yourself up for failure or sabotage by going with the resolutions that I don't know anyone they have ever worked for. So make this as flexible as you need to and as structured as you need to. You've got lots of room for adaptation. You can get as dialed in or as loosey goosey as you want.

I've had clients who simply created a screensaver for their laptop with their theme words surrounded by a really groovy design. And every day, when they fired up their machine, they're reminded to make choices and take actions that are aligned with that theme. That's all they did, and it worked for them. Other people kind of like to track their efforts and hold themselves more accountable to specific things. And if that's you, this could be anything from, like, adding a dollar bill or a penny even if it works, to a jar every single time you take aligned action.

And then at the end of the year, hopefully, you'll have a nice little wad of cash that you can buy yourself something with. You can even use a little kid's sticker chart. There's no shame in this game. There are no specific benchmarks required with this approach. If you need them, add them. But that's because the theme here is not technically a productivity strategy. So don't worry about including SMART goals. You can also combine the theme your approach with SMART goals or any other strategy you like, if you find it helpful and you won't resent it.

But if you do that, please keep in mind, we are talking about a whole ass year. As in 12 months, 365 days, 525,600 minutes. That is a lot of opportunity for procrastination, impulsivity, time blindness, and distractibility to come along and steal your win. I've used the theme your approach on and off because, hey, ADHD, I still have to try new things even when the ones I'm using are still working. But I have found that I could turn it into a game to challenge myself to see how many places in my life that I could apply the theme word over the course of a year.

And because I require a lot of stimulation and a lot of novelty, that is what made the theme your approach work for me. Is every I did it every 1 to 2 months, shift the areas that I was applying it so it continued to feel novel and fresh and exciting and fun. Now this approach might feel good for you if you wanna work and live more intentionally, but you just recoil from rigid rule laden systems that make you wanna toss them in the garbage before you even hit the 2 week mark. So keep it simple, choose your theme, then ask yourself, what three areas of my life do I wanna start off applying it to?

You can give yourself some examples of how that would look and then decide how much or how little tracking you need to maintain focus, motivation, and momentum. And I would also say interest and fun. If you like the idea of a theme year, but you're kinda drawing a blank on what theme to actually choose, here are a handful of ADHD friendly examples that some of my personal coaching clients have worked with, and I think they might suit you too. Connection, creativity, curiosity, discovery, depth, and growth.

I wanna choose all of those actually. Most people are gonna reflect on the past year and see where they've struggled. And when you're being kind to yourself, when you are practicing radical self acceptance, you can see maybe where you've struggled and where you'd like to improve, and then try to find a pattern that can be summed up in a theme. If you're having trouble being kind to yourself, you can toss what your goals are into, Goblin.tools or Chatgpt, or even a regular thesaurus to come up with some alternatives to what you might be telling yourself.

Remember, you want your theme to be aspirational, but also within reach. Because if your brain thinks, oh, this is gonna be hard. Trust me, you're not gonna do it. Now we're gonna move on to the second alternative to the New Year's resolution. Are you ready for it? This one's called the nudge. Health writer, Tara Parker Pope, read an article almost 2 years ago in the Washington Post encouraging people instead of doing New Year's resolutions to choose a nudge word or a nudge motto. Now a nudge is considered to be any intervention that gently steers someone toward a desired action.

The origin of the term is the:

One of my clients loves, loves, loves being in a state of hyperfocus because she gets so much done during those periods but that hyperfocus comes with a cost. She forgets to move, she forgets to eat, and she forgets to hydrate for hours at a time, and that has negative consequences to body and brain. So we decided that she would try nudging and have 2 different reminders on her phone that alternate every couple of hours. One reminder says walk and the other says water. We first tried drink, but that became problematic in the evenings.

So it's walk and water. As I said, they alternate every couple of hours because her hyperfocus is hard to interrupt. So we realized she needed to have repetitions. One was not going to bring her out of the state of hyperfocus. So these reminders are set to repeat every 10 minutes until she responds. Now let me be honest with you, sometimes she disables them. I know it for a fact, we've talked about it. But more often than not, she gets up. She drinks some water, or she walks around the house. She walks the dog. She walks down the long driveway to the mailbox. She moves her body.

And it's not so much that she can't get back to work, but she's not going for hours and hours and hours just sitting in front of the computer, not eating, not drinking, not peeing, not nothing, but working. And this approach, if you use it, also comes with the requirement. Well, it's not a requirement, you do you. But I strongly recommend that you give up any feeling of guilt or shame for the times that you don't decide to do with the nudge suggests. It's a nudge right? We're not in prison, there's no enforcement. It is a friendly, gentle reminder to do something that's good for you.

re's the bottom line, friend.:

So whether you call your desired change a New Year's resolution, if it works for you, stick with it. Or you decide to try the theme year or the nudge word. Hey, you can make it a rallying cry, a personal mission statement, or anything you want. But living more aligned with something meaningful to you is what matters. I wanna thank you for being an ADHD-ish listener this year, and I hope that you will continue to stick around for the next one. I've started working with an expert podcast consultant, Jeremy Enns, and we'll be making some very exciting changes to the show in the coming year.

ss I have in store for you in:

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