6 Tips for Beginning a Morning Routine When You Have ADHD
Having a morning routine can allow you to feel more focused, help you put important things first and can be a helpful way of incorporating important things you want in your life into your daily schedule. Beginning a morning routine can be hard for anyone, but when you have ADHD, it can be excruciating. Maybe the idea of a morning routine sounds good, but you don’t know where to start. Perhaps you already have some things you sometimes do in the morning, but they haven't quite solidified into a routine. What are some ways that those of us with ADHD can effectively create a morning routine and also maintain it? Let’s look at the tips below as a structure in beginning a morning routine.
1. Begin by asking yourself, “What do I want out of my new routine?”. Then set goals based on what you want.
Why do you want a morning routine? Is it to get your day off to a good start? Is it to get important things done that might get lost as the day starts going? Get clear about what your intentions are and what you’re hoping to get from your routine. After you’ve set your intentions, come up with clear, measurable goals that you can put in your routine that line up with your intentions. The more concise the step or goal, the easier it will be to know if you’ve completed it.
2. Start with the small and essential things.
When you’re initiating your new routine, it might be tempting to begin with several new tasks at once. For most people, if you begin to do several new things at once that you’ve never done before, this won’t be sustainable. As you’re beginning, it might help to add one new task, or maybe two, to your morning. Also keep each task in your routine small and specific, at least to begin with. Bite-sized steps are easier to complete than tasks with multiple steps. As you get more confident in completing the initial steps, you can consider adding additional steps.
As you’re assessing what you want from your morning routine, allow yourself to also start with those things that you deem “most essential”. What I mean by that is to look at your day and ask yourself “If I could only do a few things in my day, and in doing those things, I could see the day as successful, what things would I want to do?” Which of these essential tasks are things that you might be able to add to your morning routine? By completing these essential tasks in the morning, anything else you accomplish in the day will be icing on the cake.
3. Use tools to help you remember your new routine.
When you begin a new routine, it can be difficult to remember. There are usually so many other things to remember that seem more urgent. Also, if you’re trying to remember something new at the beginning of the day, you might be so groggy that you easily forget a new protocol. One simple thing that can help you to remember to do anything is to set a reminder on your phone to begin your routine. It might be helpful to set a reminder for each step in your routine, so you can have the satisfaction of marking off each step of the routine. This act of marking steps off can also be done with an old-fashioned pen and paper list. Encourage yourself every time you mark a routine step off your list. The positive encouragement can help reinforce the use of reminders or a list. If visual cues are helpful to jog your memory as you begin your new morning routine, stick a post-it note (or five!) on your bathroom mirror or on the inside trim of your entry door as a way to remind yourself, “hey there, you said you were going to do this morning routine thing!”
4. Use the concept of stacking to add tasks to your routine.
Stacking is a concept that can help you build on your routine as you decide to add new tasks. It happens when you add a task to something you already consistently do. For instance, I might drink a cup (or more) of coffee every morning on a consistent basis. Let’s say you wanted to pick up the habit of journaling each day. It might pay to put the journal near your coffee cup and try journaling after you’ve poured that first cup of coffee. If you connect journaling (the task you want to complete) with drinking coffee (the task you already complete), you’ll have a higher likelihood of completing the journaling. This concept can also be applied as you build your routine.
Once you have a couple of tasks in your routine that you are consistently completing, add another. Once you get consistent on the 3 tasks for a while, you can choose to add another, but make sure not to add any more tasks until you become consistent with the tasks you’ve already started. Be gradual in your addition of new tasks. Build a foundation that is strong and it will be more difficult to break the routine.
5. Try accountability.
Sometimes when beginning new routines, it can be easier for a new routine to fall off if no one else knows about it. If you’re the only one that knows about our routine, it can be easier to make excuses as to why the routine won’t fit into your day. When you are accountable only to yourself, it can become easier to change your mind if the task you’ve committed to isn’t convenient.
If you hold yourself accountable to another person, a magical thing can happen: you do the thing you said you were going to do. When you tell someone else about what you want to do, you’ve now put that intention out into the world. Someone else now knows about the thing that you want to do, and this can make you more motivated to do it. You don’t want to go back to the other person and say, “I know I seemed really excited about starting a new routine, but I decided not to do it.” In telling someone else about the thing that you want to do, you can subtly trick yourself into thinking that you are doing the thing for that person, that could make it easier to accomplish. For those of us that tend to do more for others than ourselves, this can be a very powerful motivator.
If you wanted to incorporate some accountability, you could tell your partner or a friend, “Hey, I plan on doing X, Y, Z this morning. Can I let you know once I’ve finished.” If they don’t hear from you, they’ll most likely ask you about the task. Sometimes, just knowing that someone could ask you about your morning routine might motivate you to do it.
6. Recognize you won’t get it right every day, and that’s okay.
Many times when you start something new, it’s easy to get very excited at the beginning, which motivates our ability to stay focused and on task. You might ask yourself, “Why didn’t I do this sooner? It’s so easy!” However, the monotony of doing things every day can set in. If you’re like many of us, there will come a point where you might be having a bad day and you just don’t want to follow through. So.. you don’t follow through. Once you allow yourself to get off track, it can be easy to stay off track. You can get down on ourselves and say “This is too hard. I just can’t do this!” If you del with with ADHD, you might also have messages from your past in which you were told that you give up too often and are not living up to your potential, which can result in you being terribly hard on yourself. If you stop doing something you still actually want to do, it can give you a feeling of defeat. You might get fearful of starting over again because it can be another opportunity to get off track again.
When you get into a slump like this, it is important to remember that getting off track from the things you want to do is a thing that happens to a lot of people. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than that you got off track. The key in a case like this is to allow yourself the leeway to occasionally mess up, and then get back to the task you wanted to accomplish. Be gentle with yourself and tell yourself you can get back to it. Think about the times when you were completing your routine the way you wanted and the positive things you were getting from it. Take strength from that.
To conclude, beginning a morning routine when you have ADHD can be tough, but it can be made easier if you are very clear on what you want from your routine, start small and scale up, get support when necessary, and give yourself a break if you have periods of not completing the routine. If you allow yourself to work through those steps, taking the time that you need, you can create a successful routine.
