Podcast: Why Habits Don’t Work for ADHD Writers
With Rachelle Ramirez
In this episode of the Write Anyway podcast, host Rachelle Ramirez explores why traditional habit formation struggles to work for ADHD writers and shares effective, alternative strategies. Rachelle, a developmental editor and ADHD coach, delves into the neurological differences that complicate habit formation for individuals with ADHD and presents flexible systems and tools that cater to their unique needs. Key topics include the reliance on dopamine pathways, the need for novelty, and managing executive function deficits. Learn practical methods like the string of pearls approach, the five-minute rule, and using environmental cues to enhance your writing practice. This episode is a must-listen for ADHD writers seeking personalized advice to maintain a consistent and rewarding writing routine.
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Are you a writer with ADHD? Do you find typical productivity advice for writers annoying and useless? Then this one's for you.
Hello and welcome to The Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode, Rachelle presents the typical advice to writers and reveals why it doesn't work for you and what you should do instead. Let's listen in.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway podcast. I'm Rachelle Ramirez, a developmental editor and ADHD coach. I co-wrote the pages and platforms guide to story with my friend and fellow developmental editor Anne Hawley and I authored the forthcoming book, the ADHD writer from Frustrated to Focus to Finished based on our annual ADHD accelerator program at pages and platforms.
Yep, you guessed it. I have ADHD, the inattentive type, which means probably like you. I am a champion at generating great ideas, hyper-focusing on projects and creatively solving problems. I also have a history of challenging expert writing rules and advice, especially when it pertains to neurodiverse writers.
I do so because a lot of experts writing advice conflicts with the ideas of others. Some even conflict with themselves and may counter the thinking or even capacity of the ADHD brain. Productivity gurus will go on and on about how you must break bad habits and build good habits. They'll say, to do that, you must do things like be consistent, set long-term goals.
Be patient. Stick to your plan. Reward yourself. Get the early bird worm and improve your willpower. Most of us, ADHD folks have spent our whole lives trying to do what Neurotypical people advised, and it hasn't worked. So I'm not gonna waste your time. With habit frameworks you've seen time and again to create and maintain a writing practice, you need different solutions than the neurotypical writer.
But there's a caveat to anything I'll share here. Please don't let any of these ideas change what's working for you. We don't fix what isn't broken, which is why at pages and platforms we have a tools not rules approach. Take what you need and leave the rest. The important thing is that you write the story that's in your heart to tell on your terms.
So why is creating healthy habits like implementing a regular writing schedule so hard for ADHD brains? We know it's not a lack of willpower, intelligence, or intention. Let's look at the primary reasons you might think habit formations sucks. First and foremost, we have a neurological difference that makes it difficult for us to form and maintain mindless, monotonous, and repetitive behaviors.
We have a need for novelty and stimulation, and we seek activities that provide a quick dopamine boost. Now dopamine is a neurotransmitter, transmitter and hormone involved in motivation, movement, learning, and emotional responses. It's often called the feel good neurotransmitter because it's released during rewarding experiences, helping to reinforce the behaviors that triggered it.
The challenge for us, ADHD rider, well, we have less dopamine available and a lowered reward sensitivity, especially to delayed rewards. Since traditional habit formation relies on dopamine pathways to reinforce positive behaviors by creating a, this feels good. Let's do it again. Signal habits that don't offer immediate gratification rarely stick.
Also, our preference for novelty directly conflicts with the consistent, predictable nature of habits. We, ADHD folks have executive function deficits in areas such as organization, working memory and impulse control, which makes it hard for us to plan, initiate, and stick to a consistent routine. We have difficulty with attention and memory.
Distractions easily pull attention away, making it hard to follow through on a planned action. Working memory challenges can also mean the plan to write is simply forgotten by the time we plan to do it. We also have emotional regulation challenges.
Psychological barriers you might say, and perfectionism, and the difficulty in maintaining consistency can lead to a cycle of shame and negative self-talk, which makes us less likely to try again after a perceived mistake. This all or nothing thinking can quickly derail our writing progress. We have time blindness, a difficulty tracking the passage of time.
This makes it hard to develop a 3:00 PM habit when we don't know it's afternoon. Certain types of ADHD lead to impulse control challenges, and that may lead you to abandoning new habits in favor of something more instantly rewarding. We might also have task paralysis, which is feeling stuck or resistant.
When we face a task or decision, it often happens when our brains feel overwhelmed or the task seemed boring, repetitive, or unclear. If you can't make a decision to do the task, you can't act. So enough about what doesn't work, what challenges we face, and who's telling us what to do. Let's look at some strategies that work better for ADHD writers than the attempts to form habits.
Here's the first idea. Instead of relying on rigid habit formation, we're much more likely to find success by designing flexible systems that work with our brain's natural functioning. So what might those be? We can design multiple paths to achieve a single goal, adapting our energy level as we go, and we can plan for obstacles and prepare backup plans to common challenges like caregiving tasks, unexpected events, or overwhelm.
For example, a regular writing routine or system could have three options. On high energy days, we could plan to write for a full hour. On medium energy days, we write for 20 minutes, and on low energy days, we could plan to write a single sentence. Again, the key is flexibility in our routines and expectations.
You want to set success up as inevitable and the steps to getting there less overwhelming. To do so, you might want to create plans for your low energy days on your highest energy days. Here's another variation of a flexible writing routine. In the Happily Ever Author Club, we have a string of pearls challenge that's based on an idea from the psychologist Phil Stutz.
It goes like this. Stutz explains that each pearl is an action taken with each action having equal value. No action is more or less valuable than any other, and all actions are to be celebrated as an important part of creating the string of pearls as it applies to our pursuit of writing. Every action you take toward, um, that forwards your writing project is a pearl.
You could write a sentence or a whole chapter in a sitting, and it's all still one pearl. You string a pearl by taking an action every day. You can document each pearl in a spreadsheet provided in the club, or you can track this on your own. It's a way to sort of gamify your writing actions. Take pressure off yourself to do it all in a day, and it will train you to see your writing routine in a different way, because built into every pearl is some flexibility.
You could also implement the five minute rule by committing to writing for just five minutes. Then when the time is up, reevaluate your willingness to carry on. The flexibility is in what you work on and for how long. Whatever you choose, any action is a success. What. We can also use external reminders and environmental design.
We can rely on tools and environmental cues to remind us to start tasks rather than using internal willpower or memory. For example, at night, you could put your notebook next to the coffee maker. Keep your writing tools in a highly visible location near something you already have a habit of doing to serve as a visual cue.
Now this. Also a visual reminder of what some call habit stacking in which you attach a new desired behavior to an existing automatic routine. Here morning coffee equals time to write. But note that what we're adding to habit stacking is a clear visual reminder. And for us accident prone, ADHD folks, I should point out that it's a notebook at the coffee maker rather than an expensive laptop.
I learned that the hard way, like neurotypicals, we can schedule our writing goals in times the night before, but, and this is a hard but. We need to review and likely rewrite those goals in the morning. We don't have the same working brain in the morning that we do at night. Most of us are night owls and have big expectations for our tomorrow selves.
Focus on what the morning brain says you're capable of on any given day. It's more reliable in this respect. We can use calendars, reminders, apps, and checklists as second brains. Don't underestimate the power of that super brain you have in your pocket. Set a timer, set a reminder. It's free with your paid internet service, reliable, and you can choose whether or not to act on it when the alarm goes off.
The key is that you're reminded. My favorite external reminder is one that goes wherever I go. So no matter how distracted I get where I end up, or whether my phone is still charged, I'm at least reminded of what I'd hope to accomplish. You can get some colored rubber bracelets, each one signifying a particular task you want to accomplish in a day.
When you do the task, you slip a bracelet off and put it in a jar or drawer with the aim of putting away all the bracelets by the end of the day. For routine tasks like writing, you can get these bracelets customized with your own text for just a few dollars, or write on them with permanent markers and for the other bracelets.
Did you know that they makeable markers now even scented ones, those markers alone might be an incentive for some of us to try using a planner. Specifically made for those of us with ADHD. To get a writing routine into action, you can pinpoint the puny, start with small tasks and make them extremely specific.
Overwhelm can lead to inaction, so break large goals into tiny manageable steps, such as edit dialogue in chapter 20 instead of finish my second draft. If that's too much, break the goal into even smaller steps, such as sit at desk, turn on computer open, manuscript file, open chapter 20, highlight the protagonist's, dialogue, et cetera.
Focus on progress rather than perfection in writing. Missing a day of writing doesn't mean failure. Simply restart the next day with self-compassion. Remember, the actions we take to improve our writing practice don't have to be habitual to forward our projects. Some days other activities will take priority overriding.
Some days you'll be too overwhelmed to do much of anything, and that's okay. You're human. Now. Those are some practical things that you can do to make sure there are reminders to write and to have a good plan for what to do. But what if all those are are in place and you just can't seem to act? And that's the final step, isn't it?
How do you get yourself to sit down and write when you don't otherwise feel like it? You might think that's a motivation problem, but it's not. You're plenty motivated to write. That's why you're here listening to this podcast. Your real challenge is likely with initiation. We ADHD folks have a much more difficult time than the average Joe.
Moving thoughts into action. So what supposedly motivates neurotypical people is establishing the importance of the task and setting up rewards and consequences. For their performance. That's why standard motivation and productivity experts use an importance based approach. There are certain assertions, go like this.
If it's important to you, you'll prioritize and do it. If you establish more brutal consequences for not doing the task, you will gain willpower to do it. But we need an interest based approach to writing. With that, we can solve what you might have been referring to as a lack of motivation with a combination of some simple ingredients, interest, challenge, novelty,
and urgency.
With recipes incorporating these four ingredients, we'll write more often and with ease. That's because when we find something interesting, challenging, novel or urgent, we're motivated to act on it. Knowing what gets us to act helps us identify and implement repeatable strategies and recipes for initiating writing tasks.
No matter how overwhelmed we might feel. Still how to do this might not be obvious is so let's examine these ingredients with examples. So let's take story revisions for example. Many writers procrastinate at the revision stages saying things like, I hate it. It's boring. It's a rare writer who claims revisions are exciting.
Besides getting started, there often isn't much challenge, novelty or creativity. And unless you already have a publisher, there isn't much call of urgency in the activity because, well, you can always extend your self-imposed deadlines. So how do we get ourselves to initiate revisions using the interest based approach?
The first thing to consider is whether or not you are really interested in the project you're procrastinating. Do you really care about finishing this particular story? If the project isn't interesting, why are you still insisting on working on it? Is it because you said you would or think you should?
And if the project isn't interesting, do you have the kind of time and energy it takes to force yourself through the completion of that project? Why would you, what's the payoff? Which project would really get you excited about writing? If your interest in the project isn't enough to initiate action and you've decided to proceed with the project, ask yourself if there are ways to make revisions more novel.
Our ADHD brains are always looking for novelty. Some ideas you come up with might seem silly at first, but they may be just what you need to get started. Some ideas might be to try a systematic editing pro process, such as eliminating all the chapters, scenes, and sentences you know you won't use in your final manuscript.
Then, and only then might you go ahead and fill in the missing content or try doing a full editing pass through the manuscript, evaluating and correcting one character's arc and dialogue at a time. Or edit only for essential story elements seen by scene. By the way, if you don't know how to systematically edit or write and revise scenes, we have a whole course on how to do so.
Included in the Happily Ever Author Club to introduce novelty. You could work through the revisions process with an editor or fellow writer. Or you could try working in a new setting or a location if you can afford it. Book yourself a writing retreat. If not, try writing in a coffee shop, a rented workspace, a picnic table at the park, or even moving your desk or riding spot to a new location in the room.
Another approach to getting started on revisions could be to ask yourself if there are ways to make your project more challenging. You could set a timer and try to complete the revision of a scene in under 20 minutes. Race, a fellow writer online or at a local meetup to see who could complete a chapter revision the fastest.
Read your manuscript backward to look for line edits, punctuation and word choice, or commit to texting a willing friend. Every time you revise for a full 15 minutes. You can also introduce a sense of urgency. This ingredient is really about completing writing tasks. Because urgent isn't the same as important.
We can use urgency to create importance and reprioritize tasks. Ask yourself, how can I create revision deadlines that feel eminent? You could hire and prepay an editor with specific submission dates and times. You could join a critique group and with regularly scheduled meetings and eagerly waiting readers.
You could find a writing competition with a rigid application timeline and prepay the application fee or schedule to pitch your book to an agent at an upcoming writer's conference, knowing that if they ask to see your manuscript, you'll need to produce it immediately or lose a publishing opportunity.
It's important to note that these suggestions are far from an exhaustive list. And these writing initiation recipes won't always work 'cause no strategy will eliminate the need to revise your work. Recipes sometimes fail, and because our brains seek novelty and challenge, we can expect our open ingredients to have an expiration date.
But like with any writing task, we're looking for recipes that will work for now. When a recipe doesn't work, we try something else. Maybe returning to the original recipe at a later date. So when you felt stuck and can't start your writing, you can refer to your simple ingredients list, interest, challenge, novelty.
Okay. And urgency. Then ask yourself what recipe or in individual ingredient you might use to move forward with your writing. Ask yourself, what recipes have moved me to write in the past? Might one be helpful here? How can I make this writing task more interesting? How can I make it more challenging? How can I introduce more novelty into my writing tasks?
Or how can I make this feel more urgent? All right, I think you've got the idea. So now you have some solid strategies that can help you more when than focusing on developing habits. In addition, you can learn more about me@Rachelleramirez.com, where you can see my developmental editing services and rates and schedule a low cost editing consultation, which is a chance to ask me questions about next steps in your manuscript and to find out if we're a good fit for working together.
So thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate it, and I hope these suggestions help you out.
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And that's it for this episode of the Write anyway podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.