13: Q&A: Building Routines for Self-help Rejects
Today’s episode is a Q & A, so chill out while you listen, and take the time to do something kind for yourself, whatever that may be. I’ve been asked for advice about habits and discipline for neurodivergent people, which may be difficult for neurotypical people to understand. My message is that you are not broken if you haven’t yet found what works best for your brain. Let’s talk about it.
Show Highlights:
Why we need to begin with an explanation of the terms neurodivergent and neurotypical
Why it is very common for self-help motivation to fall short for neurodivergent people
How a neurodivergent person approaches routines and habits in different ways
Why I (as an ADHD person) am motivated by pleasure, projects, pressure/panic, patterns
Why it’s OK to realize that morning routines don’t work best for you
Why there is a difference between routine and rhythm/pattern
How I work around my house in patterns–not routines that are time-bound
How patterns can help circumvent “executive dysfunction” (Want to know more? Check out Episode 1 with Dr. Lesley Cook at www.strugglecare.com.)
What to look out for when your care tasks always require “pushing a boulder up a hill” energy
How I can make myself more “disciplined” when I have structure
Why you are NOT a self-help reject if you haven’t found what works best for you
Resources:
Connect with KC: TikTok and Instagram
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
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KC Davis 0:00
Hello you sentient balls of stardust, welcome to Struggle Care, the podcast about self care by a host that hates the term self care. I am KC Davis. I'm glad you're here with me. I'm going to do some q&a today. So I hope that you take this time to do something kind for yourself. Maybe you want to put some laundry away, maybe you want to lay on the couch. Either way, just do something that is kind to you. And don't do worry too much about picking the right thing or the most kind thing, just whatever pops into your head.
Okay. So the question that I have today says, can you talk about habits and discipline for neurodivergent people, because neurotypical people go on and on about it, and it has never worked for me. So if you're just joining me, and maybe the terms neurodivergent neurotypical are new to you, let me explain what that means.
So neuro refers to our brain the way our brains work. And so neuro typical just means someone that has a typically developing brain. So this would be someone who is not autistic, does not have ADHD has never had a traumatic brain injury doesn't have any major mental illness. And they don't have Tourette's or any other sort of neurodivergent basically means someone who diverges or parts way away from what would be a typically developing brain.
So people with ADHD, people with learning disabilities, people with TBI, or fetal alcohol syndrome, people that are autistic people that have mental illness, all of those are talking about being neuro divergent sort of diverging from the norm. So this person is some flavor of neurodivergent. And they are identifying that whenever they engage or read self help about building habits or having discipline, it doesn't seem to work for them. And that is really, really common. If you've ever tried to read or take in information about self help building habits discipline, it often sort of boils down to believe in yourself, try harder, you know, it is more motivational. So it's someone who is sort of trying to pump you up, or it's someone who might even be using shame, right? A lot of self help use this shame as a way to motivate. In reality, when it comes to habit building and discipline.
The main thing that we need, doesn't really have to do with like motivational things. It's not about someone helping you believe in yourself or having you see the importance of something. And if you want to have some sort of habit or routine, and you're having a hard time implementing that typically you have some sort of very legitimate barrier. And someone whose neurodivergent approaches routine differently than someone who is neurotypical. So what do we mean by that? Well, first of all, there's sort of this. So I'm ADHD. And also I'll talk about that. But there's this almost like catch 22, where people will say, people with ADHD really thrive with routine, but people with ADHD also really struggle to implement their own routine to have sort of self structure.
In my experience, it's not actually routine that helps me. So I like to joke that I am sort of an erratic ferret at best. I'm like a neurotic German Shepherd at my other best, I have no worst, I am delightful. However, that sort of energy and presence and vibe can be hard to direct, you have to remember that. For a lot of us, you know, we don't have trouble paying attention. We just have trouble regulating what we're going to pay attention to what we're going to be interested in. So whereas people who are neurotypical are typically very motivated by sort of understanding the cognitive priorities of things, someone who is neurodivergent might have a different type of reward system happening in their brain. I know for me, there are really four things that motivate me. And they all start with P, which is really convenient pleasure. So that's pretty self explanatory, something that tastes good, sounds good, feels good, looks good. Like, I'll do that. I'll eat that good meal, I will go on that awesome vacation, I will buy that thing on the internet because it's gonna make me feel good pleasure. That's very motivating. Projects are super motivating. So if I'm going to build a piece of furniture or start a new hobby, or research something until my eyes bleed, like that is motivating to me I want to do that I will feel a drive to do that. It will be easy for me to make myself sort of activate the behavior towards doing that.
And then the next one is pressure or panic if I have a deadline Coming up, I could get something done something that I might have trouble starting for weeks and weeks all the sudden the deadline is, is tomorrow or is in three hours. And I am focused. And I'm doing it and I'm cranking it out. And then the last one is patterns. So I found that it's not really routine that I need as a person or that I'm striving for. It's really rhythms, patterns, predictability, those are the things that kind of itch my brain from the inside out. And so when we're looking at something like starting a routine, so if I say, Well, I want to have a morning routine, I think the first thing is to ask ourselves, why? Why do you want to have that morning routine, because some of you might say, I want to have that morning routine, because I can see the ways that it would impact my life to a greater degree, if I were to be able to do XYZ in the mornings. But some of us if we're really honest with ourselves, we've been trying to implement morning routines for so long. Really, just because the commercialized wellness industry has convinced us that people that have morning routines are better people, they're healthier people, they're more enlightened people, they're more productive people. And before we talk about what may or may not be a good way to implement a routine in your life, we have to recognize that routines are morally neutral. Waking up early does not make you superior to someone that sleeps until their alarm goes off, or the hits the snooze three times. There's nothing magical or enlightening or spiritual about the hours of 4am to seven, over the hours of 10pm to 1am. There's no difference.
So if you're someone that has a difficult time, getting things done in the morning, you don't have to pressure yourself to have some elaborate morning routine just because you feel like that's what valid adults that have their stuff together do. You might be someone who prefers to do stuff at night, you might be more productive at night, you might be more creative at night, you might be going through a hard season of life where maybe for the first 25 years of your life, you woke up at 5am and did all of these things. But now, life has gotten hard and you find yourself just wanting to sleep. So just sleep, just maybe you need the sleep. Okay, so that's like step number one, you have to believe that morning routines, nighttime routines, daily routines, whatever, they're morally neutral, they don't make you a good or bad person, then we can start talking about whether it might be functional for you to develop some patterns to develop some rhythms. And I love rhythm, right? So the difference between routine and rhythm, or routines and patterns. A routine is something that's typically tied to a timeframe, right, so my morning routine, I wake up at five, I do yoga for five minutes, I drink a green smoothie, I brush my teeth, I'd go for a walk, I take a shower, I get dressed, right, that might be an example of a morning routine.
And it's connected to a time. Whereas patterns are not necessarily connected to a time. So here's what I mean by a pattern. For me, whenever I decide to clean my kitchen, there's a pattern, I throw away all the trash, then I put all the dishes in the sink, then I take all the laundry because sometimes I have laundry in my kitchen, to the laundry room. And then I take all the dishes out of the sink, and I categorize them into categories. So I put all the dirty plates together all the dirty cups together all of the dirty bowls together, then I open my dishwasher. And I loaded up all the plates first, all the cup, second, all that brick, whatever, then I go from my left to right in clockwise order, cleaning off the countertop, putting things away wherever they belong, and putting things that belong in different rooms and a little basket. And then I wipe the counters. And then I sweep the floors. And then I take out the trash. That's the pattern.
So anytime I noticed that my kitchen is not functional. For me, that's a pattern that I can go into. And it can change. Maybe some days, I don't sweep the floor, maybe some days I add one thing in there. But there's this sort of predictable rhythm. And it's each part of the pattern is just one step. It's not multi step where the routine might be, you know, brush your teeth, and then wash your face. Well there's multiple steps to brushing your teeth. There's multiple steps to washing your face. Whereas let's say that I have a pattern when I want to get ready that is turn on my space heater, turn on my music, turn the water on, get into the shower, and then I'm gonna go wash face, wash hair, wash body, shave armpits, and then I'm gonna get out of the shower, right? So there's like a pattern there that prevents like that decision paralysis. It gives us multiple little finish lines to feel like we're feel good about.
When I teach my kids to clean up their playroom. We do the same thing. Get all the stuffed animals and put them in the bin. Good job. Now get all the books and put them in the little library Good job now get all the Legos, right, which is going in this predictable pattern. When I clean my bedroom, I get four big laundry baskets, and ones for trash, ones for laundry, ones for dishes, and ones for things that belong into a different part of the room, and I get all the trash, and then I get all the laundry, and then I get all the dishes. And then I get all the things that go into a different room, then I move those containers out of the room, and I pick up all the toys, then all of the things that, you know, go back on the shelves and things and then I stripped the bed, and I put a sheet on the bed, just the sheet. Sometimes it's just the pillowcases, sometimes it's the whole shebang.
But the point is that it's easier for me to engage in patterns. Because I'm not having to think really hard about what to do next, I am either listening to the radio, or I'm listening to a podcast and it feels entertaining to me. And so when we talk about quote unquote having discipline or creating routines, we need to think instead about having rhythms. The other thing that's nice about rhythms is that you can have a rhythm that's every day, I like to do a little closing duties list every night when I go to bed, which is how I shut down my kitchen. And it's really simple. I load the dishwasher, I take out the trash, I wipe the countertop, I sweep the floor. That's it, I don't worry about anything else. And then I'm done. And I do that almost every night, I do it from like seven to 720. But there are some nights I don't do it. And there are some nights I do it in the morning instead, because rhythm can be equally spaced. Or it can be like jazz, right? It can speed up, it can slow down, I can do it twice in a day, I can go three days without doing it. But every time I return to that task of resetting my kitchen, I go to those same patterns might do a long pattern or short pattern. But it's a way of taking down those barriers, circumventing a lot of what's called the executive dysfunction.
And if you want to know more about executive functioning, check out the interview with Dr. Lesley Cook that gets in the way of neurodivergent people trying to engage in routines and discipline. And when it comes to discipline, a lot of us have really been taught to believe that discipline is just sort of white knuckling it. So we're just forcing yourself to do hard things. And perhaps that is a part of it. But unfortunately, when people talk about having self discipline, they use it as this sort of blanket statement. And so you'll have someone who is trying to do something they're trying to exercise, they're trying to eat nutritious foods, they're trying to clean their room more regularly, because they want to function. And they are struggling with what we call task initiation, something in their brain just can't seem to get the momentum going. And they'll sit there and go, I just need to have more discipline, I just need to have more discipline, but this energy that we use, and I call it rolling a boulder up a hill energy. And I can do that, okay, I can do tasks that feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. But human beings only have a limited capacity for that type of effort. And at some point, I do have to push myself or have discipline, but the discipline is the pushing of the boulder. But at some point that boulder should then sort of crest a little hump and start to go downwards. So yes, it takes me some effort to maybe push myself to start something, but then the momentum picks up, then it's pretty tolerable, then it's pretty easy to stay in sync and feel a rhythm if you're experiencing care tasks, as just this constant push up a hill, never finding a rhythm, never finding a pattern, never finding your groove where things seem to flow or have some momentum. And they're just painful and intolerable the whole time.
That is not an issue of discipline. Because we connect discipline with just our character, our work ethic, whether we're lazy, but that's not what that means. I find for me, every time I've tried to have a quote unquote, exercise routine, I never stick to it. But when I sign up for an exercise class, I go to it every time. So I could look at myself and say every time I tried to do an exercise thing at home or join a gym, like I just don't have any discipline. But that's not true. Because when I sign up for a class, I go every time and I show up on time. And it takes discipline to do that. It takes self will and willpower to get myself ready and get out the door and go to this class and all those sort of it takes motivation to do that. So the issue isn't like a character issue in me it's that there's something about that sort of unstructured nature of whatever I'm trying to do that just doesn't seem to work for me. Whereas something that is structured and time something that I maybe there's people that I know are going to be there, I'm expected to be there. It's not that I couldn't back out. It's that that is more motivating to me. It's that that is Something that is easy for me, and maybe not easy all the time, I may wake up in the morning, I cannot put an early one on the calendar and go, Oh, I don't want to go. And yet I seem to be able to make myself. And so if you're listening to this, and you're someone who just feels like a self help reject, you've tried time and time again, to have routines, to have discipline and nothing seems to be working, you're not broken, you're not lazy, you just haven't found the supports that work for you. You just haven't found the ways of approaching things that work with your brain instead of against your brain. People cannot sustain that white knuckled pushing a boulder up a hill energy for ever and ever. They will eventually stop and people who are able to wake up and do you know their little exercise routine at home every day. That's not how that feels to them either. So please know that there's nothing wrong with you. You just haven't found what works for you. For me, I know it's pleasure and projects, and pressure and patterns. And so I try to work those things in any way that I can