3 Powers of Routines for People With ADHD

Mention “routine” to someone with ADHD and you’re likely to get a grimace.

Routines can feel rote and repetitive. For brains that thrive on variety and the thrill of the new, routines can feel like a prison.

And yet, deep down, what we might not admit is that we often do crave the structure of routine.

Read: 3 Myths that Keep You From Creating a Consistent Morning Routine

Welcome to the contradiction of ADHD: craving structure, yet also resisting it.

Although sometimes routines can seem boring, they are one of the most powerful tools in the vast arsenal needed to navigate life successfully with ADHD.

Here are 3 reasons why routines are so powerful, especially for people with ADHD.

(1) Create Nervous System Safety

ADHD is not really an issue of a lack of attention or focus. It’s more accurate to say that for people with ADHD the issue is a lack of a filter to direct our attention. Our attention is trying to be everywhere all at once.

Many of us are highly attuned to our surroundings: every noise, object, person in our environment pulls our attention. This creates a hyper-vigilant nervous system.

Without a routine, it’s easy for attention and focus to scatter. Everything you see around you is a reminder of something else you need to do. Before you know it, you are being pulled in many different directions.

Knowing what’s coming puts the nervous system at ease, which can help us direct our focus on what we want to accomplish.

Creating an established routine gives you certainty on what your task is for that moment, freeing up your resources to focus on that one task for that period of time. You know that you’ll have other dedicated time later for the other things on your list.

(2) Eliminate Decisions

Decisions drain energy and dopamine, both of which are in limited supply for people with ADHD.

Imagine you start each day with a given number of tokens. Once you’re out of tokens for the day, that’s it. You can’t get any more.

Every time you make a decision, you must pay a token. Some decisions cost more than one token, because they are actually multi-level decisions.

Even if you have a lot of tokens, the best strategy is to save your tokens for the big things, and not use them up on the little decisions.

The best way to save your tokens is to create routines. A routine takes you out of decisions because the activity is already decided. This preserves your tokens for more important things.

People with ADHD get fewer tokens to start our days than people who don’t have ADHD. In addition, decisions we must make early in the day often cost more than one token.

Having routines is essential to preserve our decision tokens so we can use them for the things that will matter more.

(3) Avoid Paralysis

For people with ADHD, decisions not only drain energy; they also often create overwhelm, which can lead to action paralysis.

In The Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy lands in Munchkinland, Glinda the Good Witch sets her off to Oz with instructions to follow the yellow brick road.

Everything starts out great, until she comes to a crossroads. All the paths ahead are yellow brick roads. Suddenly, the clear instructions she had are no longer so clear.

With every option a yellow brick road, the way forward isn’t clear. Dorothy is in paralysis, not knowing which way to go.

This is what it’s like to have ADHD. You may start your day knowing where you want to go. But every decision point is like being at a crossroads and not knowing which way to turn.

Routines remove the crossroads in our days, helping us stay the course to our personal Oz.

Routines Need Not Be a Prison

Within the structure of a routine, we free up our creative and cognitive bandwidth to do its best work, without falling into the decisions and distractions that are lurking around every corner.

Instead of thinking of routines as a prison that keeps you small, consider routines the foundation of a structure that supports you to think and act bigger.