ADHD and Body Awareness: Building Routines to Care for Your Physical Well-Being
This month has included a lot of health stuff in my family, with both my spouse and daughter each having (necessary but not serious) surgeries, and several routine check-ups for me. Spending a lot of time in doctor’s offices had me reflecting a lot this month on health, and how big of an impact it can have on our day to day experience. This is especially stark when we’re dealing with significant illness or injury, but it is just as important in day to day life.
My own flavor of ADHD often leaves me very much in my head, and I often need to intentionally remind myself to notice what is going on with my body and how I’m feeling. It’s not uncommon for many ADHDers to even lose track of bodily cues like whether we’re hungry or sleepy or an uncomfortable temperature.
How Low Body Awareness Shows Up
If we don’t have a reliable intuitive sense of how the body is feeling moment by moment, it can also be easy to discount how huge of an impact caring for our bodies can have. When we’re not consciously aware that our bodies are feeling discomfort, alleviating that discomfort can seem like a low priority - not to mention that many body care tasks can also register as boring or understimulating.
But so many of us have also had those moments where we stand up after being hyperfocused for a long chunk of time and stretch, or eat something and realize we’d gotten hangry, or step into the sunlight after being inside for a long time, and find the world opening up anew and the fog lifting out of our brain, which in turn lets us realize how dense that fog had gotten. That’s the feeling I love to use as a signpost to what kinds of routines I need to build more intentionally, and calling those momentary feelings of bodily delight to mind as vividly as possible can be a big part of a motivational structure while we’re in the process of building our routines.
Some ADHD-Friendly Ways Towards Greater Body Awareness
When body care tasks feel boring, it could be that we have a boring version of a body care task in our head as The Way It Should Be Done, but if we think outside the box we might find a way to add some novelty or whimsy or challenge or interest to the tasks that we might find hard because of boredom.
When the internal cues are unreliable, we may need to supplement with external cues. And in my case, if the thing I’m cuing for myself isn’t very stimulating in and of itself, I need the routine to be as automatic and ‘on rails’ as possible, without many moments of intentional choice required day to day, and ready-to-go motivators like that feeling of delight I was describing earlier, or perhaps whimsy, or maybe predetermined rewards or reinforcers.
There are lots of other concrete tactics many of us make use of to prompt our brains - some are:
- Habit Stacking - finding a routine you already do reliably and adding one additional piece
- Alarms or auditory cues like playlists
- Setting up environmental cues, such as visual reminders or sticky notes
- Reducing barriers, such as sleeping in the outfit that we plan to wear for movement
- Engineering our routines, such as putting an object we’re confident we’ll reach for, (like a phone, for example), in a location that will prompt us to remember an action we want to take
More than anything else, though, the most sustainable forms of care feel like care, not just like obligations or requirements we have to slog through. It’s not that there’s never a call for giving ourselves a push or persevering despite an internal voice complaining that I don’t feel like it, it’s that we find the practices where on balance we are finding enough moments of joy, satisfaction, and accomplishment that let us give that voice pep talks, and remind ourselves that it truly will be worth it - and believe ourselves when we do.
To receive more in depth resources and activities related to topics explored in the blog and get links to new posts straight to your inbox, sign up for the monthly newsletter.