Key Concepts

Habits

• Habits are routines that we perform automatically, often without even realizing it.
• Developing good habits is important for personal growth and authentic happiness.
• We can use habits to help align our actions with our values and strengths.
• Good habits can also help streamline our daily tasks.
• We can create habits to replace the old coping skills that no longer serve us like perfectionism, hiding, masking, and silencing ourselves.
• It's also important to recognize and address any unhelpful habits that might be holding us back.
• By fostering good habits we can create a structured framework for success and personal growth, allowing us to thrive and lead fulfilling lives.

Key Definitions.

• Motivation: This represents the internal or external forces that drive you to achieve your goals. ADHD women struggle with motivation because of brain-based differences. You don’t need motivation to create habits.
• Willpower: Willpower refers to the ability to resist short-term temptations and impulses in order to achieve long-term goals. It involves self-control, discipline, and the ability to make conscious decisions You don’t need willpower to create habits. Good habits eliminate the need for willpower.
• Mini Habits: These are small, manageable actions or routines that can be seamlessly integrated into your daily life, serving as stepping stones towards achieving grander objectives without the accompanying stress.
• Systems Thinking: A comprehensive approach to analysis, focusing on understanding the interrelationships between the different elements within a system, and how these elements function over time and in the context of larger systems.

Important things to know about Habits

1. Occur Automatically: Habits are actions you perform automatically, without requiring conscious decision-making each time.
2. Decrease Stress: Helpful habits can significantly decrease stress by eliminating the need to constantly make choices about routine actions.
3. Align with Your Values: Wise habits guide you gently towards decisions and actions that resonate with your core values, helping you shape a life that feels more authentic.
4. Promote Your Strengths: By fostering chosen helpful habits, you can effectively amplify and leverage your inherent strengths, allowing them to flourish.
5. Foster Authenticity: Developing these habits supports you in creating a life that is more aligned with who you genuinely are, fostering a sense of authenticity and personal integrity.
6. Reduce Executive Function Strain: Implementing helpful habits can lessen the strain on your executive functions, as they automate routine decisions and actions, preserving your mental resources for more complex tasks.
7. Boost Self-Efficacy: Over time, establishing wise habits can increase your confidence in your ability to manage and navigate various aspects of life proficiently.
8. Enhance Resilience: Habitual positive actions can cultivate resilience, helping you bounce back more quickly from setbacks and maintain a positive outlook.
9. Improve Focus and Attention: By reducing the number of choices and decisions to be made daily, wise habits can help enhance your focus and attention on the tasks that truly matter.
10. Facilitate Personal Growth: These habits act as stepping stones, fostering continual personal growth and development as you refine and build upon them over time.

What is Self Efficacy and what does it have to do with habits?

Self-efficacy is the belief in one's own capabilities to perform tasks and achieve goals.

Society's lack of support for different neurotypes can lower self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy makes it easier to put habits in place because you believe you can stick to things long enough to create a habit.

Mistakes ADHD Women Often Unknowingly Make when trying to create habits

One of the most common pitfalls ADHD women encounter when trying to foster good habits is overly thinking they need to rely on concepts like motivation, willpower, and executive functioning.

In a world that promotes motivation and willpower as essential for building habits, it's easy to think that they are necessary components. However, it’s just the opposite. Relying on motivation and willpower leads to feelings of shame and inadequacy. They won't work in helping you create habits. Let’s learn why.

Motivation, Habits, and the Shame Spiral

For most of us, traditional motivation might not be effective for habit development. Motivation alone often falls short in habit formation due to its fleeting nature. The duration to establish a habit varies based on its complexity, environment, and regularity. Relying solely on motivation or willpower can evoke feelings of shame and result in self-criticism, as they demand high, often unsustainable, self-control.

Developing a habit doesn't necessitate either.

Mini and Tiny Habits.

Mini and tiny habits have been discussed in two books on habit science: "Mini Habits" by Stephen Guise and "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg. I like these approaches because they:

1. Align with our flourish model: Aligning habits with personal values enhances enjoyment and motivation. It promotes self-praise, and self-compassion, and ensures self-awareness before escalating the habit, checking for its automaticity and comfort level.
2. Reduce dependency on motivation and willpower: Mini habits foster consistent, value-driven progress, sidestepping the pitfalls of erratic motivation and overwhelming efforts.

Why Small Habits?

By making tasks seem easier with mini habits, you can still make progress because you can create very small habits without having to overcome these problems. Once habits become automatic, you don't need to use these things anymore to do them.

Starting small with habits helps with obstacles such as :

• shame
• procrastination
• executive functioning issues
• willpower and motivation fluctuation

Mini habits can help build your confidence in your ability to achieve goals. This is because the simplicity and achievable nature of mini-habits allow you to build a track record of consistent success.

Breaking down big goals into smaller, manageable tasks helps conserve mental energy. This approach transforms challenges into achievable steps, fostering a sense of daily accomplishment and a positive mindset.

Create mini habits that align with your own personal values. These should be habits that are so small they are nearly impossible to fail at, helping you build a track record of success and boosting your confidence in moving you towards a life that is consistent with your values and strengths not masking.

The mini habits model is perfect for adhd women. According to the creator of mini habits these are the key concepts:

1. Starting Small:
2. Consistency Over Intensity:
3. Low Pressure:
4. Scaling Up:
5. Brain Rewiring:
6. Avoiding Burnout:
7. Building Confidence:

Let’s look at how.

You pick your habit.

Take your target habit goal and make it ‘stupid small.’

If you find it ridiculous when you verbalize a habit, then you've stumbled upon a mini habit.

For instance, imagine aiming to complete 100 push-ups every day, but instead, you reduce it to just 1 push-up. Similarly, if your goal is to write thousands of words daily, you can simplify it to writing just 50 words. Meditating for an entire hour can be scaled down to just 1 minute or even 1 breath. And if you typically struggle with waking up an hour earlier, try waking up just a minute earlier. As for reading, rather than committing to an hour every day, challenge yourself to read just 1 page (or even 2 pages, like Stephen's mini-reading habit).

If you're curious to explore more mini habits, Stephen has compiled an extensive list at minihabits.com.

“TOO SMALL TOO FAIL”

Our aim is to make the habit "too small to fail" by establishing a solid foundation of CONSISTENCY before gradually increasing the intensity. This principle will be further explained in the upcoming Big Ideas.

Tiny Habits: A Brief Overview

Tiny Habits use the same concepts as mini habits, but are a little more specific about how to go about it. Let's look at this model

The Structure of Tiny Habits

1. Anchor Moment: A current routine that triggers your new tiny habit.
2. New Tiny Behavior: A simplified version of a new habit you aim to develop.
3. Instant Celebration: A quick self-congratulation after performing the tiny behavior.

Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt (MAP)

Creating a habit is easier when the behavior is simple, motivated, and prompted, as illustrated by the MAP formula.

BJ Fogg created this formula but also recognizes that motivation is not what we want to focus on in the equation. He reminds us that we want to heavily manipulate our ability to do the tasks and our prompts.

The 7 Steps of the Behavior Design Process

1. Define your aspiration.
2. Explore possible behaviors.
3. Match with specific behaviors.
4. Start with tiny actions.
5. Identify a suitable prompt.
6. Celebrate small wins.
7. Adjust and expand as necessary.

Manipulating Prompts (Triggers):

1. Selection: Choose a prompt that naturally fits into your routine. For instance, if you want to develop a habit of doing morning stretches, use the act of getting out of bed as your prompt.
2. Consistency: Use the same prompt every time for the desired behavior. This consistency helps in reinforcing the connection between the prompt and the action.
3. Immediate Action: Ensure that the action follows the prompt immediately. The shorter the time between the prompt and the action, the stronger the association becomes.
4. Visible Reminders: Place physical reminders in locations where you'll see them. For example, if you want to take vitamins daily, place them next to your toothbrush.
5. Technology: Use alarms, apps, or notifications as prompts. For instance, set a phone reminder to drink water every hour.
6. Environment Design: Arrange your environment to naturally guide you toward the desired behavior. If you want to read more, keep a book on your bedside table.

Manipulating Ability:

1. Start Small: Begin with a version of the behavior that is incredibly easy. If you want to start running, start by walking for just five minutes a day.
2. Skill Acquisition: If the behavior requires a particular skill, invest time in learning that skill. For example, if you want to cook at home, take a basic cooking class or watch tutorials.
3. Resource Availability: Ensure you have all the necessary resources at hand. If you're trying to eat healthier, stock your kitchen with healthy foods.
4. Reduce Friction: Make the desired behavior as easy as possible. If you want to go to the gym in the morning, prepare your gym clothes the night before.
5. Increase Friction for Undesired Behaviors: Make unwanted behaviors difficult. If you want to reduce screen time, keep your phone in another room when working.
6. Routine Integration: Integrate the new behavior into an existing routine. If you want to practice gratitude, do it while having your morning coffee.
7. Gradual Increase: As the behavior becomes more automatic, you can gradually increase its complexity or duration. After walking for a week, add short intervals of jogging.

By effectively manipulating prompts and ability, you can set yourself up for success in habit formation, making the desired behavior more automatic and less reliant on sheer willpower or high levels of motivation.

Summary Thoughts from Tiny Habits

Behavior Modification as a Design Problem: Habit formation failures are design flaws, not personal flaws, suggesting a redesign can lead to success.

Creating a Feeling of "Shine": Celebrating small successes fosters a positive feedback loop, enhancing overall well-being. This decreases the self-critical voice.

Create a Tiny Habit

Systems Over Goals

Before we delve into the mechanics of forming tiny habits, it's essential to understand the philosophy of "Systems Over Goals." By focusing on systems — a series of actions or processes — instead of fixed goals, you can sidestep the discouragement that often accompanies unmet goals. Instead, you cultivate satisfaction and build momentum through consistent daily actions. This approach aligns perfectly with the tiny habits method, fostering a nurturing environment for your new habits to flourish.

Instructions to Implement Tiny Habits

To start with the Tiny Habits method, follow these steps:

Creating a Habit of Doing One Sit-Up: A Walkthrough

Let's walk through the process of creating a habit of doing one sit-up daily using the Tiny Habits method:

1. Identify a Routine: Choose a part of your daily routine to anchor your new habit, such as after brushing your teeth in the morning.
2. Select a Tiny Habit: Your tiny habit here is doing one sit-up. It's a small, achievable goal that doesn't require a lot of time or effort.
3. Anchor the Habit: Incorporate the sit-up into your routine. For instance, right after you brush your teeth in the morning, do one sit-up.
4. Celebrate: After you do your sit-up, celebrate your achievement. It could be a simple "Well done!" or a pat on your back. This celebration reinforces the positive behavior, making it more likely to stick.
5. Progress Gradually: As days go by, if you feel comfortable, you can gradually increase the number of sit-ups. But remember, the goal is to foster consistency, not intensity.

Important and Helpful Ideas from Atomic Habits

What are They?

Summary of Key Concepts:

• Habits and Systems: James Clear emphasizes that the problem with changing habits often lies in the systems we have in place. Bad habits persist because of flawed systems, not a lack of desire to change. To achieve meaningful change, focus on improving your systems rather than fixating on singular goals.
• Atomic Habits: Atomic habits are small, incremental changes that are part of a larger system. Similar to how atoms are the building blocks of molecules, these tiny habits are fundamental units that contribute to overall improvement. They may appear insignificant at first but compound over time to yield substantial results.
• Compound Growth: Small improvements, even just 1 percent better each day, can lead to remarkable outcomes when compounded over time. Clear provides mathematical examples to illustrate how consistent progress can result in significant improvements.
• Plateau of Latent Potential: Many people give up on their efforts to change habits because they expect immediate results. Clear introduces the concept of the Plateau of Latent Potential, where significant change often occurs after consistent effort over time. The most potent outcomes are delayed but worth the wait.
• Identity Change: Clear argues that identity change is fundamental to habit change. To build better habits, start by identifying the person you want to become. Your habits shape your identity, and by repeating desired behaviors, you reinforce the identity associated with those behaviors.
• The 4 Laws of Behavior Change: Clear introduces four laws that govern habit formation: making it obvious, making it attractive, making it easy, and making it satisfying. These laws guide the process of building new habits and breaking bad ones.
• Sorites Paradox: The Sorites Paradox challenges our understanding of gradual change by questioning at what point a series of small additions, like grains of sand, collectively transition from being considered "not a heap" to being recognized as "a heap."

Time Blindness and Masking and Habit Formation:

• Overestimating Singular Moments: People often overestimate the importance of singular defining moments and underestimate the value of making small, consistent improvements. Clear emphasizes that remarkable results come from continuous, incremental progress.
• Impatience: Impatience is a common mistake when trying to change habits. Many expect immediate results and give up when they don't see instant changes. Clear emphasizes the importance of persevering through the Plateau of Latent Potential. Time Blindness can make habit formation difficult.
• Neglecting Identity: Focusing solely on external goals and not considering the underlying identity can hinder habit change. Clear suggests that becoming the type of person you want to be is the ultimate driver of effective habit formation. For Adhd women, this is a huge issue because their habits and goals if not driven by their true values can be pinned to the gold standard woman.

The Importance of The Environment: Cue-Based Reminders

In simple terms, this method involves associating a task with a distinctive cue in your environment that will catch your attention when the opportunity to perform the task arises. These cues are designed to be more noticeable than regular stimuli, so they remind you to complete the task.

For example, let's say you need to remember to mail a letter tomorrow, which is on your desk. To remind yourself, you associate this intention with a distinctive cue – let's say, a bouquet of late-arriving Valentine's Day flowers also on your desk. The presence of the flowers serves as a powerful reminder to mail the letter when you see them, more than a written or electronic reminder might.

Research suggests that these cue-based reminders can be more effective in grabbing your attention and prompting you to act. Double up on your cues! Leave yourself lots of them like notes or messages.

Vivid, noticeable external cues to nudge them towards action.

In essence, it's about creating a link between an intention and a distinctive, attention-grabbing cue

1. Task: Drinking more water throughout the day. Cue: Set a bright-colored water bottle on your desk. Explanation: The bright color of the water bottle serves as a visual cue that can capture attention and remind individuals to drink water regularly throughout the day.
2. Task: Feeding a pet in the evening. Cue: Place the pet food container near the TV remote. Explanation: If watching TV is a regular evening habit, placing the pet food container near the TV remote creates a noticeable cue that reminds individuals to feed their pets when they reach for the remote.
3. Task: Going for a walk or exercising in the afternoon. Cue: Place a pair of sneakers near the front door. Explanation: The presence of the sneakers near the door serves as a visual reminder to go for a walk or exercise whenever they are about to leave the house or arrive home.
4. Task: Remember to buy groceries on the way home from work. Cue: Attach a grocery list to the car keys. Explanation: Associating the grocery list with the car keys creates a cue that captures attention right when individuals are about to drive home, reminding them to stop by the grocery store.
5. Task: Practicing a musical instrument in the evening. Cue: Place the instrument case next to a favorite chair or sofa. Explanation: The instrument case acts as a visual cue that captures attention and reminds individuals to spend time practicing when they sit down to relax in their favorite spot.

Remember, the cues should be distinctive and unusual compared to other stimuli in the environment to effectively capture attention and prompt action.

Make the Easy Hard and the Hard Easy

"Make the easy hard and the hard easy" is like setting up your space and routine so it's easier to do the good stuff and trickier to do the not-so-good stuff.

1. Make the Easy Hard: If there's something you're trying to avoid, like mindless scrolling on your phone, make it a bit tougher. Maybe move your social media apps into a folder or log out after each session. This tiny bit of friction might make you think twice before diving in.
2. Make the Hard Easy: For things you want to do more of, like reading or meditating, make it super simple. Have a book or meditation cushion always in sight, so you're reminded and don’t have to search for them.

Basically, arrange your world so it's easier to make the choices you want and note make the choices you don’t want.

Good Habit Bad Habit Concepts

Habit Discontinuity/ Jump through the window.

Concept: Habit discontinuity refers to the phenomenon where changes in our routine or environment disrupt our existing habits, making us more conscious of our actions and giving us the opportunity to develop new habits.

Simple Explanation: Imagine if you usually snack on chips while watching TV in the living room. If you rearrange your living room or replace TV time with a walk, you might find it easier to break the chip-snacking habit and perhaps develop a healthier habit.

Applying Habit Discontinuity for Women with ADHD

Significant life changes, like moving or starting a new job, can be seen as opportunities to reset and develop habits that align more with their goals and aspirations.

The Double Law of Habit

Concept: This law suggests that repeating an action continuously turns it into a habit, making us less consciously aware of performing that action over time.

Simple Explanation: It's like driving. Initially, you're very aware of every action, but over time, you can find yourself driving almost automatically without consciously thinking about each step.

Something you think is diffiuclt no longer will be difficult

Special Resilience of Habit

Concept: This concept highlights the role of habits as automatic responses that can provide stability during stressful times, as they don't require conscious thought to initiate.

Simple Explanation: Think of habits as autopilot modes that help us navigate through stressful times without having to make constant decisions, saving mental energy.

🎯 Aim for habits that are super small – too tiny to fail. Follow these guidelines to make it work:

1️⃣ Habit Stacking: Anchor your new habits to existing routines. For instance, if you're keen on reading, commit to reading for just 5 minutes post-dinner daily. Pairing the new with the familiar makes it stick! 📚🍽️

2️⃣ Environment is Key: Set yourself up for success. Make it supremely easy to follow through on desired behaviors and challenging to fall into undesired ones. If you're trying to eat healthier, keep fruits visible and junk food out of reach! 🍎❌🍪

3️⃣ Visual Cues: Use tangible reminders to keep your habit front and center. This could be a sticky note on your fridge, a timely phone alert, or even an object like a book placed prominently to remind you of your reading goal. Out of sight, out of mind, so keep it visible! 👀📝

4️⃣ Reward System: Every time you complete your habit, treat yourself. This not only makes the process enjoyable but over time, the habit itself becomes its own reward. It could be as simple as a special treat or 5 minutes of relaxation. 🎁🎊

5️⃣ Value Alignment: Ensure your habits are in sync with your core values and strengths. A habit rooted in authenticity is far more likely to thrive. Plus, if it helps you acquire a new skill, that's a double win! 🌟💡

6️⃣ Embrace the Bumps: Perfection isn't the goal; persistence is. If you skip a day, don't beat yourself up. Instead, focus on the bigger picture and jump back in with compassion and renewed vigor. 🌄❤️

Always remember: The key to sustainable habits lies in creating systems and environments that encourage desired behaviors while discouraging the undesired. With time, consistency, and the right strategy, your habit will become second nature. 💪🔄🌱