The 2 Simple Ingredients to Making ANY Strategy ADHD-Friendly and Effective

We all know the feeling: You hear about this great hack or strategy that you just know will make a difference, the thing that will finally make you feel like you have it under control.

But … despite your greatest plans, valiant efforts, and amazing ideas, the brilliant strategy just never gets off the ground.

And you’re left feeling like nothing ever works. Again.

ADHD brains are brilliant at crafting strategies but equally (if not more) brilliant at breaking them down before they’ve even gotten started.

That's why it’s so powerful to create ADHD-friendly (read: ADHD resilient) strategies. With just a little bit of understanding of the science of how ADHD brains work best, we can do just that—adding in some key factors to make ANY strategy we want to try work for an ADHD brain.

Why ADHD brains are so helped by strategies

Strategies are KEY for ADHD brains.

Why?

Because our world is not built for an ADHD brain.

It works great for neurotypical brains, the way they are motivated, and the ways they function best. But the systems and structures that have been created for those neurotypical brains fall oh-so-very-short for ADHD brains.

Strategies are intentional external systems that get repeated over and over again and create a bridge between how our brains work and how the world works. They basically translate the world for our brains. (Or sometimes translate our brains for the world)

Let’s take a medication timer, for example. We need our meds, but we’ve got a world that says you should take them at 8 am. But our brains? Who knows what we’re doing at 8 am, let alone if we remember our medication is supposed to be on our agenda. A medication timer creates a great little bridge between these two realities- a world that says 8 am and a brain that says- I want to take them, but there is no way the clock turning to 8 am is going to remind me to do that. Instead of trying to transform our brains so they can magically mark the passage of time or somehow make it less important that we take our meds at 8. The medication timer does its thing, “DING, DING, DING,” on top of your pills, effectively telling your brain - remember that thing you wanted to do? Now’s the time!

Why traditional strategies don’t work for ADHD brains

There are tons of these strategy bridges out there. Crafted for all kinds of people to translate their lives and brains for the world they find themselves in.

They’re super appealing to ADHD brains. They promise to smooth the road of our lives, remove obstacles, and solve key problems.

But they so rarely work out. Half the time, they never even make it off the ground, and the other half tend to fall apart in a matter of days (or hours or minutes). And then we end up feeling like nothing ever works and why we even try (or even worse, like complete failures).

But the reason strategies don’t work isn’t about who you are, it’s not that your brain is broken. It’s not even because the strategies are bad.

The reason strategies don’t work is because most strategies are built for neurotypical brains—brains that are motivated by tedious things like importance and priority. But for ADHD— brains that don’t work that way—they fall apart.

Just because a strategy isn’t built for an ADHD brain doesn’t mean we need to abandon it. We can still make it work, we just need to adapt it.

How do we do that?

Well, like all things ADHD- the first step is to understand the science behind how ADHD brains work best.

The Science Behind Adapting Strategies

One of the biggest differences about ADHD brains is the way it regulates dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is really important in feeling good, happy, and motivated. [1]

And because of the way the ADHD brain regulates dopamine, it often doesn’t feel like it has enough. Not enough of something that makes you feel good, happy, and motivated [2] can leave you feeling a whole lot like a puddle.

But when we give an ADHD brain something compelling, the dopamine starts streaming in [3], and suddenly, that water in the puddle starts to flow. And then, when we provide some structure—that flowing water can quickly become a rushing river.

And rivers? They have a TON of power!

The 2 key ingredients to translating strategies to work for ADHD brains

Just like a river, an ADHD brain needs 2 things to get it moving: motivation and structure. And so, those are the exact 2 things that we need to add in order to translate a strategy to make them work for ADHD brains.

Structure: The Walls that keep us moving in the direction we want to go

Habit-building research (which has been found to be equally if not more effective for ADHD brains [4]) suggests that the structure of new strategies is essential. All of those white coats and their tireless hours of study have discovered the 3 key ingredients to this kind of effective strategy [5]:

Action:

The action seems like maybe the part that we can just write off as obvious. It’s what we are going to do. But actually, it’s super important that we define it well. An ADHD-friendly action needs to be concrete and simple.

Concrete means that it’s an action that has a beginning, middle, and end. It’s something that if someone was walking by, they could say, just by looking at you or asking a couple of questions, exactly what it is that you’re doing.
Simple means that it can be done in one sitting. So we’re not writing our memoir here; we’re journaling for 20 minutes. We’re not organizing the whole house; we are reorganizing a cabinet.

Stack

Once you have the thing you want to do, we need to figure out when you’re going to do it. And as much as our society says we should do things based on time- doing a certain thing at, say, 2 p.m.- that’s not adhd-friendly.

So rather than taking our new action at a certain time, research shows that we’re most likely to take new action if we tie it to something we’re already doing, like waking up, brushing our teeth, having a meal, going to bed, or picking the kids up.

When we tie a new action to something we already do, we increase our chances of actually doing it. Which makes sense, right? Who knows if we’re going to be able to do something at 2 p.m.? We don’t know how our day’s going to play out, where we might be, what we might be doing at 2 p.m., or whether our brain’s even likely to know that it is 2 p.m.!

But right after you finish lunch? Or while you drink your morning coffee? Or as you brush your teeth? Those things are a more sure bet.

Prompt

The final piece of this structure-building puzzle is the prompt.

The prompt cues your brain—oh, right, that’s the thing I need to do. It reminds you that you are adding this new action to your stack. Because right now, you’re not doing the new thing- so what’s going to remind your brain of your plan when you need it?

So, let’s say you’ve been reading about the benefits of drinking more water first thing in the morning, and you want to give it a try. You decide you’re going to drink a tall glass of water after you brush your teeth every morning. Great! What’s going to remind you to do that?

Well, a sticky note on your toothpaste, a tall glass beside your sink, or maybe even an alarm on your phone—that combo might do the trick!

Motivation: Increasing our brain’s flow

Structure built the wall of the river. Now, what’s going to get the water flowing? Motivation.

There are 5 things that research shows help motivate ADHD brains:

Competition
Novelty
Interest
Pressure
Humor

These are the 5 things that have been shown to be compelling to an ADHD brain: increasing the flow of dopamine and getting it moving. The really great news is that we don’t need all 5 of them to get a strategy up and running. Adding 1 or 2 from that list to our strategy formation will help get our puddles flowing and that strategy up and running.

How do we add the 5 motivational factors into our systems?

Adding a motivational factor into our system sometimes takes a bit of thought and creativity but is a crucial factor in making any system ADHD-friendly and doable. First, consider if any of the 5 factors are already inherent in the task itself. If so, great! Is that factor likely to wear off? (like novelty or pressure). If so, let’s add another in for staying power. Then, think through what is possible to add or pair to the system itself.

For example:

Want to start a chore chart to get stuff done around the house? Download a gamified chore app like Habitica to add some competition.
Want to start a bedtime routine? Try adding in 20 minutes of an audiobook or reading about a subject you love to add some interest.
Want to start exercising in the morning? Try doing it while listening to your favorite standup or with your favorite funny friend to add in some humor.

Want some more ideas for how to add motivational factors into your life? Check out 20 Ways to Hack Your ADHD Brain’s Motivation.

1. Sagvolden, T., Johansen, E. B., Aase, H., & Russell, V. A. (2005). A dynamic developmental theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (adhd) predominantly hyperactive/impulsive and combined subtypes. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(03). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x05000075
2. Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting. Neuron, 68(5), 815-834. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.022
3. Volkow, N. D., Wang, G., Tomasi, D., Kollins, S. H., Wigal, T., Newcorn, J. H., … & Swanson, J. M. (2012). Methylphenidate-elicited dopamine increases in ventral striatum are associated with long-term symptom improvement in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(3), 841-849. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.4461-11.2012
4. Ceceli, A. O., Esposito, G., & Tricomi, E. (2019). Habit expression and disruption as a function of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptomology. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01997
5. Wood, W. and Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67(1), 289-314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417