My mom used to say this type of shit to me all the time. She also refused to get me tested or anything so there's that too.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
686 points (98.0% liked)
ADHD memes
10486 readers
766 users here now
ADHD Memes
The lighter side of ADHD
Rules
Other ND communities
- !adhd@lemmy.world - Generic discussion
- !ausomememes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !autism@lemmy.world
- !autisticandadhd
- !neurodivergence@beehaw.org
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You had one consistent habit, which was moving through the world untested and unmedicated. Most of your success can be attributed to this habit.
What's habits precious?
"like what nuns wear?"
Precious habits, yes, the rituals we does, yesss, over and over, they can hurt us, or make our lives better, precious!
I tried to explain to someone that our (adhd) brains are literally incapable of forming habits. They tried to remind me of all my bad habits, therefore I was wrong. And that was just too much for me to unpack and explain to them (they didn't know me or my habits, they were just talking about the bad habits that come along with adhd, but thats a whole other story)
But when someone told me habits are something you do without thinking about it. Like, at all.
I've never had a habit in my life. I have to think through every step of every task, no matter how many times I've done them before, nothing just runs of its own volition. And I could have done something literally 10,000 times and I'll still miss a vital step and screw it up.
That fun effect is called, executive dysfunction. Yay!
3 month habit? Those are rookie numbers lol. In one 3-day stint of a hospital stay, I once completely lost a habit I had developed over more than 5 years prior.
You started pissing the bed again, didn't you?
I mean... I'm not gonna say no, but I'm also not gonna lie
It helps is it was a hyperfixation at one point. In my case, timelieness was a problem, around the same time I was learning programming (Ruby/Rails) and needed so odd time functions to handle multi-timezone inputs. I ended up with a minor fixation on UTC, multiple clocks set to it and a scary ability to do timezone offsets in my head. Bonus, im not late for shit anymore.
I just use a neurotic fear of being late :)
That's what the time machines are for. Gotta go back and make it a habit for your 3 year old self, so that it sticks with you more in your adult life. Basic habits like brushing your teeth before bed, washing your hands before eating, and others commonly taught to young children tend to stick better. I wonder if it's more about the percentage of life with the habit, rather than current habit holding streak that helps keep the habit.
For hand washing, just develop a minor germ phobia from the covid pandemic. Now I wash my hands before I eat, after I get home from the outside world, and after I touch anything my mind deems "unclean". It does of the side effects of dry hands.
That works too, with measles on the rise, maybe that'll help more people with hand washing.
I've had a habit for 10+ years. One day I just forgot, and it was weeks later when I thought "didn't I use to do something at this time?"
I never managed to get that habit back.
load more comments
(7 replies)
If I don't engage with something basically every day I just forget it exists. Doesn't matter if it's a friend, a TV show I'm watching or working out every morning.
The one exception is when you end up on a runaway train of thought.
You go for a walk and you see a seagull, which reminds you of the last time you went to the beach, which reminds you of coconuts, which reminds you of a silly cartoon you used to watch, which reminds you of a specific day in elementary school when a kid quoted an episode, and then you start to wonder what that kid's up to as an adult today.
And maybe you have the thought of, "I should reach out to them. I think they added me on Facebook like 15 years ago." But then a nearby car honks. You snap out of the thought and look around. You don't know what car honked, but you do spot a dog. It's an uncommon breed and you can't remember the name of it. You then spend the next minute or so either guessing the wrong breed or going down the alphabet, hoping to trigger the right name.
By the time you give up guessing and decide to look it up on your phone, you've completely forgotten about that kid from elementary school. The thought has vanished back into the void whence it came.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD.
This happens all the time to me. I've made a game of it, that when I land at the end of a thought spiral I work my way backwards to figure out how the hell i ended up at something weird.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Half the problem with autism and adhd both is difficulty with habit formation and maintenance.
You don’t need habits. You need routines with reliable contextual triggers. They’ll fail from time to time and you will just have to be okay with that, and try to figure out exactly what made them fail when they do so maybe you can fix it going forward. But it will still occasionally fail.
You can’t make a sieve not leak without making it not a sieve.
load more comments
(4 replies)
view more: next ›