Book excerpt bonus:
Get Moving!
How To Design Your Individualized Exercise
and Nutrition Program
To Reduce and Help Manage ADHD Symptoms
(in press)
and Jeffrey Bush, M.S.
Chapter 3:
“I know I should, but…”
How To Start And Maintain Your Exercise Program
Get it started
By
now you know the obvious: following a regular exercise program is
one of the best things you can do for yourself. It strengthens your
heart, wakes up your brain, perks up your mood, and revs up your
immune system. On the ADHD front it makes you calmer, more focused,
less restless, and less impulsive. What’s not to like, right?
But
wait, you say, I kinda already knew that! Maybe painful experience
has already taught you that knowing the benefits of exercise is not
enough to get you started or keep you going. The reality is that
knowing is not, by itself, a strong enough motivator. It often
doesn’t get us beyond wishes and good intentions. Taking action
requires going several steps beyond. It starts with setting clear
and specific goals. Having a realistic plan. Making a strong
personal commitment. Perhaps most important, it requires hope and
lasting confidence in our ability to achieve those goals.
All of
us talk to ourselves inside our heads, all the time. This self-talk
can be primarily positive, or primarily negative. Much of it is
shaped by our core personality, but also by lessons learned from
life experiences and by current situations. Although most ADHD’ers
I’ve met tend to be natural optimists, repeated frustrations and
failures in life can turn the self-talk negative and pessimistic. We
start to expect failure, and in so doing make failure a
self-fulfilling prophesy.
Take a minute, sit back, and pay attention to your internal self-talk right now. You might already hear the negative, automatic message loops playing in the back of your mind:
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“Exercise program? (Deep sigh). Been there, done that, just can’t do it.”
“I really want to exercise regularly, but I can't get started.”
“My schedule is too hectic right now. I simply don’t have the time,”
“I’m too old (unhealthy/tired/out of shape) for a workout program.”
“It would be nice, but I know myself too well. I’m too lazy to stick with it.”
“I’ll get to it later."
If you
are giving yourself these messages, it’s time to tell your negative
automatic loop to shut up. The litany of excuses is just that:
excuses. Too busy to work out? At this very moment some of the
busiest people in the world are making time in their daily schedules
for a workout. Are you busier than Bill Gates, the president of
Microsoft? How about the president of the United States? The honest
answer is no, you’re probably not. If they can find time to schedule
regular workouts, so can you and I. Too old to benefit from
exercise? An exercise study with nursing home patients (average age:
80 years old) found that after just three months they improved their
strength by 200%. People of any age benefit from exercise. Time,
age, money, low fitness level? Excuses all -- but only if you allow
them to be.
Take a few minutes and write down your thoughts in Table
3-1 below. In the left column, list the excuses and negative
thoughts you’ve made in the past (or in the present) that stop you
from working out. In the right column, list a solution or positive
thought for each that will help overcome these negative roadblocks.
Revise the list later as your thinking changes or you hit new
roadblocks to following your plan.
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Table 3-1 |
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My solutions: |
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Overcome
negativity
In
order to get past the negativity and excuses, there are three
useless words you must eliminate from your vocabulary forever. Lazy.
Later. Never. These are common words that people throw around all the time,
but usually they're just rationalizations for not taking action.
Lazy
simply means: I just don’t feel like it, so I’m not doing it.
(Perhaps there’s another voice in the background that adds:
“And you can’t make me! Ha!”). Lazy is one of the most common labels
we apply to ourselves, and unfortunately one of the most
destructive. It doesn’t really explain anything. Saying “I’m lazy”
doesn’t tell you anything useful about yourself -- it’s just
name-calling. Even worse, it’s a cop-out to explain away why you’re
not doing what you committed yourself to do.
Later
simply means: I’m not going to do it right now, which is the same
thing as saying I’m not doing it, period. Of course “later” never comes,
because “later” does not exist -- it’s just an abstract concept. All
we have is now, this moment in time.
Deciding to not do it now is the equivalent of
deciding to not do it. If you believe the lie that “I’ll do
it later,” you’re just kidding yourself. You have a choice to make:
either give up this lie, or remain its prisoner and allow it to keep
stopping and frustrating you.
I’ll
never get it done simply means: I give up hope and faith in
my ability to make decisions and act on them. I am helpless. I am a
victim of my history, and I’m doomed to repeat the same pattern of behavior
over and over. I am stuck in my misery. I am not capable of change.
This sense of helplessness is nothing more than a belief, a feeling,
but as long as you continue to buy into it you are indeed stuck. If
you find yourself in this predicament, take responsibility for it.
Be clear that you create your own prison and are your own
jailer.
When these toxic motivation killers (“lazy,” “later,”
“never”) pop into your head, you must dismiss them. Fight them!
Don’t accept them automatically as some kind of eternal truths,
written in stone. The best way to fight them is to take
some positive action and move forward. Stop thinking and start
doing. Just start.
There is an ancient Korean saying:
"the first step is half
the journey." Truer words were never spoken. This principle applies
to all people of course, but if that ancient Korean sage had known
about ADHD he or she might have amended the saying a bit: “The first
step is half the journey. Considering your struggles with what you
call activation difficulties and procrastination, this saying goes double for all you
folks with ADHD!”
Overcome procrastination
For
many people with ADHD the main stumbling block to getting things
done is not getting started in the first place. The fancy name for
it is procrastination. The reasons why things get put off are almost
too numerous to mention. Something else comes up (when you're prone
to being distracted, something else is
practically guaranteed to come up). I don’t
feel like it right now. I’ll do it later, no doubt about that. I’m too busy
at the moment. This is not
going to work, so why bother.
The first step in overcoming procrastination is not to threaten yourself with doom and gloom and dire consequences (although sometimes this might be necessary as a last resort). The first step is to expect success. Focus on benefits, benefits, benefits. In order to feel motivated it is essential to see yourself achieving your goal. Visualize the end result, the benefits, and yes the celebration.
Write a behavioral contract with yourself – or with someone close to you – detailing exactly what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. Break down the goal into manageable chunks that you know you can handle. Set a start time in your planner. When that time arrives, start.
Tell yourself that you’re not going to wait until it’s too late. Many people are finally motivated to exercise after, for example, they have a heart attack or stroke. Better late than never, yeah, but what a price to pay for “late.”
Stop
for a moment and picture yourself, as clearly as you can, on the sad
and scary future day you come home from the hospital after (luckily) surviving a
heart attack. Ask yourself, what could I have done differently? How much easier would it have been to get
things going before you got sick? How much would you pay for the
chance to go back in time to this moment, right now, when you’re
still healthy? The good news of course is that time travel is not necessary.
You already are living in this moment, still healthy and kicking.
Make the most of it. But do it now.
Settle in for the long haul
After
you follow Jeff’s guidelines in Chapter 4 and design your individualized workout
program, you’re ready to go. Get out your
planner and schedule a start time for your first workout. To get
consistent and stay consistent with a program requires a structured
workout schedule. There is no getting around this simple fact.
Many people with ADHD have a love-hate relationship with structure. We know we need it, but hate feeling constrained by it. On some level it feels like giving up part of our freedom and spontaneity. To some degree that is true, but look past the apparent inconvenience and keep your eye on the bigger picture.
It is not possible to accept the
planning and scheduling that is essential to a long-term workout program until
you first overcome your aversion to structure. A structured program
might feel like a jail cell to some individuals, but it is no such
thing. Rather, look at it as a roadmap. It shows you the way
and keeps you on track to your destination. Who needs a map, you
ask? While it’s true that you might get to your destination without
a map, at best it will take you a lot longer and involve a lot more
work. At worst, you’ll get sidetracked and lost and never get there.
ADHD related activation difficulties stop being
as difficult after a behavior becomes routine; that is, once it feels
more like second nature.
Brushing your teeth in the morning is a good example. You don’t have
to think about it, you just do it because, well, that’s what you do
when you get up in the morning. It takes a minimum of several weeks before a
behavior even starts feeling routine, however. It takes months
(sometimes years) for a behavior to become a strong, ingrained
habit.
Use your reward pathway
As
the saying goes, nothing succeeds like success. It is also very true
that nothing motivates like success. By setting small doable goals,
and achieving them, you energize yourself to move on to the next
goal. And the next. And the next. This is a strategy for using the
reward pathway in your brain to build and sustain motivation and
positive energy.
Short-term goals tend to work better than long-term goals. A good
rule of thumb is to set a goal that can be achieved in three months
or less. For someone with ADHD, even shorter-term goals (six weeks
or less) are often a good idea. Shooting for long term
goals that are too large makes it more likely that you will lose
focus and interest, which leads to giving up. Setting unreachable
goals is a sure-fire way to fail.
Another
way to use your brain’s reward pathway is to make your workouts as
enjoyable as possible. Plan activities (biking, swimming, etc.) that
you like, and avoid those that don’t interest you (even if someone
else thinks it’s a good idea). Since the ADHD brain is stimulated by
variety and bored silly by too much repetition, incorporate
different types of activities into your workout routine. Make the
workouts a social activity whenever possible, for example by working
with a workout buddy, joining an exercise class, or working out with
a personal trainer.
Get SMART
Setting realistic goals is easier by following the SMART principle. No, we don't mean hiring Maxwell as your personal trainer or asking Agent 99 to be your workout buddy! SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timed.
Setting
specific goals means that you have a very clear picture of
what you’re going after. Avoid making general or unclear goals.
“I want to get in better shape” is an admirable goal, but
it’s too vague to have any meaning. “I want to run 5 miles” is a
specific goal.
Similarly, “I want to
lose weight” is much less clear than “I want to lose 15 pounds,” or
simply “I want my clothes to fit better.”
Measurable
goals are tangible. You want to know exactly how much progress
you’re making towards your goal, and exactly when it has been
achieved. “I want to be in good shape” is too general. “I want my
body fat index to be below 20%” and “I want to run a mile under six
minutes” are goals that are both specific and measurable.
Action-oriented
goals specify the details of the plan you’re going to follow. Making a promise to yourself to work out regularly is a vague wish, not a goal. What will be your training frequency? When are the workouts going to be scheduled during the week? What will be the intensity and duration of your workouts? What changes are you making in your eating habits? Sleeping habits? Define very clearly, in behavioral terms, exactly what you’re going to do.
Realistic
goals are goals that are reachable. If your goals are not realistic,
please do yourself a favor and don’t set them! The common mistake of
“too much, too soon” has sent many workout programs crashing
down in flames. The trick is to find a balance where your goals are
demanding enough to make the achievement rewarding, but not
unreachable to the point that you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Timed
goals have a specific target date for each goal. I will be able to
run five miles – by the end of October. When necessary, break
long-term goals into smaller short-term goals. I will be able to jog
a mile comfortably by the end of the month. I will be able to run
three miles by the end of September. I will be able to run five
miles by the end of October.
Why routines fail
The major reason most routines fail is surprisingly
simple – people give up too soon. That's not as silly as it may
sound. Generally speaking, it takes a
minimum of six to eight
weeks to establish any type of behavioral routine. It takes months
or years to build strong habits. These principles apply to everyone,
but even more so to people with ADHD. We tend to get bored more quickly,
frustrated more easily, and feel overwhelmed and discouraged too soon. Feeling
anxious about failing to achieve a goal leads to avoidance behavior,
which leads to
inconsistent effort, which leads to finally giving up.
Part of
being resilient is believing in your ability to persevere when times
get tough. It also means expecting setbacks, and being prepared to
get back on track to overcome them. Poor resilience is largely a matter of poor attitude. Henry Ford said it
perfectly almost a century ago: “whether you think that you can do
something, or you think that you can’t -- you’re right.”
Exercise is a lifestyle
component
The
only exercise program that has a chance of lasting is one that
becomes integrated into your lifestyle. It must become a part of who
you are and what you do. If you treat it as a bitter but necessary
medicine, it will be dead in the water within weeks. It must become
a natural, integral part of your lifestyle, not an addition or
addendum to it. Human nature is such that any voluntary behavior
that is considered aversive or unpleasant soon
becomes avoided and abandoned.
To make you workout program a part of your lifestyle, you
must embrace it as part of your identity. Make time for it. Provide
resources for it, not just in allocating time but also in terms of
finances (usually small) and energy. You will find the means if you
dedicate yourself to the goal. It has often been said that “necessity is
the mother of invention.” What is less often asked is, who is the
father? His name is priority. Combine necessity with
priority and watch the birth of something quite amazing:
results.
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