How to get (and stay) motivated to exercise with adhd
If there’s one thing that us ADHDers can struggle with (I mean, there’s a lot more than one thing) it’s motivation.
Motivation to clean our house, motivation to study for exams, motivation to just get out of bed — the days where these things seem impossible happen far more than we’d like.
The reason for this, as always, is down to our friend and foe, Mr. Dopamine.
You see, motivation is one of the primary pathways that is pretty much under full control of this chemical rascal.
An incredibly comprehensive study published in Molecular Psychiatry found that the dysregulation of the dopamine pathways in people with ADHD led to a significant drop in their motivation compared with a control group.
So when it comes to getting and staying motivated to do exercise, are we fighting a losing battle?
Well, not quite.
Yes, it’s going to be harder for us than the average person (what’s new, eh?) but with a few strategies and mentality shifts, getting yourself into a good space in terms of fitness and health can be 100% achievable.
Here are just a few things you can do:
1/ Focus on short-term reward
Us ADHDers know this one intuitively.
We want things NOW.
In fact, because of the way our brain works, our perception of time really only gives us two possible time periods: ‘Now’ and ‘Not Now’.
And so that means that any goal or objective that relies on long-term, delayed gratification or reward, is immediately doomed to fail.
On the other hand, if we can find a way to build in short-term reward boosts along our journey towards a longer-term goal, we’re far more likely to stick with it.
And this is borne out in the scientific literature too.
According to a 2013 paper in the ‘Postgraduate Medicine’ journal, children with ADHD are far more motivated by smaller, short-term rewards than they are by larger, long-term rewards.
So when it comes to sticking to an exercise regime, the suggestion is clear: finding a way to enjoy the exercise itself, or at the very least, the feelings/results immediately after exercising, is going to be far more motivational than trying to force yourself through an activity you hate on the promise of some far-flung, future result.
Of course, because ADHD is a condition of opposites and contradictions, NOT having a long-term goal is ALSO a bad idea:
2/ Constantly reinforce a long-term goal
From that same study on ADHD motivation, another key driver was uncovered: namely, that if you want to improve individual task performance for people with ADHD, a great way to do this is to continually remind them of the longer-term goal.
In terms of exercise, then, this suggests that having a long-term goal in mind, and either finding a way to remind yourself, or having someone else frequently remind you of it (e.g. a partner or trainer) will actually improve the effectiveness of that individual session of exercise.
3/ Aim for 20 mins of moderate exercise
One of the biggest barriers to starting or maintaining an exercise plan that I hear from clients, and that I’ve experienced myself, comes down to the feeling of overwhelm that can be experienced at the prospect of having to exercise for long periods, and often.
I know, myself, that when I wake up in the morning, if I think ‘urgh, I’ve got to go to the gym and do an hour workout’ — the chances of me doing it immediately drop by about 75%.
The good news is, you don’t have to do anywhere near that much exercise to feel its benefits.
Just 20–30 mins of moderate to intense exercise (ideally a mix of cardio and strength training), three times a week, is enough to give you most of the long-term health benefits that exercise can bring, including a 40% reduction in likelihood of premature death, 46% reduction in likelihood of getting heart disease, and 28% reduction in risk of getting cancer.
But even better news: according to a study in the journal of ‘Medicine and Science in sports and exercise , specifically looking at individuals with ADHD— just 20 minutes of moderate exercise is also plenty enough to INCREASE your overall motivation levels, including motivation for cognitive tasks.
Not only that, but that amount of exercise alone will increase energy, reduce feelings of confusion/brain fog, fatigue and even depression.
That’s a huge bang for your buck on 20 minutes' worth of activity.
But wait, I’ve got EVEN BETTER NEWS:
Just 5 minutes — yes, 5 minutes — of intense exercise, can improve your attention levels by as much as 30%!
30% more attention.
We’re talking a double espresso, or maybe even ADHD medication, levels of improvement there.
Just by doing something intensely active for 5 minutes.
So depending on what your goal is, 20 minutes of moderately intense, or 5 minutes of intense exercise, could be all you need to do.
Substituting my thought of ‘I need to do an hour in the gym’ with ‘Let’s just do 20 minutes in the gym’ each morning has massively improved my chances of actually getting there.
And you’ve probably spotted the hack here.
If motivation levels increase dramatically after 20 minutes of exercise, and I’m already in the gym, chances are, I’m carrying on that workout for longer.
And on the days it doesn’t work, I use the 5-minute intense exercise fallback.
Even if that’s all I do that day, I know I’m doing something that, at the very least, will improve my ADHD symptoms.
4/ Introduce competition
I’ve always been quite competitive.
To a fault, really.
I admit I can be quite a sore loser.
I once flipped over the monopoly board during a family game when I lost.
Another time, when I was 8-balled in a pool game, I snapped my cue in half.
I’m not proud of either of those moments.
But whether I like it or not, competition has always been a strong motivating factor for me.
And it seems I’m not the only one.
In a study outlined in the Journal of Child psychology and psychiatry, when a group of 22 boys with ADHD were told that they were competing with their peers on a specific task, their accuracy on said task raised to the levels of a control group of boys without ADHD.
So not only does it appear that competition improves the motivation to do better in people with ADHD, it can actually make you do better.
These results have important implications for starting and maintaining an exercise habit.
If competition motivates, then it can be a great way to get started on the path to exercising.
But if it also improves actual performance, then it will also help you stay on that path (remember the benefits of short term rewards?).
5/ Introduce Novelty
By its nature, having ADHD means getting bored of things quite quickly.
We can move from one thing to another at the speed of thought.
As it turns out, this seeking of novelty is actually a way for our dopamine irregulated brains to automatically control some of our ADHD symptoms.
Unfortunately, maintaining an exercise routine can be in some ways, the exact opposite of novelty.
By week three or four of an exercise routine, the interest and novelty has definitely started to wear off.
That’s why it’s often around this time that you’ll find people with ADHD will give up — it’s literally gone from being something that actually helps our ADHD symptoms, to being something that has no effect on it whatsoever.
Even for neurotypical people, this ‘trough’ can be tough to overcome.
But for people with ADHD, it’s that much harder, because the one thing that is required to get past this point is — yep, you guessed it — dopamine.
In the same way that it’s hard for us to see past the ‘now’, to the longer term reward, doing something that is no longer novel or interesting requires a boost of dopamine that effectively heightens the anticipation of the result.
In other words, you’ll only do something boring if you can see that the thing after it is worth having.
But because we struggle to see beyond the boring thing — we only see the ‘now’ — we struggle to see that the thing after is worth it.
So how can we mitigate this?
Find ways to mix up the routine.
As soon as something is becoming boring, or ideally earlier, we need to introduce novelty back in.
That might be by completely changing the type of exercises we do.
Or it might be by adding in an extra level of challenge — when we can easily run a 5k in 30mins, we aim to run a 5k in 20mins.
It might be by changing location — doing the same workout we do in the gym outside (weather and equipment permitting) for example.
Or maybe bringing along a friend or joining a team or a club.
There are loads of ways to introduce novelty.
The key is to have a bank of options on hand to add in when needed.
Final thoughts
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to increase motivation for people with ADHD when it comes to exercise (I can see a part two in the works!).
But hopefully it’s given you some ideas as a starting point that might help you on your fitness journey.
Of course, if you need a bit more novelty, or goal-reinforcement, or short-term reward, you could always look at getting yourself a trainer, like yours truly!
Feel free to book in a call with me here to discuss your fitness goals and see how i can help you get and stay motivated to exercise.
