Why Building a Routine Takes So Bloody Long When You Have ADHD

You don’t build ten habits. You build one chain.

There is a particular kind of routine advice that sounds completely reasonable until you actually try to follow it.

Starting tomorrow, wake up earlier. Drink water. Make your bed. Brush your teeth. Do your skincare. Eat breakfast. Take your vitamins. Stretch. Journal. Plan your day. Don’t check your phone.

Cool.

So all I have to do is wake up tomorrow and spontaneously become a person who does ten things she wasn’t doing yesterday.

Easy.

Except that has never been how routines work for me.

As someone with ADHD, I’ve realised that I can’t really build a routine by simply deciding to have one. I have to construct it, one piece at a time.

And that takes so much longer than all the shiny morning-routine content makes it look.

You’re Not Adding Ten Habits. You’re Building One Chain.

If I introduce ten new things tomorrow, none of them are actually routine yet.

They’re ten individual things I have to remember.

I have to remember to brush my teeth.

Then remember that I wanted to wash my face.

Then remember what comes after washing my face.

Then notice that I’ve somehow wandered back into the bedroom, picked up my phone and spent twelve minutes doing something completely unrelated.

A ten-step routine sounds simple when it’s written as a checklist.

In reality, it’s ten opportunities for my brain to wander off.

What works much better for me is starting with one thing.

Just one.

Maybe it’s brushing my teeth when I get up.

That’s the routine.

Nothing exciting. No journal. No lemon water. No 6am Pilates.

Get up. Brush teeth.

I do that until getting out of bed and brushing my teeth start to feel connected.

Then I add something.

Get up.

Brush teeth.

Wash face.

And I keep doing that until those aren’t two separate jobs I have to consciously remember anymore. They start becoming a sequence.

Then I can add another link.

Get up.

Brush teeth.

Wash face.

Get dressed.

Eventually, one action starts nudging me towards the next without quite as much effort.

That is when the routine starts feeling like a routine.

This Is Why Building One Takes So Bloody Long

This is the bit that I think gets missed when we talk about consistency.

You usually only see somebody else’s finished routine.

You see:

Wake up.
Make bed.
Shower.
Skincare.
Breakfast.
Medication.
Pack bag.
Leave.

What you don’t see is how long it took to get there.

So you copy the finished version.

Monday goes surprisingly well.

Tuesday isn’t terrible.

Wednesday gets questionable.

By Friday you’re drinking coffee in bed, scrolling your phone and wondering why apparently everybody else can maintain basic habits except you.

I’ve done that cycle more times than I can count.

And every time, I’d decide that I just needed to try harder next Monday.

The problem wasn’t necessarily the routine.

The problem was trying to install the finished version instead of building it.

Build the Chain Before You Lengthen It

This is probably the most useful routine rule I’ve found:

Build the chain before you lengthen it.

If the first two steps still feel like completely separate things you have to remind yourself to do, adding another six probably isn’t going to make them easier.

Leave it alone for a bit.

Let it become boring.

Let your brain start expecting the next thing.

Then add another link.

That might mean building a five-step morning routine takes weeks.

Maybe months.

Which is deeply annoying when you’ve just decided that this is the week you’re finally going to get your entire life together.

But there is a pretty obvious winner between:

A five-step routine that took two months to build and you’re still doing six months later.

and

A fifteen-step routine you designed on Sunday night and abandoned by Thursday.

Slow doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

Start With Something That Already Happens

You don’t necessarily have to create the first link from scratch.

There are things you already do.

You get out of bed.

You make coffee.

You go to the toilet.

You arrive home from work.

You eat dinner.

You get into bed.

These are useful because they’re already happening without needing another reminder.

So instead of:

‘I need to remember to do this every morning.’

Try:

‘After I do this thing I already do, I do this.’

Coffee → vitamins.

Brush teeth → wash face.

Arrive home → put keys in the same place.

Dinner plate goes into kitchen → quick kitchen reset.

Get into bed → plug phone in.

Once the new behaviour starts feeling connected to the existing one, it can become the anchor for whatever you add next.

That’s how the chain grows.

Don’t Turn One Successful Habit Into Another Massive Project

This is where I sabotage myself constantly.

You finally manage to make one thing consistent and immediately think:

Great.

Now I’ll start exercising every morning, drinking two litres of water, cooking from scratch, doing a twelve-step skincare routine and sorting out my finances.

Absolutely not.

Leave the poor habit alone.

If brushing your teeth every morning has previously been inconsistent and now you’re doing it without really thinking about it, that isn’t the boring preparation before your real routine begins.

That is the routine working.

You don’t have to upgrade it immediately.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is just let the chain settle.

Make the Next Step Easier to Do

This is also where I think routine-building starts becoming less about willpower and more about your environment.

If the next thing in your routine involves walking into another room, finding something, opening three cupboards and assembling equipment, that’s a lot of opportunities to disappear.

So make it stupidly easy.

If you want to drink more water while you’re working, putting a water carafe on the desk makes more sense than expecting yourself to repeatedly remember that water exists in the kitchen.

If you want to do skincare after brushing your teeth, put the skincare where you’re actually going to use it.

If you’re forever forgetting something when you leave the house, put it beside the thing you never leave without.

The goal isn’t to prove that you’re disciplined enough to overcome an inconvenient system.

The goal is to make the system less inconvenient.

Sometimes the Chain Breaks

This might be the most irritating part.

You can do something consistently for weeks and then suddenly stop.

A trip away.

A change in work hours.

A chaotic weekend.

Being ill.

One genuinely terrible week.

Suddenly something that previously felt almost automatic has vanished.

And because your routine is a chain, losing one cue can sometimes knock out half the things attached to it.

Then comes the extremely helpful internal monologue:

‘I WAS LITERALLY DOING THIS TWO WEEKS AGO. WHY CAN’T I JUST DO IT?’

When this happens, I’ve found trying to restart the entire routine at once just recreates the original problem.

Go back to the first link.

Do that.

Let it become reliable again.

Then reconnect the next one.

You’re not necessarily starting from scratch. You already know what the chain is supposed to look like.

You’re just putting it back together.

Your Routine Does Not Need to Be Impressive

I think this is the part I needed to understand most.

Nobody is grading how quickly you built your morning routine.

There isn’t a prize for introducing eight new habits before breakfast.

A routine only really needs to do one thing:

make your life slightly easier once it exists.

If getting there takes longer because you need to build one step, stabilise it and then add another, it takes longer.

That’s fine.

So if you’re currently staring at a list of twelve things you’re apparently going to start doing tomorrow, maybe don’t.

Pick one.

Attach it to something that’s already happening.

Make it as easy as possible.

Repeat it until it starts feeling like part of the chain.

Then add another.

Don’t build ten habits. Build one chain.

It’s slower.

It’s considerably less exciting.

It doesn’t make for a dramatic ‘new me’ Monday morning.

But it might actually still exist by Friday.

And that feels a lot more useful.