Morning + Evening Routine ADHD for Women Edition
This one I think is going to be one of those work in progress, I’ll edit when I need to type blogs.
As a human who bleeds and an ADHDer, I have always struggled with having a consistent morning and evening routine. While my body craves it, my dopamine deficient brain gets bored, loses track, or simply forgets to make it happen.
So I’ve been on a mission to discover the secret for humans like me.
And I think we’re on to something, humor me here…
For context we have to go back to basics:
As a human who bleeds, I go through 4 inner phases:
Menstrual 🌹: Days 1-7
Follicular 📝: Days 8-14
Ovulation 💃🏽 : Days 15-22
Lutheal 🧠: Days 23-28
Depending on what school of thought you subscribe to, days 1 could be during ovulation or menstrual phase. For sake of simplicity, we’ll keep day 1 when you first bleed.
To make things fun and so you don’t have to remember the scientific phases, we’re going to refer to the inner phases as inner seasons like Mother Earth.
Menstrual 🌹: Winter ❄️
Follicular 📝: Spring 🌼
Ovulation : Summer 🌞
Lutheal 🧠: Autumn 🍂
Our bodies are so cool and Mama Earth has always shown us how to exist, she slows down, takes breaks, and also goes fast and furious during summer time. We exist the same way, that’s how biologically we’re meant to exist.
Now that we know about the 4 inner seasons we go through every 22-30ish days or so, we can now go back to building a morning/evening routine.
Well, I guess we can talk a bit about ADHD brains. To simplify it, our brains crave dopamine because we simply don’t have as much.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in charge of various things, including motivation, feeling good, and satisfaction. This is why it’s a bit more challenging to exist in the world because we’re constantly looking to create experiences that feel good.
Ahora si, back to the morning + evening routine.
Considering both aspects: Inner Seasons and Dopamine deficiency, we have to consider this when building our desired am/pm practices.
Essentially, we have to have four types of routines
What? Well, let me explain…
You want to build your routine during Winter, when you’re the most connected to your inner voice, you feel powerful but not too excited. Winter is a beautiful time to ponder and connect to ourselves to uncover what we truly want.
This is the time when you want to tune into what works for you to do every morning and every evening.
Then you want to adjust for the other seasons
And frankly the first time around you are going to have to test it out.
The routine you write out in Winter is essentially the routine you’re going to follow in Summer. Because your Inner Summer is when you feel THE MOST, the most sexy, the most confident, the most motivated, the most focused. We’re allowing the wisdom of our Inner Winter to guide our ideal Inner Summer, you follow?
Let’s say that you wrote your routines in winter as I’ve been saying, well, you can now start testing it and decide what is your Winter from there, what are you going to skip when you don’t feel the best? What is going to be your Spring routine? This is when you feel the most social and talkative, do you expand your journal time? And what about Autumn? When you have the least energy and feel the most nesting. This is perhaps where you can adjust your end of day to an hour earlier or give yourself more sleep time.
We want to make sure we find our anchors.
Your anchors are the bare minimum items you want to make sure you always do no matter what inner season you’re on. Having anchors lets your body feel like you’re still making things happen regardless of how many items you are completing. Your anchors keep you grounded.
So far this is what my routines looked like when I brainstormed them during winter:
This is literally how I brain dumped it when I thought about this. I’ve been testing it out for the different seasons and I’ll update the blog with more results over time.
Stay tuned for the updates and if you’re here, maybe leave a comment with thoughts and questions!
Update - Second week of planning
This time I am in my inner Spring and I continued the planning as I started it in Winter.
This time I made an analog tracker on my planner and it’s part of my daily routine, so far it’s been fun to have an anchor to return to even when my brain is confused as to where to start.
Also, I realized that based on my energy levels and hormones, I need to have different activities to complete and use them as a guide to plan my week. So I came up with a rough monthly planner that outlines the recommended activities based on season. This is a guide and so far it’s helped my brain to get started
I printed little guides and I’ll be testing them each month
I think the process so far is more cumbersome than it needs to be, however, it’s helping me narrow down the routine and build the habit of tracking and staying focused. I also have to remind myself that a neurodiverse brain like mine sometimes requires a bit more nudges and support to get things done, and that’s okay.
Update third and last week of the month
Well, so far the many templates have been working. I created a monthly tracker on my planner and while I don’t love it, I have been somewhat diligent at completing it. The thing is that I also have a tracker on my journal, so I might get to the too many trackers place. However, seeing progress definitely has kept me motivated
Currently I’m in autumn and at the verge of winter and I’m finding myself losing track of my routines because I simply don’t want to. Having the trackers also lets me take note and give myself permission to do the minimum activities based on my inner season.
So far I’m liking this process and I shall continue. Drop a comment if you’d like me to continue to document, I’m curious about three + month data 🤷🏽♀️
Stay shining!
~ Pam
