SMART goals, streaks, and “just do it” discipline are everywhere. Where does that advice break down for a neurodivergent person?
So, so many places, and it's highly dependent on each person. First of all, autonomy is essential for a neurodivergent person when it comes to setting health goals and doing the behaviors that get us there. When "just do it" comes in, it's perceived as a demand. Many neurodivergent people are demand avoidant, which can make "just do it" something our minds rebel against. If we feel like we're being made to do something—even if it's something we want to do—we can be more prone to not do it because it's not our own choice.
On the other side of things, streaks are a slippery slope for neurodivergent people who tend toward all-or-nothing thinking. A streak can give us a high, making us feel like we're doing it "right." If something happens that makes us go off plan even for a day, however, that broken streak can activate our all-or-nothing thinking by making it all look like a failure. It's hard for us to see all the achievements we've had when there's even one perceived failure mucking it up. That's why I don't encourage most people to track streaks.
For SMART goals, these can work for some of us while not working for others. For many of us, SMART goals can offer too much structure, which feels good at first but can make our cognitive rigidity tricky. Our good friend, all-or-nothing thinking, can come in here too and make a missed day or an incomplete workout an entire failed plan.
Most of us require flexible structure instead. Scaffolding is an approach that can be helpful for this: putting a maximum and minimum limit on, say, the amount of exercise you'll do so you don't burn yourself out while making sure to get more than nothing in.
Most health frameworks treat discipline as the engine. What are they assuming about attention, motivation, and executive function that doesn’t hold for a neurodivergent brain?
Discipline depends on demands to work, which unfortunately doesn't work for neurodivergent brains. Many of us are demand avoidant even if we don't have full-blown PDA—Pathological Demand Avoidance, which has also been reframed by the community as Persistent Drive for Autonomy—and discipline is a constant demand to "STICK TO THE PLAN!!!"
Like you say here too, Chris: attention is a big factor that makes neurodivergent people interact differently with discipline. Many of us can hyperfocus into something we get interested in, which can be a certain type of movement, eating, or meditating. But what happens when we're all of a sudden over it? Discipline says, "Keep doing that thing that now bores you to tears," while my neurodivergent approach says, "Let's lean into something new." Intrinsic motivation is usually—not always—bred from finding something you enjoy doing. Neurodivergent people have the hardest time doing things they don't like—it can feel physically and emotionally painful!
Executive function affects one's entire relationship with health. Not only because of our individual executive function differences, but because of how it fluctuates over the course of a month or even a week. TMI: I'm in perimenopause, and my executive function bottomed out this past year. I could barely do anything beyond the bare minimum before I got on hormone replacement therapy.
The way traditional health frameworks work is reliant on a stable, regulated nervous system and cognitive state. That isn't us, no matter where your hormones are. Our cognitive and energetic states are not static and never will be. When we learn how to work with that fluidity, true health and wellness without the forcing and turmoil becomes available to us.
How does perfectionism shape someone’s relationship with their own health? What does it look like from the outside versus what’s happening underneath?
Ah, perfectionism. So many of us fall into this category, and it's thanks again to that all-or-nothing thinking—often an extreme version of it. People with OCD and OCPD can be especially prone to this. For many of us, doing it "good enough" is, in fact, not enough. We must be the best. We must do the most. Otherwise, it's as bad as not doing any of it.
When we set up these massive expectations that are completely unsustainable for us without a huge sacrifice of energy, time, and/or mental health, we set ourselves up for failure. Perfectionists are also often plagued with cognitive rigidity, which from the outside looks like determination, discipline, and persistence. From the inside, it looks like terror of failing, panic, anxiety, and misplaced value on appearances and/or achievements.
This can make people with these traits more prone to eating disorders or disordered eating. These are most often the people who suffer in silence too, because appearing like they have it all together is part of the perfectionism. Check in with your always-OK friends!
In Amy's words
“Health is easier when we’re not beating ourselves up for who we are.”
How can someone spot all-or-nothing thinking in themselves while it’s happening?
Oof, this would be a few pages long! Let's focus on all-or-nothing thinking for this one.
A few ways to spot it would be to notice if you have a history of "falling off the wagon" after messing up a streak, or if you've been REALLY good at dieting until you all of a sudden went the complete other direction. You're either completely on track or completely off it. You have a hard time noticing your wins, but a very easy time noticing where you "fall short."
You can check in with your expectations of yourself and see if they're higher than your expectations for other people. All of these—and many, many more—could be helpful to start being curious about.
You treat “failure” as data rather than a reason to quit. What would someone actually do with a week that fell apart?
When we reframe the actual goal away from "doing it right" to "gathering data to learn more about what's right for ME," we unlock a more curious, experimental, fail-friendly journey toward wellness. That's way more conducive to long-term consistency than our default all-or-nothing way of looking at goals through an achievement-versus-failure lens.
Also, I'm a data nerd. I know many of us are in this community. Having the opportunity to gather data through experimenting with different health behaviors can make it way more fun to try things. We focus on what we gain—data—rather than what we didn't do or failed at.
Your worksheet includes tools for separating self-worth from achievement. Why does that separation have to come first?
If we don't put in the time to process that we are people who will mess up from time to time, and that that is normal, expected, AND REQUIRED as a human being, we will never be truly at peace in our health and wellness journey.
Health is easier when we're not beating ourselves up for who we are.
Can you walk us through your framework for building a health habit that works with a neurodivergent brain instead of against it?
The first step of the process is to learn about your relationship with health. What's important about health for you? What do you believe health means for you?
After we've learned about your values and beliefs, we look at how your particular type of neurodivergence manifests. What are your diagnoses and/or realizations? How do they manifest for you? How do they make getting healthy difficult?
From there, we design together, one step at a time. I cannot emphasize that part enough! Many neurodivergent people get overwhelmed easily and tend to need time away from an area of focus if they do. This can look like going all in on trying to work out five days a week, only to crash and burn and want nothing to do with exercise for the next six months. Going slowly and sustainably, without pushing and forcing, is the name of the game here.
What does a sustainable health practice look like when nobody is watching—and how is it different from one that merely looks impressive?
A sustainable health practice for a neurodivergent person should feel as close to ease as possible. It should be autonomous, giving the person full agency—which often requires a detachment from the "rules" we were taught about getting healthy.
It should also be highly individualized to meet their fluctuating energy levels, preferences, and executive function. It should take nervous system regulation into account. From the outside, this might look different from the "typical"—see what I did there?—health routine. What matters when it comes down to it is that it's doable AND that the desire is there to do it.
