ADHD in the Gym — Hacking Your ADHD

Feb 3

Feb 3 ADHD in the Gym

Before we get going here, I just want to make sure you know that I'm not a doctor, and while this episode is a lot about your health, it is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice. Exercise can put a lot of strain on your system, so make sure that you are talking to your doctor before you start a new exercise routine. While exercise is generally great for everyone, I don't want anyone thinking that all they have to do is run a marathon, and all their worldly woes are going to be cured. Be smart and be safe.

All right then, let's really get started by talking about the benefits of exercise - which on its own is something essential to those of us with bodies, but also incredibly important for those of us with ADHD brains. Since I'm guessing that most of my listeners fit into both those categories, I figured we could talk about both benefits.

Before we dive in, I want to really get one point across. We've got this phrase - the mind/body connection, and that idea seems to imply that there is some sort of separation between the mind and body. But that's not really true. Your brain is just as much a part of your body as everything else housed in there. We don't have the body foot connection because we already know that what we do with our body affects our foot, and what we do with our foot affects the body. The same is true of our brains. What we put in our bodies and what we do with your body has a direct impact on how your brain functions. Our brains don't like it when we don't exercise because how we feel physically impacts how we feel mentally. This is an important point because it can be tough to differentiate what effects the body physically without also talking about what happens mentally.

So what do we actually get out of exercising?

One of the common answers is that it can help out your waistline - but not nearly as much as most people would like to think. So a quick aside here, if you really want to lose weight, first, you need to focus on your diet, and while diet can play a considerable role in ADHD management, that's really outside the scope of this episode. But let's just say you aren't going to outrun a bad diet in the long run. Yes, you might get some good results in the beginning, but eventually, those bad eating habits are always going to catch up with you. This isn't to say that if you are looking to lose weight you shouldn't exercise, just that there are more important things to tackle first.

Besides weight loss, exercise provides a ton of benefits for everyone - you'll build muscle, you'll increase your energy levels and you'll reduce your risk to chronic diseases by improving your cardiovascular fitness and insulin sensitivity. But wait, there's more! When you exercise, it releases hormones that will enhance your mood and it will also help you get better sleep at night.

While all that is great, what we really want to talk about is how exercise can help with our ADHD. To do so, I'm going to have to get a little scientific here - please, remember I am not a doctor.

Let's start by talking about neurotransmitters, which, very basically, are chemical messengers that transmit signals through the brain. There are a ton of different neurotransmitters, but right now, we're interested in dopamine and norepinephrine.

Dopamine is important for regulating emotion and plays a significant role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior.

Norepinephrine enhances the formation and retrieval of memory and also helps focus attention.

I don't know about you, but those sound like some sweet brain chemicals that are super important for ADHD brains. And to be clear, there are a lot more factors involved with our ADHD than just these two neurotransmitters.

Exercise can help with our ADHD by increasing both our dopamine and norepinephrine levels (1)(2). With regular exercise, we can help raise our baseline levels of both dopamine and norepinephrine - and since both these chemicals are so crucial for our brains, it becomes... well a no-brainer that we should be exercising more.

Ah, but that's really the trick here. We all already "know" that we should be exercising more. It would be great if all we needed was more information on how good for us exerise is, but it really isn't going to get us into the gym anymore often.

Well, once we do decide we're going to exercise more, we should know how much we actually need to do. Unfortunately, we don't have very good guidelines for exercise for brain health. But we do have overall guidelines on exercise that we can follow. Here in the US, we're recommended to get a 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week or some combination of the two.

If you break that down, that's 30 minutes 5 days a week or about 22 minutes 7 days a week. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Oh, except the part that we're all incredibly busy and it's really easy to put off and I'm tired and don't want to get on a treadmill for even 5 minutes.

Yeah, fitting in 20-30 minutes of exercise a day isn't the easiest proposal, especially if you are going from not exercising at all. Anytime we add something to our schedules, something else has to come off - even if it's just time that we'd typically be sitting on the couch. We spend all 24 hours every day doing something, so you can't just add something without giving something else up. We've got to keep this in mind as we work on forming our exercise habits because if we aren't actually carving out the time for exercising, it just isn't going to happen. I know I've tried to just sneak exercise in whenever I could find the time and inevitably, it never worked.

If you want to get serious about exercising, you are going to have to work on implementing the right strategies to make it stick. We talked about habits a few weeks ago in Episode 16: Tweaking Your Habits for Better Results we talked a lot about the formation of habits and how we don't want to rely on discipline to make us do things. This is especially true with exercise - while exercise has a ton of benefits and often can feel great at the time, it is really easy to skip because it does take a lot of work. No matter what kind of exercise you are doing, it is going to require physical effort, and that means relying on willpower to get it done is going to be a bad strategy.

At the same time here, I want to make it clear that the act of exercising often isn't actually the habit we're forming. It's too complex an action to be a habit. Instead, our habit is something like packing our gym bag the night before or driving straight to the gym after work. Our habits are the little things that we do that grind down the resistance to doing the big things we actually want to do. If we make it easier just to exercise than to not exercise, we're going to win that battle a lot more often.

Let's talk a bit more about ways that we can make exercise a regular habit. Many people find it easier to exercise in the morning and I like that boost in my neurotransmitters to start my day. Of course, exercising in the morning isn't going to work for everyone - maybe it'll be easier to get in during your lunch hour or right after you get out of work. We just want to make exercising the most natural option for us. If you know you aren't going to be able to roll out of bed and go on a run, then don't try and make that your routine. What it's important is finding what works for you.

So what does it mean to have habits that make exercising easier? Well, let's say you drive to the gym after work and you don't have your gym bag - are you still going to work out? Maybe, maybe not. Okay, so you'll want to make a habit of taking your gym bag with you when we leave for work, but if you see you haven't packed your gym bag, are you going to stop to pack it when you're heading out the door? That means you have to add packing your gym bag somewhere in our routine. This might be an easy thing to do right at the end of your evening routine when you lay out your clothes for the next day, or maybe in the morning while you're getting dressed. And then if you want to make that easier, you're going to want the habit of putting your gym bag in your closet when you get home. All of these are small habits, but when you put them together, they make that next step of actually working out that much easier.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I've been trying to get some more exercise myself. In December, I hurt my back and haven't been able to be that active recently. Now late in January, my back is finally at a point where I can do more than just a little bit of walking every day, but fitting a workout into my schedule isn't that easy. I've been tempted to try waking up earlier and getting in a workout before my kids get up, but I've got a pretty good rhythm with my sleep right now and I don't want to mess that up. This means I've got to get creative with when I work out. What I've come up with is that I can get in a quick workout right after my wife takes the kids to school and before I head into work. Sure it means I'll be starting my day a little bit later, but I think I'm going to b able make up for it with the boost I get in my mental performance.

One of the things that can be hardest when you want to get started with exercise is choosing what you want to do. My go-to answer when someone asks me what the best work out is is whatever you're actually going to do. It doesn't matter how amazing a workout is if you never do it, what matters is that you get it done.

I've been mainly talking about traditional workouts, but there are actually a ton of options for exercising. We don't have to stick to the conventional ideas of jumping on a treadmill or an elliptical. Those can be great if that's what will get you into the gym. But I know that I'd never be able to stick with an exercise routine if I was only doing that kind of cardio. If we really want to make sure that we're keeping our exercise consistent, we want to keep it interesting.

One of my favorite ways to build a sweat is through sports. Sports are great because they not only push you physically, but they are also going to engage you mentally. You actually have to think about what you're doing. Plus, they tend to be a lot of fun. In March, I'm planning on working to join a master ultimate frisbee team - which, yes, does mean I'm getting old, and it's another reason I'm trying to build up my exercise routine now. Another benefit of sports that's often overlooked is the social aspect - you get to go out be with people. It can be hard to make sure you're getting a healthy amount of human interaction in your life, and sports can be a great way to make some new friends.

Exercise doesn't have to be a slog. Find something that you enjoy doing - because it's about being active rather than just training for something. You got a ton of options, here are a few quick ideas:

Hiking
Tennis
Yoga
Pickleball
Basketball
Rockclimbing
Mountain Biking
Swimming

Even something like gardening gets you out and active. And again, that's what it's all about, raising your heart rate and creating those good brain chemicals. It's easy to get to the end of your day and realize that the farthest you've walked is from your couch to the refrigerator, but we want to be moving our bodies more than that.

We want to be moving our bodies pretty much every day if we can. So while I'm going to be joining that frisbee team, I'm not going to be playing frisbee every day of the week because we are only going to be practicing once a week (and also because that would break my body). I'm going to have to mix things up if I want to hit my exercise goals daily. So yeah, there might be days that I end up just doing some stuff on the treadmill and catching up on Netflix or taking a walk around my neighborhood. It doesn't always have to be the most intense exercise, and it actually shouldn't be because it's also essential to get your recovery days in too.

Also, on that note, if you are just getting started into exercise, make sure that you are easing yourself into your program. ADHD can make it so easy for us just to want to go all-in and do all the things, but if you're going to keep up your exercise for more than just a week or two, you are going to want to start slow. Sure the recommendations are 20-30 minutes a day, but you don't need to start there. In the beginning, work on the habit of getting to the gym or putting on your running shoes. Those are the things that are going to be the most important for keeping up your exercise in the long run.

Before we finish up today, I just want to give everyone a few other quick ideas for how to make getting your exercise in more of a priority.

One great method is through something called habit-bundling. The idea here would be that you form your habit through some reward system that you get while exercise. I mentioned jumping on the treadmill and watching Netflix earlier, that would be a form of habit bundling - but only if I only watched Netflix while I was on the treadmill. The system falls apart if you unbundle them. So a great option might be to have a particular show you watch at the gym - or if you like to read, maybe you could rent a gym locker and keep the book your reading at the gym. For about a year I did all my workouts in my garage while watching the show Dragonball Z, sure it's kind of trashy, but it was definitely fun to pretending I was training to go super saiyan.

And we went over a little earlier about how making it fun is going to give you more of an incentive to do it. As I said I'm a big fan of sports, but another option is to take an exercise class - this can be tricky for us sometimes because I've definitely put money down on something with the idea that because I spent money on it, I was more likely to get my butt to the class. Sometimes that works, and sometimes I just feel guilty about not only wasting money but also not going to the class - which you know makes me feel worse and even more like not going.

What I've found that works a lot better is using an accountability system - this is why classes can be great because when you are doing it with other people, that can create accountability. But if I don't know anyone in the class, it's pretty easy for me to hide in my introvert shell and then never show up again. Looking at you, Crossfit gym, I only went to twice.

Episode 9: Compassionate Ass-Kicking for the Win was all about how you can create accountability in your life, and I find that I do really well with accountability for exercise. If I tell someone that I'm going to be at the gym at a particular time, then I'm definitely going to be there - sure, it's going to take a few reminders to make sure I get out the door on time, but I really don't like letting people down - hmmm, that might say something about how people have reacted to my ADHD in the past and something about overcompensating...

Anyways, exercising is important, and you don't have to do it alone. Pretty much everyone I know could use getting a little bit more exercise in their life, and they could probably use some help too. If you can't meet in person, maybe you could send a selfie to your buddy every time you're at the gym.

Another great form of accountability can come from tracking your workouts - you've got a ton of options on how to do that with your digital devices. But it doesn't have to be fancy, pen and paper are a great way to track things as well. And a great thing about tracking your workouts is it's a great way to help create some accountability. You could form a group online that shares their workout data and supports each other along the way. Or you could simply reward yourself for hitting your workout goals - just make sure your rewards are helping you with your goals and not pushing you away, maybe a massage instead of an ice cream sundae.

Today's Top Tips

Exercise is great for our ADHD brains by increasing our levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine.
You want to try to get in 20-30 minutes of exercise a day, but if you're just starting out make sure that you're easing into it to avoid burning out.
Find a type of exercise that you find fun and switch it up sometimes. A great way to do this is through sports and classes.
Build in some accountability for your exercise routines to make sure that you keep them going.