Breaking the Boredom Barrier: Integrating Exercise into Your ADHD Life
Three strategies to work with your brain, rather than against it.
I hate exercise. Always have, especially things that were repetitive. Run laps on a track? Hated it — but I tried cross country, and ended up on the varsity team. I found calisthenics absolutely mind numbing — but put me in a dance class, and I would practice until I was a sweaty mess on the floor. I remember learning that rowing was good for me, but also that I absolutely couldn’t stand to do it for long (this was before audiobooks or podcasts were readily available). However, when I discovered the little animated “out-row the shark or you’ll get eaten” game on the screen, suddenly it became easy.
You can already guess the reason for all these things — I have ADHD, and my brain has a hard time finding a reason to do anything that I’m not interested in. Sure, I know that exercise will make me live longer, be smarter, love better, and sleep soundly — but those are all abstractions that don’t appeal to me when faced with the “WORKOUT” time block on my calendar.
That being said: I’ve managed. And I’d like to share three creative strategies that have been effective for me to make exercise a daily — well, almost — habit in spite of my ADHD making me want to do anything else.
Note: I am not a medical professional or exercise instructor, and these are all based on my own specific experience and education; before starting any new exercise please consider your own circumstances — perhaps even checking with smarter people than me (like doctors and trainers!) before beginning.
Strategy 1: Make Exercise a Purposeful Activity
We like challenges — well, at least some of the time. One of the common traits of late-diagnosed recovering hustle-culture people like me is that it is hard not to do things that don’t seem to have a practical purpose.
Lift this weight? But why? Where should I put it? Wait, just back down again? Well, ok…what? Lift it up again? Seriously, dude, let’s just leave it where it is. I’ve got articles to write…
Abstract ideas like “it’s good for you” or even “you might set a new PR” just don’t work. However, if you give your exercise a job, it suddenly doesn’t feel like repetition — instead it’s that magical ego-treat, productivity.
For example, early last year I realized that I could pretty much take care of 90% of my commuting needs with a bike (since Madison, WI has amazingly good bike trails). My girlfriend offered the use of her car for the other 10%, and when I converted the bike to an e-bike it meant that I could even arrive at appointments and meetings without being sweaty.
Suddenly I wasn’t exercising — I was going places I needed to be. And exercise was just a by-product! It worked amazingly well — until winter came, of course, and it’s not quite as practical.
Them’s the breaks when you live in the wild north…but I still use the strategy in other ways. When I go into my office, which is on the third floor, I pretend the elevator doesn’t exist — and grumble up the stairs. I’ve also taken to walking my dog more instead of just letting him out to the back yard, in spite of the snow (much to his delight).
That’s not exercise — that’s me being a good Dog Dad, or getting up to the meeting with my boss.
We all know multitasking is a myth, but this is multi-purposing — and it means that you not only get the benefits of the exercise but you are also getting closer to your goals.
Strategy 2: “Chain” Things You Enjoy to the Workout
I think it was James Clear in Atomic Habits who first introduced me to this idea. Decades before I ever suspected my own ADHD I’d wanted to start doing morning pages (a la Artists Way) but really had trouble getting myself to do it in the mornings.
Then I decided: I only get coffee if I’m journaling. Just like that, it was working (and yes, it was quite literally life changing, so if you’re not journaling, you should look into it).
There are some exercises that just don’t feel like they have any higher purpose — such as physical therapy.
I have bad knees, thanks to weirdly-connected feet, time in the Marine infantry, and a dance degree. There is, however, a set of PT exercises I can do three times a week that, if I keep them consistent, give me pretty good mobility — to the point where I can even do the occasional contact improv dance jam or carry my newest grandson upstairs to bed.
Notice the consistent part, though. If I skip a day, or worse, a week, my knees go back to crap. You’d think that being able to dance or carry a sleepy Tavi without pain would be enough to motivate me — but when I’m in the now of the exercise those are both not now and so, at best, are about as real as Australia to me.
Sure, I believe in their existence. But I don’t have any real visceral knowledge of it, and doing another three minutes of fascia-busting foam-rolling feels like torture (as any good physical therapy should, I understand).
But I realized that Mr. Clear might be a key to that. And as much as I love being a Trekkie, I have the shame of never having actually seen all of the TNG-era series.
Turns out, Paramount + is cheaper than a health club. I decided I would treat myself to the entire oevre of that era of Trek, in the 15-minute increments it took me to do the exercises.
I do them, but I’m not thinking about how much I want to be doing something else — I’m enveloped in the drama of Troi and Data and Picard.
The only hard part is forcing myself to turn it off when the exercises are done — but there’s a side benefit to that as well.
It’s automatic breadcrumbs. By cutting off a storyline mid-scene, I give myself motivation — even, believe it or not, anticipation — to come back to it the next day.
Someday I’ll run out of episodes of TNG, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine, at which point I may brave Enterprise (which I hear gets good in season 4). But for now, my “Knee Trek” sessions manage to bypass the ADHD paralysis and keep the squirrels at bay.
Strategy 3: Find Something You Like to Do
There are a lot of ways to exercise.
I was a little disingenuous with my first sentence. I don’t hate all exercise.
Just most of it. And I can’t always say why. I find most yoga workouts torturously boring (sorry, Natasha) but for some reason yin yoga — which would seem to be the most slow and boring — I enjoy. I also enjoy pilates, for some reason, but I never would have known it without trying it, because on paper it’s all the things I dislike: repetitive movements, with no music, no purpose.
I’ve found that I don’t like walking and running any more for the sake of it, even with a podcast or book — but if I put a “Zombies, Run!” episode in my headphones, suddenly it’s part of an episodic story and I get into it. And like pilates, free weight workouts (which are arguably one of the best things for people my age with or without ADHD) should be absolutely anathema to me — and they used to be.
Then I read the essay Iron and the Soul by Henry Rollins. It’s a free link, feel free to read it, but when I read it something resonated — and I think it might have been my undiagnosed ADHD, recognizing truths such as “That which you work against will always work against you.”
Swimming. Dance. High Intensity Interval Training. Kettlebells (a different feeling than free weights, but if you shout “whee!” with every swing I’ve found them quite enjoyable). Angry yoga. Kayaking. Frisbee golf. Frikkin’ pickle ball, even.
If you’re an American, you could try a form of exercise every week for a year, I suspect, and never run out.
Even if you already know what kind of exercise you like to do, try out others, because age, injury, and weather are no respecter of persons, and you may not be able to do the thing you like now forever. I discovered my enjoyment of yin yoga while recovering from pneumonia, for example. And while I’d love to take up jujitsu, at my age (or more accurately, at my knees age) that would be less than prudent. But contra dancing? Also hard on the knees, but much easier to regulate.
The ADHD Caveats
Thanks to our neurospicy brains, there are some aspects of exercise that we need to be aware of:
Hyperfocus can be a quick road to injury. I enjoyed CrossFit for a few weeks until I realized that one of the tenets is “your body will tell you when to quit.” As it turns out, my particular brain doesn’t listen to my body; whether that’s residual Marine Corps or ADHD, I don’t know, but I need to have extrinsic, not intrinsic, limits to prevent my body from destroying itself for a PR.
Teams and exercise buddies are great support — but if rejection sensitivity dysphoria is something you deal with, something as simple as “nah, not today” can send you into a personal shame spiral. Or you may have some people-pleasing mask behaviors that, like hyper focus, can make you ignore your body because you want to make them like you. Be aware.
Don’t feel bad if you get bored with one and switch to something else. You didn’t quit or fail, any more than you “quit” eating your favorite meal because you don’t have it every day. That activity will be there when you want to come back to it; there’s no shame in trying out a different flavor.
There you have it, three strategies:
Give it purpose.
Chain it to something you enjoy.
If you don’t like one, try another.
Approaching exercise with the creativity and flexibility that our ADHD brains give us can help make movement a part of your life. It’s not about how good you do it — just that you do it.
And then, chill out on the couch for a while. Resting is an activity too, after all. One that we ADHDers are not all that good at.
But I believe in us. I believe in you.
You got this.
These are the kinds of discussions that will be taking place at the ADHD Open Space on January 20th, 2024 in Madison, WI. Check out this link to learn more and register!