The ADHD Guide To Setting New Year’s Resolutions | It’s a Growth Thing

Do you want to know the 100% guaranteed way for the ADHD tribe to make New Year’s Resolutions that work?

DON’T MAKE ANY.

Seriously, that is the secret.

DO NOT MAKE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS.

If you have ADHD, New Year’s Resolutions are almost certainly guaranteed to fail. And that, my friends, is 100% the way it should be. With ADHD, New Year’s Resolutions are a trap. They are the mirage of an oasis in the desert. According to HuffPo only 8% of New Year’s Resolutions are kept — and for us ADHD’ers, that percentage is somewhere around negative 8%.

New Year’s Resolutions usually read like a list of terrible chores — go to the gym, get up early, work harder, do more stuff, get better at this thing that you hate, fix yourself…. Well, you aren’t broken. Don’t start your goal planning from a place of deficit. Your goal is to maximize some part of your life, not fix it. You aren’t broken, let’s call you “pre-optimized”. New Year’s Resolutions are often a way for us to articulate all the ways that we don’t like ourselves. But, for people with ADHD, frameworks that help you achieve goals are much more important than the goals themselves.

But, if you do want to start creating lasting change in your life, here is a framework that will help you create progress towards your goals:

1. Believe That You Can Do It: Us ADHD’ers carry a lot of can’t around. “I…