You’re on fire and then it’s gone
Happy new year, everyone! 2024 is the year where you transform your life by a thousand life hacks! Just get up at 5am every day and do all the things to become a Best Selling, Influencing Something-Or-Other! Or try it for 3 days and realise that you you just can’t, and so you give up, feeling like a failure. Sound familiar?
Most humans will relate to this, but not least if you identify as AuDHD, i.e. both autistic and ADHD. You’ll well know that one of the conflicts your brain wages against itself is the autistic need for repetition and struggle with change versus the ADHD need for novelty and struggle with consistency.
A lot of goals and ‘life hacks’ (do people still say ‘life hacks’?) are designed for neurotypical brains. If you want to do a new thing this year, this is what I’m trying out:
Do one thing. I had a list of 10 habits I was going to kickstart to change my life, and just looking at the list made me feel a bit sick. So I chose one thing that I could do easily. This one thing had to be relatively small and feel like a minimal change for my poor little autistic brain. I chose to use at least one of the dark and miserable weekday mornings, where I had to get up anyway, to write (I’m writing this at 7:30am. Go me!).
Set yourself up for success by managing your sensitivities. My big sensory sensitivity to beat all of sensitivities is the cold. I also struggle with changing situations, e.g. getting out of bed, so I set the heating to come on 30 minutes before I wake up. This means I wake up warm and so can far more easily get out of bed to do my writing on that one day.
Help your brain with tools. I don’t function without external tools (and people). I use a free Pomodoro timer to get my ADHD motor running and I time-box my writing to no more than an hour in the morning, which is 2 x 25 minute Pomodoros and 2 x 5 minute breaks. Time-boxing also creates a sense of urgency, which is apparently the only way to get me to do something.
Give yourself a break. If I don’t manage to do my one my one thing for a week (or two – which I did over December, sorry!), I remind myself that this isn’t *yet another* sign that I’m shit. Humans struggle with change as it is and it’s 10x harder for us neurodiverse types. That I’ve started at all is a win. In SGI Buddhism there’s a phrase, ‘ho nim myo’, which means ‘from this moment on’. It means that no matter what happened yesterday – or even 5 minutes ago – I’m a new person in this moment and so I will dust myself off and start again!
You can do this! Or if you can’t, or if you find that it’s actually not what you want to do, that’s fine too. No experience is wasted. Your worth comes not from ‘achievements’, but from being a good person and making efforts to make your life and those around you better. That you’re even trying means everything.
University of Brighton fine Art (Painting) submission 
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