ADHD Women: Step 2 Breaking Your Bad Habits

Trying to figure out how much time you the spend on a habit can be mentally exhausting. When it comes to your own bad habits, women with ADHD can ignore them due to you may feel that you cannot overcome them, so why bother trying. So the secret to eliminating this behavior is in Step 2 of the habit formation worksheet. The best way to understand this process is to go over each individual components so we will go over each few the key components in the next steps.

What is the habit you want to break ? In the last step 1 on the habit formation worksheet I asked you to write down ten of your positive and negative habits. For this first step is to figure out which one of the negative habits from Step 1 you would like to break. Below is an example

Bad Habit You Want To Break
– I always forget to plan for the next day

What is your reason? The first key to breaking a bad habit is to know what your tangible reason on why you want to break this habit in the first place. If you don’t know why you want to stop a bad habit, then chances are you won’t ever begin to change. For example maybe you’d like to stop procrastinating so that you have the time to do things you actually want to do, guilt-free. Just make sure that it’s a strong enough and tangible enough incentive that you’ll be willing to change, and you’ll be well on your way to breaking that bad habit for good. Here is another example:

What is your reason why you want to break this bad habit?
I want to stop procrastinating and be able to know what I need to do and will know how much time I will need for the task or errand.

What Do You Think Will Stand In Your Way From Breaking The Bad Habit For a women with ADHD there are a list of potential ways that can keep you from a tedious or overwhelming task (distractions, racing mind, overthinking) but that doesn’t mean that they have to run the show. Just write it down, use this as your opportunity to address whatever on your mind. Whatever you might think will stand in your way of breaking this habit.


What do you think will stand in your way from breaking this bad habit?
There are so many things that could get in my way but the first thing that comes to my mind is the fear of failure and getting distracted by text messages and social media notifications

Triggers That Have You Doing The Bad Habits & How You Can Avoid Them Let’s face it being a women with ADHD sometimes feels like the whole world is against us when we are trying to make healthier habits whether it is catching up on our favorite television show to not eating desert it can feel like an endless temptations of making “unhealthier” choice, there is away to revolve around your “triggers” that will help you get in control

Triggers That Keep You Doing Your Bad HabitWays To Avoid
Fear of FailureI had to be honest with myself in evaluating what works well for you and what gets in your way. Choose to do more of what works and replace what doesn’t work for you with different actions. This reflection and decision-making process will help you feel in control of your tasks and yourself, something that can be motivating and empowering.
Getting distracted by text messages and social media notificationsWhen working on a task or project put phone on vibrate and in another spot so it is unreachable

As you can see you can get pretty creative with making a plan around your triggers. The key is to fully understand what your triggers are and have a strategy in place for handling them.
Next week, I will be discussing the final step creating new habits. When you create new habits to replace your old ones often makes the growth process a whole lot easier. It can take on an average 66 days to create new habits so don’t get hard on yourself if you don’t get it the first time.