Celebrating helps the ADHD brain

What do you want to celebrate, right this minute?

I'd like to invite you to actually tell yourself an answer to this question - in your head, out loud, or on paper, if you wish. 

Does it feel a bit uncomfortable? Are you struggling to come up with something?

If yes - great! This blog post is for you.

I’d like to celebrate that we’ve identified a challenge that you can probably help yourself with. Quite easily, too, with fast results. I’ve done it, and I’ve helped others to do it, so I’m confident that you are likely to be able to too.

But first, why is this even necessary?

Many adult ADHDers struggle to celebrate

I used to find celebrating physically painful. Any hint of a compliment would put me into a panic. If I told myself I was good at something, I was sure that disaster would follow.

This is something I see again and again in my ADHD coaching practice. Many of us are used to pushing ourselves forward by telling ourselves that we're falling behind. We battle along, finally finish something, and then immediately demand that we start battling on with the next thing. 

If this is a classic adult ADHD motivation strategy, what is the cost? The cost is often motivation itself, because we build up negative feelings towards our tasks - and ourselves. 

How does celebrating help? It gives us a positive feeling about our efforts! It also helps us to tell us a more strengths-based story about ourselves. 

Celebrating is a simple reward you can give to your ADHD brain. People talk a lot about ADHD and dopamine in the context of things outside ourselves, like sugar, phones, or easy wins. Celebrating is a way to activate good feelings inside your brain, by shifting your framework to recognise the good work you’ve done.

The good news: Celebration is easier to get to than you may think. You can choose to add it into your repertoire of ADHD self-management strategies.

Through repetition, I trained myself to notice and celebrate my efforts and anything I did that moved me forward. (I added in a little DIY exposure therapy to get over my fear of thinking positively about myself, which I’ve included in this post too.) This has lowered my anxiety, as a bonus, because I’m regularly reassuring myself that I’m doing okay.

How do you celebrate? 

No, you don’t need to get drunk, or buy something you can’t really afford. You don’t have to wait until you’ve hit a goal. You definitely don’t need to be perfect, or do anything to the level you can imagine it being done to.

At its most basic, celebration is a conscious acknowledgment of effort or achievement, and a pumping up of the associated good feelings. If doing this feels unnatural or uncomfy for you, then this may be an especially useful practice. Once a day is a good start. Even more effective is celebrating a little bit many times each day!

This is how the technique goes:

• Have some way to trigger celebrating, such as when your timer goes off, or you shift between tasks

• Name what you’re celebrating - preferably something you had some choice or control over

• Find something, anything, in this that a good feeling can latch onto

• Expand the good feeling for 5 seconds

• Enjoy it!

Celebration helps ADHD motivation

Here’s an example of how intentional, regular and small celebrating has worked wonders for my ADHD coaching clients. (As always in my examples, what I describe here is a combination of different situations, to take care of confidentiality.)

Laurel tells me that she feels in a low mood and unmotivated at work all the time. When she does manage to get something done, she immediately tells herself that it could and should have been done better.

We talk about celebrating little moments throughout the day. Laurel puts forwards her arguments about why she doesn’t deserve to celebrate every single day. Over the course of the conversation, she decides to try an experiment of regularly naming what she’s done at work and making an effort to feel good about it. Just to try it out. Just to see what happens.

We make a plan for how it could work. Laurel says that she’ll try out celebrating what she’s done, or the effort she has put in, at any transition point that she notices during the day.

Over the next few weeks, when she shifts from one activity to another, Laurel trains herself to take a breath. She tells herself something good about what she just did, and activates a warm feeling about it. At first her brain rejects some of her statements, so she makes them smaller till her brain tolerates them. She carries on with the experiment, because she’s curious about what will happen.

Soon, Laurel reports to me that this is working better than she had hoped. Celebrating in this small way has become easy, and habitual. This is what convinces her to continue: she feels less drained at work, is more motivated to start tasks, and feels better about the work she does.

Celebrating is available right now

Celebrating is a skill that can be learnt. Choose a role model! I copy someone close to me who has boundless optimism and self-confidence. I once heard him say, “Good work!” to himself after clearing away his breakfast dishes.

How amazing is that?

I often help my clients to get used to celebrating moments. Did you do something rather than nothing? That’s really cool. Did you try something and it didn’t work? Okay, that’s frustrating, but you put in effort, and you also learnt what not to do. So why not celebrate that too?

If you wait for the good feeling to arrive naturally, it may not. This technique involves training yourself to actively celebrate, again and again, until your brain starts to find it easier. Eventually it may begin to celebrate without prompting.

If you need help to name what you want to celebrate, try asking yourself these sort of questions:

• What have I done that will make future me satisfied?

• What effort have I put in?

• Did I do something rather than nothing?

• How has what I’ve done moved me forward?

If you need an extra boost to trigger the good feeling, you could choose a ‘celebration song’ or other sensory anchor. Then you could play or sing the song, do the little dance, or imagine Grandma giving you a cuddle (or slipping you five bucks, if this is more her style)…whatever gives you that warm glow feeling. Then when it’s time to pump up the good celebration feeling, you can use this as your way in.

Celebrating won’t spoil you

Some of us may have a default no-celebration policy, because something about it feels unsafe. Maybe as children we learnt to keep small to cope with life’s unpredictable risks. Rather than allow ourselves to take the chance of claiming space, maybe it’s easier to believe there’s something wrong with us. Whatever the cause, that stuff can take time to shift, so luckily celebrating is tool that works even without digging into that deeper work.

You might want to say to me: “Being kind to yourself is all well and good, but sometimes you just need to give yourself a kick in the pants.” To which I reply: If a kick in the pants was going to work, it would be working already, because you kick yourself in the pants all day long. (Sure, there may be people who have spoilt themselves rotten with kindness, but I haven’t met them. Perhaps they’re all at the beach.)

If this is ringing true for you, you may want to take the time to teach yourself that it’s safe to celebrate. How do we do this? One way may be to consciously choose a new mindset around celebrating, as laid out in this ADHD tool, perhaps with a motto like: “It’s safe and fun to celebrate myself”.

Here’s a bonus technique that helps you to extend your comfort zone, little by little. It’s based on exposure therapy, which I learnt about in Psychology 101 and immediately used to stop my arachnophobia from constantly creeping me out. This technique can also be used to practice saying no, or to face not-too-huge fears in a very gentle and controlled way:

• Have a go at the smallest, lowest-risk version of the thing you are practicing

• Feel the discomfort

• Hold on for one second more

• Stop doing the thing you’re practicing

• Check in on your body sensations

• Reassure yourself that you’re safe, through words, visualisation, or imagined calm/loved feelings

• Repeat this technique every now and then

(Note: if you have trauma or fears or fixations that are keeping you from living your life, please see a professional who specialises in helping people with these things.)

Other ways into celebrating

Perhaps when you try to celebrate, you hit the resistance of your brain telling you what you should have done that would be better. You can counter this by visualising what you could have done instead - namely, nothing, or something destructive. After all, they are all just imagined comparisons, with emotional consequences, so why not choose the one that gives you a positive emotion?

Another way into regular celebrating is gratitude. It’s like the gratitude practice you may be familiar with, but it adds in an element of recognising your own efforts, strengths or achievements.

People are often comfortable to say: I’m grateful for the food in my cupboards. But they may find it harder to say: I’m grateful I was able to get myself to use my 10-minute timer to help myself to put away the laundry. But you know what? I am grateful. So grateful.

An act of ADHD rebellion

Finally, if you struggle with celebrating, please remember that celebration can be an act of rebellion, a strike for justice against all your conditioning.

Here’s how that might go:

- Intentional inner voice: I celebrate that I put away the laundry!

-Mean inner voice: You should have put it away a week ago, so how can you celebrate that or anything, just look at that huge pile of dishes, you slob?

-Intentional inner voice: Ha ha, I know your tricks, anyway you can’t tell me what to do, I’m going to take a moment to really feel good, and name what I’ve done. Yeah!

Can you still celebrate when you are feeling particularly overwhelmed by life or your ADHD symptoms? Yes, you can. When things are challenging, you work harder to do even the basics of living, so you can celebrate the extra effort you put in! This acknowledgement can be a beautiful gift you give yourself.

Sometimes I celebrate the work that Past Me has done, that is benefiting me now. I may be wandering from bed to fridge and avoiding my to-do list, but hey, some previous genius version of me bought veggies, and put away my sneakers so I can walk across the floor!

Go forth and celebrate!

Celebrating feels good! Feeling good increases motivation. Let’s not leave money on the table. You can train yourself to reward yourself frequently by celebrating throughout your day - naming what you did and choosing to feel good about it.

What would you like to celebrate, right this minute?

If you’d like me to help you to celebrate more, you can book an ADHD coaching session with me.