The 5 Habits Anyone Can Implement Today That Helped Me The Most With Sobriety And ADHD

Adults with ADHD are 5 to 10 times more susceptible to having addiction problems. Here's some simple habits that can help.

May 26, 2023

Two days ago, I passed the 400 days of sobriety mark. I didn’t realise until today. A nice place to be in. It’s nice to feel like my sobriety no longer finally defines me. Rather it’s just a part of my day-to-day life.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 402 days trying to understand why I struggled so much with addiction to substances. Writing blogs, working with my psychologist, and going on long runs in the bush alone have all helped me understand how it all came to be. I’m far from an expert, not even an expert on myself, but I do feel like I have learned a lot about addiction, mental health, ADHD and how they all apply to my personal circumstances.

Pretty early on, I realised that for me, there is no difference between mental and physical health, and I don’t think the two should be treated as separate entities. Sure, you can be physically fit and struggle mentally or the other way around, but I challenge you to find something that is good for your physical health but isn’t good for your mental health, and vice versa. I know I struggled when I asked myself that same question.

I realised I was using substances as a coping mechanism—an unhealthy one. A cheap, easy thrill that provides short-term relief but only makes things harder in the long term. On reflection, I realised that every time my physical health waned, it correlated directly with deteriorating mental health. Basically, If I weren’t looking after myself mentally, in time, I would neglect my physical health too.

I’ve had ADHD all my life, but I was only diagnosed with ADHD six years ago, at 28 years old. Although I felt like something was a miss, it’s near impossible to manage a condition you don’t know that you have. I’ve learned a lot about ADHD over the last six years, but even more so over the last year and a bit.

What I have come to realise is the better I manage my ADHD, the better, the easier my sobriety is. People with ADHD have less ability to access dopamine stores. That’s why the temptation of quick and easy sources of dopamine is so appealing to us—drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, porn, whatever. ADHD is 5-10X more common in adult alcohols than it is in people without the condition. It’s estimated that only 2.8% of the world’s adult population have ADHD, yet among adults being treated for alcohol and substance abuse, the rate of ADHD is roughly 25%. That means adults with ADHD are almost ten times more likely to struggle with substance abuse issues than neurotypical people.

Personally, I have found the better I manage my dopamine sources, the more manageable my ADHD symptoms are, and the less I need to rely on my coping mechanisms, healthy or otherwise. It all intertwines. What’s good for me is good for my ADHD, is good for my sobriety, is good for me and repeat.

So I wanted to write this little blog real quick to share the simplest things that anyone can implement right now that have helped me the most when it comes to managing my ADHD and, in turn, my sobriety. Hopefully, it helps some of you!

1. Journaling

Journaling is an amazing way for anybody to take thoughts that are running around in their head and make sense of them. It helps me to understand what I am thinking and how I am feeling. I always feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders after I journal. It can be a nightly journal on a pen and paper next to your bed, a morning journal as soon as you sit down at your computer, a blog, or even speaking into a voice-to-text recorder on your phone. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it in whatever form provides the least friction between you and getting it done. It’ll provide you with better mental clarity, which sets you up to handle any negative thoughts or stress that stop past and give you a hard time.

2. Breathwork

I call it breathwork because I don’t believe I am meditating when I do breathwork. There’s an idea out there that people with ADHD can’t meditate and that our brains are simply racing around too fast to reach a meditative state. I disagree. I do breathwork for 10 minutes each morning. I have been doing so since the first day of this year and only missed three days. Some days it’s hard, some days it’s easy, and I feel like I could do it forever. I know that I am progressively and incrementally getting much better at it and getting much more out of it.

It’s not the kind of thing that you see the results of instantly, but over time, you will find that by practising focusing on your breath, drawing your attention back to your breath when you get distracted by your thoughts, you will train your brain to put space between a stressor and your reaction. This will help you keep calm and make more considered choices when faced with a difficult decision rather than reacting based on the first emotion you feel.

3. Outdoor Exercise (With Others)

I like running, but it doesn’t have to be running. Obviously, exercising is good for your mental health. It releases endorphins in your brain that make you feel good. But it’s also been proven that exercising in nature will provide you with even greater benefits for your mental health—the same goes for exercising with friends.

I like to do both. I love running with a mate and having a chat at the same time. It makes the exercise feel easy, and some of the greatest conversations I have ever had have been while running. But I also really enjoy running alone somewhere in nature and switching off, coming up with ideas, solving problems, or letting the thoughts I need to process come to me.

Whatever the case, you will never feel worse off mentally after exercising than you did at the start.

4. Stretching/Yoga/Pilates

You don’t need to sign up for a gym or exclusive studio to do any of these. You don’t need to be bending your feet up around the back of your ears either. If you don’t know what stretches to do or have a particular area of the body that you think needs work, jump on youtube and search accordingly. There are thousands of free instructional videos out there that can guide you through a routine.

A lot like exercise, stretching can be difficult or uncomfortable while you do it, but you will feel much better afterwards.

There are a few reasons I stretch every day. The first one is injury prevention. If I get injured, I can’t run or exercise, which makes managing my mental health that little bit more difficult. But stretching also just makes you feel better and makes your day-to-day life a little easier. The easier it is for me to do the daily, monotonous tasks, the less likely I am to be bogged down in their misery of them. It’s pretty simple, the better you feel physically, the more likely you are to feel good mentally. Being in pain or uncomfortable is not conducive to a healthy mental state.

5. Reduced Screen Time

In the modern world, it’s near impossible to avoid screens. I’m staring at three of them right now. I’m not suggesting that We move to a commune in the bush and stare at trees all day, but I think it’s important to remain conscious of just how much time we spend staring at screens, especially given a lot of us to id for a job.

This isn’t the kind of screen time we need to work on reducing. It’s mindless scrolling through social media apps or online stores. We’re all guilty of it. I am. But when we are doom scrolling, we are procrastinating. We procrastinate when avoiding certain feelings or thoughts we don’t want to deal with, often subconsciously. These feelings and thoughts arise because your brain asks you to process them. The longer you leave them, the harder they will be to deal with and the more that will bank up.

Between work and fucking about on my phone, I still average a little over four hours of screen time on my phone per day. A little too much for my liking, but I’m working on it, and I do genuinely notice that on days my screen time is down, I’m in a much better mood.

There are three key things I do to try to minimise my screen time. The first is just being conscious of it. I have a daily spreadsheet where I record things like my sleep and other health metrics, and I check my screen time from the day before and enter it. It helps keep me accountable and makes me aware of it.

The next thing I do, thanks to the tip from

Ben Alexander

, is set my iPhone to greyscale, particularly when I am at work or in an environment where I desperately don’t want to be distracted by my phone. It’s been proven that setting your phone to greyscale reduces the likelihood of getting distracted by background apps and notifications when you check your phone.\

Lastly, I see my phone to Do-Not-Disturb as soon as I get home from work. Our phones are addictive and are designed to be so. Hanging out with my family gives me far more fulfilment than my phone ever does, but we are addicted to them and forever tempted to pick them out of our pockets and slip into the world of make-believe so we don’t have to deal with reality for a while. So, I went through and added anyone important to the people in my contacts who can still call while I’m on Do-Not-Disturb just in case something happens, and when I’m home, my phone is on Do-Not-Disturb because there is not a single fucking thing on the internet more important than your family.