Why ADHD Only Builds the Wrong Habits

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Alok Kanojia (1:04)

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olu Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K.

I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

So in a neurotypical brain, I think you can let reward motivate you. The problem is that in a neuro-atypical brain, the reward is usually insufficient to overcome the difficulty of the task. One of the most tricky things about ADHD is that good habits are protective against ADHD. But the problem is that in order to form a habit, you have to do something really consistently. And if you're someone with ADHD, doing things consistently is really hard, right? We're distracted, we have difficulty focusing, we can't do the same thing day after day after day. One of the most ironic things is that habits will protect you from a lot of the problems of ADHD. The real tragic thing is that even though the habit circuitry is relatively intact in ADHD, it's difficult to form good habits. If you have ADHD. So if you've got ADHD, you're distracted, it's difficult for you to focus, it's difficult to stay consistent, so you can never form a habit. But the really interesting thing is once you form a habit, it will take over even if you are distracted. Because let's think about what a habit really is. So in my mind, if I've got ADHD, and I'm thinking about something else, and my body is moving around doing random things, what is it that's controlling the random things that my body is doing? Those are actually my habit. That's my habit circuitry, right? So the really interesting thing, if you look at what a habit is, a habit is behavior that happens on autopilot. A habit is behavior that is programmed. A habit is behavior that does not require your attention, and in fact takes over when your attention is somewhere else.

And this is exactly why they are so useful for people with ADHD. Because imagine for a moment that you did get distracted, that you did wander around, but there was an autopilot circuit in your brain doing all of the right things. Putting your keys where they belong, putting your wallet away, starting to do the dishes. Imagine you could program your autopilot stuff when you get distracted. That's what we're gonna talk about today. So one of the trickiest things as a psychiatrist is trying to help my patients build good habits. And this is where we have to understand the neuroscience, okay? So ADHD is a disorder of two things. The first is it's a disorder of our frontal lobes, which allow us to plan and execute tasks, allow us to restrain impulses, retain focus, right?

That part of the brain is weak, the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes are basically the, is the master controller of the other parts of your brain. They're like the orchestra conductor that makes sure all the different parts of your brain are working together. So in ADHD, this circuit is weaker or impaired. So your brain acts in a very disorganized fashion. All your brain parts are on kind of autopilot. The second thing that's really different in ADHD is your dopaminergic circuitry and your reward circuitry. So this is the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area. So we see alterations in dopaminergic sensitivity. This means that some tasks give you a ton of dopamine, like video games, pornography, other random things. When you're really excited about something, right, you get a bunch of dopamine from it for about a day or so. And then your dopaminergic circuits acclimatize very easily, so you don't stay interested in things for long. The other problem is that normal tasks for a neurotypical brain will give you a healthy amount of dopamine, but in ADHD, it's hard to get that dopamine flowing with boring stuff, regular stuff.