Hey blogees! Welcome back - I hope you've had a good week!
Today I'll be following on from my last post/video and we'll be talking about why guilt alone doesn't work on ADHDers, why, and some things that actually do work to change behaviour.
We saw in my last video that guilt It tells the brain that your behaviour needs to be attended to and what happens is something like this:
expectation - mismatch - guilt - corrective action
Put basically guilt, in neurotypical brains, acts as a signal.
Which is great, right? You get a bad feeling in your head and it pushes you to change your behaviour. Perfect.
But, there are cases where the brain DOESN'T work like that. When brains are wired a little differently, it can cause all kinds of odd-seeming behavioural artifacts... today we're going to be looking at what happens in the ADHD brain. As a proud, late diagnosed member of the ADHD community I can't tell you how often I feel guilty about stuff - something I've forgotten; an action I said I'd do and then just... forgot about; messages that I've read and never replied to - I've accidentally ghosted more people than I am comfortable with and it's NEVER been on purpose. From a young age we're taught to be sorry about these things, but it DOESN'T work on ADHD brains - and this is why.
When an ADHDer doesn't do a task, it looks like this:
expectation - mismatch - guilt...nada...
Today I'll be following on from my last post/video and we'll be talking about why guilt alone doesn't work on ADHDers, why, and some things that actually do work to change behaviour.
We saw in my last video that guilt It tells the brain that your behaviour needs to be attended to and what happens is something like this:
expectation - mismatch - guilt - corrective action
Put basically guilt, in neurotypical brains, acts as a signal.
Which is great, right? You get a bad feeling in your head and it pushes you to change your behaviour. Perfect.
But, there are cases where the brain DOESN'T work like that. When brains are wired a little differently, it can cause all kinds of odd-seeming behavioural artifacts... today we're going to be looking at what happens in the ADHD brain. As a proud, late diagnosed member of the ADHD community I can't tell you how often I feel guilty about stuff - something I've forgotten; an action I said I'd do and then just... forgot about; messages that I've read and never replied to - I've accidentally ghosted more people than I am comfortable with and it's NEVER been on purpose. From a young age we're taught to be sorry about these things, but it DOESN'T work on ADHD brains - and this is why.
When an ADHDer doesn't do a task, it looks like this:
expectation - mismatch - guilt...nada...
Why?
Basically because we have really poor executive function. We want to make things better, but we lack the tools, so instead we get stuck in a guilt loop - feeling badly about it but never changing it, and it feeds on itself, often then affecting self-esteem and percieved control. In fact, EEG studies show we have INCREASED emotional responses AND less inhibition over that feeling, this suggest we feel guilt even more strongly than neurotypicals do.
It turns into:
expectation - failure - guilt - self judgement - increased avoidance of the task
When you take into account that exercise also has a delayed reward, is effortful AND has low immediate pay off, you've got the perfect storm. We're VERY good at detecting immediate payoff VS reward and our dopamine hungry brains just don't get enough of a hit from exercise immediately.
It turns into:
expectation - failure - guilt - self judgement - increased avoidance of the task
When you take into account that exercise also has a delayed reward, is effortful AND has low immediate pay off, you've got the perfect storm. We're VERY good at detecting immediate payoff VS reward and our dopamine hungry brains just don't get enough of a hit from exercise immediately.
So how can we fix this?
We need to externalise our signalling systems AND get a BIG hit of immediate dopamine.
And this is how to do it:
1. body doubling - Eagle et al, 2024 found that neurodivergent participants use external signals to help them stay on task and having another human in close proximity helps us stay in an externally focussed mindset.
2. Social accountability & rewards - especially praise. This is a BIG dopamine hit for a lot of ADHDers. It's even how my blog initially started - to feel accountable to a bigger group of people than those that automatically supported me. And then praise from strangers - it might seem superficial but we're social animals and we thrive with social rewards.
3. connected to the last point - add an immediate reward. Since exercise has a long.term payoff get something fast - favourite song, compliment from someone else, a big old hug from someone you love - whatever makes you feel good!
Reducing barriers to starting is also SUPER important (and i've made a few videos on ideas of how to do this, and will continue to do so!).
The last point is: make sure you also CONCIOUSLY separate behaviour from identity. "I didn't get this done today because I didn't have the resources" NOT "I didn't do this because i'm lazy".
Always remember: guilt tripping DOESN'T work on ADHDers. It just makes them feel like crap while NOT giving them the tools to change.
If you liked this, gimme a like or/and a comment to let me know you've been here follow me for more! :)
And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at @divergentlyperfect for videos on this content and more!
References
If you're interested, these are the articles I used in my research!
https://neurosciencenews.com/guilt-shame-behavior-neuroscience-30065/
https://iris.unitn.it/retrieve/3ae87282-953d-41c6-ae30-bd0ff7f1c812/2023_Grecucci_shame%20MEtabrainsci-13-00559.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10156575/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5281644/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13539
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22609
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3689648
https://neurosciencenews.com/guilt-shame-behavior-neuroscience-30065/
https://iris.unitn.it/retrieve/3ae87282-953d-41c6-ae30-bd0ff7f1c812/2023_Grecucci_shame%20MEtabrainsci-13-00559.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10156575/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5281644/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13539
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22609
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3689648
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