Habit Stacking for ADHD: When Your Routine Suddenly Falls Apart

I have the perfect morning routine. I get up, take my meds, feed my rats, exercise, shower, drink tea, eat breakfast. One thing naturally leads to another and carries me through my mornings even if I’m tired or don’t feel well. 

When a perfectly good ADHD routine suddenly stops working

Or, maybe I should say, I had the perfect morning routine. Because a few weeks ago, it stopped working. I started forgetting to feed my rats. I don’t know why this happened, I don’t know why I forget to give them their breakfast after I take my meds, but this is how it is now. 

Curiously enough, I’m interacting with the rats several times during the course of my morning, and it still doesn’t remind me of feeding them. First, I collect the rats from their nest in the wardrobe where they rest after their nightly free roam and put them in a cage. Then I have one rat always with me when I drink my tea and eat my breakfast, and I let her lick the yogurt from my finger as I eat. And the habit of giving my rats their medicine after breakfast is still working too. But even handling my rats doesn’t remind me that they need to be fed. 

And this is super important. My rats can’t go hungry. I love them, and I care for them the best I can. I don’t want to be an irresponsible pet owner who doesn’t look after the basic needs of their animal companions. 

So I have the opportunity to try finding a new method that will work. I can see the morning routine from the perspective of someone for whom it doesn’t work yet, and try to find solutions for it. And maybe then I will be able to help people better because of it. 

This will require some creative thinking because I can’t solve it by my favorite method, setting an alarm for it. I have irregular wake-up times, so I don’t know in advance when I will be taking my meds. 

What is habit stacking for ADHD?

I created my morning routine through habit stacking, which is attaching a new habit to an existing one – something you already do automatically – so the existing habit acts as a reminder for the next one. For example, you may brush your teeth and right after take your meds as the new habit in the habit stack. Or drink your coffee and then check your calendar.

Habit stacking for ADHD can be particularly helpful because it reduces the need to remember each task separately. Instead, one action naturally leads to another, creating a routine that requires less conscious effort. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But what happens when a habit stack that has worked perfectly for months suddenly falls apart?

8 ways to fix a broken ADHD habit stack

So I asked ChatGPT for advice. And she gave me these tips:

1. Use a visual reminder instead of relying on memory

The first thing that is obvious is placing the rat food next to my meds. But as the box is quite bulky and I don’t have much space on my bedside table, I replaced it with a sheet of paper that says in big, bold letters: FEED THE RATS!!! I wouldn’t rely on the habit of taking my meds to cue the next action, I will put this out of my memory and externalize remembering it. 

2. Put the next task directly in your way

The other way of externalizing the task it suggested was putting my meds on top of the box with rat food. I decided not to experiment with this because I worry that by doing this, I won’t remember to feed my rats, but I would forget to take my medicine because it will be next to something I’m already forgetting. I think that when the rat food doesn’t register for my brain, putting my meds next to it would make them disappear from my consciousness as well. 

3. Reverse the order of your morning routine

The next idea was to reverse the order and make feeding the rats the first task in the morning. I would wake up and immediately go to feed them and then continue with my morning routine. The problem with this is that I would still need to remember to feed my rats, and I would still be doing a change to my routine that takes conscious effort at first before it becomes a habit. So I can’t rely on my remembering to feed the rats first thing in the morning. 

4. Use timers and digital reminders

The next tip was to start a timer once I have taken my meds, or say “Hey Google, remind me to feed my rats in five minutes!”, or put an NFC tag next to my meds and tap my phone on it when I take my meds. But all of this also relies on me remembering to take an action I’m not used to. And on top of it, it creates a delay between taking my meds and feeding the rats, which I don’t really want. I want one to follow immediately after the other. 

5. Attach the task to a stronger habit anchor

The next suggestion was not to try to repair the broken habit stack by trying to feed my rats after taking my meds, but to attach it to a new habit that would be a stronger anchor. For example, I always change my rat’s water while the kettle boils, so I could feed them too while I’m in it. This may actually work, even if it needs conscious work in the beginning. But it has the potential to turn my mornings into a working habit stack again. 

6. Create a physical obstacle you can’t ignore

The next tip, which I think may work, is to create physical obstacles. In the evening, I would put something related to feeding the rats somewhere I physically have to deal with in the morning. For example, putting the food container in front of the bathroom door so I run into it in the morning. The point is that it isn’t just a visual reminder. I would actually have to interact with it before moving on. The problem with this is that it still relies on my memory. I would need to remember to put the rat food in front of the bathroom door in the evening.

7. Use a visual indicator to track completed tasks

The next thing it suggested was to create a status indicator, like a card that would say RATS NOT FED on one side and RATS FED on the other, and then flip it once I complete the task. But this doesn’t solve the problem of remembering to feed them as much as the problem of remembering if I had fed them, which isn’t really what my problem is. But it could pair nicely with the first solution of putting a reminder next to my meds. 

8. Build a backup system for important habits

The last suggestion was for something this important: not to rely on a single system, but to add a backup checkpoint. For example, having a card that says FEED THE RATS, but also before eating my own breakfast, check whether the “RATS FED” marker has been flipped. Or place the rat food in front of the bathroom door, but also start a timer once I take my meds. I will definitely do this, and I think I will try to attach the habit of eating my own breakfast because that is an easy association. 

The main point of all of this advice was that when habit stacking, it relies on the brain creating a connection “A reminds me of B”. A more AuDHD-friendly solution is to set things up so that A physically cannot happen without encountering B.

My new AuDHD-friendly morning routine experiment

So what will I be doing? I will place one card with FEED THE RATS/RAT FED  on it, and I will place another card on the kitchen counter where I prepare breakfast. I even added a little rat drawing on the cards in order to feel less like they are shouting at me and more like they are reminding me of someone I love.

If this doesn’t work, I would be putting the rat food in front of my bathroom door. But I believe the method with cards will work, because it is obvious enough and externalizes the memory nicely without relying on me making a conscious effort. 

I think for those of us who have RSD, it would be better to put something more gentle on the cards, like “The rats you love are hungry”, or something like that, in order not to trigger RSD and remind you of your love of your pets. 

Message from future me: Did my experiment work?

As you may remember, I placed two sheets of paper with big bold “FEED THE RATS” messages on them. One was on my bedside table and one on the kitchen counter. Surprisingly, one worked, and the other didn’t. Here’s why.

I saw the message on the bedside table every time I took my meds, but seeing it wasn’t enough. I got used to it, and it became just a part of the scenery that my brain filters out.

The second message, on the other hand, is leaning against the container where I keep my morning tea. The act of physically removing it every time I want to make the tea and then putting it back serves as a tangible reminder to actually do it. And the fact that I doodled a happy rat on it makes the message more gentle and associates it with something I love directly.

So part of my new AuDHD habit stack will be feeding the rats just after I make my morning tea. I already have one habit attached to it, changing the rats’ water, so it goes tea-water-food.

When a habit stops working, change the system, not yourself

What I like about this little experiment is that it reminded me that when a routine suddenly stops working, the answer isn’t necessarily to try harder to remember. Sometimes the system itself needs to change.

I think that’s especially true for AuDHD people. A habit can feel completely automatic for months or even years, and then one day the connection just disappears. That doesn’t mean the whole routine is ruined. It means I need to make the next step more visible, more physical, or less dependent on my memory.

So now, my morning routine has a slightly different habit stack: make tea, change the rats’ water, feed the rats. And the most important part? A reminder I can’t simply look past, because I physically have to move it out of the way.

Maybe that’s the more useful way to think about habits in the first place: not as something we finally perfect and then keep forever, but as systems we keep adjusting when our brains stop cooperating with the old version.

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