So. It's not specific strategies or anything (legally and ethically I **cannot**)
But I've always found that understanding not just the whats (so wonderfully reflected above in the comic) but also the whys/hows can help me cope better over all.
So let me see if I can take each of these one at a time.
Habits and patterns not sticking tends to stem from a few places: all or nothing thinking/perfectionism, executive dysfunction around working memory and task breakdown/management, and lack of internal bio-chemical reward responses at task initiation, just prior to task completion, and following task completion.
Some examples of how this can look:
All or nothing thinking says that if I can't "make a real dent" in a task, there's no point wasting my vanishingly rare energy and functioning on it, and that if I fall off of "keeping up on maintenance" then my routine is over rather than having been interruped, and lacking the greyspace of thought to "remember-believe" that I can return to the routine or even plan ahead for how to deal with interruptions and intermittent roadblocks as part of my routine. It also prevents me from being able to prioritize tasks in my brain, which is part of why tasks always seem to expand when I try to interact with them, leading me to get distracted or overwhelmed or otherwise wander off from my needs. And the reason my energy and functioning is so vanishingly rare, is that my brain is "understimulated" without the necessary function of reward responses, and my autonomic system is "overstimulated" without the ability to consistently regulate environmental, emotional, and social stressors.
Things that help are often things that help me intentionally mamage stressors and regulate my nervous system, as well as ways of introducing reward responses I do experience into my "task work" process to make up for the absence of them organically (part of this for me is medication, part is coping strategy, part is "grazing" food rather than eating separate sit down meals, etc). And what always always matters is that I take shame out of how I talk to and about myself. This feels silly at first, it really does. You feel ridiculous doing it, and then you kinda start shittalking the process and yourself and how you experience it and then one day you kinda look at that way you have of talking to yourself and realize it. It just sucks all the good out of your life. And you start to feel more comfortable with the new ways of talking to yourself. And you start to notice all the little shames that pile up throughout the day and how scary it is that letting go of that shame will mean things never get done but then somehow they do. And you realize the shame made it harder. Makes everything harder. Letting it go doesn't end mistakes or mishaps sure, but they somehow **genuinely** matter less? Not just to you, but in their impact and damage on your life.
Weirdly, it's not the understimulation (exactly) that causes dissatisfaction and mental/emotional restlessness! It's the autonomic hyperactivity (this is why we see similar expressions in our PTSD cousins). Calming our autonomic system can actually increase our overall satisfaction with life, hobbies, relationships, etc. It's something to do with how our body and brain are activated to direct and prioritize bodily resources when our nervous system dysregulates (the "hyperactive" in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is referring to autonomic hyperactivity that causes chronic or irregular autonomic dysregulation - often experienced in ADHD expressions as intense emotional escalations that are hard to "come down from" and/or general psychological/physiological symptoms resulting from chronic stress). Folks with chronically hyperactive autonomic systems are prone to needing activity to regulate their autonomic system, rather than stillness or rest (although of course everyone needs a little of both, it's more a ratio thing I think) and so while we often think of "destressing" as "resting", that can actually be **stressing** for us instead. I do a lot of puttering around outside in the yard doing garden or animal stuff as "rest" or like fidget crafts like finger weaving or idle tap games while I listen to music or watch a show. The expression and release of autonomic hyperactivity is super soothing, and generally lets me feel more consistently relaxed. I do a lot of fun and weird diaphraghmatic breathing exercises (polyvagal approaches to autonomic regulation), a lot of low impact- movement based activities, and create "planned unstructured time" each day to just sort of putter around and follow my brain like a dog chasing a bone dangling in front of its face by a stick stuck in its own collar. I always do weird stuff. Not like. Interesting weird. Just weird. But it helps!
Building up skills around the general vibe of "this too shall pass, and here's how i can be kind to myself in the meantime" tends to be really valuable to those rejection sensitivity moments. I've got some great structured journal prompts I worked out with a therapist's help to "self reflect" on what feelings or needs are being communicated via the rejection experience, a self care plan to get through the parts I have less control/influence over and a processing/coping plan to get through the parts I can be more proactive about. I do a lot of checking in with my body and brain (I set timers/alarms for this) and use a lot of visual thought mapping and prompting in my environment (e.g. task step lists for cleaning a room pre-written on a whiteboard in that room, shared calendars, etc) to reduce the demand of routine/cyclical tasks on my executive functioning.
The jar gets filled over time by routine task completion on a task by task basis, and when it's full, I get to buy new plants :)
It's a system I learned while training dogs (I know I know) and developing a "no failure" system of training for them. I realized I needed to change my own concept of/relationship to failure states. I really have a hard time coping with failure. And like. That'll probably always be true. But I can remove failure states from my life until they're rarer to encounter, so that overtime my sensitivity to it can scale down from lack of repeat trigger, and my coping skills for bleedthrough failure state emotional care and response can be more consistently effective.
One of the ways I do this is that I keep an extended documentation of things I "need to do" but I only allow myself to keep a max of 3 of them on my mind at once. And once I have interacted with one of these "priorities" to the extent of my comfort both physical and psychological, I put the task's respective reward marker in the jar. Tasks I struggle with the most get the biggest reward markers that take up the most space in the jar while the tasks I am more currently more consistent with get the smaller reward markers (think a silver dollar versus a dime).
I like getting my lil thing. I like how colorful my jar is. I like taking my little $10 allowance to the plant store like an excited 9yr old who has only just heard of allowances. I like having a plant to putter around and relax with. All positives in my book. Gotta find your own positives and way of removing failure states as an option.
It's not easy. And it's more of a process than a skillset? Because my relationship with myself and my environment is always changing, which means the way I need support in that environment is always changing even if the base kind of support needed doesn't. So I'm constantly adjusting and modulating and just. I dunno being really intentional about everything all the time. And it can suck sometimes, but other times its really really good, and mostly I'm just. Doing okay. Which is pretty cool :)
Anyway. I dunno if that's closure really, but I think it's worth more of us making our way through life acknowledging our experiences in ways that are mechanical and constructive when we can, rather than always hanging out in the self-deprecating space I think aot of us are prone to occupying due to our battles with shame. It's like building muscle memory. The more you do it, the easier and more reflexive it becomes.
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