The gist: Discover 3 fun strategies to make self-care more enjoyable for neurodivergent individuals struggling with burnout and executive dysfunction.
Earlier this year, I started experiencing something new that, at first, REALLY threw me off.
What was it?
Cravings to clean the apartment and go on the treadmill. 🧐
WTF was going on?
Never in my life had those been things I ever felt a desire to do…they were things I had to beat myself up to do.
Was I finally becoming a responsible adult?!
No, I was just obsessed with Agatha Christie audiobooks. 🤓
Sure, I didn’t NEED to go on the treadmill or knock out chores to be able to listen to my latest library loan, since I listen to audiobooks during lots of other activities too. But those two activities are the ones where my mind is able to really focus on the story.
So whenever I was listening to a book while doing something that only let me halfway pay attention to the plot, and I could tell a really good part was coming up, I’d get a desire to go walk or clean and let myself lose myself in the story a little more.
Now, this isn’t just an example of how weirdly my book obsession sometimes manifests itself.
It’s also an example of how you can trick yourself into loving something you used to find boring, if you want or need to.
And that’s the secret to making “boring” self-care feel less boring, maybe even fun.
Today we’re talking about a few different ways you can do this yourself.
Use temptation bundling
This trick is the one I talked about in the introduction: pairing something you should/have to do with something that you want to do.
Temptation bundling is often mistaken for habit stacking, but they’re different in a crucial way.
Habit stacking is doing different activities one after another, and most useful for things that you don’t necessarily dislike doing, but just don’t remember to do. The first habit in the stack serves as a reminder to do the later ones, to help you remember.
But temptation bundling is about pairing different activities and doing them at the same time.
For example, you could use temptation bundling by…
- Listening to an audiobook while doing housework and chores
- Catching up on your Netflix queue on the treadmill or at the gym
- Saving new music you want to listen to for your journaling sessions
- Having dedicated podcasts you listen to new episodes of during your hygiene routines
- Eating a piece of candy along with your daily medications (this is how I built that habit 🙃)
You can make this tactic even more powerful by ONLY during the fun thing during the boring self-care task.
For example, choosing one specific podcast that you’re not allowed to listen to if you’re not doing the thing it’s paired with.
Reduce burnout with a self-care action plan
Creating a plan for your daily and weekly self-care will help you get proactive about rest and burn out less often. For help creating your own plan, download our free worksheet.
Add gamification
Another strategy to make boring self-care more fun is to gamify it.
This doesn’t need to be “official,” like going as far as using an app with gamification or coming up with an official game and rules.
It can be as simple as raising the stakes of the activity so that they’re higher and more immediate than “this will benefit my long-term wellbeing.”
For example, you can set a time limit for yourself and try to “race the clock” to finish the activity before the timer runs out. Or “challenge” yourself to keep up with a given habit for 3 or 5 days in a row.
And of course, give yourself a prize for “winning” the game.
You may not even need to change how you complete the activity…just how you think about it.
Depending on your personality and the task at hand, it might be enough to reframe goals as “quests”, self-care habits as “magical rituals that earn health points and energy”, and helpful tools or resources as “power-ups.”
Make yourself a character
Finally, one way to make things a little more fun is to inject some main character energy.
Or rather, some “any fictional character” energy.
By this I mean imagining yourself as a character in a movie, game, book, or TV show, and how you might “produce” the scene in your head.
How would someone complete this task in a TV show?
This is another way I’ve learned to enjoy cleaning…by thinking about all of the scenes in visual media where someone has on a super cheesy song like “Walking on Sunshine” and dances around the house as they dust and tidy.
When there’s not an audiobook I’m itching to finish, that’s now how I clean. 🤓
The right soundtrack can do wonders for putting you in the right mood, along with having a special costume.
For example, a friend of mine wears a chef hat and apron anytime she’s preparing food, even if it’s just microwaving leftovers, to help her feel like she knows what she’s doing in the kitchen. And a YouTuber I follow (Cass at Clutterbug) wears a cleaning apron and gloves when she cleans to help her get into and stay into “cleaning mode.”
Another benefit of wearing a costume or adding a soundtrack?
It can make things feel like a performance, which can be helpful for trying to do activities that don’t feel natural or authentic to you yet.
Instead of trying to ignore that feeling of inauthenticity, this exaggerates and takes advantage of it.
For example, it can be a lot easier to pretend you’re playing a character who’s having fun cleaning their house in a movie montage, than it is to pretend find cleaning fun when you don’t.
Try it yourself
Is there a boring self-care task that you know you should be doing more?
Think about which of these 3 tactics might be most effective at making it more fun, or at least less boring.
See if you can pick 1 tactic and find a way to test it out this week!
And if you do give it a try, let me know how it goes!
Reduce burnout with a self-care action plan
Creating a plan for your daily and weekly self-care will help you get proactive about rest and burn out less often. For help creating your own plan, download our free worksheet.