This is a topic I'm currently living with, right now, as I type this.
I haven't been to the gym, properly, in longer than I'd like to admit. Not because I don't want to. I do want to. There are other projects pulling at my attention, the kind that feel urgent and interesting in a way the gym just doesn't, and every day I mean to go, and every day I don't.
And here's the part that stings. I know exactly how good it makes me feel after exercise.
I always feel better on the days I go. That knowledge sits there, completely useless, while I don't go anyway. And a quiet layer of guilt builds on top of it.
If you recognise that exact feeling, you're the person I'm writing this for.
Starting a fitness habit was never the hard part. Not stopping is.
I don't have this solved. I'm just a bit further into thinking about it. But I've been reading about why it happens, and some of it genuinely helped, so I wanted to share what I found. It's also the reason we ended up building an app called Loops, and the thing I use Loops for myself.
Russell Barkley argues that ADHD isn't really a knowledge or desire problem. It's a self-regulation problem at the point of performance, and his conclusion is that the support has to be externalised. Visible cues, prompts, accountability, placed exactly where the behaviour needs to happen.
That lands hard for me, because it names the thing I keep getting wrong. I keep assuming that if I just wanted it enough, I'd go.
A study of what actually drives exercise in adults with ADHD symptoms gently takes that assumption apart. People with ADHD symptoms reported more barriers around planning, emotion, belief in their own ability, and motivation, which neatly separates "I don't want to" from "I can't reliably make the plan survive contact with real life." I'm firmly in the second camp. The wanting is not the problem. The gap between deciding and going is.
Here's something it took me embarrassingly long to see.
A 45-minute workout is almost never 45 minutes. It's finding the kit, the journey there, the changing, the waiting, the shower, and dragging myself back to what I was doing afterwards.
The session itself is the easy bit.
The hidden chain of steps around it is where I quietly fall apart. That makes sense given that time perception in adult ADHD is consistently impaired, so that clean-looking block of time is actually experienced as an amorphous pile of admin.
And it isn't just me being disorganised. Qualitative research on physical activity in adults with ADHD found a barrier cluster that reads a lot like a description of my own head. Forgetfulness, trouble sustaining focus, time-management problems, low self-esteem, and low motivation. The friction was never in the exercise. It's in the route to it.
Then there's the reward, or rather the lack of an immediate one.
Adults with ADHD have well-documented differences in reward processing and delay discounting, which means distant rewards lose their pull fast. "Future me will be fitter" is a hopeless motivator against the very immediate cost of getting changed, travelling, and leaving a project I'm enjoying. On paper the maths is obvious. In the moment, the office desk wins.
But here's the reframe that actually works for me, on the days it works at all.
Exercise isn't only a slow, invisible investment. A single bout of exercise can improve attention, mood, and executive function more or less the same day, often within the hour. So I don't go for a version of me six months from now. I go because it makes the next few hours of today more workable. That's not a motivational trick. It's just a truer description of what the movement actually does for an ADHD brain, and it's the one thing that occasionally gets me out the door.
I don't go for a version of me six months from now. I go because it makes today more workable.
The shape of my failure is always the same.
I go all in for a couple of weeks. Then something interrupts, a trip, a busy stretch, a bad few days, and I miss a session. Then a few. And because a broken streak feels like starting from zero, going back feels enormous, so I don't. The break quietly becomes permanent. That all-or-nothing response isn't a lack of commitment. It's just how an ADHD brain tends to handle a lost run of momentum.
And the emotional side is real, not decorative. Given how much emotion dysregulation shows up in adult ADHD, setbacks land harder than they should, and the whole category of "fitness" slowly becomes emotionally loaded. The unused gym bag by the door stops being neutral. It becomes a small daily reminder that I've failed at this before. That's the guilt I'm carrying this week, in fact. It doesn't make me go. It just makes the not-going heavier.
It doesn't help that so many of us are running on unstable fuel. Adult ADHD is strongly tied to sleep problems and delayed circadian timing, so we're often trying to build a movement habit on late nights and hard mornings, at exactly the times our task-initiation is weakest.
So "just be more disciplined" turns out to be useless advice. The evidence points somewhere else entirely.
NICE recommends visual reminders, routine anchoring and peer support to help people with ADHD stick with things, none of which is willpower. It helps enormously to assume interruption rather than fear it. UK activity guidance is built around weekly totals rather than perfect daily streaks, which quietly gives you permission to have an uneven week and still be doing fine. Broken streaks are one of the fastest routes to quitting, so anything that treats a gap as normal rather than fatal is worth its weight.
Novelty matters too. Varied, engaging formats tend to hold an ADHD brain better than the same repetitive routine, which is why the thing that felt brilliant in week two can feel impossible by week eight. And the single most reliable lever, across the research and my own experience, is another person. Exercising with someone, or even just having someone see that you did, turns intention into action in a way going solo almost never does. That gap is the whole problem, and it's where we decided to build something.
Loops is our answer to this specific problem, and I'll say plainly that this is the one I use the app for myself. At its core, Loops is a daily coaching app for people with ADHD.
It gives me small daily actions instead of a whole programme, so the decision is tiny and the threshold to start is low. It coaches me through the moment the routine breaks, so a missed week stays a pause rather than becoming the end. It's built for getting back in, not starting over. And it leans on the two things that actually move me, the same-day payoff and one person who gets to see me show up, rather than a distant goal and a lonely streak.
It hasn't made me love the friction. I'm still me. But it has helped me make time for the gym again this week, not because I suddenly became more disciplined, but because getting back no longer feels like starting from scratch. What it's changed is what a gap means. Stopping used to feel like a verdict on me. Now it feels like a pause, and I come back faster. I'm not writing this to sell you anything. I'm writing it because I'm in it too.
If you've started and stopped more times than you can count, you've probably decided that means you lack the discipline for this.
I don't believe that, about you or about me.
Starting was never the hard part. Staying in it is, and staying in it isn't about discipline. It's about the friction before each session and the reward that arrives too late, and both of those can be designed smaller. It's not a motivation problem. It's an ADHD one, and that's a far more fixable thing.
I'm making time for the gym again this week, not because I finally found the willpower, but because the thing that gets me there was never willpower in the first place. If you're carrying the same guilt right now, put it down. The bag by the door isn't proof you failed. It's just waiting for tomorrow.
Starting a fitness habit was never the hard part. Not stopping is. And that's not a motivation problem, it's an ADHD one.
Starting is easy. Staying in it is where it breaks. The evidence shows the barriers sit around planning, emotion, self-belief and reward, not around desire. The real gap is continuity, closing that space between deciding to go and going, over and over, through real life.
The struggle tends to follow a predictable shape:
The workout is the easy part. Impaired time perception makes the admin around it feel enormous, and steep delay discounting makes the slow rewards weak. Meanwhile emotion dysregulation turns lapses into a loaded "I always fail at this" story. The reframe that helps most is immediacy. A single session can lift attention, mood and focus the same day, often within the hour. That's a reason to move today, not for a distant version of you.
The evidence favours externalising the habit over trying harder. What actually helps looks like:
Loops keeps a movement habit alive through real life. It helps you:
Starting and stopping many times doesn't mean you lack discipline. Starting was never the hard part. Not stopping is, and that's about friction and reward, not willpower. Both can be designed smaller.
It's not a motivation problem. It's an ADHD one, which is a far more fixable thing. Put down the guilt. The bag by the door is just waiting for tomorrow.
Matt has worked in design and marketing for 14 years and is fascinated by how AI will shape the future of both. Diagnosed with ADHD in his early thirties, he writes and researches the ideas that help him better understand his own brain.
At Loops, Matt helps train the AI coach, speaks with users and shapes the app around how people with ADHD actually think and work. It's the kind of tool he wishes he'd had years before his diagnosis.
Outside work, Matt lives with his wife, dog and cat, grows pine trees and dreams of one day owning a patch of land to plant them on.