How to Build Routines That Never Fall Apart (Even With ADHD on Bad Brain Days)
You know those mornings when it feels like your brain just… stopped working?
You wake up, drag yourself out of bed, and everything feels off.
You can’t think. You can’t remember what to do next.
You’re standing in the bathroom, staring at your reflection, and it’s like your brain has lost the file called “how to be a person.”
You feel sluggish and a little confused.
Everything feels way harder than it should be.
You start making breakfast, then realize you never turned on the coffee pot.
You sigh, flip the switch, and head to the bathroom to brush your teeth.
When you walk back, the coffee’s ready, but now you’ve already brushed your teeth.
You take one sip and think, Great. Now my coffee tastes tastes disgusting and I’m going to have coffee breath.
Little things keep going wrong.
You forget the order you usually do them in.
You keep missing steps, backtracking, fixing mistakes that wouldn’t even happen on a normal day.
And it’s so frustrating because you know you’re not stupid.
You’ve done this routine every single morning of your life.
So why does it suddenly feel like climbing a mountain?
What’s wrong with your brain today?
You’re not imagining it.
Your brain really is working harder than usual, because you woke up in a different neurobiological state.
And the version of you who normally runs that routine simply isn’t online right now.
What’s Actually Going On: Understanding Neurobiological States
So what does it really mean that you woke up in a different neurobiological state?
It means your brain and body are running on a different internal setting than usual — a different chemical and physiological “mode.”
Your brain is constantly recalibrating dozens of variables: dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline, hormones, blood sugar, temperature, heart rate, muscle tension.
Each unique combination of those signals changes how you feel, how you think, what memories you can easily access, and how your body moves.
That internal configuration — your chemistry, your energy, your emotional tone — is your state.
And you don’t have just one.
You move through many of them every single day.
You’ve felt these shifts a thousand times, even if you didn’t realize that’s what they were:
- There’s the version of you who wakes up clear-headed, suddenly ready to go for a run or clean the kitchen.
- The version who, later that evening, can barely get off the couch.
- The version who feels magnetic and social when you’re with trusted friends, and the one who freezes or shrinks in a room of strangers.
- The version who feels capable and creative, and the one who can’t make a single decision.
Each of those versions of you isn’t a mood — it’s a different neurobiological configuration.
When your chemistry shifts, your thoughts change too.
Your priorities change.
Your sense of what’s possible changes.
That’s why in one state, you can feel confident and open, and in another, anxious and withdrawn.
Why in one moment you think, I want to go out, I love being around people, and a few hours later you think, I just want to stay home in my pajamas and watch Netflix.
Those aren’t random swings — they’re state changes.
Your state is the lens your brain looks through.
It determines not just how you feel, but what parts of yourself you can access.
How State-Based Memory Works
When I say your state determines what parts of yourself you can access, I mean that each state unlocks its own thoughts, emotions, and memories—almost like logging into a different version of your brain. This is the basis of state-based memory.
Let me explain.
Your mind doesn’t keep everything available at once.
It stores experiences together with the chemistry that was active when they happened.
So when you re-enter a similar state, that whole cluster of memories, motivations, and habits lights up again.
Change states, and that network fades into the background.
That’s why you can know something logically and still not be able to feel it.
You’ve felt this before:
Imagine you’re lying in bed on a lazy weekend morning.
You’re warm, comfortable, scrolling Instagram, and completely relaxed.
In that state, you can’t imagine wanting to go anywhere. The idea of putting on real clothes or going outside sounds exhausting.
Then your friend calls.
You resist at first, but you get up anyway, take a shower, do your hair, and get dressed.
You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror—wow, I look great!
Suddenly you’re a different person.
You want to go out, meet people, stay out late, talk to everyone, flirt.
Those thoughts didn’t exist in your “pajamas-in-bed” state.
They simply weren’t accessible from there.
Or think about cleaning.
One afternoon you start wiping the counter, and suddenly you’re on a roll.
You organize the pantry, rearrange drawers, and start planning to repaint the kitchen.
You feel unstoppable.
But the next day, you wake up tired, look at the list of changes you wanted to make, and think—ha ha ha, what was I thinking?? I’m not doing any of those things!
The motivation, the vision, and the excitement are all gone.
And you know what? That’s actually not laziness; it’s a state change.
Yesterday’s version of you built that momentum, and today’s chemistry can’t open that file.
The same thing happens in emotional states.
When you’re furious, calm reasoning is unreachable.
When you’re happy, hopeless thoughts don’t enter your mind.
When you’re relaxed, problems shrink; when you’re stressed, they eat you alive.
Each state opens one mental “room” and closes the doors to the others.
You can remember that those other rooms exist, but you can’t walk into them until your chemistry shifts again.
That’s state-based memory, which is your brain’s habit of linking what you know and feel to the state you were in when you learned it.
So when your state changes—after poor sleep, stress, hormones, or even a small emotional trigger—the version of you who normally feels capable, motivated, or organized may be temporarily out of reach.
It’s not that you’ve changed who you are.
You’re just accessing a different chapter of yourself.
How State-Based Memory Ruins Your Routines
So how does all of this connect to your morning routine — or any routine, really?
The thing is, for people with ADHD especially (but honestly for everyone), our habits and routines are highly state-based.
That means the instructions for how to do them are stored inside the state you were in when you built them.
And what did we just learn?
When you’re not in that same state, you don’t have access to all of the thoughts that belong to it.
You only have access to a skeleton version of the routine.
It’s not that the memories are gone — they’re just stripped down.
You remember the outline, not the details.
Let’s see what that looks like in real life.
The Skeleton Version
When you’re lying in bed in the morning, still half-asleep, your brain says, Okay, I just need to get up, get ready, and go.
You think it’ll take twenty minutes.
But what you’re remembering is the bare bones of your routine:
get out of bed → use the toilet → brush teeth → get dressed → maybe eat something → leave the house.
That’s not your real routine.
That’s the state-based summary your sleepy brain can access from a relaxed, low-dopamine state.
The Real Version
Once you start moving, you suddenly remember there are hundreds of micro-steps you forgot to factor in:
You have to take off your pajamas, choose clothes, check if they match, find socks, find shoes.
Use the toilet, wash your hands, dry your hands.
Brush your teeth, rinse the toothbrush, spit, rinse the sink, maybe wipe it down.
Do your hair — which means unpacking the hair tools, plugging them in, waiting for them to heat, styling, unplugging, wrapping cords, putting everything away.
Do your makeup — get it out, apply, adjust, clean up, check in the mirror, maybe redo your eyeliner or change your lipstick.
Eat breakfast — which means taking out the food, preparing it, eating it, cleaning up, putting dishes away.
Then find your phone, keys, purse, earbuds, jacket, maybe your water bottle.
And that’s just a normal day.
All of those tiny steps exist in the version of your brain that’s in motion — the “morning panic” state you usually enter when you’re running late.
That’s the state where your brain finally has access to the full set of instructions.
Why It Keeps Happening Day After Day
When you’re still in bed, you’re not in that state yet.
You’re in a low-energy, low-dopamine, comfort-preserving state — and from that place, your brain only sees the skeleton list.
Because it can’t access the full routine, it underestimates how much time and energy it will take.
Then, once you finally get up and the right state activates, you remember everything you forgot — but now you’re behind schedule and stressed.
That stress becomes the neurobiological key that unlocks the routine.
And then the cycle repeats.
Tomorrow, when you think about getting ready, you’ll again remember only the short version, because the stress state has ended.
You’ll tell yourself, Yesterday I just wasn’t fast enough, or I just need five more minutes.
But it’s not about time.
It’s about state-based access.
You keep trying to run a routine from a brain that doesn’t currently hold the full map.
So every morning, you wake up, remember only the skeleton version of your routine, underestimate the time, and then have to scramble once the full version loads.
And that scramble becomes the very thing that activates your morning brain.
But guess what?
You don’t actually need that stress to function.
You don’t have to keep depending on panic to wake up the “right” version of you.
There’s a way to make your routines easy to access from any state — without chaos, without rush, without relying on stress chemistry to unlock your memory.
You can build them so they make perfect sense no matter how you feel.
So even on low-dopamine, half-asleep, “please don’t make me move” mornings, your brain can still find the full path automatically.
That’s the workaround.
And it’s shockingly simple once you understand how to build your routines the right way.
The Workaround: Build Logic-Based Routines
So how do you escape this endless cycle — the underestimation, the rush, the panic, the stress that has to “wake up” your brain every morning?
You build your routines so they don’t depend on your state at all.
You design them to make predictive sense — so that even when your chemistry changes, the sequence still feels obvious.
What does that mean?
It means your brain automatically loads the steps of your routine in the correct order without conscious effort, because they only make sense in that order.
And your brain never forgets things that only make sense in one logical order.
Think about it.
You would never do your hair and makeup before taking a shower, because they’d get ruined and you’d have to start over.
You would never spray hairspray before styling, because your hair would be stiff, unworkable — or worse, you could burn it while using heat tools.
You would never put on your shoes before your socks, because you’d just have to take them off again to fix it.
And you’d never clean the pan before taking out the food, because then your meal would end up in the sink instead of on your plate.
There’s the logic.
Each step naturally predicts the next one.
Your brain knows this leads to that — and that doing it in any other order would be inefficient, inconvenient, or even counterproductive.
It wouldn’t make sense to do it differently. It wouldn’t benefit you. It would cause problems.
Your brain recognizes this automatically.
Because the sequence makes such perfect sense, you don’t have to think about it at all.
It doesn’t even enter your conscious mind — your brain just loads it and runs it like a background program.
You simply know what to do.
That’s the workaround.
You make your routines so logically connected that your brain can’t get them wrong.
Why Logical Sequencing Works So Effortlessly
When your routines make perfect logical sense, your brain moves them out of fragile, state-based memory and into something far more stable.
Most of the routines that feel hard to start — the ones that vanish the second you’re tired, stressed, or low on dopamine — live in context memory.
That means they’re stored inside the same state they were created in.
So when you wake up in a different state, your brain can only access that skeleton version of those routines that we discussed earlier— the vague outline without the fine details.
That’s why, when you’re lying in bed, you can only remember the basic steps: get up, brush teeth, get dressed, leave.
To access the full version — all the hundreds of little actions you actually do — you’d have to think extremely hard, piece by piece, and visualize each detail deliberately.
But no one does that. It’s too cognitively demanding.
So you keep operating from the shortened skeleton version, and the morning keeps catching you off guard.
Logic-based routines don’t work that way.
When each step makes sense in a single, obvious order, your brain stores it in a completely different system — procedural memory.
That’s the system that runs all the things you can do without thinking:
tying your shoes, typing, washing your hands, using the toilet and wiping yourself, brushing your teeth, pouring a glass of water, filling it, and drinking it.
You don’t rehearse those steps. You don’t have to “remember” them.
Your brain knows immediately what to do because there’s only one sensible way to do it.
That’s what logic-based routines feel like.
You don’t have to consciously think through each action because your brain builds the sequence for you, automatically, in the background.
And that makes the routine absurdly easy.
You start the first step, and the rest unfold without effort.
There’s no internal narration, no searching for the next move.
You can think about completely different things while you’re doing it — hold a conversation, daydream, plan your day — because your working memory is free.
That’s the power of procedural memory: once a sequence is stored there, it doesn’t require supervision.
Your brain runs it cleanly, predictably, and efficiently — even when your chemistry, mood, or energy shift.
So instead of waking up every morning having to rebuild your routine from fragments, your brain simply loads it.
You’re no longer searching for the “morning version” of yourself who knows all the steps, because they’re already there, waiting, wired into logic.
When your routines make sense, your brain doesn’t have to think.
And when your brain doesn’t have to think, life suddenly feels easy.
How to Build Your Own Logical Routine
Now that you know how logic-based routines work, let’s make it practical.
We’ll start with your morning — because the way you start your morning often sets the tone for the rest of your day.
Step 1: Choose a small sequence to fix
Pick just one part of your morning, not the whole thing.
Maybe it’s the first ten minutes after you wake up, or the order you get dressed and make coffee.
Trying to rebuild the entire routine at once will overload your brain and make it feel like too much effort.
You’ll risk teaching your brain, “This is exhausting — avoid.”
So go slow and just pick a bite-sized part of your routine to rewrite, and change one or two steps at a time until the order feels natural.
Step 2: Give every step a reason
As you decide what comes next, ask yourself, Why does it make sense to do it in this order?
If you can’t answer that question, rearrange the steps until you can.
The “why” is what tells your brain, Only this order makes sense.
Example:
When I get out of bed, I fix my bed right away because I’m already there and I like to lay my clothes out on my bed while I’m choosing my outfit. If I wait to do it later, I might take my clothes out and then see that my bed is still messy and then have to set them down somewhere else first, then fix my bed, then pick the clothes up again before I continue. It’s a waste of time.
Next, I’ll go straight to the kitchen to start the coffee pot before going to the bathroom.
It makes sense because the bathroom is closer than the kitchen, so I’ll save time walking back and forth between rooms if I go directly to the kitchen. Also, the coffee can brew while I do some of the other parts of my routine, and will be ready by the time I’m ready for breakfast.
See how every step predicts the next?
You’re creating a chain that makes sense — and because it makes sense, your brain will remember it automatically.
Step 3: Test and adjust slowly
Keep adding or shifting one or two steps at a time.
Each time you make a change, explain it to yourself out loud:
“I do it in this order because it saves time.”
“I do it this way because I’ll already have my hands free.”
“I do this first because it lets me relax later.”
Your brain needs that reasoning to understand why this is the only order that makes sense.
Once it learns the logic, it stops needing conscious effort to recall it.
Now You Know
If you’ve ever wondered why some days you just can’t seem to get into your routine — why everything feels off, why you can’t remember the steps, or why you keep doing things out of order — now you know.
It’s not because you’re lazy, inconsistent, or bad at adulting.
It’s because your brain was in a different state.
You’ve learned that your routines don’t disappear — they just become hard to access when your chemistry shifts.
You’ve also learned that you can design them differently — so they never depend on state at all.
By building logic-based routines, you’ve essentially taught your brain a new language: one that runs on reason instead of mood.
Each step now predicts the next, so your brain doesn’t have to plan or remember anything.
It just follows what makes sense.
That’s how you bypass state-based memory entirely.
You don’t have to rely on panic to remember the full version of your morning routine.
You don’t have to wait for motivation or “the right mood” to start.
You’ve built a system that works from any state — calm, tired, distracted, or fully focused.
And because your brain no longer has to think about every tiny decision, everything feels easier.
Lighter. Quieter. Absurdly easy.
You’re free to use your mental energy for what actually matters.
This is what it feels like when your brain finally gets to do what it does best — follow logic that makes sense.
Your routines stop being something you struggle through.
They become something that carries you.
So try it today!
