When it comes to ADHD, movement is often treated like a “should” – something you’re meant to force your way into for the sake of productivity, mood, or health. But for many of us, especially those navigating burnout or executive function challenges, the real challenge isn’t willpower — it’s friction. It’s overwhelm. It’s disconnection.
That’s why we’re so excited to share this guest piece by Dr Sonia Ponzo—researcher with a background in psychology and founder of Outset—a behaviour-change-based app designed to help people with ADHD stay consistent with movement. Sonia brings a rare mix of scientific depth, lived understanding, and compassion. In this article, she explores what really gets in the way of exercise for ADHDers, why traditional advice so often misses the mark, and how rebuilding a body-brain connection can quietly change everything.
We’re incredibly grateful to Sonia for offering her time and expertise freely to support the ADHD Pirates community.
Why is movement such a powerful support for ADHDers, especially when it comes to mood, focus, and energy?
Why movement matters for ADHD brains
Movement changes things, not just how your body feels, but how your brain functions and you feel about yourself and the world. And for ADHDers, that change can be the difference between “I know what I need to do but can’t get myself to start” and “okay, we can make the first tiny step”.
It helps with mood, focus, and executive function
There’s a well-established link between physical activity and executive function. We know that moving your body increases dopamine and norepinephrine — chemicals often dysregulated in ADHD. Movement gives structure to time, can stop you from spiralling, and offers a tangible sense of progress.
ADHD and body-brain disconnection
But that’s only part of the story. Most people think of ADHD as mainly a problem with attention or motivation. But underneath that, it’s often a problem with connection, specifically, the connection between what your body is telling you and what your brain understands. You might be tired but still wired, or restless but unable to start. That kind of mismatch creates friction; internally, emotionally, and behaviourally.
A quick explanation of active inference
One way to understand this is through a framework called active inference, which basically says: your brain is constantly guessing what’s going on in your body and the world, and choosing actions based on those guesses. Then it checks what actually happens, and if the guess was wrong, it updates. Maybe your brain predicts you’re fine, but your body’s shutting down. Or it predicts the mug in front of you is cold (guess), but it’s actually hot, so next time, you use a towel (update). The gap between prediction and reality is called a prediction error, and your brain uses it to refine both its beliefs and behaviours over time.
When self-regulation breaks down
The problem is, in ADHD, that loop can break down. Your brain’s guesses might be too rigid, or it might not trust the signals coming from your body at all. When that happens, you lose access to what we call embodied self-regulation, the ability to feel something, make sense of it, act on it, and learn from the outcome. This process is what we refer to as the Embodied Activation Loop at Outset Wellness.
Movement makes the signals clearer
Movement helps rebuild that loop. It creates clear, reliable signals – heart rate, muscle feedback, breathing patterns, that your brain can learn to trust again. Even small moments of movement help refine your internal model of “what state am I in, and what do I need?”. And that’s a big deal when you’ve spent years second-guessing your own needs, impulses, or capacity to follow through.
So it’s not just “movement helps mood”. It’s that movement helps you restore the loop ADHD often disrupts, the one that helps you act and adapt in everyday life.
What makes it hard for ADHD brains to stick to exercise or routines — and how does behaviour change theory help?
The gap between knowing and doing
There’s often this idea that if someone really wanted to exercise, they’d just do it. But ADHD doesn’t work like that. Wanting to move and actually getting yourself to start are two very different things, and that gap between intention and action is where a lot of people get stuck.
One part of that is paralysis, especially when the task feels vague, effortful, or too far removed from reward. You might think about exercising all day, but the moment never feels right. It’s often about task initiation and timing, not motivation.
Repetition doesn’t always work
Then there’s novelty. ADHD brains often crave it, which can make rigid repetition feel unbearable, even if it’s something you like. Routines that rely on doing the exact same thing, at the same time, in the same way, can start to feel difficult to keep up with. What tends to work better is a sense of adaptability, when movement feels like it fits into your rhythm, rather than being imposed on top of it.
Too many choices = no action
Decision fatigue is another big one. Having to choose when, how, what, and where to move every day is exhausting. Even thinking about it can be enough to make you avoid it. That’s why removing friction is so important, the fewer choices, the easier the start.
Support without the pressure
There’s also the issue of accountability. Many people with ADHD struggle to maintain habits when no one’s watching, but also feel uncomfortable in conventional fitness spaces. So they end up stuck, wanting support, but not in a way that adds pressure or performance anxiety.
The brain wants reward now
And then there’s the reward system. A lot of behavioural models assume people act based on delayed rewards, but in ADHD, rewards often need to be more immediate to feel motivating. That doesn’t mean you can’t build long-term habits, it just means the way you design those habits matters.
Designing for brains like ours
This is where behaviour change ideas come in as a way to design systems that work with your brain, not against it. Routines that rely on cues, reduce choice overload, and offer consistent positive feedback are more likely to stick. That’s at the heart of what we’ve built into Outset, a system that handles the logistics so you can focus on showing up.
You’ve spoken about how many ADHDers feel disconnected from their bodies — can you tell us more about that, and how Outset helps rebuild that body-brain connection?
When the signals feel unclear
One of the things I hear most often is this sense that something feels off, but there’s no clear signal to act on. You might notice tension building, or a heaviness of sorts, but you can’t tell whether it means you need to rest, move, eat, stop, start, or just wait it out. That uncertainty creates a kind of friction that isn’t always visible, but shows up everywhere, in missed opportunities and the distinct feeling that your own body isn’t giving you anything reliable to work with.
The Embodied Activation Loop
At Outset, we think of this as a disruption in what we call the Embodied Activation Loop, the internal cycle that lets you notice a change in your state, interpret what it means, act on that interpretation, and update your internal model based on what happened. When the loop is working, it gives you a growing sense of trust in your ability to respond. But when it breaks, as it often does in ADHD, that trust is slowly eroded – and it gets harder each time to believe the next action will work.
An example of disconnection
Imagine a moment where something feels wrong, but you’re not sure what. You try to interpret it, maybe you think you need to get outside and clear your head. You try to go for a walk, but it turns out you were actually exhausted, and your body doesn’t follow. What stays with you is the feeling that even this one small thing you wanted to do was out of reach. And if that happens enough, it starts to shape how you see yourself. You stop trying not because you don’t care, but because the outcomes have stopped teaching you anything useful, and instead, they leave you feeling incapable.
How Outset supports reconnection
Outset is designed to gently support that loop, not by pushing you or correcting you, but by offering just enough structure to help you notice the window, take a small step, and feel what comes of it. Over time, it becomes easier to recognise those internal cues when they show up again, and to respond in a way that feels more grounded, not perfect, but possible.
What are some ADHD-friendly strategies for building movement into daily life without pressure or shame?
Make the start easier
The hardest part is often just starting because the “right” moment never comes. So the most helpful strategies are the ones that create just enough friction in the right direction, while removing it everywhere else.
Use gentle cues and priming
One of those strategies is using cues, signals that help prime your brain to expect movement. That might be a certain time of day, a pair of shoes by the door, a playlist or an app notification that feels like a nudge rather than a demand. When the cue is clear and consistent, the start takes less effort.
Remove decision overload
It also helps to reduce the number of decisions you need to make. For people with ADHD, the buildup of micro-decisions – when, where, what, or how long can be more exhausting than the activity itself. That’s why Outset plans everything for you, based on your actual schedule. The goal is to make showing up the easiest option.
Use gamification to change the story
And then there’s gamification, not in the sense of chasing streaks, but in the way we reframe the experience. At Outset, we use a growing plant to reflect your progress. It’s simple, visual, and designed to help you associate movement with something gentle and alive, not rigid or performative. That small change in framing can impact the way you relate to consistency, so you start seeing it as something that grows with you, more like a journey.
What motivated you to create Outset, and how does it reflect your insight into ADHD?
I was burning out badly, but in a progressive way, the kind where your system begins shutting down, but so slowly that you almost miss it. I was in a demanding leadership role, pushing through constant pressure, and didn’t have the language yet for what was happening. What I did know was that movement helped. Exercise became my only reliable way to feel grounded, the one thing that gave me a sense of clarity, regulation, and control when everything else felt like too much.
So I went full on. But the more I tried to stay consistent, the more pressure it created. It stopped being supportive and started becoming another thing to get right, another system to maintain, another thing to fail at. And that’s when we started building the first version of what eventually became Outset. A tool to take the weight off, something that could help me move without having to plan, decide, justify, or perform.
It wasn’t until later that I started seeking diagnosis for ADHD, and suddenly it all became clear. Everything we’d built to make exercise feel more possible, the gamification, the removal of decision fatigue, the flexible planning, the built-in accountability, all of it made sense through the lens of executive dysfunction. Without realising it, I’d built something to support the exact things ADHD makes hard.
So Outset came from lived experience, of burnout, of trying to find a way to move without burning out further, and of living with unsupported executive dysfunction.
Are there any myths or unhelpful messages you see around ADHD and exercise?
Myth: No pain, no gain
There’s still this theme of “no pain, no gain” in the way exercise gets talked about – like if you’re not pushing yourself to the limit, it doesn’t count. But that mindset is completely misaligned with how motivation actually works, especially in ADHD. Intrinsic motivation, doing something because it feels good, meaningful, or satisfying, is what tends to keep habits going. The problem is, intrinsic motivation isn’t something you can force. You can’t just tell yourself to love running. What helps is reducing the barriers and making it easier to have a good experience (think a nice sunny walk in the park vs a gym session at peak time). That’s often what builds enjoyment over time: consistency and small wins.
Myth: It only counts if it’s an hour
Another myth is that it only counts if you do it for an hour. For a lot of people, especially those managing executive dysfunction, that kind of all-or-nothing framing is exactly what stops them from starting. Movement doesn’t have to be long or structured or even look a certain way to be worthwhile. Even five minutes can make a positive impact – physically, cognitively, emotionally.
Myth: Missing a day means you’ve failed
There’s also the belief that if you miss a day, you’ve failed, that the streak is broken and now it’s ruined. But habits are life-long journeys, that are really made in the decision to come back. Skipping a day doesn’t mean you’ve lost progress, it just means you’re human.
Myth: Discipline and willpower are what matter most
And finally, the one that shows up everywhere: that sticking to movement is about discipline or willpower. For people with ADHD, it’s much more often about friction. If the system you’re using wasn’t designed with your brain in mind, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’ll burn you out. Building something sustainable means designing around how you really function, and adapting from there.
What’s one thing you wish more people knew about ADHD, movement, and motivation?
That motivation isn’t a feeling you wait for, it’s something that gets built, through action, timing, and trust. And for people with ADHD, that process looks different. It’s not about pushing harder or wanting it more, but rather, it’s about removing friction, spotting the right window, and giving yourself enough safety to try without fear of failure.
Movement helps, not because it makes you more productive or fixes your brain, but because it gives you something solid to work with, something you can feel, respond to, and learn from. When movement becomes part of your loop, not a separate task, but a way to tune into yourself, everything starts to change. Not overnight and not perfectly, but in a way that lasts.
Final Thoughts
Movement isn’t about fixing ADHD, it’s about reconnecting with your body in a way that feels doable, kind, and real. When we reduce friction and design support around how ADHD brains actually work, we stop fighting ourselves and start building something that lasts.
About the Contributor:
Dr Sonia Ponzo is a researcher with a background in psychology and founder of Outset, an ADHD-friendly movement app that helps people reconnect with exercise without shame, pressure, or overwhelm. With over a decade of experience in digital health and more than 30 peer-reviewed publications to her name, Sonia has spent her career turning behavioural science into tools that actually work in the real world. She kindly contributed this article on a voluntary basis. We’re proud to share her voice as part of our commitment to practical, lived-experience-led support. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.