Published: December 23rd, 2019
Pattern recognition is one of the most important aspects of living with ADHD.
You must become aware of the patterns in your own life because how you do one thing is how you do everything.
Once I understood this, my entire life changed forever.
You’ve probably heard the old saying that “humans are creatures of habit.”
Well, this is because the human brain uses pattern recognition to process information more easily and conserve mental energy (homeostasis).
The problem is people often aren’t aware of their habits
How you do one thing is how you do everything.
If your house is messy, this is going to reflect in all other areas of your life.
Your work will be messy. Your sleep will be messy. And your relationships will be messy.
If you frequently read half a book, quit the book, and start reading a new book, you’ll have problems with completion in other areas of your life.
You might not even notice this happening!
But you’ll have a bunch of ongoing projects at work that never get finished.
This is also called the Law of Correspondence, which is often thought to be the most important Universal Law.
The Law of Correspondence basically states that our current reality is a mirror of what’s going on inside of us.
For example:
I used to have a really bad habit of getting to the 90% point of completing a project. Then I’d stop, and not go “all the way” for whatever reason.
I first noticed this with my early blog posts on ADHD Boss.
I’d write a great blog post, and almost finish the blog post, but leave a few things missing so that the blog post couldn’t be published (like having a few missing images, or procrastinating on my final round of editing).
Completing the blog post would have taken just an extra 30 or 45 minutes of work. But I would always procrastinate for some reason.
This became a huge issue in my life mainly because 90% completion is just as bad as 5% completion.
In other words, 100% completion is the only thing that matters
The sooner you’re able to complete something, the better you’ll feel, and the better your life will be.
This is why you must become aware of your habits starting today.
Pattern recognition or correspondence influences everything in your life
Your brain always recognizes patterns at a subconscious level, which means there’s no way to “cheat” correspondence.
No one is perfect at this, of course, because no one has perfect patterns in their life.
But the goal is to get as close to perfection as possible.
We want to stack all of life’s odds in our favor.
And as you know, when it comes to ADHD, we especially need every advantage we can get.
Action steps
- Understand that every action you take is ultimately reinforcing a pattern in your life (negative or positive)
- Answer this question: Can you think of a time in your life when you took a certain action and noticed that same pattern reoccur elsewhere in your life?
- Know that it’s possible to use pattern recognition to your benefit by becoming aware of all of your habits in life, and changing your habits accordingly
- Above all else, know that all of your habits are interconnected
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