As a journalist navigating unmedicated ADHD, I’ve treated sugar like a crutch for as long as I can remember. A square of 70% dark chocolate before writing could achieve what pep talks, productivity podcasts, and aggressively optimistic planners routinely failed to inspire. Only now, though, have I realized this coping mechanism wasn’t sustainable. I thought this was a method of concentration, but it was actually a chemical bribe to get my brain to function.
In January, I stopped outsourcing my stability to a candy wrapper and quit sugar cold turkey. I quickly found that without my afternoon chocolate, I had a hard time getting started on tasks. Sometimes, for a brain like mine, the distance between intentions and actions can feel absurdly large. You can want to start, plan to start, speak at length about starting, and then spend 40 minutes reorganizing tabs and finding increasingly inventive ways not to do what you’ve been avoiding. We often end up explaining this as a lack of discipline or willpower, which makes sense from the outside, but feels very different when you’re the one living through it.
Sugar felt like a way to restart my system. Before an interview, after a mentally exhausting afternoon, or during that dangerous hour when focus begins to disappear, sweetness offered the fastest route from stillness to momentum. But I knew this couldn’t last.
I went into this expecting a 90-day wellness reset, but instead, I encountered a grieving process for a system that had been holding me together.
The first week of the experiment was strange. My body felt mildly offended, and I experienced dull headaches, a hovering irritability, and the sense that an expected guest had failed to arrive. One afternoon, I stood in my kitchen opening and closing cabinets for 20 minutes, looking for productivity behind cereal boxes. Shruti Shah, a psychologist and the founder of Holistic Mind Therapy, suggests this feeling is about losing part of my routine rather than the chocolate itself. “You miss the predictable reward and the emotional function it served,” she says.
Once I reached the 60-day mark, I had a clearer view of my nervous system. As a psychology student who studied reward circuitry for years, discovering my motivation had been propped up by confectionery was humbling.
When I removed the crutch, I had to learn slower, less sparkly ways to build momentum, such as listening to music before writing a difficult email, setting timers to gamify my focus, and having a friend in the room while I worked to survive the dead zone of admin work.
“Instead of asking ‘How do I stop eating sugar?’ we need to ask, ‘What is sugar helping me regulate?’” Shah says.
The social friction was the most revealing part of the 90 days. At birthdays and family gatherings, the pressure to “just have one bite” was relentless. In a culture where celebration is tied to moments of frosting-covered cake, my refusal was seen as a critique of others’ pleasure. “Life should be enjoyed,” people would say, unaware that they were asking me to tear down the new, fragile architecture of my focus for the sake of a social ritual.
But the reward-loop prison is one I am determined to escape. Today, more than 90 days in, my focus is steadier. I still struggle with navigating ADHD and task initiation. Only now, it’s movement and structure that carry me through the day, not sugar.
