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Show HN: I built a app to help neurodivergent brains form better habits
A friend of mine who I've known since childhood has adult diagnoses for autism + adhd. He's a business owner and has always struggled with creating and maintaining healthy habits both in his personal and professional life. Those of you with adhd will get it: He knows what habits he wants and needs to form, but the executive function disorder often prevents him from being able to initiate and follow through on them. The autism side of his brain adds a whole extra layer of complexity. Through therapy and a lot of personal research, he's learned techniques to manage this in small doses but has always had difficulty maintaining those habits for more than brief periods of time.
As a fun little side project, I created an app to help him maintain the habits he struggles with based on techniques that we've seen actually work for him in the past. It was meant to be a simple tool that he'd be motivated to use regularly, and it worked! It worked so well that we decided to polish up this little side project and publish it for others to use.
We figured, if it worked so well for him, it'll probably work for others with similar neurodivergent brains for whom more traditional habit forming apps just aren't effective enough.
- The website is linked in the title.
- It's on the iOS App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kudos-habits/id6746104744?plat...
Questions and feedback are welcome!
At the risk of adding too much to this wall of text, I told him I wanted to post on HN and asked him to explain to you all WHY this works so well for him, from his own personal perspective. This is what he had to say:
"Honestly, for me, the way the app works just clicks because it aligns with how my neurodivergent brain actually functions on a neurological level. With ADHD, there’s this well-documented dysregulation in the dopamine reward pathways, so I literally need immediate, tangible reinforcement to activate my motivation system... otherwise my brain just doesn’t engage.
The gamified elements in Kudos basically hijack that system in a good way, giving me those quick dopamine hits and making even basic tasks feel rewarding. And on the autism side, I crave routine and predictability to reduce cognitive load and anxiety, but rigid systems trigger black-and-white thinking and can lead to shutdowns or burnout. Kudos balances this perfectly by offering a scaffolded, flexible structure that supports my executive function deficits without overwhelming me.
I also love that it lets me define my own rewards and success metrics, which strengthens intrinsic motivation and reduces shame cycles. In a way, it feels like it's designed to work with my neurological wiring, leveraging my need for predictability, my dopamine-driven motivation, and my sensory preferences...instead of forcing me to conform to some rigid neurotypical productivity model."
I was recently diagnosed with autism + adhd as an adult. When I look at the screenshots, it seems like the reward system is point based. Do task X, earn N point, once you have Y point you get your self-defined reward. Am I understand this correctly?
I’ve always had problems with rewards I make up like this. If they are too small, they don’t seem to matter to me, and I can just go get the reward without doing any work. When the reward is bigger, even if I do the thing, I won’t actually be ready for the reward, I’ll drag my feet (as it requires some effort to make the reward happen), and after some period of time the reward is completely detached from the action. I went nuts paying off my house, and told myself I’d do something one I finally do to celebrate and reward the effort and sacrifice. I didn’t end up doing anything. I told myself certain things were because I achieved the goal, but it wasn’t. I was going to do those things anyway. I didn’t pay off the house to get a different reward, not having the mortgage to deal with was the reward in itself.
When it feels like I must do something, I tend to rebel against it. I think they call this pathological demand avoidance (pda)? This has the side effect of making me less likely to follow through on things I try and commit to, if it’s because I think I should (or someone else thinks I should) vs having a deep internal drive to do it and understanding why I’m doing it. When the latter is true I can’t be stopped, but with the former, I can’t bother to start.
I’m currently using HabitKit to track some things, the UI is similar to the GitHub commit visualization. I’m not necessarily trying to hit things every day, but I want to be able to see if there are trends or patterns, and if things are getting better or worse. Remembering to go in the app can be a problem. I was able to automate a couple with Shortcuts, which is handy. The only real reward is the hope that the data it generates will be useful, or seeing it visually will evoke some kind of mental shift where I start to actually care about the things I “should” care about.
As for the habit and reward system, it's similarly designed to be something he wants to use vs has to use because his PDA will immediately kick in and rebel against any kind of forced system. Our built-in tutorial tries to provide enough guidance on this to help you understand what types of habits/rewards could be effective for you and your brain so it doesn't run up against the problems you mentioned. The app does a lot of work to reward you for using the app in support of the habits you want to form without triggering the stuff like PDA that you're trying to avoid triggering. If you end up trying it out and have feedback on ways we can improve this, please do share! We're definitely open to feedback and have already received some good ideas for improving the tutorial from others we've shared this with.
It sounds like you and he share a lot of similar struggles. We realized that he wasn’t the only one with these needs so we’re very interested to hear about others’ experiences with the app. Look out for his response later on.