Practice, not discipline — and treat self-care as an experiment
You'll never become 'disciplined' with an ADHD brain, so stop fighting impulse with willpower. Build habits by practice (each attempt is a rep, expect to forget), and do a recovery activity as an experiment to OBSERVE your guilt rather than to 'fix' yourself.
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ADHD brains are pulled by impulses and won’t sustain willpower-based control, so expecting discipline just sets up repeated failure. The answer to building a habit is practice, not discipline: treat each instance of self-care as a rep you practice — expect it to be hard, expect to forget — and keep practicing in spite of forgetting rather than waiting to feel disciplined.
To defuse the guilt that sabotages recovery, run it as an experiment. Schedule one recovery activity, then do it not to ‘take care of yourself’ but to observe what happens — notice when guilt arises afterward and time how long it lasts when you don’t feed it. Engaging or arguing with guilty thoughts (like giving in to a barking dog) reinforces them; observing them calmly lets them subside. Reframe the activity as data-collection, which removes the pressure to feel okay: say ‘yes, I could have done more, but I chose not to, so be it’.
It helps to know the guilt is not factual. ‘I wasted time’ thoughts are conditioned patterns, not truths, and the work is effectively infinite — the marginal tasks skipped (38 vs 40, ‘30 teaspoons out of the ocean’) are meaningless, and even if you’d worked you would never be ‘doing enough’. So the trade-off the guilt is policing was negligible; label it a learned reflex and let it pass.
