Similarly, North Carolina allows unaffiliated to choose their primary, but R and D must vote in their registered primaries. Definitely good to know your state’s laws before taking OP at face value!

I see my cat doing the same! At 16, she started pawing me incessantly while I was sleeping. Over 3 weeks I lost a lot of sleep and tried many ways to appease her. Finally I was so fed up I grabbed and held her so close she couldn’t paw me any more. She instantly relaxed and purred. The whole time the pawing was a request for me to cuddle her in my arms.

Three years later, the pawing has continued and expanded. She uses it to make me lift the blanket for her or reposition myself in ways more comfortable for her. In the past year, she’s decided I must face her while I sleep, so if I ever roll over on my side she will paw the back of my head until I face her again. She is so needy and getting worse all the time, but at 19 years old, I’ll give her whatever she wants for whatever time we have left together.

Sorry for the long message ahead :)

This is a TL;DR list I wrote to help when my cousin was struggling to eat and having stomach aches whenever he did eat:

1. By medical definition, “anorexia” just means low/no appetite. Anorexia nervosa is the intentional eating disorder.
2. Anorexia can cause stomach pains, especially following a meal. Fix this by eating frequent small meals or snacks.
3. Cut your diet down to bland food and introduce different things in slowly or document your food intake to figure out if there are any allergies/intolerances causing you to not feel well.
4. Make food a routine using external motivation to eat, such as alarms, calendar invites, or planning meals with coworkers/friends.
5. Suggested rule of threes: 3 meals, 3 snacks, at least 3 hours apart. Set a timer!
6. Find easy meals you can always eat. Whether it’s takeout or just something super easy to make, have a staple you can always fall back on when you don’t want to think about food. A rice cooker with a steamer basket was a game changer for me, and lately it’s been Trader Joe’s frozen foods.

Learning #1 was what made me realize my relationship with food was unhealthy and needed to change. #2-3 might not apply to your situation but I’m leaving them in case anyone else needs it.

#4 and 6 really are the answer to your question. When I got my first job out of college, I ate lunch daily with coworkers even if I had no desire to eat, which greatly helped the last thing I’ll share: I redefined what I thought of as hunger.

I realized even when I didn’t consciously feel the need to eat, my body had symptoms. I paid attention to things like lightheadedness, a tightness in my stomach, and shakiness, and started considering those to be “feeling hungry.” After forcing myself to eat more consistently and listening to my body, I actually started to feel hungry on a regular (daily-ish) basis.

Oh, and for a year or two I lifted weights 3x/week and that made me hungrier than I’d ever been in my life. The first three months I always felt hungry. But that’s a bigger commitment than the other suggestions :)

I hope this might help you!

LOL, relatable. I also had to literally train myself over years to feel hungry, and all that training goes away when I’m really stressed. Living with a partner is the best thing for my eating habits. He needs to eat, so I eat… at least once a day.

Thanks for speaking to the other side, because that’s so hard to believe. I don’t know about everyone with ADHD, but it definitely seems to be a common shared experience. The only habits I do completely without thinking are a) putting my seatbelt on in the car, and b) picking my phone up like 100 times a day. Anything bigger, even something like eating, is something I have to will myself to do.

And when I’m trying to form a “habit,” like certain types of note taking or task planning at work, no matter how effective it is and how much I like it, I never manage to do it more than about 3 weeks before my brain just completely shuts off that pathway and it’s like I forget that process exists altogether.

If I don’t put my meds on my nightstand AND have a reminder on my phone, I will forget them most of the time. Daily activity, takes almost no brain power, and it still doesn’t trigger in my head as something I need to do unless I physically see it.