Your body

These practices are not only pleasant. They change things you could measure, which is worth knowing on the days when pleasant is not reason enough to bother.

Yoga and breath work tend to get filed under relaxation, and that undersells them. There are claims made about them shifting the chemistry involved…

A good instructor says light, moderate, heavy. A poor one says set the dial to three. Only one of those takes account of the body you actually brought with you.

Fixed settings guarantee that somebody in the room is working far too hard and somebody else is barely working at all. If you tend to go flat out and…

There are two skills here rather than one: letting your body move and settle in its own way, and being able to steer yourself deliberately towards rest or alertness. It is worth having both.

Most people are strong in one and shy of the other. If you always take charge, your body never gets to finish anything on its own. If you only ever…

If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.

Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…

Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.

Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…

Irritable bowel symptoms turn up more often in people with ADHD, and they tend to track stress. If your stomach is at its worst in the weeks when everything else is at its worst, that is information rather than coincidence.

Two things help more often than they get suggested. Cutting caffeine frequently settles symptoms on its own, since it speeds the gut up and raises…

If your mood drops reliably as the light goes, that is worth naming as a thing in its own right. Seasonal low is more common alongside ADHD, and a light box first thing in the morning helps a lot of people.

Use it early in the day and use it consistently, since the timing is part of how it works. It is also worth asking whoever prescribes for you about…

If sitting still with your eyes closed has never worked, do it moving. Walking, washing up, gardening: the exercise is the same, and there is something to hold on to.

Sitting meditation asks for the hardest possible version of the task, sustained inward attention with nothing outside to grip. Attach attention to…

Walk somewhere at a deliberately slower pace than normal. Stop now and then to look at something properly, and let your breathing settle into the pace.

Choosing to go slower is itself the exercise, because it is a small piece of holding back that you can actually feel. Ten minutes is plenty. Outdoors…

If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.

Being able to disappear into a scene is a real ability, even when it has mostly got you into trouble at school and in meetings. A recording that…

Left, right, left, right. Walking, swimming, drumming and rowing all give the body the same steady side to side rhythm that the seated techniques are copying.

If tapping your own shoulders feels odd, or you would rather not do anything that looks like a technique, go for a walk instead and let the rhythm do…

Your settling kit should cost nothing. Tea you already buy, a photo already on your phone, an old jumper, a smooth stone, a puzzle that takes your whole attention.

Anything you have to buy first becomes a reason not to start, and for anyone short of money it can add a layer of shame to the thing that was meant…

Move earlier in the day if you can. Whatever it gives you is then available for the hours that follow, and the day has fewer chances to swallow it.

Evenings fill up with everything that got postponed, and the session is usually first to go. Morning does not have to mean dawn: before work, after…

Put music on. A faster tempo pulls your pace up without you deciding to, and the same effort feels lighter when there is something to listen to.

Make a short list you genuinely like and save it for moving, so it does not turn into background. Podcasts and audiobooks do a similar job if music…

Being outside gives your attention something to rest on rather than something to hold. That is why an hour outdoors leaves you clearer than an hour lying on the sofa.

Indoors, most of what you look at wants something from you. Outdoors, leaves moving, water, birds, the light changing, all of it holds you without…

You do not need greenery for outside to help. Snow, grey sky, bare trees, a car park at dusk. Getting out still does something.

This matters if you live somewhere that is brown and frozen for half the year, or in a city with more concrete than park. Wrap up, go out for fifteen…

No particular kind of movement wins. Balance work, martial arts, tai chi, swimming, all of it helps about as much, and what predicts the benefit is moving regularly at all.

This is good news, because it means you can stop researching and start doing. Pick whatever you have access to and will still be doing in a month. If…

Learn a long sequence in small pieces and join them up afterwards. Nobody should be holding twelve steps in their head at once.

Take the first two moves until they are boring, then add the third. It feels slower and it is not, because the version learned this way stops falling…

Doing the identical sequence every time is not boring for everyone. For some people the sameness is precisely what settles them.

Tai chi runs the same series again and again, and there is nothing to decide once you know it. It is a bit like having a programme on that you have…

Slow movement practices seem to help mood, sleep and the general hum of stress. Bringing that background level down often does more for your concentration than trying to concentrate harder.

Running on a constant stress signal wears down exactly the part of you that plans, waits and holds a thought. So lowering the load is not a soft…

Tai chi, qigong, karate, whatever is running near you at a time you can make. Choose on availability, cost and what you actually like, because those decide whether you keep going.

The ingredients are much the same across these: steady movement, a structure somebody else designed, and a session that happens whether or not you…

A hard walk or a run works a little like a small dose of something. Alertness up, mood up, for a while afterwards.

This is a useful way to think about it because it puts movement in the category of things that do something to you, rather than things you ought to…

Movement gives you back some willingness, not just some focus. The problem is often not that you cannot concentrate but that you cannot make yourself care enough to start.

Those are two different difficulties and the second one is usually the more disabling in adult life. After moving, the same task tends to feel…

The best exercise is whichever one you go back to. Something you enjoy, outdoors if you can, with other people if that helps, and above all something you will do again on Thursday.

There is always a more efficient programme on paper. It does not matter if you stop after a fortnight. Judge any plan by whether you would still be…

Moving your body is not a pleasant extra alongside the proper treatment for low mood. It has been tested as a treatment in its own right and it holds up.

This matters most when you are already doing other things and still struggling. Walking, cycling, swimming, anything that lifts your heart rate for a…

If a movement class sounds like it comes with somebody else's beliefs attached, ask what actually happens in the room before ruling it out. Much of it can be done as plain movement.

Stretching, holding a shape, breathing steadily, none of that belongs to anyone. Teachers vary, and plenty will leave out the chanting or the framing…

You do not have to walk into a room full of strangers for this to work. The moving and the attention are the active parts, and both travel happily to your living room.

Group classes suit some people and cost others far more than they give. A video at home, a quiet corner, the same fifteen minutes, all of it counts.…

How often you move matters more than how hard. Pick something you would still do on a mediocre Tuesday.

Big efforts on good days followed by nothing for a fortnight tend to average out at very little. Three easy sessions a week that you actually keep…

Some of what you are carrying has not finished happening. Movement that soothes rather than pushes tends to suit that better than anything strenuous.

Advice built around a danger that has passed does not fit a person still meeting it weekly, whether that is racism, an unsafe household or work that…

Rest is not the prize waiting at the end of the work. It is part of what makes the work possible, and it does not have to be earned first.

Self control runs down over a day the way a battery does, and the thing that fills it back up is properly stopping. What that looks like is yours to…

A regular sitting practice is training rather than a treat. What you practise when things are calm is what your body can find when they are not.

The state people describe in mindfulness and the state of feeling safe in your own body overlap almost completely. That is a good reason to keep the…

Yoga, slow breathing with feedback, neurofeedback and listening programmes are all aiming at the same target. Pick the one you can actually get to and keep doing.

Because they share a mechanism, they are largely swappable. Cost, travel, waiting lists and whether you enjoy it are legitimate grounds for choosing…

If you understand your history perfectly and nothing has changed, you are not failing at this. Insight alone is pushing water uphill against the current of information coming from your body.

Articulate people get stuck here often, because talking is the thing they are best at. What tends to be missing is an actual experience of being safe…

None of this makes thinking useless. Making sense of what happened, and changing what you concluded about yourself, does work that no breathing exercise touches.

The body work settles the alarm. The thinking work deals with the verdict you passed on yourself afterwards: that you are weak, that it was your…

Being still is not the problem. The circuit that shuts you down under threat is the same one that lets you sleep deeply, digest, rest and curl up with someone you love.

So the aim is not to stay switched on. It is to be still and safe at the same time, which is a capacity you can rebuild rather than a symptom to…

Deep rest needs a dose like anything else. If a long daily relaxation is leaving you flatter each week rather than steadier, make it shorter.

Someone can start a forty day programme of long guided rest with the best intentions and find that by the second week they are sinking instead of…

Real rest, closeness and unhurried prayer all ask for the same thing: being still while feeling safe. That is harder than it sounds if stillness has ever been dangerous.

It is why some people cope beautifully in a crisis and find a quiet evening unbearable, and why intimacy and slow worship are often the last things…

If a practice feels like homework you are failing at, turn it into a game. Some feedback tools do this for you, bringing colour and birdsong to a grey screen as your heart rhythm settles.

Trying hard to relax is a trap. The effort keeps you keyed up, and then you have one more thing to be bad at. Play sidesteps that entirely. It is the…

You do not need other people to reach a settled state. Breath, a slow walk somewhere green, a cat asleep on your lap: all of them get you there.

The name social engagement system makes it sound as though company is the only door, which is bleak if you are isolated, and worse if people are the…