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Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
What works for this
Working from the body first
A body that has not slept, eaten or moved has less left over for holding itself steady. Changing the state you are in is often faster than changing the thoughts you are having, and it is more reliable when you are already worn out.
One move, today
A long slow out breath, longer than the in breath, three times. The out breath is the part that does the work.
What matches
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Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking…
Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.
The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…
Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.
Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…
Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.
The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…
Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.
The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…
Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.
Tracking anything in your head is hard when your head is already full, and harder still when concentration is one of the things that has taken a hit.…
Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.
The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…
The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.
Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…
Skin prick and IgE blood tests find real allergies. The IgG food sensitivity panels sold direct to families have not been shown to measure sensitivity at all, and they tend to come back with a long list of foods to avoid.
IgG antibodies mostly show that you have eaten something, not that it harms you, which is why the results look alarming and change so little when…
A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.
One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…
The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.
In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…
Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.
If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…
Put an actual number on it: how many coffees, teas, energy drinks and colas in a normal day. Without that number, your sleep problems, your anxiety and how well a medication is working are all being read against an unknown.
People underestimate this, partly because it feels embarrassing and partly because a large takeaway cup is often two or three servings. Count across…
Stimulants sharpen focus in almost anyone, so responding well to one does not confirm you have ADHD. The diagnosis comes from your history and how you function, not from a trial of tablets.
This cuts both ways. Someone can be handed a diagnosis on the strength of a good response, and someone else can be doubted because their response was…
Health advice usually assumes a kitchen, a fridge and money for the week. If you are working with less than that, the answer is not to try harder at the advice. It is to shrink the plan until it fits what you actually have.
A plan you cannot keep does more than fail. It quietly adds to the pile of evidence that nothing you do makes any difference, and that pile is heavy…
Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.
People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…
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…
A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.
Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…
If you are testing whether a food affects you or your child, the test has to be complete. Among children with suspected sensitivity to artificial colouring, most reacted to as little as 100 mg, so a bit left in is enough to blur the answer.
What usually happens is that a family removes the obvious sources, misses the ones hidden in medicines, sauces and cereals, sees no change, and…
Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.
Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…
Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.
The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…
If you are going to test whether a food matters, work out in advance where the plan will leak. School lunch swaps, a grandparent's biscuit tin, your own memory on a hard week: all of it decides whether the answer means anything.
Change one thing at a time and keep everything else steady, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Then be honest about who is running the…
If the word exercise makes you flinch, drop it. Say moving about, or getting out, and see whether a plan turns up.
For a lot of people that word carries school changing rooms and years of not keeping things up. Swap it and the list of things that count grows:…
Missing a day is not the end of the programme. You missed a day. Tomorrow you carry on.
The dangerous part is not the missed session, it is the story that follows it, the one where you have blown it so you may as well stop altogether.…
When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.
The pause can be tiny. Say out loud what you did, tell someone, sit with it for a minute, thank God for it. Racing straight on to the next target…
When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.
Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…
Use a timer you can see rather than a warning you have to remember. A dial that shrinks, or a light that goes from green to red, does the work that five more minutes never quite does.
Time is not something everyone feels passing. Turning it into something you can look at moves the job from guessing to seeing, which is much easier.…
One minute of moving between tasks. Star jumps, a lap of the corridor, anything that gets the blood going before you sit down to the next thing.
Classrooms that do this report smoother changeovers and better recall of whatever was just taught. The same trick works at a desk: end one job, move…
A silent room is not restful for everybody. If every cough and creaking knee pulls at you, ask for music or bring headphones with something plain in them.
Too little going on can be as unsettling as too much. A low steady sound covers the sudden little noises that keep snagging your attention. Some…
When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.
They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…
Five minutes of moving about sharpens concentration enough to notice. You do not need a session, you need a lap of the building.
Before a task you have been avoiding, get the blood going for five minutes. Stairs, a brisk walk to the end of the road, star jumps in the kitchen if…
It does not have to be one block. Ten minutes here and ten there add up to the same total, and they are far easier to get.
An hour set aside is an hour that one interruption can swallow. Bits scattered through the day survive better and they break up the sitting, which is…
Nobody sits down at a piano and plays Mozart the first afternoon. Set the bar at this week rather than at the finished version of yourself.
The stretch between starting and being any good is where most attempts die, because the reward sits a long way off and today feels like nothing.…
Give yourself an hour rather than a fortnight. A short window creates the pressure that gets a thing started, where a long one quietly fills up with everything else.
Two weeks of notice usually means the work happens in the last few hours anyway, with all the dread in between. So set a smaller box on purpose:…
When a child starts martial arts and their maths marks go up, the maths did not improve. Their attention did, and timed maths tests measure attention as much as arithmetic.
It is worth being clear about this, because the wrong reading sends people looking for a movement class that teaches numbers. What actually changed…
End a session with a few minutes of sitting still. The styles that close with quiet seem to help most with the pause before reacting.
That pause is the couple of seconds in which you get to decide whether something is a good idea. It is trainable, and stillness right after exertion…
Teaching a child to fight works better when it comes with a plain rule: you defend, you never start it. The rule is doing as much work as the training.
A child whose brakes are slow benefits from having the decision made in advance, out loud, many times over. Then it is not something to work out in…