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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
62 practicesSome 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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Do not stop dead. Give the end of anything energetic a few minutes of winding down, so the change of gear is a routine rather than a demand.
Stopping is a transition, and transitions are where things fall apart for a lot of people. A short unwinding phase, the same one every time, takes…
A scheduled break does not break concentration. It is the unplanned wandering off that does that, and a known break tends to replace it.
Teachers usually expect movement breaks to shatter the lesson and find the opposite: children come back more easily because the break is part of the…
A promising study can be very small. Thirteen teenagers, teachers doing the rating, and a fortnight of follow up is a good start and not a settled answer.
The clever part of that design is the follow up, because it asks whether anything survives after the classes stop, which is where a lot of attention…
When nobody has checked whether a benefit lasts, that is not the same as finding out it does not. Following people up for a year costs money that most studies never had.
Two mistakes sit either side of this. One is reading a gap in the evidence as bad news. The other is assuming something lasts because a trial…
The lift from a morning run does not last all day. It fades by the afternoon, which is information about when to move rather than a sign it failed.
People often notice they are sharp through the morning and gone by three. If your hardest hours are later, put some movement in before them: a walk…
Move just before the difficult task, not after it as a reward. Five minutes of skipping, stairs or running on the spot, then sit down to the thing.
The window straight after moving is when focus is at its best, so that is the bit worth spending on whatever you have been dreading. For a child,…
Almost nobody needs convincing that exercise helps. The gap is between knowing it and doing it, so spend your effort there.
More facts will not close that gap. What closes it is arranging things so the session happens with fewer decisions in the way: kit by the door, a…
Chasing the big hit is a trap. Aim for the quieter satisfaction you can have most weeks, because that is the one that lasts.
If you are built to seek out intensity, exercise can turn into another place to chase it: further, faster, more extreme, until you are injured or…
Start the movement slow enough that it is almost boring. Speed it up once it has gone smooth, and only then add the thinking part.
Throwing a beanbag back and forth, bouncing a ball, drumming on the table: pick something plain and let it become automatic before you make it…
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…
Arrange to meet someone. A neighbour at the gate at eight, a friend expecting you, even an app counting a streak. Turning up for someone else is easier than turning up for yourself.
Benefits that arrive in six months are weak motivators. Something that pays out today works better: a person waiting, a number that goes up, a…
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…