Your body

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…

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…

Bolt the movement onto something you would want to do anyway. A game with a friend, a walk to somewhere with good coffee at the end, a route past the river.

People keep up a weekly game with a mate for forty years and never once call it exercise. The friendship is what they turn up for and the moving…

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…

Classes and clubs work mostly because somebody notices when you are not there. It is the being expected, more than the workout, that gets you out of the door.

A running club, a swimming group, a friend at the gate at seven. On the evening when you feel like nothing, an arrangement with another person…

Moving your body and being with people you like are the two most reliable things for feeling well. Doing both at once is not a trick, it is just efficient.

Each of them changes how you feel through the body, and neither depends on you having a good week. A walk with a friend gets you both. If you can…

Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.

Break it down and you usually find a child is fine in four of those and struggling in two. That turns a vague sense that they are awkward into…

Not every family can get occupational therapy. Almost anyone can get outside with a skipping rope, a long rope turned by two people, or a board.

Skipping and boarding ask for much of what a therapist would be working on anyway: both sides of the body keeping time with each other, judging the…

Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.

Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they…

Give a new habit two months rather than two weeks, and change one thing at a time. The old line about thirty days sets you up to feel like a failure on day thirty one.

Routines that wobble make repetition harder, and repetition is the whole mechanism, so it simply takes longer for some of us. Pick one change, keep…

Unstructured play in a big open space settles a child. A structured class teaches them how to be with other children. You want some of each, for different reasons.

If you only ever book the class, you take away the roaming that calms them down. If you only ever send them out to roam, they miss the taking turns…

Whatever gets you outside and quiet for a stretch of time counts. Fishing, sitting in a hide, weeding, waiting in the car park with the window down.

Nobody has to call it mindfulness for it to work like mindfulness. Hours of low demand attention outdoors, with nothing much required of you, is the…

Martial arts happen to bundle four useful things at once: hard physical work, a fixed structure, feedback in the moment, and a teacher who stays. That is why they suit restless minds so well.

Any one of those on its own helps a little. Together they cover the arousal, the shapelessness of time, the need for a reward that arrives today…

Long goals need markers you can reach this month. Belts work because you get a visible, earned step every so often instead of one distant summit.

Build the same thing into anything you are trying to keep up: a distance, a number of sessions, a move you could not do in January. Make it something…

For a child having a hard time, one adult who plainly thinks well of them makes more difference than almost anything else. A coach or a teacher can be that person.

Studies of children growing up through poverty, hunger and worse keep landing on the same finding: those who did well usually had somebody who…

A practice kept up for years stops being something you do and becomes part of who you are. That is when it no longer needs willpower.

People who started something physical as children and carried on often point to it as where their steadiness came from. The early years are the…

Keep a movement practice going long enough and your body starts doing it without you. People who have practised for decades describe the form running itself while their mind is elsewhere.

In the early months it takes all your concentration, which is why it feels expensive. Later it stops asking for that, and you get the calm without…

A few sessions give you an effect that fades. A few months of it starts to change your baseline. Plan for the longer version if you can.

One class leaves you calmer for an afternoon, which is real and also temporary. Fifteen weeks of the same practice is where people start reporting…

With a small child who is struggling with both movement and speech, start with the body. Balance and steadiness come before a child can take in much language or learning.

A child who is using most of what they have simply to stay upright in a chair has little left for the words on the page. Sorting out the physical…

An hour a day of moving enough to warm you and shorten your breath. Keep a record of it, on a watch or on a scrap of paper, because meeting a number you can see turns out to be quietly satisfying.

It does not have to arrive in one block and it does not have to look like exercise. Walking to the shop, taking the stairs, standing at the desk for…

If light touch makes you squirm but firm deep pressure feels wonderful, that is worth knowing about yourself. It is the same preference behind weighted blankets and a very tight hug.

Once you know it, you can arrange for it: a heavier duvet, a firm rather than gentle massage, sitting with your back against something solid,…

If several medications have failed, ask whether anyone else in the family had the same experience. A pattern of non response runs in some families.

It is a question that rarely gets asked and can save a year. If a parent or sibling went through the same list without success and then responded to…

The study most often quoted for magnetic stimulation in attention difficulties had eight people in it, and half of those on the dummy treatment improved too.

That dummy half is the interesting number. It tells you how much improvement can come from attention, hope and being taken seriously, before any…

Lead with what has evidence behind it. Save the thinly supported options for when the person brings them up themselves.

Mentioning something is a form of recommending it, whatever hedges you attach, and families will spend money and hope accordingly. If they raise it,…

If something is safe, affordable and it helps you, the fact that the effect may be mostly expectation is not a reason to stop.

The test worth applying is practical: is it safe, can I afford it, is it taking the place of something that works better, and would that money and…

Regular massage has been studied with restless, distractible children and teenagers, and their teachers noticed the difference in class as well as the young people noticing it in themselves.

The pattern in these studies is modest and repeated: short sessions, twice a week, over several weeks, with mood and behaviour improving rather than…

Aching shoulders and a bad back are not separate from finding it hard to concentrate. Pain takes up room in your head, and there is less left for anything else.

People who are restless tend to hold more tension and pick up more injuries, and then the pain makes the focus worse, and round it goes. So it is…

In placebo studies, people improve even when they have been told outright that the pill is inert. They also usually spend half an hour talking with someone who is paying attention.

That half hour is easy to dismiss as a detail of the study design, and it may be most of the treatment. Which is oddly encouraging: careful listening…

Reviews do not support acupuncture as a treatment for attention difficulties. Some studies of acupuncture alongside counselling have done better than dummy needling alongside counselling, which is a more modest claim than it first sounds.

The likeliest reading is that a warm, unhurried practitioner who examines you carefully is doing much of the work. Needles are very fine and harm is…

People who are sure they could never lie still for an hour tend to be asleep within ten minutes of getting on the table. Being unable to fidget seems to do it.

Worth saying in advance to anyone who is putting off booking. It is the same effect as a car journey knocking out a child who has not stopped moving…

A useful picture: the parts of your brain are sections of an orchestra. In dysregulation they are playing different tunes at different speeds. The aim is timing, not repair.

This is a kinder frame than damage, and a more accurate one. Nothing is broken or missing. What has gone is the coordination between parts that used…

Neurofeedback has its strongest support in attention difficulties, decent support in depression and anxiety, and for trauma it is promising rather than proven.

Reported gains include better sleep and attention, less irritability and fewer trauma symptoms. The honest caveats are cost, wide variation in how…

Long stress does not have one look. Some people end up permanently switched on. Others end up flat, heavy and hopeless. The two need opposite things.

If you are the switched on kind, the work is coming down: a longer breath out, less caffeine, a real end to the working day. If you are the flattened…

The stress hormone that carries you through a hard month also quietens your immune system while it is high. When it drops, the immune side comes back up.

That is the plain version of a relationship usually summed up as stress making you ill, which is too blunt to be much use. Running high and running…

Long histories of unresolved stress show up in bodies: inflammation, gut trouble, broken sleep, conditions that end up labelled unexplained. Being told it is all in your head is both wrong and useless.

There is a well known overlap between hard early lives and diagnoses such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and several autoimmune conditions. Overlap…

An immune system that stays switched on with nothing to fight can begin turning on healthy tissue. It is doing its job with the wrong target.

That is a kinder account than the ones people are usually handed, which tend to imply they brought it on themselves by not coping. None of this is…

Digestion runs on the resting side of your nervous system, which is one reason long stress and gut trouble travel together so often.

People with reflux, irritable bowels or years of unexplained stomach pain are often told the two things are unrelated, or that it is stress in the…

Neurofeedback reads your brain's electrical activity through sensors on your scalp and turns it into a game. Nothing goes into your head.

You might watch a plane that flies smoothly when your brain produces the pattern being encouraged and wobbles when it does not. Nobody tells you how…