Areas › Your body
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
10 practicesWhere ADHD and disordered eating meet, the pattern is more often bingeing, or bingeing and purging, than strict restriction. Restriction tends to travel with over-control, while bingeing travels with impulse and reward seeking.
This matters because the questions asked at assessment are usually the restriction ones, so a binge pattern can sit unnoticed for years. If you…
Pick one small change and leave the rest alone. A full overhaul asks the most of you at the point when you have the least to give, and it usually collapses in the second week.
One change, small enough to be almost boring, kept for a month. Then another. It feels slow while you are in it, and it is the version that tends to…
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…
When digestion goes wrong there are usually two things to look at rather than one: something you are eating that does not suit you, and a body too braced to digest properly. Checking only one door tends to leave you stuck.
Digestion mostly happens when your body believes it is safe. If you eat every meal with your shoulders up round your ears, that alone can show up as…
Months of fog, where thinking feels like wading, is a real complaint and deserves looking into rather than waving away. It usually has more than one cause, which is part of why it gets dismissed.
Fog sits where several things overlap: dissociation, anxiety, poor sleep, thyroid and iron problems, infections, medication. Because it belongs…
Moving first does not only help you concentrate. It takes some of the heat out of being stuck, which is often the thing that ends the task.
For a lot of people the problem is not the maths, it is what happens inside them when the maths does not come immediately. That surge of frustration…
Hours of nothing, then panic, then three hours locked onto the wrong task, then dread, then a promise that tomorrow will be different. If that is your day, it is a known pattern and not a character flaw.
People post this shape as a joke and clinicians recognise it as an accurate description. Seeing it written down is often the moment something…
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…
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…
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…