Your body

The famous count is not automatically your count. One teacher finds that adding a pause after the inhale wakes her up, while the plain long exhale has her asleep within three breaths.

Protocols get passed around because they worked for someone, often someone with a large audience. That is not the same as fitting you. Keep the shape…

When you are flat rather than wound up, try this. Rub your palms together until they feel awake, let them rest, then breathe in as your arms lift and out as they lower, two or three times.

Sluggish, heavy, far away: those states rarely respond to more calming. A bit of friction in the hands, some movement through the arms and a fuller…

The fast forceful practices are not for everyone. With high blood pressure, heart trouble or glaucoma, leave them out and use the slow ones, which carry no such warning.

Rapid breathing with effort behind it raises pressure inside the chest, the head and the eyes for as long as you keep it going. The gentler lift,…

Any breathing instruction that reaches you through a screen or a book comes from someone who cannot see you. Keep the final say over what your body does.

Recorded instructions have to be general. You are the one who knows that your chest tightens on holds, or that counting makes you anxious. Treat each…

Breath is the quickest way you have of turning your own nervous system up or down. Nothing else you can simply decide to do works on that timescale.

Your heart rate already rises slightly as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, on every breath. So changing how you breathe changes something…

Put a hand just below your ribs and let it move. Most of us breathe up in the chest, and the settling effect comes from lower down, where the diaphragm can actually shift.

You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it…

A child cannot watch their own breathing, so give them something to watch instead. Bubbles through a wand show the out breath as it happens: too hard and it bursts, too weak and nothing comes.

Smelling a flower and then blowing it out gives each half of the breath a picture. The bubble wand is better still, because it answers back straight…

Hot yoga asks you to keep drinking all the way through the class. If forgetting to eat and drink is one of your regular problems, choose a different room.

This is not about the style being bad. It is about matching what you choose to the things you genuinely find hard. Dehydration creeps up quietly and…

There is no breath that calms everyone. The one that settles your friend may leave you worse, and that is information about your body rather than a failure in you.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been…

Start with a count of four in and four out, then drop the count. Once the rhythm is there your body will choose its own length: six and six, eight and eight, whatever settles you.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point.…

Rather than pulling in a big breath, breathe gently and slightly less than you want to, then wait. The deep breath that arrives by itself does more than the one you force.

Keep the breathing light and unhurried, and after a while a mild hunger for air builds. Let it build a little. At some point the body takes a fuller…

Holding your breath for a moment makes the next one deeper, which sounds backwards until you know why. The urge to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide, not by a shortage of air.

Sensors in the brainstem watch the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, and a pause, especially after breathing out, lets it rise a little. The…

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…

Heading towards the shape is the whole job. A perfect triangle is not what the pose is for, and nobody is marking it.

Perfectionism and going too hard tend to travel together, and between them they produce most of the injuries and most of the quitting. If you are…

Go slowly enough to learn something about yourself, rather than only a technique. What is worth keeping is knowing which breath does what in your body.

One round is rarely enough to tell. Try a breath for a minute or two, stop, and check what shifted: the chest, the shoulders, how loud your thoughts…

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…

How often you actually do it matters more than which version you chose. The people who keep turning up tend to get more out of it, and those who carry on at home get more again.

This is quietly encouraging, because an unimpressive practice done regularly beats an ideal one you manage twice. It also sets the expectation…

Part of why martial arts suit some people has little to do with the kicking. Every session opens with a plan and closes with a look back at what happened and what comes next.

Those brackets at each end are doing quiet work: planning, then reviewing, then planning again, which are exactly the things that are hard to hold in…

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…

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…