Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
What works for this
Implementation intentions
Putting things off is mood repair rather than laziness: delay removes the bad feeling straight away and the cost lands later. So the move is not more willpower, it is a plan specific enough to run without a decision.
One move, today
Write one sentence: when it is [time] and I am at [place], I will [the first small action]. Naming when and where is the part the evidence supports.
What matches
5 practicesWho pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.
With a sixteen year old at home on the family plan, parents setting terms is reasonable and worth saying out loud. With an adult, the same move…
Ask your child to show you their feed and explain it to you. You are asking to be taught rather than to inspect, and from the other side those feel nothing like each other.
Something shifts when the young person is the one who knows more. They slow down, they explain who these people are, they tell you which bits are…
Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?
Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they…
Try one hour with the phone away and out of reach, then talk about what came up. The hour itself is the information.
What surfaces is usually specific and useful. The twenty minute mark where the hand starts moving. The exact worry about what is being missed. The…
Pick one series and watch it together on the same evening each week. The point is not the programme. It is that something puts the two of you in the same room on purpose.
With an older teenager or a young adult, a set night can carry a relationship through stretches when talking is hard. Some weeks you will pause it…