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
4 practicesIf most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.
In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together,…
Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.
The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…
Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.
Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…
When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.
Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…