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
6 practicesThis explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Long acting does not automatically suit everybody. Some people genuinely do better on shorter doses, and it is worth saying so rather than assuming the newer option must be right.
There is a folk belief that a person's own chemistry takes over in the afternoon once the medicine wears off, and the research does not support it.…
Medication does not make somebody care more. It narrows the distance between meaning to do the thing and doing it, and that distance is exactly what the other person has been feeling as being let down.
It helps a couple enormously to have the right name for what has been happening. The intention was real every single time. What went missing was the…
Managing the ADHD is not the goal. Being happy together is the goal, and the ADHD work is only worth doing to the extent that it gets you there.
Keeping that order straight changes the atmosphere of the whole effort. A partner who has spent years being a project stops being one. Requests stop…
Coaching for adult ADHD comes down mostly to one thing: a standing appointment with somebody who will ask how it went. That sounds thin until you have tried keeping a plan alive entirely on your own.
A coach is not a therapist and does not need to be. They hold the horizon you keep losing and the fortnight that has quietly gone by, and they make…
Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.
Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is…
People who are sleeping properly, eating properly and moving a bit tend to want each other more. The unglamorous parts of life management run closer to the bedroom than either of you might expect.
It is worth saying out loud when desire has quietly gone from a marriage, because the usual explanations reach for something heavier: he has lost…