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
7 practicesSome of what feels like a flaw in your character is really a job that can be handed to something outside your head: a calendar, a list on the wall, a person who helps you lay out the week.
Coaching for attention difficulties is mostly this, and nothing more mysterious. Someone sits with you, builds the week, works out what comes first,…
A bridge year can be a deferred place, a course at the local college, a job, or a stretch of genuinely doing very little. That last one is a real option and not a refusal to choose.
For someone who has just come apart, a fresh demand can restart the same collapse, so a few months with nothing scheduled is sometimes the…
If 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,…
Sorting goes better fast than carefully. If every item stalls you, ask someone to sit in the room while you work, not to help but to keep the pace up.
A person nearby changes what the hour feels like, and they can be reading their own book the whole time. What they supply is momentum, which is…
Ask a struggling ten year old what division actually is and you will often get a blank, or a method with no meaning under it. Going back to what each operation does is usually worth more than another go at this term's work.
Division is sharing out, or taking the same amount away again and again until nothing is left. Multiplication is that same amount repeated. Children…
If the first medicine disappoints, that is information about the first medicine. Plenty of people who get nothing from one class do well on another.
Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not the same drug at different strengths. They work by partly different routes, so a poor result on one says…
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…