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
8 practicesWhat you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.
If you are beginning something new and half of you thinks it is nonsense, say so. A doubt that stays unspoken tends to come out as a missed…
Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.
If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…
Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.
Use it the way it was meant to be used. Review it as the child grows instead of filing it as a fixed fact about their brain, and think about how you…
Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.
So ask, before handing over another tool: how do you feel about the diagnosis itself? Sometimes the honest answer is that they still half hope it was…
Stimulants are not the only licensed route. Atomoxetine, guanfacine and clonidine all hold approval for attention difficulties, and they matter when a stimulant cannot be used.
They usually sit after stimulants rather than beside them, because the comparative evidence still favours stimulants overall. They come into their…
A heart tracing before starting a stimulant is not routinely needed. Some practices still ask for one anyway, and it can hold a child up for months.
What the guidance asks for is a careful history and an examination, with a tracing kept for children whose own or family history warrants it. An…
Licences start at six years old, and that number comes from how trials have to be run rather than from a safety finding. Younger children do get treated where the case is strong.
Trials need the child's own assent alongside a parent's consent, and assent means a form the child can read and understand, so studies stop where…
There are three families of medicine here: the stimulants, the agents that work on noradrenaline alone, and the alpha-2 drugs that began as blood pressure treatments. Three routes rather than three brands of one thing.
That matters when one of them does not work or cannot be used. A poor response inside one family says little about the others, so a sequence has…