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 practicesA 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…
Sitting in a room with other people who lose their keys, cry at nothing and hate themselves for both does something no explanation can. You find out you were never the only one.
Groups also do encouragement better than a therapist can. When someone with the same trouble asks whether you managed the homework, it does not land…
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…
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…
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…