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
5 practicesWhen your child comes to you in a spin, the kind thing is to stay warm and steady rather than to promise that it will be fine. Reassurance settles the next ten minutes and feeds the asking.
It sounds cold and it is not. What your steadiness says is two things at once: this feeling is real, and I think you can carry it. Keep it short and…
Tell your partner, on a good day, that the things you say at full volume are not a fair record of what you think. Not as an excuse. As information about how you work.
It changes what lands. If they know in advance that the heat is real but the words are unreliable, they can wait for the version that arrives twenty…
One sign that the heat has come off a little: you can hold I am furious with you and you probably did not mean it in the same moment, without dropping either one.
In the middle of an argument that second thought is simply not available, and its absence is not a failure of character. It comes back as the arousal…
Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.
Say the mismatch out loud when things are calm, so that it is understood before the next row rather than argued about during it. If you are the fast…
Saying I need a break only works if you have agreed beforehand what a break means. How long it lasts, what the other person does meanwhile, and when the two of you come back to it.
Settle it on a calm evening. Twenty minutes, no following, no messages in between, and we sit back down at nine. Then keep the return time exactly,…