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 practicesIf a parent has been saying since the first year of school that something is wrong with their child's reading, start from the assumption that they are right. They have watched more of it than anyone else has.
The usual story is years of being told the child is fine, a little behind, will catch up, and then a diagnosis at nine or ten when the easiest years…
Real footage of people dying circulates without any warning, sometimes buried inside a video that starts off looking harmless. Young people rarely raise this themselves, so it is worth asking.
Ask plainly what they have come across that they wish they had not seen, and how often it happens. There is no preparation before it and nothing…
Among teenagers, saying they want to die has become something you say when the bus is late. You can no longer read intent off the phrase, in either direction.
So the words neither prove there is danger nor prove there is not. What tells you is everything the words leave out: whether there is a plan, whether…
When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.
The question is simple enough. Has anything about someone dying gone round your school or your feed lately, and did you see it. Then ask how it left…
Asked what all the scrolling had done to her most, one young woman did not say sad. She said angry, more or less all the time.
Constant irritability in a teenager usually gets worked up as depression or ADHD, and sometimes that is right. Saturation belongs on the list too,…
For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.
One young woman with a history of being bullied found her platform use feeding the depression, the social anxiety, the fear of leaving the house and…