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 practicesA child who has spent years being told they are careless will often say yes to whoever finally seems glad of them. Work on how they see themselves is not a soft extra to the clinical work.
Count the corrections in a single day and it is easy to see what accumulates. By the time an offer comes from someone friendly, the pull is belonging…
Most people who try do find something that helps, but often not the first thing they try. Not responding to one class of stimulant says surprisingly little about the other.
The high response figures you may have read come from people who worked through more than one option, not from one prescription going well. Response…
One of the founding figures of biological psychiatry summed the whole business up as some medicine helping some people at some doses some of the time. Knowing that before you start makes the first disappointment much easier to survive.
Most people need more than one adjustment: the dose, then the timing, sometimes the drug itself. Go in expecting the first prescription to be the…
Food colouring is the one narrow exception in this area. Large studies suggest it may mildly wind up some very young children, so a trial removal in a preschooler is a reasonable thing to do.
Keep it in proportion though. This is a minor irritant in a subset of little children, nowhere near the sweeping dietary cause that was claimed…
The restrictive elimination diet has real methodological problems, and it is expensive and exhausting to run. If a family still wants to try it, they can, because unproven and dangerous are different words.
There is usually more to lose by forbidding it. A family who feels blocked either does it anyway without telling you or spends another year…
The most convincing programme for teenagers does the obvious thing. It runs at school, twice a week, so nobody has to be driven anywhere: homework systems, organisation, some social practice and sport, in the place where the trouble actually happens.
By the teenage years the leverage parents had is thinning, and a clinic appointment is the first thing to fall off the week. Putting the help inside…