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
132 practicesWhat a person expects from a treatment genuinely changes what they get from it. That is not a trick to be exploited, and it is not nothing either.
In some trials the dummy treatment helps around half the people who receive it, and there is work showing benefit even when people were told outright…
The point of explaining ADHD to a parent is to produce a particular kind of parent: one who is kind about it, quick to forgive the day's failures, and willing to make a nuisance of themselves at school.
Those three are results, not manners. Harsh days breed pushing back, pushing back breeds harsher days, and that loop is the main road from ADHD to a…
Treatment is not only about school reports. Lower rates of accidental injury and of other serious harms are reasons in their own right, even for a child whose marks are perfectly fine.
This is the answer to the question about the bright child who is coping academically and whose impulsivity worries you in traffic, on a bike, or…
People who use several kinds of help tend to report more benefit than people relying on one. Medication, therapy, coaching, reading, sleep and movement all seem to add something rather than compete.
That turns a hard conversation into an easier one. Instead of pressing a reluctant partner towards the single thing they least want, you can offer a…
When you explain ADHD to someone who does not have it, describe the effort rather than the outcome. Not that the form is unfinished, but what twenty minutes of trying to fill it in actually took out of you.
Most people around you are judging the visible result, because that is all they can see. One concrete picture of the inside of an ordinary task…
Telling parents that their child's self-management is running behind their age usually brings relief rather than alarm. It names something they had already noticed and had been blaming somebody for.
Left unexplained, parents fill the gap with a story, and the story is almost always that the child is choosing this or that they have parented badly.…
Set jobs at the level the child can manage now, then build up. A task pitched at their age that ends in a row every week mainly teaches them they are hopeless at chores.
Break it down further than feels necessary: not tidy your room, but put the clothes in the basket. Stay nearby for the first few goes, since being in…
Much of what matters most in an assessment never comes up unless you ask for it directly. Unplanned pregnancies, money trouble, sackings, near misses in the car: people very rarely volunteer these.
Put the questions on the form rather than waiting for a moment that feels right, since a questionnaire normalises them and takes the weight out of…
The teenager with ADHD is often the one who admits it while everyone else produces a story. That is not worse judgement about right and wrong, it is less thinking ahead about how it will land.
Parents can read a caution or a suspension as proof of a moral problem, when the honesty in the room points the other way. Instead of a lecture,…
Some families make it a house rule that driving happens only on a day the medication has been taken. It works because it ties a privilege to safety rather than to obedience.
Set it with the young person rather than at them, and be clear it is about the road and not about whether you trust them. It also moves medication…
If a young person says they do not feel ready to drive, take that as information rather than something to talk them out of. Plenty of them know their own attention better than the adults around them do.
Waiting a year is not a failure, and there are other ways to get about. Do ask what sits behind it, because there is a difference between a sober…
Explain ADHD to the child themselves, in words they can hold. Something like: your brain is brilliant at things it finds interesting and needs extra help with things it finds boring, and we are going to work out that help together.
Children build an explanation whether or not you give them one, and the one they build is usually about being bad. A short, matter of fact account,…