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 practicesIf rating a feeling out of ten means nothing to you, use something that does. Colour in bubbles, point at a picture, hold your hands apart to show how big it is today.
This began as an adaptation for children, swapping the numbered anxiety ladder for bubbles to colour in, and it is just as useful for anyone who goes…
Being far apart is not the same as being out of touch. What usually stops contact is the question of who starts it, not the miles.
Distance turns into disconnection when both people wait for the other one. It helps to fix a when rather than promising to speak soon. The same…
Step in while a child is only starting to wind up, and offer something calming rather than a correction. Slow breathing, counting, a soft toy, a quiet corner for a few minutes.
Three to ten minutes in a set place is plenty. It works best when the offer is warm and matter of fact, one sentence, no lecture about what they did.…
The whole value of a calming corner is that the child can take themselves there. An adult may suggest it, but if it is only ever ordered, what gets learned is obedience rather than self-regulation.
Make it clearly available rather than assigned. They go, they take their few minutes, they come back with a short hello and a nod at whatever they…
Instead of sending a child out to sit and stew, send them to a side table for three very easy worksheets, then straight back to whatever everyone else is doing.
It takes them out of whatever was rewarding about the behaviour without leaving them with nothing to do and an audience to play to. Keep the work…