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
7 practicesThe planning part of the brain is the last to finish growing, and it keeps developing well into the twenties. Eighteen is a legal age rather than a developmental one.
This is worth saying plainly in a family where someone is being asked why they cannot just be responsible now. Nobody expects a fourteen year old to…
If a year out is coming, call it a bridge rather than a gap. A gap is a hole in a record. A bridge is going somewhere.
That word will be repeated at every family gathering for twelve months, so it is worth choosing carefully. A bridge year has a direction and an end,…
Writing things down is not evidence that your memory has failed. It is what happens once there is more in your life than one head can hold.
Most people who refuse a system are protecting something: the sense of being capable, of not being the sort of person who needs help with this. Argue…
Saying that medication helps is not the same as saying everyone should be on it. If you have walked in braced for a push, it is fine to say so at the start.
Plenty of people do well with sleep, movement, work that suits them and someone in their corner, and plenty of people need all of that and a tablet…
Writing 'do not substitute' on a prescription tells the pharmacist what to hand over. It does not tell an insurer to pay for it, and that surprise at the counter is where a lot of prescriptions quietly get abandoned.
If a particular brand is being chosen for a reason, say out loud what it might cost and what the fallback is if the price turns out to be impossible.…
Rather than arguing that someone ought to get organised, ask one question. Would your life be better if fewer things slipped, fewer people were annoyed with you, and you spent less of the day worrying about what you had forgotten?
The answer is nearly always yes, and it lands differently when the person says it instead of hearing it. Keep the list concrete and drawn from their…
Somebody will eventually ask you whether you want what is best for your child. It is a sales line, and knowing that in advance is most of what you need to withstand it.
Parents of a newly diagnosed child are frightened, motivated and often exhausted, which is exactly the state that gets marketed to. The question is…