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
4 practicesWith attention difficulties the organising side often runs a few years behind the birthday. A nineteen year old may be running life more like a sixteen year old, and that is a lag rather than a verdict.
Set expectations against where someone actually is instead of what year they were born in. That way the support that felt normal at school does not…
A wave across the road, a joke with the man in the shop, asking someone how they are and meaning it. These unplanned seconds count for more than they look like they should.
They are also the easiest place to start when arranging a proper meet up feels like too much. Almost nothing is at stake in a greeting, so a fear of…
Some of what looks like muddle is the system's fault. Our tenth month is named for eight, because two months were added later and nobody renamed the rest.
Worth saying to anyone who feels stupid about dates and forms. A calendar whose numbers are out of step, a tax year starting in April, forms asking…
Before you offer anyone the upside of their ADHD, say the hard part out loud first. One patient's answer to being told it was a gift was to ask where he could return it.
A reframe offered too early does not sound hopeful, it sounds like you were not listening. Name the cost in specifics, the job that went, the…