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 practicesTime with people is not the nice extra you get to once the real work is done. Put it alongside sleep, medication and exercise rather than underneath them.
It helps to treat it like any other part of a plan, with something specific in the week rather than a general intention to be more social. One…
Belonging to the group does nothing. Going does. Having a friend does nothing either, unless you see them.
So count the actual events. How many times this week did you sit with someone, not message them. A number you can check beats a resolution to be more…
When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…
ADHD rarely turns up on its own. If anxiety or low mood is in the room as well, it needs treating in its own right, and that includes when it is the other partner who is struggling.
This is the part that gets missed in couples. One person becomes the identified patient and everybody works on them, while the other one's untreated…
Explain the calming corner on a quiet Tuesday, not in the middle of a meltdown. New instructions do not go in once a child is already rising.
Walk them through it when nothing is happening. This is where it is, this is what you can do there, this is how you come back. Let the whole class…
Whatever the correction is, teach it before you need it. A routine the child already knows can be started with two words instead of a negotiation in front of everybody.
Show them the table, the worksheets, what happens when they finish, and let them try it once while nothing is wrong. After that the instruction is…