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 practicesBefore 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…
Before you explain anything about ADHD to someone, ask what they already think it is. What they tell you decides what your explanation can land on.
People arrive with family stories, cultural rules about mental health and firm views about medication, and none of it shows up unless you invite it.…
By the time somebody comes for an assessment, the poor opinion of themselves is usually decades old. Assume it is there even when the person in front of you is visibly doing well.
It rarely arrives as a complaint. It shows up as apologising for taking up your time, as brushing off achievements, as a joke about being useless…
When a young person with ADHD goes through a first breakup or loses a friendship group, stay closer than usual. Do not wait for the next arranged contact.
Rejection lands harder here, and impulsivity shortens the gap between feeling unbearable and acting on it. A short unannounced check in, a lift…
With children, acting a situation out teaches far more than talking about it. Play the scene, swap roles, get it wrong, do it again.
Explaining social rules to a child who missed them leans on the same steady attention that let them slip past in the first place. Rehearsal skips…