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
9 practicesNobody tolerates something unpleasant for no reason. Before starting anything difficult, get clear about what you want on the other side of it, in your own words.
Something like: I want to sit an exam without being sick, so I am willing to practise feeling uncomfortable. The sentence has to be yours. A goal…
Setting out to get rid of worry altogether sets you up to fail twice, first at the worry and then at the failing. A kinder aim is to change how you sit with it.
Anxiety and ADHD keep close company, and for most people some background hum does not go away. What can change is what happens next: whether you…
If your only system for remembering things is your head, of course you are anxious. Nothing is safe in there and some part of you knows it.
Some people hold everything mentally because letting go of it feels like the thing will stop existing. The answer is not trying harder to remember.…
Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.
After years of being told you get things wrong, a low estimate of yourself does not feel like a distortion, it feels like the evidence. So argue with…
When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.
At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do…
If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.
Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…
Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.
They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…
Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.
This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…
If therapy for ADHD did little for your thirteen year old, that is not a sign they were not trying. The self monitoring it leans on is still being built at that age, and it builds later in ADHD than in most.
The practical reading is about timing rather than willingness. Younger teenagers usually do better when the adults around them change the setup at…