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 practicesIf you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.
Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…
Being in recovery is not a reason to leave an attention difficulty untreated. The restlessness that made a substance useful is still there once the substance goes.
Clinicians often hold back here, uneasy about a stimulant for someone with a history, and that caution is understandable. The other choice carries a…
Some people find they drive better in a manual, because there is always something to be done. Treat that as an experiment rather than a finding.
The reasoning is the same as a fidget toy or a standing desk. A little constant demand can keep an under-occupied system in the room instead of…
For a small number of children the question was never about school reports. A toddler who runs into a road and keeps running, a child who climbs the pool fence: what is being weighed there is whether they stay alive.
Most decisions about treating a very young child are finely balanced and deserve to be taken slowly. Where the behaviour itself is life threatening,…
When medication works, its best effect is often on everything else you were already trying. Coaching, exercise, a routine: each of them needs enough attention to get started, and attention is the thing in short supply.
That is why setting medication against the other approaches usually misses the point. The plan you could not keep last year may be perfectly keepable…
Play therapy and insight based psychotherapy do not treat ADHD. There is no buried, unexpressed feeling driving it that talking will let out.
The difficulty sits in executive control and how it develops, not in hidden conflict. That said, a child with ADHD can also be anxious, grieving or…
The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.
Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…
Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.
This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they…
When a child with ADHD and a parent get stuck in daily rows, the rows themselves start doing damage. Getting the ADHD properly managed early takes some heat out of those exchanges before defiance settles in as a habit.
The chain people worry about runs from constant friction at home to entrenched defiance, and from there to difficulties in the teenage years that are…