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 practicesAn ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.
Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…
Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.
That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and…
There is a difference between low mood you have carried all your life and low mood that grew out of years of working twice as hard for half the result. Both are real, and they need treating in a different order.
If the second describes you, the picture often lifts a fair way once the attention difficulties are being managed and the daily experience of falling…
Assessing a child's thinking used to mean a referral, a waiting list and a report some months later. Brief cognitive tools an ordinary clinician can run have changed that, and the gap between noticing something and having a plan can now be a session rather than a season.
Learn one of them properly instead of dabbling in three. Know what it measures, what it does not, and how to talk about a score without turning it…