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
7 practicesTry not to ask why. If the person knew why, they would probably have sorted it out already, and the question tends to land like an accusation.
Ask what happened just before instead. What was going on, what they felt, what came after, what sort of day it had been. Those answers can be worked…
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…
The checklists were built around the loud version of this, and girls are more often the quiet version. If she is struggling and nobody has ever suggested an assessment, that is worth pressing on.
Defiance in girls can look like refusal, withdrawal or a long-running argument about friendships rather than the disruption a teacher would report.…
Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.
People find half siblings. Sometimes they find that the story they were told about their birth was not the story. That is a great deal to receive by…
Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.
Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…
When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.
The two travel together often, and a minority of children follow a path from constant defiance into more serious trouble later. Every stage of that…
When a child truly does not mind losing the privilege, taking more away will not get you anywhere. That is the moment to change approach rather than raise the stakes, usually to a structured parent programme that works on the pattern between parent and child.
Star charts fail with these children because the reward was never the point of the behaviour. What helps is a proper course of parent management…