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 practicesSomeone running just ahead of the avalanche has nowhere to stand and think. Reflection needs a bit of room, and a life with no room in it cannot make any.
This is why so much sensible advice slides straight off. Before asking what the wisest option is, something usually has to come off the pile: fewer…
Nobody decides well mid-panic. So cutting the number of panics is itself a way of making better decisions, even if nothing about your judgement changes at all.
It is slow work and it is usually the real work: fewer things said yes to, earlier starts, deadlines negotiated before they are sitting on top of…
When someone has shut down, pressure to get moving usually pushes them further in. Safety first and activity afterwards, even when the whole household is desperate for a sign of life.
Safety here is ordinary and physical. Food that turns up without being asked for. A room nobody is inspecting. Conversation that is not a progress…
If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.
In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together,…
If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.
This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves…
If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.
For some of us an unresolved question hums in the background until it is settled, and settling it becomes urgent even when nothing depends on it.…
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…
There is a rough ladder for tech overuse. Build a schedule together with some outside control at first, add substitutes once the person can stop for a while, then more intensive care, and residential only when someone is entirely taken over by it.
The order matters more than the rungs. You cannot install a better alternative in someone who has no capacity yet to put the thing down, so a bit of…
No food in the house means eating out late, which means a late night, which means a late start, which means no time to shop. It is not a character flaw. It is a loop.
The parts that feel most like personal failure, the takeaways, the extra coffee, the money going nowhere, are mostly downstream of a plan that never…