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
8 practicesWhen someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.
Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…
Sitting in a room with other people who lose their keys, cry at nothing and hate themselves for both does something no explanation can. You find out you were never the only one.
Groups also do encouragement better than a therapist can. When someone with the same trouble asks whether you managed the homework, it does not land…
You are already off your phone somewhere. In lessons, at work, in the pool, driving. That is worth more than it sounds.
It quietly disproves the sentence people say most often about this, that they can never put it down. They already do, most days, for hours at a time.…
Sometimes the scrolling is not really about the scrolling. It is about the coursework, or the conversation, or the thing you have not let yourself think about since March.
You can usually tell by what happens when the phone goes. If the hours quietly move into something else equally absorbing and equally pointless, the…
Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.
It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…
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…
Try one hour with the phone away and out of reach, then talk about what came up. The hour itself is the information.
What surfaces is usually specific and useful. The twenty minute mark where the hand starts moving. The exact worry about what is being missed. The…