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 cognitive behavioural therapy is the approach you keep being offered for ADHD, part of the reason is that it is easy to measure. It has good evidence behind it, and being the most studied is not the same as being the only thing that helps.
Structured, session by session approaches produce tidy numbers, so they get trialled more often and written up more often. That leaves quieter…
The change mostly happens between the sessions rather than in them. Catching a thought where it actually turns up, at the kitchen table or in the car park, is what makes a new one stick.
Make it small enough to survive a bad week. One thought written down as it came, and one line underneath saying what else might be true. If you have…
You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.
A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am…
When your child comes to you in a spin, the kind thing is to stay warm and steady rather than to promise that it will be fine. Reassurance settles the next ten minutes and feeds the asking.
It sounds cold and it is not. What your steadiness says is two things at once: this feeling is real, and I think you can carry it. Keep it short and…
If your only system for remembering things is your head, of course you are anxious. Nothing is safe in there and some part of you knows it.
Some people hold everything mentally because letting go of it feels like the thing will stop existing. The answer is not trying harder to remember.…
For one week note three things each time: how you felt before you opened it, how it felt while you were in it, and how you feel twenty minutes after putting it down.
Most people find the before and the after are not the same, and that the middle was better than either. Usually one or two apps come out fine and one…
Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.
Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…
A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.
Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…
Before a phone gets taken away, it is worth asking what else goes with it. For a lot of young people the group chat is where their friendships actually live, and losing it leaves them alone at the moment they most need someone.
This is not an argument against limits. It is an argument for knowing what you are cutting. If the same device carries the friendships, the homework…