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
5 practicesOne sign that the heat has come off a little: you can hold I am furious with you and you probably did not mean it in the same moment, without dropping either one.
In the middle of an argument that second thought is simply not available, and its absence is not a failure of character. It comes back as the arousal…
Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.
Say the mismatch out loud when things are calm, so that it is understood before the next row rather than argued about during it. If you are the fast…
ADHD rarely turns up on its own. If anxiety or low mood is in the room as well, it needs treating in its own right, and that includes when it is the other partner who is struggling.
This is the part that gets missed in couples. One person becomes the identified patient and everybody works on them, while the other one's untreated…
When you cannot skip it, shorten it. Come for the meal and skip the drinks afterwards. Two hours of you at your best is worth more to everyone than five hours ending badly.
Decide the leaving time before you arrive and say it out loud on the way in, so that it is a plan rather than a walkout. Booking something afterwards…
Saying I need a break only works if you have agreed beforehand what a break means. How long it lasts, what the other person does meanwhile, and when the two of you come back to it.
Settle it on a calm evening. Twenty minutes, no following, no messages in between, and we sit back down at nine. Then keep the return time exactly,…