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
4 practicesThis explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Medication does not make somebody care more. It narrows the distance between meaning to do the thing and doing it, and that distance is exactly what the other person has been feeling as being let down.
It helps a couple enormously to have the right name for what has been happening. The intention was real every single time. What went missing was the…
A great many people are diagnosed and then left with a starting dose nobody ever revisited, no reading, no group, nothing else at all. If things have stalled, the first thing to check is whether the treatment was ever actually finished.
Optimising is unglamorous and often the quickest thing available. Was the dose ever adjusted upwards, and on what basis. Does the cover reach the…
If the prescriber, coach or therapist is not delivering much, say so and ask for someone else. Working around poor care quietly is the thing that convinces a couple this is simply as good as it gets.
A dose never revisited, or a therapist who has never worked with ADHD, sets a low ceiling. The trouble is that the ceiling gets read as the person:…
People who are sleeping properly, eating properly and moving a bit tend to want each other more. The unglamorous parts of life management run closer to the bedroom than either of you might expect.
It is worth saying out loud when desire has quietly gone from a marriage, because the usual explanations reach for something heavier: he has lost…