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
6 practicesThis explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.
Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…
Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.
This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they…
Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.
That frame does a lot of quiet work. It says the treatment is ongoing rather than a course you finish, it explains why things slide back when…
The therapy that helps adult ADHD is not really about arguing with your thoughts. It is practical work on how your week is built, and it works because you are the one who can go and rebuild it.
Sessions tend to circle the same handful of things. Where the list lives, what the calendar actually does when you are not looking at it, how a large…
Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.
Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is…
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…