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
15 practicesIf you are being assessed for attention, say something about your mood and your worry as well, even if nobody asks.
Anxiety and low mood sit alongside ADHD often enough that a thorough assessment will go looking for them anyway. But shame is quiet, and years of…
If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.
Otherwise the question lands as one more reminder of what is missing, and some people will spend the rest of the appointment feeling they brought the…
Some of what looks like muddle is the system's fault. Our tenth month is named for eight, because two months were added later and nobody renamed the rest.
Worth saying to anyone who feels stupid about dates and forms. A calendar whose numbers are out of step, a tax year starting in April, forms asking…
'I set a reminder and still did not do it' is not a story about a bad reminder. It tells you the missing piece was never information, and a bigger, louder version of the same thing will fail in the same way.
The reflex is to escalate: three alarms, a different app, an entire new system built on Sunday night. What is needed is a change of kind, something…
There is a difference between low mood you have carried all your life and low mood that grew out of years of working twice as hard for half the result. Both are real, and they need treating in a different order.
If the second describes you, the picture often lifts a fair way once the attention difficulties are being managed and the daily experience of falling…
Not all distraction comes from outside. Some of it is a thought that will not leave, circling while you read the same paragraph four times.
That difference matters at an assessment. Being pulled away by everything in the room, and being held in place by an intrusive thought you cannot put…
Eating that runs away from you, and eating you cannot stop once it has started, turn up alongside ADHD more than people expect. Usually it is doing a job rather than proving a weakness.
The pattern leans towards bingeing rather than restricting, which fits: it belongs with the difficulty of stopping something already in motion. Often…
Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.
In men it runs more towards size and muscle than towards thinness, and towards fixing on one part of the body that everybody else says looks…
Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.
Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the…
With gambling machines the pull may be the lights and the noise as much as the chance of winning. That changes what you actually need to stay away from.
If the sensory buzz is doing the work, the triggers are not only the betting shop. They are the phone games built with the same flashing and chiming,…
Not every bout of eating too much belongs to an eating disorder. Ask whether how the body looks is part of it, because that is where the two paths separate.
When bingeing comes out of ADHD it is often boredom, or the food simply being there with nothing stepping in to stop it, and the person is not…
Ask for a number first, then go hunting for exceptions. How is today on a scale of one to ten, and when was it last higher than that?
An assessment can turn into an hour of everything that is wrong, which leaves a person flatter than when they arrived. Exception questions do the…
The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.
Told carefully, this changes the story a family tells about itself. Not a line of difficult people, but a trait that has been present for generations…
Before you decide a strategy has failed, check whether the medication underneath it is doing its job. If someone is sitting in front of you still struggling, the honest first answer is usually that it is not, quite.
Ask about the shape of the day rather than the dose alone. When does it come on, when does it wear off, which hours are the hard ones, is there any…
Time management is only the fit between tasks and the hours you have: planning them against time, then doing them against time. It is a skill with parts, not a verdict on what kind of person you are.
Most people arrive having already decided they are lazy, and that decision is doing them no good at all. Describing it mechanically gives you both…