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.
A child who has spent years being told they are careless will often say yes to whoever finally seems glad of them. Work on how they see themselves is not a soft extra to the clinical work.
Count the corrections in a single day and it is easy to see what accumulates. By the time an offer comes from someone friendly, the pull is belonging…
Being in recovery is not a reason to leave an attention difficulty untreated. The restlessness that made a substance useful is still there once the substance goes.
Clinicians often hold back here, uneasy about a stimulant for someone with a history, and that caution is understandable. The other choice carries a…
For a small number of children the question was never about school reports. A toddler who runs into a road and keeps running, a child who climbs the pool fence: what is being weighed there is whether they stay alive.
Most decisions about treating a very young child are finely balanced and deserve to be taken slowly. Where the behaviour itself is life threatening,…
If the first medicine disappoints, that is information about the first medicine. Plenty of people who get nothing from one class do well on another.
Methylphenidate and amphetamine are not the same drug at different strengths. They work by partly different routes, so a poor result on one says…