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 practicesBefore you hand it over, read the original request again. Not your memory of it. The actual words.
Almost nobody enjoys this, which is why almost nobody does it. But work that is good except for the two things nobody remembered is the commonest…
When the thing is over, sit down for twenty minutes and go through it: what happened, what worked, what did not, what you will do differently. Put it in the diary, because it never happens on intention alone.
The monthly report, the school year, the audit. Write the answers where you will actually find them next time, and be specific about the point it…
Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.
Use it the way it was meant to be used. Review it as the child grows instead of filing it as a fixed fact about their brain, and think about how you…
Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.
In each case the first job is the same: get some data. Not another opinion, not another meeting, but something measured about how this child thinks…
A weighted vest seems to do its work in roughly the first quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes did not beat fifteen, so longer is not more help.
Use it as a tool for a moment rather than a garment for the day: on before the piece of work that needs the most sitting still, off once that is…