Focus, starting, and ADHD

Write it up before you leave. One salesman, knowing full well he will not remember the visit an hour later, does his notes in the car with the engine still off.

The strength of it is that the trigger is fixed and physical. Sitting down in the car is the cue, and the notes happen before the key turns. No…

Whatever the record is, do it the same day, every time. The salesman writes his notes in the car outside the client's office. Not that evening, not on Friday.

No exceptions is the part doing the work. One skipped day teaches you that skipping is survivable, and 'it worked out fine that once' is the thought…

Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.

Holidays, illness and school closures are when bedtimes drift, and a fortnight of late nights undoes more than any homework plan can fix. Keep the…

If reminders, other people's deadlines and a bit of chivvying are what keep you moving, you are allowed to keep them. Inner drive arrives later for some of us, and taking the scaffolding away early does not hurry it along.

Families often pull the supports back on a birthday, as though a certain age should switch on self-direction. What tends to happen is that the only…

An ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.

Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…

Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.

People find half siblings. Sometimes they find that the story they were told about their birth was not the story. That is a great deal to receive by…

When you are weighing up whether a teenager is ready for something, it helps to think in two thirds. A fifteen year old may be handling responsibility more like a twelve or thirteen year old.

This is not an insult and it should never be delivered as one. It is a way of explaining why a privilege arrives later here than for their friends,…

Skipping weekends, holidays and summers is a common suggestion and mostly it is the wrong call. The difficulty does not take a holiday when school does.

Unstructured time asks more of planning and self-regulation rather than less: whole days to fill, everyone at home, no timetable holding the shape of…

Two products can hold the identical molecule and still behave differently in a person, because the difference lives in how fast the drug is released. A change of formulation is a real change, and it is a different thing from a change of drug.

The release pattern sets how high the level climbs, how quickly it gets there, and how long it holds. For stimulants that decides whether cover…

If you take a prescribed stimulant and your workplace tests, sort the paperwork before anyone asks. A labelled bottle and a short letter from your prescriber turn an alarming result into a filing matter.

Prescribed amphetamine shows up on a standard screen as amphetamine, because that is what it is. The test cannot tell the pharmacy from anything…

Some settings simply suit an attention difficulty better. Expectations set out minute by minute, consequences that arrive the same day, a visible ladder to climb: military life often fits for exactly those reasons.

The point carries well beyond the army. When you are helping someone choose work, ask what the day actually looks like rather than what the job is…

Stopping medication rises sharply in the early teenage years. If that is where you are, it helps to know this is the usual pattern rather than a sign that something has gone wrong with your child.

The pull is understandable: wanting to be in charge of your own body, hating being the one who is different, and a parent no longer standing over the…

One man with ADHD described the goal as no longer suffering from it, only having it. The diagnosis had not changed. What it cost him had.

Half of that shift comes from removing particular sources of pain: the job that was never going to work, the arrangement at home that left everything…

Most children with ADHD grow into adults with ADHD. Some of it settles as the brain finishes developing into your late twenties, and adult life gives you more say over how your days are arranged, but the underlying difficulty tends to stay.

This is worth knowing because much of the improvement people do get comes from arranging things to suit themselves: the job that fits, the hours that…

Instead of one warning, give several: half an hour, fifteen minutes, five, one. The child then has time to arrive at the ending rather than having it dropped on them.

A single warning asks a child to track the gap on their own, which is the thing they cannot do. A ladder of prompts turns a stretch of time into a…

Moving between lessons is where things fall apart, so plan the move out loud before it happens. What to bring, where to go, and who will be waiting.

Before the child leaves maths, walk them through what comes with them and tell them to check in with the next teacher on arrival. That teacher greets…

ADHD does not usually vanish at eighteen. The visible fidgeting often settles while the inattention stays, and the restlessness moves inwards where nobody can see it.

A teenager who has stopped bouncing off the walls can look much improved at exactly the point their workload has quadrupled, which is a poor moment…

If a young person says they do not feel ready to drive, take that as information rather than something to talk them out of. Plenty of them know their own attention better than the adults around them do.

Waiting a year is not a failure, and there are other ways to get about. Do ask what sits behind it, because there is a difference between a sober…