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 practicesWhen someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.
Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…
Expect more anxiety, low mood, drinking and drug use in the young people coming through now. And expect the boys to say less about it, so go looking for irritability, trouble and substances instead of waiting to be told.
Ask parents what they are seeing rather than only what they have been told, and ask the young person directly and privately. Screening that rests on…
Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.
Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…
When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.
The two travel together often, and a minority of children follow a path from constant defiance into more serious trouble later. Every stage of that…