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
6 practicesIf you run a group for people with ADHD, keep it to about five or six, or bring in a second facilitator. Past that you spend the session keeping order instead of doing the work.
The limit is not really about behaviour. It is about how many people one person can genuinely track while also holding the thread of the session.…
You can be connected to a thing as well as to a person. A cause, a project, something you are making. On the days people feel like too much, it is still there.
This works best when it asks something of you regularly: a rehearsal, a shift, a chapter a week. The obligation is the useful part, more than the…
If you tell people that company is part of their treatment, it is worth noticing whether it is part of yours. Sitting in a training room with colleagues is the same medicine, taken by you.
There is a quiet loss of credibility in prescribing connection from a life that has none in it. It also flattens something that ought to be flat. You…
There is a difference between being calm because your partner manages you and being able to steady yourself. The first works right up until the person is not there.
Plenty of adults with ADHD have got by on outside regulation without ever noticing it: a spouse who makes the difficult phone calls, a deadline that…
Sleep, food and moving your body will not cure ADHD, and they do change how much of yourself you have available. Aim for good enough here rather than excellent.
The gain shows up in the margin more than in the symptoms. Rested, you have a bit of room before you snap. Short of sleep, you arrive at the evening…
You cannot ask anyone to work harder on your difficulty than you are working on it yourself. That is the condition attached to every adjustment you ask for.
It is what keeps help from curdling into supervision. If your partner is holding the calendar, softening the tone and steering round your worst…