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 practicesHeadsets have become cheap enough to sit in an ordinary consulting room, and the use with the best backing is graded exposure. You can set the intensity exactly and repeat it as often as the person needs.
The value is in the control. A feared situation can be dialled up in small steps, run again the moment it stops being frightening, and ended without…
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…
With some sensory routines, the part doing the work may be a parent's steady hands and full attention rather than the technique itself. Worth knowing, because contact carries into the rest of the day and a protocol does not.
Views differ on this and the research has not sorted it out. What follows practically is that a family who cannot keep the exact routine going has…
When a test trips a child on something it was never meant to measure, change how they answer rather than what is asked. A spelling test spoken aloud is still a spelling test.
One girl saw letters as solid three dimensional shapes that would not sit together on a page, so writing them was a perceptual problem rather than a…
Ask for photographs of every bottle rather than a list from memory, then pass that list to the prescriber. Recall is patchy about names and hopeless about doses.
Intake forms catch some of it and a photo of the shelf catches the rest, including the two things nobody mentions because they seem too minor to…