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
7 practicesCheck, feel the small relief, put it down, feel the pull again a minute later. If your phone use has that shape, it is running like a compulsion, whatever else it is.
The structure matters more here than the label. An urge rises, checking brings it down, and every check teaches the urge to come back sooner. Which…
When someone says they did not really mean it, that it was not really them, the temptation is to hear an excuse. It is usually better information than that.
Take the disowning seriously and ask what state it came out of. What time was it, how long had they been online, what had happened that day, had they…
Among teenagers, saying they want to die has become something you say when the bus is late. You can no longer read intent off the phrase, in either direction.
So the words neither prove there is danger nor prove there is not. What tells you is everything the words leave out: whether there is a plan, whether…
When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.
The question is simple enough. Has anything about someone dying gone round your school or your feed lately, and did you see it. Then ask how it left…
Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.
It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…
If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.
Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…
Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.
They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…