Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
The energy behind an unevidenced treatment is usually love with nowhere to go, and if it is not given somewhere to go it moves on to the next unevidenced thing. Offer a specific swap rather than a principle: the hours that would have gone to the clinic become a club, a swim, a walk that happens whatever the weather.
travel its regions; eat His provision (Quran 67:15). Movement and food are set side by side there as ordinary human business, which is roughly where they belong.
الملك
هُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ ذَلُولࣰ ا فَٱمۡشُواْ فِي مَنَاكِبِهَا وَكُلُواْ مِن رِّزۡقِهِۦۖ وَإِلَيۡهِ ٱلنُّشُورُ
It is He who has made the earth manageable for you––travel its regions; eat His provision- and to Him you will be resurrected
Qur’an 67:15read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Exercise is the honest suggestion here, with its limits said out loud. A meta-review across mental and substance use disorders found exercise improved neuropsychiatric and cognitive outcomes, while noting that the ADHD specific evidence was among the thinnest in the field. A twelve week programme with thirty medication naive children with ADHD improved resilience and reduced internalising symptoms, promising and very small. Worth doing for the person as a whole, then, rather than as a proven treatment for the condition.
Ashdown-Franks G, Firth J, Carney R, Carvalho AF, Hallgren M, Koyanagi A, Rosenbaum S, Schuch FB, Smith L, Solmi M, Vancampfort D, Stubbs B. (2020). Exercise as Medicine for Mental and Substance Use Disorders: A Meta-review of the Benefits for Neuropsychiatric and Cognitive Outcomes.. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) doi
Liang X, Xu RH, Zhao M, Qu L, Shum DHK. (2024). Impact of a physical exercise intervention on psychological resilience and mental ill-being in medical-naïve children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a pilot randomised controlled trial.. Psychology, health & medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A need that has been given somewhere better to go stops hunting for the next thing to spend itself on.
When omega levels are low, everything about ADHD tends to get louder: attention, mood swings, holding things in mind. Low omega does not cause ADHD, but it can be sitting on top of it.
Headsets 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.
More clinicians now raise supplements themselves, and more of them will suggest something like omegas. The shift matters less for what gets recommended and more for what it does to disclosure.