Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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14 practices

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What you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.

If you are beginning something new and half of you thinks it is nonsense, say so. A doubt that stays unspoken tends to come out as a missed…

Five minutesFeelings and focusCBTQur’an 3:139One line of research

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 9:40One line of research

Partners of people with ADHD tend not to name the lateness or the lost keys as the real injury. It is the size of the reactions. That is where the damage collects.

Annoying is survivable and frightening is not. If you are working through things in a rough order, the temper comes before the calendar, even though…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 8:46One line of research

Being good at apologising is a real skill, and it loses value each time the same apology comes round. After a while what repairs things is something visibly different, not a better sentence.

So keep the apology specific and small. Name the thing, do not explain it away, say what you will do differently, and then let the doing carry the…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 41:34One line of research

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Use your strengths

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Shame

The fear underneath anger

Obsessions and compulsions

Your nervous system

When everything feels flat

Choosing your response

Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.

If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 16:98One line of research

The reason your partner follows you out of the room is usually not control. It is the fear that if you leave now, this will never be finished.

So say the return out loud and mean it. I am not dropping this, I will be back at nine and we will finish it. Then be back at nine. A few kept…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 9:40One line of research

A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.

Name the thing you did, own it flatly, and stop there. Then do something that shows it: the phone call you dodged, the mess cleared up, the thing you…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 39:53One line of research

You may not get to be a calmer person any time soon. What can change quickly is what you do in the twenty minutes after you lose your temper, and that is the part people remember.

Reactivity shifts slowly if at all, while repair is a skill you could be noticeably better at by next week. Go back sooner than feels comfortable.…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 42:37One line of research

Tell your partner, on a good day, that the things you say at full volume are not a fair record of what you think. Not as an excuse. As information about how you work.

It changes what lands. If they know in advance that the heat is real but the words are unreliable, they can wait for the version that arrives twenty…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 3:134One line of research

Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.

Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…

Twenty minutesFeelings and focusCBTQur’an 94:5One line of research

One sign that the heat has come off a little: you can hold I am furious with you and you probably did not mean it in the same moment, without dropping either one.

In the middle of an argument that second thought is simply not available, and its absence is not a failure of character. It comes back as the arousal…

Twenty minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 42:37One line of research

Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.

Say the mismatch out loud when things are calm, so that it is understood before the next row rather than argued about during it. If you are the fast…

Twenty minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 7:199One line of research

Saying I need a break only works if you have agreed beforehand what a break means. How long it lasts, what the other person does meanwhile, and when the two of you come back to it.

Settle it on a calm evening. Twenty minutes, no following, no messages in between, and we sit back down at nine. Then keep the return time exactly,…

Twenty minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 8:46One line of research

Sitting in a room with other people who lose their keys, cry at nothing and hate themselves for both does something no explanation can. You find out you were never the only one.

Groups also do encouragement better than a therapist can. When someone with the same trouble asks whether you managed the homework, it does not land…

LongerFeelings and focusCBTQur’an 9:40One line of research