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.

What matches

18 practices

Narrow these down

When someone says they feel restless inside, ask what the restlessness wants. Restless to move, or restless to do one particular thing until it feels right?

The two feel similar from the inside and point in different directions. With ADHD it is usually undirected: the legs go, the chair is wrong, you need…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 91:8One line of research

If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.

Otherwise the question lands as one more reminder of what is missing, and some people will spend the rest of the appointment feeling they brought the…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:32One line of research

Hypervigilance after trauma and ADHD scanning look much alike from outside. Often the honest answer is that both are present, and the real question is how much of each.

Watching that comes from threat is aimed at something and tends to switch on in particular situations. ADHD distraction is not fussy about where it…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:6One line of research

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

Your nervous system

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Obsessions and compulsions

When everything feels flat

The fear underneath anger

Shame

Use your strengths

Choosing your response

Not every bout of eating too much belongs to an eating disorder. Ask whether how the body looks is part of it, because that is where the two paths separate.

When bingeing comes out of ADHD it is often boredom, or the food simply being there with nothing stepping in to stop it, and the person is not…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 95:4One line of research

When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?

Asking whether something happened between October and January invites a guess. Asking whether it was before or after a wedding, a house move or a…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:286One line of research

Ask for a number first, then go hunting for exceptions. How is today on a scale of one to ten, and when was it last higher than that?

An assessment can turn into an hour of everything that is wrong, which leaves a person flatter than when they arrived. Exception questions do the…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 94:5One line of research

Find out what they have tried before that did not work. It saves everybody from a plan that failed this person two years ago.

Most people arriving for an assessment have been trying things for years: apps, alarms, lists, an early night, a course somebody recommended.…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One line of research

The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.

Told carefully, this changes the story a family tells about itself. Not a line of difficult people, but a trait that has been present for generations…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 24:61One line of research

Before you decide a strategy has failed, check whether the medication underneath it is doing its job. If someone is sitting in front of you still struggling, the honest first answer is usually that it is not, quite.

Ask about the shape of the day rather than the dose alone. When does it come on, when does it wear off, which hours are the hard ones, is there any…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:26One line of research

Before handing anyone a new system, make sure they can say back why it should work better than what they are doing now. A strategy with no reason attached gets dropped the first time it is inconvenient.

Ask them to explain it to you in their own words and listen for whose reason it is. If the logic is only yours, it will hold for about a week. It is…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 18:66One line of research

Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.

So ask, before handing over another tool: how do you feel about the diagnosis itself? Sometimes the honest answer is that they still half hope it was…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 12:53One line of research

Ask what they think this will cost them in effort, then say what you think. People rarely give up because a strategy failed. They give up because it turned out to be harder than anyone had told them.

Be specific about the first fortnight, since that is when it is worst and the payoff has not arrived yet. Someone who expected a small effort and met…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 18:69One line of research

When something did not get done, find out which half broke. Did they not know what to do or when? Or was the plan fine, and the moment for doing it came and went?

Ask for the last time it happened, hour by hour, up to the point where it did not happen. A planning failure needs somewhere reliable to catch tasks…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 91:8One line of research

Awareness is knowing what needs doing and when. Motivation is doing it once you know. Nearly every app on the market solves the first one, which is why buying another one so rarely helps.

Test it with one question: at the moment it did not happen, did you know? If the answer is yes, the reminder was never the missing piece, and a…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:25One line of research

Ask about the family properly: parents, brothers and sisters, children, then aunts, uncles and grandparents. Include drinking and drug use, in them as well as in the person sitting with you.

This tends to be the highest yield few minutes of an assessment, because the condition runs strongly in families. Relatives who were never assessed…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 12:87One line of research

If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.

A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One line of research

'I am disorganised' cannot be treated. 'The post piles up on the hall table until something ends up with a debt collector' can. Spend the time getting the problem down to something that specific.

Push for the particulars: which task, which moment, what was happening just before, what they did instead. Where you can, ask someone who was there…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:31One line of research