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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106 practices

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Wanting to try everything else first is a normal instinct and worth taking seriously. It is still fair to ask why we would have a child squint for a year before trying glasses.

The cost of waiting is not nothing. A school year is a school year, friendships form or fail to, and a child's sense of who they are is being built…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 26:80One line of research

Most resistance to medication turns out to be something a person heard rather than something they decided. Work out which one you are holding, because the two need different things.

A worry built on a half remembered article tends to dissolve once you find out what was actually studied. A worry that comes from your values, about…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 10:59One line of research

Holding off on treatment can feel like the safe, neutral option. For a child who is struggling now, it is a choice with its own costs rather than an absence of one.

It is completely reasonable to want to try gentler things first, and many of them are worth trying. What is worth resisting is the sense that doing…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:87One line of research

A swimming float keeps you at the surface. It does not decide which end of the pool you are heading for, and medication is much the same.

That is a good sentence to have ready before the first prescription. What a drug can hand you is capacity: a little more room to hold your attention,…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286

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

What ADHD actually is

Being seen and judged

Living with uncertainty

Structure and routine

Shame and stigma

Screens and attention

Rest and pacing

Remembering to do it

Practising under provocation

Posture and how you carry yourself

Panic and the body

Exercise, food and other supports

Grounding and settling

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Get started

One line of research

Ask for the actual list. Not some side effects, but the specific ones people commonly get in the first week or two, and roughly when they tend to settle.

A vague warning leaves you reading every ache as a sign that something is going wrong. Being told that an unsettled stomach, loose bowels, headache…

Five minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:6One line of research

A long acting injection into muscle releases its medicine slowly over weeks. It lifts the daily burden of remembering, at the price of not being able to stop quickly if the medicine disagrees with you.

That trade is worth naming out loud rather than settling on someone's behalf. For a person whose entire difficulty is the daily doing, weeks of cover…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28One line of research

For most people who get as far as asking for help with ADHD, medication is the single change that shifts the most. It is not compulsory and plenty live well without it, and it does deserve an honest look rather than a place at the back of the queue.

The reason is unglamorous. Nearly every strategy anyone teaches assumes you can pause before responding, hold a plan in mind while doing something…

Twenty minutesMedication and how it worksADHD skillsQur’an 26:80One line of research

One of the founding figures of biological psychiatry summed the whole business up as some medicine helping some people at some doses some of the time. Knowing that before you start makes the first disappointment much easier to survive.

Most people need more than one adjustment: the dose, then the timing, sometimes the drug itself. Go in expecting the first prescription to be the…

LongerMedication and how it worksMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:5One line of research

Before you decide a club is out of reach, ask. Some let children earn the uniform through the levels, and plenty have quiet arrangements for families who need them.

Cost keeps more children out of these things than lack of interest does. A single phone call is worth making, and the answer is often better than the…

Five minutesMoving your bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 53:39One line of research

Speech has a beat inside it. When a child cannot hold a steady rhythm, that often sits alongside difficulty with reading and with the flow of talking, so time spent clapping or tapping a beat together is doing something real.

You need nothing for this. Clap a slow pattern, ask them to clap it back, then keep it running while you both count or walk in time to it.…

Five minutesMoving your bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 31:19One line of research

Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.

Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they…

Twenty minutesMoving your bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 62:10One line of research

If you are thinking about a weighted blanket or vest for a child, let an occupational therapist set the weight. It is a specific number for a specific body, not something to guess at in a shop.

The pull to order one straight away is understandable, especially after months of bad nights. What an OT does is match the weight to the child's size…

Twenty minutesExercise, food and other supportsMedical and treatmentQur’an 55:8One line of research

The strengthened warning on this class covers misuse, addiction, physical dependence and withdrawal. The part most people miss is that dependence builds with ordinary correct use over weeks, with nobody doing anything wrong.

That distinction needs handling gently, because patients hear dependence and hear addict. Physical dependence is the body settling around something…

LongerPanic and the bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28One line of research

When you start paying attention to your body, things wake up. More feeling, a deeper breath, memories arriving sideways. That is the practice working, not the practice going wrong.

Say this at the start, not afterwards. People who were not told tend to decide the movement made them worse and stop, when what actually happened is…

A minutePosture and how you carry yourselfBody basedQur’an 17:109One line of research

Before anyone does something exposing, let them check their own conditions and give them a clean way to say no. A public yes given under pressure is not really a yes.

It can be as ordinary as asking someone to consider whether they have the privacy, the time and the state of mind for this today. Ask it first and…

A minutePractising under provocationCBTQur’an 2:45One line of research

Somebody should ask the boring question: is there a list at all, anywhere? It gets skipped for being too obvious to ask, which is how a person can go years with nothing.

The format does not matter: Outlook, a notes app, the back of an envelope kept in one place. What matters is that intentions live somewhere outside…

Five minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 12:47One line of research

There are two jobs here, not one. Free up the time, and then be able to sit in it without feeling like a fraud.

Working more efficiently buys hours back, and that is the easier half. The harder half is the belief that rest is only for people who have finished…

LongerRest and pacingADHD skillsQur’an 9:91One line of research

Ask everybody, at the start, what they use and how it goes for them there. Not only the ones who arrive with an obvious phone problem.

Two questions do most of the work: which platforms are you on, and what is it like for you on them. Asked early, without any warning tone, it makes…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 63:9One line of research

A child who is blind to time is not ignoring the deadline. They are living in whatever is happening right now, with no sense that the bell is close or that Friday's test has anything to do with today.

It shows up as reacting to each moment rather than moving through a day with a shape. Adults read that as not caring, and the child usually cannot…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 21:37One line of research

The pattern usually ends the same way. Nothing feels urgent, then the deadline lands all at once, and the child panics and produces something poor or nothing at all.

Once you can see the sequence, you can step in near the beginning instead of managing the wreckage at the end. Say it out loud with the child,…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:23One line of research