Practices

A strong feeling makes the rest of your life go quiet for a while. That is when people resign, send the message, or start something they cannot undo, for reasons that seem good and are not enough.

So make a rule now, while it is calm, about which decisions are never made on the day: leaving a job, ending a relationship, spending a large amount,…

The big promise is usually made in a rush of love rather than after a calculation. It is meant sincerely, which is exactly why it keeps happening, and why the disappointment keeps landing.

The gap here is between feeling something and announcing it. Try a rule: nothing involving money, dates or other people gets said out loud on the day…

A small annoyance can be steered. A full blaze cannot. Nearly all of the winnable work happens in the first thirty seconds, before the feeling has finished arriving.

Which means the skill to practise is noticing, not calming down. Learn your own early signs: the jaw, the hot face, talking faster, the flat voice,…

Halfway up the argument, ask yourself one question. What do I want here, and who am I trying to be. Winning the sentence is rarely worth what it costs by bedtime.

It is a simple move and it is genuinely hard, because the moment is loud and the long view is quiet. A short version helps. Not in front of the…

You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.

A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am…

Often the feeling fits the situation perfectly and the size of it does not. You were right to be annoyed. The ten out of ten is the part that caused the trouble.

This is a useful thing to say to yourself afterwards, because it stops you throwing out your own read of what happened. Your sense that it was unfair…

The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.

Worth saying, because a conversation about emotional control can easily become a list of everything wrong with you. The aim is not a flatter version…

When you cannot skip it, shorten it. Come for the meal and skip the drinks afterwards. Two hours of you at your best is worth more to everyone than five hours ending badly.

Decide the leaving time before you arrive and say it out loud on the way in, so that it is a plan rather than a walkout. Booking something afterwards…

There is a difference between being calm because your partner manages you and being able to steady yourself. The first works right up until the person is not there.

Plenty of adults with ADHD have got by on outside regulation without ever noticing it: a spouse who makes the difficult phone calls, a deadline that…

Sleep, food and moving your body will not cure ADHD, and they do change how much of yourself you have available. Aim for good enough here rather than excellent.

The gain shows up in the margin more than in the symptoms. Rested, you have a bit of room before you snap. Short of sleep, you arrive at the evening…

You cannot ask anyone to work harder on your difficulty than you are working on it yourself. That is the condition attached to every adjustment you ask for.

It is what keeps help from curdling into supervision. If your partner is holding the calendar, softening the tone and steering round your worst…

When a task is missed it is usually not sitting somewhere being refused. It has gone off the radar altogether, the way a name goes when somebody asks you for it.

The refusal reading is the expensive one, because it turns a lapse into an insult and starts the argument in the one place where nothing can be…

A thought you have in the car about something to say at home is worth nothing until the person is actually there in front of you. Cues have to sit where the action becomes possible, not where you happened to think of it.

Picture where you will be at the moment the thing can be done, and put the reminder there: a note on the front door for something that happens on the…

It tends to go in a sequence: unreliable first, said kindly, then irresponsible, said less kindly. After that it stops being about the tasks at all and turns into a description of who you are.

By the third stage shame has arrived, and shame makes people avoid the very systems that would help, because setting up a calendar means admitting…

By response rate, extended release stimulants are among the most effective medicines in psychiatry, and most people tolerate them well. That is worth hearing plainly, particularly from people who are not generally keen on medication.

What the long acting form buys you is coverage. A dose that has faded by four in the afternoon leaves the evening bare, and the evening is where home…

A great many people are diagnosed and then left with a starting dose nobody ever revisited, no reading, no group, nothing else at all. If things have stalled, the first thing to check is whether the treatment was ever actually finished.

Optimising is unglamorous and often the quickest thing available. Was the dose ever adjusted upwards, and on what basis. Does the cover reach the…