Practices

When someone asks for an hour of your time, your head searches for a clash, finds nothing, and says yes. A calendar with everything already in it turns that guess into something you can look at.

The trick is to put in the whole of your life, not only the appointments other people gave you. Travel, meals, the school run, the hour you actually…

Pick one aim big enough to hold the year, and let it be the thing you measure choices against. Not a list of values. One.

It might be finishing the course, or being the parent who is actually there in the evenings. When something new arrives you hold it against that one…

Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.

Seeing the list that way makes deleting bearable. You are not abandoning your ambitions, you are letting go of ideas that arrived on a hopeful…

A healthy list loses items as well as gaining them. Some leave because they are done and some because they did not survive the week. Both are normal.

If the only way something can leave your list is by being completed, the list can only grow, and every glance at it will feel worse than the last…

If deleting makes you anxious, do not delete. Keep two lists: a short one for this week, and a long one where things are safe but out of the way.

The anxiety is usually about losing the idea rather than about the task itself, and a separate holding list answers that. Nothing is gone, it is…

A pile is mostly decisions you have not made. You did not know what to do with the thing, so you put it down there to sort out later, and later has not arrived.

Read that way, tidying stops being about tidiness. The job is not moving things around, it is making forty small decisions you have been putting off.…

A task needs smoothing at both ends. If it looks big and horrible you will not begin it, and if the middle is full of snags you will not see it through.

These are two different problems and people usually only work on one. Making the start smaller helps you begin: open the document, write one line.…

If you are pulled towards risk, you will do better giving that pull somewhere with a floor under it than trying to switch it off. Fast, high, cold, loud: choose the planned version rather than the one that turns up at two in the morning.

Work out what the appeal actually is. Speed, height, cold water, a crowd, the edge of fear. Then find the form of it that has brakes: a climbing wall…

Medication can make the learning possible. It does not do the learning. If no tools get built while things are steadier, there is nothing standing there when the dose wears off.

A common disappointment runs like this: the medication helps, then it seems not to be enough, then it gets stopped. Often what happened is that…

The pull towards bread, pasta and biscuits when you are low is not simply greed. Carbohydrate makes it easier for the brain to get hold of the raw material it needs for serotonin, so it gives a real if short lived lift.

Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking…

Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.

The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…

Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.

Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…

Even where a herb has good evidence behind it, that evidence belongs to the plant and not to the bottle in your hand. Testing keeps turning up products that do not contain what the label says.

This part of the argument does not depend on whether herbal remedies work. You could accept every claim made for a plant and still be left with the…

Own brand products from large retailers were among the worst performers in these tests. A big name on the packet is not a quality check, however much it feels like one.

Own label goods are usually made under contract on thin margins with no independent verification of what comes out the other end. So the reassurance…

People often turn to herbal remedies hoping to avoid side effects. Plants are chemistry too, and some of them interact with prescribed medication in ways that matter.

A plant extract is not one substance, it is a mixture of many, which gives it more places to interact rather than fewer. Origin has nothing to do…

Your gut is not just plumbing. It makes many of the same chemicals your brain runs on and it is in constant conversation with your nervous system, which is part of why a bad stretch of digestion and a low mood so often turn up together.

If your stomach has been unsettled for weeks and your mood has slid over the same weeks, you do not have to work out which one is the real problem.…