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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1061 practices

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When someone hands you a date, the useful move is not writing the date down. Open your calendar there and then and decide the hour the work will actually happen.

A deadline only announces itself at the very end, when there is no room left to do anything about it. Booking the doing rather than the due date…

Five minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 18:23One line of research

There is a point where a to do list stops being a tool and becomes something you flinch away from. If you have not opened yours in a fortnight, it has passed that point.

The usual advice is to work through it, which is precisely what nobody does with a list that long. It is kinder and quicker to start a fresh page…

Twenty minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 18:24One line of research

Take one of the gaps you already have, the commute or the walk or the shower, and use it to ask what is coming up this week and what might be slipping. No new tool, no new app, just the question.

That turns something accidental into something you can count on. It works best in the same place each time, so that the place starts asking the…

Twenty minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 24:37One line of research

Anything that comes round every month should be leaving your account without you. Direct debits and standing orders take the remembering out of the job altogether, which beats any reminder you could set.

It is worth an afternoon. List what recurs, automate what can be automated, and put one calendar note to check the statement each month instead of…

Twenty minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 23:8

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

What you are actually defending

Food, caffeine and fuel

Making it stick

Feelings and focus

Breaking the worry loop

Tolerate distress

Reading, numbers and learning differences

When you use something to cope

Self-compassion

Growing empathy

Choosing your response

When everything feels flat

Anger, alcohol and the body

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Facing it a step at a time

Use your strengths

When anger turns to harm

Practising under provocation

Letting it out safely

Shame

Being seen and judged

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Question the thought

The cost of avoiding

Obsessions and compulsions

Feeling from the inside

Living with uncertainty

Rest and pacing

One line of research

Every extra step in a task is another place to lose it. Three clicks and done beats a process with a form, an envelope and a walk to the postbox, even when the second one saves a little money.

Before you commit to a routine, count its steps, then take some out. Bin bags stored next to the bin, stamps kept with the envelopes, paying on the…

Twenty minutesRemembering to do itADHD skillsQur’an 16:91One line of research

Rest is not the prize waiting at the end of the work. It is part of what makes the work possible, and it does not have to be earned first.

Self control runs down over a day the way a battery does, and the thing that fills it back up is properly stopping. What that looks like is yours to…

Twenty minutesRest and pacingADHD skillsQur’an 10:67One line of research

Certainty feels good. That sudden clean sense of knowing exactly who is in the wrong is part of what keeps anger coming back, so it is worth noticing as a pleasure rather than as proof.

Anger tidies things up. The doubt goes, the mixed feelings go, and for a moment you know where you stand. Take that away without putting anything in…

A minuteRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 53:32One line of research

When someone is in full flood, leaving is allowed. Getting out of the way of a person who is past listening is a skill, not a defeat.

You can say where you are going and that you will come back to it, which keeps it from reading as punishment. This matters most for anyone who was…

A minuteRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 42:41One line of research

If you are simmering most days and cannot point to what set it off, look at the standards you are running rather than at the day itself. A rule that is never quite met keeps producing small failures for you to react to.

Try listing what you expected of this morning, hour by hour, and see how many of those expectations were met exactly. Most people find a long tail of…

Five minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 2:185One line of research

However you speak to yourself about your own mistakes is usually how you will end up thinking about other people's. Going easier on yourself is not a treat you have not earned, it is part of getting easier on everyone else.

Watch for it in small moments. You snap at someone for being slow, and if you are honest you would have flayed yourself for exactly the same thing.…

Five minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 4:28One line of research

Some anger is really an expectation that will not be put down. The other person has moved on, the thing is over, and you are still holding the version of how it should have gone.

The tell is a short fuse over things that barely matter: a queue, a misplaced item, someone doing a job their own way. When frustration arrives that…

Five minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 23:62One line of research

A fair share of what angers you each day was selected for you, because outrage is what holds attention. Worth asking what you are being served, and how often.

Look back at the last hour of scrolling and count how many items were built to get exactly the reaction you gave them. You do not have to swear off…

Five minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 49:6One line of research

Some of what makes people angry is far bigger than any one conversation can settle. Saying that plainly is not giving up, it stops you carrying what was never yours.

If you are the calm one, at work or in a family or in a consulting room, there is a steady pull towards feeling you ought to be able to sort out the…

Five minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 22:78One line of research

If you carry a firm picture of how the world is supposed to work, the world will break it several times a day. No coping skill outpaces a supply of grievance that never runs out.

This is not a case for caring less about fairness. It is about telling apart an injustice you could act on from the general refusal of life to be…

Twenty minutesRighteous anger and perfectionismCoreQur’an 3:104One line of research

The studies tying childhood screen hours to later attention problems are correlational. They cannot tell you which way the arrow points, and there is a very ordinary reading where it points the other way.

The child who cannot settle is the child most likely to be put in front of a screen so that dinner gets cooked. A parent who is scattered themselves…

A minuteScreens and attentionMedical and treatmentQur’an 3:14One line of research

A ping about a parcel and a ping about your mother's health feel identical in the second before you look. Give that feeling a name, false urgency, and you get a little room.

The buzz carries no information about importance. It borrows the feeling of importance and lends it to whatever happened to arrive. Naming it in the…

A minuteScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 62:11One line of research

You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.

Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday…

A minuteScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 20:131One line of research

When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.

At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do…

A minuteScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 3:14One line of research

Gaming for an hour before you start the work almost never costs an hour. Do the thing that has to be done first, then the thing you want.

Once something enjoyable is running, whatever you were meant to do afterwards looks duller than it already did, and the hour quietly becomes three.…

A minuteScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 62:9One line of research

Charge the phone in another room overnight and use a proper alarm clock. Small change, and it takes the decision away from you completely.

In bed the phone is right there, and stopping is left to you at the hour you have the least left. Out of the room, there is nothing to resist. Buy…

A minuteScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 13:28One line of research