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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10 practices

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If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.

Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31One line of research

Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.

Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31One line of research

Irritable bowel symptoms turn up more often in people with ADHD, and they tend to track stress. If your stomach is at its worst in the weeks when everything else is at its worst, that is information rather than coincidence.

Two things help more often than they get suggested. Cutting caffeine frequently settles symptoms on its own, since it speeds the gut up and raises…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 106:4One line of research

If your mood drops reliably as the light goes, that is worth naming as a thing in its own right. Seasonal low is more common alongside ADHD, and a light box first thing in the morning helps a lot of people.

Use it early in the day and use it consistently, since the timing is part of how it works. It is also worth asking whoever prescribes for you about…

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

When you use something to cope

Remembering to do it

When everything feels flat

Exercise, food and other supports

Shame

Breathing

Being seen and judged

Practising under provocation

Anger, alcohol and the body

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Use your strengths

Equanimity and perspective

Emotions as signals

Shame and stigma

Choosing your response

Letting it out safely

When anger turns to harm

Obsessions and compulsions

Facing it a step at a time

Breaking the worry loop

Making it stick

Feeling from the inside

Structure and routine

Shared spiritual life

Treatment and medication

Living with uncertainty

Listen to the body

What worry does

What you are actually defending

Question the thought

Care for yourself in loss

The cost of avoiding

Posture and how you carry yourself

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 36:33One line of research

Very low vitamin D produces fatigue, low mood and a flatness that looks exactly like depression, and it is not part of routine bloods in most places. If you have never had it measured, it is a fair thing to ask for.

One clinician telling this story about himself had a level that was almost undetectable, and no antidepressant would have raised it, because what was…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:57One line of research

The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.

Correcting a deficiency usually means a high dose for a defined period and then a steady daily amount, with the level rechecked to see where you have…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:141One line of research

Before settling on depression as the whole story, ask for thyroid function and vitamin D to be checked. Both are common, both are cheap to test, and an underactive thyroid produces a picture that looks like depression from the outside.

An untreated thyroid problem also blunts how well antidepressants work, so missing it can mean months on a treatment that was never going to do the…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

If a health habit keeps sliding, attach something immediate to it. The apps where you put real money on hitting a step target work for a reason: the payoff arrives now instead of in twenty years.

The natural reward for walking more is invisible and decades away, which is no use to a brain running on what happens next. A small stake, a streak,…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 52:19One line of research

Stress unsettles the gut and an unsettled gut drags on mood, so the two keep each other going. The good news buried in that is you can step in from either end.

You do not have to establish which came first. Easing the pressure on your nervous system helps digestion, steadying what you eat helps mood, and…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:168One line of research

Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.

This is not about swapping therapy for supplements. It is about not spending a year working on something a blood test could have partly explained. If…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 80:24One line of research