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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43 practices

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If therapy for ADHD did little for your thirteen year old, that is not a sign they were not trying. The self monitoring it leans on is still being built at that age, and it builds later in ADHD than in most.

The practical reading is about timing rather than willingness. Younger teenagers usually do better when the adults around them change the setup at…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationCBTQur’an 65:3One line of research

Play based programmes that build executive skills in young children have done reasonably well with children at risk of struggling at school. None has yet been tested in children actually diagnosed with ADHD, and that is a real difference rather than a technicality.

Results found in a broad at risk group tend to shrink, sometimes to nothing, when the same thing is tried with clinically diagnosed children, where…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:114One line of research

Showing a teenager live pictures of activity in one targeted part of their own brain has been tried once, in a small trial, and it looked encouraging. That was around a dozen young people, and nobody has repeated it yet.

This is worth knowing about mainly so you can tell it apart from the neurofeedback that is widely sold. The clinic version reads surface brain…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:43One line of research

There is a headband worn at night that stimulates a nerve in the face, cleared by regulators and tested against a dummy version in a single trial. Some children improved. Some felt sick or slept badly and stopped.

Regulatory clearance answers whether a device is safe enough to be sold, not whether it beats what you are already doing. One trial, funded by the…

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

Shame and stigma

Making it stick

Breathing

Structure and routine

Treatment and medication

What worry does

Feeling from the inside

Tolerate distress

Being seen and judged

What you are actually defending

Remembering to do it

Growing empathy

When you use something to cope

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Breaking the worry loop

Answering bids

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Obsessions and compulsions

Fondness and admiration

Self-compassion

Emotions as signals

Question the thought

Facing it a step at a time

Shame

Knowing your partner

Use your strengths

Anger, alcohol and the body

Posture and how you carry yourself

Repair after rupture

Shared spiritual life

Gratitude

When anger turns to harm

Meaning after harm

Letting it out safely

When you go numb

Living with uncertainty

Calm the body

Safety and grounding

Notice the pattern and flex

Name what you feel

Act on your values

Let the wave come

Your worth is not conditional

Your window of tolerance

Rituals of connection

Get it out of your head

Find meaning

Face it gently

Care for yourself in loss

Listening and understanding

Validate yourself and others

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 39:9One line of research

Magnetic stimulation of the brain has been tried for ADHD and has not yet shown anything. The studies are small, often single cases, and not built in a way that could give a trustworthy answer.

Small uncontrolled studies are generous places. Hope, attention and the freedom to report only the good parts all push results upwards. That does not…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:7One line of research

Two of the three big advances in ADHD over recent decades were not new treatments at all. They were clearer thinking about what the difficulty actually is, and honest accounting of what psychological treatment can and cannot deliver.

Understanding ADHD as a problem of self regulation rather than a shortage of attention changed what help gets aimed at. Knowing which psychosocial…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationADHD skillsQur’an 10:57One line of research

Programmes built on crossing the midline or on balance and inner ear work do not appear to beat ordinary exercise. If movement is what you are after, movement is available free.

These packages come with a theory about why they work, and the theory is usually where the confidence comes from rather than from the results. What…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 22:78One line of research

Massage may well leave you calmer, and calmer is worth having. It is not a treatment for ADHD, and the two are worth keeping in separate boxes.

Living with ADHD is stressful in a measurable way, so anything that genuinely lowers that load is doing real good and deserves a place. The error is…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28One line of research

Rather than memorising which treatments to avoid, keep a few questions you can put to any of them. New products arrive faster than anyone can keep a list.

Ask how it was tested and by whom, and whether anyone independent of the company has looked at it. Ask what it costs, whether insurance touches it,…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38One line of research

Roughly, the order runs like this. Stimulant medication does the most, the non stimulants help but come second, and after that exercise, omega oils, accommodations and therapy are the ones worth your time.

Decent sleep, ordinary good food and keeping screens within reason sit underneath all of it as support rather than treatment, and a sleep study is…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

A ramp does nothing for someone's legs, and it gets them into the building. Timers, visible clocks, a shorter task list and a calendar somebody else keeps do the same job here.

Accommodations are not treatment and they are not pretending to be. What they do is take the parts of the work that live inside a person's head,…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

Mindfulness for adult ADHD is promising and thinly researched at the same time. If it helps you, that is worth having. It is simply not yet in the same bracket as medication or practical therapy.

There are only a handful of studies, mostly small, and few of them set mindfulness against another active treatment rather than against not much.…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationCBTQur’an 17:36One line of research

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…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 65:2One line of research

If the prescriber, coach or therapist is not delivering much, say so and ask for someone else. Working around poor care quietly is the thing that convinces a couple this is simply as good as it gets.

A dose never revisited, or a therapist who has never worked with ADHD, sets a low ceiling. The trouble is that the ceiling gets read as the person:…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:87One line of research

Sleep, food and movement will not cure anything, but they lengthen the fuse. Bad moments still arrive, and you handle them differently when your body is not already running on empty.

This matters more here than it sounds, because ADHD tends to wreck exactly these three and then the wreckage feeds back into the flare ups. Late…

Twenty minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:28One line of research

The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.

Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…

LongerTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185One line of research

Think of ADHD as sitting at the centre of an onion. Poor sleep, sleep apnoea, low vitamin levels, allergy, ongoing pain, untreated anxiety or low mood all sit in layers around it, and each one makes the centre look worse than it is.

This explains something that otherwise looks strange: treatments that do nothing whatever for ADHD can still make a real difference, because they…

LongerTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 9:105One line of research

Think of it the way you would think about diabetes. Something to manage with several things at once, most days, for as long as it is there.

That frame does a lot of quiet work. It says the treatment is ongoing rather than a course you finish, it explains why things slide back when…

LongerTreatment and medicationADHD skillsQur’an 2:185One line of research

There is no single treatment that covers all of this. What works looks more like five things running alongside each other, and understanding the condition comes first.

Each piece reaches a different part of the day. Medication does something the environment cannot, changing what a room asks of someone does something…

LongerTreatment and medicationADHD skillsQur’an 22:78One line of research

The stack goes: understand it, medicate where that is right, change what the adults do, change what the day asks, and keep arguing the child's corner. Each layer does a job the others cannot.

None of them stands in for another, which is why swapping one out leaves a gap rather than a smaller plan. Medication does not reorganise a…

LongerTreatment and medicationADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One line of research