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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31 practices

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In the famous test a child is left alone with one sweet and told that waiting will earn them two. Some reach for it almost before the grown up has finished speaking. They understood the offer perfectly. The second sweet simply was not real to them.

That is the whole thing in one image: the knowledge intact, the feeling absent. You can know that filing the return today would save you a fortnight…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:19One line of research

A hundred pounds now, or the same hundred pounds guaranteed at the end of the year. Same money, same certainty. One of them pulls at you and the other does not.

Worth sitting with for a moment, because it takes risk out of the picture entirely. There is nothing to lose by waiting, and the near one still feels…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 84:19One line of research

Here is a short way to hold the whole difficulty: the now in front of you is too big and the later is too small. It fits in your head at the moment you need it, which longer explanations do not.

Use it as a question rather than a verdict. Standing at the fridge at eleven at night, or with the tab open instead of the form, you can ask whether…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 84:19One line of research

Time speeds up inside something absorbing and crawls inside something dull, and for many people with ADHD that swing is much wider. Which means your sense of time is least reliable exactly where you need it most.

Two things follow. When the task is dull, expect your sense of how long you have been at it to fall well short of the truth, so use a timer instead…

A minuteYour sense of time

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

Food, caffeine and fuel

Practising under provocation

Cool the body first

Making it stick

Structure and routine

Screens and attention

What you are actually defending

What worry does

Treatment and medication

Growing empathy

Breathing

Answering bids

Fondness and admiration

Being seen and judged

Shame and stigma

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Feeling from the inside

Breaking the worry loop

Gratitude

When you use something to cope

Shared spiritual life

Use your strengths

Anger, alcohol and the body

Facing it a step at a time

Question the thought

When anger turns to harm

Meaning after harm

Calm the body

Let the wave come

Posture and how you carry yourself

Rebuilding trust

Safety and grounding

Name what you feel

Notice the pattern and flex

Your worth is not conditional

Act on your values

Working with anger

Affection and touch

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Listen to the body

Keep the bond

Hold a boundary

Obsessions and compulsions

Patience and trust

Rest and pacing

Ride the urge

Rituals of connection

Get it out of your head

Find meaning

Your window of tolerance

Work with your brain

Face it gently

Care for yourself in loss

Validate yourself and others

The cost of avoiding

Living with uncertainty

Panic and the body

When you go numb

Listening and understanding

ADHD skills

Qur’an 103:1

One line of research

A clock with hands shows you how much is left. A number only tells you where you are, which is why the hour can vanish while you keep checking it.

Try one on the wall where you work, or the sort that shows a shrinking coloured wedge for the time remaining. What you want is to see the deadline…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 36:39One line of research

If you will not look at clocks, let something tell you instead. A watch or phone that buzzes every fifteen minutes, or on the hour, rebuilds a rough sense of how long you have been at this.

Start with a gentle interval, a quarter of an hour or half an hour, and treat it as a question rather than an alarm: what am I doing, and is this…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 30:17One line of research

Reading the time off a clock does nothing on its own. The useful bit is the question straight after it: where was I meant to be by now, and how much is left.

Try adding one sentence to every glance. It is twenty past two, so I have forty minutes and I am about halfway. Said out loud it sounds laborious,…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 25:62One line of research

Keep one short question and use it everywhere: is this what I should be doing right now. Nothing clever, just the same words often enough that they turn up on their own.

The value is in it being fixed. An intention to monitor yourself is far too vague to survive a busy afternoon, whereas a set phrase can be triggered…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 59:18One line of research

You do not have to agree that it will take longer. Add the extra time anyway and let the week prove you right or wrong. If you finish early, you have a spare twenty minutes, which is not a punishment.

This matters because the felt sense of duration is stubborn, and waiting until it corrects itself means waiting a long while. So treat the padding as…

A minuteYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 10:5One line of research

For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.

This is worth knowing because it explains why being told the date again does nothing. You knew the date. What was missing was the sense of it coming…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 23:113One line of research

Spotting on day one that a procedure is pointless is a real skill. Saying so in the first meeting is the part that costs people the job.

The observation is rarely the problem. It is that it arrives before anyone asked, from someone who has been there a fortnight, often with the…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 20:114One line of research

Every trait worth having here arrives with its twin. A love of the offbeat and a real problem with deadlines are the same wiring seen from two sides.

Strength lists that leave the cost out are not believable and they do not help anybody. Pair them instead. If you are the one who finds the…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 36:38One line of research

A clever workaround can hide a difficulty for years. A child who memorises what he cannot read looks fine, right up until the amount to be read grows past what memory can carry.

So do not judge by output alone. Ask what it cost to produce. Someone keeping up but exhausted, dreading the reading, staying up late to cover it, is…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 2:189One line of research

Think of your sense of the future as how far out to sea you can spot a ship. How far depends on your eyesight, and also on how big and bright the ship is and what the weather is doing.

That last part is the useful bit. The same person sees a wedding six months off perfectly clearly and misses a form due on Tuesday completely,…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 36:39One line of research

How far ahead a person can hold in mind grows as they get older. A five year old on Monday does not care about Saturday, a fifteen year old should, and by thirty most people can worry about a pension.

Reading it that way changes what you are looking at. The question is not whether someone cares but whether their reach is what you would expect at…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 22:5One line of research

If it is not happening now, it is often not being thought about at all. Not faintly, not somewhere in the background. Not there.

That changes what a reminder has to do. Turning up the volume on a faint signal is useless when there is no signal at all. The thing has to be made…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 59:18One line of research

There are two quite different ways of putting things off. One is anxious and full of dread. The other is perfectly calm until the pressure arrives, and then everything happens at once.

The difference matters because the help is not the same. Where there is dread, the work is with the fear, and approaching the task in small doses…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 10:5One line of research

A small job due tomorrow feels heavier than a big one due next week. Everyone works this way. It is simply stronger with ADHD, and it quietly wrecks any list ordered by importance.

Which is why ranking tasks by what matters most tends to fall apart by Tuesday. Your felt sense of weight is set by how near a thing is, so an…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 17:11One line of research

Fun things serve the present. Important things serve the future. Put like that, you can see why the advice to just do the important thing is asking rather a lot.

It asks you to act on the part of the picture you can least feel. So let the important thing serve the present a bit too: do it with someone, do it…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 103:1One line of research

The further off something sits, the less it weighs on today's decision. That is not a flaw in your reasoning. It is how the weighing works for everybody.

It also explains something that often gets read as dishonesty. The plan you made on Monday was sincere. By Thursday the reward for keeping it has…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 65:3One line of research