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.

What matches

435 practices

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Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.

Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…

Twenty minutesFeelings and focusCBTQur’an 94:5One line of research

If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.

This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves…

LongerFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 94:1One line of research

Putting something off is often fear wearing a lazy costume. If planners have never fixed it for you, that is a clue the trouble is what the task makes you feel, not what your diary looks like.

Ask what you expect to happen when you open it. There is usually something specific in there: that it will be wrong, that it will swallow the whole…

Five minutesGet startedADHD skillsQur’an 2:45One line of research

Sometimes both roads carry a cost and neither will feel good. Accept that first, then choose, rather than searching for the option that comes without a sting.

A lot of long deliberation is really a search for the version that leaves nobody upset and nothing lost. When that version does not exist, the search…

Five minutesGet startedADHD skillsQur’an 2:45One line of research

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

What worry does

When anger turns to harm

Bringing the future closer

Making it stick

When everything feels flat

Shame and stigma

Breaking the worry loop

Food, caffeine and fuel

Treatment and medication

Emotions as signals

Facing it a step at a time

Growing empathy

What you are actually defending

Posture and how you carry yourself

Obsessions and compulsions

Get started

Letting it out safely

Being seen and judged

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Exercise, food and other supports

Question the thought

Self-compassion

Treatment and medication

Your sense of time

When you use something to cope

Structure and routine

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Anger, alcohol and the body

What ADHD actually is

Rest and pacing

Remembering to do it

Panic and the body

Look at what you are actually working for this week. If every item is there to stop someone being cross or something going wrong, you are running on avoidance, and it is exhausting.

Avoidance does get things done, but only at the last moment and only with dread attached, and it leaves behind nothing you wanted. Take one thing off…

Twenty minutesGet startedADHD skillsQur’an 29:69One line of research

If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.

For some of us an unresolved question hums in the background until it is settled, and settling it becomes urgent even when nothing depends on it.…

LongerGet startedADHD skillsQur’an 94:8One line of research

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:32One line of research

Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.

Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 39:53One line of research

With gambling machines the pull may be the lights and the noise as much as the chance of winning. That changes what you actually need to stay away from.

If the sensory buzz is doing the work, the triggers are not only the betting shop. They are the phone games built with the same flashing and chiming,…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 16:43One line of research

Expect more anxiety, low mood, drinking and drug use in the young people coming through now. And expect the boys to say less about it, so go looking for irritability, trouble and substances instead of waiting to be told.

Ask parents what they are seeing rather than only what they have been told, and ask the young person directly and privately. Screening that rests on…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 21:83One line of research

Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.

Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:7One line of research

Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.

Do it slowly and write it in their words rather than yours. Most people arrive believing anxiety is one solid block that either has hold of them or…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:83One line of research

When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.

The two travel together often, and a minority of children follow a path from constant defiance into more serious trouble later. Every stage of that…

LongerGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:216One line of research

Cold water on your face, especially around the eyes and cheeks, slows things down fast. Splash it, or hold a cold flannel there for half a minute.

This is one of the few things that works when you are too far gone to concentrate on anything. It asks for no skill and no privacy beyond a tap. Lean…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 8:11Long taught, never tested

Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.

Twenty or thirty seconds is enough to feel something shift, and most people find the breath falls into step with the tapping on its own. Warmth in…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 48:4Long taught, never tested

When you are helping someone settle, put the technique in their hands rather than your own. They tap themselves, they set the pressure, they stop when they want to.

Being touched by someone else, even kindly and with permission, asks a lot of a person whose body has been handled badly before. Self-administered…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 40:64Long taught, never tested

Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.

The counting brings the breath down to somewhere between four and six a minute, depending on how fast you count, which is the range most of the heart…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 78:7Long taught, never tested

In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 2:22Long taught, never tested

Breathe in, then let it out as a sigh you can actually hear. Not a polite one.

The sound is the point. A silent out breath does some of the work, and letting the voice into it adds a bit more, which is probably why sighing turns…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 3:126Long taught, never tested

Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.

You can strip away everything else and this part still stands up. Naming the state and accepting it in the same sentence blocks the second wave, the…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 9:118Long taught, never tested