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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586 practices

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When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.

People agree that things helped for all sorts of reasons: not wanting to seem difficult, not wanting to disappoint you, having learned long ago that…

A minuteGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 16:53Long taught, never tested

Telling someone they have changed their brain lands harder than telling them they have changed their mind. That is worth knowing, and worth handling carefully.

Brain language feels solid and permanent, so a person can lean on it. That same weight is why it should not be stretched: promising rewiring you…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 9:105One line of research

Your brain is less a single organ than a crowd of billions of cells working out what to do next. The angry pull you feel is one voice in that crowd, not the whole of you.

This matters most in the second when an impulse arrives sounding completely certain. You can hear it, treat it as one contribution, and still not act…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 13:11One line of research

You do not have to believe the calmer sentence yet. Say it anyway, on purpose, often, and belief tends to arrive behind the repetition rather than in front of it.

Pick one line you would want ready in your mouth, something like: he is not doing this at me. Repeat it in quiet moments, not only in hot ones. It…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 2:152One line of research

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

Food, caffeine and fuel

Feelings and focus

Moving your body

Breathing

Exercise, food and other supports

When everything feels flat

What ADHD actually is

Treatment and medication

The cost of avoiding

Being seen and judged

Tolerate distress

Shame and stigma

Screens and attention

What worry does

Shame

What you are actually defending

Remembering to do it

Posture and how you carry yourself

Feeling from the inside

Emotions as signals

Self-compassion

Obsessions and compulsions

Facing it a step at a time

When you use something to cope

Panic and the body

Question the thought

Breaking the worry loop

When anger turns to harm

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Righteous anger and perfectionism

When you go numb

Letting it out safely

Rest and pacing

Anger, alcohol and the body

A new practice needs somewhere to live. Hook it to something you already do a few times a day, like sitting down to eat.

Vague plans to practise more collapse without anyone noticing. Name the moment instead: when I put my plate down, I take three slow breaths before…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 11:114One line of research

Reaching for your water at dinner is a chance to practise. Stop your hand for a second, notice that you want it, then go ahead and drink.

No cushion is involved, no mantra, nothing to schedule. The point is to rehearse the shape of the thing many times a day at almost no cost: impulse,…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 33:41One line of research

You are practising the pause, not giving anything up. Once you have paused, go ahead and drink the water.

This gets misheard quickly and turns into one more rule about denying yourself, which most people rebel against inside a week. The target is the…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 17:19One line of research

Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.

Memory is unfair about this. The single evening you lost your temper stays vivid while thirty quiet successes disappear, and then it feels as though…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 53:40One line of research

If you held back at four o'clock and then snapped at seven, the holding back still happened. A later slip does not reach backwards and cancel it.

All or nothing scoring is the quickest route from one lapse to giving the whole thing up: I lost it, so none of it was working, so why bother. Count…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 18:24One line of research

The aim is not to stop feeling angry. It is to stretch the time between the feeling arriving and you doing anything about it, from no seconds to a few.

That target has the advantage of being honest and checkable. You can ask whether you got a moment this time that you did not get last time. The anger…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 3:186One line of research

One move to interrupt, one to settle. Open your hand, then take the slow breaths: the first buys you the gap and the second gives you something to do with it.

An interrupt on its own leaves you standing there, aware and still flooded. A settling practice on its own never gets going, because the moment goes…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 94:7One line of research

Sometimes you can feel the whole exchange lined up before it starts: your line, then theirs, then the door. Leaving your line out is enough to stop the sequence that once.

Nothing impressive is required. You sit there, you say nothing, you let the moment go past unfilled and you find out that it can. Some scripts do…

A minuteMaking it stickCoreQur’an 31:17One line of research

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 29:69One line of research

One or two minutes every day will do more for you than forty minutes once a week. The long sit sounds serious and is mostly a good way to end up dreading it.

Set the price so low that skipping it would be odd: a minute, at a moment you already have. The aim is that it happens again tomorrow, not that it…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 33:41One line of research

Treat it like brushing your teeth rather than like meditating. Nobody is good at brushing their teeth, and nobody skips it because last night's went badly.

The hygiene framing takes the achievement out of it, and achievement is where perfectionists quit. Put it next to something already automatic: after…

A minuteMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 16:96One line of research

You can screen for a processing difficulty with no test at all. Just notice, in ordinary conversation, whether the child is answering what you actually said.

A child who drifts off topic, answers a slightly different question, or needs things said twice may not be avoiding you or daydreaming. The words may…

A minuteReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 20:28One line of research

Behaviour is usually the visible end of a skill that has not been built. What you are watching in a classroom is the shape of the difficulty rather than the shape of the child.

It is a single sentence you can say in a meeting, and it tends to move the conversation away from what to do about the behaviour towards what the…

A minuteReading, numbers and learning differencesCoreQur’an 17:84One line of research

You can say what an SSRI does in one sentence. It blocks the doorway that carries serotonin back out of the gap between two nerve cells, so more of it stays there for longer and is likelier to be picked up.

Worth being able to say plainly, because most people are carrying something vaguer and more frightening than that. It also sets a fair expectation.…

A minuteWhen everything feels flatMedical and treatmentQur’an 8:24One line of research

The blockade is partial. Serotonin is not trapped in there forever: enzymes still break it down and the transporters that are not blocked carry on working.

That matters for accuracy and it matters for reassurance, because people do picture something flooding and stuck. It also explains why serotonin…

A minuteWhen everything feels flatMedical and treatmentQur’an 94:1One line of research

Serotonin syndrome comes from stacking, and the second agent is usually something nobody thought to mention: a migraine tablet, a cough medicine, a herbal remedy for low mood.

Triptans, tramadol, dextromethorphan, linezolid and St John's wort all count, as do other antidepressants. Someone who mentions in passing that they…

A minuteWhen everything feels flatMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:87One line of research