Practices

Put your small interruption right before the moment you already know is hard. If it is the drive home, do it as you get into the car.

Anger tends to be patterned rather than random: the same commute, the same meeting, the same hour of the evening, the same name coming up on the…

Trace a slow circle with your finger, on your knee or in the air, once a day. One a day is the whole prescription, which is why it survives contact with real life.

A small movement done daily becomes a handle. After a few weeks the gesture starts to bring a little of the settled state with it, and you can use it…

An open hand has meant coming unarmed for a very long time. If that meaning does something for you, keep it. If it does not, the gesture still works.

Some people find a practice sticks better when it stands for something they already care about, like refusing to cause harm, or showing up with…

The out breath is the part that quiets things down. Cells in the brain's alarm centres behave differently across the two phases of a breath, and breathing out is the calming side of that cycle.

This is why nearly every breathing technique that works has a long exhale somewhere inside it. You do not need the anatomy to use it, but knowing why…

You may hear that humming floods you with nitric oxide and drops your blood pressure. Humming does raise nitric oxide in the nose. The rest of that sentence is a leap.

It is worth being careful with this, because a practice sold on a dramatic mechanism gets dropped when the mechanism turns out to be shaky. Hum…

Say out breath, not breath. Told to take a signal breath, most people pull air in hard, which stirs them up rather than settling them.

This is a small wording change that decides whether the technique works. Whether you are teaching someone else or reminding yourself, put the phase…

The planning part of the brain is the last to finish growing, and it keeps developing well into the twenties. Eighteen is a legal age rather than a developmental one.

This is worth saying plainly in a family where someone is being asked why they cannot just be responsible now. Nobody expects a fourteen year old to…

Reading a room is a skill rather than a personality trait, and it can be broken into parts. Before you speak, take a second to look: who is here, what they are doing, how loud the place is.

Give yourself a short list to run through. How are people dressed and speaking, is this somewhere jokes land, is anybody clearly in a hurry. Then…

If a year out is coming, call it a bridge rather than a gap. A gap is a hole in a record. A bridge is going somewhere.

That word will be repeated at every family gathering for twelve months, so it is worth choosing carefully. A bridge year has a direction and an end,…

Writing things down is not evidence that your memory has failed. It is what happens once there is more in your life than one head can hold.

Most people who refuse a system are protecting something: the sense of being capable, of not being the sort of person who needs help with this. Argue…

Putting a task in the diary is not the same as doing it. The slot holds the time. The starting is still yours.

Worth knowing before you build anything, because when the first week goes by with the boxes filled and half of them untouched, the honest conclusion…

Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.

The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…

Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.

The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…

Even where a herb has good evidence behind it, that evidence belongs to the plant and not to the bottle in your hand. Testing keeps turning up products that do not contain what the label says.

This part of the argument does not depend on whether herbal remedies work. You could accept every claim made for a plant and still be left with the…

People often turn to herbal remedies hoping to avoid side effects. Plants are chemistry too, and some of them interact with prescribed medication in ways that matter.

A plant extract is not one substance, it is a mixture of many, which gives it more places to interact rather than fewer. Origin has nothing to do…

Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.

The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…