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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716 practices

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If the same three names keep coming up, compare those three and stop looking. Twenty options will not give you a better answer, only a later one.

Past a handful of choices, more searching adds very little while the cost of deciding keeps climbing, and if you are prone to circling it can stop…

Twenty minutesGet startedADHD skillsQur’an 23:61One 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

If you are being assessed for attention, say something about your mood and your worry as well, even if nobody asks.

Anxiety and low mood sit alongside ADHD often enough that a thorough assessment will go looking for them anyway. But shame is quiet, and years of…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 40:60One line of research

If someone was adopted, or simply does not know their family history, say early and plainly that this is not a problem. It helps to have and it is not needed.

Otherwise the question lands as one more reminder of what is missing, and some people will spend the rest of the appointment feeling they brought the…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

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

The fear underneath anger

Tolerate distress

The cost of avoiding

Moving your body

Obsessions and compulsions

What worry does

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Feeling from the inside

Emotions as signals

Breathing

When you use something to cope

Breaking the worry loop

Being seen and judged

Treatment and medication

Practising under provocation

Bringing the future closer

Structure and routine

Growing empathy

Exercise, food and other supports

Remembering to do it

Question the thought

Posture and how you carry yourself

When you go numb

Making it stick

When anger turns to harm

Letting it out safely

Self-compassion

Facing it a step at a time

Living with uncertainty

What you are actually defending

Rest and pacing

Panic and the body

Anger, alcohol and the body

Use your strengths

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Some of what looks like muddle is the system's fault. Our tenth month is named for eight, because two months were added later and nobody renamed the rest.

Worth saying to anyone who feels stupid about dates and forms. A calendar whose numbers are out of step, a tax year starting in April, forms asking…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:26One line of research

'I set a reminder and still did not do it' is not a story about a bad reminder. It tells you the missing piece was never information, and a bigger, louder version of the same thing will fail in the same way.

The reflex is to escalate: three alarms, a different app, an entire new system built on Sunday night. What is needed is a change of kind, something…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 17:36One line of research

There is a difference between low mood you have carried all your life and low mood that grew out of years of working twice as hard for half the result. Both are real, and they need treating in a different order.

If the second describes you, the picture often lifts a fair way once the attention difficulties are being managed and the daily experience of falling…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

Not all distraction comes from outside. Some of it is a thought that will not leave, circling while you read the same paragraph four times.

That difference matters at an assessment. Being pulled away by everything in the room, and being held in place by an intrusive thought you cannot put…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 50:16One line of research

Eating that runs away from you, and eating you cannot stop once it has started, turn up alongside ADHD more than people expect. Usually it is doing a job rather than proving a weakness.

The pattern leans towards bingeing rather than restricting, which fits: it belongs with the difficulty of stopping something already in motion. Often…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 12:53One line of research

Trouble with eating, and with how your body looks, gets missed far more often in men. The questionnaires and the expectations behind them were built around women.

In men it runs more towards size and muscle than towards thinness, and towards fixing on one part of the body that everybody else says looks…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 17:70One 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

Not every bout of eating too much belongs to an eating disorder. Ask whether how the body looks is part of it, because that is where the two paths separate.

When bingeing comes out of ADHD it is often boredom, or the food simply being there with nothing stepping in to stop it, and the person is not…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 95:4One line of research

Ask for a number first, then go hunting for exceptions. How is today on a scale of one to ten, and when was it last higher than that?

An assessment can turn into an hour of everything that is wrong, which leaves a person flatter than when they arrived. Exception questions do the…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 94:5One line of research

The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.

Told carefully, this changes the story a family tells about itself. Not a line of difficult people, but a trait that has been present for generations…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 24:61One line of research

Before you decide a strategy has failed, check whether the medication underneath it is doing its job. If someone is sitting in front of you still struggling, the honest first answer is usually that it is not, quite.

Ask about the shape of the day rather than the dose alone. When does it come on, when does it wear off, which hours are the hard ones, is there any…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:26One line of research

Time management is only the fit between tasks and the hours you have: planning them against time, then doing them against time. It is a skill with parts, not a verdict on what kind of person you are.

Most people arrive having already decided they are lazy, and that decision is doing them no good at all. Describing it mechanically gives you both…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:13One line of research

Parents with one affected child often ask what they might do differently before the next one. Answer honestly: there are lists of suggestions in circulation, the evidence behind most of them is thin, and the question underneath is usually about blame.

Take the question seriously and take the guilt seriously alongside it. Give what is genuinely known, say plainly where recommendations run ahead of…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 2:286One 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 truly does not mind losing the privilege, taking more away will not get you anywhere. That is the moment to change approach rather than raise the stakes, usually to a structured parent programme that works on the pattern between parent and child.

Star charts fail with these children because the reward was never the point of the behaviour. What helps is a proper course of parent management…

LongerGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 3:159One line of research