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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1384 practices

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One more episode tonight is obviously worth it, and by eleven the next morning it obviously was not. Nothing changed except where you were standing in time.

Everyone recognises this, which makes it a good thing to notice rather than a private failing. The exchange rate flips overnight: tomorrow's…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 78:10One line of research

When a deadline or a reward sits a long way off, it can feel almost weightless, while the thing in front of you feels enormous. That is not you being shallow. It is a shortened view of time doing what it does.

You can notice it in the gap between what you know and what you feel. You know the report matters more than the tidying, it just does not feel that…

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

How long will this take is really several questions at once. There is the doing, and there is finding everything you need before you can start, and the second one is usually missing from the guess.

Next time you estimate something, split it out loud: how long to gather what I need, how long to actually do it, how long to put it all away again.…

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

Think of the small repair job that swallows an hour because the right screw is not in the drawer. That hour was always part of the job. It just was not part of the picture in your head.

The same thing happens with paperwork, only less visibly: the ten minute form needs a reference number that lives in an email you cannot find. When…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 6:96

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

Grounding and settling

Growing empathy

The cost of avoiding

Structure and routine

Food, caffeine and fuel

What worry does

Practising under provocation

Cool the body first

Emotions as signals

Treatment and medication

Making it stick

Breathing

What you are actually defending

Being seen and judged

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Shame and stigma

Breaking the worry loop

Feeling from the inside

When anger turns to harm

When you use something to cope

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Remembering to do it

Facing it a step at a time

Tolerate distress

Self-compassion

Anger, alcohol and the body

Use your strengths

Obsessions and compulsions

Posture and how you carry yourself

Living with uncertainty

One line of research

The more you have to look up before you can begin, the further the real time drifts from your guess. Every search is also a door left open, and some of them lead somewhere else entirely.

Booking a trip is the clearest case: one question about dates becomes four tabs and an hour gone. A decent defence is to do the looking up as its own…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:19One line of research

Nobody works five hours straight. If your estimate assumes you will, then the shortfall gets read as you being slow rather than as the estimate being wrong.

For anything long, put the breaks into the number before you start. Say four hours of work plus the standing up, the kettle, the two interruptions,…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 40:61One line of research

If an hour of real work reliably eats two hours of clock, book two. You do not have to become a better estimator to end up with a schedule that works.

Take a fortnight of honest evidence and work out your own number. Some people run at one and a half, some nearer three, and it shifts with the type…

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

Set the limit while you are calm and let the device hold it. A computer that shuts itself down at half past ten is arguing with nobody, which is why it wins.

Screens, browser blockers, a plug timer on the television: pick whichever you will not immediately undo. The point is to move the decision away from…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 17:78One line of research

People put the meeting in the diary and not the shower, the finding of the keys or the twenty minutes on the bus. The event gets planned as though standing up puts you in the room.

Give preparation and travel their own lines in the calendar, with their own start times. If the meeting is at two and it takes half an hour to get…

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

If the test is on Friday and it is Monday, Friday is doing almost no work. Put something today on the end of today's revision, however small.

This is not spoiling a child. It is matching the reward to the timescale they can actually feel, which is roughly the one they are living in. Half an…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 78:11One line of research

If the only real feedback a child gets arrives every ten weeks, it will not shape a single Tuesday. A report at the end of term is a record, not a motivator.

This is worth saying gently to teachers and to parents who feel that grades ought to be motivation enough. For this child they are not, and no amount…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:19One line of research

For younger children, make the reward small, concrete and soon. Stickers, points, a smiley face, five minutes of something good, handed over the same hour rather than at the end of the week.

Points that build towards something bigger work well, as long as the point itself arrives immediately. Hourly is not too often for a young child, and…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 11:114One line of research

Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.

Children with this difficulty collect an extraordinary amount of correction over a childhood, from teachers, from parents, from other children.…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 30:17One line of research

Go looking for the moment the child does the thing you have been asking for, and say so while it is still happening. Most of us watch for the problem and only notice the good behaviour when we have run out of trouble.

It helps to decide in advance what you are hunting for, so that starting the homework without being asked, or waiting a turn, actually registers…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 25:62One line of research

Part of what keeps the late start going is that it has genuinely worked. You have produced something good in one long night before, and you remember it clearly.

So telling you that leaving it late is a bad plan tends to fail, because you have evidence and the other person does not. The honest version is…

Twenty minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 18:23One line of research

The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.

People who are managing well in every visible way still get brought down by a lapsed policy or an unopened letter from the council. Trying to care…

Twenty minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 78:11One line of research

When someone tells you they have failed, the most useful thing you can do is nothing clever. Let your face stay soft and keep looking at them.

Shame is braced for disgust, so it reads your face before it hears your words. A quick reassurance can even land as a rush to move on. Slower is…

A minuteShameEmotionally focusedQur’an 93:3One line of research

When someone's shame fills the room, check your own state before you say anything. If you start to shrink, or to worry that you are handling this badly, they will feel it.

Shame is catching. The particular risk is a quiet spiral of your own, along the lines of I am no good at this, which pulls you out of the room at the…

A minuteShameTrauma informedQur’an 53:32One line of research

You did not choose which things hurt you. Where you are tender was set long before you had any say in it, and the only live question is what you do with it now.

This is worth saying out loud between two people, because each usually thinks their own soft spot is embarrassing and the other's is obvious. Try…

Five minutesShameEmotionally focusedQur’an 30:54One line of research

ADD and ADHD are not two different things. ADD is the older public word for what is now called ADHD, inattentive type, and the quieter presentation is not a lighter version of it.

The mix up matters more than it sounds. Parents sometimes hear ADD and take it to mean something mild that will not need treatment, and school or…

A minuteShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 33:5One line of research