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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50 practices

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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

When someone says they feel restless inside, ask what the restlessness wants. Restless to move, or restless to do one particular thing until it feels right?

The two feel similar from the inside and point in different directions. With ADHD it is usually undirected: the legs go, the chair is wrong, you need…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 91:8One 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

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

There is more about focus, starting, and adhd than the practices: the focus, starting, and adhd area has the themes and the courses too.

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

One man put his lamps on a timer so the room would go dark at eleven and send him to bed. It worked for a few nights. Then he simply carried on in the dark. A cue can tell you the time. It cannot make you stand up.

Worth remembering before you build anything clever. If the pull of whatever a person is already doing is stronger than the nudge you have designed,…

A minuteGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 96:5One 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

An ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.

Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:31One line of research

The age by which symptoms have to have shown up is a number people agreed on, not a line in nature. It moved from seven to twelve when the manual was revised.

That matters if you are an adult wondering whether you would even qualify. The old cut-off was itself a compromise between studies pointing in…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:32One line of research

Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.

That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and…

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

Hyperactivity and impulsiveness almost never turn up alone. When restlessness appears with no attention difficulty beside it, that is a reason to ask what else might be going on.

In practice the two run together, and over the years the visible restlessness tends to settle while the attention side stays. So a picture that is…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:6One line of research

You do not need clinical language at an assessment. Some of the wording in the manual came straight from how families described it in the first place.

Phrases about being permanently on the go are in there because people kept saying them. So use yours: that your head is like a browser with forty…

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

The diagnostic manual is a document people sat in rooms and argued over. That is no reason to dismiss it, and it is a good reason not to treat it as the last word on you.

Committees weigh how reliably clinicians can agree on a criterion, what the field trials show, what a particular wording will do out in the world.…

Five minutesGetting 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

The checklists were built around the loud version of this, and girls are more often the quiet version. If she is struggling and nobody has ever suggested an assessment, that is worth pressing on.

Defiance in girls can look like refusal, withdrawal or a long-running argument about friendships rather than the disruption a teacher would report.…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 20:114One 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

Most autistic people also meet the criteria for ADHD. The other direction is much thinner: only a small minority of people with ADHD meet the criteria for autism.

That is mostly arithmetic rather than mystery. ADHD is the more common of the two, so one overlap looks large from one side and small from the other.…

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

Autism and ADHD share some surface features and are still two different things. The social difficulty in each arrives by a different road.

With ADHD it tends to be impulsiveness and missing what was going on: the interruption, the thing said too fast, the friend never rung back. With…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 96:5One 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