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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1182 practices

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Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.

Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 62:10One line of research

A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.

Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 2:286One line of research

Who pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.

With a sixteen year old at home on the family plan, parents setting terms is reasonable and worth saying out loud. With an adult, the same move…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 28:77One line of research

Screens are easy to start and have no natural end. So the part worth planning is not the getting on, it is the getting off.

Decide in advance what happens at the finish, and make sure something appealing is waiting on the other side. A timer that only tells you to stop…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 6:68One line of research

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

Cool the body first

Breathing

Shame and stigma

Treatment and medication

Feeling from the inside

What you are actually defending

Remembering to do it

Breaking the worry loop

What worry does

Being seen and judged

Emotions as signals

Structure and routine

Growing empathy

When you use something to cope

Making it stick

Tolerate distress

Treatment and medication

Facing it a step at a time

Staying regulated in conflict

Rebuilding trust

Obsessions and compulsions

Knowing your partner

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Self-compassion

Posture and how you carry yourself

Shame

Listening and understanding

Question the thought

Shared spiritual life

When you go numb

Living with uncertainty

Use your strengths

Rituals of connection

When anger turns to harm

Meaning after harm

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Anger, alcohol and the body

Notice the pattern and flex

Let the wave come

Your worth is not conditional

Help someone grieving

Get it out of your head

Your window of tolerance

Face it gently

Letting it out safely

What you are on there for matters more than how long you are on. Scrolling to keep up with people you love is a different activity from posting and then watching to see who approved.

Use aimed at status, at likes, at managing how you come across tends to sit alongside feeling worse. Use aimed at staying in touch and sharing what…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 57:20One line of research

Online you can draft, delete, reply an hour later or simply leave. None of that exists in a kitchen, and plenty of people now find real conversation unbearably fast.

So the ordinary friction of talking to someone in person, the pause you fill badly, the thing that comes out wrong, gets read as proof that you are…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 18:28One line of research

Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.

Rudeness online is loud, cheap and rewarded, so it fills the space out of all proportion to how common it is. The trouble is that we generalise.…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 4:140One line of research

Most children with ADHD grow into adults with ADHD. Some of it settles as the brain finishes developing into your late twenties, and adult life gives you more say over how your days are arranged, but the underlying difficulty tends to stay.

This is worth knowing because much of the improvement people do get comes from arranging things to suit themselves: the job that fits, the hours that…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 65:7One line of research

It tends to run the same way each time. You struggle with something, you feel awful about it, so you keep away from it, and anyone who raises it gets a sharp answer, which makes you keep away harder.

The relief when you avoid it arrives instantly, which is exactly why the loop tightens. Meanwhile the pile of unopened post has not moved, so next…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 39:53One line of research

The goal was never to enjoy the dull task. It is to arrive at something more like: I hate this and I can still do it well enough.

Both halves are doing work. Moving towards the thing you dislike, rather than away from it, is what loosens the avoidance. And well enough is what…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 94:5One line of research

It rarely stays a matter of attention. The difficulties shape what you come to believe about yourself, that colours how you are with the people closest to you, and their responses feed straight back into the original trouble.

Discouraging to read, and genuinely useful, because it means there are three places to work and they are not equally stuck. The wiring is the hardest…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 2:186One line of research

There is a difference between having ADHD and being ADHD. It sounds like word games until you notice which one you are living in.

Being it means the condition runs everything and explains everything, and there is a quiet relief in that which is hard to give up. Having it means…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 53:32One line of research

Work properly at the parts that can be managed, then be at peace with what is left over. The order matters more than it sounds.

Peace offered before any real effort is giving up with better vocabulary, and it never quite convinces the person saying it. Effort with no end point…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 22:78One line of research

Every list, timer and rule exists to buy you a life worth having. If the systems have quietly become the point, something has turned the wrong way round.

It is easy to end up managing your ADHD as a full time occupation and calling that recovery. A better test of a week is whether it held anything you…

Five minutesSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 7:156One line of research

For a lot of people with ADHD there are only two times: now, and not now. A deadline on Thursday and one six months out sit in the same box until the day they suddenly become today.

This is worth knowing because it explains why being told the date again does nothing. You knew the date. What was missing was the sense of it coming…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 23:113One line of research

Spotting on day one that a procedure is pointless is a real skill. Saying so in the first meeting is the part that costs people the job.

The observation is rarely the problem. It is that it arrives before anyone asked, from someone who has been there a fortnight, often with the…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 20:114One line of research

Look back over your own history for the times you were knocked down and started something anyway. That pattern is common with ADHD, and it is easy to miss while you are busy counting the failures.

It may be a side effect of not weighting the future heavily. The past does not press down quite as hard either. People who have been sacked, dropped…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 25:47One line of research

Every trait worth having here arrives with its twin. A love of the offbeat and a real problem with deadlines are the same wiring seen from two sides.

Strength lists that leave the cost out are not believable and they do not help anybody. Pair them instead. If you are the one who finds the…

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

A clever workaround can hide a difficulty for years. A child who memorises what he cannot read looks fine, right up until the amount to be read grows past what memory can carry.

So do not judge by output alone. Ask what it cost to produce. Someone keeping up but exhausted, dreading the reading, staying up late to cover it, is…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 2:189One line of research

Think of your sense of the future as how far out to sea you can spot a ship. How far depends on your eyesight, and also on how big and bright the ship is and what the weather is doing.

That last part is the useful bit. The same person sees a wedding six months off perfectly clearly and misses a form due on Tuesday completely,…

Five minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 36:39One line of research