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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792 practices

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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

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

Cool the body first

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Structure and routine

The moment before you snap

Remembering to do it

Facing it a step at a time

Food, caffeine and fuel

When you use something to cope

When anger turns to harm

Making it stick

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Choosing your response

Self-compassion

Growing empathy

Emotions as signals

When everything feels flat

Tolerate distress

Being seen and judged

Shame

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Anger, alcohol and the body

Practising under provocation

Obsessions and compulsions

Use your strengths

Rest and pacing

Letting it out safely

Help someone grieving

Question the thought

Feeling from the inside

Touch and bodywork

Living with uncertainty

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

Shame speaks in one flat sentence: I am bad. Notice that it never offers evidence, it just announces a verdict.

Because the claim covers all of you, no good day can disprove it. That is what makes it different from ordinary regret, which points at one thing you…

Five minutesShameTrauma informedQur’an 95:4One line of research

If you can see shame arriving in someone, say so gently and make it welcome. Something like: it looks like there is some shame here, and it is alright that it came.

Naming it does the opposite of exposing it. Left unnamed it works away in private, and the person assumes you have noticed and are judging. Said out…

Five minutesShameTrauma informedQur’an 3:135One line of research

You were the child. They were the adults. Say it as often as you need to, because shame will keep quietly filing it the other way round.

It is not an argument to win, more a fact to keep returning to. When a memory arrives with you cast as the guilty one, try describing the same scene…

Five minutesShameTrauma informedQur’an 49:11One line of research

The idea that attention problems are a moral failing is older than the diagnosis itself. An early medical name for this put it down to defective moral control, so if you grew up hearing that you simply were not trying, you were hearing an echo of that.

The name changed several times after, through minimal brain dysfunction and a childhood hyperkinetic disorder, to what is now called ADHD. Each…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 24:61One line of research

ADHD now sits with the neurodevelopmental conditions in the diagnostic manual rather than under disorders that begin in childhood. That move carries a claim worth hearing: this is about how a brain is built, and it does not stop at eighteen.

The older category quietly implied something you would grow out of, and plenty of adults were told exactly that. Shifting it means the evidence for a…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 95:4One line of research

If your version of this is fog, slowness and drifting off rather than restlessness, you are not a half case. Researchers are still arguing about whether that pattern is a subtype or something of its own.

The quiet presentation gets noticed late, because it disturbs nobody. It seems to sit alongside a different set of difficulties too, more inward than…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 92:4One line of research

Before you explain anything about ADHD to someone, ask what they already think it is. What they tell you decides what your explanation can land on.

People arrive with family stories, cultural rules about mental health and firm views about medication, and none of it shows up unless you invite it.…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 20:44One line of research

Rejection sensitivity is something clinicians see often in ADHD, and it is not a diagnosis in any manual. It can describe what happens to you accurately without being a label anyone can write in your notes.

The experience is real enough: a look, a short reply or an unanswered message lands like a verdict and takes hours to shake off. Held as a…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 50:16One line of research

Most of what other people do is about their own day rather than about you. That is easier to hold once you have also admitted that in childhood, sometimes, it genuinely was about you.

The two halves have to travel together. Skip the history and the reassurance sounds like someone telling you your memory is wrong. Skip the present…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 6:132One line of research

The feeling that everyone else was handed a manual on how to be with people has a plain explanation. Most social rules are picked up by watching, and watching steadily is the hard part for you.

So the gaps are real rather than imagined, and they are gaps in information, not in worth. That is oddly good news, because information can be taught…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 2:148One line of research

Sensing that you got something wrong socially, without knowing what, tends to turn into watching yourself constantly. That watching is usually what makes the next conversation go badly, not the original mistake.

This kind of nerves does not clear up by pushing yourself into more social situations. Without knowing what actually went wrong, more exposure only…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 2:286One line of research

Cheer up, calm down, try harder. It is the same instruction wearing three different names, and treating every difficulty as a question of effort turns each symptom into a comment on your character.

This assumption is old and it is everywhere, so most people have absorbed a good deal of it long before anyone offers them another explanation. You…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 17:70One line of research

The disbelief that hurts most rarely comes from strangers. It comes from a parent, a sibling or a cousin who calls the whole thing an excuse.

It carries more weight because they have known you longest, and some part of you still treats their reading of you as the accurate one. It can wear…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 42:43One line of research

By the time somebody comes for an assessment, the poor opinion of themselves is usually decades old. Assume it is there even when the person in front of you is visibly doing well.

It rarely arrives as a complaint. It shows up as apologising for taking up your time, as brushing off achievements, as a joke about being useless…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 6:54One line of research

The feeling that you were let in by mistake is common among capable people with ADHD, and it has a plain source. A patchy performance history gives you real evidence of inconsistency, and fraud is simply the wrong explanation for it.

Being sharp one week and unable to start anything the next looks, from the inside, like proof that the good weeks were an act. Regulation that varies…

Five minutesShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 16:97One line of research