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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1570 practices

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A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.

This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 28:77One line of research

Among teenagers, saying they want to die has become something you say when the bus is late. You can no longer read intent off the phrase, in either direction.

So the words neither prove there is danger nor prove there is not. What tells you is everything the words leave out: whether there is a plan, whether…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 4:140One line of research

When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.

The question is simple enough. Has anything about someone dying gone round your school or your feed lately, and did you see it. Then ask how it left…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 6:68One line of research

Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.

It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 3:14One line of research

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

Breaking the worry loop

Remembering to do it

What you are actually defending

Facing it a step at a time

Making it stick

When you use something to cope

Tolerate distress

Choosing your response

Growing empathy

When everything feels flat

When anger turns to harm

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Self-compassion

Shame

Anger, alcohol and the body

Emotions as signals

Use your strengths

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Practising under provocation

Being seen and judged

Obsessions and compulsions

Letting it out safely

Touch and bodywork

Feeling from the inside

Rest and pacing

Question the thought

Help someone grieving

Living with uncertainty

If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.

Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 28:77One line of research

Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.

They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 33:35One line of research

An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.

The choosing is part of why any of it works. A limit handed down gets tested and beaten, while one somebody picked themselves tends to survive a bad…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 17:110One line of research

Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.

This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 17:36One line of research

Ask your child to show you their feed and explain it to you. You are asking to be taught rather than to inspect, and from the other side those feel nothing like each other.

Something shifts when the young person is the one who knows more. They slow down, they explain who these people are, they tell you which bits are…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 24:31One line of research

If you want a way back in with a teenager who has gone quiet, ask them to show you the game. Not to assess it. Just to be shown something they are good at.

It works because it asks almost nothing of them. No eye contact, no explaining how they feel, no returning to whatever the last argument was about.…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 31:19One line of research

Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?

Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 18:46One line of research

For a week, jot down what was going on just before you picked up the phone, what you were thinking while you scrolled, and how you felt when you put it down. Nothing cleverer than that.

What usually surfaces is not that screens are bad but that two or three specific things are: one account, one time of day, one mood you always reach…

Twenty minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 20:131One line of research

Asked what all the scrolling had done to her most, one young woman did not say sad. She said angry, more or less all the time.

Constant irritability in a teenager usually gets worked up as depression or ADHD, and sometimes that is right. Saturation belongs on the list too,…

LongerScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 96:6One line of research

For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.

One young woman with a history of being bullied found her platform use feeding the depression, the social anxiety, the fear of leaving the house and…

LongerScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 102:1One line of research

Pick one series and watch it together on the same evening each week. The point is not the programme. It is that something puts the two of you in the same room on purpose.

With an older teenager or a young adult, a set night can carry a relationship through stretches when talking is hard. Some weeks you will pause it…

LongerScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 33:35One line of research

The aim was never to stop needing the aids. It is to find ways round the parts that do not work well, and then to keep using them.

People tend to treat the alarms, the lists, the whiteboard by the door as scaffolding they ought to take down eventually. That is usually why it all…

A minuteSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 4:28One line of research

Everyone has something about themselves they wish were different, and something they cannot do reliably however much they mean to. Yours has a name and a good deal of research behind it, which is not the same as being uniquely broken.

Say this carefully, because there is a careless version that does real damage. Everyone is a bit ADHD is not what is meant, and it leaves a person…

A minuteSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 20:115One line of research

One man with ADHD described the goal as no longer suffering from it, only having it. The diagnosis had not changed. What it cost him had.

Half of that shift comes from removing particular sources of pain: the job that was never going to work, the arrangement at home that left everything…

A minuteSelf-compassionADHD skillsQur’an 94:1One 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