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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874 practices

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The further off something sits, the less it weighs on today's decision. That is not a flaw in your reasoning. It is how the weighing works for everybody.

It also explains something that often gets read as dishonesty. The plan you made on Monday was sincere. By Thursday the reward for keeping it has…

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

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

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

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

The moment before you snap

Food, caffeine and fuel

Choosing your response

When you use something to cope

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Growing empathy

When anger turns to harm

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Making it stick

When everything feels flat

Self-compassion

Emotions as signals

Facing it a step at a time

Anger, alcohol and the body

Tolerate distress

Use your strengths

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Obsessions and compulsions

Being seen and judged

Touch and bodywork

Help someone grieving

Shame

Rest and pacing

Question the thought

Practising under provocation

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 reminds you often enough, things do get done. But the sense of time doing the work is theirs, which is why it all collapses the moment they stop.

Worth naming out loud in a household, because the reminding costs the relationship something and never builds the missing part. A better arrangement…

Twenty minutesYour sense of timeADHD skillsQur’an 103:3One 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

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

Some people will not believe this exists whatever you show them. You are allowed to give a short honest answer and then let the conversation go.

Keep one or two plain facts ready for people who are genuinely curious, because that conversation is often worth having. It is a different…

A minuteShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 16:125One line of research

Talking a lot is on the diagnostic list. It sits with the impulsive symptoms, which makes it part of the condition rather than proof that you are self absorbed.

That reframe is worth having, because most people who do this have been told off for it for years and have drawn an unkind conclusion about…

A minuteShame and stigmaADHD skillsQur’an 48:17One 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