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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365 practices

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The teenager with ADHD is often the one who admits it while everyone else produces a story. That is not worse judgement about right and wrong, it is less thinking ahead about how it will land.

Parents can read a caution or a suspension as proof of a moral problem, when the honesty in the room points the other way. Instead of a lecture,…

Five minutesWhat ADHD actually isADHD skillsQur’an 17:11One line of research

ADHD does not come with extra intelligence, and it does not take any away either. What being bright does is buy you time, because you can work around it for years before anyone notices.

That is why so many capable people get diagnosed at university, or in a first job with real responsibility, at the point where the workarounds…

Five minutesWhat ADHD actually isADHD skillsQur’an 49:13One line of research

A lot of people with ADHD quietly believe they are not clever. Usually it comes from reading a page four times and taking nothing in, and concluding the obvious thing about themselves.

That belief does a great deal of damage. It keeps people out of courses and jobs they could do, and it makes them give up on any new strategy the…

Five minutesWhat ADHD actually isADHD skillsQur’an 32:9One line of research

Eating and body image are part of this for more people than you would think. Forgetting meals all day and then eating without stopping in the evening is a very ordinary ADHD pattern rather than a separate failing.

The useful move is usually to eat by the clock rather than by hunger, since the signal arrives late or not at all when you are absorbed. Put one…

Five minutesWhat ADHD actually isADHD skills

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

Emotions as signals

Systems for daily life

Choosing your response

Shame

When you use something to cope

What worry does

Treatment and medication

The cost of avoiding

Food, caffeine and fuel

Growing empathy

Reading, numbers and learning differences

When you go numb

Remembering to do it

When anger turns to harm

Moving your body

Question the thought

Structure and routine

Being seen and judged

Treatment and medication

Tolerate distress

Practising under provocation

Posture and how you carry yourself

Exercise, food and other supports

Bringing the future closer

Making it stick

Facing it a step at a time

Self-compassion

Letting it out safely

What you are actually defending

Living with uncertainty

Rest and pacing

Qur’an 95:4

One line of research

Most outbursts are a last try at getting something across. Underneath the noise there is usually a need that has gone unmet for a long time.

It rarely arrives as a message, though. It arrives as volume, and the other person hears the volume and misses the content entirely. Treating it as a…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 20:86One line of research

A lot of anger carries a hidden demand: you damaged how I feel about myself, so now you restore it. That leaves your steadiness in somebody else's hands.

It feels like the opposite of dependence, all force and self-sufficiency, which is why it goes unnoticed. Look at the shape of the complaint. If the…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 70:20One line of research

Anger is not something to get round to next month. One bad half hour can cost a job, a marriage or a criminal record.

Most difficulties give you time. This one can hand you an outcome that cannot be undone, and it can do it before you have finished deciding whether…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 7:150One line of research

The speed of your reaction says something about how humans are built. It is not a report on how bad you are, and that difference is worth holding on to.

Shame is why people keep the incidents to themselves, and a hidden incident cannot be worked on. Understanding reactivity as inherited equipment lets…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 70:19One line of research

Nobody should tell you your anger is always useless. In a prison, a war, or a house where someone is dangerous, it is doing a job.

Advice that ignores where you actually live is easy to dismiss, and rightly so. The aim is not to strip the response out but to get it calibrated:…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 42:41One line of research

You are an animal, in the plain biological sense. That is not an insult, and it explains a good deal about why your body gets there before you do.

People often hear this as a way of lowering them. It runs the other way. A creature with old defensive equipment reacting fast to a threat is…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 70:19One line of research

The cooler, story-shaped anger is not the safer one. It lasts, it gets rehearsed, and it has time to make plans.

A flare passes in minutes. Something you have been going over for a fortnight can arrive somewhere far worse, because you have had time to build the…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 59:10One line of research

In long-running anger the alarm is not broken. It is set too sensitive and too loud, which is two things to adjust rather than a character to fix.

Sensitivity is how little it takes to set you off. Volume is how big the response gets once it starts. Sleep, food, pain, alcohol and how much you…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 16:126One line of research

If you have been told all your life that you are too negative, some of that is standard human wiring. Bad news gets more attention than good, in everyone, because it always did.

That does not make pessimism pleasant to live with, and it does not mean nothing can shift. It does mean the second layer, where you tell yourself…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 70:19One line of research

Anger works by sorting the world into me and not me. Once someone has landed on the wrong side of that line, everything they do starts reading as evidence.

You can feel the sorting happen if you watch for it. Their tone becomes proof, their silence becomes proof, the way they load the dishwasher becomes…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 15:47One line of research

If you have been told that anger passes quickly, that is only half true. Roughly half of episodes do settle inside the hour, which also means the other half are still going.

It helps to know which kind you are having. Anger that fades on its own within the hour is mostly your body coming back down. Anger that is still…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 7:154One line of research

Anger that is still with you the next morning has changed shape. It is less an event by then and more a mood you are living inside.

Around a third of angry episodes run past a day, and once that becomes the usual pattern the anger stops needing much of a trigger. Small things…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 59:10One line of research

Letting it all out does not drain the anger off. Every rehearsal of the row, out loud or in your head, is practice, and practice makes the response easier to reach next time.

The comeback composed in the shower, the retelling to a friend that gets a little sharper each time, the pillow taking a beating: all of it keeps the…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 3:134One line of research

Change the question. Instead of asking what made you angry, ask what threatened, confused or unsettled you.

The anger version of events comes out first because it is the easier one to tell. The other version tends to be closer to what actually happened, and…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 20:86One line of research

Everyone knows the line about sticks and stones. If words really could not hurt you, you would not still be turning over what he said.

It is a rhyme we all agreed to and none of us believe. Rather than argue with it, set it beside the evidence: the words landed, so something in them…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 4:148One line of research

A cut heals and stops being news. An insult from years ago can still get your heart going, because the part of the brain that keeps threats on file does not heal in the same way.

It is why you can be perfectly reasonable about a broken arm and still be turning over what somebody said at a wedding a decade ago. The memory keeps…

Five minutesWhat anger actually isCoreQur’an 59:10One line of research