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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466 practices

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Start with less work than they can manage, not more, and add back slowly. Break the long jobs into pieces small enough that each one can be finished and noticed.

Setting the first week deliberately below capacity feels like giving in. What it actually does is produce a run of finished things, and a child who…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 22:78One line of research

Teach the school's online system properly, once, and then treat it as something known. I do not know how to use it cannot stay true forever.

Sit down together and go through it: where assignments appear, how to see what is due, what to do when it will not load. Until that has happened,…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 27:40One line of research

Sort the room out before you sort the willpower out. One agreed place to work, television off, phone in another room for the duration.

Attention here is pulled by whatever is brightest, and a phone face down on the table still wins. Taking the competition out of the room is far more…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 12:55One line of research

A behaviour agreement needs six things in it: the goal, exactly what the child does, what they earn, what happens if they do not, signatures from everyone, and an adult who sticks to it.

Most of these fall apart over what was meant rather than over what was done, so write the specifics down to the level of what counts as finished. The…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 2:282One line of research

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

The fear underneath anger

Shame

Tolerate distress

Facing it a step at a time

Shame and stigma

Breathing

Remembering to do it

Staying regulated in conflict

When everything feels flat

When you use something to cope

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Repair after rupture

Choosing your response

What worry does

Growing empathy

When anger turns to harm

Being seen and judged

Rituals of connection

Structure and routine

Practising under provocation

Anger, alcohol and the body

Equanimity and perspective

Obsessions and compulsions

Posture and how you carry yourself

Feeling from the inside

Letting it out safely

Answering bids

Listen to the body

What you are actually defending

Question the thought

Care for yourself in loss

Rest and pacing

Safety and grounding

Living with uncertainty

Treatment and medication

Keep the bond

Guard sleep first, especially through any long stretch away from the usual routine. Once the nights slide, everything else you have set up starts giving way.

Holidays, illness and school closures are when bedtimes drift, and a fortnight of late nights undoes more than any homework plan can fix. Keep the…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 12:47One line of research

Put the schoolwork early in the day and let the screens come after it. For a teenager early means later than you would like, but the order stays the same.

Effort is a thing that runs down through a day, so the demanding job goes where there is most of it left. Teenagers really do wake up later, and…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 12:47One line of research

Work the deal out with the child instead of handing it to them. Much the same rules, an entirely different feeling.

Let them argue for a bit longer on the console, or for Friday off, and give ground where you honestly can. The terms tend to land in roughly the same…

Twenty minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 42:38One line of research

If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.

Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31One line of research

Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.

Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 7:31One line of research

Irritable bowel symptoms turn up more often in people with ADHD, and they tend to track stress. If your stomach is at its worst in the weeks when everything else is at its worst, that is information rather than coincidence.

Two things help more often than they get suggested. Cutting caffeine frequently settles symptoms on its own, since it speeds the gut up and raises…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 106:4One line of research

If your mood drops reliably as the light goes, that is worth naming as a thing in its own right. Seasonal low is more common alongside ADHD, and a light box first thing in the morning helps a lot of people.

Use it early in the day and use it consistently, since the timing is part of how it works. It is also worth asking whoever prescribes for you about…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 36:33One line of research

Very low vitamin D produces fatigue, low mood and a flatness that looks exactly like depression, and it is not part of routine bloods in most places. If you have never had it measured, it is a fair thing to ask for.

One clinician telling this story about himself had a level that was almost undetectable, and no antidepressant would have raised it, because what was…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:57One line of research

The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.

Correcting a deficiency usually means a high dose for a defined period and then a steady daily amount, with the level rechecked to see where you have…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:141One line of research

Before settling on depression as the whole story, ask for thyroid function and vitamin D to be checked. Both are common, both are cheap to test, and an underactive thyroid produces a picture that looks like depression from the outside.

An untreated thyroid problem also blunts how well antidepressants work, so missing it can mean months on a treatment that was never going to do the…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

If a health habit keeps sliding, attach something immediate to it. The apps where you put real money on hitting a step target work for a reason: the payoff arrives now instead of in twenty years.

The natural reward for walking more is invisible and decades away, which is no use to a brain running on what happens next. A small stake, a streak,…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 52:19One line of research

Stress unsettles the gut and an unsettled gut drags on mood, so the two keep each other going. The good news buried in that is you can step in from either end.

You do not have to establish which came first. Easing the pressure on your nervous system helps digestion, steadying what you eat helps mood, and…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:168One line of research

Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.

This is not about swapping therapy for supplements. It is about not spending a year working on something a blood test could have partly explained. If…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 80:24One line of research

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

Twenty minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 5:87One line of research

When all you can say is that something happened and you went off, take it apart in five pieces: what set it off, how you read it, what your body did, what you made it mean, and what you wanted to do next.

Written out on paper it usually stops being a blur. You often find the trigger was small and the meaning was enormous, or that your body was already…

Twenty minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 91:7One line of research

Going deeper into a feeling only helps if it is being put in order at the same time. Depth without order is just flooding.

So as the feeling rises, keep laying it out: this is what happened, this is what my body did, this is what I was afraid it meant. If your chest is…

Twenty minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 3:154One line of research