Focus, starting, and ADHD

A small child does not have a feeling, they are the feeling, entirely, until it passes. Growing up is largely a gap opening between feeling something and doing something about it.

If that gap is narrower for you than for other people your age, it is a lag on a road everyone is on rather than a defect. The framing is worth…

A strong feeling makes the rest of your life go quiet for a while. That is when people resign, send the message, or start something they cannot undo, for reasons that seem good and are not enough.

So make a rule now, while it is calm, about which decisions are never made on the day: leaving a job, ending a relationship, spending a large amount,…

A small annoyance can be steered. A full blaze cannot. Nearly all of the winnable work happens in the first thirty seconds, before the feeling has finished arriving.

Which means the skill to practise is noticing, not calming down. Learn your own early signs: the jaw, the hot face, talking faster, the flat voice,…

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

Self-restraint runs on a supply that stress uses up. In a week when everything is late and nothing has been slept on, you will react to things you would normally let go.

That is worth knowing because it changes what you work on. Instead of trying to be more patient at the moment of provocation, look at what is quietly…

Step in while a child is only starting to wind up, and offer something calming rather than a correction. Slow breathing, counting, a soft toy, a quiet corner for a few minutes.

Three to ten minutes in a set place is plenty. It works best when the offer is warm and matter of fact, one sentence, no lecture about what they did.…

The whole value of a calming corner is that the child can take themselves there. An adult may suggest it, but if it is only ever ordered, what gets learned is obedience rather than self-regulation.

Make it clearly available rather than assigned. They go, they take their few minutes, they come back with a short hello and a nod at whatever they…

Instead of sending a child out to sit and stew, send them to a side table for three very easy worksheets, then straight back to whatever everyone else is doing.

It takes them out of whatever was rewarding about the behaviour without leaving them with nothing to do and an audience to play to. Keep the work…

If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.

This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves…