Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD
Focus, starting, and ADHD
Most advice about focus is written for a brain that starts easily. This area is not. It covers what ADHD actually is, how to make a start when starting is the hard part, how to bring a future consequence close enough to feel, and how to stop paying for it in shame.
Narrowed down
6 practicesTheme · Getting assessed and diagnosed
How long you have
Approach · ADHD skills
When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.
Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…
Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.
Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the…
With gambling machines the pull may be the lights and the noise as much as the chance of winning. That changes what you actually need to stay away from.
If the sensory buzz is doing the work, the triggers are not only the betting shop. They are the phone games built with the same flashing and chiming,…
Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.
Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…
Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.
Do it slowly and write it in their words rather than yours. Most people arrive believing anxiety is one solid block that either has hold of them or…
When a child with attention difficulties is also at war with every instruction, that pairing is worth taking to someone early rather than waiting to see whether it settles.
The two travel together often, and a minority of children follow a path from constant defiance into more serious trouble later. Every stage of that…