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
150 practicesTheme
How long you have · A minute
Approach · ADHD skills
Do the task at the same time and place each day, so the setting starts to do the reminding.
Novelty costs a mind like yours energy. Sameness of time and place buys that energy back.
Listen for the sentence that says the child could manage all of this perfectly well if they only decided to. However kindly it is meant, that is the belief to take apart.
It sounds like encouragement and it works like a verdict, because it says the ability was always there and only the willingness was missing. In a…
The name is a little misleading. What tends to be hard is not seeing or understanding a task, it is getting your brain to switch on for something it finds no reward in, and to switch off from something it loves.
You may have noticed you can lose four hours to something that grips you and then be unable to start a ten minute form. That gap is the thing itself,…
There is a real difference between a person who will not start and a person who cannot get started, and with ADHD it is nearly always the second.
This matters most in how you speak to yourself, and in how the people near you speak to you. Refusal invites pressure and punishment, which reliably…
With ADHD the one dependable thing is that you are not dependable in the same way each day. A day when everything works and a day when nothing does can arrive with no reason you can find.
Say this out loud to the people who need to know, because the good days get held against you later, by them and by you. Plan around your average…
ADHD does not look the same in two people. If someone tells you that you cannot have it because you are calm, or organised at work, or did well at school, they are describing one version of it.
Two people with the same diagnosis can look nothing alike: one talkative and always moving, the other quiet and away inside their own head. Other…
Roughly one person in twenty has ADHD, and the figure holds up across very different countries. You are not part of a modern trend.
That number matters in two directions. It means you are not rare, so in a class of thirty or an office of forty there will be others. It also means…
More people being recognised is not the same as more people having it. What has changed over recent decades is awareness, not the number of minds built this way.
Parents often carry a quiet fear that something they did, or something modern, caused this. Grandparents with the same traits simply grew up without…
If thoughts of ending your life turn up, tell someone that day. Do not wait to see whether they pass, and do not wait until you can explain them properly.
Feelings can arrive at full volume with ADHD, and the gap between a thought and acting on it can be short, which is why waiting it out alone is the…
When you speak about a death by suicide, say died by suicide or completed suicide rather than committed. Committed sets a crime beside the person's name.
Families hear these words at the worst moment of their lives and carry them for years afterwards. The wording also reaches people who are struggling…