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
4 practicesTheme · Medication and how it works
How long you have · A minute
Approach · ADHD skills
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Long acting stimulants are the usual starting point for a plain reason: they cover the most hours and they remove the lunchtime dose, which is the dose ADHD is most likely to swallow whole.
Remembering a tablet in the middle of a busy day is itself an executive task, so asking for it is asking the person to do the thing they came for…
The most useful question about a dose is whether the person can tell. A shrug and 'I think it sort of helps a bit' usually means it is not yet doing its job.
At a dose that suits them, most people can say when it comes on, what the middle of the day feels like, and when it leaves. Vagueness points…
Half the useful health information arrives sideways. Someone says 'I am so tired' on the way into another subject, and that is an opening worth taking gently.
People rarely bring sleep or food to a session as a topic, because they do not file them as symptoms. So the tiredness, the skipped meals and the…
Count good days, not unbroken runs. Whatever yesterday was, brilliant or a write off, the only live question is what can be done with today.
Streaks make one slip cost everything, so the missed night turns into a missed week and then the whole effort gets quietly dropped. Aiming for more…