Focus, starting, and ADHD

If cognitive behavioural therapy is the approach you keep being offered for ADHD, part of the reason is that it is easy to measure. It has good evidence behind it, and being the most studied is not the same as being the only thing that helps.

Structured, session by session approaches produce tidy numbers, so they get trialled more often and written up more often. That leaves quieter…

The change mostly happens between the sessions rather than in them. Catching a thought where it actually turns up, at the kitchen table or in the car park, is what makes a new one stick.

Make it small enough to survive a bad week. One thought written down as it came, and one line underneath saying what else might be true. If you have…

You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.

A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am…

If your only system for remembering things is your head, of course you are anxious. Nothing is safe in there and some part of you knows it.

Some people hold everything mentally because letting go of it feels like the thing will stop existing. The answer is not trying harder to remember.…

You are already off your phone somewhere. In lessons, at work, in the pool, driving. That is worth more than it sounds.

It quietly disproves the sentence people say most often about this, that they can never put it down. They already do, most days, for hours at a time.…

For one week note three things each time: how you felt before you opened it, how it felt while you were in it, and how you feel twenty minutes after putting it down.

Most people find the before and the after are not the same, and that the middle was better than either. Usually one or two apps come out fine and one…

Sometimes the scrolling is not really about the scrolling. It is about the coursework, or the conversation, or the thing you have not let yourself think about since March.

You can usually tell by what happens when the phone goes. If the hours quietly move into something else equally absorbing and equally pointless, the…

Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.

Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…