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
7 practicesHow long you have
Approach · CBT
When · Under stress
The unkind thoughts tend to arrive in a handful of familiar shapes. One friend is busy so nobody wants you. One bad mark so you are going to fail everything. Someone did not say hello so they must dislike you.
Rather than fighting the content, try naming the shape: that is the all or nothing one, that is the mind reading one. Most people find they only have…
If rating a feeling out of ten means nothing to you, use something that does. Colour in bubbles, point at a picture, hold your hands apart to show how big it is today.
This began as an adaptation for children, swapping the numbered anxiety ladder for bubbles to colour in, and it is just as useful for anyone who goes…
Setting out to get rid of worry altogether sets you up to fail twice, first at the worry and then at the failing. A kinder aim is to change how you sit with it.
Anxiety and ADHD keep close company, and for most people some background hum does not go away. What can change is what happens next: whether you…
When your child comes to you in a spin, the kind thing is to stay warm and steady rather than to promise that it will be fine. Reassurance settles the next ten minutes and feeds the asking.
It sounds cold and it is not. What your steadiness says is two things at once: this feeling is real, and I think you can carry it. Keep it short and…
Some of what you believe about yourself is not a distortion. Things really did go wrong, often for years. What can be argued with is the conclusion you drew from them, that this is simply what you are.
Try separating the record from the verdict. The record might be missed deadlines, jobs that ended badly, friendships that faded. The verdict is 'so I…
Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.
After years of being told you get things wrong, a low estimate of yourself does not feel like a distortion, it feels like the evidence. So argue with…
Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.
Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…