Focus, starting, and ADHD

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…

A reward that is far off has almost no weight in ADHD. Tying the task to something you actually care about gives you a reason that does not depend on the payoff arriving soon.

So instead of 'I should file these', try 'I want to be someone my family can rely on, and this is part of that'. The other half of this approach is…

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.…

When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.

Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…

Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.

It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…

If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.

Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…

Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.

They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…

An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.

The choosing is part of why any of it works. A limit handed down gets tested and beaten, while one somebody picked themselves tends to survive a bad…

Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.

This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…

Ask your child to show you their feed and explain it to you. You are asking to be taught rather than to inspect, and from the other side those feel nothing like each other.

Something shifts when the young person is the one who knows more. They slow down, they explain who these people are, they tell you which bits are…

If you want a way back in with a teenager who has gone quiet, ask them to show you the game. Not to assess it. Just to be shown something they are good at.

It works because it asks almost nothing of them. No eye contact, no explaining how they feel, no returning to whatever the last argument was about.…

Coaching for adult ADHD comes down mostly to one thing: a standing appointment with somebody who will ask how it went. That sounds thin until you have tried keeping a plan alive entirely on your own.

A coach is not a therapist and does not need to be. They hold the horizon you keep losing and the fortnight that has quietly gone by, and they make…

Mindfulness for adult ADHD is promising and thinly researched at the same time. If it helps you, that is worth having. It is simply not yet in the same bracket as medication or practical therapy.

There are only a handful of studies, mostly small, and few of them set mindfulness against another active treatment rather than against not much.…