Focus, starting, and ADHD

With children, acting a situation out teaches far more than talking about it. Play the scene, swap roles, get it wrong, do it again.

Explaining social rules to a child who missed them leans on the same steady attention that let them slip past in the first place. Rehearsal skips…

Achievement does not cancel an old belief that you are a failure. People reach the very thing they were sure would fix it, feel nothing change, and quietly conclude that the problem must be them after all.

The belief was not built out of results, so results do not dismantle it. Anything good gets reattributed on the way in: luck, timing, other people…

It usually travels in stages. Something in how attention and planning work becomes a story you tell about yourself, then becomes the story other people tell about you, and by then it is much harder to shift.

Knowing which stage you are at tells you what will help. Early on, practical strategies do most of the work. Later, when a family or a workplace…

The parts of this that look like lifestyle, meaning sleep, driving, drinking, appointments that get missed, are the parts carrying the most risk across a lifetime. They are also the most changeable parts.

You may have met a striking figure quoted about untreated ADHD and years of life lost. Take the point underneath rather than the number: risk from…

Getting your ordinary life a bit calmer is worth doing for its own sake. More sleep, a little more structure, food that is not all improvised. Not perfect, just good enough to work with.

It will not give you more capacity than you have. What it does is let you use more of what you already have, more of the time, which is usually the…