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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

6 practices
Getting assessed and diagnosed remove filterIn a change remove filterClear all
Theme · Getting assessed and diagnosed
Medication and how it works 15Systems for daily life 15What ADHD actually is 13Getting assessed and diagnosed 6Treatment and medication 4Bringing the future closer 3Your sense of time 3Self-compassion 2Reading, numbers and learning differences 1Shame and stigma 1Structure and routine 1Remembering to do it 1Use your strengths 1Get started 1Feelings and focus 1
How long you have
Five minutes 4Twenty minutes 1Longer 1
Approach
ADHD skills 4Core 2
When · In a change
Any ordinary day 64Coming and going 14Under stress 7In a change 6After a row 2

An ADHD diagnosis usually arrives with two extra words attached: which presentation it is, and how severe. Both are descriptions of what gets in your way, not a grade you were awarded.

Inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive, or the two together, and then mild, moderate or severe. Mild means you met the threshold and the effect on…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:31

Teenage memories of this often come with a sting: the year you worked out how much longer everything took you than it seemed to take everybody else.

That is usually why adolescence is the period people can describe in detail. The work got harder, the scaffolding of primary school fell away, and…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 94:5

There is a difference between low mood you have carried all your life and low mood that grew out of years of working twice as hard for half the result. Both are real, and they need treating in a different order.

If the second describes you, the picture often lifts a fair way once the attention difficulties are being managed and the daily experience of falling…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 4:28

Home DNA tests turn up relatives nobody expected. If someone is thinking of taking one to fill in a blank family history, it is worth saying out loud that it may hand them more than they asked for.

People find half siblings. Sometimes they find that the story they were told about their birth was not the story. That is a great deal to receive by…

Five minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 50:16

Before intensive work ends, turn what you have learned about a child's thinking into things a teacher can actually do on a Tuesday morning. That translation is what decides whether any of the gains survive going back to school.

A profile written for clinicians is no use in a classroom of thirty. Give three or four concrete actions instead: where this child sits, how…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 3:159

Assessing a child's thinking used to mean a referral, a waiting list and a report some months later. Brief cognitive tools an ordinary clinician can run have changed that, and the gap between noticing something and having a plan can now be a session rather than a season.

Learn one of them properly instead of dabbling in three. Know what it measures, what it does not, and how to talk about a score without turning it…

LongerGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 18:66