Focus, starting, and ADHD

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

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…

Self-restraint runs on a supply that stress uses up. In a week when everything is late and nothing has been slept on, you will react to things you would normally let go.

That is worth knowing because it changes what you work on. Instead of trying to be more patient at the moment of provocation, look at what is quietly…

Step in while a child is only starting to wind up, and offer something calming rather than a correction. Slow breathing, counting, a soft toy, a quiet corner for a few minutes.

Three to ten minutes in a set place is plenty. It works best when the offer is warm and matter of fact, one sentence, no lecture about what they did.…

The whole value of a calming corner is that the child can take themselves there. An adult may suggest it, but if it is only ever ordered, what gets learned is obedience rather than self-regulation.

Make it clearly available rather than assigned. They go, they take their few minutes, they come back with a short hello and a nod at whatever they…

Instead of sending a child out to sit and stew, send them to a side table for three very easy worksheets, then straight back to whatever everyone else is doing.

It takes them out of whatever was rewarding about the behaviour without leaving them with nothing to do and an audience to play to. Keep the work…

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.…

If you are permanently behind, short of sleep and scrambling, that is not the backdrop to your short fuse. A good deal of the time it is the cause of it.

This is what makes the dull organisational work worth doing, because it buys you something you actually want. A morning that is not a panic leaves…

Putting something off is often fear wearing a lazy costume. If planners have never fixed it for you, that is a clue the trouble is what the task makes you feel, not what your diary looks like.

Ask what you expect to happen when you open it. There is usually something specific in there: that it will be wrong, that it will swallow the whole…

Sometimes both roads carry a cost and neither will feel good. Accept that first, then choose, rather than searching for the option that comes without a sting.

A lot of long deliberation is really a search for the version that leaves nobody upset and nothing lost. When that version does not exist, the search…

Look at what you are actually working for this week. If every item is there to stop someone being cross or something going wrong, you are running on avoidance, and it is exhausting.

Avoidance does get things done, but only at the last moment and only with dread attached, and it leaves behind nothing you wanted. Take one thing off…

If not knowing makes you itch, the work is learning to sit with the itch rather than making it go away. The plan can stay unfinished while you get on with today.

For some of us an unresolved question hums in the background until it is settled, and settling it becomes urgent even when nothing depends on it.…

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

Very sweet, very salty, very fatty food acts on the reward system in a way that has more in common with a drug than with dinner. Reaching for it when you are flat is self-medication, not greed.

Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the…

With gambling machines the pull may be the lights and the noise as much as the chance of winning. That changes what you actually need to stay away from.

If the sensory buzz is doing the work, the triggers are not only the betting shop. They are the phone games built with the same flashing and chiming,…

Expect more anxiety, low mood, drinking and drug use in the young people coming through now. And expect the boys to say less about it, so go looking for irritability, trouble and substances instead of waiting to be told.

Ask parents what they are seeing rather than only what they have been told, and ask the young person directly and privately. Screening that rests on…

Attention and impulse problems that appear for the first time in middle age or later are not ADHD arriving late. They need a doctor to look, not a prescription.

Several conditions affecting the frontal lobes can show up first as new disinhibition, poor judgement or a change in personality, and some are…